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  A few minutes, maybe a few hours later, feeling expansive on smack and Thunderbird, Harold announced he would get me a job on CSI. Based, he proclaimed, on my extensive pharma-scribbling experience.

  To hear Harold tell it—he was rehearsing what he was going to say about me, in his dulcet, James Earl Jonesy Mexican-tar tones—I hadn’t just composed the copy for Restless-Knee Syndrome, I was the brains behind the syndrome itself: the genius who concocted the disease to justify selling a cure. Not true, sadly. Had it been, I wouldn’t have been scarfing motel dope crumbs from the likes of Harold. I’d have been spending the Squibb Inc. “naming bonus” on limo-delivered China white and a pharmaceutical-grade girlfriend. (There’s no way to exaggerate: RKS marked new and lucrative territory. Restless Knee went beyond branding. It represented free pharmarketeers tossing out TV bait for folks looking for a disease to call their own. Lyrica was a treatment in search of a disease.) In full SESSIE mode, I could feel the copy coming back to me, like a catchy tune. Some of the most common side effects of LYRICA are dizziness, blurry vision, weight gain, sleepiness, trouble concentrating, swelling of your hands and feet, dry mouth, and “feeling high.”

  That’s right. “Feeling high”! And how much did I love writing that? Seriously. How many people decided their knees were restless just to get that feeling? Once in a while we all get to do our bit for humanity, and who knows how many legions of euphoria seekers dove into the as-yet-unsuspicious world of Restless Knee pills thanks to my little hint? I imagined doctors’ offices flooded with otherwise healthy—if slightly skeeved—individuals rolling in with sudden, uncontrollable, loafer-throwing twitches in their lower limbs. “Doctor I need help. This dang knee of mine just won’t behave itself. It’s all, y’know . . . restless!”

  Given that any promise a junkie makes has a shelf life shorter than a space heater in a bathtub, I wasn’t banking on Harold really nailing me a CSI gig. I would have been surprised had he remembered that he offered. In the meantime I had to sweat through a bout of my own brain-eating Ebola—otherwise known as my immediate future.

  SIXTEEN

  Fresh Dead Man Shit (Memory Issues)

  And yes, yes, I’m trying to tell the story here, but things occasionally wander. Did I mention that I have—what do you call them?—memory issues? No doubt too much bad shampoo had altered my brain chemistry. Forget the tainted heroin, Plexiglas-cut crack, questionable E, and bathtub crank, not to mention all the preteen hallucinogens and booze. Fucking Head and Shoulders has left me linear-thought-fucked and incapable of spinning a straight narrative without veering left and right, careening over the median like a lush behind the wheel on New Year’s Eve.

  I can say this: not a minute went by when I did not think about the murder . . . or think about the fact that I wasn’t thinking about it. (Which is the same thing—the old Guilt-Over-Not-Feeling-Guilty routine.) Here’s what lingers: the Lysol and stale urine stink of the men’s room. The ear hair and scalp flecks on Spectacles when I stood above him, wielding my paper clip. The odd way he cupped himself, his “manhood,” with both hands while he relieved himself. Detail upon detail. Enough to drown a man in memory if he wasn’t careful. But was it guilt? Was it remorse? Well . . . no. It’s too late to try and look good, Father. In truth, what I felt after murdering was about what I felt before murdering. Only more.

  Does that make sense?

  If not, let me, as famously popular and charismatic two-term president and former Screen Actors Guild snitch Ronald Reagan used to say, restate and reiterate. What I felt was a niggling, occasionally-more-than-niggling—okay, gnawing—sensation that I had risked Death Row, retribution, and eternal damnation for killing an innocent man out of my new companion’s fantasy and paranoia; that I had smelled fresh dead man shit; that, in fact, Steeple Fingers had no connection to Nora whatsoever, let alone the intention of taking her life. And all of it, all of it, was too brutal and soul-soiling to let rise to the surface of my brain. So, naturally, I kept it down, weighted with carefully arranged anvils (well, actually heroin) on the bottom of that roiling cesspool that passed for consciousness.

  As for my Greyhound date—she and I didn’t speak about the murder. Until the next one.

