Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

Sun Tzu Drilling the Concubines of King Ho-lu

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.”