I Smell Esther Williams

I SMELL ESTHER WILLIAMS

Shivering Beneath The Blue Clouds

Having An Aperitif With A

Name From The White Pages

Reading about nitrogen fixation, that process that lays the foundation for the synthesis of proteins, the sadness of my friends popped into my mind and I admitted the possibility that I had read instead of the authoritative text, Speer’s memoirs entitled Inside The Third Reich.

Here’s to the syphilitic world and its sullen lugubrious days and the recrudescence of family turmoil in pockets across an individual’s map — and I am not the individual and things cease being what they are not, and I stop

this

here, and sip

To ask, once out of the bar mitzvah brunch, is our convivial relative waiting, like Vitamin A in the retina, to be discovered or is he making profit out of sacred things or is he too much the naif for simony; or to accept someone who says, I saw him before picking his nose at a red light — and to ask, who is this splenetic image deflator. These treaties exist in name only. And, under the circumstances, they doubt him “stalwart” enough to resist the temptation to flee, but only one burro has the energy to bray for him.

How bummed, to be fuelless in these futuristic boondocks with this synesthesia of some before and the taste of this medium point like a dentist’s finger in my mouth.

I drew my shades a crack (life’s been good to me so far) (Everyone thinks orange juice is good and cigarettes are bad — but I like both of them) and poured a glass of orange juice and looked for a cigarette (“If only I could find one!”). I don’t remember anything after that. Let’s see, I opened the shades a tiny bit … I got some juice … or maybe made some and then had it, I couldn’t find my pack of cigarettes … nope, I can’t remember a thing after that.

Isn’t so and so a snob? She won’t even admit she liked Grease. I’d like to empty out her tube of Ortho cream and fill it with Oscar’s guacamole dip.

When I was looking at the quart container of milk I’d gotten that morning, it reminded me of when I was a boy because it’s so little and skinny compared to the half-gallon we usually buy. It led me to think about glandular disorders and growth dysfunction — I was perusing the label on the bottle of Topco Multiple vitamins. Topco Associates, Inc. is based in Skokie, Illinois which, of course, had gained recent notoriety for the Nazi-Jewish controversy. I looked at the clock and bolted. I quote what’s-her-name verbatim on the issue of promptness — If you don’t pick me up at 5:30 on the button, I’ll beat you and beat you until even your colleagues at the university won’t recognize you. This shows how inhuman she is because everyone knows how ignominious it is not to be recognized by one’s colleagues.

I was talking to Napoleon’s sister — she’s living with these African natives; the kinds that have saucers in their lips and their hair shaped at the top into Milkbones. They carried her on a vine litter to her house. She had a comparatively nice place.

“He wouldn’t have liked what they did with him,” she was saying, “he was so into the earth — y’know — he’d wanna be with it.”

She turned her attention to a cheese cart that her son was inching towards.

“Didn’t you just play with the dog?”

He nodded.

“Well wash your hands … c’mon now.”

TEENAGE CHRIST KILLERS

Mother:

Where were you?

Out.

Mother:

Where!?

Just out.

It’s Wednesday in Tokyo. Here it’s Tuesday. In Denver it’s Monday. On Saturn, it’s Christmas for the 93rd consecutive day this week. We should begin to think of jogging, beyond the therapeutic and recreational. NASA knows this and is developing a sneaker. Bio-feedback will be used to teach runners to produce, within the body, a glandular form of Tang. A camphorated tincture of colorless remarks like “it’s murder, but I love it” and “it’s the only body I’ve got” will be used to tranquilize hostile aliens. You’ll hear more about this, as we do, darling. For now, my aims are nude. A breeze from the window at the foot of the bed excites the hairs.

MOVIE SCRIPT

Two plastic containers of shampoo sitting at the edge of a tub — I don’t know, one might be Revlon or Breck, the other, a little fancier, maybe Vidal Sassoon or something: one says to the other “I like your back-to-school sweater,” the other says, “I never get to watch sports on t.v. anymore.” The phone rings — I’m on the can — for the 53rd day, trying to break Dimaggio’s other record. A guy on the radio says that the concrete shortage is over — I get the hell off the John, saying “fuck this.” I go get some concrete shoes made and form a rock band called “Mafia Victims.” We volunteer to tour oil-rich nations as “musical ambassadors” in the tradition of Louis Armstrong. Things don’t pan out quickly enough — I get itchy. I try to form a Sonny and Cher type act with a really talented ticketing agent from Frontier Airlines. We flounder around for a while and she eventually takes an accounting job in Atlanta. I volunteer to become the world’s first human study lamp. I’m sold to a sophomore pre-law student at Harvard. He turns out to be Edward Kennedy. The rest of the movie can be about Joe and JFK and Bobby, and Ted’s back problems, his senatorial career, Chappaquiddick, his wife Joan’s battle with alcoholism, etc.