  SEVENTEEN

  Pre-Occupied

  We had, Nora and I, initially decided not to take a place, but to live with the Occupy people, down by City Hall. It was easy enough to find a tent. People were donating, so there were piles of them. Finding space beside City Hall proved less difficult than boosting canned beans from the local Ralphs. Our neighbors were a wan and truculent Korean gent called Viper and an almost translucent, puppety-voiced white girl named Partyeleanor. (I had to ask her twice, and she insisted this was the name she was born with.) Despite the edict banning all drugs from the Occupy site, Partyeleanor seemed to be imbibing her share of party-grade methedrine, a lapse that left her incapable of not talking. When she met us, like most meth-heads, she did not so much initiate conversation as aim whatever monologue was already spewing out of her mouth in our direction. (And would, no doubt, continue spewing after we departed.) The subject of her rant—actually the subject of most people’s the night we arrived—was Scott Olsen, the Iraqi War vet who had just taken a gas canister to the head, courtesy of the Oakland Police Department. Partyeleanor filled us in about Scott Bergstresser, “uniformed Satan,” the cop who—she kept repeating—shot the tear gas projectile that hit Scott Number One’s head. She ended every sentence with a little up-trill, so that even, say, “Dogs have four legs” sounded like a question: “Dogs have four legs?” It was something you got used to. After five minutes of Party, I tuned out and found myself meditating on the vicious brown nicotine stains coating Nora’s fingers, and her curious habit of dining almost exclusively on canned tomatoes and varietal jerky.

  Our first night downtown, doing some supermarket boosting on Alvarado and Eighth, I watched Nora pore over the small print, back-of-the-label information on a package of faux baloney. What was she looking for? “GMOs,” she informed me, without looking up. “The food lobby paid off Congress to pass a law saying companies do not have to put on the label whether their shit is genetically modified or not. Fucking agribusiness? I’m telling you, this soyloney causes birth defects they don’t even have names for.” She put the non-lunch-meat lunch meat back and we moved to the dairy aisle, where she grabbed a half gallon of 2 percent, wielding it over head. “The growth hormones? In cows?” I thought she was going to smash the carton onto the floor in protest. A trio of Cholitas pushing strollers stopped to stare, as if this skinny white girl were some kind of in-store entertainment. Everything about Nora was scrawny, except, as mentioned, her breasts. (And why do I keep mentioning them? What is that about?) What impressed me was that she owned breasts of such girth, they made no attempt to not look artificial. When she ranted, they bobbed up down under her T-shirt like fat, drowning babies. The way she fumed at me, anyone would think I had personally hormoned the offending livestock, and saw to it their tainted issue made its way into pregnant women and children. “Babies in Arkansas are being born with cartoon kidneys, from genetically modified corn in baby food. The fucking food lobby—agribusiness is worse than Nazis. But what’s the alternative? Breast milk’s full of paint thinner, termite killer, and toilet deodorizer. And that’s just the good shit. They’ve done secret tests, at NASA, and found rocket fuel in there. At least Hitler just murdered Jews—he didn’t foul the world so that nature could do it for him.”

  “Not technically true,” I said, even though I knew I shouldn’t. “Mengele experimented on babies. He exposed them to all kinds of chemicals.”

  “Well, fine!” she shouted back, even though the manager, a largish red-faced man with a clubfoot, was now marching lopsidedly up the aisle toward us. I recalled—Fun Fact!—how the Nazis, before moving on to Jews and Gypsies, exterminated babies with clubfeet. Though Hermann Göring himself had a clubfoot, he claimed it was the result of a bear-hunti
ng accident.

  “At least Mengele bothered to experiment,” Nora snapped, cutting off my own unpleasant thoughts. “Monsanto doesn’t even do that. They just put the crap out there. What do they care? The money they’re not making on deformed toddler hearts they make on patenting seeds that have existed for two thousand years. More than two thousand small farmers in India kill themselves every year. You know why? Because mighty Monsanto bought off the Indian government—not just the prime ministers, but the supervisors and mayors of tiny villages. Now they send thugs out to tiny family farms and shut them down unless the farmers pay piles of rupees for the privilege of planting the same seeds that their grandparents and great-grandparents and their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents used. Oh, and did I mention that Obama appointed the former VP of Public Policy at Monsanto to run the FDA? Change you can believe in!”

