Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

THE CONTESTANT:Who is Mark Leyner?

THE HOST:“Who is Mark Leyner?” is correct, for $100!

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE CONTESTANT:“Team Leyner” for $500, Bob.

THE HOST:“The worst thing that can happen to a man is to die anonymous. You can be a sensitive guy, really in touch with your feelings, gentle and loving to your wife and kids, active in all sorts of charitable organizations, you can tithe 75 percent of your income to Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity, etc. etc., but then one day, you die — and outside of your friends and family, who gives a fuck? Nobody. You came, you went, no one remembers, no one cares. It’s a tragedy. Because this is the critical difference between a human being and an animal — the capability to be famous. There are exceptions, like Secretariat or Willard or Flipper, but generally, only a human being can make himself immortal with renown. This is your destiny. But die unknown, and you will disgrace me, and I will endlessly grovel through the streets of eternity, eating garbage and mumbling incoherent nonsense.”

THE CONTESTANT:What did Mark Leyner’s mother whisper as she nuzzled him to her breast immediately after his birth?

THE HOST:That’s absolutely right, for $500!

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE CONTESTANT:“Team Leyner” for $750, Bob.

THE HOST:“The size of a Ping-Pong ball, it’s fifty times as large as that of a normal heterosexual male’s.”

THE CONTESTANT:What is the third interstitial nucleus of Mark Leyner’s hypothalamus?

THE HOST:You got it, for $750!

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE CONTESTANT:“Team Leyner” for $1,000, Bob.

[There’s a deafening arpeggio of sirens.]

THE HOST:It’s Double or Trouble!

THE AUDIENCE:[Jubilant shouting and stomping]

THE HOST:You can risk your entire winnings to double your money with a correct answer for a total of $4,700 or you can play it safe for the $1,000.

THE CONTESTANT:I’ll risk it all! Double or Trouble, Bob!

THE AUDIENCE:[Thunderous ovation]

THE HOST:Her father founded TV-OLFATO, the first global smell-a-vision network, whose inaugural broadcast was “Que Oloroso!” an olfactory portrait of Julio Iglesias, beamed across Central and South America on September 10, 1994. Known variously as “Kid Woman,” “Yuka D.,” and “Squirmelia,” she consummated her affair with Leyner on a “bed” of plastic bubble wrap in a Bloomingdale’s stockroom.

THE CONTESTANT:Who is the Ecuadorian girlfriend?

[There’s an explosion, then a huge flash and Shockwave. Black, acrid smoke fills the studio. When the air finally begins to clear, shattered glass and other debris can be seen littering the ground. The metal grid that supported various lights and microphones is mangled and twisted, the audience is cheering ecstatically.]

THE HOST:That’s exactly right! Double or Trouble for $4,700!!

THE AUDIENCE:[More wild cheering]

THE CONTESTANT:Let’s stick with “Team Leyner” for $5,000, Bob.

THE HOST:This Team Leyner honcho defected from the organization and wrote a shocking exposé. After hearing the title of his or her book, identify the honcho: Megalomania’s Mascot: My Life with the Team Leyner Cult (As told to Cleveland Amory).

THE CONTESTANT:Who is Carmella?

THE HOST:“Who is Carmella?” is absolutely correct, for $5,000!

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE CONTESTANT:“Team Leyner” for $10,000, Bob.

THE HOST:“After their resignations were angrily rejected by a raving, wild-eyed Leyner who’d taken to wearing a lavishly be-medaled military uniform and a booby-trapped truss (apparently to be detonated in case of capture), Desiree Buttcake and the elderly bodyguards were placed in a Polyvinylchloride kiddie pool filled with powdered poi mix (a desperate, ruthless Leyner threatening to add water) and surrounded by an 18-foot-high fence topped with concertina wire and electrified with 400 volts and guarded by a rudimentary cyborg pig who’d been jerry-built from spare laboratory cadaver organs and obsolete computer components. (In the final days, Leyner personally constructed the so-called ‘hog of vigilance,’ naming it ‘Mahapuna’ after the sow warrior-goddess of Hawaiian mythology.) It featured an old bulky Radio Shack ‘brain’ with only 32 kilobytes of RAM, its cardiopulmonary system was powered by 17 hamster hearts rigged in tandem, and its prosthetic cloven hooves were made out of plastic vacuum cleaner casters. Although capable of limited ambulation and of digesting small amounts of slop, it was incapable of snorting, rooting for truffles, and other characteristically porcine behaviors, making it the object of constant derision from disgruntled Team Leyner staffers. Using small amounts of cleverly concealed Czechoslovak-made Semtex plastic explosive, Butt-cake and the bodyguards managed to escape from Team Leyner Headquarters in the middle of the night. After three weeks of wandering the countryside, during which time they subsisted on hailstones, discarded pizza crusts scavenged from frat house dumpsters, and ultimately, when even this meager food source became unavailable, licking the dried sweat from the earpieces of each other’s sunglasses, they sought and were granted asylum in this posh Westchester County community founded by the owner of a popular Italian fast-food franchise.”

THE CONTESTANT:What is Sbarro-on-Hudson?

THE HOST:Right you are, for $10,000!

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE CONTESTANT:Let it ride, Bob. “Team Leyner” for $25,000!

THE AUDIENCE:[Applause]

THE HOST:“Certain muscles were so convex, so protuberant, so cantilevered, that they kept the areas beneath them completely shaded from the sun. So his body was mottled red and white. His torso was cubist. And I’d come home from a grueling ten-hour day of back-to-back sessions with clients, and I’d find this two-tone cubist troglodyte on the floor of his office, completely naked, a tampon string hanging out of his ass, softly ranting into a tape recorder, and I’d think to myself, I just can’t take this much longer. Nothing in all my training as a psychotherapist prepared me for marriage with a man so relentless in his effort to construct a self out of the fabric of pure delusion, a man whose valuation of other human beings was so warped that he was, at any instant, capable of terrifying outbursts of cruelty and violence. We went to a computer store one day because Mark needed a new daisy wheel for his printer, and he asked the salesclerk if they sold a daisy wheel with the Tifanagh font. Tifanagh is an obscure medieval script used by Berber women for writing love poetry — of course they didn’t carry it, no company even manufactures such a thing. But Mark became absolutely crazed. He grabbed a surge protector off the shelf and beat the clerk quite badly. It’s only because the cops who responded to the owner’s frantic 911 call were big fans of Mark’s books that he wasn’t arrested. A similar incident occurred at Sears one morning. We were shopping for gardening supplies and Mark asked a salesperson — a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen — if Sears sold bags of Raptor Pellets. Raptor pellets are hair-and-bone balls regurgitated by birds of prey. The poor kid gave us this befuddled shrug and Mark went nuts. Mark’s got a tremendously powerful throwing arm — he pitched, I believe, four or five no-hitters in a single season when he played semi-pro ball down in the Galápagos Islands. Now, I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to be hit by a crocus bulb that’s traveling 98 miles per hour, but this poor kid caught the first one above the left temple and crumpled. It took some dozen men from heavy appliances to finally restrain my husband from further violence. But again, when these guys found out that this was Mark Leyner , it was all high-fives and autographs — forget about the kid, who’s propped up unconscious against a 50-pound bag of peat moss.