July 2: I have the Pathet Lao dream again. Insurgents, some fidgeting with the drawstrings that hold their pajama bottoms up, expropriate all the apartment’s furniture. I establish psychic communication with the couch and extrapolate, from bits and pieces of information, the whereabouts of the rebels’ sanctuary. I make reservations with an airline. I pack and rush to the terminal. I walk back and forth, from one end to the other — apparently the airline doesn’t exist.

The bone of contention lodged in the throats of Wall Street pundit, armchair investor, and consumer alike was simply this: would the new, lighter, less caloric beer sell or did the putative American penchant for vigor and lankness pale in the face of pretzel sticks and a foamy head? Light beer advocates could obviously point to the success of its sister industry’s parallel “line”—the low tar cigarette. But was obesity the compelling concern that cancer of the lungs or throat had turned out to be? I think that for one brief moment, no one knew!

My head felt like an aluminum pod filled with loose Klaxon peas. I felt like running to someone and hiding it between her breasts.… That morning I’d seen the doctors — they’d looked into my ear and seen the perforated drum, the spot of blood, the protective clog of wax, the trapped pool of water. Veteran explorers of ancient rocks believe that cell nuclei may have originated 1.4 billion years ago — not 600 million, as is widely supposed. There is also Paul Jennings’ observation: “When numbered pieces of toast and marmalade were dropped on various samples of carpet arranged in quality from coir matting to the finest Kirman rugs, the marmalade-downwards incidence (Mdi) varied indirectly with the quality of the carpet (Qc) — the Principle of the Graduated Hostility of Things.”

Certain sectors of the citizenry, such as the housewife, must not be neglected. They must be enabled to matriculate and take courses like Introduction to Is Johnny Mathis Really Black? and Advanced How Come Sophia Loren Has Made Nine Pictures With Marcello Mastroianni If She Is So In Love With Her Husband, Carlo Ponti. They must be prepared to take the standardized Clank Shtup Exam.

Husbands must not act like moronic fans who jeer when their wives are losing and cheer when they win. Nor like hypercritical shades from the underworld.

That night I dreamt of the mullican — a huge crinite dugong-like sea mammal, thought to resemble, when beached and basking, those recumbent nudes of fin de siècle portraiture.

Dear Gregg: The waitress has got psychic powers. She put me in touch with my dead mother at lunch.… I don’t want to talk about it. I nurture many dreams, but paramount is the hope that, someday, our camps have another skating party.

Mother called with her versions of Mickey Rooney’s galvanizing exhortations from Babes in Arms. Though, without the advantages of phone-a-vision, I was helpless to determine if she had gone as far as to affect Rooney’s two-story brilliantined pompadour.

Susan and Jill were so excited! They’d primped for weeks and the day had finally come! Is there anything more beautiful than a pair of girls consumed by romance! Jill stood in front of the mirror! Her underpants were a “yellow-pages” print! “Howard will flip!” Susan assured Jill! Susan was not to be outdone! She wore a diaphanous blouse! She was well-endowed and knew it! So did Jill! They were some luscious pair!

Across the street, Howard and Steve nervously gulped beer! Howard looked as if he’d stepped out of a training film! Steve seemed dissipated though! His hollow eye sockets distilled a purulent fluid! What turpitude had precipitated this dissolution?! What did Susan see in him?! Jill tended her own beeswax in this matter!

Jill couldn’t eat a thing! Susan fried eggs and sausage! The smell pervaded the small house! “What a silly stench!” Jill giggled! “I get hungry when I’m excited … and I’m starving!” Susan blushed! Jill sniffed at her armpits and shook her head, “You can’t smell anything in this room!” “Speaking of smells,” Susan said, “I hope their parts are pleasant!”

“Are you sure you don’t mind having Clare for the week?”

“No, no.”

“Because I could always get a professional baby-sitter … it would be a strange woman … but …”

“No no no, I’d love to have Clare. Where are you two going anyway?”

“Brussels.”

“Do you know where to stay?”

“Arthur Frommer recommends The Hotel Cecil, 13 Blvd. du Jardin Botanique corner of the Blvd. Adolphe Max directly on the Place Rogier.”

“That sounds like a nice place.”

“You sure you don’t mind staying with Clare? We could get a woman from an agency — she might turn out to be a mutilator or junkie or something — one of those women who puts the kid in the oven and tucks the turkey in … but if it’s less trouble …”

“No no no … it’s no bother.”

A gentlemen from the apartment complex is stockpiling torpedoes, X-ray specs, switchblade combs, flesh eating plants, exploding pens, black soap and sneezing powder. All morning he knocks boiled eggs into the garbage disposal with a facsimile of the tamping iron that shot through the head of Phineas P. Gage at Cavendish, Vermont, Sept. 14, 1848.

“Shouldn’t he be working?”

