Mark Leyner - My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

He'd never shot a woman before. He'd shot men, plenty of them. Shot them, bludgeoned them, garroted them, drowned them, poisoned them, he'd even pushed some poor slob out of a 747 as he crapped in his pants and pleaded for his life. But he'd never shot a woman before. No, wait a minute. He had shot a woman before. There was that dance therapist in Fort Lauderdale. He'd filled her with so much lead you could have sharpened her head and done a crossword puzzle with her. He'd shot women before but never anyone as beautiful as this. He'd never shot a beautiful woman before, that's it. And this one was beautiful, wow. Long legs, long long hairy prehensile toes. An ape-woman. Square peg teeth, hairy floppy ears, a bridgeless nose with wide flattened nostrils. He'd never shot an ape-woman before. Well, come to think of it, he had shot an ape-woman. Back in '63 in Reno. But he'd never shot an ape-woman this beautiful. Nope.

… Where was I? muses Big Squirrel, reloading his pistol. Oh yeah… don't forget, put plenty of duck sauce on the egg rolls. One of the kids in the audience stands up. Big Squirrel, you forgot to put the egg rolls in the microwave. All the kids in the audience start to giggle. Big Squirrel, you're so silly, they chime, hysterical with giggles, you're a big silly, you can't eat egg rolls when they're frozen! Big Squirrel fires a warning shot in the air. It's time for yoga! he says. Yea! yea! go the kids. OK, how many of you have accumulated mucus in your lower bowel? Yea! yea! Yogi Vithaldas, come out here. The organist plays a few bars of snake charmer music. Kids, give Yogi Vithaldas a nice Big Squirrel hello. Howdy, Yogi Vithaldas, they chime. Hello, kids. Yogi Vithaldas, tell the kids out there a little bit about yourself. Well, I just got married, Bill. Did you hear that, kids?! Yea! yea! Yup… my beautiful wife is a psychic who specializes in mediumistic psychotherapy — say you're in the middle of psychoanalysis and your analyst dies — you don't want to have to forage through upper Manhattan for someone new and start all over again at square one in the uterus — so my wife will conduct a seance and contact your late-lamented analyst in the spirit world: knock once for libido fixation, twice for obsessive-compulsion neurosis. And my brother-in-law is a movie star — y'know that Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses where the woman cuts off her lover's penis and walks around Tokyo for four days with it in her pocket — well, my brother-in-law played the penis. And the three of us are honeymooning at the beautiful Beijing Buena Vista Motel where we'll play mah-jongg with Madame Jiang Qing and toast the memory of Mao Zedong with hundred-year-old egg creams. Yea! Mazel tov, Yogi Vithaldas, now what do you have for us today? Today I have a yogic bowel cleansing exercise that can save you kids a lot of big gastroenterologist bills. Yogi Vithaldas assumes the graceful lotus pose. Without warning, Big Squirrel screams, It's kung fu time! and leaping high into the air delivers an explosive roundhouse kick upside Yogi Vithaldas's head that sends his right eyeball flying into a Styrofoam coffee cup. Olй! go the kids. OK, kids, today we have rare footage of lions eating a Christian taken by an amateur photographer at the Colosseum in 290 A.D. As the grainy, flickering footage appears on the studio monitor, Big Squirrel comes backstage to towel off. I approach Big Squirrel at the Pepsi machine. Big Squirrel, you are the world's most formidable master of Tiger and Crane style kung fu. Walid Jumblatќs Druse Militiamen are heading for the U.S.A. We need your lethal and balletic Tiger and Crane style kung fu to defeat and slaughter Walid Jumblatќs Druse Militiamen. What is your answer? Big Squirrel stares mystically into his Pepsi. I hear the twang of a chest hair being plucked, he says. (What Big Squirrel say mean Big Squirrel help fight Walid Jumblatќs Druse Militiamen.)

I'm dialing numbers frantically, fingers flying over push buttons in a blur, in my ear a crazy cacophony of electronic beeps. I'm getting places like Wales, Sterling Colorado, Vladivostok, Altamont Speedway, Barnes & Noble Annex, Nuremberg, Braintree Mass., and Biafra. I'm stirring a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis with one hand and sliding a tray of frozen clams oreganata into the oven with my foot. I've got a dozen cigarettes going simultaneously in ashtrays all over the apartment. God, these Methedrine suppositories that Yogi Vithaldas gave me are good! As I iron a pair of tennis shorts I dictate a haiku into the tape recorder and then dash off to snake a clogged drain in the bathroom sink and then do three minutes on the speedbag before making an origami praying mantis and then reading an article in High Fidelity magazine as I stir the coq au vin. These Methedrine suppositories are fantastic! I'm spinning through the apartment like a whirling dervish, finishing things I'd put off for months, cleaning the Venetian blinds, defrosting the freezer, translating The Ring of the Nibelung into Black English, gluing a model aircraft carrier together for my little son. I'm writing to my congressman, doing push-ups, changing a light bulb as I floss my teeth and feed my fish with one hand, balance my checkbook with the other and scratch my borzoi's silky stomach with my big toe. The stimulatory effect of the suppositories is convulsive. I'm an exploding skeleton of kinetic vectors. I stand upon a peak in Darien like stout Cortez shouting I write the songs! I rupture into afterimages like the nude descending a staircase. Holographic clones of myself appear all over the apartment smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis. Where are the women, they chuckle. Mona arrives to borrow a cup of sugar. Quaaludes. Clothes shed. Gang bang. Death. Ambulance. Police. Apartment a mess. Next morning call maid. Maid arrives, drinks martinis, swallows goldfish, and vomits on little son. I take a deep breath…