  This might have been the most sentences my kind-of girlfriend had strung together since I met her. Her passion was impressive, even if, deep down, I had a feeling the real source of her anger was something else entirely. True, she had righteous indignation over Monsanto, but the rage boiling inside her—that sprang from a whole other hell.

  Nora was still ranting while I guided her by the arm way from the approaching manager. Steered her toward a case of hot chicken roasters in aluminum pans. “The world’s fucking brutal, baby, but right now we have to—”

  “Chickens!” She eyed the trays as if they were personally offending her. “Forget the chemicals Tyson farms pumps into hens, forget the fact their feet are glued to the bottom of their cages.”

  The three Cholitas, still following us, laughed and elbowed each other. All three rocked super-tight tops that showed the spaces between the buttons they barely managed to button over their solidly stout torsos. (I could not help wondering, why is it Latinas can be ample enough to show visible stomach rings and still be absolutely sexy, while the same sausage heft on non-Latinas, specifically white women—call me reverse racist—looked desperate and fat?)

  “Are you fucking listening?” Nora hissed. “If the hormones in these chickens don’t cause a five-year-old girl to sprout pubic hair, the aluminum in those pans will make sure she’s half senile by the time she’s thirty.”

  This time I didn’t bother to plead, I grabbed her arm and frog-marched her out of the store, aiming—I hate to say it—a sheepish, shit-eating henpecked hubby grin toward the shoppers who’d stopped to stare. Better to have security think I’m dickless than pat me down for canned goods.

  Once in the lot, I stopped smiling fast. “Do you realize I’ve got two cans of those tomatoes you wanted in my pants, plus the Fritos? You can rant or you can steal, but not both, okay? Nora? You with me on this? Come on, I need to hear you say it.”

  She eyed me patiently, waiting till I finished. “Corn’s the biggest GMO, you know? When genetically modified corn was fed to pregnant rats, baby males were born with testicles that kept changing color. And females with mature uteruses that usually prolapsed.”

  I gave up. “Bet you can’t eat just one, huh?”

  “This is funny to you?”

  “Nervous joke,” I said, checking over my shoulder. “Just keep moving. If a rent-a-cop finds sardines in your pants, they can still arrest you a hundred feet outside of a store.”

  Her glare let me know the esteem in which she held me.

  “For Christ’s sake, Lloyd, what are you thinking?”

  “You really want to know?” We were out of the danger zone, so I relaxed a little. “I’m thinking about octopi.”

  “Octopi?”

  “You know, your octopus shows mood by changing color. Made me wonder about those male rats. Maybe they have mood balls.”

  “If they’re lucky,” she said, without sounding mad about it.

  “I’m just saying, baby, you advertise those on an infomercial at four in the morning, people would phone in their credit card numbers, I guarantee.”

  “You’re so funny,” she said. “I got a can opener, so I can eat the canned tomatoes now.”

  Again, I had to ask why.

  “Bisphenols. The plastic they use to line the cans.”

  “What, you like the texture?”

  “Mmmm,” she said, tossing the can back and sliding a whole tomato down her throat. “It’s like licking porpoise belly. If porpoise gave you birth defects.”

  I couldn’t believe that managers hadn’t come running.

  “Just three servings is enough to mutate frontal neocortical development—and let’s not even talk about genital development.”

  “Jesus, we’re back to that?”

  My discomfort had no effect on her. We were standing before a botanica advertising “natural remedies” for “impotencia.” A woman inside stared at us like she knew something horrible but wasn’t going to share. I turned back to Nora, who was busy explaining.

  “You know about anogenital distance, right? Bisphenols significantly increase the space between anus and genitals.”

  “Baby taint? Is that what we’re talking about?” I felt a buzzy discomfort in some organ I couldn’t identify, but still wanted to rip out and beat with a ball-peen hammer. My mouth had gone dry as melba toast.

  Now I wanted the manager to come. A rent-a-cop. An irate shopper, anything to interrupt us.

  “Anogenital distance,” Nora announced, as if stating the name of a dignitary at a state dinner, “happens to be an indicator of neurological development.”

  Digging deep, I peered directly into her feline eyes.

