Happy Mutant Baby Pills Read online

  For one bad moment, I was afraid Nora’d convulse and snap the glass off. But I managed. 104.2. Which had to be great for the baby.

  I sat up with her. Waiting. What goes up, must go sideways. But no matter what, even in mid-convulsion, her palms never left her belly, stroking and patting (well, drumming) during the seizure, as if signaling her victim. Pretty soon she added to her stew of street drugs, toxic pharmaceuticals, and industrial by-products, deciding to include an extra ingredient: my sperm.

  Festivities ensued . . . I began taking drugs, but not the kind we’d been taking. See, this entire time, and for decades earlier, I had been “suffering” with hepatitis C. I say suffering advisedly, because it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t AIDS. That’s how most junkies viewed it. We’d dodged the big one. A little crushing fatigue, uncontrollable anger, some mood swings, your basic brain fog—look it up, “brain fog” is an actual medically indicated symptom. Like waking up every day with a brutal hangover, without getting drunk. (Saves on a bar tab.) But then I heard about this trial, at St. John’s. An all-new cocktail was on the way! And I could be the first to belly up to the bar.

  Pharma-sidebar: For years interferon was the treatment of choice for hepatitis C. The stuff was debilitating, causing suicidally depression, hair loss, daily nausea, and skin-clawingly itchy rashes. Plus, you had to inject it—and when isn’t it a good idea to put needles in the hands of a recovering junkie?

  The trial took ten weeks and did away with the interferon. That was the big news. No needles, no debilitation, no nausea, no hair loss. The experimental regimen consisted of Ribavirin—a staple of the modern-day AIDS cocktail—and a protease inhibitor called telaprevir. (And yes, I’d love to meet the genius who came up with the idea of calling a punishing drug regimen a “cocktail.”) The other pills in the trial just had numbers: the super-secret ABT 450 and ABT 333, as well as the vaguely menacing Z-10. They weren’t sure what the side effects would be for the guinea pigs taking it. (Maybe I’d get the gig writing them!) They suspected we’d still get that party rash, and there’d be some OMD, occasional mental displacement. Also known as “profound spaciness.” What they were certain about was the impact on the unborn. Which was very, very bad. You wouldn’t want to be a fetus and go anywhere near this shit.

  Talk about synchronicity! Or as they used to say at Christian Swingles, “Coincidences are Jesus’s way of staying anonymous.” Now I was the one packing all-new fetal-defect batter, an armory of pharma-financed, cutting-edge weapons to mutate an innocent baby. Fate had tossed my testes into Nora’s wheelhouse.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The Non-Interferon Treatment

  So. The first thing you’re told, when they accept you into Phase Two of the Abbott-financed non-interferon Hepatitis C trial, is that you must have no contact with pregnant women. The doctor who gives you this news is tall and athletic, Eric Cantor-y. He can’t hide his contempt for the subjects of his own trial, mainly LA drug addicts. Maybe he’d rather have been administering placenta-based skin rejuvenation therapies. But he was a hepatologist. And right now a drug company was paying him to administer a trial to a room full of low-life livers. Six of us, on folding chairs in a fluorescent-lit room at St. John’s.The other five—all guys—still looked fiendy. Or had some kind of residual prison vibe. Slouched in their chairs: legs apart, arms spread crucifix wide on the backs of the chairs to the left and right, taking up as much space as possible. The What are you lookin’ at, bitch? pose. Not even showing ink; wearing long sleeves, to hide it, so you knew there was something interesting under there: like the Viking riding the SS thunderbolt on the hand of my Aryan neighbor to the right. Something you might not want Dr. Joel Weinstein to see.

  Along with the possibility of curing you, the drug company was paying six hundred dollars for the privilege of plying us with untested antivirals and drawing blood once a week. (Rich people didn’t need to join a study. They could get the stuff off-market.)

  (The funny thing is I actually did get cured. Which can be disconcerting. It’s so much easier when you have an excuse for feeling like shit and wanting to strangle people. You mean I’m cured and I still feel this way? That all along it was me? I feel sick!)

