Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

After the Q and A, I’ll pose a question to the workshop participants: Do any of you think you could ever be as good a writer as I am — or perhaps even a better writer — and would you explain why you feel the way you do? Yes — over there, the fellow in the green sweater.

“Well, I think it’s possible — although it would take just a tremendous, tremendous amount of work to reach your level of virtuosity — I think it’s possible that I could someday be as good a writer as you are, although a very different kind of writer. I’ve lived all over the world and I’ve had a very interesting life, full of passion and joy and a great deal of sadness and pain, and I think that if I could ever develop a style to accommodate all the material that I’ve stored in my head and in my heart, I could be a damn interesting novelist.”

“OK … anyone else? The lady in the back with the boots and the vest.”

“Well, yes, Mr. Leyner, although I have a great deal of respect and admiration for your accomplishments, I certainly think that my work has as much literary validity as yours does. I’ve studied with some very fine writers at various programs around the country and I’ve worked assiduously at my craft for a good number of years now and etc. etc. etc.”

A couple of other people will affirm themselves and proclaim their ambitions, and then I’ll ask if there’s anyone else and, if not, we’ll proceed with some writing exercises.

At the conclusion of the workshop, my bodyguards, who’ve been working undercover, will take into custody each of those participants who has stated that he or she could be as good a writer as I am. Quietly, so as not to alarm those who have remained to get my autograph, the detained participants are handcuffed, loaded into the security van, and taken to headquarters. The standard procedure begins with the placing of a bag over a detainee’s head; interrogation and reeducation can last from several hours to a few weeks. Sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, mock executions, and various psychological techniques are used to persuade the detainees never to write again. When the staff is certain that a detainee’s reeducation is complete, the detainee is branded on the buttocks with my insignia as a reminder of his matriculation at headquarters and then released. It’s the antithesis of a writer’s colony, an anti-Yaddo.

Bookstore shelf-space is limited, as are the column inches available in today’s book reviews, and we at headquarters are adamant in our belief that all competition — active or potential — must be neutralized.

My insignia is a guy surfing on an enormous wave of lava — it’s an avalanche of this lurid molten spume with this glowering chiseled commando in baggy polka-dotted trunks on an iridescent board careering across the precipice of this incredible fuming tsunami of lava — and there’s an erupting volcano in the distance in the upper right-hand corner. It’s excellent.

I have it tattooed on my heart. And I don’t mean on the skin of my chest over my heart. I mean tattooed on the organ itself. It’s illegal in the States — I had to go to Mexico. It’s called visceral tattooing. They have to open you up. They use an ink that contains a radioactive isotope so that the tattoo shows up on X-rays and CAT scans.

Do you want to get sick to your stomach — I’ll describe the fetid, vermin-infested office of the “physician” who did my first visceral tattoo: Dr. Jose Fleischman. I went to sit down on what I thought was a couch in his waiting room … it wasn’t a couch. It was thousands — tens of thousands — of cockroaches that had gathered in a mass that was the shape of a couch. The same thing happened with what I thought was a magazine. I reached for what I thought was the latest issue of Sports Illustrated and it moved. It wasn’t a magazine at all, but a rectangular swarm of centipedes with a cluster of silverfish lying near the upper edge, and I guess from a distance, and in the dim light, the silverfish against the dark background of centipedes looked as if they formed the words Sports Illustrated . There was no receptionist and there were no other clients.

Finally, Fleischman emerged from the back room. The lenses of his eyeglasses were the thickest I’d ever seen. They actually bulged several inches out from the frames. It was as if he were wearing two of those snow-filled glass paperweights on his face. His clothes were soaked through with sweat. I explained that I wanted a surfer on a wave of molten lava tattooed on my heart and I handed him a color Xerox of my insignia. He lit a cigarette and studied the rendering from various angles, holding his head askew and squinting through the smoke.

“My friend,” he said, speaking for the first time, “what chamber?”