He should be, but someone at Oil of Olay Summer Camp taught him to maintain a constant vigilance. When he puts his records on, he thinks of her sucking his cock. He paints a phone booth on the wall and goes in it and calls her. Then he bugs her all afternoon. Eventually they marry. He finds work in the field of “auto salvage.” She bears a daughter. At twelve, the daughter’s body blossoms. She spends her afternoons smoking cigarettes and listening to records with her friends, exchanging a regicidal wink now and then with a girl who plays with her hair — the clouds becoming darker and darker blue — one girl repeats something she’d heard from an older friend about love-making being like watching a World War II movie with Red Buttons.

The clandestine organization (The Hardware Moguls) that was playing her for a chump taped her boyfriend’s conversation: “Oon WHIS-key kon SO-dah, por fah-VOR” (“Please mix me a drink of whiskey and soda”) and “PAH-rah me SO-loh, kon AH-wah natu-RAHL” (“I shall take mine straight, with plain water”). When they interrogated him in the A&P parking lot, he broke down:

“What in god’s name do you want from me — I told you — I have no … no journal — I’m a … bank clerk … an ordinary garden variety bank clerk.”

“Oh yeah? What’s an Individual Retirement Account?”

“An Individual Retirement Account is a personal tax-sheltered retirement plan. It was developed by Congress to bring to every American worker the opportunity to build a more secure future for himself and for his family.”

“Who can establish an account?”

“Retirement accounts are available to any wage-earner.”

“Can my spouse establish one?”

“Your working spouse may establish a separate account too, provided she is not currently a participant in an employer-sponsored plan.”

“Do I pay taxes on the income earned by my account?”

Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil wasn’t Typhoid Mary’s son and we never, never had a duel with shish kebab skewers over the same girl, but he did work his way through two years of UCLA as a make-up man’s assistant with the Mack Sennett crew, though something about that droopy-lidded, wheels-turning-in-the-head gaze of his reminds one of Brad Darrach’s description of Bobby Fischer, “Alone, uncounseled, jouncing to rock music in a borscht-belt hotel, Bobby had outgeneraled the mighty Soviet chess establishment.” Phil! Phil! Phil! Here’s Phil — holding a dish towel and pan as he listens to “Refillable Dispenser Raga” coming from the radio in a neighbor’s car … when suddenly Phil yells in the direction of a body hidden under the hood of the idling Chevy Nova, “Hey!.. etc……….” To try to alleviate nervous tension and insomnia, Phil submits himself to the Kneip treatment — a form of hydrotherapy that requires him to take cold baths.

A man and woman (who looks like Katherine Ross) sink down into the hot foliage in a film version of Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers.

The stag party goes on until breakfast and she’s beginning to feel hungry again. Well, the organist is high and he’s playing “Needles and Pins”. The bride’s name is Sirloin Stockade. Her real name is Bonnie from Phase I.

If a muscular Italian is pushing you higher and higher on a swing and you fall — high in an arc to the hard packed sand — the nuns will take care of you and you will have my baby. Don’t cry.

THE MONSTER

The Monster hates you because you melted her Conway Twitty 45s. But here we are again! You in your cardigan sweater with the letter you won in gymnastics. Hickory smoke from the barbeque curling towards the perfume of the bath. The Hatfields and McCoys downstairs at their annual conclave. The village chiropractor pedaling up our front path, the litter of dachshunds asleep in their box under the striped tent. But doesn’t it bother you that you weren’t enough of a fusspot to see that the lawn service people raked near the patio and got rid of those detestably allergenic puffballs?

It was a time of uncertain leisure, a time of faulty parachutes, of an uncertain public’s mandate for pyrotechnic child care, of the two-handed backhand with tons of topspin. And over the years the sun cooled as if it were a tablespoon of bisque that Yahweh was blowing on.

A macadam path lined with quackgrass and pokeweeds stretched down the hill towards P.S. 231 Harry Moore School and in the shadow of Togo Mountain, beneath a pastel sky, Amos the Weimaraner puppy, played by Jackie Cooper, felt like Pascal among his variety of books. Then the Monster came and offered him vichyssoise from a swollen can, but Amos balked and, dropping his bundles of text into a pasteboard portmanteau, loped … towards the Newark drive-in movie showing Kung Fu Zombies Drink Campari. And later, when the delivery man came to install the pad and shag carpet, the Monster (unable to get a job because of her weight) cozened the workmen, with untapped girlishness, into converting her storm windows to tinted insulating glass.

