Et Tu, Babe

INTRODUCTION

In order to rescue my book from the ineluctable current of its own narrative, and in order to resuscitate myself (depressed by an impending divorce, “stupefied in an inner marsh of ennui”), I have decided to work in miniature. Accordingly, Chapter Five shall be comprised of 24 concise segments with headings, in abecedarian sequence.

May God help me. I almost gunned down my father and my elderly grandmother in an expensive nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida, last week. Incensed by the paucity of my $ 15 appetizer, which consisted of three gossamer-thin shavings of raw filet mignon on a single frond of arugula, and by my grandmother’s remark that my pants were inappropriately “heavy” for the summer, and my father’s comment that the mole over my right eyebrow had become a “disfigurement,” I threw my napkin down on the table and stormed off to the men’s room. There, a molten rage seethed within me. I inadvertently reached behind the toilet tank and found, to my utter surprise, a gun taped to the wall. Who had taped the semiautomatic 9-mm pistol to the wall behind the toilet and for what purpose, I had no idea. But I removed the weapon, concealed it under my jacket (à la Napoleon, but with a larger and more conspicuous bulge), and I staggered back toward our table, lurching, careening from side to side, fury playing havoc with my equilibrium. Reaching the table, I withdrew my hand, leveled the weapon at my father, and was about to fire, when I remembered my own preprandial admonition to the thin-lipped, 60-year-old attorney from Jersey City: “Dad, this is our last night with Grandma. She’s recovering from cataract surgery. Please don’t squabble. Let’s make this a special dinner for her.” I laid the gun on the table. The restaurant had become deathly quiet. The only sound came from the cappuccino machine, which gurgled intermittently like life-support apparatus in a coma ward. “Short, individually titled sections … arranged alphabetically,” I murmured dazedly. The maitre d’, a heavyset man, cultivated in vitro from embryonic cell buds on a planet within the globular cluster Omega Centauri, wearing a sequined dress inset with points d’esprit, and suffering from spasmodic torticollis — painful neck-muscle spasms that twist the head to one side — would later tell me that the expression on my face was beatific — radiant, yet preter-naturally serene. “Like the Little Prince, señor.”

That night as I slept in my bed, someone or something apparently drilled an evenly spaced series of tiny holes in my forehead. I hadn’t felt anything or even woken up, and only discovered the holes as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror where I begin each morning, monitoring those inevitable daily manifestations of decay — the brown age spots, the broken blood vessels, the wrinkles; some days more appalling matutinal discoveries: maggots, for instance, and once a large piece of pinkish-white brain tissue extruding from one ear — the equivalent of a cerebral hemmorrhoid. Typically these rather sensational “A.M. surprises” subside by the time I have to meet friends or editors or critics for dinner. Even the cerebral hemmorrhoid shrunk back into my head that same day by about 7 P.M. and I was able to join two very powerful Japanese publishing executives at La Côte Basque without embarrassment. But these holes in my forehead were extra-corporeal in origin and, as such, more disturbing. I called Dr. Nils Wachtel. Wachtel was one of the White House “Dr. Feelgoods” who pumped JFK full of speed every day. (Personally — and I think Anna Quindlen might disagree with me on this one — I believe that Congress should make it mandatory that the President of the United States be kept on a continuous amphetamine drip IV. The Commander-in-Chief should be wide awake, 24 hours a day. I don’t want a President who wakes up with green gook in his eyes, all groggy, and who’s like “What day is it?” [According to an article by military veteran Xiao Ziming in the overseas edition of The People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), Mao slept only 25 minutes a day — devoting the rest of his time to statecraft, poetry, food, and to pleasuring himself in a specially made vulval-necked Ming vase designed to collect his seed for cryonic preservation. Today the Great Helmsman’s sperm is reportedly in the custody of Shining Path guerillas who move the specimens among several secret locations in the Andes via mobile refrigerators strapped to the backs of blindfolded llamas.]

Later at Wachtel’s office: “Whoever or whatever did this to you has either an incredibly hard, long, and thin drilling proboscis or used a very sophisticated drill with an advanced-ceramic bit, because these are very tiny but cleanly and precisely drilled holes that go deep into your skull … it could even have been some kind of laser.

“Look,” he said, after further examination, “there’s nothing I can do except patch up the holes with Plastic Skin, which is a kind of dermal spackling. You don’t seem to have suffered any kind of neurological damage, so I wouldn’t worry.”

He suggested that I wear bifocals whose bottom halves were microscopy lenses, enabling me to keep an eye out for any untoward devices or creatures that might appear in my bedroom. But I’ve found this intolerable because when I use them I become aware of how everything — silverware, drinking glasses, telephone receivers, toothbrushes, even the manuscript pages of the text you are presently enjoying — is covered with a thick layer of dust mite feces.

And as I compose the penultimate paragraph of this Intro, my girlfriend, who’s wearing the same iridescent chiffon cocktail dress that she’s had on for three days, is lying on the couch, headphones blasting Black Sabbath, guzzling Bacardi 151 until she passes out. Her muzzled rottweiler, sought by the FBI and Interpol in connection with the brutal 1998 mauling of Condor Tisch, Postmaster General under President Hallux Valgus, dreams at her side, its paws twitching spasmodically. Holographic images of celebrities (e.g., Newt Gingrich, Axl Rose), mistakenly transmitted into my home, bang against the closed windows like trapped flies oriented toward the transparency of glass but ignorant of its materiality.

And the tranquillity of the summer evening is shattered by another ten-minute nonstop barrage of projectile vomiting from the fifth-floor suite of the opulent Casa Grundy … followed, again, by the ominous whine of a power saw.

AAH!

He’s just arrived, apparently having come straight from the gym. The iconic proliferation of his face and body in magazines and newspapers and posters across the country has ironically inured us to the real majesty of his physical presence. Only when confronted by him in person, his face flushed, his hair slicked back, his torso veiny, topographical with muscle, visibly hot from the tremendous workout that professional bodybuilders have called kamikaze-like in its intensity, do we apprehend — with a spine-tingling frisson that I can only compare to my experience as an adolescent of seeing a huge lathery stallion and then a dirigible in rapid succession — how gorgeous he really is. It’s almost impossible to conceive that this is the body of an acclaimed writer. And not just an acclaimed writer, but perhaps the most influential writer at work today, certainly the writer who single-handedly brought a generation of young people flocking back to the bookstores after they had purportedly abandoned literature for good. Between mouthfuls of fennel-flavored monkfish, he chats amiably with a group of admirers who’ve surrounded him. His Ecuadorian girlfriend, wearing a lavender bustier and short chiffon skirt, gazes at him lovingly …

— Martha Stewart

It came as something of a surprise to discover that Martha Stewart’s August 3rd birthday/housewarming party in East Hampton was merely a pretense to meet me — and not simply to meet me, but to gather material for her adoring profile entitled “Totally Brilliant … Totally Buff” which appeared in the September issue of Condé Nast’s Traveler, and from which the foregoing is excerpted. After all, I’m a ruthless, corrupt, self-indulgent hypocrite; an opportunist, compulsive womanizer, liar, bully, and amphetamine addict. I approach fiction as a great ravenous lion might approach a helpless effete antelope who’s lying in the grass stupidly licking the gelatin that oozes from her hooves. Yet sometimes fiction is such docile prey to my depredations that it sickens me, and I feel like abandoning it to the hyenas and focusing my creative powers exclusively on poetry.

I composed a very beautiful poem earlier this morning when I was in my garden, weed-whacking:

Why did best-selling author Martin Cruz Smith

testify before a secret Senate subcommittee

that superlawyer Alan Dershowitz has

continuously lactating breasts that could someday

produce up to 50 gallons of milk a day in space?