  “I still can’t believe I found a woman who can talk side effects. Do you know how hot that is?” Nora didn’t respond, so naturally I kept talking. “Anyway, I thought this was a GMO thing, not bisphawhat-the-fucks.”

  “Bisphenols, GMOs—they’re just the delivery system. The source is always the same. The one percent. Who profits from lax regulations? By putting mutagens in tomato soup?”

  This was Nora: bursting into political rage after boosting dinner from a supermarket—two minutes from the supermarket. It’s a nice sensation: being annoyed and terrified and in love at the same time. Like loving oysters even though shellfish send you into anaphylactic shock. “So,” I said, feeling dickish without doing anything to stop it, “there is somebody who makes money off kids with defects and learning disorders. I’m guessing that’s a growth industry. There is some secret creepy spread sheet that calculates the market value of challenged toddlers. First it was Baby Einstein. Now it’s Baby Hawking. That’s the magic of capitalism.”

  “There’s value in every child, though it may not be what you think it is.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re speaking like a Catholic or a sideshow operator.”

  “You’ll see what I am.”

  Here she glared at me. The sky had turned the color of pale dirt, the smog taking over. We’d moved down Alvarado half a block, beside a bus bench where a muttering crone plagued by hair crust had set up camp with a shopping cart full of cats. In matter-of-fact fashion, she yanked up her blanket skirt and relieved herself heartily at the curb. Nora might as well have been watching Masterpiece Theatre. She beamed at the crust lady and her splashing, horselike gush. But I was still nervous about walking out of the store with unpaid items. I have always been a terrible criminal. That’s why I got straight jobs to pay for . . . what I needed to pay for.

  Nora—who seemed, oddly, to blossom the more dire things got—had that golden aura around her when she shoplifted. Like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. Remember when Martin Sheen sees him, strutting around, talking surfboards, with Vietcong shells exploding all around him? Nora had the same aura of seeming protected—if not from bullets, then at least from the mullahs of shoplifting.

  I was the one who’d sweat through his clothes. Nora couldn’t have been more relaxed—for her—as if it were normal to stroll
around and chat with stolen goods in our crotches, as if there were no risk whatsoever of some seven-dollar-an-hour Police Academy washout humping out after us with a cell phone and plasticuffs. (Even though, on some level, a little time in supermarket jail might have been preferable to hearing tales of baby taint.)

  We were still using heroin, but smoking it now, so it was more like health food. Besides which, heroin could calm you down but it couldn’t cure neurosis. I was once caught shoplifting at a bodega in the Mission, in San Francisco. The owner, originally from Juárez, pulled a machete from under the counter and swung it, nipping the tip off my middle finger and sending it flying into a jar of Slim Jims. The owner chuckled sourly. “Thanks for the tip, pendejo.” I was too stunned to feel pain, but not too stunned to appreciate the joke, or the calm in his mild, raspy voice. (On the plus side, the free oxys I got at SF General made it all worthwhile. So worthwhile I almost considered asking El Bodega Man to slice off another tip.)

  There was no danger of macheted retribution with Nora. We’d strolled around the corner like regular people. But wait! My fucking memory! I mentioned the Depakote thing, right? Way up top? Second or third chapter? The whole I-had-a-breakdown backstory? I also mentioned that we’d stolen a Prius? (Didn’t I?) Well, not stolen, exactly . . . More like stole-slash-borrowed from Harold.

  See, Harold preferred a Prius for scoring, since most cops—undercover or uniformed—were unlikely to profile a white man in a white Prius with a “Vegans Do It Organically” bumper sticker as a heroin buyer. (Or so he theorized.) The one time he got pulled over, Harold insisted he was cruising the hood to look for his little sister, who’d said she had taken up with a man named “Loco” on Alvarado. “Is that a balloon in your hand?” the cop wanted to know. “Oh this? I don’t know what it is, officer. A Mexican fella just came up at a red light and asked for twenty bucks. I didn’t know if he was gonna shoot me or what. I didn’t even know he stuck the balloon in my hand until just now. Why the hell is a man like that selling balloons on the street? Is there a party or something?” Harold swore the UCs looked at each other and said, “We can’t arrest the asshole for being stupid,” and let him go.