The omens are inauspicious. In my haunted closet, mothballs mysteriously assemble into a triangle like a rack of billiard balls, my pants wriggle from their hangers and dance the cancan. Each night I have the same dream: I'm sitting on the John in the men's room at Avery Fisher Hall — at the climax of Bimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade a swordfish flies up out of the toilet water and buries itself in my rectum, but when I look down into the bowl I find that in actuality I've defecated the missing 18-minute section of Watergate tape. Each morning I wake up on the ledge of a tall building gripping the concrete with white fingernails. In kindergartens and pediatric waiting rooms, young children greet each other with handshakes and eerily formal salutations. Whales throw themselves on the decks of whaling ships with interminable Schopenhauerian suicide notes pinned to their dorsal fins. The Puerto Rico Day parade is the largest in history, it is visible even to the astronauts who point excitedly from the porthole of their orbiting space shuttle, but tragedy strikes when the parade's grand marshal Herman Badillo bludgeons himself to death with his own ceremonial scepter after learning that his mother's gynecologist was aboard the ill-fated Korean jetliner flight #007. My mother wanders around the house like a member of the Manson family, saying "Maalox is groovy" and when I ask her to explain she says that the mucilaginous remains of history's cannibalized explorers from Magellan to David Rockefeller have collected in her stomach like wads of undigested chewing gum, giving her terrific heartburn, she says that she has a huge hair ball in her stomach made of the exquisitely flaxen underarm hair of Amelia Earhart. Cupping my ear to a bowl of Rice Krispies I hear German V-2 rockets falling on London Bridge. Unemployed laboratory mice laid off after cuts in federal research funding huddle in skid row alleyways guzzling miniature bottles of airline whiskey. When the president finds out that the astronauts left a new popularized version of the Bible on the moon instead of leaving the King James he is outraged. He calls an emergency meeting of the Girl Scouts and the Teamsters Union. In that Bible, he fumes, Delilah uses Nair on Samson's head and Jesus Christ is crucified with Phillips-head screws and Krazy Glue. He makes the astronauts go back to the moon and switch Bibles. But there is another snafu and this time instead of leaving the King James Bible on the moon they leave Cecil Brown's novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Two elderly chimpanzees who, in the heyday of television documentaries about primate speech capacity, required sumptuous private dressing rooms with stars on the doors, now sit dejectedly in a Miami Beach Laundromat using sign language to bemoan their dwindling pensions and persistent hemorrhoids. Moving men hoist a Soviet-made antiaircraft rocket launcher into the third-floor window of a Beirut brownstone. Put it right next to the chifforobe, says Wali Assam, coyly raising her veil. Wali Assam is Beirut's most celebrated sexual self-help authoress. Her latest volume, Liquidating the Zionist Entity in the Nude, is number one on the best-seller list. Please don't make me move the chifforobe, says one of the workmen. Which one of you grungy hunks has the biggest muscle, she says, undulating the ruby in her navel. Don't flirt with the workmen! bellows a stentorian voice that rattles the china. Who is that? demands Wali Assam. This is your kitchen drain speaking! Don't flirt with the workmen! An enormous Caucasian fat man in plaid Bermuda shorts spraying Windex on the front windshield of a Datsun 280-Z with a Playboy rabbit dangling from the rearview mirror gets a cramp and calls out, Grandma! Grandma! Vultures circle above. The scene is worse at Bergdorf Goodman's: frenzied women in estrus writhe on their bellies in the aisles, mooing, snorting, and ululating, clutching violently at their breasts and loins. In an effort to quell the feral cravings of the super-horny shoppers, Abolhassan Bengazzara, the reptilian sadist and Savak alumnus who commands the notorious Bergdorf Goodman's internal security police, orders his men to load their weapons with darts containing powerful doses of Librium and testosterone. Me and Huck are trapped in a fitting room in the junior miss department. Every time one of us pokes his head out a dart comes whizzing by. You don't want to get hit with one of those darts, says Huck, they'll make you sleepy and your balls'll swell up like muskmelons. During a lull in the shooting Huck goes foraging for food and returns with a bag of Famous Amos cookies, a pocketful of papaya jelly beans, and a box of frozen tortellini. Later by the campfire Huck reclines with his ukulele and sings love songs to his girlfriend in Hannibal. When ten-story radiation-spawned mutant leviathans rise from the bubbling slime of toxic cesspools, tossing their ophidian manes of napalm-spouting lymph tubes, the U.S. Air Force will shower them with hydrogen bombs but don't cry, little love bug, after the mushroom cloud clears we'll be eating cream of mushroom soup in Monte Carlo, where the manhole covers are embossed with champagne glasses & bubbles and the gendarmes are armed with party favors, croons Huck. Huck is heavily into a Bertolt Brecht/Barbra Streisand thing. Later we go to the Thalia and sit through a double feature of Mother Courage and Yentl. During the climactic scene in Yentl where Barbra Streisand eats 300 salted herrings to prove to the other rabbinical students that she is macho, Huck weeps uncontrollably and vomits.