Et Tu, Babe

AN ORAL HISTORY

CONNIE CHUNG: I’m fairly certain that I was the last one to see him on that final day. He was in the throes of his work — writing frenetically, wearing his trough. (So that he never had to leave his computer keyboard, he’d devised a small trough that hung from his neck and from which he ate continuously while he typed.)

Whether it was tragedy or comedy that he’d been commissioned to produce, the sine qua non was elegance. The apotheosis of elegance and élan in his own rough-hewn attire and phlegmatic demeanor, he had written extensively on the subject, including a 1,300-page disquisition on armpit fetishism composed in the form of intricate commentaries on the hitherto suppressed Polaroid photographs of Bruce Lee’s underarms that were taken by Steve McQueen in the late 1960s when the two were scouting locations in Bangkok for a Kung Fu version of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—a film that was never made. (I might add here that McQueen’s other dream project, Honey, I Shrunk the Children of a Lesser God, the story of a maniacal scientist obsessed with miniaturizing deaf children, was also never made.)

Incessantly haunted by hallucinations of apocalyptic mayhem and driven half-mad by a desire to simultaneously terrorize and seduce women in uniform, he has attempted to live a decent, productive life. To those whom he has offended, those who have found his almost masturbatory exaltations of Darwinian natural selection cynical and misanthropic, I offer the following incident from his youth as he himself recounts it in his shocking memoir, Et Tu, Babe:

As the anesthesia wore off, a bushy-haired man in a gauze mask, with a stethoscope around his neck, and a percussion hammer and sphygmomanometer jutting from the pocket of his white lab coat, came into focus.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Leyner. Mark Leyner,” I answered groggily.

“Do you know where you are?”

“All I know is that I answered an ad in

High Times

for volunteers for experimental brain surgery and that a week later a Nissan mini-van picked me up and I was driven blindfolded to a secret laboratory in Tijuana.”

“You don’t remember undergoing the procedure?”

“Procedure? What are you talking—?”

At that moment, half a dozen FDA agents, automatic weapons blazing, killed the “doctor” who had operated on me, and then escorted me to the border where I was given $20 and a small bottle of effervescent apple juice.

JOAN JETT: Notwithstanding all the bullshit to the contrary, I was the last person to be with Mark Leyner before he disappeared. I remember that afternoon vividly — Mark was at his escritoire, his fingers a blur across the keyboard of his laptop, thick daubs of chili paste on his temples, his nipples, and his balls. [Leyner would apply a poultice of chili paste to his temples, nipples, and testicles whenever he felt “blocked,” claiming that it unclogged the channels through which his “interior elixir” flowed.]

He was his usual confident, ebulliently bellicose self, with his sights set very much on the future. For instance, while I was there that day, he’d occasionally — as a momentary respite from his literary labors — devote his attention to a linen design he was working on for J. P. Stevens’ “Team Leyner Bed and Bath Collection.” [The flat and fitted sheets depicted four 275-pound Nigerian infantrymen bathing naked in a sylvan pond, their uniforms and weapons hanging from the branches of a spreading sycamore tree. The pillowcases were a canary legal-pad print, emblazoned with miscellaneous “numerical fun facts” rendered in Leyner’s exuberantly juvenile calligraphy — e.g., “There are 40 million denture wearers in the United States,” “Bats roosting under the Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin eat 14 tons of insects a night,” “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a form of spongiform encephalopathy) strikes one person in a million worldwide,” etc.]

Later on in the afternoon, we took a couple of bottles of scotch up to the rooftop patio and we played this drinking game that Mark invented. You listen to one of those talk-radio stations and every time you hear the word “the” or “and” you have to take a drink.

I remember … that afternoon, we … we … I’m sorry … I get kind of emotional when I … Do you have a tissue? I just really miss that son of a bitch. If you can imagine being kidnapped by some gorgeous psychopath and you’re in this stolen semi, and each tire is inflated with laughing gas, and you’re plummeting down this endless gradient, and he’s not saying a word, but there’s this … this peripheral blur of subliminal billboards … and it’s the most beautiful spaced-out erotic poetry in the world, and it’s his poetry, and it’s speaking to you in this incredible way that every woman yearns to be spoken to, and … well, that’s what it was like being with Mark Leyner. He was real intense.

