Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl Page A

flying. The other advantage—you couldn’t dunk with a coffee enema. On other occasions, when I’d relapsed on latte, I’d find myself unable to resist purchasing a Dunkin’ Donuts Toasted Coconut Vanilla Kreme or some Sugar Glazed Strawberry Munchkins and soaking them in my liquid liver killer as I consumed them. Why coffee should destroy your liver orally and save it anally remains one of the great mysteries of New Age medicine.) So, when I saw the candies, and realized I’d had some kind of yen I didn’t even realize—I don’t even like Necco Wafers, they’re hell on my chalky molars—I took it as some kind of omen. I was actually going to get clean. I’d decided. Now was the time. No ifs, ands, or balloons.
    Somehow, gathering my candies and my copy of Weekly World News —I believed the WWN , home of “Bat Boy,” reflected America’s primal fear and id in ways new media couldn’t hope to, but it’s not a point of view I’d want to defend—hope bit me like a werewolf and kept running, so that I felt simultaneously uplifted and infected.
    Speaking of the infected, Curt Siodmak, who wrote the original Wolf Man , viewed the werewolf as a metaphor for the Jew in Hitler’s Europe. Siodmak escaped Germany and landed in Hollywood. Through no fault of the werewolf’s own, he’d been attacked by a monster, who in turn transformed him into a monster, a good man become hunted and shunned. Why do I know this? Because Wolf Man was the first Side-Effects movie. First the attack—then the symptoms. We see them at the same time the victim sees them. Once lycanthropic serum is in the blood, the effects—as so often happens, pharmaceutical commercial buffs will tell you—reveal themselves slowly, and then all at once. Bitten by a werewolf? You may experience mild euphoria, feelings of newfound power, sudden appearance of full-body pelt and canine incisors during a full moon. Some patients report disturbing “incidents,” followed by memory loss and occasional incarceration. See your doctor if you experience rapid “bulking up,” four-legged gait, urge to urinate outdoors or kill and eat people.
    I love that movie.

SEVEN
    Daddy Ink
    The woman—not a girl, just girlish—was tiny enough to curl up in the bus seat with her legs under her, and from what I could see, where her army jacket had crumpled down and exposed her back, owned a neck and shoulders of such sinewy delicacy that the size of her breasts came as a shock. Perhaps to equalize the impact, between her shoulder blades, in loving detail, was a tattoo of a German shepherd’s head, teeth bared, like it was about to lunge, with DADDY inked underneath in Gothic letters.
    Maybe the Daddy dog drove people away. You’d think stripper, or ballet dancer, or both. Trouble in any flavor. By the time I found out the story behind Daddy and the big-fanged dog, my heart cracked in a different place than it would have had I found out earlier. The only empty seat, besides this one, was next to the chemical toilet in back. Aside from the prospect of breathing disinfectant and people’s private sadness for twelve hours, I knew, from experience, that the toilet door would probably de-latch at some point and start banging back and forth off the seat behind it. Off the knees of whatever large liver happened to be occupying it. I liked my chances better with Daddy’s girl.
    There had to be some reason nobody else would sit next to her. I had a feeling I was going to find out why. Is there a tribe of fuckups that seek each other out? That recognize the scent of exhilarating desperation that comes from etc . . . etc . . .
    When you’ve written corpo-speak you sometimes lapse into it. Find that it’s crept into your brainpan and shaped the patterns and presentation of all your precious thoughts. Or else whole-cloth replaced them. This is an area