“Chamber?” I asked.

He pointed with his cigarette to a yellowing diagram on the wall.

“The two atria are thin-walled. The ventricles are thick-walled. I recommend the ventricles. Either one — it’s your call, amigo .”

I scrutinized the diagram for a few seconds.

“The left ventricle,” I announced.

“ Bueno ,” said Fleischman. “Today, we gonna put you out, open you up, and I’m gonna just do the outlines, then I sew you up. Then in two weeks, we open again, we fill in the colors, and sew up, all finished.”

I was still looking over the diagram.

“Say, Fleischman, while you got me on the table, could you do ‘Mom’ on my pulmonary artery?”

“What kind of calligraphy you like? You like somethin’ like this?”

He showed me an X-ray of someone’s thyroid gland with the word Mother done in what he called “Florentine style”—a very serpentine, filigreed style of lettering.

“That’s very nice.” I nodded.

Those were my first visceral tattoos. I’ve had many since. A tip to the guys out there — visceral tattoos really turn on female medical technicians and nurses. I’ve had numerous hot relationships start because a med-tech or a nurse saw one of my X-rays and went nuts over all the tattoos. They know that any wimp can go out and get “Winona Forever” stenciled on his arm — but it takes real balls to have yourself put under general anesthesia, sliced open, have a vital organ etched with radioactive isotope ink, and then get sewn up again every time you want to commemorate that special lady.

Next, I want to have the words Desert Storm — Thunder and Lightning tattooed on my left frontal cortex. But I don’t know where I’m going to go for that one. Brain tattooing is illegal even in Mexico. Someone told me maybe Malaysia.

Rocco left today. Baby Lago and I found a mercenary magazine left open on his bed with a page torn out. I was surprised, but not surprised, if you know what I mean. Lately, he’d seemed uncharacteristically subdued. He’d been talking a lot about his father. That in itself struck me as peculiar. Trezz wasn’t typically given to retrospection or wistfulness. But every so often I’d find him smoking a cigar by one of the bay windows overlooking the carp ponds and I’d say, “Trezz, what’s up, man?” and he’d gaze into the distance for a minute or two and then he’d take the cigar out of his mouth and stare at the soggy masticated stub and he’d say in a hoarse whisper: “I was thinkin’ about my old man.”

Rocco’s father had been a medical cheese sculptor — he sculpted cheese centerpieces for medical conventions. It was a profession that required not only fine craftsmanship and an encyclopedic knowledge of cheeses, but a comprehensive understanding of human anatomy. One needed to know which cheeses by dint of their hues and textures would allow the sculptor to render an organ with maximum fidelity. Havarti with dill, for instance, is particularly suitable for sculpting uterine lining. Mozzarella has just the right slickness and convoluted folds for the brain. A long and difficult apprenticeship is necessary. Rocco’s father studied with a master medical cheese sculptor for over ten years before he was allowed to solo, debuting with a cheddar prostate gland for the American Society of Urologists 1937 convention in Lake Tahoe. Tragically, at the height of his career, there was a terrible accident. Rocco’s father and mother had won a sweepstakes contest and had gone to London, England. One night they went to a pub. And the poor man, not knowing the local customs, walked where he shouldn’t have and took a dart in the right temple. He survived, but his virtuosity with a cheese knife was irrevocably lost. A proud man, he stubbornly refused to capitulate, attempting to recover some vestige of dexterity through a daily regimen of physical therapy, until age and infirmity made even that impossible. Rocco was at his bedside when he died. He had something in his fist and before the body was removed from the hospital room, Rocco gently pried open his fingers to see what he’d been gripping with such poignant tenacity: it was a torn anterior cruciate ligament made out of Muenster and Swiss that he’d been laboring to complete for the Canadian Association of Sports Physicians’ 25th Annual Meeting in Ottawa. Trezz kept his father’s final sculpture with him always, and when he came to work at headquarters he stored it in a special place in the commissary freezer.