Listen. Max Jacobsen and Theodore Morrell. Max got custom Dexedrine so Bob Fosse could keep fucking after open-heart surgery. Fosse called his speed gun powder. He called his cock his gun. See, people have to have a certain greatness first. You can’t learn to be Hitler. But if you are Hitler, speed can make you more speed Hitlery. That’s what Morrell did. Morrell had the ultimate high—not the IV cocktail he concocted for der Führer, but the one he got from chemically inducing the psycho-physical mutations that made der Führer the way he was. In his journals, Morrell called it Fütterung der Bestie. Feeding the beast. He gave him diarrhea and constipated him at the same time. Control. That made Morrell the only man who knew that, while he made his Reichstag speech, Hitler was wet-farting his pants in a speed rush, nursing a stubborn turtle-head, flooding back shame and fighting the urge to tear off his pants and just shit in the throngs at Nuremberg, at the Berlin Victory Gate, at the Reichstag. Il Dottore injected his boss five minutes before every public appearance and timed the rush to hit ten minutes later. The frisson of dopamine that kicked in was like a vibrating squid-arm on Hitler’s prostate. Up his ass and hitting that spot. They gave him his only free-standing erections. (With Eva, at best, he grew from flaccid to spongy. But he never showed her his unit.) That was speed sex, Hitler-style; he unloaded on Eva five minutes after each speech, just not from the front. He didn’t table it. That was Danny Thomas. Who had an entire wing of Domestic Scatology named in his honor. It’s almost heroic. Danny was not just a family-friendly TV funny-man—he was King of the Plate Jobs! This was Hitler. He got up and splattered Poland. Before each big Invasion he’d draw a map from Eva’s nipples down to her curiously pasty thighs. He’d lower his pants. Just enough. (The Führer always wore woolen drawers. Soldiers drawers, they were called.) In the exquisite shiver of Morrell’s custom-made delivery system, he’d climax on Eva’s face and lose his bowels on her peroxide mons pubis at the same time. Spewing Heil Hitler! After Poland, he got bold; drop to his knees and daintily lick after he browned her. After Stalingrad he began to throw up. Three-hole opera, Morell called it. Eva would pretend to whimper when he Bitzkrieged. “Oh mein Führer…Mein Führer!” Eva only complained when Reichfeces got in her hair. Even when she shampooed with lye, she still smelled Hitler’s “shit perfume.” Morrell’s spiraling doodles indicated his own stimulant intake. The same two words, over and over. Potenza e vergogna. Vergogna e potenza. Power and shame. Shame and power. The doctor kept his notes in Italian.

“Morrell was part of the grand tradition. Think Elvis and Dr. Nick. Behind Every Great Man Is An Amoral, Moneygrubbing Doctor. These are the marriages that make History. Hitler was Hitler because of speed. You see the tradition? Think Nietzsche! Of course Nietzsche didn’t use speed. He didn’t need it. He had tertiary syphilis.” He held up three skin-peeling fingers, nails rimmed with black moons. “And”—he dug in a pile of books and magazines, pulled out something and smiled. “It’s in German,” he sighed, like he was swooning, it got him so prostate-quivery hot just touching the title page. “But Von Sneltz demonstrates, conclusively, that the psycho-motor and cognitive psychosis of third stage syphilis mirrors the effect of methamphetamine psychosis. Actually, it’s a paper on narcotic mirroring phenomenon. Fascinating, right? Right, right? Fascinating!” I had to squeeze my eyes to stop picturing him without any skin on his face. I don’t know what kind of psychosis that was a sign of—imagining people in front of you with flayed faces. I’m talking about how you are fucked up. The syphilis psychosis or the speed psychosis way? See, we need to spend so much money to alter ourselves, to feel like we have a disease. America—founded on disease. Why did we give the Indians smallpoxed blankets? To obliterate them? To make them fear us? No—well, not only. Because, it’s so obvious—White Man got small pox, Red Man didn’t!