Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

Pop: Dogs don’t grow on trees, son.

Little Roy: Why Pop? You said they put Confucius and Candy in the ground — just like we did when we planted seeds for Greta’s garden.

Pop: Son, what do you say we both get some hunks of knockwurst and catch that Denver Bronco game we’ve been waiting for?

Little Roy: Super idea, Pop!!!!

Pop: Super Bowl , son!

Re: Lansing visit with Barbara. I, Mark Leyner, repudiate everything I said about uncharted human relations. The first night in Lansing, we fucked three times — each time more tedious than the one before. She kept wanting more more more more more satisfaction. For four days she talked about her heat without let-up, like a disgusting pig … always with a bottle of Tab jammed into her mouth — a shiny red mouth that seemed like the only sign of life enshrouded in the dough of her fat flesh. Uh-oh Barbara’s coming — I better stop and put this away.

Every person at the colloquium thought Kathleen an overweening prima donna. And when round robin discussion opened, more depressing invective than ever filled the shape of its container. In a parade, they unfurled their skeins of initials. With craven unanimity, they blasted Kathleen with their ill-conceived and pleonastic implosions. But still, amidst this wilting, Kathleen (a little drunk) delivered her statements inviting the very adversaries present before her to give up, to lie down, to die, to rot, to become ant food.

Today, people look for “fiber” in their food like Ponce de Léon looking for the fountain of youth — the pool of puerility that’s been cussed and discussed. That’s as real as a pomegranate poo-bah. But her rear looks like a cleft pomegranate, but her rear is a red herring. The real issue is her royal flush of boyfriends that runs from Jerk to Asshole.

The aroma of green tinder imbued his albums and bloodmobile & when he saw wisps of her by the rigid percolator, his eyes rolled like egg yolks on a piano bench being moved from room to room, and his hand was observed by witnesses in a town five miles away, around the neck of a bottle of Chivas Regal.

They kissed, but the warm contents of her mouth troubled him like an automat’s pot-luck. And the Tudor arches afforded an incomplete view of her bus.

The affidavit states that he said “Ahoy there!” when he arrived. That she chewed and swallowed a photograph of his swami. He lists “choking on a piece of food at an embassy party” as his #1 phobia; she lists “the smell of gasoline” as her favorite olfactory turn-on, and “giving myself paper-cuts” as her most debilitating hobby.

“What a beautiful gun … more beautiful than the three pointed at your back, amigo.”

“Give it to me straight. I can take it. How long do I have?” “About two seconds.” “Put that gun down!” “After all the misery you’ve put me through …” “Misery? What misery?!”

I made a mental catalogue of the spread: a rosewood desk on embossed “lion’s paw” legs / photograph of a woman in filoplume hat and child on a mechanical hobby-horse / golfball paperweight / an overturned rosewood Windsor chair / a disarray of legal and steno pads and pencils / a half-torn letter reading “… ght. Can’t we begin again — without suspicions and recriminations — can’t we say to each other — I made a mistake — that each night I spent apart from you was filled with sadness and emptiness — because that’s how it was for me. If only you hadn’t …” / a bust of Nefertiti / a calendar-penholder / a set of windows with drawn shades / a coatrack / an oriental-style taboret / a Morris chair with dark green chamois leather cushions / an open bottle of gin on a mock-filigree fold-out bar / an ashtray filled with butts, some bearing lipstick traces.

She coughed — a dainty little cough like that of an antique miniature Basin-Pull steam engine.

“Shoot” I said.

She opened her pocketbook and took out a plaid cloth-covered cigarette box. In a slow, cautious, unassumingly economical motion, I reached into my vest pocket and withdrew a lighter which I displayed in the air before flicking. She leaned over and, smoothing a wisp of hair behind her ear, lit her cigarette. She took a quick nervous puff and fidgeted with a loose thread at the hem of her skirt and then with the chipped plastic viridine green button over one of the mock pockets of her blouse.

“Shoot” I said.

She gnawed at a hang-nail briefly and then tugged at the charm bracelet at her wrist. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, she scratched a discolored patch of flesh on her cheek. She kicked one of her pumps off, slid it under the chair with her foot, and loosened the nainsook Montpellier green bow at her collar.

“Shoot” I said.

I’ve got to get some rest now — tomorrow’s leather pounding time — flat-footing … gumshoeing … hawkshawing … what’s in a name anyway — tomorrow the sun rises — I shake the bones out of my hair — rinse the sea-weed out of my mouth — palliate these gripping cramps with some luke-warm juice and go out and make a dirty god damn shit-eating motherfucking buck. My name’s Leyner … Mark Leyner — I wasn’t born with that name — I earned it … believe me.

THE ROSEATE SPOONBILL

(Comments after the death of John D. Rockefeller 3d)

It’s difficult to empathize with anyone. But it’s like impossible to comprehend the fright with which one, after not having been home for literally years — the fright with which one reaches into his old bureau — into his tenebrous grotto of a drawer — the fright with which one reaches into a drawer, right, and into the unsympathetic length of his tattiest dowdiest widowed sock and have like pains shoot up his dorsal environs. You want to say “see you in the funny papers” and burrow straight under that Disneyesque counterpane immediately. Life is, au fond, not for the chicken-hearted. Stan Musial, when he was physical fitness consultant to the president in ’65 wrote, “… there is no equality of opportunity — in education, in employment, or in any other area — for persons who are weak and lethargic, timid and awkward, or lacking in energy and the basic physical skills.”

What considerations must be taken into account when looking for a man to marry? Can, for instance, one woman’s priorities accommodate both astrological affinity and the extent to which a gentleman has built up equity? And what form does that equity take? Has it been accumulated in a piecemeal, haphazard manner, consisting of, say, a television, stereo, toaster, wardrobe, clock-radio, and turquoise ring or two? Is its value apparent only with respect to a certain connoisseurship, as in the case of my friend Randall Schroth’s antique car?

In this regard, what occupies the mind of someone like Brooke Shields’ mother? Miss Shields, whose pool of nuptial possibility is rife with the most conniving piranha. Has the thought of an arranged marriage not occurred to the mother of this extraordinary girl? An arranged marriage of the sort that was common in a host of venerable cultures, including the Akwe-Shavante Indians of Central Brazil and the Heian court of 10th century Japan.

Although judging from coeval texts such as The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon and The Tale of Genji , the feudal Japanese court boasted enough heavy action, (conducted surreptitiously behind screens of wattled bamboo or rather ostentatiously, in keeping with the fabulously amoral Zeitgeist of the period), to curl hair upon the nape of the most coy and prim of handmaidens’ necks or to unravel the top-knot of even the most phlegmatic warrior.

Oh great, Werner from my soap opera “To Knot the Grey Nuts” is dying. That phony … It’s good to see his hopes blow up in his face!