My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

3. fugitive from a centrifuge

Dad was in the basement centrifuging mouse spleen hybridoma, when I informed him that I'd enrolled at the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty.

The spirit, pride, and discipline I acquired during the rigors of the Academy would remain with me for the rest of my life. I'd never forget the Four Cardinal Principles: Teamwork; Positive Attitude; Hair That's Swinging and Bouncy, Not Plastered or Pinned Down; and Hair That's Clean, Shiny, and Well-Nourished. Years after I graduated, I'd occasionally rummage through the trunk in the attic and dust off the vinyl, flesh-colored pedicure training foot that was issued to each new beauty cadet. I'd give each toenail a fresh coat of polish, and the memories would come cascading back… memories of being unceremoniously roused in the middle of the night and sent off on 25-mile tactical missions with full pack which included poncho, mess kit, C rations, canteen, first-aid kit, compass, lean-to, entrenching tool, rinse, conditioner, setting lotion, two brushes (natural bristle and nylon), two sets of rollers (sponge and electric), barrettes, bobby pins, plastic-coated rubber bands, and a standard-issue 1,500-watt blow-dryer.

On our last mission — our "final exam" — we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms.

When we look back upon our childhoods, how terribly painful it can be. The people whom we loved seem to float across our hearts (like those entoptic specks that drift across our eyeballs), tantalizing us with the proximity of their impossibility.

When I graduated from the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty, my poor diabetic mother was sixty-one, blind, and obese. She'd sit out on the stoop hour after hour, plaintively plucking her untuned banjo. We never seemed to have much money even though Dad made about $60,000, which was an upper-echelon salary at that time — Dad was a senior partner at Chesek & Swenarton, one of the "Big 8" accounting firms. But he spent most of his money on his mistress. Although it disappointed me terribly that he wasn't able to spend more time with us at home — he usually spent Thanksgivings and Christmases and summer vacations with his girlfriend — I didn't resent his infidelity. Mom was extremely fat, she wore the same tattered tank top every day, her back and shoulders were covered with acne and boils, she wouldn't use the toilet. Dad, on the other hand, was quite handsome, athletic, vigorous, dapper — a cross between Errol Flynn and Sir Laurence Olivier. He'd come home after a long productive day at the office to find Mom in her soiled rocking chair on the stoop, endlessly strumming those atonal arpeggios on her banjo. But to me, to a boy, to her son, she was everything. She was wise… and she was clairvoyant. I'll never forget it — it was the summer of 1954—we were all at an Italian restaurant in Belmar, New Jersey, and Mom suddenly collapsed face first into a hot dish of eggplant parmigiana. And she lifted her head up, her face covered with steaming sauce and mozzarella cheese, and she predicted in an eerie, oracular monotone the establishment of the European Common Market in 1958, the seizure by North Korea of the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo in 1968, and the nation's first compulsory seat-belt law enacted in New York in 1984.

When Elvis Presley, in the song "Jailhouse Rock," sang the lyrics "If you can't find a partner, grab a wooden chair," he freed a generation of young people to love furniture and, by extension, to love any inanimate object in a way that heretofore would have been strictly verboten.

Soon psychopathology replaced ethnicity as the critical demographic determinant. There were no longer Italian neighborhoods, or Cuban neighborhoods, or Irish or Greek neighborhoods. There were Anorexic neighborhoods, and Narcissistic neighborhoods, and Manic and Compulsive neighborhoods. There was no longer a Columbus Day parade or a Puerto Rico Day parade; there was an Agoraphobics Day parade. Fifth Avenue lined with police barricades, traffic diverted. But, of course, the designated route was empty, utterly desolate, because the paraders, the spectators, even the Grand Marshal himself — agoraphobics each and every one — had all stayed away, each locked within the "safety" of his or her own home.