Legendary legal eagle F. Lee Bailey and

sf virtuoso Ray Bradbury debate the issue

that’s tearing the American legal and dairy communities apart.

Martha Stewart,

you awaken in me a new fury,

a new desperation to stun my enemies!

No family but fans!

I a hunk, a psycho!

It is rare that a poem so fully realized and of such complexity would arise spontaneously and intact, leaving me to merely rush to my laptop, the loam from my garden darkening the keyboard as I furiously type, verses beginning to fade from memory much as a dream dissipates upon awakening. Aah, if only one could apply a kind of oneiric fixative to dreams before they vanish …

C’EST SI BON

In a garden of video sculptures, sleek geometries, Mylar surfaces, and falling water, G. takes off her sweat-soaked tennis shirt — her nipples are covered with two banana daiquiri transdermal patches that transmit the cocktail through her skin into her capillaries — and she breaks off a shard of brittle matzoh and scratches a name on her arm: Jose Canseco. He appears, guitar in hand. She hears the faint echo of her doctor’s voice, “G., don’t give up, fight, please, G., stay with us.” It seems so ridiculous, now that G. knows what really happens after you die, now that G. knows how wonderful it really is. Raising her outstretched palm, she urges Canseco to increase the volume of his song. His music is primal and throbbing, his lyrics speak of the open road, of sin, of guns, of steroids, of Madonna. The masturbating zebras, their long slender penises like black and white barber poles, join in on the chorus, the gist of which is simply: “The government is suppressing information about how sweet life after death is.”

Of course they are. Why did every single scientist who was working on the secret Life After Death Project commit suicide? Once they found out how fantastic it is, once they realized how shitty life before death is compared to life after death, they raced home to their pistols, pills, razor blades, plastic bags, and exhaust-filled garages. Some were too impatient to even endure the commute home and — too eager to even wait for the elevator — they raced 30 stories up the stairwell to the roof of the institute and leapt with the exultant whoops of children pouring from the schoolyard in the last days of June.

DIAMOND HEAD

She was Rachel, the Lubavitcher girl. Rachel lived a pious studious life, studying the Torah. She’d never ventured much beyond the confines of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. But one night she and two of her girlfriends went to Chinatown. And there she met Nguyen Du, a member of Born to Kill, the craziest, most violent Vietnamese gang in New York. So began the love story that would turn two families, two communities, two cultures inside out. Only Mark Leyner — who underwent cosmetic surgery (blepharoplasty) and lived with Born to Kill for a year, eating, sleeping, and stealing with them, frequenting their haunts (Maria’s coffee shop on Lafayette Street and the Tung Nam Har mall on Canal) — could capture the pathos, the humor, and the garish violence of this incendiary romance. Imagine Chaim Potok collaborating with Amy Tan and Iceberg Slim. Imagine Fiddler on the Roof starring Bruce Lee. Imagine Miss Saigon with book by Martin Buber and music by Booger Storm, a garage “cai luong” band from suburban Da Nang. Your heart will melt when Rachel’s eyes meet Nguyen’s for the very first time. You’ll squirm in your reading chair during the extraordinary mystical battle scenes between Rachel’s Kabbalah-wielding father and Nguyen’s cousin, an I Ching — toting Taoist alchemist. You’ll weep big-time when Born to Kill assassins machine-gun the synagogue during Nguyen’s bar mitzvah. You’ll become dizzy, perhaps even nauseous, as you’re catapulted from the kosher pizzerias of midtown Manhattan’s diamond district to the chaotic fish markets of Mott Street. But love conquers all in this vertiginous bildungsroman of the human heart. In an unforgettable tour de force of impressionistic reportage, Leyner follows Rachel and Nguyen on their honeymoon to a bed and breakfast inn near the malfunctioning Platte River nuclear power plant. Nguyen visits the sarcophagus-like reactor and absorbs massive amounts of gamma radiation, which inexplicably enables him to travel through time. You’ll gnash your teeth and tear the hair from your head when Rachel decides that she has no other choice but to accept Nguyen’s decision to travel back in history and attempt to have sex with civilization’s most luminary women, women whom Nguyen has secretly lusted after ever since his junior high school history class. You’ll teeter on the edge of your seat as Nguyen, working against a tightly scheduled itinerary, tries to score with the likes of Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria, Madame Curie, Florence Nightingale, Edith Piaf, Babe Didrikson, and Amelia Earhart. Meanwhile, inexplicably, Rachel has been sent to live on a commune populated by a terrifying assortment of psychopaths: serial killers, neo-Nazi skinheads, cocaine-cartel hitmen, “angel of death” hospital orderlies, etc. Imagine Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Utopian, socialistic community in his novel The Blithedale Romance—but now imagine it inhabited by Ed Gein, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, Mark David Chapman, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc. Rachel’s escape from this egalitarian pit of evil (engineered by an intrepid team of Hasidic Ninjas, masters of night stealth in their black fedoras and frock coats) and her ultimate reunion with Nguyen comprise one of the most electrifying narrative sequences in modern literature. But all is not quite peaches and cream (or perhaps we should say, kreplach and nuoc mam). Rachel is anguished by what she perceives as Nguyen’s abandonment of her. Although Nguyen has converted to Judaism, learned Yiddish, and forsworn the drug peddling and gunplay that characterized his youth, Rachel feels that she will never again trust him sufficiently for an intimate relationship. Enter Dr. Harriet Raeburn, couples therapist extraordinaire. Remember Sybil’s therapist — the one who patiently integrated Sally Field’s swarm of personalities? Remember Dr. Martin T. Orne, poet Anne Sexton’s psychiatrist who first persuaded Anne to write down her feelings and add line breaks? Harriet Raeburn is such a therapist. You’ll cry tears of joy when after only nine years of weekly couple therapy, Rachel and Nguyen are able to again communicate without physical violence and are able to look into each other’s eyes with the longing and passion of that first night at the New Viet Huong on Mulberry Street.

Un-fucking-believable, right? What would you think if I told you that I conceived of that entire scenario — word for word — in about two minutes, between sets of incline bench presses? I still have to figure out how to incorporate Camp Schreckensherrschaft, a weight-loss camp for terrorists that I found advertised in the back pages of The Sunday Times Magazine. The camp’s run by a guy called the Schreckenmeister (the Terror Master), an erstwhile operative for the notorious East German security service Stasi, who’d reputedly been cashiered because of a weight problem, and who then dedicated himself to training obese terrorists to lose weight and keep it off. A list of this guy’s clients reads like a who’s who of international terrorism: Carlos the Jackal (who was once known as Carlos the Hippo), Ulrike Meinhof, Abu Nidal, Abimael Guzman (the founder of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso), plus scores of formerly overweight members of the Japanese Red Army, the IRA, the ETA (the Basque-autonomist underground organization), plus many more! You’ll be shocked and amazed by the story of how the Schreckenmeister helped Renato Curcio — the Red Brigade mastermind of the Aldo Moro kidnapping — lose over 75 pounds simply by replacing whole milk ricotta and mozzarella cheese with low- or no-fat substitutes in his favorite dishes!

Here’s the chilling account of my first meeting with the “Terror Master”:

It was beautiful the way the sunlight filtered through the louvered blinds casting vertical slats of thermal illumination on the section of his face left intact. Most of the face was gone, mangled and riven on the battlefield or in the torture chambers of his enemies. There was a jagged swath of forehead, a bubbled crimson knob of cheekbone, and an eye, merciless and abstracted — these the last remaining vestiges of natal physiognomy; the rest was prosthetic — a filtrated perforation in lieu of nostrils, servomechanical jaws with ceramic-fiber-reinforced metal teeth, and polyurethane tongue. I stood there transfixed, as if before a masterpiece in a museum.

“I’m Mark Leyner,” I finally managed to mumble.

He extended his hand, tautly sheathed in a blue latex glove.

