Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

“It seemed like another lifetime when Mark and I would lie in bed at night reading Bleak House and The Spoils of Poynton to each other. More recently he’d insist on regaling me with the most vile, adolescent, fetishistic sorts of trash as I lay there with the covers pulled over my face. Just to give you a random example of the type of bedtime story I was subjected to, here’s the jacket copy from a typical offering:

She pulled Snap’s pants off and tossed them on the floor.

“What are these?” she asked, her hand probing between his legs.

“Balls … t-t-testicles,” he stammered.

“They look good,” she said, brandishing a straight-edge razor that glinted as she began to sharpen it on a long leather strop.

From the day that he got his first Polaroid camera, Snap was the quintessential all-American shutterbug — Cub Scout photo club, high school newspaper photography editor, U.P.I, stringer. But when he went 200 miles beneath the surface of the earth to get photos of a flesh-eating, gynecocratic, subterranean culture, his life began to go out of focus and he had to pull out all the f-stops just to survive!

“I’d make one final attempt at persuading Mark to hospitalize himself and begin long-term in-patient psychotherapy. I arranged to meet him at one of his preferred haunts, in the hopes that a congenial environment would make him, if not wholly sympathetic, at least somewhat receptive to my recommendation. It was a South Philadelphia after-hours club frequented by a nefarious assortment of methamphetamine traffickers, Cosa Nostra hitmen, extortionists, bookmakers, and Bryn Mawr students who found the truculent, garishly garbed habitués of this lurid night spot a perfect libidinal antidote to their professors — whose repertoire of facial tics, speech impediments, halitosis, and dandruff (which clogged the wide wales of their corduroy jackets) made the Oresteian trilogy and Isthmian odes so insufferable.

“I told him that it had all became more than I could bear: the insane obsession with his body, with compulsively altering the size and shape of its parts, with its secretions and their sundry smells and tastes; the government’s punitive confiscation program that was dispossessing us of everything we’d worked so hard to acquire; the pills, the booze, the Bolasterone, and testosterone cypionate; the philandering; and most of all — the strident, evangelical exaltation of his own psychopathology, as if there were some revelatory alchemical truth in his stunted development, ordaining him to proselytize a benighted humanity.

“He stared vacantly past me, sucking on the silver skull he wore on a chain around his neck, looked at his wrist-watch, and mumbled something about having to meet a new business partner with whom he was purchasing a syndicate of decrepit nursing homes.

“And that was the end.”

THE CONTESTANT:What is an excerpt from Arleen Portada’s When Telling Your Husband That He’s “A Delusional, Narcissistic Sadist with Deep-Seated, Unresolved Issues About His Mother” Just Isn’t Enough Anymore: My Seven Turbulent Years as the Wife of Cult Author Mark Leyner?

THE HOST:That’s absolutely correct, for $25,000! And we’re all out of time for today! See you back here tomorrow!!

THE AUDIENCE:[Wild cheering]

THE PRERECORDED VOICE:A tintinnabulation of kisses deep in the brain. A tiny leak of neurotransmitters, perhaps. An infinitesimal burst gasket in the latticework of cerebral piping. But the densely packed, intricately knotted ribbons of self-congratulatory cognition writhe into perpetuity … into the perpetuity of night.

[Roll credits]

[Dissolve]

“In your culture, it’s not considered appropriate for a heterosexual man to be in the presence of his heterosexual sister if she is naked, correct?” asked the anthropologist.

The tribal headman nodded. “Yes.”

The anthropologist, who was tape-recording the conversation and taking written notes, made a quick notation and then looked up, smiling at the headman.

“It is also not considered appropriate for a heterosexual woman to be in the presence of her heterosexual brother if he is naked, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Why is this?”

“The modesty of a man or a woman in the presence of his or her opposite-sex sibling is a built-in preventative mechanism that has the effect of precluding sexual arousal. Sexual arousal between siblings is incestuous and incest is an absolute taboo in our culture.”

“What about a homosexual man and his heterosexual sister?”

“The heterosexual sister will feel ashamed to be naked in front of her homosexual brother.”

“But the homosexual brother will not be aroused by the nakedness of his sister.”

“Presumably not.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The heterosexual sister may herself become aroused by exhibiting her naked body to a man — whether or not he is aroused — and since in this case the man is her brother, the arousal is incestuous and taboo.”

“That makes sense.”

The anthropologist bowed and grunted, a sign of respect.

The headman bowed and grunted reciprocally.

“What about two brothers — can they see each other naked?”

“Yes.”

“And two sisters can see each other naked, too?”

“Of course. Same-sex siblings often see each other naked. They frequently shower in each other’s presence and try clothes on in each other’s presence, etc.”

“What if a homosexual man is in the presence of his heterosexual brother who is naked? Wouldn’t it be possible for the homosexual man to become aroused by the naked body of his brother?”

The headman stared far into the distance without answering. He gazed out toward the great mountains where the sacred ancestral burial places were.

The anthropologist jotted something down in his notebook and continued his questioning.

“And what about a naked homosexual woman and her homosexual sister who is naked, or two naked homosexual brothers? Wouldn’t the opportunities for incestuous arousal be exponentially increased in these instances? And yet there is no taboo against two sisters being naked together whatever their sexual orientations are and there’s no taboo against two naked brothers in each other’s presence no matter what their sexual orientations are. Can you explain this to me?”

The headman beckoned to several of his underlings and whispered something to them.

He said: “Take the anthropologist into the woods and kill him. If anyone from the village wants to eat his flesh, let them. I’m not into it, but I have no problem with anyone who is. Just get him out of my sight and into the woods and slaughter him as you would a wild pig or a tapir. He’s really beginning to annoy me! Go! Take him!”

“Yes.” The young acolytes nodded, bowing and grunting.

Off they went, escorting the scribbling anthropologist into the jungle.

“OK, who’s next?” asked the tribal headman.

His administrative assistant ran an index finger down a clipboard. “Your three o’clock is Ralph Korngold — he’s vice-president in charge of sales and marketing for Genitotech, a specialized biotechnology company located in Sparta, New Jersey.”

“Where’s New Jersey?”

The administrative assistant pointed beyond the great mountains where the sacred ancestral burial places were.

“Show him in,” said the headman, straightening the cartridge bandoliers that crisscrossed his bare chest.

The Genitotech VP, sweating in a blue double-breasted suit, entered the pavilion, bowed and grunted.