Free Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl Page A

all that shit before the corny stuff, like murdering and writing “PIG” in blood on the wall.
    There were so many things I could have said, at that moment. Words of caution. Concerned, reasonable words. Because, for some irrational reason, this was someone I cared about. Despite the fact that we’d just met. I hardly knew anything about the woman, but I already knew enough to know there were things I didn’t want to know. (In other words, she was a total stranger about whom I was likely delusional; for whom, not to flatter myself, I harbored huge and inappropriate emotional expectations.)
    S o, out of all the things I could have said, I said the thing that, I hoped, could make her like me. I didn’t think it out of course. But that’s what I was doing. I said, “Do you know anybody in LA?”
    She asked, “Why?”
    I said, “Maybe we can hang out . . . So, what did you say your name was?”
    â€œNora,” she said, like she was ashamed of it. “My mother wanted me to be an old lady.”
    We didn’t speak for a while after that. But I could tell she wanted to say something. Finally she put her cold hand on mine and turned to me.
    â€œYou were right, what you thought before.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    I could tell she was used to guys staring at her enormous breasts instead of looking her in the eye. So I made a point of not staring at them. I was, as of that moment, an eye man.
    â€œAbout the guy trying to murder me,” she said. “You heard right. He’s back there, right now. Looking at us. He probably wants to murder you too.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œWhy do you think? Because you’re with me.”

ELEVEN
    Words Made of Cheese and Blood
    Think of all the great murders you’ve seen in TV and movies. The entertaining death you were raised on. Bullets, bombs, knives, arrows. Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower. Sonny Corleone machine-gun twitchy at the toll booth. The shoot-’em-ups. The throw-’em-downs. The great Danny Trejo in Machete .
    Our entire EIC (Entertainment-Industrial Complex) exists as one giant instructional murder video. And we haven’t even talked about the specialty items. The master courses. Gourmet murder shows. . .
    I know, I know. I was trying to come up with shit to say to the CSI people. I was, niche-wise, the designated “edgy” guy, which meant, in my experience, serving up the comfortable cliché: the most beloved commodity in Hollywood. Safe Edge . . . Don’t get me started.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. See, a weird thing happened when we got to LA. We got a little turned around at Union Station. I’d never been there, but I had seen it already, in the first half of a William Holden double bill on AMC. In Union Station (Paramount, 1950), the future dead alcoholic portrays a railway cop whom Joyce Willecombe, played by the world’s most forgettable actress, tells about the two very bad men on her train. Joyce is the secretary to a rich man named Henry Murchison (Herbert Heyes), whose blind daughter, Lorna, has been kidnapped and held for ransom. The station has been chosen as the site of the drop! (Despair in film noir is always cool.) Why this (albeit slow-moving) classic has not been excavated and remade with Ryan Gosling is beyond me.
    Then again, what do I know? I’m no movieland obsesso, just a guy who’s killed a lot of time loaded in front of the TV. Now, pharma trivia—whole different deal. Ask me anything. Did you know marketers invented irritable bowel syndrome because crippling diarrhea sounded too low-end? (No pun intended.) Or that Lomotil, an early treatment, contained atropine? About which narco-titan William Burroughs waxed eloquent in the fifties as a cure for drug addiction. Though, until his final dose, Big Bill himself ended up in Kansas on methadone—originally called Dolophine, named for Adolph Hitler by