“I am the Schreckenmeister.”

Pretty chilling, huh? I also have to figure out how to incorporate the former NBA player who’s been programmed to kill whenever he hears Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” played at the wrong speed.

And I have to figure out how to incorporate the quartet of fifties-style a cappella vocalists who were performing for bauxite miners in Ghana when there was an explosion and cave-in, trapping the satin-suited lounge act almost two miles underground.

Here’s the stirring account of their rescue:

The singers are alive! The excavation team — grimy, exhausted, yet ever determined — is raising its blistered hands in joyous unison. The foreman puts his stethoscope to the ground and bids the crew, media representatives, and assembled onlookers to quiet down. He’s listening … he’s smiling … he’s beginning to snap his fingers. “They’re alive all right!” he’s saying, apparently discerning a very faint but unmistakable “doo wop doo wop … doo wop doo wop.”

Pretty stirring, huh?

FEELINGS

Today my marble citadel looms high above the asphalt, which is littered with the sun-bleached skeletons of my enemies. My dog Carmella wears a gold Rolex just above each of her four paws. I’m often seen dining at Spago, L.A.’s enduringly glamour-packed eatery, or strutting around Yemen in a full-length ermine coat, a hooker on each arm. Just yesterday, I was invited by ABC’s “The American Sportsman” to go to Australia to hunt bandicoots with aboriginal boomerangs along with Ken Follett and Whitley Strieber. Bergdorfs is charging $3,500 for a hand-carved Baccarat crystal bottle of “Team Leyner,” the perfume. (Forty million scent strips have been inserted in October and November issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vanity Fair, Mirabella, Glamour, and Mademoiselle.)

What’s a typical day like for Mark Leyner?

Yesterday, after a long afternoon of volunteer bereavement counseling and then reading to blind residents at a local nursing home, I go to Le Cirque. I drink something like 14 martinis. I get into a fight at the bar with the president of the Jersey City firefighters’ union over a woman we’re both trying to pick up. I kill him with a single roundhouse kick to the side of his head. I leave with the woman, who’s cooing to me in a gravelly basso profundo voice. When we get to my apartment, I dump out the contents of her pocketbook: loaded jade-handled pistol, Quaaludes, Thai “golden eggs” (vibrating anal-stimulation balls), a packet of pharmaceutical-grade morphine, a little black book with the private phone numbers of Pentagon officials. I get up on the bed and dance to the electronic music they use to drive fleas and cockroaches crazy, my hard-on glowing in the dark and keeping time like a metronome, and then we fuck until dawn, strangling each other almost to the point of unconsciousness with kimono sashes each time we climax.

The next morning, I prepare a Jerusalem artichoke and spinach salad, stewed rabbit in white wine, and a pureed chestnut and chocolate layer cake, and I bring it over to Sister Norberta for the homeless shelter she runs at the church. I write for the rest of the day — extended, lyrical, almost psalm-like meditations on the redemptiveness of love.

Will I ever reconcile my inner contradictions? Is it so terribly wrong to live the way I do?

GAMMA GLOBULIN, UP, OLIVES

Many of the great American poets of the late 20th century murdered Hollywood stars (perhaps to silence their shrill insipidity), but what were their writing habits?

The man who killed Kevin Costner, flayed him, and wore his skin eschewed the computer keyboard; he preferred to write his poetry in longhand, producing an indecipherable rebus of printed letters, script, numerical formulae, and pictures.

But Jesus! What a strange rich beautiful music was frozen in the inscrutability of these hieroglyphs, waiting to be awakened by the warm kiss of an expert’s exegesis, like cryonically preserved Vedic birds, thawed, and tweeting recondite ragas!

After a day of painful labor (he was a rigorous, fanatically self-critical, self-flagellating slave to his muse, and his progress from line to line and stanza to stanza was torturously slow), he would drive to town and stand in the middle of 7 Eleven, garbed in Costner’s flesh from head to toe — in a unitard of Costner’s skin — and he would affect Costner’s bovine gaze and Costner’s uninflected speech pattern, and recite those weirdly buoyant and long long lyrics to hapless customers, many immobile with horror, some amused and snickering.

How profoundly sad that he considered these often chemically dependent nocturnal nomads his public!

How profoundly sad that during his lifetime only isolated and ineffectual academics would apprehend the preternatural vivacity and divine fabric of his mind.

And the woman who smothered Julia Roberts — she is perhaps my favorite fin de siècle poet of all!

In “The Florist of Agony,” in measured stanzas simultaneously candid and marmoreal, she tells the story of two anthropologists — one very smart and domineering and one very stupid and obsequious — who travel to a part of Amazonia heretofore “unmolested by civilization.” They encounter a tribe of fierce, head-shrinking, hallucinogen-snorting people who befriend them and allow them to live in their village as kin. But soon, through a series of comically abortive sexual encounters with pubescent girls, the tall, sleazy anthropologist discovers that the tribespeople are robots. Who built them? No one knows. Perhaps a tribe of sophisticated rain forest inhabitants who lived thousands of years ago and committed mass suicide rather than face a time when people like Costner, Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Emilio Estevez would be considered “stars.” Or perhaps they were cannibalized by their own robotic progeny — severely tonsured, squat, broad-nosed “Indians,” the women naked save for feather appurtenances, the men wearing only penis strings.

MAILBAG

Dear Mark,

First of all, I’d just like to say what tremendous pleasure your books have given my entire family. My wife and I just think that you’re an out-and-out American genius of the highest magnitude. The kids think that reading your fiction is “excellent — like being on drugs,” and they both want to be writers, thanks to you. We all loved Martha Stewart’s piece on you in Traveler—please say “buenos dias” to your Ecuadorian girlfriend for us! We’ve recently read articles in the Enquirer and the Star about how distracting your divorce from Arleen has been for you and how it might significantly delay the completion of your new book and we’ve heard rumors about your violent mood swings from steroids and about how they and the Lincoln’s morning breath scandal may have cost you lucrative endorsement contracts for Ore-Ida Tater Tots and, more importantly, for Phallotropin — the new synthetic Penile Growth Hormone from Genitotech, and about how the government’s punitive confiscation program is eating away at your net worth, and how Team Leyner has become a miasma of antagonism, misunderstanding, and mutual suspicion, and about how there’s sectarian strife within the elderly bionic security force, and about how Baby Lago defected and went to work for Tom Clancy, and we’d just like to say that we don’t believe any of it, and we look forward to your new book with great excitement and anticipation.

Ed Audet

Cicero, NY

Dear [insert name],

Thanks so much for your kind words. Although my busy schedule does not permit me to personally respond to the tremendous volume of adulatory mail that I receive, I’d like to send you and your family an official Team Leyner gift. Please indicate on the enclosed business reply card which exciting premium you’d like rushed to your home.

A. One slow-release polymer matrix system LeynerHead Sublingual Software Lozenge that, placed under the tongue, provides you with the sensation of being a sinewy and licentious pop icon (do not use LeynerHead software lozenge if you have a hernia or difficulty in urination due to enlargement of prostate gland).

B. Finley Pantry Maid—Performance artist Karen Finley, who provoked the wrath of conservatives across the country when she received federal grants for performances that included shoving yams up her ass, has now angered many of her supporters by signing a multimillion-dollar licensing deal with the Pantry-Maid Company. PantryMaid will be making a plastic “Karen Finley Kitchen Canister.” The container, molded into a scale model of Finley’s ass with a screw-top anus, will allow you to store not only yams, but rice, candy, leftover beef Bourguignon … whatever you want. Here’s a microwavable, dishwasher-safe kitchen container with a dash of downtown-intellectual cachet. Team Leyner is proud to offer you — as an absolutely free gift premium — the Finley PantryMaid, which is not yet available in any store!

