Et Tu, Babe

Chapter Two

First Fisherman [stammering]: Could you … uh … please … [He hands the fish hook and worm to the Second Fisherman.] I can’t … I knew him … way back … high school … I just can’t … I can’t bring myself to hook him …

Second Fisherman: You knew this worm?

First Fisherman: He was my … well, I was his … I … I knew him … yes …

Second Fisherman: This particular worm?

First Fisherman: I knew the worm, OK? I can’t hook him, all right? No way … can’t hook him. [He looks at worm.] I can’t hook you … no way I could hook you, man.

[Worm manages a weak smile.]

Second Fisherman: You want me to hook him?

First Fisherman: Please!

The trail of lavender azalea blossoms leads to the stadium, to the locker room. Faces are almost unrecognizable in the heavy fog of aerosol deodorant and jock-itch powder. Some of the strongest men can barely move, encumbered by their massive plated stegosaurian tails, which leave long trails of cheesy sebaceous excretion. The strongest man of all, who wears a combination lock through a hole in his nose, empties a box of Good & Plenty into the whirlpool. The Second Fisherman walks to the whirlpool and, leaning over the edge, stares into the gurgling vortex of pink and white.

The two scenes you have just seen, both from the 1979 film Let’s Not and Say We Did, helped make Iron Man Wang — who played the role of the Second Fisherman — one of Hong Kong’s most popular screen stars. Evincing a taut sexuality, high-wire anxiety, and vulnerable fair-haired eccentricity, Iron Man Wang is today attempting to parlay these attributes into political capital as he launches his campaign to become Hong Kong’s Administrative Prefect. Across the street, there’s a huge photograph of his face, emblazoned with the caption: “I’m Iron Man Wang, how are you this evening?”

I’m inside the King Fok Club — a Hong Kong mah-jongg parlor and lounge frequented by drug couriers, numbers runners, transsexual prostitutes, and off-duty cops. The bandstand is a green blur of jade drumsticks as the topless all-girl trio sweats through an aerobic repertoire of Buddy Rich covers. I’m dancing with Antoinette, who’s so gorgeous it’s hard to believe she was a man once — not only a man, but a Golden Gloves middleweight champion and then the head of a teamsters local that was considered the roughest on the East Coast, but let me tell you, she is absolutely ooh-la-la. I guess no matter how many pugs he KO’d in the ring and no matter how many scabs and union dissidents he savaged with his brass knuckles, there was always a beautiful woman struggling to emerge. Compliments to the surgeon, he sculpted a real Venus de Milo. I inhale her wicked perfume as we waltz, large pimples on her back spelling “Vote for Iron Man Wang” in Braille.

The band finishes its set, I bid Antoinette bon soir and kung hei fat choy after politely declining an hour of “infernal ecstasies,” she vanishes into the smoke, and I return to the bar and order the house special, something called a Stinky Pinky: two parts gin, one part strawberry schnapps, one part O-amino acetomphenome, which is the primary odor component of extract from the anal sac of a Japanese weasel. Some people hate Stinky Pinkies, I think they’re yummy, and I’m draining my sixth when there’s a loud commotion outside — so I run out and there lying in the middle of the street is Antoinette. She’s dying. But something quite extraordinary is happening in extremis. As she dies, she is gradually resuming masculine form. Whiskers sprout from her cheeks and chin. Her Adam’s apple protrudes from her throat. Her breasts shrivel, and her chest, now broad and muscular, becomes matted with black curly hair. Her hips and buttocks shrink and a large penis rises from beneath her Lurex skirt, stiffening in the cool Hong Kong night.

