Mark Leyner - My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

i found the lovers' passionate predicament and their passionately ingenious solution quite poignant not only was i moved by the sophistication of their microcomponents — only fourth-generation robots were capable of dreaming and telepathy — but they made me think back to the springtime of my own youth, when i first fell in love the year was 1958 cary grant and sophia loren starred in a motion picture called houseboat it was a beautifully tender love story of an italian conductor's daughter and a widowed father of three small children to me it was the most romantic film of my lifetime and i thought that sophia loren was the most potent embodiment of erotic love imaginable i suffered the agonies of an enraptured adolescent i can remember vividly the very sweetness of my longing, the hot sudorific intensity of fantasies inevitably doused in the icy realization of my desire's futility… absently doodling her name on my gym shorts "sophia"… "sophia"… the word reverently multiplied on every wall of the weight room, scratched even in the vinyl-covered benches of my nautilus equipment she was the first and last woman i ever loved although cary grant and sophia loren appeared larger than life on screen, they were actually 10-inch scale models — graphite-reinforced shells of polycarbonate polybutylene resin filled with cellular urethane foam — designed and constructed by special-effect artists at toho films, the japanese studio also responsible for godzilla, rodan, mothra, and ghidrah

after finishing my cheeseburger, coffee, and dessert, i paid my check and repaired to the bar car for a brandy i had just settled onto my bar stool when i felt the firm grip of a biometal hand on my shoulder i swiveled around and for a second was so nonplussed that i didn't recognize the sallow and sunken-cheeked figure before me it was a painter i'd known quite some time ago when i lived on reade street featuring a gyroscopic balance sensor, enhanced manual dexterity, advanced irony and image appropriation functions, and a 600K-byte art history memory, he was the first of the automaton painters to exhibit simultaneously at boone, castelli, and radio shack, and to appear in the same month on the covers of art forum and popular mechanics and he was the first automaton painter equipped with a functional gastrointestinal tract enabling him to eat at mr. chow's he appeared to me to be in a state of extreme agitation and although we hadn't seen each other in some twenty years, he forwent any pleasantries and steered me roughly from the bar come with me to my loft car, he said, i want you to see my new painting — i think it's the best work i've ever done every computer-run monorail had five or six loft cars — usually towards the back of the train these loft cars were reserved for artists to enable them to work on their paintings or sculptures without interruption between stations so with me in tow, he proceeded hurriedly to his loft car the painting was propped against the side of the car, draped in a section of tarpaulin let me give you some background before you see it, he said two men get out of prison after 10-year stretches for armed robbery in a shared fit of spontaneous recidivism, they immediately steal a bright red mustang convertible they're driving along and they approach a huge billboard depicting a voluptuous woman in a very scanty, revealing bikini the men, neither of whom has seen or been with a real woman in 10 years, are overcome with desire they slam on the brakes — the red mustang swerves and screeches to a halt in a roadside ditch and the two men get out of the car, rip their clothes off, throw themselves across the hot hood of the mustang, and begin to furiously masturbate and the red mustang is so hot from the engine and the desert sun that when they ejaculate the globs of semen literally fry on the hood and that's the painting, he said, releasing the tarpaulin and so it was — there was the desert road, the lean muscular etiolated bodies of the two ex-cons sprawled exhaustedly across a red mustang convertible, two large albuminous pools of fresh semen sizzling on its hot hood like two fried eggs this is a numinous work of art if i ever painted one, he said, this painting is extremely spooky it's like the portrait of dorian gray or something it frightens the living shit out of me what is it that frightens you about it? i asked the painting is protean… it's unstable… it changes! what do you mean? i asked i mean the painting literally changes depending on where the monorail is — the painting transforms itself — it apparently metamorphoses its pigments to reflect the location of the monorail — it's like some kind of weird window! well, it didn't take me more than a couple of seconds to realize that it was a window and if there had been any doubts, they were dispelled as the monorail began to pull away and, through the window, the red convertible and the two pale and spent convicts receded in the distance and the setting desert sun cast a coral light on the landscape