GEORGE PLIMPTON: Leyner didn’t have a regular shower head in his shower — he’d attached one of those Water-Piks that people use for cleaning their teeth. He liked an extremely concentrated, piercing stream of water in which to bathe. He found it more effective in dislodging dirt from those hard-to-clean parts of his body — all the furrows and crevices — and, frankly, I think he just liked the way it felt. Sometimes he’d lie prostrate in the tub for hours letting this thin pulsing line of hot water hit the top of his coccyx bone — the area from which his vestigial tail was removed soon after his foster father found him on the Pebble Beach golf course.

His foster dad was an avid golfer, and one afternoon he was out on the back nine and he hit a wedge shot and carved a hefty divot out of the fairway, and there — unearthed and wriggling in the sun for the first time in its life — was a cute itsy-bitsy little fetal humanoid whose biological mother had, just moments before, buried it alive. That was Mark Leyner! The poor little … Do you have a tissue? [Leyner’s natural mother had suffered accidental gamma ray exposure as a teenager. Doctors warned her that there was a possibility that the radiation had scrambled the DNA in her eggs, dooming her to mutant births. Dr. Shlomo Hemplemann, noted forensic psychiatrist and author of One Monster, Many Mommies: Whose Fault Is Mark Leyner?, contends that overwhelming anxiety concerning the potential abnormality of the newborn motivated this attempted infanticide.]

From these humble beginnings to international superstardom to his current contretemps — a fascinating and complex journey. I’ve come to know hundreds of artists in my life, but I must say that I’ve never encountered a single one — writer, painter, composer — possessed by anything approaching the colossal scope of Leyner’s ambition. I remember sitting with him on a marble bench sipping local grappa under an old pomegranate tree in a beautiful little courtyard on the Lou Ferrigno estate, and I asked him what he hoped to ultimately accomplish in his career. He talked about his vision of a nation where every home has a speaker that broadcasts passages from his books throughout waking hours, where his texts are read over loudspeakers on the main streets.

CARL SAGAN: He was absolutely serious about leaving Earth and relocating elsewhere. He was not at all nostalgic about the terrestrial world, and he was quite unsympathetic and impatient with my ecological concerns. He’d say, “Carl, the world’s population is putting such a strain on the global infrastructure and, in particular, on the world’s water supply and sewerage capacities, that by the middle of the twenty-first century, if someone flushes a toilet in Mombasa and you’re in the shower in San Diego, you’ll get scalded. All the more reason to get off the planet, babe. Why stay if conditions are going to be so impossible? Rather than flagellating ourselves for having plundered the earth of its precious resources and for having toxified the globe’s air, water, and soil, why not channel our intellectual and spiritual energies into figuring out how to get the hell out of here. Once we’re a safe distance from this place, on a nice hospitable planet with a respirable atmosphere and fauna capable of being ground up into some kind of burger, then we can determine culpability and mete out the punishment.”

There are still so many things we don’t understand about him — even those of us who know him well. Why, for instance, did he write a weekly letter to General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime prime minister who was hanged in 1948 as a war criminal? [These bizarre missives — each of which was returned unopened and peppered with the Japanese postal service’s “Return to Sender” stamp, and dutifully filed and cataloged in a vault in the catacombs of the Team Leyner Library by Team Leyner archivist Yvette Bokassa — were no hastily scribbled apostrophes, but lengthy, detailed, searingly self-appraising synopses and analyses of that week’s events, often running in excess of 75 single-spaced pages!] Why correspond with an infamous Japanese general who’s been dead for over half a century? Why?

I was on my way to Sea World in a rented Ford Escort, blow-drying my bangs, when the news came over the radio that he’d disappeared. I had to pull over.