Now, I’m a writer, but I’ve always fancied myself something of an amateur forensic pathologist. My favorite show — as Arleen will certainly corroborate — is “Quincy, M.E.” So whenever I run across a corpse, I try to take advantage of the opportunity to do a quick autopsy. I kneel down beside Antoinette and get to work. “Does anyone have a tape recorder?” I ask the crowd. Silly question, this is Hong Kong — a dozen state-of-the-art, micro-format, voice-activated, digital audiocassette recorders with Dolby noise reduction are immediately proffered. I grab one and begin to dictate: “The decedent died as a result of craniocerebral trauma (skull fractures, subfrontal and temporal bone contusions, and an organizing subdural hematoma). Observation of brain tissue indicates that the decedent suffered from incipient cerebral sclerosis — an actual hardening and shrinking of the cerebral mass, a condition that in its advanced form would have reduced the size of the decedent’s brain to that of a peach pit. Other significant postmortem findings include multiple round, depressed skin ulcers in various stages of healing on the lower abdominal wall, thighs, and left elbow consistent with “skin-popping scars” of chronic subcutaneous narcotism.” I eject the cassette, return the recorder, and judging the proximity of the police by the rising volume of their sirens, decide that it’s time for me to say goodbye to the King Fok Club and good-bye to Hong Kong for now. I hail a rickshaw and we sprint toward Kai Tak Airport.

It’ll be a long flight home, but even as we prepare to take off, I already perceive the geographical and cultural disjunction. I write on a napkin: “I feel like a seed in the digestive tract of a bird, being transported thousands of miles from one habitat to another.” I sign the napkin and ask the stewardess to give it to the pilot. Fortunately, I’m seated next to a fascinating passenger. She’s Flo, a chimpanzee selected by Jane Goodall from among chimps at Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, who was taught a sign language vocabulary of over 2,000 words. Flo often appears on MacNeil-Lehrer, “Nightline” with Ted Koppel, and CNN, participating in panel discussions on animal rights, the use of animals in medical research and cosmetics testing, etc. Luckily I learned sign language when I dated the Academy Award — winning deaf actress Marlee Matlin when I lived in L.A., so communicating with Flo is no problem. I learn that she’s flying to the States to “speak” at a demonstration against a new product that’s been introduced by Burger Hut called Rhesus Pieces: bite-size chunks of rhesus monkey coated in granola and deep-fried.

Even though it’s quite expensive, I splurge and take the Glass-bottom Bus from Newark Airport back to headquarters. Upon my return, I find Arleen in bed, fast asleep, a book called Object Relations Group Psychotherapy open across her softly rising bosom. I kiss her warm lips and whisper, “I love you.” Carmella is also asleep. I lift her ear flap and whisper, “I had a great time in Hong Kong — I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Good night, babe,” I say, stroking her. The first autumn night of the year … I fall asleep with a feeling of profound contentment. How strange that I’ll abruptly awaken in the middle of the night and clamber like a zombie to the roof — my eyes blazing in the darkness like the cigarette I smoke so rabidly!

It was determined at an October 17th meeting — attended by my literary agent Binky Urban, editor Marty Asher, publicist Katy Barrett, and lecture agent George Greenfield — that I disguise my appearance before entering the Hyatt Self-Surgery Clinic in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Although the dimpled, clean-shaven face framed by blond-flecked chestnut tresses combed back into an undulating pompadour had become an instant icon to millions of fans who clipped photos from the pages of Rolling Stone, Creem, the New York Times, and the Asbury Park Press and pasted them to dormitory walls and three-ring binders, sometime in early November, a makeup artist was summoned to Team Leyner headquarters and instructed to execute a temporary new Look. The Look was Hezbollah — Party of God — closely cropped black hair, black beard, white button-down shirt, black pants.

The Hyatt Self-Surgery Clinic? Self-surgery clinics were the medical equivalent of U-Hauls or rental rug shampooers. Clinics provided a private operating room, instruments, monitoring devices, drugs, and instructional videocassettes for any procedure that could be performed solo, under local anesthetic, on any part of your anatomy that you could reach easily with both hands. As I pulled into the parking lot of the recently renovated Hyatt, I realized that I’d left my copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the Mercury Capri XR2 that I’d test-driven for Gentleman’s Quarterly. All my notes on the 132-hp turbocharged roadster were scrawled in the margins of the Elizabethan poet’s magnum opus. I called Casale Lincoln Mercury on my cellular car phone and asked for Joe Casale, showroom manager. My heart went out to Joe — tiny misshapen “pinhead,” flipper-like forearms.

“Joe Casale.”

“Joe, this is Mark Leyner. I was in about an hour ago to test-drive the new Capri and I think I left a book on the passenger seat. Can you have someone check and see if it’s there?”

