Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

“I gotta get out of here for awhile,” I said, “while I’m gone I wonder if you could do that seam on my blue corduroy jacket.”

I kept trying to fly to the District of Columbia. But each time, the plane would take off from Denver, fly for four hours or so and then land in Denver — and the passengers would get up and stretch and reach into the overhead luggage compartments for their coats, queue up and deplane, as if we’d really arrived in the District of Columbia after all. But I doubt we ever had.

Each day I’d watch the newspaper boy arrive at my apartment and stand in the center of the complex’s vast atrium and toss the papers up towards the second and third floor balconies. But he could never reach the apartments and the papers would just fall back to the ground. And he’d throw them again and they’d fall short again. Then he’d throw them with more force and they’d land on the roof. Then he’d throw them a little softer and they’d hit the balcony’s railing and tumble back to the ground. Then much much harder and they’d fly over the roof. And finally he’d leave, not having delivered a single paper. So tenants were held virtually incommunicado from the world and not infrequently there’d be screams from apartment windows “Is it baseball season or basketball?!”

Another week began on the radio. Air blew through the heat vent and someone in an adjoining apartment was using their garbage disposal. These were things I noticed. Because in many ways I lived with my apartment and not in it, I knew its moods and habits. I thought the apartment was so horny. I looked for its diary everywhere. It must have longed for something as neuter and clean as it was. Within its confines, I could smell myself and vent in the inexpressible ways an unexpurgated hatred of the other women I wanted desperately desperately to just hold me and kiss me — that would be better than fucking — just being held. A friend lent me his guitar and one night I just played Under The Boardwalk. Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk “On a blanket with my baby …” These were the feelings I held. The walls of the apartment were covered with lipstick marks of big inhuman kisses. The next morning I woke up and began to live more realistically. I ate breakfast quickly and put my sweat pants and orange sweat shirt on and drove to the basketball courts at the Williams Village dormitories. As I entered the court, there was an almost unprecedented ovation and I sang the Everly Brothers’ “never knew what I missed until I kissed ya” as I dribbled. It was there, I think, at mid-court, beneath the clouds’ pink under-bellies, that I decided that the most prudent and expedient thing I could do was leave Boulder.

I made up my mind not only to relocate but to assume a new identity. To weather the future under cover. To lose myself in the great anonymity of the mid-west. I applied to an exchange program that would place me with a mid-western farming family. And with greater dispatch than I could have hoped for, I received notification that I’d been accepted and that I was to join my new family at the first opportunity. The speed with which my application was processed was due, I think, to the unassailable discretion with which I’d answered the application’s queries. Where it asked why I wanted to live with a farm family, I wrote, “Because I like farmers.” Where it asked why I liked farmers, I put, “First the farmers angered Washington residents by trampling the mall and driving their tractors into the reflecting pools, but then really charmed them by plowing capital motorists out from under that uncharacteristically heavy snowfall. And some farmers even sought a brief respite from controversy beneath snowy monuments and dashed off impassioned letters to wives and sweethearts.” And on the part of the application where it asked what kind of letters the farmers sent, I put: “Dear Helen, If you got telephone cable and wrapped it around all the planets and stars so that if you wanted to you could call other galaxies and universes you would not speak to a finer prettier best-cookinest gal than you are Helen. I mean it too, brown eyes.”

Needless to say, I was delighted at the sudden prospect of being able to live quietly, and without constant foreboding.

I called my friend Bianca and invited her to the Boulderado for a drink. It’s funny, y’know I even remember what we had — she drank Spanish coffee and I had bourbon and soda. And while we were drinking, the waiter brought a telephone over, “It’s for you, sir.” It was Lisa.

“I can’t talk now,” I said, “I’m insulating. I’ve got fiberglass all over me. Bye.” I hung up and called Barbara.

“Listen Barbara, I’m having a drink with Bianca at the Boulderado. Call up the airline and make a reservation for me.”

“Forget it,” she said, “If it’s so important to have a drink with Bianca, let her make your calls.”

“Look Barb, do as I say or I’ll read your letters to a room full of English 119 students.”

When I got back to the apartment, Barbara was on the floor, filling a syringe with soy sauce and mayonaisse. She clenched and unclenched her fist a few times, looped her belt around her arm and pulled it tight with her teeth.

I could see the words at the bottom of the glass I’d been drinking from.

Barbara turned to me, “There are cops in the kitchen.”

There were four cops disguised as three cops. One cop was part wasp, part fascist pederast. One cop was short and fat. One cop was drenched in Aqua Velva. They were in my kitchen.

My heart hit the linoleum like a clump of dough, with a real bottom of the ninth splat that evaporated into a cloud of valerian vapor, a real gaseous calm, a real back-to-mom, a real relieved throb. Cause being caught for the wrong thing is the loftiest exoneration there is. And maybe they got me for stealing cigarettes from King Soopers, or stealing books from Brillig Works, or reading other people’s letters in the mail room, or stealing newspapers from other apartment complexes, or lying without let-up, lying about the woman I love without question so other women will sleep with me, or napping when most of the citizenry is slaving away, or keeping my sea-onion in the closet or overbreading my chicken or being myopic and algophobic and predatory.

“Big deal,” I said. “Big shit. What’s the big fuss all about,” I said, as they led me outside to the car.

I stopped walking and tilted back my head and for a minute just felt the rain fall on my face and for just a second it felt like being very young again … another little kid who’d skated in his dress shoes across the frozen ponds that had formed on the settlement’s big plans, for a big future, for big thinkers, with big wallets, on big behinds.

“Asshole.” I said.

Taken off the face of the earth.

From its static electricity and unctuous detergents.

“Face of the earth!” I swore.

I swore at the crowd of things I knew.

And someone yelled from a window, “Is it hockey season or baseball?”

“Asshole season,” I said, “Asshole season.”

A

DISCO DIASPORA

WAITRESS: Sir, I’m sorry but we’re out of Thousand Island. You can have French, Blue Cheese, Russian, or the house vinaigrette.

IRTZY: Alright … French. (Then hissing to himself.) Oh bold stalk of enmity. Phototropic tattersall of crimson and black. Lopped far above root by the blunted edge of compromise’s loose desultory scythe! You shall stretch forth again. And nourish the air with fragrant revenge!

LEIBMAN: Your stalk, sahib, is still redolent of that wench’s soiled hole.

IRTZY: That is no wench, Leibman, that is my dear wife.