C. Ahfongool!: Petrarchan Love Sonnets by John Gotti—Experience a facet of the “Dapper Don” that you don’t often read about in the tabloids. This collection of ardent, elegantly crafted Petrarchan love sonnets, composed by the capo di tutti capi of the Gambino crime family between 1983 and 1992, is masterfully translated from the Italian by the esteemed Richard Howard, winner of a National Book Award for his rendering from Yiddish to English of Meyer Lansky’s Talmudic commentaries. This exquisite first-edition book, with Italian and English lyrics printed on facing pages, bound in leather with richly hubbed spines ornamented in 22-karat gold and produced with gilded page edges and specially milled acid-free paper, will be a treasured addition to your heirloom library. Ahfongool! is a “must-have” for bibliophiles everywhere!

D. The Complete Guide to Forensic Musicology—a comprehensive sourcebook exploring this fascinating and revolutionary field in which scientists, by studying molecular changes in the ear’s cochlea, can determine what music homicide or suicide victims were listening to at the time of their deaths.

Dear Mark,

My girlfriend and I have a bet over who’s older, soul crooner Isaac Hayes or Dash Crofts of Seals & Crofts. I say Hayes. (Whoever wins has to be the other one’s sex slave for 24 hours.)

Lewis Pavlik

Boonton, NJ

Dear Lewis,

I hope you sprinkled a lot of Spanish fly on your Wheaties this morning. Isaac Hayes was born on August 20, 1942, making him 49 years old. Crofts performed his first extrauterine concert on August 14, 1940, putting 51 candles on his B’day Twinkie. Enjoy your captivity while it lasts, big guy.

Dear Mark,

You’re playing tennis with your father. It’s a brutally hot and humid afternoon. The other courts are empty, apparently no one else is willing to play in this stifling heat. You and your father have each won a set apiece. The score of the third and deciding set is six games to five, you’re serving at 40–30, match point. Your father’s face is flushed, his breathing is labored. You hit a 112-miles-an-hour serve wide to his backhand. He grunts as he lurches toward the sideline, barely getting his racket on the ball, but managing to return it. He groans, apparently having severely twisted — perhaps even sprained or broken — his ankle. Sensing a diminution of his mobility, you float a delicate drop shot just over the net with so much backspin that it barely rises from the ground. Your father limps desperately in from backcourt, clutching his chest with one hand, and he lunges toward the ball, tumbling to the hot asphalt surface, scraping sections of flesh off his knees and elbows, but amazingly getting the ball back over the net, but not deep into your court. You decide to take advantage of his obvious fatigue and battered legs. You lob over his head, forcing him to backpedal as fast as he can in order to save the point, the set, and the match. In the still sultry air, you can hear him wheeze as he struggles back, back, back … and flicks his racket head at the ball, managing an absolutely last-ditch survival-lob that sends the ball back high into the shallow court — a perfect setup for your game-, set-, and match-winning overhead smash. As you keep your eyes focused on the ball and you bend your knees and arch your back in preparation for the authoritative winner, you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that your father has collapsed. Do you forgo the winning smash, leap over the net, and rush to your father’s assistance? Or do you hit the overhead, winning the hard-fought match, and then rush to your father’s aid? Mr. Leyner, you make the call.

Greg Hayes

Evansville, IN

Dear Greg,

Nietzsche wrote: “What is good? — All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad? — All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? — The feeling that power is increasing.”

Hit the smash, win the match, and then rush to your stricken father’s aid. Your father, from the symptoms you’ve described — flushed face, labored breathing, severe chest pains — has apparently suffered a massive coronary. It’s doubtful that the time it takes to win the point will cost your father much in terms of his survivability. Don’t let the last thing your father sees you do be an act of abject sentiment and weakness. Execute the overhead with joyful ferocity. You win, your father loses. Victory is good. Be happy.

SQUIRMELIA

Squirmelia, miniature and dark (a.k.a. “Yuca D.”; a.k.a. “Kid Woman”), retreats to her aluminum tanning shack near Casino Lens Loch to eat Double Shells, bivalve pasta shapes in a creamy lime sauce.

Her estranged boyfriend has been on a submarine for four years.

Off in a funnel of distance, where the quantum infrastructure of the lake is turned inside out (i.e., on the anti-lake), the desultory dance of the reddish-purple prolapsed rectums of the aged busboys can be seen as the stooped septuagenarians dismantle the table umbrellas on the crepe-swathed deck of the steamboat, al fresco dining deemed high-risk due to an impending downpour of asteroid shrapnel.

Squirmelia eats, grinning methodically, wondering how she will explain to Vinnie all that’s changed since he joined the Sikh navy. Like how Rei Kawakubo was invited to design the uniforms of the suicide squad of dental hygienists who floss the comatose sea monster’s teeth, and how she refused.

I can’t seem to vaporize Squirmelia’s brains by staring into her eyes ardently.

In my hammock, I listen to the rain hit my helmet and wonder if it’s true or simply my mother’s fanciful apocrypha that as a child I’d listen to the patter of space stones on the aluminum roof of the “museum” where Father kept my brain-dead brother alive, impaled with hundreds of fish hooks, and I’d discern winning Lotto numbers.

Like ballistic war-cannoli that fly through the sky and plunge into people’s mouths at incredible speeds, rigid microscopic larval creatures hurtle through time.

THREE HUNDRED MILLIGRAMS OF DIANOBOL

“I drink it black.”

“You’re the best lover I ever had. Last night … the pleasure you gave me was so fucking unbelievably intense … I felt like I was going to disintegrate cell by cell. Eggs?”

“A dozen egg whites scrambled, baby. Kippers. Rye toast. Can I help with anything?”

“Well, uh … there’s this real creep who moved in next door and … he’s sort of been … well, bothering me.”

“What do you mean, bothering you?”

“Well, grabbing at me in the hallway, saying disgusting perverted things to me under his breath …”

“Call an ambulance.”

“An ambulance? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. And I’ll be right back. Tell them to get here as quickly as possible.”

I was dressed in casual but expensive clothes. I stripped down to my bikini briefs and went next door.

I was back in five minutes.

“What happened? I heard three thuds.”

“Two thuds were me breaking his hands. One thud was me breaking his jaw. So he won’t be grabbing at you anymore and he won’t be saying disgusting perverted things to you. Are you OK? You’re trembling and panting.”

“I’m so turned on by you. Can I smell you?”

“Yes.”

She pressed her face to my chest and inhaled.

“You smell so good … it’s like cloves … mushrooms … caramel … vanilla … popcorn … roast potatoes … cooked apples … fried fat. I’m so glad that my sister-in-law introduced me to you!” she said.

“Ditto,” I replied laconically.

“Also, Mark, I just wanted to tell you that I think it’s so amazing that you won the competition to design the new Museum of Contemporary Art. You were competing against some real heavyweights — I. M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman — and you won without ever having taken a single architecture course, without, in fact, ever having made a single architectural sketch before!”

“I’m outa here.”

“OK, Mark. Will I see you again?”

“Uh … maybe I’ll … uh … I don’t know if … uh …”

“Mark, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know if the problem is that I’m incapable of expressing myself adequately or if my feelings are too inchoate, too amorphous, perhaps too puerile to even warrant expression.”

“I love you.”

“Call me sometime. That’s as much of a commitment as I can make right now.”