Corruption was epidemic, achieving its absolute apotheosis when the palsied 94-year-old godfather of the Mafia family which controlled organized crime in Louisiana was actually crowned Miss Universe in Taipei, Taiwan, and presented with a ruby ring, a tiara, a Renault, $8,000 in cash, and a year's worth of cosmetics from Avon.

On any given weekday morning, an astonishing procession of well-heeled mothers with Louis Vuitton bags slung across salon-browned shoulders could be seen escorting their children who were themselves resplendently outfitted in cute Oshkosh overalls or, better yet, pricey Laura Ashley kiddie casuals. The procession wended its way to the outskirts of the city, under a dilapidated trestle, past leaking barrels of sludge laden with PCBs, where it wasn't unusual to see, among hordes of surfeited rats, the partially decomposed body of either a cult murder victim or the victim of a Colombian coke cartel assassination or simply a teenage derelict comatose atop a heap of empty Robitussin bottles. There you'd find the open-air "schoolroom" of the remarkable peripatetic teacher, Uchitel. Uchitel, who appeared to be in his late 40s, wore a caftan, loafers, and a baseball cap that said SURF'S UP. Beneath his wrap, his completely hairless body (he suffered from alopecia) smelled really good (patchouli). Who was this Uchitel? Why did he live and teach in toxic squalor? Why did these snotty, status-crazed, acquisitive mothers brave the dangerous urban outback and actually leave their precious pampered babies with this enigmatic vagrant? The legend began years ago when a wealthy woman reported her little seven-year-old son, Trevor, missing. After four days, police found him — unharmed — in the care of Uchitel, at the dismal chez-Uchitel. One week later, Trevor— who heretofore could barely concentrate long enough to comprehend a three-word sentence — was accepted into a postdoctoral high-energy physics program at Stanford. Fifteen days after his so-called abduction, Trevor was made Senior Space Policy Analyst at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

It was through Uchitel that I met… Olivia.

Olivia had just returned from the badlands of Patagonia, where she'd been excavating for dinosaur fossils, to accept a position as Dean of Admissions at the Uchitel School.

I had just been fired from McDonald's for refusing to wear a kilt during product launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich. (Haggis is the traditional Scottish dish that consists of the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the animal.)

When I first met Olivia, I was a bit stilted in the way I expressed myself. I'd say things like: "Would you care for a cookie and a glass of the fluid secretions of the bovine mammary gland?"

But Olivia taught me to be insouciant.

And soon after we met, we made a pact that if we were on a plane that was crashing, we'd grab the Walkman off someone's head, we'd grab three or four little bottles of Scotch, and we'd fuck — so that we'd die in our kind of glory — in that ecstatic maelstrom of booze and rock ʼn' roll and orgasm. But remember that time when we ripped the Walkman off a Hasidic boy's head, plundered the cocktail cart and slugged down the booze, tore each other's clothes off, and then started going at it right in the aisle, and the stewardess came up to us and said: "It's only turbulence"?

We decided to take a trip to celebrate our first year together, and I asked Olivia where she'd especially like to go.

"I want to go to that asteroid where they breed the gladiator-drones," she said.

The asteroid of choice boasted a new luxury hotel and a miscellany of guest houses and bed and breakfast inns, and I asked Olivia where she'd especially like to stay.

"The new luxury hotel… 125 floors of elegant design and sumptuous appointments rise within a sleek monolith of glass and steel, surrounded by a moat of pure mercury," she said, reading from the brochure.

Perhaps it was the extraordinarily mirthful outpouring of song from a wake-up chorus of XYY-chromosome gladiator-drones outside our door that first morning at the hotel that inspired me to reach across the bed and gently place my hand on the slightly convex belly of sleeping Olivia and then put my lips to hers — her breath still pungent with the previous night's escargot, snake and eggs, aduki beans all'aglio, and midnight snack of onion bagel with cream cheese, chives, and slivered scungilli — and kiss her with unbridled ardor. Or perhaps it was just because I was absolutely crazy about her.