“No problem, Mr. Leyner. Just hold for a couple of seconds.”

“Thanks, babe.”

A minute or two passed and Casale returned to the line.

“Mr. Leyner, I’m sorry but the Capri you drove is out on the road again. Where are you now?”

“I’m at the Hyatt Self-Surgery Clinic in New Brunswick.”

“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Leyner, why don’t I drop the book off at the clinic later this evening.”

“It’s not out of your way?”

“It’s no problem, Mr. Leyner.”

“Thanks, babe.”

I parked, slung my overnight bag over my shoulder, and went in to register. The clerk at the front desk keyed my name and American Express number into the computer.

“Mr. Leyner, what procedure will you be performing on yourself?”

I hesitated for a moment before responding. It seemed injudicious to divulge to this woman that a deceased rodent was impacted between my prostate gland and urethra and that the surgical procedure I intended to perform was a radical gerbilectomy.

“Appendectomy,” I lied.

“Mr. Leyner, do you have a preference with regard to O.R. accommodations?”

“Well, where do the real players stay?”

“The ‘real players,’ sir?”

I pushed my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose and superciliously eyeballed the desk clerk over the blue mirrored lenses.

“The players … the Stephen Kings, the Louis L’Amours, the Jeffrey Archers, and Ken Folletts and James Clavells.”

“Mr. L’Amour was in last month to perform his own cold-fusion blepharoplasty and he stayed in … let me check … ah yes, the Tivoli Suite.”

“I would like the Tivoli Suite, then.”

“Very good, sir.”

* * *

It’s 10:30 P.M. I’m in the Tivoli Suite and I’ve just self-administered a spinal block leaving my lower torso insensible to pain. I’m about to make my first incision when I hear the doorknob turn.

“¿Quién es?” I ask. “Who is it?”

With the exception of my instrument tray and my lower abdomen, which are illuminated by high-powered halogen lamps, the room is pitch dark. I tilt a lamp toward the door and discern a figure with a tiny head and a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene tucked under his flipper.

“Joe?” I inquire.

“It was right on the passenger seat where you left it, Mr. Leyner!”

“Thanks, babe.”

Joe turns to leave.

“Joe, wait a minute. How’d you like to come work for me?”

“Work for you, Mr. Leyner?”

“Yeah. Move into headquarters, coordinate the staff, oversee the bodyguards, y’know, do a little of this, a little of that — you’d be my adjutant, my aide-de-camp. It’s a great group of people, you get free medical treatment from Dr. Larry Werther — my cousin, my gastroenterologist — and basically I think you’d do a great job and I think you’d have a ball. What do you say?”

“Mr. Leyner … I think you have yourself an aide-de-camp,” Joe says, extending a flipper.

“Welcome aboard, babe.”

You enter the pink-and-yellow-splashed foyer and you’re swept quickly toward the inner sanctum. Flashbulbs pop as svelte spokesmodel and media liaison Baby Lago pours the Moët. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Arleen ravaging a french-fried yam. She’s wearing a short, provocative strapless dress by Emanuel Ungaro that’s candy-box pink and pale green. The dress is so provocative that you want to approach Arleen and perhaps caress the nape of her neck. But you dare not. Because there I am. Even more heavily muscled than you’d expected. More frightening and yet somehow more alluring than you’d imagined. My crisp white shirt is by Georges Marciano and costs about $88. My suede jeans — Ender Murat, $550—are rolled up, exposing calves that make you realize for perhaps the first time in your life how beautiful the human calf can actually be — when it’s pumped up almost beyond recognition. I’m being interviewed by a reporter from Allure, the new Condé Nast beauty magazine.

“I have a way of being noticed and being mysterious at once,” I’m saying, “like a gazelle that is there one second and then disappears.”

Joe Casale comes running in. “Mr. Leyner, Mr. Leyner — Maria’s on ‘20/20.’ You said I should let you know.”

“OK, babe, thanks. Everybody quiet down! Joe, turn it up.”

