Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

“I’ll teach you the abc’s of dance,” I said and Sally said, “We gotta get some zzz’s” and I began to shimmy unavailed upon, but then, at the western portico, a head popped up and we both saw it, you know what I mean? — and we just knocked that expensive oeil-de-boeuf style window right out in our enthusiasm to intercept the mannerless guy.

“I am zee zinger who zings at Anthony’s Abattoir Sur La Mer,” he said, bowing crisply — and his back crackled.

“Perfect” I said, “Now we can certainly dance, see — he’ll sing and we’ll dance.”

“Nix” Sally said, “Shall I hit the hay alone or will you join me?”

“Loosen up,” I suggested, doing a few quick squats, nipping at her tail at each descent.

“I run tomorrow in The Big Stakes you randy lunk — lemme sleep.”

Needless to say I did everything to keep her up including putting flies on her behind. I didn’t go to the event the next day but ascertained via reliable source that she ran like molasses.

The next night after another scene, I vowed to sell her—“I’m through with horses,” I adjured. I took a whore’s bath, zipped over to the club and in the enthusiasm of my watershed pledge, I split a card in two, sideways, and burst about four thousand seven hundred balls in ten hours of continuous shooting.

I was a bit hard pressed as I approached the second way:

The guerillas are the fish —

the people are the sea …

“No, no!” the judge shouted, “You got the fly motif not the fish motif. Get lost and don’t come back!”

With the sangfroid of an oyster on Sunday, I accepted the nonetheless unpalatable notion that I had been foiled. I suppose I’m really quite frightened of flies.

I vant to be as mysterious as a voman.

Dear Mao,

I hope the people in heaven are real together. If they’re not, I know you’re organizing them.

Sincerely,

Kathy

The workers in the old factory were laughing so much! Someone had just told the funniest joke! “A Yankee goes into a drugstore to buy condoms. ‘I’ll have a package of rubbers,’ he says. The druggist takes them from the shelf, ‘That’ll be $3.50 with tax.’ ‘I don’t want the ones with tacks,’ the Yankee says, ‘I want the ones that stay up by themselves!’ ”

“You know, you look too nice to be in a dump like this. What brought you here?”

“You’re a queer one, you’re young,” she said. “Love brought me here.”

She laughed, and the laugh was harsh with the hint of tears behind it. She threw back her head, and touched the rose in her black hair. She had a lot of hair.

— from Confidential

by Donald Henderson Clarke

You see me with my sunglasses and cigar at ringside — then in the morning — it’s the 14th of September — I had bought a purple toothbrush to clean my tongue and imagine a voluptuous coed — a pouting libertine in men’s pajamas — a girl paring her eyelashes with the scissors my father had used for his nose hairs — a Hoffritz scissors! Some cowboy told me an eastern scissors won’t cut at this altitude … who do they take me for? Do they want to see me cry like Jackie Coogan in “Toyota Sally”?

(This section should be read like a Jewish Haggadah.)

I began to think of my employees as students — two of whom were intrigued by the image of a hypertrophic drummer beating upon a bus-like gong. The re-juxtaposition of words, that is, simply, the manipulation of language, from a position within the matrix of a consumer society, (such as U.S.A.), or from within the matrix of a draconian society (such as ours) is an analogous operation to one which I undertook a number of days ago and which I wish to render: I awoke on the morning of the 10th of September and divided my body up into square centimeters and upon each cm. applied a different cologne — in point of illustration, upon one nearly matted area beneath my pitching arm I daubed what is commerically known as “Canon & Common Law”—a fusty bouquet with the slightest hint of sherry and damp tweed; upon the raised demarcated square at the base of what Sean Michaels calls the “milch pimple” I applied the somewhat rousing fragrance of “Turkish Scimitar.” At any rate, each of the thousands of square cms. was “bathed”—as it were, in like fashion. The experiment consisted of, procedurally, simply this: entering a full early-morning bus and evaluating the response, particularly the distaff response to, first, the cumulative effect of the odeur and secondly the particular effects of each “flesh-tag”, as it was exposed to the air. I was at the time completely unaware of the fact that similar experiments conducted in Quebec City under the aegis of the Canadian Royal Academy had resulted inexplicably in epidemic-style outbreaks of (with each affliction a drop of wine should be poured into the plate) Bugger’s Itch, Bilge Mouth, Fad Dieting, Listless Advertising, and infrequently, Ridiculous Judicial Appointments. The bus rocked back and forth like a buoy and before I could collate any substantial data a behemoth percussionist had set his giant mallet upon the top of the bus and its metallic richness resounded throughout Boulder calling all writers to work. Boulder’s a writer’s town; its streets bespeak the tangled strains of the raconteur’s spiel. “Sally” I said to the girl sitting next to me, “Is that my wallet you have? Do you have any relatives with irritating habits? Is an olfactory art plausible?” Just then we careened into the old factory — the place where great literature is made — the place where many of the great classics were written including, most recently, Thelma Strabel’s Reap The Wild Wind and my own “In Susan.”

She insisted upon reading and re-reading “In Susan” and talking technique.

She pointed to my nose. “Run into a hammerfish?” she asked.

The next morning I wrote her a note:

In response to your question — how well do we know Susan — it seems to me that the question should not be — how well do we know Susan vis-a-vis the notion of character qua character — but how well do we “know” Susan qua Susan — a question which synecdochically raises the corollary — how do we “know” “In Susan” qua “In Susan”—at which point, the word “know” seems to spasm like a fish out of water.

I’ve recently begun a new tack … now I’m writing about the agent of my twenty-four hour-a-day anxiety. Listen closely … he’s like a madman on the loose. His footsteps approach with each creak of of the floorboards above. I can hear his bell. He murmurs, “Sally’s forgotten you …”

She lay in the sand with her scuba mask, snorkel, spear and flippers and I built, like the bowerbird, a chamber in which to woo her. To woo her hence. To woo her from the gloss of the page. I looked at the clock-radio, at the photograph of Sally upon the night-table and again at the photograph in the magazine. My laziness annoyed me — there were three matters which required my immediate attention: the unraveling of a blunderheaded confusion regarding my bank account, the acquisition of a New York Times and the purchase of Donald Henderson Clarke’s newest volume entitled Confidential . I was especially anxious to see the size of the headline announcing the Kaiser’s break with the Prussian Parliament. I called two of my students and told them to get right over with the new palanquin and take me to the bank, first of all!

I precipitated the disco wave by using a bat bone on a woman’s ear as a sort of musical dildo. The song went like this:

I know I’ve said and done stupid and upsetting things in the past — but please believe me, I want to be with you always — I just want us to be together for good. I have absolutely no interest in any one else — that’s simply the fact of it.