That night we were standing on the balcony overlooking the mercury moat and the balcony collapsed and as we fell we were insouciant, we continued to nurse our Harvey Wallbangers and say things like: "You look simply radiant tonight."

When we returned from the asteroid, we purchased a home.

We had a rather large thing in our home and one day it got a hold of Bev and Jimmy's schnauzer. It was a buttocks-shaped seat-testing machine used by airlines. We examined the house with ultraviolet light because granulated schnauzer fluoresces; we scrutinized the carpet for the white glow of schnauzer.

Bev and Jimmy were from different cultures. Bev was from a pagan, matriarchal, moon-worshipping, earth-related stone culture and Jimmy was from a Christian, patriarchal, sun-worshipping, heaven-related bronze culture. But one thing upon which they completely agreed was suing Olivia and me for the freak pulverization of the schnauzer.

Luckily for us, Bev was distracted by another lawsuit she'd recently initiated. Bev was a speech pathologist. She had a twelve-year-old patient named Bob. Bob had been in school one day standing in front of his speech class giving an extemporaneous talk. The assignment he'd been given was to describe driving on Interstate 80 through the Midwest. Suddenly Bob couldn't speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn't total aphasia. He could speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here's how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: "Corn corn corn corn Stuckey's. Corn corn corn corn Stuckey's." His parents took him to a hospital and they performed a CAT scan and an MRI scan and a PET scan and digital subtraction angiography and they found nothing wrong. So they took him to see a speech pathologist. Bev. One day, Bob was in session with Bev when a waterbug crawled out into the middle of the floor and signaled somehow to Bob. Whether it used its legs to communicate via sign language or exuded some sort of pheromone, no one knows. But Bob was cured. He began to speak in full sentences, saying things like: "Oh yes, with respect to the Interstate… Whereas prostitution constitutes the commoditization of desire, the tollbooth exchange constitutes the eroticization of commoditized mobility — the tactile exchange of coins, a tryst in the night on the highway, albeit a surveillance, a regulation," etc. etc. Bev was charmed by the waterbug and decided to keep him as a pet. One day, Bev discovered a lump on the waterbug's thorax. She took him in to see the top entomological dermatologist in Kansas City who said that it was a benign tumor. He said he'd burn it off right there in the office using a magnifying glass and sunlight. But while he was performing the procedure, something distracted him and he momentarily lost control of the magnified sunbeam and the bug was incinerated. Bev sued for malpractice.

Our lawyer convinced Bev and Jimmy to drop the schnauzer-pulverization litigation and devote themselves completely to the waterbug-incineration malpractice case. Our lawyer's name was Knobloch. Harvard Law. Class of '64.

Introducing Gary P. Knobloch, attorney at law. I first hired Gary to aid in the administration of my mother's estate and the distribution of its assets which included the DeFrancesco Diamond — a 63.19-carat gem worth $1.5 million— that my mother had bequeathed to me. Gary lived in a sweltering vermin-infested apartment. I couldn't figure out why. The guy put over $180,000 in his pocket every year. So why the disgusting pad? I'd find out.

In appreciation of his efforts in settling the Bev and Jimmy matter, I gave him an old Radio Shack brand air conditioner/personal computer. Pour megabytes of RAM, 256 kilobytes of ROM, and about 1,600 BTUs. You put it in the window and it cooled a good-sized room and did spread sheets and word processing.

About a week later, in the middle of the night, he called me up and told me to meet him in the parking lot of the old garter belt factory. And he told me to bring the diamond. The DeFrancesco Diamond.

When I got there, he wasn't alone. He had "friends." And he wanted the diamond. He wanted the DeFrancesco Diamond.

"How much money do you think I spend on prostitutes and cocaine every week?" he asked me.

"I have no idea, Gary."

"Guess."

"I couldn't even guess."

"Guess how much!"

"I have absolutely no idea."