“Today Marla Maples, the twenty-six-year-old model-actress who first achieved notoriety as the ‘other woman’ in the Donald and Ivana Trump divorce, sits on death row at San Quentin as her attorneys exhaust their final appeals in an apparently futile attempt to save the blond serial killer from the gas chamber. Implicated in the deaths of Leonard Bernstein, Malcolm Forbes, Grace Kelly, Billy Martin, Muppet-creator Jim Henson, and reggae singer Peter Tosh, Maples has devoted her final weeks to a letter-writing campaign in support of a congressional bill that will require television sets manufactured after July 1997 to be equipped with a computer chip that provides caption service for the deaf.

“Marla, you’re young, you’re leggy, you’re busty — yet in a matter of days, the State of California is going to put you in a metal room and fill it with sodium cyanide gas. Do you have any advice for other leggy, busty, young women who might be experiencing peer pressure to experiment with serial killing and who might be watching tonight?”

“That’s enough, Joe. Turn the TV off, OK? Thanks, babe.”

I apologize to the Allure reporter.

“Now … where were we?”

“I was asking you how you got started as a writer, and, more specifically, how you got started writing liner notes for albums.”

“When I was six, I came home from school one day and I went down into the basement to look for a bicycle pump and I found the dead bodies of my parents. They were each hanging from a noose, naked. All their fingers had been cut off and arranged in a pentagram under their dangling feet and in the center of this pentagram of bloody fingers was a note and the note said: ‘Dear Mark, You did this to us.’

“A year later, I took a job as a bookkeeper at an insurance agency that was located in an old two-story brick building not far from here. And on my first day of work, a few of my colleagues took me out to lunch. After a long silence, one of them finally said that there was something very important that they needed to tell me. He said that about thirty or forty years ago, our office building had been owned by a very wealthy man. And this man was a chronic philanderer. And his wife knew about his affairs. And she decided that the only way to end his infidelity and to preserve their marriage was to get pregnant again, to have a ‘change-of-life baby.’ So she stopped using contraceptives and, sure enough, she got pregnant. The baby was born, a boy. And he was horribly deformed. He had neurofibromatosis — Elephant Man’s disease. The couple kept the child shackled in a storeroom in the husband’s commercial property. He was never brought to the couple’s home, but kept for his entire childhood in a dark, windowless storage room in the very building that this insurance company now occupies. The child, the monster child, did nothing to stop the husband’s philandering. In fact, if anything, the tragedy of this birth, of having to go every day to the storage room and find this chained horror writhing in its own excrement, simply deepened the husband’s despair and inflamed his bitter compulsion to betray his wife. All of this finally drove the wife over the edge and one night, while the husband was working in the office building, she set it on fire. The husband’s charred body was found, but somehow the deformity escaped. And although he’s never been seen, it’s rumored that on his birthday he goes foraging for a special meal of human flesh.

“At this point, my colleagues looked at me beseechingly and confided their suspicion that the monster child returns at night to the building. ‘We’re begging you,’ they said, ‘don’t stay late. If there’s extra work to be done, take it home. But there’s danger — we feel it, we feel that he comes back.’

“It was soon Christmas season. And one of my responsibilities was to close out the books for the year. It was a very hectic time for us and one night I was asked by the president of the company to stay late, finish some work, and then lock up. That night I worked on the books until almost two in the morning — the building, of course, completely empty except for me. I finished up, turned out the lights, armed the building’s security system, locked the door, and exited. I walked through the parking lot to my car, opened the front door, and got in. There was a smell … a smell of rotting flowers, of putrid water from a neglected vase … and the stench of decaying flesh. I felt something on my neck … not fingers, but stumps … finger stumps caressing my neck. I turned around and there were the corpses of my parents seated in the back, and they were gazing at me with wide eyes and horrible grins on their faces. I was ice-cold and nauseous with terror. I opened the car door, rolled to the ground, and ran back to the building. Fumbling frantically with the keys, I finally got the door open. I took a few trembling steps into the dark hallway, when I felt something brush against my leg and then do a series of … are you familiar with classical ballet steps?”

The Allure reporter nods. “Somewhat.”

