Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

“ ‘He’s not coming home tonight and if he was I wouldn’t fuck him. I’m too angry to fuck him.’

“ ‘What are you angry at him about?’

“ ‘He’s cheating on me. It’s in the poems. Couldn’t you figure that out?’

“I shrugged and started putting my clothes back on.

“ ‘How’d you get that scar over your right nipple?’

“ ‘I had an Uncle Jack. He was my mentor; he taught me to be a writer and to be a man. He said that when you write you march through the reader’s mind like Sherman marching to the sea and you burn every neuron and synapse as you go. He taught me a secret style of Kung Fu that’s based on ballroom dancing steps — the Foxtrot, Lindy, Waltz, etc. — but that’s lethal and terrifying. He had a girlfriend, a cocktail waitress at a nightclub. Her name was Adele. One night Jack had to go meet some business associates and he left Adele and me at his place. We were drinking heavily. At some point Adele said that she’d recently read something of mine in a magazine and that she really found the style exhilarating and she asked me if I’d take off my clothes so she could see my body. I said OK. Just then Jack came home. He was drunk. He went for me with his knife. I swiveled around and did a modified mambo step and kicked the knife out of his hand and then did a polka backfist and knocked him cold. Adele screamed, pointing to my chest. Jack had slashed me over my right nipple on his first lunge. That’s the scar story.’

“She walked me out to the carport.

“Her glazed breasts shimmered in the moonlight.

“Someone had spray-painted ‘Death to America!’ on my car.

“Not a pretty sight — especially considering the fact that it was a brand-new 1997 Ferrari Testarossa Spider with less than 100 miles on the odometer — not a pretty sight at all … but then, coronary arteries clogged with atherosclerotic plaque aren’t a very pretty sight either. And that’s where Becker Surgical Devices comes in. Becker Surgical Devices, makers of fine percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty catheter tubes and balloons, is the overwhelming choice of cardiologists across the country. And remember, Becker Surgical Devices is the official balloon angioplasty instrument supplier for Team Leyner.”

“Cut! That was perfect, Mr. Leyner! Absolutely perfect!”

In order to rescue my book from the ineluctable current of its own narrative, and in order to resuscitate myself (depressed by an impending divorce, “stupefied in an inner marsh of ennui”), I have decided to work in miniature. Accordingly, Chapter Five shall be comprised of 24 concise segments with headings, in abecedarian sequence.

May God help me. I almost gunned down my father and my elderly grandmother in an expensive nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida, last week. Incensed by the paucity of my $ 15 appetizer, which consisted of three gossamer-thin shavings of raw filet mignon on a single frond of arugula, and by my grandmother’s remark that my pants were inappropriately “heavy” for the summer, and my father’s comment that the mole over my right eyebrow had become a “disfigurement,” I threw my napkin down on the table and stormed off to the men’s room. There, a molten rage seethed within me. I inadvertently reached behind the toilet tank and found, to my utter surprise, a gun taped to the wall. Who had taped the semiautomatic 9-mm pistol to the wall behind the toilet and for what purpose, I had no idea. But I removed the weapon, concealed it under my jacket (à la Napoleon, but with a larger and more conspicuous bulge), and I staggered back toward our table, lurching, careening from side to side, fury playing havoc with my equilibrium. Reaching the table, I withdrew my hand, leveled the weapon at my father, and was about to fire, when I remembered my own preprandial admonition to the thin-lipped, 60-year-old attorney from Jersey City: “Dad, this is our last night with Grandma. She’s recovering from cataract surgery. Please don’t squabble. Let’s make this a special dinner for her.” I laid the gun on the table. The restaurant had become deathly quiet. The only sound came from the cappuccino machine, which gurgled intermittently like life-support apparatus in a coma ward. “Short, individually titled sections … arranged alphabetically,” I murmured dazedly. The maitre d’, a heavyset man, cultivated in vitro from embryonic cell buds on a planet within the globular cluster Omega Centauri, wearing a sequined dress inset with points d’esprit, and suffering from spasmodic torticollis — painful neck-muscle spasms that twist the head to one side — would later tell me that the expression on my face was beatific — radiant, yet preter-naturally serene. “Like the Little Prince, señor.”

That night as I slept in my bed, someone or something apparently drilled an evenly spaced series of tiny holes in my forehead. I hadn’t felt anything or even woken up, and only discovered the holes as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror where I begin each morning, monitoring those inevitable daily manifestations of decay — the brown age spots, the broken blood vessels, the wrinkles; some days more appalling matutinal discoveries: maggots, for instance, and once a large piece of pinkish-white brain tissue extruding from one ear — the equivalent of a cerebral hemmorrhoid. Typically these rather sensational “A.M. surprises” subside by the time I have to meet friends or editors or critics for dinner. Even the cerebral hemmorrhoid shrunk back into my head that same day by about 7 P.M. and I was able to join two very powerful Japanese publishing executives at La Côte Basque without embarrassment. But these holes in my forehead were extra-corporeal in origin and, as such, more disturbing. I called Dr. Nils Wachtel. Wachtel was one of the White House “Dr. Feelgoods” who pumped JFK full of speed every day. (Personally — and I think Anna Quindlen might disagree with me on this one — I believe that Congress should make it mandatory that the President of the United States be kept on a continuous amphetamine drip IV. The Commander-in-Chief should be wide awake, 24 hours a day. I don’t want a President who wakes up with green gook in his eyes, all groggy, and who’s like “What day is it?” [According to an article by military veteran Xiao Ziming in the overseas edition of The People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) , Mao slept only 25 minutes a day — devoting the rest of his time to statecraft, poetry, food, and to pleasuring himself in a specially made vulval-necked Ming vase designed to collect his seed for cryonic preservation. Today the Great Helmsman’s sperm is reportedly in the custody of Shining Path guerillas who move the specimens among several secret locations in the Andes via mobile refrigerators strapped to the backs of blindfolded llamas.]

Later at Wachtel’s office: “Whoever or whatever did this to you has either an incredibly hard, long, and thin drilling proboscis or used a very sophisticated drill with an advanced-ceramic bit, because these are very tiny but cleanly and precisely drilled holes that go deep into your skull … it could even have been some kind of laser.

“Look,” he said, after further examination, “there’s nothing I can do except patch up the holes with Plastic Skin, which is a kind of dermal spackling. You don’t seem to have suffered any kind of neurological damage, so I wouldn’t worry.”

He suggested that I wear bifocals whose bottom halves were microscopy lenses, enabling me to keep an eye out for any untoward devices or creatures that might appear in my bedroom. But I’ve found this intolerable because when I use them I become aware of how everything — silverware, drinking glasses, telephone receivers, toothbrushes, even the manuscript pages of the text you are presently enjoying — is covered with a thick layer of dust mite feces.