Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

Her estranged boyfriend has been on a submarine for four years.

Off in a funnel of distance, where the quantum infrastructure of the lake is turned inside out (i.e., on the anti-lake), the desultory dance of the reddish-purple prolapsed rectums of the aged busboys can be seen as the stooped septuagenarians dismantle the table umbrellas on the crepe-swathed deck of the steamboat, al fresco dining deemed high-risk due to an impending downpour of asteroid shrapnel.

Squirmelia eats, grinning methodically, wondering how she will explain to Vinnie all that’s changed since he joined the Sikh navy. Like how Rei Kawakubo was invited to design the uniforms of the suicide squad of dental hygienists who floss the comatose sea monster’s teeth, and how she refused.

I can’t seem to vaporize Squirmelia’s brains by staring into her eyes ardently.

In my hammock, I listen to the rain hit my helmet and wonder if it’s true or simply my mother’s fanciful apocrypha that as a child I’d listen to the patter of space stones on the aluminum roof of the “museum” where Father kept my brain-dead brother alive, impaled with hundreds of fish hooks, and I’d discern winning Lotto numbers.

Like ballistic war-cannoli that fly through the sky and plunge into people’s mouths at incredible speeds, rigid microscopic larval creatures hurtle through time.

“Idrink it black.”

“You’re the best lover I ever had. Last night … the pleasure you gave me was so fucking unbelievably intense … I felt like I was going to disintegrate cell by cell. Eggs?”

“A dozen egg whites scrambled, baby. Kippers. Rye toast. Can I help with anything?”

“Well, uh … there’s this real creep who moved in next door and … he’s sort of been … well, bothering me.”

“What do you mean, bothering you?”

“Well, grabbing at me in the hallway, saying disgusting perverted things to me under his breath …”

“Call an ambulance.”

“An ambulance? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. And I’ll be right back. Tell them to get here as quickly as possible.”

I was dressed in casual but expensive clothes. I stripped down to my bikini briefs and went next door.

I was back in five minutes.

“What happened? I heard three thuds.”

“Two thuds were me breaking his hands. One thud was me breaking his jaw. So he won’t be grabbing at you anymore and he won’t be saying disgusting perverted things to you. Are you OK? You’re trembling and panting.”

“I’m so turned on by you. Can I smell you?”

“Yes.”

She pressed her face to my chest and inhaled.

“You smell so good … it’s like cloves … mushrooms … caramel … vanilla … popcorn … roast potatoes … cooked apples … fried fat. I’m so glad that my sister-in-law introduced me to you!” she said.

“Ditto,” I replied laconically.

“Also, Mark, I just wanted to tell you that I think it’s so amazing that you won the competition to design the new Museum of Contemporary Art. You were competing against some real heavyweights — I. M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman — and you won without ever having taken a single architecture course, without, in fact, ever having made a single architectural sketch before!”

“I’m outa here.”

“OK, Mark. Will I see you again?”

“Uh … maybe I’ll … uh … I don’t know if … uh …”

“Mark, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know if the problem is that I’m incapable of expressing myself adequately or if my feelings are too inchoate, too amorphous, perhaps too puerile to even warrant expression.”

“I love you.”

“Call me sometime. That’s as much of a commitment as I can make right now.”

“Iwrote my first play quite late in life. In fact, it wasn’t until I was almost 25 years old that I entered a theater for the first time. I carried a metal pail of candy corn in one hand and a pail of soda in the other — I was straight from the countryside, a strapping libidinal bumpkin, utterly unsophisticated. (I’d gone to see Ida Villanueva in Green Wind, Black Kites , a film about a man who spends four days at a Robert Bly “Wild Man” workshop at which every dish is made out of garbanzo beans — e.g., faux steak tartare and faux blood sausage, both meatless and consisting solely of garbanzo beans and clever seasoning — and when he returns home he locks himself in a closed unventilated garage and asphyxiates himself on his own intestinal gas. The movie hinges on the question of whether he should be considered a suicide — thereby making his wife ineligible to collect his death benefits — or whether he should be considered a moron who has accidentally rid future generations of his genetic toxicity in the self-cleaning oven of Darwinian evolution, in which case his wife should be rewarded under the insurance company’s innovative “green” eco-bonus policy — double indemnity for the spouses of policyholders who die making a contribution to the health of the planet. Angie Dickinson plays the grieving widow, Gene Hackman plays the gutsy insurance adjuster who lobbies for her eco-bonus, falls deeply in love with her, and is eventually pecked to death by a 175-pound genetically engineered gamecock, while trying to disrupt a cockfight sanctioned by the Venezuelan Institute of Biotechnology in Caracas. Ida Villanueva plays a beautiful and temperamental violin prodigy, longing to be loved, but distrustful of the men she so gladly exploits, who, by film’s end, has degenerated into a frumpy, vulgar, and castrating middle-aged shrew.)

And so you see, “the theater” as a cultural institution, certainly as an expressive prerogative, did not even enter my consciousness until I was an adult. While ambitious young tyros were honing their play writing skills in MFA programs, poring over their Marlowe, their Ibsen and O’Neill, I was ensconced in my basement “laboratory,” manipulating the size of my scrotum with a recombinant strain of filarial elephantiasis that I’d developed. (Filarial elephantiasis, in its natural form, leaves its victims with grotesquely deformed limbs and sometimes with scrota the size of basketballs. But precise titration of my altered strain allowed me to capriciously enlarge or shrink my scrotum with impunity.)

At that stage of my life, walking through a shopping mall with a pair of gigantic testicles ballooning the crotch of my jeans was an infinitely more compelling pastime than sitting in a library carrel, scribbling marginalia in a copy of Mourning Becomes Electra .

And, in all candor, it still is.

A Play in One Act

CHARACTERS:

The Prerecorded Voice

The Host

The Contestant

The Audience

SETTING:A television studio in Pyongyang, North Korea

THE PRERECORDED VOICE:Slight in stature, but volcanic in temperament, I became dedicated in 1969 to transforming myself into, first, a sullen, violent, willfully inarticulate teenage boy who was enthralling to ebullient, chatty, earnest teenage girls; and then to evolving into a truly explosive, erotic, fetishistic corporeal object, lean and muscled like an ex-con cowboy. I include myself in this developmental category along with Lenny Dykstra, Napoleon Bonaparte, and others.

So can I be enthralling to women today by obsessively projecting a cartoon version of my adolescent fantasy-self? So far the answer is “Yes! We want more!” Is this somehow related to heavy-metal? Yes, probably. Did Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, Austen, et al psych themselves up to face the empty page by staring at their bare torsos in the mirror or by sinking even deeper into the narcissistic contemplation of an even smaller frame of that image, e.g., the silver skull nestled in the hairy cleavage of a pumped chest? The answer must be no. But then I don’t think that those folks wrote to enhance their fuckability.