They beat me. These were ruthless kung fu Chivas-sipping Hong Kong triad thugs in tailor-made silk suits and gold Rolex watches. I spit out a tooth and a hunk of bloody pulp.

"All right. All right. I'll guess. $6,000 a week."

Gary appeared crestfallen.

"No," he said, "it's only $4,500."

"Gary, that's exactly why I didn't want to guess. I'd make some wild guess and it would be higher than the actual figure so that when you told me the real amount you spend on prostitutes and cocaine every week it would seem diminished and anticlimactic compared to the higher guess and you'd be disappointed and embarrassed… it's precisely precisely why I didn't want to guess."

I put my arm around his shoulder. His goons started toward me again, but he waved them off.

"C'mon, pal," I said, "why don't you just go home and get some sleep… OK? C'mon… I got something for you."

I opened the trunk of my car and gave him a surge protector for his air conditioner.

As time passed, I became obsessed with death, dismemberment, mutilation, and torture, and — more specifically — with death or serious injury as a result of violent crime, plane or auto crash. This obsession with violence was well-founded. The incidence of brutality and accidental trauma had reached a level that appalled even the most pessimistic Malthusians. According to the Bureau of Violent Crime Statistics, the chances of being killed in one's own bedroom by a member of one's own family on any given night were 3 in 5. The chances of having an arm or leg slashed off while using public transportation were now 7 in 10! The chances of the criminal absconding with the severed limb and hiding it somewhere so that surgeons couldn't reattach it were a chilling 4 in 7! And the chances of being sucked out of a passenger jet were now 2 in 3—according to Forensic Free Fall, an industry newsletter devoted exclusively to accidental in-flight deplanings.

The military government cracked down on the public at large, banning deviations from quotidian routine.

But as the following diary entry indicates, such irregularities persisted: "May 20. A young commodities trader in business suit and sneakers walked into a deli and purchased his daily V-8 juice which, customarily, he'd put in his briefcase and drink at the office later in the morning. But inexplicably, the man took the 24-oz. can of vegetable juice out of the brown paper bag and — as the deli owner and his wife looked on in horror — drank it down on the spot, draining the can's contents with what Antoinette Orbach, a career counselor who'd come in for her usual fried egg and Gorgonzola on a hard roll, described as 'a gurgling sound — a sound I don't think I'll ever forget.' The man then proceeded to purchase one 59-cent can of V-8 after another and, standing in front of the register, gulp each one down, until in the middle of the fifth can, he became ill and stumbled outside where he was shot and killed instantly by the single bullet of a police sniper. Meanwhile, across town, a severely retarded woman who was unable to speak, feed herself, or control her bodily functions — never mind play a musical instrument — sat down at her stepbrother's hammered dulcimer and suddenly played a flawless rendition of 'Ease on Down the Road' from The Wiz."

The diary entry continues: "I'm chain-chewing stick after stick of sugarless bubble gum. It's the hottest day of the year and I'm in my wrestling leotard and I can't find anyone to wrestle with. 'Two out of three falls,' I suggest to Kenny. 'Maybe towards the end of the week when it cools off a bit,' he demurs. 'How about you, Andrew?' Andrew's a clerk at a clothing store for stout men and hyperpituitary giants. 'Greco-Roman, WWF, any style you want.' 'No, I'm going to Fire Island to beat the heat and relax with my love interest, Jane.' I go to the Korean fruit and vegetable stand because I always see my pal Ivan there, Ivan the Realtor. There's Ivan. His short-sleeved button-down shirt is sopping wet with perspiration, his breathing is labored, his eyes unfocused — he's clearly having difficulty coping with the 100-plus degrees. 'Hey, Ivan!' I slap him on the back — sweat flies everywhere. 'Hey, watch it,' snaps a Korean guy. 'You knocked that guy's sweat into the nice salad bar.' 'Sorry,' I say. I usher wet Ivan out onto the sidewalk. 'Hey, Ivan, do you want to wrestle, I've got an extra wrestling leotard that would fit you.' 'No,' says Ivan, 'I've got to go finish a letter to my sister Gretel. I'm trying to describe to her how beautiful the sunlight is when it strikes a particular skyscraper in the late afternoon, but without using the words beautiful, sunlight, skyscraper, or late afternoon.' 'All right!' I say, throwing myself to the ground and pounding my fist on the gooey macadam. 'I give up… I give up!'"

