Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

Q:Mr. President, do you condone the colorization of Civil War daguerreotypes, and, if so, why?

A:I do indeed condone the colorization of Civil War daguerreotypes. I believe that if Mathew Brady had had access to color film he would have used it.

Q:Sir, you’ve recently urged Americans and, in particular, poor Americans to nutritionally supplement their food with their own hair and nail clippings. Could you expand on this?

A:Our nails and hair are made out of a protein called keratin. Keratin provides us with a wonderfully inexpensive way to supplement the protein content of our families’ diets. Our bodies are like farms — we’re growing this perfectly good source of protein right from our scalps and our fingers and our toes — and what do we do with it? We throw it away. I think that especially for parents having trouble providing their children with three square meals a day, this is an economical — and I’ve been assured by the Surgeon General, healthy — solution. Using an industrial grinder, you simply pulverize the clippings into a fine powder. Then you can add the powder to soups, cereals, shakes, chopped meat, whatever. By incorporating pulverized hair and nail clippings into your family’s recipes, you should be able to use 25 percent less beef and still exceed the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance for protein.

When we got back to the hotel, Arleen was still quivering with excitement.

“Oh man, what a thrill that was for me! The drama, the sensation of history in the making … but I don’t know about grinding up my toenail clippings and mixing them into the meatloaf.”

“Look, babe, we’re not exactly poor,” I said.

I handed her a statement from our Japanese licensing company that my agent had faxed to the hotel. It showed bottom-line quarterly revenues for Team Leyner from the My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist Miniature Golf Course in Yokohama of over 68,000,000 yen.

Up in our suite, I splashed cold water on my face, slicked my hair back, slapped on some Versace Eau de Toilette, pocketed my gloves and lock picks, affixed my six-and-a-half-inch stainless steel Gerber survival knife in a Cordura sheath to a tie-down on my right leg, and holstered my SIG P-226 9-mm pistol loaded with 15 rounds of ARMCO 115-grain full-metal-jacketed military spec ammo to my left leg. Arleen had zapped the TV to life and was mimicking an aerobics instructor who was firming fanny on a beach on Maui.

“Arleen, I’m going to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Do you want to come?”

“Nah. I think I’m going to take a nap for a while. Will you be long?”

“I hope not, babe.”

I managed a glancing kiss as she slithered back and forth across the carpet in response to the rhythmic exhortations of the television.

Iwas back with the vial of Lincoln’s morning breath in less than an hour. Security at the National Museum of Health and Medicine was a joke. The vial wasn’t under guard; it wasn’t monitored by surveillance cameras; it wasn’t even kept in a locked vitrine. It was propped up on a table in the middle of an empty room.

“What do you think of this?” I asked Arleen, handing her the vial.

Arleen shrugged.

“Arleen, what you’ve got in your hand happens to be a vial of fucking Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath. And it’s my pleasure and honor as your husband to invite you to join me in partaking of a snort or two.”

Arleen looked at the vial.

She looked at me.

She looked back at the vial.

And then back at me.

“Let’s get stoned,” she said.

It’s impossible to do justice to the smell in words. One may try to quicken the olfactory imagination with poetic evocations like “suppurating abscess … colonic effluvia … smegma.” But nothing comes close to capturing the overwhelming stench that wafted from the vial when I removed its rubber stopper. It’s suspected that Lincoln was afflicted with an inherited disease called Marfan syndrome. Perhaps this accounts for the unbelievable foulness of his morning breath. Unfortunately, the vial was not dated. We only know that it was prepared during the Lincoln presidency. Halitologists contend that anxiety and tension can affect the odor of one’s breath. Perhaps the sample was taken in 1863, the morning after the Battle of Chancellorsville, when Union forces commanded by Joseph Hooker were decimated by the Confederate troops of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Or perhaps Lincoln had simply split a sopressata and smoked mozzarella sub with hot peppers and extra onions with Mary Todd the night before the sample was collected.

But did we get high? you ask.

The psychoactive effect of Lincoln’s morning breath was quite as astonishing as its aroma.

I could easily devote the balance of this memoir in its entirety to detailing the 12-hour psychedelic joyride/Götterdämmerung that Arleen and I experienced under the influence of the rancid vapor. But highlights shall suffice.

Sex was intense. Creamy lime cum. Then creamy apricot cum. Then a mint gel. And finally a cyan-yellow-magenta swirl that actually burst into flame. Now, I’m no stranger to chemically enhanced lovemaking. For instance, I’ve explored the romantic possibilities of the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol (OT), used in conjunction with Piracetam, a drug which increases endurance and enhances concentration. I’ve been known to revive a humdrum evening with a discreet injection of recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO), which raises the red blood-cell count so that more oxygen is carried through the circulatory system, for big performance gains. And every so often, I like to turn the lights down low, put something lush and dreamy on the stereo, and inject myself with blood plasma from hibernating woodchucks, which imparts to the lovemaking an extraordinarily serene and sylvan quality. But these paled in comparison to Lincoln’s morning breath.

Using a piece of charcoal and a sheet of hotel stationery, Arleen did a rubbing of the welter of protuberant veins on my biceps. Had the neuronal networks linking the left and right sides of our brains not undergone an amazing spurt of spontaneous hyperplasia as a result of our inhaling the gaseous relic of the Great Emancipator, surely the rubbing would not have achieved the mystical profundity that it held for us that afternoon. With Arleen’s permission (of course), I quote verbatim from her journal entry dated April 12, 1991: “We gazed at the rubbing for over an hour in awed silence. Like the intricate tesselations that decorate the walls and floors of the Alhambra, the veins on Mark’s biceps bespeak a cosmic meta-mind, a universal and primordial mentality of form, the interplay of energy and entropy that preceded life and will follow it. I will never be able to look at his biceps again without a sense of epiphany.”

Do you know the commercial where the heavily mustached old woman in a black shroud drinks strawberry Nestlé’s Quik and turns into this buxom bombshell in pasties and G-string, and she squats down for a second in a mud puddle, and when she gets up, her buttocks are covered with leeches, and Jesus appears holding a Barbie, and two beams of sparkling particles shoot from the eyes of the Barbie and vaporize the leeches, and the bombshell gets on her motorcycle, and pink florets of exhaust spurt from its tailpipe spelling out the words Be All That You Can Be? Try watching that on Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s un-fucking-believable.