Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

I am the vacuum cleaner salesman in this orbiting suburb, the slumbering widower, the little colorful head on your pillow, the frightful shock in your drink, the fob chain, tobacco, and cuff link in your caddy, the cherub-shaped pastille who scents the air in your gangrenous salon, and you are so many lines of whimsical tripe embroidered up and down my ass, a tasteless remake of your mother who herself was a platter of luncheon meats.

So, before the surgeon takes ten paces and aims his laser at my knotted skull, before he addresses this malignant growth with his 7-iron and takes a swing or two, before he says grace and sinks his carving knife into the sinew and gristle of my brain, I have one thing to say and though it may sound like death be not proud though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, what I really mean is this, your sister is too self-conscious about her weight and that’s why she had such a terrible time in Atlantic City. She never should have allowed that kind of silliness to dampen the pleasure of winning six thousand dollars. Now, suddenly, you seem thrilled that she’s finally met someone, but look who she’s invited into her life and inadvertently into yours — a man who’s indicted each tuesday and thursday, a man who whiles his time away suborning witnesses and garroting jurors, and doesn’t the thought of them making love in that squalid waterfront shack make it difficult for you to finish your spinach or is it somewhat exciting to imagine their rhythms amidst the ebb and flow of iridescent waters and the whirrr and thunk of flying cargo hooks? But I suppose you’re right, someday they’ll rope off his bathroom and charge admission, and there he’ll be, like Spinoza grinding lenses in Rijnsburg, sticking his hand between two pieces of bread and taking a bite.

And instead of cutting two holes in your mask, you want me to describe this landscape for you. But how can I describe the clouds and the blue sky or the lagoon and its smell if I’m coming through the porch door and I hear a score that means curtains for my team on the radio? Out of habit I get a magazine and stare at her breasts, she lifts her arms like that. How can I reach her? By describing the clouds and the blue sky or the lagoon and its smell? What makes me leak the word “sleep” in a trail? It’s wrong to think that every well-dressed chimp, every little-league shortstop, every four-foot lothario who steps off the escalator in Penn Station is a potential benefactor. But to describe how they hang themselves with their bow ties, wheezing into their dictaphones that one final valedictory letter … Ah! That you like. You’re a delicious elixir, and you occupy my thoughts endlessly.

Is denver a real city or just your mother’s address? Part of you is like a feather, but are you a glyph in the snow that gives off steam like the shanghai delight restaurant which hunches in the sleet on splayed arthropodic limbs and breathes vapor? No, you are more like a holiday that one leases. I love to miss you. I force myself to. It’s like being tickled. And becoming helpless. It’s like slipping on soap in the shower and waking up in a broderick crawford movie with bright orange hair and running mascara. It’s like singing mexican army songs with a black checker caught in one’s throat. It’s like a dream that ends with you pounding on my back.

At this distance, semaphore or pantomime, even hawaiian dancing would be completely indecipherable. The affidavits have been shredded. “We Are Closed” signs are everywhere, and every key has been swallowed. That cloud that is creased like an onionskin seems to denature the moonlight and it indelibly stains the water, and when your shadow falls in my eyes, it stings so badly that I find the secretions of my own mouth indigestible. You no longer look like a camel when you sleep. The sequence of presidents has been shuffled. The days of the week have been renamed. Our old brand of kerosene has been taken off the shelves. Our favorite programs have been cancelled. This is a glut of coincidences. And after all those months of “letting the pieces fall where they may,” of playing in traffic, of divinity school, of bribing cops and cleaning up after circus animals, frame by frame, this epic for insomniacs has worked itself through the terrain, and, finally, the rails have crossed and mark this spot.

So here we are again. Crouched between a blade of grass and a bottle of gin. In a lair as black and warm as a nostril. And tonight, in a field of pollarded tree trunks, you’ll unhook my yellow rain slicker and measure my biceps with calipers.

The sails are cold and palpable in the bent light, and so is the cosmonaut’s tube of chicken kiev, so is your jawbone, so is the plaster cast of my dick, so is your wrecked corvette, and our spines are curled like fishhooks and nestled in the sand, and the wind whispers vermouth over the bay.

I dated a lot of Esteé Lauder girls and was a monster to a few of them, until the police-state blossomed and fashionable girls from all echelons of demi-monde found their brains afloat in dishes of formaldehyde. I kept my figure up — which more often than not required surgery. And often the surgery was quite primitive. Bed of leaves as operating table, machete moving in moonlight, strange birds whooping, humidity rike sauna, grunting in lieu of Mantovani. Sometime edge of blade make ablation, sometime numinous human spirit itself excise excrescent wrinkled fresh.

What if prick becomes so tiny after drinking radioactive milk from Japanese mother that one have to have social life, perdue, this way and that a’way? Screwing thick-thighed horse-fly in a vestibule of my lazaretto overlooking a burg and the burg’s water supply and overlooking the puddle of hairy turbid fly love-juice. (Here’s funny part — I cannot find fly asshole to plug with finger during fly orgasm.)

If I take you into the sauna, little lover, you’ll die. “Take me!” the fly says in my ear, “Let me space out tonight.” Go down on me, I say, and it lights after a while on my teeny prick.

I lay in a pasture of flags, and troops and their brainless slatterns lay with me. Soon, as the sun fell into the side-pocket of night, I was coerced into cooking linguini verde. As they passed my steamy kettle, the girls winked at me, some hiked their skirts and blew kisses. I just kept cooking. The wonderful thing about what I was doing was that I deeply felt a dedication to my job. I remember thinking of my mother and how I must have annoyed her as she’d concoct mouthwatering dishes in a seeming jiffy. To digress for a second, and I truly mean this and don’t hesitate to nail my colors to the mast; the United States is the greatest country in the world. I think people should want to join the Army. Why shouldn’t the Army overtake the university in popularity? Shouldn’t the G.I., the martyred moral-frontiersman, soon supplant the teaching assistant, the canting troglodytic don, as varsity champion? The purple heart displace the diploma? I think of beautiful America as a tall and lean woman in a crowded pedestrian mall. A breathtakingly stunning woman.

“Want to eat cock and pussy with a friend of mine?”

“No,” she’d say, “Your friend should join a service organization or a bowling league. Meeting compatible members of the opposite sex right on the job is often the most natural and stress-free way to rekindle one’s social life.”

And she’d walk on with that majestic bearing.

A woman like that: I salute her.

The next day, oil was discovered in my study; I was meditating when a black geyser shot up into my ass from a crack in the floorboards — it was an enema fraught with success, I thought. “Mark! Mark! We’re rich!” Mom came caterwauling and wiped me and taped the lucrative tissues to the refrigerator, for everyone to see what her son had done. When the accountant showed up, he said, “He’s made a million.” But the money didn’t last — Mom absconded with the bundle and, after a few nights of sturm and drang, I urged the cops to bust her ass.