i walked away, deeply moved by the refusal or inability of this robot to distinguish between the factitious and the natural but a powerful turbulent hungry feeling was welling up within me i longed for the warm textures of flesh and blood — the faint glimmers of sympathy and pleasure in a pair of eyes indicating the presence of a heart and nerves and synapses and not gallium arsenide chips and integrated circuits perhaps i'm the last human being on earth with an abiding system of ethics and a beautiful body although on certain beaches beautiful heavily muscled proletarian boys are cracking open horseshoe crabs with ball-peen hammers and sucking out their 175-million-year-old deoxyribonucleic acid in a gallant effort to rejuvenate the human species but i am nostalgic for more romantic times i slipped into a camisole top of silver and violet mesh, a black velvet skirt, a sapphire and opal necklace, diamond earrings, and a pair of multicolored python pumps and i made my way, car by car, through the computer-run monorail — cruising for sentient beings

about the author

I was born on January 4, 1956, at Margaret Hague Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey. Little is known about my early life. My father, Joel, and my mother, Muriel, kept me with them in Jersey City. Often they would take me to look at dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History, and then, invariably, I would be given ravioli. Summers were spent at the Jersey shore in a town called Deal which is near Long Branch where Ulysses Grant spent his presidential summers. It should also be noted that from the stoop of our little house in Jersey City I could discern the screen at the Newark Drive-In Movie Theatre. When I was six, my sister Debbie was born. (An actress and former shoe model, she has since changed her name to "Chase.") One day we moved to West Orange, where I saw my first squirrel. On my first day at school in West Orange I was asked to do something that I refused to do: skip. When I saw the Beatles on television in 1963, I decided that I'd like to be an "artist." At various times the Leyner family went to Holland, England, Denmark, Sweden, and Portugal. In junior high school, there were only three girls shorter than I was — two were identical twins and one was Shelly Ullman, whom I asked to wear my ID bracelet. Unfortunately her wrist was too pudgy to accommodate the bracelet without her hand becoming gangrenous. Bringing great honor to my people, I was chosen as one of the starting pitchers in the Little League All-Star Game. I began writing poetry. I attended Columbia High School, where I wrote a column called "This Side of Paradise" for the school paper. The column chronicled the parties that my friends and I attended. In high school, I loved to rock ʼn' roll, a hot dog made me lose control. I was in a band that broke up over artistic differences — I wanted us to go "glitter," а la T. Rex, Bowie, the New York Dolls; the other guitarist, Tom Cacherelli, wanted us to be a more workmanlike band like the Allman Brothers. I graduated from high school when I was sixteen and dashed off to the Middle East with my girlfriend Liz Ross, who today is a lawyer in Boston. Eventually, sick of falafel, we dashed off to Greece, Switzerland, and Prance before returning to the U.S.A. to attend our respective universities: Radcliffe for Liz and Brandeis for me. In 1972 my poem about Tina Turner appeared in Rolling Stone —my career was launched! Then I met Sarah "Calamity Jane" Vogelman and offered her a quaalude, and so began our college romance — today Sarah is married to Adam Kariotakis and has two kids; she's a lawyer in New Brunswick. I began writing fiction at Brandeis, and when I graduated in 1977, I was awarded the Dorothy Moyer Memorial Award for writing. I was offered fellowships at the graduate writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I went to Boulder, got my M.A. in 1979, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where "Calamity Jane" Vogelman was living and I had a series of stupid jobs and began work on I Smell Esther Williams. I moved to Hoboken in 1982 and worked as an advertising copywriter for Panasonic for a year. I dated a bass player named Trude Koby, who was also going out with Fab Five Freddy at the time — today she's a lawyer in Miami. In 1983, I Smell Esther Williams was published by the Fiction Collective. That year I met Arleen Portada, and in 1984 I asked her to marry me. She got very embarrassed and ran into the bathroom; eventually she came out and said "yes" and we were married and had a riotous party at — where else? — the Hoboken Elks' Club. Arleen is a brilliant psychotherapist. She was asked to appear on "The Morton Downey Show" and refused. We've traveled to places all over the country including Fayetteville, North Carolina. My work began appearing in various magazines. In 1986, I was awarded a fellowship grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. I've given readings at many distinguished venues, including the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the West Side Y's Writer's Voice series, Columbia University, Illinois State University, SUNY Buffalo etc. While working on My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist , I supported myself by doing advertising copywriting. Recently I've written ads for biodegradable incontinence briefs and artificial saliva. No one knows what the future holds in store for me.