AUGUST

The pig’s out of the pen. Grandma can’t speak. My heart is about to explode. Negative-three: see how you look — crooked blouse minus a button, disheveled trousers, zipper jammed halfway. Negative-two: “maybe we’ll have a meatless-friday with your baited ponytail.” Negative-one: they’ve been watching your programs all night. Zero: whose idea was it to stock the pool with carp for the labor day potlatch. First of all, I don’t believe in the star system or nepotism and I’ve seen political patronage first-hand, having lived in Jersey City. Second of all, a potato-dumpling-riding show is a crystal meth image and not something to mention while I’m calling home. Third of all, when you’re done throwing flour at those chops, think about going to the store for air freshener. Deodorant for this chapel. “We smell from the speed. And we’re about to jump into a bracing pool of matrimony, of tax relief, of surfing and snoring … marry me you piece, you unwitting pawn in a brand … new … negligee!” I like that big pink cyst on his fishing pole. August … drum corps season, you can see the veterinarian’s office I designed, from this B-52 of an apartment.

Rakish crescent moon, does thin hair require combing or brushing? You want to comb my hair? You want me to remove my hat which I bought in Maine — so you can see my hair and sort of diagnose its needs? It’s difficult to hear — someone’s playing that whale album again.

The very tender message is not drawn above a resort beach by propeller plane, but left, say, between the cup and saucer of one’s fancy. The element of suspense attending such a message’s reply is said to be what goaded Bob into just forgetting it and he celebrated the easing of his burden in a park adjacent to the bait store. Drugs … sure, Bob took a few. Cheated the government? No more than the rest of us. Swallowed his gum every once in a while. Puts his pants on one leg at a time. Socks. Shoes. Buttons his shirt. Knots and adjusts his necktie. Winds his watch. Slips his jacket on. Quick cup of coffee. Puts water in the dog’s bowl. The car-pool honks. Out he goes. Not the most nutritious breakfast in the world — but so it goes. Day after day. With the thump of each new headline upon the front porches of our people — the North-Americans.

Digging for family roots, one may unearth an uncle who delighted in sniffing professional women’s tennis players’ “dew-laden” socks, (which, left to the winter night, provide an image of “frost encrusted socks”). National security, though, like the discovery of penicillin, may be served by providential accident. Video espionage mistakenly applied, for example, to room 325 instead of 225, may reveal an unemployable emigré, an idiot-savant with a funny accent in a long smock with a rattan cane, (one imagines him waving goodbye to the inflation-ravaged Western European nations whose citizens have been forced to choose between college for their children and air-conditioning for their homes), designing a bomb that would, regardless of the site of detonation, seek out and shatter Alexander Haig. But Secret Service agent and mermaid alike — my caveat for either would be identical: a summer cold can be pretty terrible if you don’t take care of it. Good health doesn’t have to be an accident.

I’LL BE WEARING GOLDEN ARCHES

I.

I think I’m wearing largemouth bass instead of sneakers, this afternoon. I think they’re laced through the eyes. I had better butter my magazine and put a band-aid on my watch band, your honor. Yak. Yak. Yak. And eat the article and nurse the time. I’d better cool the braggadocio and savor the silt and retire my Kodak to its pouch case. Vat’s dis katzenjammer? (She can’t stand his bruxistic slumber …) Your honor, this is a kangaroo court … A Central-Asiatic couldn’t get a fair hearing within 10,000 miles of this room. It behooves ya to eeeck out a living before they usurp your jurisdiction. Before I pour a quart of koumiss on this tinsel town. It’s late, shut the gate. Listen for the katydid.

II.

The Inquisitor: What will you be wearing?

Me: Just … peds.

The Inquisitor: I can’t hear you.

Me: Just peds!

The Inquisitor: 50 more lashes!

Me: Arrrrgh! No! No!

The Inquisitor: What’ll you be wearing then?!

Me: Wedgies.

The Inquisitor: Prepare the thumb-screws!

Me: Pumps!

The Inquisitor: Ready the rack!

Me: Wing-tipped Oxfords!

III.

Dawn breaks over the cabin and lake. The Rat Pack — Sinatra, Martin, Lawford, Davis — is drinking booze and horsing around with the bread dough bait that their guide has prepared.

IV.

As time robs moisture from our skin, death beckons. We sing: “It’s a hell of a way to go / noshing on herring and nagging each other / but we’re just hired stooges / getting laid off by death.”

V.

This is my feeling: Should the citizens, who people the slopes which descend from the abscissa, be segregated according to blood-sugar levels — those designated “X” doomed to an eternity of vending mother-of-pearl plaques and gold baubles at roadside stands — those dubbed “Y” left to rattle the bars of their proscenium calaboose? Wheat must be sold. Tradeswoman, meatman, fishmonger, and furrier must thrive. Commerce must hum as time traipses by.

Additionally, there is life’s diverting aspect, e.g. making a toast in one of many languages, “hunting” a lightning bug, tickling someone who’s drinking at a fountain, even ballooning or carving and painting miniature wooden animals. Finally, there is a wetter aspect, which includes singing in the shower or participating in a swim meet.