The man whose songs helped unionize thousands of workers in colonic irrigation clinics across the country was named Folk Musician of the Year in London, England. My cousin and three other noted gastroenterologists were scheduled to attend the awards ceremony as representatives of the American Gastroenterological Association. My cousin had an extra ticket and he was kind enough to invite me to accompany him to London. "What's more," he said dramatically, "there will be an official visit with the royal family!"

"The royal family?" I asked. I was skeptical because I'd known a Royal family back home — Joel and Muriel Royal. He was in pharmaceutical sales, she hausfraued and substitute-taught on the side. They had three kids: Joaquin, Orville, and Joey D. Joey D. had a tumor on his pineal gland that caused him to sexually mature at the age of four and a half. His tricycle had a turbocharged V-8 engine with double overhead cams that did 0 to 60 in 7 seconds.

My cousin's invitation was particularly fortuitous because only days before, I'd received a wire from a prestigious jeweler in London who said that he had an ornate antique platinum setting that would be perfect for the DeFrancesco Diamond— would I be interested, next time I'm in Britain, in bringing the diamond to his home and discussing the setting? I wired him immediately after accepting my cousin's offer: YES, I'LL BE THERE. WHERE IS YOUR HOME? He wired me back immediately: YOU'LL FIND IT — I EAT MEXICAN FOOD WITH THE SHADES UP.

Hats off to the Omni International Hotel in London! Their can-do attitude and their commitment to catering to the needs of their guests exceed anything that I've encountered in over 30 years of extensive business travel.

By way of background, about six months before I accompanied my cousin to London, I was privileged to have been invited to accompany a team of deep-sea researchers and Mitsubishi top management representatives on the maiden outing of the Shinkai 6500, the world's deepest-diving research submarine. I'll never forget my embarrassment upon arriving at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard in Kobe, Japan. There I was in full deep-sea diving regalia, straining under the weight of $10,000 worth of state-of-the-art equipment. I heard a sharp knock on my diving helmet, turned on the heels of my flippers, and there was Takeo Yoshikawa, Director of Benthonic Research at Mitsubishi, grinning broadly, casually attired in pale-blue polo shirt, safari shorts, and espadrilles.

"My good friend," he laughed, "you look like an extra from a Japanese monster movie. Shinkai environment enables us to dress very comfortably — let's find you some suitable garments."

Takeo and his assistant, Yukio Yamamoto, found it hysterically funny that I'd actually taken a taxicab dressed in deep-sea diving gear. In fact, I thought I heard Yamamoto mutter the phrase "deficit-generating American, your protectionistic tariffs and economic jingoism will never obscure the fact that archaic management techniques and shoddy workmanship have caused American consumers to eschew their own country's products in favor of our own" under his breath, but in deference to my long friendship with Takeo and the importance of the Shinkai project, I refrained from pursuing the issue. I offered to go back to the hotel and change clothes, but Takeo pointed out that the Shinkai was scheduled for an 11:30 a.m. launch, leaving me no time to make the 90-minute round trip.

"We'll find a shop close by," Takeo suggested, and Yamamoto nodded, the trace of his smirk still lingering about his lips, or so it seemed. (In retrospect, it's more than possible that I'd projected my chagrin at being inappropriately dressed onto Yamamoto, perceiving hostile gibes and contempt where none existed.)

Finding a haberdashery near the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard was no easy task, notwithstanding Takeo's optimism, but we succeeded, and soon we were aboard the Shinkai and heading for the black depths of the East Pacific Rise, two miles below the surface, where volcanic vents continuously shoot out black clouds of 660° F sulfurous water.