CHRISTIAAN BARNARD: When Leyner made the decision to have the mole in his right eyebrow removed, the news was apparently leaked to several fanzines. Apprised of the impending surgery, his followers immediately began clamoring for the mole — as evidenced by the thousands upon thousands of phone calls and letters received at headquarters, his fans wanted that mole and they wanted it bad.

Team Leyner elected to sponsor a lottery, the winner of which would actually receive the mole in a transplant. The mole would be grafted onto any part of the winner’s body that he or she chose. I was personally recruited by Leyner himself to perform the mole transplant. The winner of the lottery was a sixteen-year-old girl from Terre Haute, Indiana, who sent in her high school yearbook picture with an arrow drawn indicating the center of her forehead.

After I excised the mole from Leyner’s eyebrow, it was frozen and flown by helicopter to University Hospital in Terre Haute, where I performed the procedure. Tragically, the recipient died four days later.

A typical mole is a collection of cells that contain an unusually high concentration of melanin. Leyner’s mole not only contained high concentrations of melanin, but staggeringly high concentrations of Hexalone, Bolasterone, and Dehydralone — powerful anabolic steroids, plus significant levels of cesium 137 and strontium 90.

By the second day following the transplant, the mole had almost completely subsumed the girl. The only vestige of her that remained visible amid the throbbing brown neoplasm was the big toe of her left foot, which she could still wiggle in response to questions.

I asked her: “After all that’s happened to you, do you still idolize Leyner, do you still consider him some sort of messianic savior?”

“Yes! Yes!” She wiggled emphatically.

I’ll never forget that fuchsia toenail twitching zealously, as her EEG became flatter and flatter.…

CHIP GIBSON: Let’s go back to 1983 or 1984. I’m fuckin’ selling stolen $5,00 °Chanel quilted leather biker jackets out of the trunk of my car for $600 a pop. And I’m bangin’ this manicurist on weekends — fuckin’ bangin’ her in a hot tub at a friend’s condo in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and I’m drivin’ at the time a fuckin’ … a fuckin’ … uh … a fuckin’ … what the hell was that called … a fuckin’ … fuckin’ uh … Toyota Celica GT. Red. And I got this air freshener on my rearview mirror — you send a photograph of yourself to this company in Florida and they make an air freshener out of it — so I got this little cutout of myself dangling from my rearview mirror and it smells like a fuckin’ coconut. And this broad’s got a big fuckin’ brown recluse spider bite scar on her ass…

You want “oral history”? I can fuckin’ go back to 1958, for Christ’s sake. There I am, I’m in the doctor’s office, I’m fuckin’ five years old. My parents take me to this doctor to see why I talk like this. ’Cause, see, my parents don’t talk like this. My father’s a pretty well-known anthropologist at Yale — he’s pretty famous for translating the hieroglyphs from the fuckin’ … the fuckin’ … who the fuck … they’re like the earliest fuckin’ wetbacks … the fuckin’ … the Mayans. The Mayans. And my mother was like head of the Brandeis Alumni Association, y’know, nationwide. So they don’t know why I talk like this and they take me to this specialist. And we’re sittin’ there. And I remember I’m eatin’ a fuckin’ corn muffin and I’m hittin’ the doctor on the side of the head with the back of my hand while I’m talkin’ to him like whap! c’mon, you stupid prick, what’s your fuckin’ problem? and I’m sprayin’ corn muffin in the guy’s face, I’m like pollinating this fuckin’ guy with these yellow crumbs and I’m like whap! whap! y’know? ’Cause I hate this guy, I hate this prick. And he says to my parents: I don’t think there’s any neurological damage, maybe he should see a speech therapist. And I’m like fuckin’: don’t quit your day job, Doc. Whap! Whap!

At any rate, I did eventually see a speech therapist, and in 1992 I became Senior Vice President, Trade Sales and Marketing Division, Random House, Inc., and that’s how I originally met Mark Leyner.

