Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

“The latter.”

(Very direct, succinct, confident.)

“Desiree, what sort of position are you looking for with us?”

“Something in security. As you can see, I’ve been in some dangerous situations and I think that my experience would be a great asset to you and your staff. As I alluded to on the phone, I definitely think you need to beef up your security, and now. There are rumors out there about missing fiction workshop participants … things could get rough.”

(There was now positively no doubt in my mind that Desiree would be an invaluable addition to the staff at headquarters, and I made a note of my decision.)

“Could you start tomorrow?”

“Absolutely!” she said, grinning.

“Good. We’ll see you at nine A.M. Report to Baby Lago and she’ll see that you get your W-2 forms and security pass and health insurance information and belt buckle. OK? Desiree, I’ve got to get going now, Arleen’s going to be worried about me. Welcome to Team Leyner.”

I stood up, kissed her on the cheek, and threw some money on the table.

“Mark, there’s one more thing I want to talk to you about. Do you do drugs? There’s something I think you might be interested in.”

I sat back down.

“Desiree, as you know, Mark Leyner is about total fitness and power — muscle mass, density, ripped definition, triceps, biceps, pecs, lats, glutes, intensity, stamina, endurance, mental focus … on the other hand, I do have a responsibility to my fans to forge ahead where most men fear to tread. I mean, we can’t leave the exploration of inner space to New Age Milquetoasts like Terence McKenna. What kind of drug and how much?”

“Well, it’s not really a ‘drug’ per se, although it’ll get you off, believe me. And I don’t exactly have it to sell you, but I know you’ll be interested and I know how you can get it. It’s Lincoln’s morning breath.”

“What’s ‘morning breath’?”

“Y’know, it’s the worst breath of the day — morning breath.”

“Lincoln’s morning breath? Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath?”

“There’s a vial of Lincoln’s morning breath in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. The museum used to be the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and it’s located on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. They’ve got thousands of specimens, including tissue samples from presidents and military leaders. But when I heard about this, a sealed ampule of Lincoln’s morning breath — I mean a snort or two and who knows — I knew you’d be interested, Mark.”

“Desiree, I think this is going to be a very profitable association for both of us. See you in the A.M., babe.”

I stood up again, turned to leave, and then remembered something that had been on my mind.

“Desiree, in your letter you said something about being the Vatican. Did you mean the building?”

“Yeah, the building,” she said.

Joe Casale made the arrangements. We’ve got the first-class section of Continental Flight 213 to National Airport in Washington, D.C., all to ourselves. Arleen’s wearing a chartreuse skating skirt with an ornate jeweled bodice and boots with jeweled cuffs. I’m wearing Air Jordans, camouflage pants, no shirt, an onyx quarter-pound burger embedded with chunks of diamond on a gold rope around my neck, and a black baseball cap with the words Golden Nugget in gold stitching. When we reach cruising altitude, our stewardess rolls out a five-foot hero with mortadella, cappicola, prosciutto, sharp provolone, and sweet peppers, two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black, and a bucket of ice. We each take a bottle and start on either end of the sandwich. Arleen — by day, mender of shattered psyches; by night, voluptuous temptress and pleasure addict — is a woman of voracious appetites. By the time we make our final approach to D.C., she’s polished off two feet of hero and a fifth of scotch.

As we touch down and taxi toward our gate, I nudge Arleen and flash two White House press passes.

“You said you always wanted to go to a presidential news conference, right, babe?”

“Oh, Mark!! When? When?!”

“Tomorrow morning, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Arleen is euphoric. Ever since that spring afternoon when she shot me out of a tree with a tranquilizer dart, there’ve been two things she’s always talked about wanting to do: see harness racing at the Meadowlands and attend a presidential news conference. I’ve now made good on both of my nuptial promises. And she’s loving it.

Q:Mr. President, I have a chunk of pork in my mouth—

A:I’m sorry, you say you have a pork chunk in your mouth?

