Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

“Your Grandpa Mark was a violent maverick loner with a fatal weakness for Hispanic women … and he was the finest, most audacious, most illuminating, most influential and imitated writer of his time. He was all these things.”

“Will there ever be anyone like him again, Mama?”

“Never.”

Iwas awakened by the gentle caress of a familiar flipper-like appendage.

“Oh … Joe … I just had the weirdest dream. I was dead, I guess, and I had this granddaughter on a perpetual sucrose binge and …”

“Mr. Leyner, I’m leaving.”

“Wake me up when you get back, OK, Joe?”

“No, Mr. Leyner. I mean I’m leaving. I’m quitting.”

I discerned through groggy eyes Joe’s luggage in the doorway.

“Et tu, babe?” I said.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Leyner. But I just can’t handle it anymore.…”

“Forget about it, Joe. Do what you have to do. And if you ever need a reference …”

The image of yeoman Joe Casale struggling with his suitcases as he made his way down the hall dissolved in a mist of emotion.

I loved that guy.

On September 24, 1994, federal operatives, acting under the authority of the Punitive Confiscation Act, seized Chapter Five manuscript entries for the letters B, E, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, U, and X.

Team Leyner deeply regrets the impossibility of including these sections in what the author had intended to be a complete abecedarian series.

CONNIE CHUNG:I’m fairly certain that I was the last one to see him on that final day. He was in the throes of his work — writing frenetically, wearing his trough. (So that he never had to leave his computer keyboard, he’d devised a small trough that hung from his neck and from which he ate continuously while he typed.)

Whether it was tragedy or comedy that he’d been commissioned to produce, the sine qua non was elegance. The apotheosis of elegance and élan in his own rough-hewn attire and phlegmatic demeanor, he had written extensively on the subject, including a 1,300-page disquisition on armpit fetishism composed in the form of intricate commentaries on the hitherto suppressed Polaroid photographs of Bruce Lee’s underarms that were taken by Steve McQueen in the late 1960s when the two were scouting locations in Bangkok for a Kung Fu version of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye —a film that was never made. (I might add here that McQueen’s other dream project, Honey, I Shrunk the Children of a Lesser God , the story of a maniacal scientist obsessed with miniaturizing deaf children, was also never made.)

Incessantly haunted by hallucinations of apocalyptic mayhem and driven half-mad by a desire to simultaneously terrorize and seduce women in uniform, he has attempted to live a decent, productive life. To those whom he has offended, those who have found his almost masturbatory exaltations of Darwinian natural selection cynical and misanthropic, I offer the following incident from his youth as he himself recounts it in his shocking memoir, Et Tu, Babe:

As the anesthesia wore off, a bushy-haired man in a gauze mask, with a stethoscope around his neck, and a percussion hammer and sphygmomanometer jutting from the pocket of his white lab coat, came into focus.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Leyner. Mark Leyner,” I answered groggily.

“Do you know where you are?”

“All I know is that I answered an ad in

High Times

for volunteers for experimental brain surgery and that a week later a Nissan mini-van picked me up and I was driven blindfolded to a secret laboratory in Tijuana.”

“You don’t remember undergoing the procedure?”

“Procedure? What are you talking—?”

At that moment, half a dozen FDA agents, automatic weapons blazing, killed the “doctor” who had operated on me, and then escorted me to the border where I was given $20 and a small bottle of effervescent apple juice.

JOAN JETT:Notwithstanding all the bullshit to the contrary, I was the last person to be with Mark Leyner before he disappeared. I remember that afternoon vividly — Mark was at his escritoire, his fingers a blur across the keyboard of his laptop, thick daubs of chili paste on his temples, his nipples, and his balls. [Leyner would apply a poultice of chili paste to his temples, nipples, and testicles whenever he felt “blocked,” claiming that it unclogged the channels through which his “interior elixir” flowed.]

He was his usual confident, ebulliently bellicose self, with his sights set very much on the future. For instance, while I was there that day, he’d occasionally — as a momentary respite from his literary labors — devote his attention to a linen design he was working on for J. P. Stevens’ “Team Leyner Bed and Bath Collection.” [The flat and fitted sheets depicted four 275-pound Nigerian infantrymen bathing naked in a sylvan pond, their uniforms and weapons hanging from the branches of a spreading sycamore tree. The pillowcases were a canary legal-pad print, emblazoned with miscellaneous “numerical fun facts” rendered in Leyner’s exuberantly juvenile calligraphy — e.g., “There are 40 million denture wearers in the United States,” “Bats roosting under the Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin eat 14 tons of insects a night,” “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a form of spongiform encephalopathy) strikes one person in a million worldwide,” etc.]

Later on in the afternoon, we took a couple of bottles of scotch up to the rooftop patio and we played this drinking game that Mark invented. You listen to one of those talk-radio stations and every time you hear the word “the” or “and” you have to take a drink.

I remember … that afternoon, we … we … I’m sorry … I get kind of emotional when I … Do you have a tissue? I just really miss that son of a bitch. If you can imagine being kidnapped by some gorgeous psychopath and you’re in this stolen semi, and each tire is inflated with laughing gas, and you’re plummeting down this endless gradient, and he’s not saying a word, but there’s this … this peripheral blur of subliminal billboards … and it’s the most beautiful spaced-out erotic poetry in the world, and it’s his poetry, and it’s speaking to you in this incredible way that every woman yearns to be spoken to, and … well, that’s what it was like being with Mark Leyner. He was real intense.

GEORGE PLIMPTON:Leyner didn’t have a regular shower head in his shower — he’d attached one of those Water-Piks that people use for cleaning their teeth. He liked an extremely concentrated, piercing stream of water in which to bathe. He found it more effective in dislodging dirt from those hard-to-clean parts of his body — all the furrows and crevices — and, frankly, I think he just liked the way it felt. Sometimes he’d lie prostrate in the tub for hours letting this thin pulsing line of hot water hit the top of his coccyx bone — the area from which his vestigial tail was removed soon after his foster father found him on the Pebble Beach golf course.

His foster dad was an avid golfer, and one afternoon he was out on the back nine and he hit a wedge shot and carved a hefty divot out of the fairway, and there — unearthed and wriggling in the sun for the first time in its life — was a cute itsy-bitsy little fetal humanoid whose biological mother had, just moments before, buried it alive. That was Mark Leyner! The poor little … Do you have a tissue? [Leyner’s natural mother had suffered accidental gamma ray exposure as a teenager. Doctors warned her that there was a possibility that the radiation had scrambled the DNA in her eggs, dooming her to mutant births. Dr. Shlomo Hemplemann, noted forensic psychiatrist and author of One Monster, Many Mommies: Whose Fault Is Mark Leyner? , contends that overwhelming anxiety concerning the potential abnormality of the newborn motivated this attempted infanticide.]