Leyner’s recent problems, beginning with the Lincoln’s morning breath theft and culminating with his disappearance, disrupted the most elaborate, energetic, and expensive sales and marketing program we at Vintage had ever undertaken for any author. Since Leyner had his own Saturday morning cartoon show and a Leyner doll, Vintage had secured a deal with Toys “Я” Us to sell his books in the toy stores next to the dolls. One of the most exciting things about the project for Vintage was that — with Toys “Я” Us — we had the opportunity to reach a subteen group, giving us a whole new market. Then we signed a fifteen-year deal with Mattel to sell a line of Team Leyner preschool and infant toys based on characters from Leyner’s books. There was a cuddly little stuffed “Carmella,” a “Joe Casale” tub toy with movable flippers, a “Kid Woman” talking doll that spoke Spanish or Quechua depending on which braid you pulled, bionic elderly bodyguard “action figures”—we anticipated annual sales of close to $200 million. But now the entire marketing program is on what’s called “permanent hiatus.” It’s a shame.

I like Leyner personally — he’s a hell of a lot of fun to party with — but I don’t think he’s ever considered how many people are hurt by his irresponsible behavior. And I don’t think it’s going to be a very “Team Leyner” Christmas for all the folks we’re going to have to lay off.…

[The announcement of Leyner’s disappearance sent Mattel stock plunging on the New York Stock Exchange to $35,625 a share, down $8,075. The news also sent shock waves through the Tokyo Stock Exchange. At the midday recess, the Nikkei index of 225 issues was down 6,574.75 points, or about 15 percent, to 24,115.79.]

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: On a number of occasions, on the way home from the Supreme Court, I stopped in at Team Leyner Headquarters for a Coke or a Bud Light — but it was no matter of great import …

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS: Justice Thomas, approximately how many times did you stop in at Team Leyner on the way home from the Supreme Court?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: Senator, I’d say approximately 1,100 times I stopped in at Team Leyner — and in order to continue a debate I’d been having with Mark about, say, the relationship between quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence or St. Augustine’s conception of a neo-Platonic God or Lacanian psychoanalysis — I’d stop in at Team Leyner Headquarters and have a Diet Dr. Pepper or an Amstel Light.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS: Justice Thomas, did you ever — on any of these approximately 1,100 occasions when you say you stopped in at Team Leyner Headquarters to continue a discussion — take anabolic steroids, Thorazine, Percodan, or LSD with Mark Leyner?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: Senator, I categorically deny that. I did, on several occasions, stop in at Team Leyner Headquarters on the way home from the Supreme Court to continue a discussion I might be having with Mark about the sonnets of Gerard de Nerval or the impact of movable type and gunpowder on the decline of the feudal nobility, and I did on a number of those occasions have several tablespoons of Maalox Extra-strength Antacid/Antiflatulent and several Extra-strength Tylenol Gelcaps.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS: Justice Thomas, did Mark Leyner ever discuss with you his desire to develop a clandestine nuclear weapons plant at the Team Leyner facility?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: No, Senator.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS: More specifically, Justice Thomas, did he ever discuss with you using funds from a secret family trust in Liechtenstein to acquire the technology to produce weapons-grade plutonium?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: Senator, that is absolutely, categorically untrue. Nothing even remotely resembling such a conversation ever took place between Mark Leyner and myself.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS: Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions for Justice Thomas.

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: Mr. Chairman, with all due respect to the members of this committee, I must express to you my belief that conducting these investigations into the activities of Team Leyner at a time when Mr. Leyner is unable to participate and unable to refute the scurrilous attacks on his name — at a time when his whereabouts are unknown and his well-being, his very existence, is in doubt — is profoundly unfair, and it’s tearing the very fabric of our society asunder.

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG: I was the last person to be alone with him before he vanished that afternoon. He was dressed in a green uniform with gold epaulets, crotchless blue pantaloons, and red top boots, unshaven, bleary-eyed, working relentlessly — mauling his computer keyboard like some kind of rabid animal — pausing intermittently to gobble a handful of electric-eel roe from a nearby terrine, wiping his mouth on a piece of fan mail, and then renewing his assault. I don’t know how graphic you want me to get — but it was obvious that he was extremely aroused by whatever he was writing. And there was just something so incredibly sexy about him as he worked. He was so … he just had this … this “thing” about him.