Q:Yes. I have a chunk of pork in my mouth and I’m not planning on chewing it or swallowing it. Do you have any idea if it’s possible for my saliva to dissolve the chunk and, if it is possible, can you say how long it will take for my saliva to dissolve the piece of pork? And I have a follow-up question.

A:As I’ve stated previously, the enzyme in saliva, amylase, functions primarily to break down carbohydrates. It’s the gastric juice in the stomach that works on proteins … it’s the pepsin, which is the stomach’s main digestive enzyme, and the hydrochloric acid in the gastric juice that will really break down the pork chunk. But it may very well be that the saliva in your mouth over a long period of time could possibly erode the chunk away … We’ll have to get back to you with some more information on that.

Q:My follow-up question is this: There’s been a tremendous amount of controversy recently about the size of the First Lady. At a briefing last week, your press secretary — in response to a question about how you first met her — said that you were at an after-hours club, sitting next to a man who still had anti-shoplifting magnetic tags attached to his sports jacket and safari shorts. Now the FBI is baffled as to how this man managed to leave the Harvé Benard outlet in Takoma Park with anti-shoplifting magnetic tags affixed to his clothes without setting off the store’s alarm. But at any rate, your press secretary said that the man ordered a cocktail and then began playing Tetris on his Game Boy, when — and I think you, sir, repeated this in a speech you made last Friday before the AFL–CIO — you saw something crawling out of his ear and you reached over and took it between your thumb and index finger and, looking closer at it, discovered that it was a woman, a woman about the size of the letter “o” in a magazine or a newspaper. I think you even indicated a point size, but I don’t have the transcript handy here. Your press secretary then went on to say that within the next forty-eight hours, you and the First Lady were married. Could you fill in some of the details about what exactly transpired in the forty-eight hours between the time that you plucked the First Lady from the ear of the man at the after-hours club and the marriage ceremony?

A:First of all, let me say this — I think it’s very important that people not lose confidence in our retail industry’s anti-shoplifting magnetic tag program and I have urged the business community to continue utilizing the program in order to curtail pilferage and avoid the need to pass along revenue losses to customers in the form of higher prices. Now … when Barbara crawled out of this fellow’s ear — and I think I compared her size to that of an 8-point Times Roman lowercase “o”—I didn’t know what she was. I plucked her off this guy, who said absolutely nothing and just continued playing Tetris, held her in the light, and asked her what her name was. She said Barbara and she asked me what my name was. I introduced myself and then I said that it was difficult to talk here, would she like to come back to my place. Now I think it’s critical here for people to understand that this wasn’t the clichéd bar pickup line it may appear to be. Because she was so tiny, it was extremely difficult to hear her, and with the jukebox blaring it was impossible. When we got home, we talked and we talked and it became apparent I think to both of us that we were just in complete synch on every level — politically, philosophically, spiritually — and it was equally apparent that we were physically quite attracted to each other. Now here’s where some of the controversy’s been generated and I appreciate the opportunity to clear some of this up. Sex presented some very real difficulties. I had to use a jeweler’s loupe in order to find her vagina and her clitoris. Utilizing a bristle from the tiny applicator used to apply solution to micro-format audio cleaning cassettes, I jury-rigged an erotic toy which I could manipulate to give her an orgasm. She then insisted that I come, too. I told her that it didn’t really matter, that just experiencing her own pleasure and passion was satisfying to me, but she insisted. And she insisted that she bring about my orgasm. She tried running up and down my penis in an effort to somehow generate enough friction to cause an orgasm but it didn’t work and she was soon exhausted. After a rest, Barb came up with an ingenious suggestion. We cut a shoeshine cloth into a thin strip, glued the ends together to form a continuous loop, and rigged up an oblong treadmill. Barb ran in the center of the strip causing it to turn and I put my penis inside the end of the loop and the friction of the cloth buffing my erection soon did the trick.