“Well, it did a series of brisés volés. This is a flying brisé where you finish on one foot after the beat and the other is crossed in back … it’s basically a fouetté movement with a jeté battu. And then it landed in the middle of the reception area in an arabesque à la hauteur—that’s an arabesque where the working leg is raised at a right angle to the hip, one arm curved over the head, the other extended to the side. It was the monster child! And he had a birthday hat on his head! To my astonishment — especially after everything I’d heard — he wasn’t such a malevolent creature after all. We talked for quite a while — touching on a wide range of issues — and then he said that he had a friend who was in trouble and he asked me if I could help her. I said I’d try. I followed him deep into the woods, maybe two or three miles until we stopped. And there seated against a tree, sobbing inconsolably, was Julianne Phillips.

“ ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her.

“She said that Bruce Springsteen had just left her for Patti Scialfa.

“ ‘Listen, I’ve got a car,’ I said. ‘Is there somewhere I could take you?’

“ ‘P-P-Paula’s.’

“Well, it turned out that Paula was Paula Abdul. And we became very close. And it was through Paula that I met Elton and then Axl and Queen Latifah. And that’s basically how I got started writing liner notes.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Leyner, that was absolutely fascinating!” the Allure reporter gushes. “And good luck on your new book.”

“Thanks, it was a pleasure chatting.”

I’m frequently asked that question about how I got started writing liner notes and I have to admit that it’s become somewhat tedious explaining it over and over again. So I feel a bit pooped and sneak off to the bedroom for a quick nap. There’s an open book on my pillow. This is one of Arleen’s modes of communicating with me. She’ll leave a certain book, opened to a certain page and passage, on my pillow, and I’ll deduce from the text what Arleen is trying to tell me. Perhaps a passage from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” indicating that she’d like to spend more time in pristine, rural environments. Or an issue of Vogue, hinting that a new blouse or pair of shoes might be appreciated. Or maybe a chapter from Greenberg and Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, implying that we’re not “connecting” as Arleen feels we should be. So I take the volume — a weighty anthropology textbook — from the pillow and read the indicated passage:

When the men have retired to the “sulk house” to sulk, the youngsters run exuberantly to the river. In they wade, and with playful boasts, attempt to snare recyclable refuse — everything from broken chunks of polyvinyl chloride buoys to foil packets of ketchup — from the swift current. The women, who have been watching from either the menstrual gazebos or the song stalls where they flatten manioc cakes between their hands to rhythmic doggerel, shout praise at the boys and heap derision on the ensconced brooding men, impugning their scavaging prowess and disparaging their virility. The men sulk for usually an hour, when a preset timer resounds in the sulk house and, depending on whether the men have planned a hunting raid or just want to watch television and drink, prepare themselves accordingly. If TV and drinking comprise the agenda, the men change from their dark, cowled sulking robes into gym shorts and flip-flops and undo their topknots, letting their long orange hair fall casually down their backs. They then make exaggerated exhibitions of pride about their hair, tossing their heads and narcissistically flipping their tresses about with the backs of their hands. Although these displays of extravagant, almost effeminate vanity usually culminate in gales of laughter, this is a crucial, highly ritualized transition activity that psychologically enables the men to shift from sulking to watching television and drinking — a transition that is physically accomplished by walking through an underground passageway from the sulk house to the spirit house. Once in the spirit house, the remote control for the television — a device made out of black beeswax, parana palm thatch, jaguar bone, and toucan feather tassels and featuring power, mute, volume, and channel buttons — can only be operated by the “kakarum” (powerful one). To be acknowledged as a kakarum, a man must have killed at least several persons. It is considered a feat of overwhelming courage and strength to kill a kakarum and wrest from him jurisdiction over the remote control — but this rarely happens, and in fact none of the elder informants can remember a remote control ever being taken from a kakarum. Kakarums are believed to possess supernatural power derived from the souls of the men they have killed. The prospect of acquiring this power by killing a kakarum and usurping his remote control rights is often too enticing for ambitious young men to resist. But conflicts over the remote control almost invariably end with the violent death of the young challenger, whose body is then dumped down a metal chute that delivers it into a pit located between the menstrual gazebos and the song stalls where the victim is prepared for burial by his matrilineal grandmother or mother-in-law. The kakarum then chooses a TV program and signals the commencement of drinking by announcing, “Let us drink until we vomit” and “Drink quickly so that you may be drunk soon.” The beverage that’s consumed — and consumed in staggering quantities — is a beer made from masticated pupunah mash and sugar cane extract. It’s produced in two versions: regular and lite, which is less filling. The first man to vomit is known as “wetcówe” (vomiting one) and it is he who goes outside the spirit house and makes a loud, dramatic display of vomiting in order to signal to the women to come join the men and “utcíwaiwa” (party). The women, having been signaled by the wetcówe, change from the drab clothes they’d been wearing in the menstrual gazebos or the song stalls into short, back-strapped sequined dresses, and they dance single file toward the spirit house chanting, “utcíwaiwa wetcówe! utcíwaiwa wetcówe!”