Just to give you another example — I remember a couple of years ago, Mark was in Paris to have some sort of surgery, and, in the middle of the operation, the guy gets up off the operating table, walks out of the hospital, and strolls into the Yves Saint Laurent spring couture show, onto the runway, viscera bulging out of an eight-inch abdominal incision, clamps and hemostats and catheters dangling from his body. And the girls — the Christy Turlingtons, the Linda Evangelistas, the Naomi Campbells — they were all over him! And sure enough, that spring, you’d go to a dinner party or a gala and you’d actually see women wearing priceless couture ensembles that had been artistically stained with iodine germicidal scrub and adorned with a variety of silver surgical instruments — that’s how charismatic a presence he was, and that’s how pervasive his influence was among people who wanted to be irreproachably au courant.

HAROLD PINTER: I admire Leyner tremendously. First of all, his work — stunning, magnificent! His play Varicose Moon is achingly beautiful. I think it will be unnecessary for playwrights to write any new plays for some time now—Varicose Moon should suffice. In fact, I think it would be vulgar for playwrights to burden the public with their offerings given the creation of this coruscating masterwork.

He has also been a wise and magnanimous friend. It was Leyner who first introduced me to Beckett’s Hawaiian writing — and for that alone, I remain eternally indebted to him. [Between the completion of his novel The Unnameable and his debut as a dramatist with En attendant Godot, Samuel Beckett, desperate for money to support the child he’d fathered with American singer Kate Smith, moved to Hawaii and secured a job in public relations, writing brochure copy for the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Maui. Long suppressed by the Beckett estate, which publicly denied their existence, Beckett’s Maui brochures constitute a fascinating lens through which readers can further explore the mind of the angst-ridden Nobel Laureate. Today, many Beckett scholars consider these brochures (which hype the hotel’s 750,000-gallon pool with its romantic grotto, 130-foot water slide, and swim-up cocktail bar, championship golf course, lei-making and ukelele classes, and authentic luau) Beckett’s most important work.]

Here’s a wonderful instance of Leyner’s intellectual generosity. I was working on a play, a play that contained all of my characteristic motifs — the fallibility of memory, the ultimate unknowability of women to men and men to women, the notion that all human contact is battle — in oblique, elliptical dialogue delivered by an estranged elderly couple who remain immobile for most of the play. And I just was not happy with it at all. So I gave the script to Leyner. He took it with him to his hotel that evening, and later that same night, he rang me up and suggested that instead of the action taking place in a house in London’s Hampstead Heath, as I’d intended, it take place in Reno, Nevada, at the Eldorado Hotel. It’s been discovered that some six metric tons of an experimental, highly mutagenic fungus developed by the Defense Department’s Advanced Fungal Weapons Research Center, located in nearby Sparks, have seeped into the city’s underlying aquifer. As the play opens, scientists suspect the lethal fungus of having rapidly evolved into a sophisticated ratiocinative being capable of defeating all but the top two or three chess grandmasters in the world. Well, it was an astonishingly brilliant suggestion — it would never have occurred to me in a million years! It totally transformed the play, which critics would laud as the most powerful and innovative of my career.

KATARINA WITT: It’s been over two years since I spent that final afternoon alone with him as he furiously endeavored to complete his memoirs, and yet I still find him as maddeningly seductive and utterly unfathomable a man as ever. I don’t think a half-hour goes by in the course of a day when I don’t catch myself fantasizing about him.

I recently competed in the World Figure Skating Championships in Stuttgart. It was the climax of my program, I was doing a triple Salchow and, right in the middle, in midair, I just left my body and there I was with Mark again — this was during the most important international competition of the year! Well, it turns out that, in my disembodied state, I didn’t do a triple Salchow, I did a septuagesimal Salchow — that’s seventy rotations in the air! — obviously a feat that had never been accomplished before and has not been since. My coach, who’d always been a bit superstitious, saw the devil’s work in the freak Salchow, and she quit and entered a monastic order in Baden-Baden.

DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS: Substance abuse problem? In my medical opinion, no. He’d been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on himself to finish this particular book before, what he called, “an imminent siege by the spineless degenerates arrayed against me.”

If I prescribed Percodan, Demerol, Valium, Quaaludes, Placidyl, pentobarbital, Anadrol, Primobolan, erythropoeitin, amineptine, and clenbuterol for him, it was simply to ease his mind and give him some enhanced stamina. Like I said, there was the pressure of this book and the pressure of just being who he was.

RON HOWARD: Gosh … what can one say about “Le Leyner”? I just hope that the Team Leyner sign in Times Square isn’t taken down. To me, that sign is synonymous with New York City. It is New York City — it’s brash, it’s ballsy, it’s like “Yo!” [The huge neon Team Leyner sign at 2 Times Square simulates positron emission tomography images of Leyner’s brain function as he writes, laid over a magnetic resonance image of his brain anatomy — so pedestrians below can actually observe glucose metabolism at various sites within Leyner’s cerebral cortex as he’s producing one of his critically acclaimed best-sellers. The 85-ton, 105-foot-high, 6l-foot-wide sign, built at a cost exceeding $5 million, features nearly 70 miles of fiber-optic tubing, more than eight miles of neon tubing, and more than 34,000 light bulbs.]

Actually, you know what I’d do with the Team Leyner sign? I’d put it into orbit, so it could be like the earth’s Statue of Liberty — so it would be the first logo of humanity that the extraterrestrial aliens see when they immigrate here.

Come to think of it, there is one personal experience that stands out in my mind when I think about him. I was with a group of Hollywood directors and actors on a sightseeing bus tour of Team Leyner Headquarters. Leyner happened to be on the grounds that afternoon — he was doing some kind of martial arts sparring with one of his elderly bodyguards — and he recognized me and invited me in for iced tea. While I was there, a UPS truck pulled up to the front entrance and the driver unloaded a calutron. [A calutron is a device that produces highly enriched weapons-grade uranium through a process called electromagnetic isotope separation.] Leyner signed for the merchandise and sat back down with me, making no mention of the delivery. I recognized the Chinese ideogram for “This Side Up” so I’m fairly certain that it was either from Taiwan or the People’s Republic. About a half-hour later, another UPS truck pulls up, and the driver unloads a shipment of zirconium from an export company in Frankfurt. [Zirconium can be used to make uranium fuel rods.] Again, Leyner signed for the delivery, returned to finish his drink, and then vanished. I was allowed a last swallow of tea and then escorted back to the bus by one of his minions. Weird, huh? Weird guy, though. But fun weird. I don’t know if other men had this experience, but Leyner made me feel really small physically, really stupid, and really sexually inadequate. But it was still so cool being with him! [Though accurate intelligence is sketchy, Defense Department experts say they believe Leyner was probably two to five years away from producing a crude nuclear weapon.]

JESSICA HAHN: I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling everybody all along: I was the last person to be with Mark Leyner before he disappeared. Fact. OK? And I’ve offered to take a polygraph. I don’t hear any of these bogus last-to-be-with-Leyner wannabes from “Nightline” and “Larry King” offering to take a lie detector test, do you? If you had polygraph equipment here in the van, I’d take the goddamn test right now. I was the last one to see him — that’s the truth.

