Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

My books and my body — my status as a reckless writer and a gorgeous man — are my iridescent plumage; they’re the equivalent of the male L. ocellatus frog’s 250- to 500-hertz call made to maintain territoriality and to attract mates; they’re the equivalent of the peculiar ritual of the male pyrochroidae beetle displaying to a potential mate a deep cleft in his forehead. Stashed within the cleft is a small dose of the chemical cantharidin; during courtship, the male exposes his cleft to the female, she grabs his head and immediately laps up the chemical offering. Apparently placated, she allows the male to mate. Scientists have determined that the male transfers to the female a much larger quantity of cantharidin during intercourse, and that she subsequently incorporates the chemical into her eggs, which thenceforth are protected against ants and other common predators of beetle eggs.

My books and my body: my not-so-subliminal advertisement to women that I will make a primo contribution to the genetic makeup and survivability of their children.

It’s the night. I spread my cerebral hemispheres and display my chemical offering. Who will grab my head and immediately lap it up?

THE CONTESTANT(rising from his seat in the audience): I will! I’ll grab your head and immediately lap up your chemical offering!

THE HOST:Well, come on down!!

[THE CONTESTANTruns wildly down the aisle, waving his arms, and mounts the stage.]

THE HOST:It’s great to have you on the show!

THE CONTESTANT:It’s great to be here! I love the show! I made this for you!

THE HOST:That’s fantastic! It’s a beautiful ring … what is this here, amber?

THE CONTESTANT:It’s a forty-million-year-old chunk of amber in which a female fungus gnat was embedded, Bob.

THE HOST:Incredible! It says here you’re married.

THE CONTESTANT:I’m married, Bob, and I have a beautiful mistress who just turned twenty. And my wife is a boozer and she has a lover.

THE HOST:It says here that your wife’s lover doesn’t use spoken language to communicate, that he communicates with a complex vocabulary of exuded chemicals.

THE CONTESTANT:That’s right, Bob, my wife uses a gas Chromatograph and ion-trap mass spectrometer to analyze the chemical content of his “message secretions” and then a computer to translate the chemical sequences into English.

THE HOST:Where did your wife meet this fascinating lover?

THE CONTESTANT:In the yard, Bob.

THE HOST:And where did you meet your mistress?

THE CONTESTANT:At The Gap, Bob.

THE HOST:It says here that you’re the president of the Brine Shrimp Council.

THE CONTESTANT:That’s right, Bob. We live in an increasingly complex and technological society, and we find that for real, honest, old-fashioned food enjoyment, more and more people are turning to delicious, half-inch-long brine shrimp raised in space.

THE HOST:In space?

THE CONTESTANT:Yes, Bob. They’re part of a food chain for astronauts in space stations. Algae feed on the solid waste of the astronauts and in turn are consumed by the brine shrimp, which grow about a half-inch long. Astronauts then eat the brine shrimp. We thought, what the hey, why should astronauts have all the fun? For the first time, we’re now making available to the public all-natural astronaut-poop-fed-algae-fed brine shrimp shuttled directly to our plant daily from orbiting space stations. You like shrimp scampi, Bob?

THE HOST:Ummmmmm. I love it.

THE CONTESTANT:Try our mouth-watering, half-inch, space-station-raised brine shrimp prepared scampi-style. It’s a taste sensation you’ll never forget.

THE HOST:It says here that you have trouble trusting other people.

THE CONTESTANT:That’s right, Bob. It’s probably related to something that happened to me when I was a kid.

My grandmother, who’d always seemed like a sweet, kind, indulgent old lady, went out for a pack of cigarettes one day. I happened to be at the newspaper stand that afternoon leafing through the latest muscle magazines. Grandma didn’t see me right away — I had my back to the register. She asked for a pack of Lucky Strikes and I recognized her voice and I turned around and said, “Nana, hello.” She looked insane. She grabbed me and dragged me outside.

“I’m not the Nana I appear to be, kid,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to squirm out of her grasp. I’d never realized how physically strong she was or how masculine her body odor was when she exerted herself.

“I’ve got a Grandma facade, but inside I’m the most un-Grandma-like creature on earth.”

“ ‘Un-Grandma-like’ how?” I asked, not ready to accept this challenge to my idealized version of the doting, potato-pancake-making, warm-hearted geriatric.

“What if I told you that I’m a total slut, that I give blow-jobs to all your friends on the football team, that I have a female lover — an ex-Marine who’s a bouncer at a bar in Key West — that I attacked a mailman with a baseball bat when I lived in Spain and he’s been a brain-damaged vegetable ever since, although he can still get erections … and that’s how I conceived your father.”

“You mean you attacked Grandpa with a baseball bat and then sat on his poor insensate erection to get your own sick jollies and that’s how my dad was conceived?”

“That’s right. That’s your grandfather. You always thought he had a stroke, right?”

I was getting pissed at her now. “You’re a liar!”

She spit on the street. “Fuck you, kid. You’re just too much of a naive baby to accept the truth.”

Just then, these guys jumped out of a van parked across the street. “Surprise!” they yelled.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Tell him, Grandma,” one of them said.

And she said: “Mark, you’re on ‘America’s Favorite Secret Videos!’ ” (Or “America’s Funniest Covert Surveillance Videos” or something — I don’t remember the exact name of the show, some rewarmed version of “Candid Camera.”)

I was deeply hurt by the whole episode. I felt that my Grandma had betrayed me. But no one in my family understood how I felt. My parents and my sister were all excited about Grandma and me being on TV and they couldn’t understand what my problem was. They had no idea how embarrassed I felt about the video and how mortified I’d be when all my friends saw it. And they had no inkling of how painful and profoundly disillusioning it was to have my own grandmother behave in such a dishonest and treacherous way to me.

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE HOST:OK, let’s get started!

THE CONTESTANT:“Team Leyner” for $100, Bob.

THE HOST:“When he was in the third grade, he had stationery printed up that said ‘From the word processor of Mario Puzo …’ and he’d write these unbelievably prolix, baroque, hallucinatory, torridly erotic mash notes to the female teachers at his elementary school.

“Today, farmers let their land lie fallow after having visions of his semen raining down from the sky and fecundating their fields. Wives refuse to get out of bed, remaining supine, their legs spread in the air, declining to even roll onto their sides lest a drop of his precious fluid leak from their vaginas, after dreaming that he’s floated into their bedrooms like a muscle-bound incubus and made love to them, bringing them to seismic, apocalyptic orgasms with one single stroke of his unearthly dick.…”