“I wrote my first play quite late in life. In fact, it wasn’t until I was almost 25 years old that I entered a theater for the first time. I carried a metal pail of candy corn in one hand and a pail of soda in the other — I was straight from the countryside, a strapping libidinal bumpkin, utterly unsophisticated. (I’d gone to see Ida Villanueva in Green Wind, Black Kites, a film about a man who spends four days at a Robert Bly “Wild Man” workshop at which every dish is made out of garbanzo beans — e.g., faux steak tartare and faux blood sausage, both meatless and consisting solely of garbanzo beans and clever seasoning — and when he returns home he locks himself in a closed unventilated garage and asphyxiates himself on his own intestinal gas. The movie hinges on the question of whether he should be considered a suicide — thereby making his wife ineligible to collect his death benefits — or whether he should be considered a moron who has accidentally rid future generations of his genetic toxicity in the self-cleaning oven of Darwinian evolution, in which case his wife should be rewarded under the insurance company’s innovative “green” eco-bonus policy — double indemnity for the spouses of policyholders who die making a contribution to the health of the planet. Angie Dickinson plays the grieving widow, Gene Hackman plays the gutsy insurance adjuster who lobbies for her eco-bonus, falls deeply in love with her, and is eventually pecked to death by a 175-pound genetically engineered gamecock, while trying to disrupt a cockfight sanctioned by the Venezuelan Institute of Biotechnology in Caracas. Ida Villanueva plays a beautiful and temperamental violin prodigy, longing to be loved, but distrustful of the men she so gladly exploits, who, by film’s end, has degenerated into a frumpy, vulgar, and castrating middle-aged shrew.)

And so you see, “the theater” as a cultural institution, certainly as an expressive prerogative, did not even enter my consciousness until I was an adult. While ambitious young tyros were honing their play writing skills in MFA programs, poring over their Marlowe, their Ibsen and O’Neill, I was ensconced in my basement “laboratory,” manipulating the size of my scrotum with a recombinant strain of filarial elephantiasis that I’d developed. (Filarial elephantiasis, in its natural form, leaves its victims with grotesquely deformed limbs and sometimes with scrota the size of basketballs. But precise titration of my altered strain allowed me to capriciously enlarge or shrink my scrotum with impunity.)

At that stage of my life, walking through a shopping mall with a pair of gigantic testicles ballooning the crotch of my jeans was an infinitely more compelling pastime than sitting in a library carrel, scribbling marginalia in a copy of Mourning Becomes Electra.

And, in all candor, it still is.

VARICOSE MOON

A Play in One Act

CHARACTERS:

The Prerecorded Voice

The Host

The Contestant

The Audience

SETTING: A television studio in Pyongyang, North Korea

THE PRERECORDED VOICE: Slight in stature, but volcanic in temperament, I became dedicated in 1969 to transforming myself into, first, a sullen, violent, willfully inarticulate teenage boy who was enthralling to ebullient, chatty, earnest teenage girls; and then to evolving into a truly explosive, erotic, fetishistic corporeal object, lean and muscled like an ex-con cowboy. I include myself in this developmental category along with Lenny Dykstra, Napoleon Bonaparte, and others.

So can I be enthralling to women today by obsessively projecting a cartoon version of my adolescent fantasy-self? So far the answer is “Yes! We want more!” Is this somehow related to heavy-metal? Yes, probably. Did Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, Austen, et al psych themselves up to face the empty page by staring at their bare torsos in the mirror or by sinking even deeper into the narcissistic contemplation of an even smaller frame of that image, e.g., the silver skull nestled in the hairy cleavage of a pumped chest? The answer must be no. But then I don’t think that those folks wrote to enhance their fuckability.

My books and my body — my status as a reckless writer and a gorgeous man — are my iridescent plumage; they’re the equivalent of the male L. ocellatus frog’s 250- to 500-hertz call made to maintain territoriality and to attract mates; they’re the equivalent of the peculiar ritual of the male pyrochroidae beetle displaying to a potential mate a deep cleft in his forehead. Stashed within the cleft is a small dose of the chemical cantharidin; during courtship, the male exposes his cleft to the female, she grabs his head and immediately laps up the chemical offering. Apparently placated, she allows the male to mate. Scientists have determined that the male transfers to the female a much larger quantity of cantharidin during intercourse, and that she subsequently incorporates the chemical into her eggs, which thenceforth are protected against ants and other common predators of beetle eggs.

My books and my body: my not-so-subliminal advertisement to women that I will make a primo contribution to the genetic makeup and survivability of their children.

It’s the night. I spread my cerebral hemispheres and display my chemical offering. Who will grab my head and immediately lap it up?

THE CONTESTANT (rising from his seat in the audience): I will! I’ll grab your head and immediately lap up your chemical offering!

THE HOST: Well, come on down!!

[THE CONTESTANT runs wildly down the aisle, waving his arms, and mounts the stage.]

THE HOST: It’s great to have you on the show!

THE CONTESTANT: It’s great to be here! I love the show! I made this for you!

THE HOST: That’s fantastic! It’s a beautiful ring … what is this here, amber?

THE CONTESTANT: It’s a forty-million-year-old chunk of amber in which a female fungus gnat was embedded, Bob.

THE HOST: Incredible! It says here you’re married.

THE CONTESTANT: I’m married, Bob, and I have a beautiful mistress who just turned twenty. And my wife is a boozer and she has a lover.

THE HOST: It says here that your wife’s lover doesn’t use spoken language to communicate, that he communicates with a complex vocabulary of exuded chemicals.

THE CONTESTANT: That’s right, Bob, my wife uses a gas Chromatograph and ion-trap mass spectrometer to analyze the chemical content of his “message secretions” and then a computer to translate the chemical sequences into English.

THE HOST: Where did your wife meet this fascinating lover?

THE CONTESTANT: In the yard, Bob.

THE HOST: And where did you meet your mistress?

THE CONTESTANT: At The Gap, Bob.

THE HOST: It says here that you’re the president of the Brine Shrimp Council.

THE CONTESTANT: That’s right, Bob. We live in an increasingly complex and technological society, and we find that for real, honest, old-fashioned food enjoyment, more and more people are turning to delicious, half-inch-long brine shrimp raised in space.

THE HOST: In space?

THE CONTESTANT: Yes, Bob. They’re part of a food chain for astronauts in space stations. Algae feed on the solid waste of the astronauts and in turn are consumed by the brine shrimp, which grow about a half-inch long. Astronauts then eat the brine shrimp. We thought, what the hey, why should astronauts have all the fun? For the first time, we’re now making available to the public all-natural astronaut-poop-fed-algae-fed brine shrimp shuttled directly to our plant daily from orbiting space stations. You like shrimp scampi, Bob?

THE HOST: Ummmmmm. I love it.

THE CONTESTANT: Try our mouth-watering, half-inch, space-station-raised brine shrimp prepared scampi-style. It’s a taste sensation you’ll never forget.

THE HOST: It says here that you have trouble trusting other people.

THE CONTESTANT: That’s right, Bob. It’s probably related to something that happened to me when I was a kid.

My grandmother, who’d always seemed like a sweet, kind, indulgent old lady, went out for a pack of cigarettes one day. I happened to be at the newspaper stand that afternoon leafing through the latest muscle magazines. Grandma didn’t see me right away — I had my back to the register. She asked for a pack of Lucky Strikes and I recognized her voice and I turned around and said, “Nana, hello.” She looked insane. She grabbed me and dragged me outside.

“I’m not the Nana I appear to be, kid,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to squirm out of her grasp. I’d never realized how physically strong she was or how masculine her body odor was when she exerted herself.

“I’ve got a Grandma facade, but inside I’m the most un-Grandma-like creature on earth.”

“ ‘Un-Grandma-like’ how?” I asked, not ready to accept this challenge to my idealized version of the doting, potato-pancake-making, warm-hearted geriatric.

“What if I told you that I’m a total slut, that I give blow-jobs to all your friends on the football team, that I have a female lover — an ex-Marine who’s a bouncer at a bar in Key West — that I attacked a mailman with a baseball bat when I lived in Spain and he’s been a brain-damaged vegetable ever since, although he can still get erections … and that’s how I conceived your father.”