This is from my diary entry for that day: “He was haunted by a ceaseless ambition and a deep loneliness that he hoped fame and an ostentatiously vulgar lifestyle would alleviate. He promised me that someday we’d make love for thirteen straight hours in Death Valley, and we’d sweat so much that we’d end up skeletons — two grinning skeletons, pumping and rattling under the red thermonuclear sun. If only that were possible now …”

Mark had been tutoring me in creative writing. I’d never had that much confidence in my ability to express myself, but Mark really made me feel as if I had a natural aptitude for verse. Here’s a poem I wrote — after a couple of lessons with Mark — describing one of the gardens at Team Leyner Headquarters. The part at the end about the mule is a sort of imaginative embellishment: “Innumerable shades of green./An infinite taxonomy of greenness/trebled by the effects of direct, deflected, and umbral sunlight./The ambient “contrast” modulated by the evanescing day./Each leaf in sovereign motion,/yet all according in synchronous oscillation—/from branch to tree to copse./Flies wheel above/compoundly eyeing the furfuraceous eczema that covers/the buttocks of a moribund mule.”

I know that during that last afternoon, he got a dirty phone call from Camille Paglia. It was on the speaker phone, so I heard most of it. It was pretty explicit. I know I heard the words “tart mucosity.” It sort of faded in and out, so I figured she was calling from her car phone and going under trestles. Mark didn’t seem to mind the call, though. But I don’t think he was really paying attention.

And suddenly headquarters was illuminated by arc lights, and surrounded by heavily armed officers in flak jackets, and hundreds of riot troops and sharpshooters from the Punitive Confiscation Tactical Division.

He was wearing Hugo Boss moss-green suede pajama bottoms. He had reached the climactic section of his Team Leyner memoirs, and he was typing like a lunatic, flailing at his keyboard in ecstasy like some enraptured pentacostal organist.

He was in mid-sentence when they wrested away his final remaining possession — yes, his laptop! — and he di

TEAM LEYNER TODAY!

The sensational disappearance of Mark Leyner following the expropriation of his laptop by the Federal Punitive Confiscation Tactical Division has ignited a firestorm of protest around the world! Mobs of rampaging fans have besieged U.S. embassies in London, Paris, Warsaw, Mexico City, Riyadh, and Tokyo, forcing the evacuation of terrified diplomatic personnel by troops wielding truncheons, attack dogs, tear gas, and water cannons! Shadowy underground organizations have threatened the lives of American political leaders and Fortune 50 °CEOs and — in clandestine radio broadcasts — urged children to subliminally indoctrinate their parents by murmuring key passages from Leyner’s texts into their ears as they sleep!

YOU can be a vital link in the Team Leyner chain of solidarity that girds the globe in Power and Bold Unity! HOW?

• The Punitive Confiscation Act is an outrageous attempt by the federal government to squash Team Leyner, persecute its leader, and drive him into the arms of his enemies. Write to your congressmen and senators demanding that they immediately repeal this misbegotten legislation that exists solely to impede a historic visionary in the fulfillment of his destiny.

• Book sales are crucial. If Mark Leyner is alive — and we must assume that an individual who, as a toddler, honed himself into a ferocious, cunning, and pitiless animal will survive whatever befalls him — he’s certainly monitoring the best-seller lists and Publishers Weekly. There’s no better way to register your support for Leyner and everything he stands for than by urging — and, if necessary, coercing — your family, friends, and co-workers to bulk-order Et Tu, Babe from their local bookstores.

Remember, when you purchase a copy of this inspirational volume, 100 percent of the proceeds go to funding important Team Leyner projects such as:

• The production of large-print, Braille, and pop-up editions of Leyner’s work

• The construction of the Buffway, a 600-mile-long suspension bridge in the form of Leyner’s outstretched body that will span the Arabian Sea linking Ras al Hadd, Oman, to Karachi, Pakistan

• The development of the World Institute of Advanced Science, a research facility in Palermo, Sicily, that will reevaluate evolution from the Big Bang through the Cretaceous demise of the dinosaurs to the present moment as one continuous teleological process leading inevitably to the birth of Mark Leyner and to the propagation of his genetic lineage through sexual intercourse and auxiliary methods including “mole seeding”

Call 1-800-T-LEYNER today for an exhortatory message from Mark Leyner to his fans recorded in the heroic hours before his disappearance! Stay on the line to record your personal words of support for the man whom food-and-lifestyle authority Martha Stewart has described as having “the face of an angel and the glands of a god!”