Having read the preceding selection, I’m initially at a loss to determine what message Arleen has intended to convey. Could she be trying to say that we should go out dancing more? Or that I have a drinking problem? Or that I’m dictatorial about what we watch on television? Or that I’m moody and sulk too much? Perhaps she’s suggesting that I kill someone to enhance my supernatural powers. Or maybe — just maybe — she’s trying to say that I need to get away from the rarified and glamorous world of my headquarters. Maybe Arleen, in all her psychotherapeutic wisdom, is trying to tell me to return to my roots, to re-stomp the rough-and-tumble stomping grounds of my youth.

So the next day, I went back to the old neighborhood to look up Rocco Trezza.

“Hey, man, where’s Trezz? You seen Trezz around?” I asked a guy who used to hang out with Rocco and me.

The guy dismissed the question with a wave of his hand.

“Trezza’s been bakin’ doughnuts,” he said disdainfully.

I hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood for some twenty years and obviously I was no longer fluent in the local patois. But I didn’t want to ask what “bakin’ doughnuts” meant and seem like some kind of hick, so I just shook my head and rolled my eyes and said, “Bakin’ doughnuts … oh man.” I bid the guy adieu and walked down the street, trying to figure out what he meant—“bakin’ doughnuts”? Maybe it meant he was doing nothing — cooking up a big zero every day. Maybe he was doing a lot of crack — blowing smoke rings through his mind. Or maybe he was pimping — maybe “doughnuts” stood for vaginas and “bake” meant control, exploit — taking the raw dough of young girls and parlaying it into lucrative pastry. Or maybe Rocco had hit it big — maybe “doughnuts” stood for the fat round digits in a seven-figure income. Then I thought maybe it meant that he was wasting his life away masturbating … maybe “doughnut” stood for the round configuration of fingers and thumb around the penis and “bakin’ ” was a literal reference to the heat caused by the friction of hand against dick or a figurative reference to the passion of autoeroticism.

I was so lost in thought as I rounded the corner of the street that I barreled right into a guy — didn’t even see him coming. As I helped him up off the ground, I suddenly recognized him and I was so stunned that I let go and he fell back on the sidewalk.

It was Rocco. Rocco Trezza. He was older. A bit heavier in the gut. His hair had thinned out. But he was unmistakably Trezz. Same inimitable style: the thigh-high jackboots, the black latex jockstrap, the Prussian spiked helmet strapped under the chin.

“Trezz, I can’t believe it … after all these years.”

Trezz hugged me. “How’s it goin’, man?” he asked.

“I’m good. I’m good. I got a hit book out, my wife got $35,000 because a ceiling fell on her head while she was watching the Academy Awards, and we got a dog named Carmella.”

“Carmella?”

“Yeah, Carmella … Trezz, it’s really good to see you, babe.”

“Likewise. I been reading about you.”

“Hey, Trezz, I want to ask you about something.”

“Ask.”

“Trezz, I hear you been …”

I hesitated for a moment, wondering whether I should pursue it or not.

“Trezz, I hear you been bakin’ doughnuts.”

Rocco stared at me and I could see the fury just boiling up within him.

“Bakin’ doughnuts? Bakin’ doughnuts? You heard I was fuckin’ bakin’ doughnuts?!!”

He wrestled me down and pinned me to the sidewalk. His breath hit my face in hot gusts.