The Autocron’s girlfriend slipped out of her peignoir and tossed it across his miniature schnauzer which he adored more than his hordes of minions. When he went outside to get the paper, he noticed that the clew had become frost and, noting that the frost was architecturally complex although it could not literally house anyone, reasoned that a bubble’s tenant was simply air. His adjutant walked up the front path and said “Good morning, you have to drive your sister somewhere today.” The Autocron said, “Where? I thought I had today to myself.” The adjutant’s breath smelled mediciney and he said, “She needs a ride to the Lodge Hall where she’ll be singing tonight … she needs to rehearse.” After breakfast, when the Autocron got into his car, he noticed scores of sand nicks in his windshield. He wondered whether he should ask his father for the money for a new windshield. He wondered whether insurance would cover the replacement. He wondered whether bearing the cost himself wouldn’t prevent him from being able to afford the rent if his girlfriend got the H.E.W. job in Washington and moved out.

“Rouse the stevedores from their atmospheric bistro — we sail at dawn!” I said. While I was heating up some beans, later, I decided to have a braunschweiger sandwich with a yogurt dressing. (I’d just gotten back from visiting my parents in New Jersey.) I was reading Rex Morgan M.D. in the Post — Morgan’s standing behind some woman who’s on the phone — she’s saying, Vince please — listen to me — CLICK — Morgan looks up at her looking at the phone and says, Did he hang up on you, Connie? And she says, We — We must have been cut off. I’m one of those purists who can’t ignore a blurry television picture and still enjoy the show. If the networks were taking a survey and asking which programs I preferred, though, I’d be hard put to say. What could I do with the survey-taker? I don’t know morse-code, or the language of the deaf or Esperanto for “If I do not come out soon, keep going around the block” or “I love girls who smell like chewing gum.… like the ones at the all-night dermatologist’s office.” Three years ago in Hempstead, N.Y. where I was doing research in low-temperature physics, I had an experience with survey-takers. A couple appeared at my door one evening, with sheafs of questions. The second I let them in, the gentleman flew to the metallic globe I kept on my coffee table. The young lady was sweet and self-effacing and beguiling. But it was ridiculously beautiful the way he brandished the globe above his head as if to whack himself with a how-would-you-like-a-punch-in-the-nose attitude — his cerebral hemispheres parting like red seas, like masses yearning to be free, revealing down the center of his head, a black-top shuffleboard court with miniature retired people on it.

“A lot of aches and pains go with the territory,” Craig assured a pair of junior partners cornered against a cupboard in the butler’s pantry. And Kay teetered by, hailing Craig’s attention y’know — shaking hands with herself, the way she does, and went, “Craig Newcomer, if you’d put that drink down for one little second and come over here and …” Now Craig’s coming over and Kay goes “Look, I’m sittin here and I think I’m payin real good attention and all of a sudden I turn my back — it’s autumn. Y’know — wha’did it do, creep up on me or what? Get coy? What?” Craig takes her by the shoulders and points her towards the veranda, “What do you want the seasons to do, Kay,” he says, “hit you on the head when they change?” And, oh my, there’s Beatrice and her driving instructor friend dressed to commit homicide. But soon, fear of Yankee patrols makes further conversation taboo. Bang. As sweating rack boys push carts loaded with suits, coats and dresses, a Schlitz sales representative in a goat costume is convulsed by a neuromuscular spasm after being shot by a burp gun.

Rachel left on Friday … I’m saying this because I want everyone to know how sad I am.

You think that’s bad?

What do you mean?

I know someone who was swimming in his pool and drowned—that’s sad.

Who was he?

That Rolling Stone — Brian Jones.

You really knew him?

Naaa … I just read about him, really.

I don’t know what to say.

How about “I’m very sorry.”

I am … very very sorry. I know he played a seminal role in the formation of the group.

(The water-skiers gave us a shower as they passed. Then we were deloused and had to go to prison.)

MOVIE SCRIPT

George Washington Carver stands in an Alabama field scratching his head, fanning a thin, sensitive visage with his cap. A rain-washed gully, (of the sort that scourges Southern farm land starved for inorganic mineral salts — desperate for the cyclic replenishment of crop rotation), is always an annoying place to break a plow handle, but poor Professor Carver’s troubles are just beginning. “Oh, no!” he says, “Here comes a bunch of Tuskegee coeds!” He knows they’ll be mean, meaner than any of the girls he’d ever dated. He looks around for a place to hide, but before he thinks to climb in the wagon and cover himself with seed bags, they’re on him. These girls have foraged enough leaf mold to be expert botanists, but the only instruments they plan to use on Carver’s stalk are their mouths and slits. For women who lead lives like this, it’s nothing to take an unwilling guy and put him through their paces. In fact, a gang bang is like normal sex for these creeps. But for Carver, it’s a whole new trip. At first, it was one he’d wished he missed. He’d never even been to bed with two girls, let alone make it in public. But there’s little discourse in situations like this, and no choices either. Once they’ve spotted his firm slender ass, there’s no way they’ll leave without seeing — and feeling and fucking — a lot more. As each item of clothing is torn away, he feels his demure personality as a research professor at Tuskegee Institute also disappearing — along with his former sexual inhibitions. Since the greedy coeds don’t bother to take turns with him, but rather have him all at once, the action makes his head spin — or is it the rough hands and soggy, steaming cunts that make him dizzy? After this, going back to the old way would seem anticlimactic. But later that evening, Carver is attacked by Blacula.