Well, to make a long story short, I fell in love with the Rimicaris exoculata. Rimicaris exoculata is a species of deep-sea shrimp which inhabit the high-temperature sulfide chimneys at East Pacific Rise hydrothermal fields, feeding on the sulfur-metabolizing microorganisms that find the sulfide chimneys congenial. Using a sophisticated robotic specimen-collection arm, Takeo captured a dozen of these fascinating and exotic deep-sea shrimp for me to take back to the States and keep as pets.

Needless to say, the shrimp and I became inseparable, and, of course, I intended to bring them along with me when I accompanied my cousin to London. The problem was that during my stay I'd need a continuous supply of sulfur-laden 660° F water to provide an appropriate environment for the bacteria which my shrimp feed on. I wired the hotel, explaining my unique requirements. They wired back immediately: please BE ASSURED THAT WE WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO MAKE THIS A MOST PLEASANT STAY FOR YOU, YOUR DEEP-SEA SHRIMP, AND THE SULFUR-METABOLIZING MICROORGANISMS UPON WHICH THEY FEED.

Leave it to the zealous, resourceful folks at the Omni International. When I got to my suite and opened the door to the bathroom, I stood there, mouth agape, absolutely flabbergasted. In the beautiful sunken bathtub, there was a cold-water faucet, a hot-water faucet, and a specially constructed faucet that delivered 660° F sulfurous water. Kudos to staff and management!

My agenda in London was hectic, to say the least. In a single day, I was scheduled to meet with the jeweler about the setting for the DeFrancesco Diamond, attend the Folk Musician of the Year ceremonies with my cousin, my gastroenterologist, and then visit with the royal family. Finding the jeweler's home was no problem. Through the window of his villa, I could see him eating a tortilla.

I didn't expect the Queen's hand to be so sweaty, so soggy. I was also surprised that her accent was Southern and not British. I expected lockjawed noblesse oblige, but I got "Y'all come back and visit Buckingham Palace real soon, y'hear."

The day with all its glamour, pomp, and fanfare was exhilarating and exhausting. And when I returned to my suite at the Omni International that evening, I quickly doffed my tuxedo, slipped into my robe, had a Scotch and soda sent up, and stretched out across the plush chaise longue. Just then, the phone rang. It was Olivia.

"Does it sound like I did the wrong thing?" she asked.

"What?"

"Does it sound like I did the wrong thing?"

"Olivia, what do you mean?"