“You mean you attacked Grandpa with a baseball bat and then sat on his poor insensate erection to get your own sick jollies and that’s how my dad was conceived?”

“That’s right. That’s your grandfather. You always thought he had a stroke, right?”

I was getting pissed at her now. “You’re a liar!”

She spit on the street. “Fuck you, kid. You’re just too much of a naive baby to accept the truth.”

Just then, these guys jumped out of a van parked across the street. “Surprise!” they yelled.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Tell him, Grandma,” one of them said.

And she said: “Mark, you’re on ‘America’s Favorite Secret Videos!’ ” (Or “America’s Funniest Covert Surveillance Videos” or something — I don’t remember the exact name of the show, some rewarmed version of “Candid Camera.”)

I was deeply hurt by the whole episode. I felt that my Grandma had betrayed me. But no one in my family understood how I felt. My parents and my sister were all excited about Grandma and me being on TV and they couldn’t understand what my problem was. They had no idea how embarrassed I felt about the video and how mortified I’d be when all my friends saw it. And they had no inkling of how painful and profoundly disillusioning it was to have my own grandmother behave in such a dishonest and treacherous way to me.

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE HOST: OK, let’s get started!

THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $100, Bob.

THE HOST: “When he was in the third grade, he had stationery printed up that said ‘From the word processor of Mario Puzo …’ and he’d write these unbelievably prolix, baroque, hallucinatory, torridly erotic mash notes to the female teachers at his elementary school.

“Today, farmers let their land lie fallow after having visions of his semen raining down from the sky and fecundating their fields. Wives refuse to get out of bed, remaining supine, their legs spread in the air, declining to even roll onto their sides lest a drop of his precious fluid leak from their vaginas, after dreaming that he’s floated into their bedrooms like a muscle-bound incubus and made love to them, bringing them to seismic, apocalyptic orgasms with one single stroke of his unearthly dick.…”

THE CONTESTANT: Who is Mark Leyner?

THE HOST: “Who is Mark Leyner?” is correct, for $100!

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $500, Bob.

THE HOST: “The worst thing that can happen to a man is to die anonymous. You can be a sensitive guy, really in touch with your feelings, gentle and loving to your wife and kids, active in all sorts of charitable organizations, you can tithe 75 percent of your income to Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity, etc. etc., but then one day, you die — and outside of your friends and family, who gives a fuck? Nobody. You came, you went, no one remembers, no one cares. It’s a tragedy. Because this is the critical difference between a human being and an animal — the capability to be famous. There are exceptions, like Secretariat or Willard or Flipper, but generally, only a human being can make himself immortal with renown. This is your destiny. But die unknown, and you will disgrace me, and I will endlessly grovel through the streets of eternity, eating garbage and mumbling incoherent nonsense.”

THE CONTESTANT: What did Mark Leyner’s mother whisper as she nuzzled him to her breast immediately after his birth?

THE HOST: That’s absolutely right, for $500!

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $750, Bob.

THE HOST: “The size of a Ping-Pong ball, it’s fifty times as large as that of a normal heterosexual male’s.”

THE CONTESTANT: What is the third interstitial nucleus of Mark Leyner’s hypothalamus?

THE HOST: You got it, for $750!

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $1,000, Bob.

[There’s a deafening arpeggio of sirens.]

THE HOST: It’s Double or Trouble!

THE AUDIENCE: [Jubilant shouting and stomping]

THE HOST: You can risk your entire winnings to double your money with a correct answer for a total of $4,700 or you can play it safe for the $1,000.

THE CONTESTANT: I’ll risk it all! Double or Trouble, Bob!

THE AUDIENCE: [Thunderous ovation]

THE HOST: Her father founded TV-OLFATO, the first global smell-a-vision network, whose inaugural broadcast was “Que Oloroso!” an olfactory portrait of Julio Iglesias, beamed across Central and South America on September 10, 1994. Known variously as “Kid Woman,” “Yuka D.,” and “Squirmelia,” she consummated her affair with Leyner on a “bed” of plastic bubble wrap in a Bloomingdale’s stockroom.

THE CONTESTANT: Who is the Ecuadorian girlfriend?

[There’s an explosion, then a huge flash and Shockwave. Black, acrid smoke fills the studio. When the air finally begins to clear, shattered glass and other debris can be seen littering the ground. The metal grid that supported various lights and microphones is mangled and twisted, the audience is cheering ecstatically.]

THE HOST: That’s exactly right! Double or Trouble for $4,700!!

THE AUDIENCE: [More wild cheering]

THE CONTESTANT: Let’s stick with “Team Leyner” for $5,000, Bob.

THE HOST: This Team Leyner honcho defected from the organization and wrote a shocking exposé. After hearing the title of his or her book, identify the honcho: Megalomania’s Mascot: My Life with the Team Leyner Cult (As told to Cleveland Amory).

THE CONTESTANT: Who is Carmella?

THE HOST: “Who is Carmella?” is absolutely correct, for $5,000!

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $10,000, Bob.

THE HOST: “After their resignations were angrily rejected by a raving, wild-eyed Leyner who’d taken to wearing a lavishly be-medaled military uniform and a booby-trapped truss (apparently to be detonated in case of capture), Desiree Buttcake and the elderly bodyguards were placed in a Polyvinylchloride kiddie pool filled with powdered poi mix (a desperate, ruthless Leyner threatening to add water) and surrounded by an 18-foot-high fence topped with concertina wire and electrified with 400 volts and guarded by a rudimentary cyborg pig who’d been jerry-built from spare laboratory cadaver organs and obsolete computer components. (In the final days, Leyner personally constructed the so-called ‘hog of vigilance,’ naming it ‘Mahapuna’ after the sow warrior-goddess of Hawaiian mythology.) It featured an old bulky Radio Shack ‘brain’ with only 32 kilobytes of RAM, its cardiopulmonary system was powered by 17 hamster hearts rigged in tandem, and its prosthetic cloven hooves were made out of plastic vacuum cleaner casters. Although capable of limited ambulation and of digesting small amounts of slop, it was incapable of snorting, rooting for truffles, and other characteristically porcine behaviors, making it the object of constant derision from disgruntled Team Leyner staffers. Using small amounts of cleverly concealed Czechoslovak-made Semtex plastic explosive, Butt-cake and the bodyguards managed to escape from Team Leyner Headquarters in the middle of the night. After three weeks of wandering the countryside, during which time they subsisted on hailstones, discarded pizza crusts scavenged from frat house dumpsters, and ultimately, when even this meager food source became unavailable, licking the dried sweat from the earpieces of each other’s sunglasses, they sought and were granted asylum in this posh Westchester County community founded by the owner of a popular Italian fast-food franchise.”

THE CONTESTANT: What is Sbarro-on-Hudson?

THE HOST: Right you are, for $10,000!

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE CONTESTANT: Let it ride, Bob. “Team Leyner” for $25,000!

THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]

THE HOST: “Certain muscles were so convex, so protuberant, so cantilevered, that they kept the areas beneath them completely shaded from the sun. So his body was mottled red and white. His torso was cubist. And I’d come home from a grueling ten-hour day of back-to-back sessions with clients, and I’d find this two-tone cubist troglodyte on the floor of his office, completely naked, a tampon string hanging out of his ass, softly ranting into a tape recorder, and I’d think to myself, I just can’t take this much longer. Nothing in all my training as a psychotherapist prepared me for marriage with a man so relentless in his effort to construct a self out of the fabric of pure delusion, a man whose valuation of other human beings was so warped that he was, at any instant, capable of terrifying outbursts of cruelty and violence. We went to a computer store one day because Mark needed a new daisy wheel for his printer, and he asked the salesclerk if they sold a daisy wheel with the Tifanagh font. Tifanagh is an obscure medieval script used by Berber women for writing love poetry — of course they didn’t carry it, no company even manufactures such a thing. But Mark became absolutely crazed. He grabbed a surge protector off the shelf and beat the clerk quite badly. It’s only because the cops who responded to the owner’s frantic 911 call were big fans of Mark’s books that he wasn’t arrested. A similar incident occurred at Sears one morning. We were shopping for gardening supplies and Mark asked a salesperson — a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen — if Sears sold bags of Raptor Pellets. Raptor pellets are hair-and-bone balls regurgitated by birds of prey. The poor kid gave us this befuddled shrug and Mark went nuts. Mark’s got a tremendously powerful throwing arm — he pitched, I believe, four or five no-hitters in a single season when he played semi-pro ball down in the Galápagos Islands. Now, I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to be hit by a crocus bulb that’s traveling 98 miles per hour, but this poor kid caught the first one above the left temple and crumpled. It took some dozen men from heavy appliances to finally restrain my husband from further violence. But again, when these guys found out that this was Mark Leyner, it was all high-fives and autographs — forget about the kid, who’s propped up unconscious against a 50-pound bag of peat moss.

“It seemed like another lifetime when Mark and I would lie in bed at night reading Bleak House and The Spoils of Poynton to each other. More recently he’d insist on regaling me with the most vile, adolescent, fetishistic sorts of trash as I lay there with the covers pulled over my face. Just to give you a random example of the type of bedtime story I was subjected to, here’s the jacket copy from a typical offering:

She pulled Snap’s pants off and tossed them on the floor.

“What are these?” she asked, her hand probing between his legs.

“Balls … t-t-testicles,” he stammered.

“They look good,” she said, brandishing a straight-edge razor that glinted as she began to sharpen it on a long leather strop.

From the day that he got his first Polaroid camera, Snap was the quintessential all-American shutterbug — Cub Scout photo club, high school newspaper photography editor, U.P.I, stringer. But when he went 200 miles beneath the surface of the earth to get photos of a flesh-eating, gynecocratic, subterranean culture, his life began to go out of focus and he had to pull out all the f-stops just to survive!

“I’d make one final attempt at persuading Mark to hospitalize himself and begin long-term in-patient psychotherapy. I arranged to meet him at one of his preferred haunts, in the hopes that a congenial environment would make him, if not wholly sympathetic, at least somewhat receptive to my recommendation. It was a South Philadelphia after-hours club frequented by a nefarious assortment of methamphetamine traffickers, Cosa Nostra hitmen, extortionists, bookmakers, and Bryn Mawr students who found the truculent, garishly garbed habitués of this lurid night spot a perfect libidinal antidote to their professors — whose repertoire of facial tics, speech impediments, halitosis, and dandruff (which clogged the wide wales of their corduroy jackets) made the Oresteian trilogy and Isthmian odes so insufferable.

“I told him that it had all became more than I could bear: the insane obsession with his body, with compulsively altering the size and shape of its parts, with its secretions and their sundry smells and tastes; the government’s punitive confiscation program that was dispossessing us of everything we’d worked so hard to acquire; the pills, the booze, the Bolasterone, and testosterone cypionate; the philandering; and most of all — the strident, evangelical exaltation of his own psychopathology, as if there were some revelatory alchemical truth in his stunted development, ordaining him to proselytize a benighted humanity.

“He stared vacantly past me, sucking on the silver skull he wore on a chain around his neck, looked at his wrist-watch, and mumbled something about having to meet a new business partner with whom he was purchasing a syndicate of decrepit nursing homes.

“And that was the end.”

THE CONTESTANT: What is an excerpt from Arleen Portada’s When Telling Your Husband That He’s “A Delusional, Narcissistic Sadist with Deep-Seated, Unresolved Issues About His Mother” Just Isn’t Enough Anymore: My Seven Turbulent Years as the Wife of Cult Author Mark Leyner?

THE HOST: That’s absolutely correct, for $25,000! And we’re all out of time for today! See you back here tomorrow!!

THE AUDIENCE: [Wild cheering]

THE PRERECORDED VOICE: A tintinnabulation of kisses deep in the brain. A tiny leak of neurotransmitters, perhaps. An infinitesimal burst gasket in the latticework of cerebral piping. But the densely packed, intricately knotted ribbons of self-congratulatory cognition writhe into perpetuity … into the perpetuity of night.

[Roll credits]

[Dissolve]

WHERE THE BEE SUCKS, THERE SUCK I

“In your culture, it’s not considered appropriate for a heterosexual man to be in the presence of his heterosexual sister if she is naked, correct?” asked the anthropologist.

The tribal headman nodded. “Yes.”

The anthropologist, who was tape-recording the conversation and taking written notes, made a quick notation and then looked up, smiling at the headman.

“It is also not considered appropriate for a heterosexual woman to be in the presence of her heterosexual brother if he is naked, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Why is this?”

“The modesty of a man or a woman in the presence of his or her opposite-sex sibling is a built-in preventative mechanism that has the effect of precluding sexual arousal. Sexual arousal between siblings is incestuous and incest is an absolute taboo in our culture.”

“What about a homosexual man and his heterosexual sister?”

“The heterosexual sister will feel ashamed to be naked in front of her homosexual brother.”

“But the homosexual brother will not be aroused by the nakedness of his sister.”

“Presumably not.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The heterosexual sister may herself become aroused by exhibiting her naked body to a man — whether or not he is aroused — and since in this case the man is her brother, the arousal is incestuous and taboo.”

“That makes sense.”

The anthropologist bowed and grunted, a sign of respect.

The headman bowed and grunted reciprocally.

“What about two brothers — can they see each other naked?”

“Yes.”

“And two sisters can see each other naked, too?”

“Of course. Same-sex siblings often see each other naked. They frequently shower in each other’s presence and try clothes on in each other’s presence, etc.”

“What if a homosexual man is in the presence of his heterosexual brother who is naked? Wouldn’t it be possible for the homosexual man to become aroused by the naked body of his brother?”

The headman stared far into the distance without answering. He gazed out toward the great mountains where the sacred ancestral burial places were.

The anthropologist jotted something down in his notebook and continued his questioning.

“And what about a naked homosexual woman and her homosexual sister who is naked, or two naked homosexual brothers? Wouldn’t the opportunities for incestuous arousal be exponentially increased in these instances? And yet there is no taboo against two sisters being naked together whatever their sexual orientations are and there’s no taboo against two naked brothers in each other’s presence no matter what their sexual orientations are. Can you explain this to me?”

The headman beckoned to several of his underlings and whispered something to them.

He said: “Take the anthropologist into the woods and kill him. If anyone from the village wants to eat his flesh, let them. I’m not into it, but I have no problem with anyone who is. Just get him out of my sight and into the woods and slaughter him as you would a wild pig or a tapir. He’s really beginning to annoy me! Go! Take him!”

“Yes.” The young acolytes nodded, bowing and grunting.

Off they went, escorting the scribbling anthropologist into the jungle.

“OK, who’s next?” asked the tribal headman.

His administrative assistant ran an index finger down a clipboard. “Your three o’clock is Ralph Korngold — he’s vice-president in charge of sales and marketing for Genitotech, a specialized biotechnology company located in Sparta, New Jersey.”

“Where’s New Jersey?”

The administrative assistant pointed beyond the great mountains where the sacred ancestral burial places were.

“Show him in,” said the headman, straightening the cartridge bandoliers that crisscrossed his bare chest.

The Genitotech VP, sweating in a blue double-breasted suit, entered the pavilion, bowed and grunted.

“Korngold, what can I do for you?” asked the headman.