“After all these years … after all we’ve been through … after every fuckin’ thing you and me have been through — you think that I would possibly fuckin’ end up bakin’ doughnuts?!! Huh?!!”

I threw him off me and we both looked at each other, sitting there on the sidewalk. I still had no idea what it meant—“bakin’ doughnuts.”

“Trezz,” I said, “I didn’t believe it … OK? I knew it was a fuckin’ lie.”

“It is a fuckin’ lie,” he said, helping me up.

I put my arm around him, and me and Trezz walked down the street. And it was just like the old days.

I’m sitting by my pool, which is encircled by the eight-foot, four-ton basaltic bluestone pillars from Stonehenge’s inner circle that I bought with a portion of my latest advance from Vintage Books, when Baby Lago brings me a fax that’s just come in. It’s from Stu Gallenkamp, V.P. Marketing, Columbia Records, re: the liner notes I’d written for George Michael’s “Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1.” It says:

Dear Mr. L., I just got off the phone with George. He loves the liner notes and in fact called them the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most significant liner notes he’d ever read. But he agrees with me on the advisability of deleting the following paragraph: “The teenage baby-sitters are slathering me with Ben-Gay. I’m eleven. I’ve got this erotic fascination with the girls’ armpits — it’s completely unfocused; I don’t know quite what I want to ‘do’ to or with their armpits, but I’m locked into their brunette stubble. The two girls shut my bedroom door, lock it, and turn out the lights. They take the warm pink wads of bubblegum from their mouths and affix them to special acupressure points on my body. They remove their tampons and smear menstrual blood on my eyelids. They shave their armpits and rinse their razors in a basin and we drink the hairy water and we chant — their Marlboros glowing in the crepuscular shadows. Then one of them — I think it was Felice — puts my face into her freshly shaven armpit, which smells slightly but deliciously of teenybopper b.o., and she says ‘count backwards from 100’ and the next thing I remember is waking up and it’s Rosh Hashanah, U.S.A., in the 1990s.”

At breakfast the next morning, Baby Lago informed me that we were out of turtle eggs and strawberries. I felt like driving her new Porsche 911 Turbo, so I offered to fetch the groceries myself, and she tossed me the keys and her flame-resistant driving gloves. I negotiated the concrete antiterrorist road barriers in first gear, the tachometer needle climbing toward the 6800-rpm redline. I brought the car to a complete stop where the headquarters access road meets the highway. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror … nice. And then I stomped on the gas, tore through the gearbox, and hit 60 mph in 4.8 seconds.

Approximately four miles west of Exit 16, outside of Wenton’s Mill, I began following a 1983 light-blue Chevy Impala, Tennessee plates, traveling west on Rte. 70. My initial observation was of a male Caucasian driver approximately 25–30 years of age and two passengers, a female Caucasian and a female Hispanic, both approximately 25–30 years of age. As I followed the vehicle, I observed its occupants engage in almost continuous sex. The male driver was being fellated by the female Caucasian, who was propped on hands and knees in the middle of the front seat. She, in turn, was enjoying vigorous cunnilingus courtesy of the female Hispanic who was supine in the passenger seat, her bare feet dangling out the window. Near Fannington, at the junction of Rte. 70 and the interstate, I observed a rearrangement within the moving vehicle: the female Hispanic climbed across the front seat and took over the wheel, the male Caucasian slid to the middle, and the female Caucasian repositioned to the passenger seat, and the sex resumed immediately. The male Caucasian lay on his side, sucking the female Hispanic driver’s nipples through her T-shirt and stimulating her clitoris with his hand, his legs scissored open, presenting his genitals to the seated female Caucasian, who initiated uninhibited fellatio. I observed three subsequent realignments within the moving vehicle with only momentary hiatuses in sexual activity. Approaching Exit 3, outside of Knoll, I decided to pull the vehicle over. I attached my flashing red light to the roof of my car, and the vehicle slowed, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway. I got out of my car, approached the Impala, and gestured to the driver — at the time it was the female Caucasian — to roll down her window. She did. The smell of sweat, semen, and vaginal mucus was overpowering. Half-eaten chicken wings and drumsticks, Juicy Fruit gum wrappers, crushed Marlboro packs, and empty beer cans were strewn all over the car. The occupants wore no trousers or underpants. Their pubic hair was full of potato chip crumbs.

