Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

“Look, Joe, there are all kinds of women, and I truly believe that there’s someone out there for everyone. Just take a look at some of these personal ads here.” I reached across the bar for the newspaper. “For example, look at this one: ‘Do you wear peasant blouses and billowy gypsy skirts? I’m a drooling, catheterized, cataract-eyed white supremacist from Baton Rouge who has three to four lucid hours a day. Let’s go underground where Zionist water-fluoridators and Russian space debris can’t find us.’ What do you want to bet that this guy gets a couple of hundred responses?”

“Well, I’m not interested in other women. I’m interested in Desiree.”

“Joe, check this out,” I said, handing him my first target, which had just arrived at the bar. I’d managed to achieve, at a range of 50 yards, a four-inch seven-round group on the black of the target, with most of the shots less than two inches apart. “Not bad, huh?”

“Really great, Mr. Leyner,” Joe said morosely.

“C’mon, Joe, lighten up, would ya? Maybe there’s a way for you to somehow provoke Dez into feeling romantic about you.”

“Provoke her how?”

“Well, I can only tell you what works for me, babe. I take my clothes off. Women go nuts. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s how I do it that’s important — it’s the style, it’s the head trip I get into. Each item of clothing — leather blazer, T-shirt, snake-skin boots, jeans, socks, and finally underpants — is removed as if I were stripping for an audience at a maximum security prison for criminally insane women. With that masturbatory simultaneity of languor and urgency, I whip the floor with my silk bikini briefs that have been stretched grotesquely out of shape after a day of restraining my restless genitals, and I hear — in my head — the horrific cacophony of gasps, moans, ululations, stomping feet, shrieks, sobs, pleas … y’know what I’m saying?”

“I guess so, Mr. Leyner, but I don’t know if I could—”

“Listen, the thing you’ve got to be careful about is the effect something like that can have on a woman. I was with this notary public Felice Ruiz once, and I’m doing the whole bit and I get to the part where I’m whipping the floor with my silk undies, and I guess my body’s just too much for the poor girl — she goes apoplectic on me. She’s hyperventilating, taking in giant gulps of air, foaming at the mouth. Then she’s purple in the face, clutching at her throat, clutching at her chest, like she’s having some kind of seizure. She falls to the ground and, writhing, manages to point to a cabinet in the armoire. I rush to the cabinet, open it, and there are two bottles, gin and vodka. I make a split-second decision — vodka. I bring the bottle to Felice, who’s rolling on the ground, tearing at her hair. I show her the vodka bottle. She shakes her head violently back and forth, kicking her feet. I rush back to the armoire and retrieve the bottle of gin. Felice is trying to say something, and I put my ear to her lips, but her mumbling and grunting are completely unintelligible. I quickly produce a pad and a pen. Can you write? I ask. She nods, and I hand her the writing implements. Her body jerking spasmodically, she manages to scrawl: Singapore Sling. Now, a Singapore Sling is a fairly elaborate cocktail; it involves shaking together gin, cherry brandy, lemon juice, and powdered sugar, pouring it into a tall glass filled with ice and topping it with soda water. But I concoct the drink as rapidly as I can, bring it to the convulsant Felice, tilt the highball glass to her lips, and let her drink. After a few sips, her paroxysms begin to subside, and she’s eventually able to return to the sofa. So what I’m trying to say is that you have to exercise some degree of caution here … are you following me, babe?”

“Yes, Mr. Leyner.”

“Joe, can I get you another drink?”

“No thanks, Mr. Leyner, I think I should get to bed. I’ve got a pretty full schedule in the morning.”

“OK, babe. Sweet dreams. And thanks again for all your effort.”

I love that guy.

I ordered an anisette with three spent shells. The shells, still muzzle-hot, warm the anisette for a nice nightcap.

I felt good.

The first applicant whom we accepted for the agoraphobic housewife-poet program was Mary Elizabeth Thuring, whose manuscript Coarse-Cut Marmalade Enema Binge opened with the erotic sonnet “The Wilted Crudités.”

Eyeballs stew in hot sockets

During long sexual dream of bearded

Blacksmith in crotchless high-bib overalls

Hammering hot metal on an anvil.

Funny … isn’t this Belmar?

I lie ungarnished in the sand,

Sweet carrion for beach hyenas.

The plaited strands of his licorice noose

Become sticky in the heat of the sun.

Soon thousands of flies form a buzzing black garland

Around the neck of the condemned candy cowboy.

Yes, Emily Dickinson,

Once I did love a Pakistani badminton champion.

You got a problem with that?

I spent some six-and-a-half hours with Mary at her lovely home, poring over her manuscript, rearranging the order of the poems for maximum effect, suggesting various emendations and deletions (for example, I cut the following two lines: “Whiskey-swilling itinerant beauticians/Wax the bikini line of Isis” from the first stanza of “The Wilted Crudités”).

When I return to Team Leyner HQ from Mary Elizabeth Thuring’s home, it’s approximately 5:20 A.M.

Arleen is being led out the front door, her wrists handcuffed behind her, surrounded by FBI agents. A miscellany of Team Leyner employees is milling around, smoking cigarettes, muttering, glaring, cursing. Joe Casale is screaming at the top of his lungs one of his cryptic algebraic curses: “Go MW your PGs, you pimply D’ed, CL-flapping, U-quaffing YIs!” My immediate chain of thought is: missing fiction workshop participants … federal kidnapping indictments … prison.

I throw one of the agents — a burly guy about 6′ 6″, 275 pounds — up against a column and slap him hard across the face about a dozen times.

His playmates draw their weapons.

“You gonna shoot me, you motherfuckin’ morons? There’d be riots in every major city of this country!”

“Holster your weapons, men,” orders the senior agent. “Holster your weapons!”

“That’s better,” I snarl. “Now, what’s the fucking problem here?”

“Mark Leyner and Arleen Portada, you are both being charged with theft of a federally protected bio-historical specimen.”

Ahhhh, I thought to myself, greatly relieved, this has nothing to do with kidnapping fiction workshop participants, it’s the Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s just a bullshit larceny rap.

“Joe, get Gary Knobloch [chief corporate counsel for Team Leyner] over here right away — OK, babe. The rest of you get back to work. Everything’s going to be all right.”

* * *

Knobloch was leafing through the U.S. Criminal Code.

“Let’s see … Tailgating a Presidential Motorcade … Talking Dirty to a Congressional Page … Terrorizing a U.S. Mail Carrier … Testifying Falsely Against a Fetus … ah, here we go. Theft of a Federally Protected Bio-Historical Specimen. First offense: Weekly punitive confiscation. Second offense: Removal of the nasal septum, leaving offender with one large nostril. Third offense: Underwater spear-gun execution by scuba-diving firing squad. Listen, Mark, I don’t like telling you what to do — you’re my favorite writer, you’re my favorite client, you’re the godfather of my two children — but I strongly advise you to plead guilty on this thing and live with punitive confiscation once a week. If we go to trial and there’s any way they can prove that you did something like this before, you could be walking around with one big hole in the middle of your face. Wouldn’t make a very attractive book jacket photo, kid.”