These are very dear to me — these notes — very expensive and uncertain and childish. I’m writing them every day. Tonight I feel very lonely — Rachel’s gone to Bermuda with her family and the apartment is empty. I’m a little apprehensive about my visit with Barbara in Lansing — but more hopeful than apprehensive, really. I’m looking forward to human contact that’s un-habitual and un-mapped — my latest estimate is that certain forms of human relations are redemptive. I probably still have firm expectations in mind vis-a-vis un-mapped human contact and vis-a-vis Barbara in Lansing and vis-a-vis these notes — what a typically topical malady. This will be tonight’s final entry then:

Bob was saying, I’ll never bring Sharon over again — I’m so sorry … About what, I said. About her knocking the idol off your speaker cabinet. C’mon, I said, that’s nothing — that’s ridiculous. What bothered me was her breaking that glass. Those glasses were the first things I bought for the apartment. I got the pieces of the broken glass which I kept wrapped in a few pages of the Denver Post. As I was showing them to Bob, he suddenly turned white. What? I asked. I swear to god, he said, I swear to god I saw them move! He spoke very little the rest of the evening and hasn’t broached the subject since.

Because nothing is so overtaxed as the network of cybernetic checks and balances that averts and thwarts rash judgment, system fatigue is an inevitable fact of life whether it literally advertises itself as in the case of those improvident, precipitantly released Hollywood pageants (“am I nuts or what?”) that, in the phraseology of the trade magazines “snooze into the market;” or whether it hides its head under the covers of police paperwork, hearsay, and miscellaneous clue, as in the instance of the FBI-wired county official with severe tachycardiac spasms who chose mistakenly between instant gratification and a fifteen minute ride to medication; or whether it surfaces in a cherub-cheeked appliance heiress unwittingly surrendering her heart and purse strings to a philandering chiseler, whose unctuous good looks are matched only by his unprincipled greed, in the shadows which caress the kiosk’s colonnettes like a gossamer bunting during this lush Virginia fall twilight.

I unbuttoned my jacket, loosened my tie, scratched a mosquito bite on her calf and rose to brush my tongue before kissing beautiful Maria Ragazza, Carlo Gambino’s ex-wife. As I spit hurriedly into the sink, I turned to see her clawing a red pit in her calf where the bite had been. You did this to me, she hissed. I rushed to her side and buried my kisses into the raw gouge. When the skin heals, I said, my kisses will be interred in your calf! Her face trembled like a leaf on an antenna. We kissed. I apprehended the kiss modally. The Labial Protasis: initially, the predominant sensation is of full slick tumid quivering catholic lips / Le Temps de la Langue: the tongue sweeps the lips with excruciating luxury and delves assertively into the mouth, playfully jousting its counterpart — its “jumeau d’amour” / The Orifice Complexus (also Swinburne Phase and rarely Tartar’s Play): simply — the active hungering mouth in febrile animalistic dilation and systole.

The bassoon seems to say, what do you know about setting up a business letter? and the strings seemingly retort in unison, as much as you do! Who was it that couldn’t find the key to the xerox machine after being here six months. An impish staccato passage from the first violins recalls the Czech “Furiant”, a lively Bohemian dance in 3/4 meter, and, with its sudden changes from melancholy to exuberance, evokes Dvorak’s “Dumky Trio.” As the timpani and basses augur an almost subterranean ritardando, the orchestra segues into a bucolic conciliatory movement that seems to suggest, this office is like an eco-system — managerial duties, secretarial duties, maintenance responsibilities, switchboard and messenger service — all mesh in a synergetic, mutually advantageous hierarchy, that necessarily precludes petty squabbles and bitching.

MERCERNARIES UNEARTH JOMO KENYATTA’S “PRIVATE STASH”

The rugged family room atmosphere would have been shattered had the Guffs known that the poodles were suffocating in their station wagon. But soon they would find the still poodles. Let’s eavesdrop:

Pop: Dogs don’t grow on trees, son.

Little Roy: Why Pop? You said they put Confucius and Candy in the ground — just like we did when we planted seeds for Greta’s garden.

Pop: Son, what do you say we both get some hunks of knockwurst and catch that Denver Bronco game we’ve been waiting for?

Little Roy: Super idea, Pop!!!!

Pop: Super Bowl, son!