  By now, I’d cleaned up and begun paddling around town in TV-writer drag: button-down shirt, good-boy khakis, New Balance running shoes. (On the inside, I felt like I was wearing a unitard.) There was no doubt, sitting with all these hard cases, that I was the lame one in the room. The square. Even though, I did not have to remind myself, I was the one participating in a crime so transgressive, so—when accompanied with the manifesto Nora was working up—real-life potentially world-changing, it was hard not to feel Dostoyevskian. If they only knew!

  THIRTY-SIX

  Tumor Daddy

  Weeks turned into months. Our crime became grander, the more Nora and I discussed it. The real shock was not that she willingly did this to her own fetus. The real shock was that millions of women did the same thing unwillingly. And Nora would be their symbol. She’d be the Helen of Troy of corporate irresponsibility, of capitalism unconstrained by human consequences. Of profit made on the tiny, malformed spines of fetal-deregulation monsters. A one-woman corpo Guernica, with real womb and real blood. I felt like I was writing copy for a pregnant Revelations.

  We had no doubt the video would go viral. From there—well, we had a long to-do list. (Her cause, as you can see, had become our cause.) Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Vimeo, Facebook, Boing Boing, Gawker, Reddit, BuzzFeed. And those were just the beginning. The press releases, the event . . . It was the Kony campaign without the resources and the guy running naked through the street. (When rich people are filmed naked in the streets, they’re suffering from fatigue. When poor people crack and go clothesless it’s bath salts or Cops.) In free moments, when we thought about it, I’d jot down blobs of talk-show take-away, FAQs to give to interviewers. I reassured her that nothing went viral faster than hate—and some people were really, really going to hate her. Until I brought it up, she hadn’t even considered a safe house. There was no guarantee the baby would even live. But if it did, there was no way social services would let it live with her. Or that righteous hordes would not want her hide. Look at Tanning Mom! I got it out of Nora that her real dream—mind you, this was somebody who carried a picture of Emma Goldman in her wallet—was to be the subject of her very own Lifetime special. Because mothers watch Lifetime, as I wrote for her to say when interviewed, and mothers are the hearts and minds of this country.

  We had stacks of handwritten notes, since we had no printer and hadn’t been to Kinko’s since Jay and Riegle forged our insurance. Some nails to hit on talk-show pre-interviews: We always knew we were going to go viral, Rachel, and we also knew they’d want to eradicate us. But you can’t eradicate the truth . . . This isn’t even about me, Charlie. The chemicals that did this to my baby are out there, unregulated, and the longer we go without acknowledging this quiet apocalypse, the more we’re going to see what happened to my child happen to other children . . . I know what I did was controversial, Amy, I know some people are even calling it sick. Fair enough. People can think what they need to think. What we’re thinking about are how many other babies, and how many families, are going to have to get sick at the hands of these capitalist monsters before this country changes its laws and begins to care more about the health of its children than lining the pockets of the chemical companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and all the lobbyists, politicians, and pundits—no offense—who are in the tank with them . . . Thanks to a bought-and-paid-for Congress, we are exposing an entire generation to unspeakable disease. These companies—like Monsanto, like Dow, like DuPont—are literally allowed to kill and maim with complete impunity. And they do it with something far more insidious than guns or bombs, Chris. They do it with the very products you buy yourself. Sunblock, sofas, soy milk, chewing gum, blueberries, deodorant. We are talking about the most commonplace items in your life killing you and dooming yo
ur unborn children . . .

  I could crank this stuff out by the yard. It felt empowering. Applying all my powers for good. Did the fact that I used the same skills trying to save the world as I did pimping fake testosterone cream make the effort any less meaningful?

  Sometimes, we’d shoot up and do The View. I’d pose a question as, say, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and then Nora would answer off the notes I’d given her.

  Me (as Elisabeth Hasselbeck): “Nora, how do you handle all the haters? So many in our audience have already tweeted . . . well, I don’t have to tell you about the public reaction to what you’ve done.”

  Then Nora would read, or try and recite, from the words I’d given her: “I’ll take the hate, ladies. I’ll take the name-calling and the death threats if, thanks to what we’ve done, other children can be spared the horrors to which we subjected our child deliberately . . .”