“Chief, I don’t know how familiar you are with the Genitotech Company and its flagship product, Phallotropin …”

“Phallotropin — if I’m not mistaken — is a patented form of synthetic penile growth hormone (PGH). The drug was originally developed as an otological drop to facilitate ear wax removal. Then, a number of men who inadvertently ingested the solution orally began to notice significant penile growth. In subsequent FDA trials, synthetic PGH was credited with adding up to six inches of penile length to men who produced insufficient quantities of the hormone on their own. Phallotropin, along with Upjohn’s Rogaine and Johnson and Johnson’s Retin-A, is a golden product of pharmaceutical serendipity, a drug that was originally developed for one very specific usage and which later manifested a quite unexpected and much more lucrative indication. Researchers at Genitotech have ‘fine-tuned’ the drug to work gradually so there’s no sudden bulge, an important benefit emphasized in Genitotech’s new television commercials (“People at the office noticed that I was looking younger, more virile — but they couldn’t quite put their finger on exactly what it was”). I also know that the writer Mark Leyner has supposedly signed a multimillion-dollar contract to be the spokesperson for Phallotropin.”

“That’s amazing! How is it that you’re so well versed in the developmental history of Phallotropin?”

“Look, just because we’re an extremely isolated, hallucinogen-snorting tribe of headhunters doesn’t mean that we don’t read the trade journals … Urology Today, Annals of Endocrinology, etc. Granted, we get them pretty late — the November issue of Urology Today, for instance, didn’t get here until May — but we read them. But anyway, Korngold, why’d you come all the way down here to talk to me about Phallotropin? At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, our men are more than adequately endowed.”

“Chief, I don’t know how closely you follow American pop culture.…”

The headman shrugged. “I know Sting, ’cause he’s down here a lot. But otherwise, by the time we get People or Entertainment Weekly, whoever they’re talking about is usually dead and buried.”

“Well, let me fill you in. Leyner was originally going to be the Phallotropin Man. He was perfect — a huge reputation for his books and hyper-macho image, especially with our targeted consumer sector, the adolescent male. He’d even experimented with some amateur genital enhancement as a youngster. But the guy’s run into some major problems lately.”

“The Lincoln’s morning breath thing … with the punitive confiscation?”

“That and an ugly divorce and defections that have decimated almost the entirety of his upper-echelon staff, and there are rumors of bizarre behavior — episodes of extreme delusional megalomania alternating with bouts of hysterical paranoia and deep depression, alcohol and Percodan abuse, etc. etc. And we just couldn’t take the risk with a product like this — Genitotech expects to sell over $650 million of Phallotropin in its first year on the market.”

“Mamma mia!” exclaimed the headman.

“The long and the short of it, Chief, is that we’ve dropped Leyner and we’d like you to be the Phallotropin Man.”

The headman cupped a hand over his mouth and cogitated for a long while.

“What about side effects …?” he asked finally. “I don’t want to bring ignominy upon my tribe by endorsing a product that’s unsafe.”

“Not to worry, Chief. So far as we’ve been able to determine, Phallotropin’s only side effects are hirsutism, priapism, and Holmes-Berle disease — a rare form of dementia caused by burrowing microworms that live in the brain.”

“And I’d get the same seven-figure deal that Leyner got?”

“Same cash deal, incredible media exposure for you and your tribe, and enough free Phallotropin to make you guys the preeminent studs of the Amazon. What do you say?”

“Korngold, I’m going to go snort some ebene, stagger around wild-eyed for a while with green mucus streaming from my nostrils, leave my body, descend to the subterranean world, evaluate your proposal with my dead ancestors, and then get back to you.”

“What sort of time frame are we talking about here?” Korngold asked, checking his appointment book.

“We’re talking a day or two, three tops.”

The headman stood, bowed, and grunted.

Korngold did likewise. “Chief, I’m looking forward to your decision and hopefully to a long and prosperous partnership with the Genitotech Company.”

The young acolytes reappeared, rooting their molars with long toothpicks, and escorted the stocky biotech exec into the rain forest.

The headman flicked a pebble at his administrative assistant, who’d been staring off into space, scratching his crotch. The round stone glanced sharply off his forehead.

“Who’s next, babaçú heto-hokã [worthless one]?”

“Chief, a Mr. Geoffrey Hoag and a Ms. Pamela van Zandt of Pretty Polly Inc., a British hosiery producer, were supposed to have been here half an hour ago. Maybe they’re lost.”

“Maybe …” echoed the headman bemusedly, gazing out toward a clearing in the jungle where a jaguar, who’d eaten the 50 pounds of rugelach that Korngold had brought for the chief, lay sprawled among white bakery boxes and string, immobile, his belly extremely fat, panting in the heat.

YELLOW FEVER

Ashley had just eaten the last chocolate egg.

“Mama, whatever possessed Mia Farrow to marry Frank Sinatra?” she asked, her words slurred somewhat by the thick volume of confection filling her little mouth and encumbering the agility of that trilling little tongue.

“Dear, not another word until you swallow what’s in your mouth. You’re a very naughty, very gluttonous little sugar addict.”

Ashley, with visible effort, swallowed the large sweet bolus, quite prematurely, especially as she was accustomed to savoring her chocolate upon her palate until it had seemed to melt away.

“That’s better. Now, what makes you ask why Mia Farrow would marry Frank Sinatra?”

“Well, Mama, when I look at the other men in Mia’s life — sensitive, artistic men like Andre Previn and Woody Allen — I just can’t understand what she saw in such a coarse, vulgar man who flaunted his Mafia connections and referred to women as ‘broads’ and ‘cunts.’ ”

Ashley reached into a crystal wassail bowl filled with jellybeans and candy corn and conveyed a fistful to her mouth.

“Ashley!”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she mumbled. “These are my last ones, I promise.”

“They most certainly are, young lady. Why, if you keep this up, you’ll be the only little girl in Gregory Day School wearing dentures.”

“Last ones, promise.”

“Ashley, what I don’t think you understand quite yet is that in their heart of hearts, women don’t lust after men who are merely sensitive and artistic. Men like that are ultimately quite boring. On the other hand, women can’t truly be loved and nurtured by men who are brutes and nothing more. And often in the course of a woman’s life, she vacillates back and forth from one extreme to the other in an effort to satisfy the spectrum of her needs. How rare it is that a single man can embody both of these seemingly antipodal profiles. Your grandfather, Ashley, was such a man.”

“Grandpa Mark?”

“Yes, Grandpa Mark — may his soul rest in peace.”

“Mama, what sort of man was Grandpa Mark?” Ashley asked, stealthily plucking several caramels from a jar across the table, as her mother took a tissue and dabbed her eyes, which had moistened at this recollection of her late, illustrious father.

“Your Grandpa Mark was a violent maverick loner with a fatal weakness for Hispanic women … and he was the finest, most audacious, most illuminating, most influential and imitated writer of his time. He was all these things.”

“Will there ever be anyone like him again, Mama?”

“Never.”

I was awakened by the gentle caress of a familiar flipper-like appendage.

“Oh … Joe … I just had the weirdest dream. I was dead, I guess, and I had this granddaughter on a perpetual sucrose binge and …”

“Mr. Leyner, I’m leaving.”

“Wake me up when you get back, OK, Joe?”

“No, Mr. Leyner. I mean I’m leaving. I’m quitting.”

I discerned through groggy eyes Joe’s luggage in the doorway.

“Et tu, babe?” I said.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Leyner. But I just can’t handle it anymore.…”

“Forget about it, Joe. Do what you have to do. And if you ever need a reference …”

The image of yeoman Joe Casale struggling with his suitcases as he made his way down the hall dissolved in a mist of emotion.

I loved that guy.

ZWANGSWIRTSCHAFT

On September 24, 1994, federal operatives, acting under the authority of the Punitive Confiscation Act, seized Chapter Five manuscript entries for the letters B, E, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, U, and X.

Team Leyner deeply regrets the impossibility of including these sections in what the author had intended to be a complete abecedarian series.