"Well, it had been an unusually long and rough day at work. There'd been a breakdown in our proofreading protocol and a mistake got through on an expensive pathogen identification wall chart — so instead of one of the panels reading 'E. Coli,' it read 'E. Cola,' and we'd already printed 10,000 pieces and the client wanted us to eat the costs and reprint the wall chart and my boss wanted the client to eat the costs and he insisted that I call the client and tell him that we wanted him to eat the costs since he'd signed off on the mechanical and the blueprint and never caught the mistake. It was a mess and it was unpleasant having to call the client and haggle over what was our mistake — it was really our lax editorial system that permitted the error to appear on the printed piece. Anyway, I got home at about 9 P.M. I popped a Lean Cuisine into the microwave and ate it in front of the TV. There was a miniseries on based on James Michener's Lincoln— the saga of the men and women who built the Lincoln Tunnel. It ended with the postscript 'In 1985, AM radio reception became a reality for Lincoln Tunnel commuters. It's a shame that Gordon Toltzis — tunnel-radio pioneer — couldn't have lived to hear his dream come true.' After I finished dinner, I felt exhausted and I decided to go to bed even though it was only about 10:30, so I went into the bedroom and I got undressed. And there I was standing in front of the full-length mirror, stark naked, looking at the liposuction scars on my thighs, when the phone rings. I picked it up and said hello but no one said hello in response. Then I started to hear some really peculiar sounds. It was as if someone had a Jell-O mold and he was 'spanking' it with a flyswatter, because there'd be this sort of muffled squishy slap and then a guttural voice moaning 'Sweet mother of God' and then the squishy slap and the 'Sweet mother of God,' etc. etc. I know I probably should have hung up but… Anyway, finally this guy started talking and he said he had a pizza for me, could I give him my address and he'd deliver it. And I told him that I hadn't ordered a pizza, but he said that I'd won it. I know I probably shouldn't have, but I told him OK and I gave him the address. In about a half hour this guy showed up and I looked at him through the peephole in the door and he didn't even have a pizza and I know I probably shouldn't have let him in — but I did. One of his eyes was sort of half closed, with a jagged scar across the lid as if he'd been knifed or something. After a while he asked me if I wanted to make love and I asked him if he had any venereal diseases and he said no, that he just had some symptoms. And I know that I shouldn't have, but I made love with him. Well, about a month later I found out I was pregnant. I realize that I probably should have gotten an abortion, but I decided to have the baby, and we got married. Then, a couple of weeks after I gave birth, he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, convicted, and sent to prison to do a 15-year stretch. I know… I know at that point I probably should have just filed for divorce… but I just didn't. So about a week before his birthday, I decided to go to the department store, buy him a gift, and drive up to the prison to give it to him. I was at that store for over three hours, trying to make up my mind between this really handsome gray turtleneck shirt and an ultrasonic humidifier on sale that I thought might be nice for his cell. I mean I just could not decide — I'd be standing on line at the checkout counter with one and then suddenly I'd be like: no way, he'll definitely like the other one better. And I'd bolt for the aisle and switch. And finally, finally — after three entire hours of vacillating between the turtleneck and the ultrasonic humidifier — I bought him the humidifier. So does it sound like I did the wrong thing? I know that he really likes turtlenecks and he likes 100 % cotton, but the ultrasonic humidifier seemed so practical and I think $55 is such a great buy."

I calmly hung up the phone. My cocktail was evaporating to the ceiling, condensing, and drizzling back down into my highball glass.

I had dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie read: You will develop a pilonidal cyst. So I tried to see Dr. Pons back at the hotel, but the nurse said: "Dr. Pons got a hernia taking off his cowboy boots." So I packed my bags and took a taxi to Heathrow Airport.

When Pan Am hired Jeffrey Bower as a pilot for its London to New York flights, it was apparently unaware of his lifelong obsession with the kamikazes — the suicide fliers of the "Divine Wind," the self-immolating archangels of the Rising Sun who steered their bomb-laden planes into the decks of U.S. aircraft carriers.

Approximately midway across the Atlantic, Bower suddenly banked our flight into a terrifyingly sharp 360° turn, the centrifugal force of which separated the passengers' red cells from their leukocytes and platelets from their blood plasma. He then took the jet into a suicide dive, aimed at the QEII which cruised innocently below. The effect on the passengers as the plane dove towards Bower's target on the water was traumatic. Many hyperventilated. Others showed agitated motor activity: complex twirling movements, writhing, flailing. Eventually the cabin was filled with sounds of gagging, retching, shrieking, exaggerated laughter, and choking. Many people were sweating profusely, some were in the fetal position.

I struggled out of my seat and made my way to the cockpit. Bower had drugged the copilot and flight engineer. Utter madness blazed in his eyes.

"Bower!" I shouted at him. "You're going to kill us all! Stop this insanity — I beg of you!"

Bower turned to me momentarily with a look of complete contempt before returning his attention to the trajectory of the jet towards the unsuspecting luxury cruise ship. (As I look back on the incident, perhaps, again, I was projecting my own very negative feelings onto Bower, but my sense of his contempt seemed quite genuine at the time.)

I realized that there was only one thing left to do if we were going to survive. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the DePrancesco Diamond.

