Free Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl

he strong-arms their maladies by letting the Holy Spirit hammer through him.
    â€œSo,” I said, wading into the sullen silence that had descended after the freak lightning and my apparent misunderstanding about why someone was trying to kill her. (It’s the little things.) “Are you suing? Do you have any kind of plan?”
    â€œPlan?” The way she squinched her face sideways made the word seem vaguely degrading. “That’s a strange idea. But I like strange, if you know what I mean.”
    â€œ Strange ,” I said, blocking the words with my fingers in the air before I realized the assyness of it, “ when what you want is an adventure you’ve never had before. Then you show a photo of some girl face down on a bed, crying.”
    She sat up straight. “You could do it that way. Or have that same photo with text across the top: MAKE A NEW MISTAKE! ”
    â€œWow!” I wasn’t normally a wow guy, but I meant it. “Did you just come up with that?”
    â€œIt’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”
    We weren’t touching, but my skin could feel her skin buzzing.
    Everything had happened so fast—the whole exchange—we both kind of froze in place, eyes straight ahead. She may have half-smiled. I didn’t want to ruin the moment and check. Sex was something you didn’t care about when you had dope—and used to kill the pain when you didn’t. Kick-sex was fairly uncelebratory. You—if you were a man—came in seconds. And you could come often. Over and over. You just couldn’t come much. The operative term is “air popper.” It didn’t even feel good. It was relief, not pleasure. Like so much of life. (Well, my life; a junkie’s life.) But. With this person I experienced something. Something unfamiliar. Like that weird yellow lightning. Like chemical refineries that flared in the night, toxic birthday candles lighting the sky right and left for miles.

TEN
    I Guess This Is What They Call Pleasure
    Or maybe . . . fun ? Is that going too far? It was all such foreign territory. The snappy patter. The out-of-nowhere joy of it! I remembered my championship line from Christian Swingles. (And yes, there’s nothing classier than quoting yourself.) Sometimes we wait for God to make the next move when God is saying, “It’s your time to act!”
    This was more intense than sex. More unlikely, at any rate. For the second time, after our “strange” exchange, I found myself cracking open a silence born either of implied intimacy or complete disregard. Maybe she hated me. Maybe she hated me and wanted to fuck me. Maybe . . . you get the picture. The scenarios were endless. And therefore meaningless. So I plunged on in. Where was she going to go? We were on a fucking bus.
    â€œSo . . . you invented the cards? Reinvented. Gave them a new look. Whatever . . .”
    â€œI took the concept. Made it more now-ish.”
    â€œNow-ish. Right. And some boss-type guy stole your idea?”
    â€œYou calling me a liar?”
    â€œWhat? No! I’m commiserating. ”
    â€œExactly. He screwed me. Trust me on that. I got fucked. Nothing I could do.” She sounded angry about it, as if somehow I were in on this travesty, and she resented me for it. “Now I just want to go after him.”
    â€œTo get the money?”
    â€œI just told you. I’ll never get the money. I just don’t want him to be happy. I don’t even want him to be unhappy. I want him to be destroyed.”
    â€œWhat do you want to do to him?”
    â€œI want to fuck with him.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œThe worst way you fuck with anybody. You can think about it but you’ll never guess.”
    I flashed on “creepy-crawly.” The Manson Family’s favorite pastime. Imagine it, insane strangers could be clawing at your carpet right now. Licking your sheets. They did