Re: Lansing visit with Barbara. I, Mark Leyner, repudiate everything I said about uncharted human relations. The first night in Lansing, we fucked three times — each time more tedious than the one before. She kept wanting more more more more more satisfaction. For four days she talked about her heat without let-up, like a disgusting pig … always with a bottle of Tab jammed into her mouth — a shiny red mouth that seemed like the only sign of life enshrouded in the dough of her fat flesh. Uh-oh Barbara’s coming — I better stop and put this away.

Every person at the colloquium thought Kathleen an overweening prima donna. And when round robin discussion opened, more depressing invective than ever filled the shape of its container. In a parade, they unfurled their skeins of initials. With craven unanimity, they blasted Kathleen with their ill-conceived and pleonastic implosions. But still, amidst this wilting, Kathleen (a little drunk) delivered her statements inviting the very adversaries present before her to give up, to lie down, to die, to rot, to become ant food.

Today, people look for “fiber” in their food like Ponce de Léon looking for the fountain of youth — the pool of puerility that’s been cussed and discussed. That’s as real as a pomegranate poo-bah. But her rear looks like a cleft pomegranate, but her rear is a red herring. The real issue is her royal flush of boyfriends that runs from Jerk to Asshole.

The aroma of green tinder imbued his albums and bloodmobile & when he saw wisps of her by the rigid percolator, his eyes rolled like egg yolks on a piano bench being moved from room to room, and his hand was observed by witnesses in a town five miles away, around the neck of a bottle of Chivas Regal.

They kissed, but the warm contents of her mouth troubled him like an automat’s pot-luck. And the Tudor arches afforded an incomplete view of her bus.

The affidavit states that he said “Ahoy there!” when he arrived. That she chewed and swallowed a photograph of his swami. He lists “choking on a piece of food at an embassy party” as his #1 phobia; she lists “the smell of gasoline” as her favorite olfactory turn-on, and “giving myself paper-cuts” as her most debilitating hobby.

“What a beautiful gun … more beautiful than the three pointed at your back, amigo.”

“Give it to me straight. I can take it. How long do I have?” “About two seconds.” “Put that gun down!” “After all the misery you’ve put me through …” “Misery? What misery?!”

I made a mental catalogue of the spread: a rosewood desk on embossed “lion’s paw” legs / photograph of a woman in filoplume hat and child on a mechanical hobby-horse / golfball paperweight / an overturned rosewood Windsor chair / a disarray of legal and steno pads and pencils / a half-torn letter reading “… ght. Can’t we begin again — without suspicions and recriminations — can’t we say to each other — I made a mistake — that each night I spent apart from you was filled with sadness and emptiness — because that’s how it was for me. If only you hadn’t …” / a bust of Nefertiti / a calendar-penholder / a set of windows with drawn shades / a coatrack / an oriental-style taboret / a Morris chair with dark green chamois leather cushions / an open bottle of gin on a mock-filigree fold-out bar / an ashtray filled with butts, some bearing lipstick traces.

She coughed — a dainty little cough like that of an antique miniature Basin-Pull steam engine.

“Shoot” I said.

She opened her pocketbook and took out a plaid cloth-covered cigarette box. In a slow, cautious, unassumingly economical motion, I reached into my vest pocket and withdrew a lighter which I displayed in the air before flicking. She leaned over and, smoothing a wisp of hair behind her ear, lit her cigarette. She took a quick nervous puff and fidgeted with a loose thread at the hem of her skirt and then with the chipped plastic viridine green button over one of the mock pockets of her blouse.

“Shoot” I said.

She gnawed at a hang-nail briefly and then tugged at the charm bracelet at her wrist. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, she scratched a discolored patch of flesh on her cheek. She kicked one of her pumps off, slid it under the chair with her foot, and loosened the nainsook Montpellier green bow at her collar.

“Shoot” I said.

I’ve got to get some rest now — tomorrow’s leather pounding time — flat-footing … gumshoeing … hawkshawing … what’s in a name anyway — tomorrow the sun rises — I shake the bones out of my hair — rinse the sea-weed out of my mouth — palliate these gripping cramps with some luke-warm juice and go out and make a dirty god damn shit-eating motherfucking buck. My name’s Leyner … Mark Leyner — I wasn’t born with that name — I earned it … believe me.

THE ROSEATE SPOONBILL

(Comments after the death of John D. Rockefeller 3d)

It’s difficult to empathize with anyone. But it’s like impossible to comprehend the fright with which one, after not having been home for literally years — the fright with which one reaches into his old bureau — into his tenebrous grotto of a drawer — the fright with which one reaches into a drawer, right, and into the unsympathetic length of his tattiest dowdiest widowed sock and have like pains shoot up his dorsal environs. You want to say “see you in the funny papers” and burrow straight under that Disneyesque counterpane immediately. Life is, au fond, not for the chicken-hearted. Stan Musial, when he was physical fitness consultant to the president in ’65 wrote, “… there is no equality of opportunity — in education, in employment, or in any other area — for persons who are weak and lethargic, timid and awkward, or lacking in energy and the basic physical skills.”