  Other times I’d shoot up and imagine myself on The 700 Club, fellowshipping with Pat Robertson. It was so realistic, my shins tickled from the little Prayer Partner contribution number crawling across them at the bottom of the screen. “Did God ask me to do this? Well, Reverend, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the Almighty came to us personally, like God telling Abraham to kill him a son, and said, ‘Sacrifice your sweet unborn darling so that other sweet unborn darlings will live . . .’ We’re doing this for all the other darlings, born and unborn, who are victims of these capitalist monsters. Of course not. What I’m saying is, if there is a God, then God is working through my little girl . . . The Lord has chosen her to suffer the deformities and birth defects so that others can come into this world free of deformity and defect. . . .”

  There were times when I didn’t think Nora was insane, and I really thought she had a chance to change the system. Until, eventually, I came to see the obvious. If she had a chance at saving the world, it was precisely because she was insane.

  Meanwhile, we were still in the hep C drug trial doctor’s office, where the doctor, obviously the drug company’s man in Havana, was so concerned about what he was saying that he kept repeating himself. Abbott clearly had liability concerns. The upshot, in every version, was that we understood that if we so much as touched a pill and then touched the skin of a mother-to-be, there was the chance—let’s not kid ourselves, the probability—of vascular and neurological defects. Your baby will be deformed. Not that the dozen other bad livers in the house had any grave concerns in that direction. “You mean her baby,” one of the slouching wags muttered, to general snickering and some fist-bump-finger-touch yuk-yuk penitentiary handshake with the ambassador of goodwill next to him. But the doctor ignored them and moved on to a danger even closer to home. Our sperm would now be poison. Actually, he said “teratogenic.” Then he said poison, explaining for the non-vocabulary-builders. Nobody smirked at this one. Personally, all I could think was that my ejaculate was now a lethal weapon.

  We had to sign a form, in triplicate, in which we declared that we understood the risks—which, I discovered when I read the fine print, also included death and frequent nosebleeds.

  Later, when the RN was drawing blood, I asked about the whole pregnancy-danger thing, and she put down her phlebotomy needle. “What I always say is, you and your lady be in bed together, and she expecting?” I caught a whiff of lunchtime Burgundy as she rolled her chair closer, so the doctor couldn’t hear through the walls. “She so much as roll over in your sweat, that baby gonna be neurologically janky. At least. More likely, your shit will be seriously deformed. You ever hear of thalidomide?”

  “I’ve seen pictures.”

  “Okay, compared to this, them babies was styling. They advise refraining from sexual relations for the length of the study. But we know that ain’t gonna happen. So what you gotta do, you gotta wear two condoms. Sperm is what they call a volatile delivery system. It brings the bad stuff right up in there.”

  There it was. Nora was already pregnant, so it wouldn’t be my little dumpling. I wouldn’t be father to the child, just its defects. Thanks to my newfound trial-monkey status.

  Call me Tumor Daddy.

  When I told Nora about my toxic sperm, her eyes went wide. Knowing that sex was so dangerous did something for her. Some women got off on bad boys. Nora got off on bad sperm. Our lovemaking was never better. We took it next-level. This was the golden period of our relationship. And not just with each other. With, if I may sound so Buttercup Junction, the whole world.

  Once she really began to show, everybody loved us. We were suddenly mainstream. Pregnancy was the great leveler: the universal acceptance magnet. Everybody loves a mommy-to-be.

  Only I knew what was going on inside her. That what was coming would not be on the label of a Gerber baby food jar. Walking down the aisle at Trader Joe’s, strangers would smile at us. Women with children exchanged knowing looks. Dads shot me thumbs-ups and winks. Happy citizens of a happy world. We always smiled back. If they only knew. It was like going out with a suicide bomber.