"Bower, listen to me. If you pull us out of this dive and promise to get us back to New York in one piece, the DeFrancesco Diamond is yours… $1.5 million, all yours."

Bower eyed the gem with considerable interest.

"$1.5 million?" he said.

I nodded.

"All mine?"

I nodded.

"It's a deal," he said, relieving me of the DeFrancesco Diamond that my mother had bequeathed to me.

He pulled the yoke back and pushed the throttle forward. The nose of the aircraft pointed up and we started to climb.

At the point that Bower pulled the 747 out of its kamikaze dive, we were so close to the QEII that I could read the mahjongg tiles held in the fingers of women on the recreation deck.

When we landed at Kennedy, the aircraft was surrounded by heavily armed police and special agents. But instead of seizing Bower as I'd expected, I was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder by destroying a cruise ship with a plummeting commercial aircraft, a federal offense. It was Bower's wiles and an unbelievable confluence of events that had successfully conspired against me. Apparently Olivia and her convict husband had been on the QEII, celebrating his unexpected parole. Bower and the federal authorities concocted a story that in a fit of jealousy, I attempted to bribe Bower with the DePrancesco Diamond to crash the plane into the cruise ship, killing the woman who'd jilted me and wasting her loathsome beau. Bower even produced a parachute and an inflatable rubber raft that he claimed I'd supplied him, enabling him to escape the aircraft well before impact.

At the nationally televised tribunal, Olivia betrayed me. She presented detailed testimony that I was "essentially a bilious individual," that "beneath a mask of jocularity, [I] had Schadenfreude written all over [my] face."

My attorney, Gary Knobloch, put up a feeble defense, calling only one witness, my old boyhood chum Joaquin Royal, who under cross-examination claimed that I'd taken advantage of his color blindness when we shared crayons in the first grade.

Each member of the tribunal delivered a personal denunciation before sentencing me to death.

Scientists now believe that each person's "expiration date" is encoded within his or her DNA. They've located the operative genes on the operative chromosome and deciphered the specific sequencing of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine that determine, from the moment of conception, an individual's life span. In other words, scientists are now convinced that it's possible to perform a DNA scan — something that will be as easy to do as a laser scan of the universal product code at the supermarket — and determine the exact date and time of day of an individual's death. The potential for abuse is enormous, of course. I remember speaking to a librarian who said that if a DNA scan shows that a person will die, say, on August 15th, and he or she wants to take out a book that's due on the 16th, then "we're just going to have to turn that person down." Well, I'd never had a DNA life-span scan, but it was obvious that my time had come.

As the date of my execution drew closer, there was trouble on death row. A convict was denied his last meal request — bacon and eggs over easy, rye toast, and fries — because it exceeded the cholesterol limits set by the President's Penal Lifestyle and Wellness Task Force.

Luckily I'd developed an unusually close relationship with the warden. Knowing how much I loved Mies van der Rohe, he had an electric Barcelona chair custom-built for my execution. And when the date finally came and I was led into the death chamber, I couldn't help but marvel at the delicate curvature of the X-shaped legs, the perfect finish of the plated steel and the leather upholstery, and the magnificent, almost monumental proportions that have made the Barcelona chair timeless.

As the warden attached the electrodes to my body, I asked him if I could read a magazine. He gave me that week's issue of Newsweek, which had a photo of the president of the International Mensa Society on the cover. She was reaching up to her skull with both her hands, bending over, and spreading her cerebral hemispheres for the photographer.

And as I sat there with the electrodes attached to my head, perusing Newsweek, I couldn't help but recall those days back at the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty when we'd sit under the hair dryers at the training salon, flipping through our favorite magazines. And then my mind wandered to a particularly hot day at the Academy. We'd been standing under the brutal sun for hours as our drill instructor quizzed us.

"Unwanted facial hair?" he barked.

"Electrolysis, sir!" we chorused.

Well, here I am, sir. The most unwanted hair on the face of the earth.