“I’m charging you all with public lewdness,” I said, and I looked at my watch in order to log the correct time on my report. It was 10:45 A.M.

The occupants looked at me and began to speak. But they didn’t use words. A soft crackling sound, a kind of modulated static, issued from their mouths. I looked at my watch again. Incredibly, it was almost 12:45. Somehow two hours had passed.

The female Hispanic proffered a stick of fluorescent chewing gum. I chewed it.…

When I came to, I was in a hospital room. Four days had passed. Dr. Larry Werther, Baby Lago, Joe Casale, Rocco Trezza, and Carmella were pacing around my bed. I had a severe headache.

“Where are the bodyguards?” I asked.

“They’re out in the hall, Mr. Leyner,” Joe Casale said, as he worked the remote control on a television set cantilevered from the wall opposite my bed.

“What about Arleen?”

“She’s got clients till ten, then I’ll pick her up and bring her over.”

“Larry, what was in that chewing gum?”

“When they pumped your stomach, Baby Lago took samples and analyzed them in the lab back at headquarters. Gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance — she did the works. It was ibotenic acid. A powerful neurotoxin — destroys nerve cells in the brain. It’s a good thing Joe Casale had tailed you.”

I gave Joe the thumbs-up. “Thanks, babe.”

Joe turned his gaze momentarily from the TV and gestured with his flipper. “No problem, Mr. Leyner.”

“Joe also found this stuffed in your mouth.”

Larry handed me an ivory mah-jongg tile with the words Vote for Iron Man Wang engraved on one side.

“Damn …”

“Forget about it, man, that’s Hong Kong,” Trezza said, taking my hand in his. “You can’t worry about that shit now. You’ve got your books and your liner notes to write — that’s your life, man. Not chasing Iron Man Wang and his posse of hotwired sex freaks around the world. That’s chump shit, man.”

That’s why I loved Trezz. He always knew exactly what to say to make me feel better. I playfully snapped the elastic waistband of his black latex jockstrap.

“Trezz, y’know if you ever decide to stop bakin’ dough—”

Trezz’s eyes flared instantly.

“… if you ever decide to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing, I’d love to have you come work for us over at headquarters. And that’s a serious offer.”

Trezz was about to respond when Joe Casale interrupted from across the room.

“Hey, Mr. Leyner!” he said, gesturing at the TV with the remote control. “Look at this—”

The Brazilian actress Sonia Braga, Elle MacPherson, two Victoria’s Secret models, and Claudia Schiffer, the German model featured in Guess? jeans ads, were sitting around talking about what kind of man turns them on the most.

“I like a guy about five-seven,” said MacPherson.

“Yeah,” said Braga in husky, heavily accented English, “five-seven and about a hundred and thirty pounds.”

One of the Victoria’s Secret models, a voluptuous redhead in burnished gold satin and black lace demi-cup bra and bikini, was staring into space as she conjured her ultimate turn-on. “Light brown hair … and balding.”

“Oooooh yeah … balding!” enthused the other Victoria’s Secret model breathily. She sported a black velvet bustier and leather miniskirt.

“My Liebchen must have some broken blood vessels on his nose and he must be bowlegged,” said the pouting Guess? jeans model, squirming a bit in her chair as she spoke.

MacPherson was distractedly tracing abstract figures in the rug when she looked up and announced: “To really turn me on so that I just melt, a man must have an irritable colon and epaulet-like patches of hair on his shoulders.”

“A muscular upper body, skinny legs, and really small feet — about a size seven,” Braga asserted.

The German cover girl vigorously nodded her assent. “And hazel eyes and a mole in the right eyebrow,” she added.

The others swooned in unison. “Oh yes, a mole in the right eyebrow!”

The auburn-maned Victoria’s Secret model had shut her eyes. Her hands were crossed over her breasts as she swayed from side to side. “I can even picture what he’s wearing,” she whispered. “He’s got a leather blazer on over an Oakland A’s T-shirt, black jeans …”

“… and snakeskin boots!” MacPherson growled.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” squealed everyone.