  At three months I understood something: the universality of family. Until you’re there, you just don’t know. You can’t. Black, white, Latino, Asian, homeless, or leaning out the window of a still-dealer-stickered BMW 760Li. Now it was more than smiles and nods. We would end up having coffee with other pregnant couples we ran into. Total strangers became new-mommy friends. Sometimes, after the couples left, Nora liked to pull out her short dog of Old Mr. Boston and pour a slug into her Starbucks. I could tell how much she would have liked to do it in front of people. I never could decipher her motivation for these displays. Except that the part of her that wanted to pass was always a little smaller than the part that was dying to say Fuck you.

  Mostly, though, from the outside we were the perfect parents to be. Once, at CSI, when I was brought in again because they’d run out of perversions, I told them about shrimping. Bea always wanted to know what kind of life I led that I’d know about this. For once, instead of marching out an old girlfriend who worked at a bondage parlor, I told them something interesting: the first time I heard about toe-sucking it was under Clinton. “He did that, too?” Bea sounded more impressed than surprised. But I told them no, it wasn’t Bill. His consultant, Dick Morris, broke his tooth on a hooker’s toenail. There was an S beside his name in the Mayflower Madam’s little book, which no one at the FBI could figure out. Until one bright young agent came up with shrimper. “Bingo,” as they say in TV shows and movies. But never, in my experience, in real life.

  Basically, the plan was, when Nora went into labor, to alert the media—new and old. To get the ball rolling fast and hard. But it had to be done right. She was using her own womb to make the statement. One wrong move and Nora would make Octomom look like Michelle Obama.

  But we were ready. Once we had the photo and videos, Nora would provide her detailed list of all the products she’d been exposed to or taken. Everything USDA-approved safe for home and garden. (We didn’t mention the narcotics—or that paint products are generally deemed “safe when used properly.” Which, technically, did not include huffing them. But why niggle?) Nora insisted she didn’t have a criminal record, when I told her how they’d be coming after her after Baby Mutando was born. The powers that be would want to make her bipolar, felonious, or otherwise unhinged and untrustworthy in order to dilute her message. “Look at Sandra Fluke,” I said. “All she did was stand up for government-funded birth control, and Rush Limbaugh went foamy and called her a ho bag.”

  “I would love that,” Nora said, staring dreamily off over the glass stem in her hand, features softened by crack smoke into something very Madonna-esque. (Not Madonna, the venerable performer, but Madonna, the mother of another celebrity freak-baby, Jesus Christ.)

  Thanks to my newly reminted pals Jay and Riegle, we had everything media ready. (Or so they claimed.) We discussed the whole thing over pills and caffeine at Chico’s, a Mexican joint in Highland Park where the pair spent a large part of the day imbibing Horcha
ta and, as Riegle always used to say, “doing what we do.” It was eight in the morning. Nora’d been up all night vomiting. Which, the doctors assured us, was normal for pregnant women. I’d sat with her, watching a very Barney Rubble-y Joe Scarborough, on Morning Joe, swapping fun political chitchat with his perky sparring partner Mika Brzezinski.

  By now Nora’d begun vomiting for hours at a time, but it never seemed to bother her. “You know,” she remarked, coming back from the toilet as she was wiping her mouth, “Mika’s father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is the one who recruited Obama to be the Trilateral Commission’s puppet.”

  “The Black Manchurian,” Riegle two-centsed.

  “As in ‘Candidate,’ ” Jay explained. They’d taken to finishing each other’s sentences like a married couple.

  Riegle got a seemingly endless number of pills off the Internet. He still made the same joke he made when we’d grab a bite before going to work at Christian Swingles, back in the day: “Opiates and caffeine, breakfast of champions.” After we got good and well, the pair started in about erecting a platform on YouTube. Or something. With the oxys, it was all pleasantly incomprehensible. I forgot how hillbilly heroin made your ears ring. (Speaking of Rush, how much did it take to make a fat man go deaf in one ear?) Jay and Riegle promised they’d get her “out there” Gangnam style.

  “Being a con man ain’t that different from being a promoter,” Jay opined. “Look at Colonel Tom!”

  Neither ever seemed overconcerned about what we were doing, or even what Nora was doing. Both these guys had a way of smiling like they knew something you didn’t. Of course they knew that Nora wanted to make a statement with the baby. But, oddly, I think they both just liked the idea of becoming uncles.