What considerations must be taken into account when looking for a man to marry? Can, for instance, one woman’s priorities accommodate both astrological affinity and the extent to which a gentleman has built up equity? And what form does that equity take? Has it been accumulated in a piecemeal, haphazard manner, consisting of, say, a television, stereo, toaster, wardrobe, clock-radio, and turquoise ring or two? Is its value apparent only with respect to a certain connoisseurship, as in the case of my friend Randall Schroth’s antique car?

In this regard, what occupies the mind of someone like Brooke Shields’ mother? Miss Shields, whose pool of nuptial possibility is rife with the most conniving piranha. Has the thought of an arranged marriage not occurred to the mother of this extraordinary girl? An arranged marriage of the sort that was common in a host of venerable cultures, including the Akwe-Shavante Indians of Central Brazil and the Heian court of 10th century Japan.

Although judging from coeval texts such as The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon and The Tale of Genji, the feudal Japanese court boasted enough heavy action, (conducted surreptitiously behind screens of wattled bamboo or rather ostentatiously, in keeping with the fabulously amoral Zeitgeist of the period), to curl hair upon the nape of the most coy and prim of handmaidens’ necks or to unravel the top-knot of even the most phlegmatic warrior.

Oh great, Werner from my soap opera “To Knot the Grey Nuts” is dying. That phony … It’s good to see his hopes blow up in his face!

Ray thought it was funny that my toilet is coin-operated — but what does he think this apartment complex is, a public school? Up in the rarefied air of my income bracket, you get what you pay for, Ray!

The last thing she said was, “I’m about to be discovered. I’ve been pitting all my friends against each other.”

So I said, “That’s an intensely delicate operation to have undertaken. And I really admire intense individuals. In fact, people have said that I have a certain intensity. A certain ‘I don’t know what exactly.’ A certain hunger for truth … a certain thirst for adrenaline maybe. Perhaps an unnatural affection for danger, a latent death wish … a kind of hopelessly self-destructive Weltschmerz. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“I’m about to be discovered. I’ve been pitting all my friends against each other.”

The October weather has been delightful. Like that crisp breeze just now. Did you see how rosy it made my cheeks? The playoff games have been more than body and soul can bear. Vitamin E has transformed my scalp into a fertile promised land. But the dead Pope looks like an ornate canary laid out that way.

Some afternoons, the sun hits my phonebook at just the right angle and light shimmers off its cover like shards of topaz. Other men may be stalled in traffic, asleep with their succubi. Other men may be sitting down to dinner already. These men eat too early! But we men are such a club. With our habits and clothes. We love to kiss babies when we campaign. And we love to drink coffee. And that accounts for the sheer voluminosity of our philosophies, all that coffee.

Ah, October whatever it is. I’m back in the saddle again. I’m the story of lovely lady who was very very very bewitching. As George Eliot said of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, “Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback.” I feel as if a sixteen ounce glove has softened the fist of fate’s devastating uppercut. I feel as if horse tranquilizer has slowed the team that aproaches with my hearse. As if firemen have discovered new ladders, to discover me. The addlepated officer, retrieved, fighting a war that ended thirty-three years ago. The last of the Mohicans. The final Brontosaurus-burger sold on a Sat. night. Half swan, half doe. With feathers of Chantilly lace and hooves of translucent quartz.

On the other hand, I’m an insular queen amidst all this exalted glee, amidst these Visa cards and platters of cheese and smoked lox. Even when I’m playing bridge, I have to worry about my ex-husband’s friends bombing my oil fields. In the dead of night, having to throw on a few things and go join the bucket line. It may be just a false alarm that a kid’s idle hands turned in or a ruse contrived by my sister to get me to my surprise party! I don’t know what to say. “For me?” or “You shouldn’t have!” or simply “I don’t know what to say.” But the simultaneous sensation of rampant happiness and anxiety results in a kind of torsion that is exhilarating.

Aaaaaaahhh! To sleep, though, I need to be tapped not so gently on the forehead with a rubber mallet. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz …

It feels magnificent, in this Morristown orchard, heaving apples towards the doe, with you, to end something here with this kissing and this tacitly fiducial understanding that this finality has all the taut resilience of a trampoline lofting us back next time across the flat lasagna pans that our separate individual lives have devolved towards … this monody of kissing — this flicker of emulsion.

The germs in her nostril clung from tiny hairs which bristled like stalactites, and she said “Ahhhhhhchoooooo!” And from her delicious mouth sallied forth bits of a cyclist moving from left to right, bits of blue body-warm linen, bits of a tattle, bits of sky — of its blue polyhedra, bits of a spritz.

— Gesundheit.

— Thanks.

“May I have this dance, senorita?”

“You are indeed a wonderful man, Captain Parker!”

— Thanks.