Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

From these humble beginnings to international superstardom to his current contretemps — a fascinating and complex journey. I’ve come to know hundreds of artists in my life, but I must say that I’ve never encountered a single one — writer, painter, composer — possessed by anything approaching the colossal scope of Leyner’s ambition. I remember sitting with him on a marble bench sipping local grappa under an old pomegranate tree in a beautiful little courtyard on the Lou Ferrigno estate, and I asked him what he hoped to ultimately accomplish in his career. He talked about his vision of a nation where every home has a speaker that broadcasts passages from his books throughout waking hours, where his texts are read over loudspeakers on the main streets.

CARL SAGAN:He was absolutely serious about leaving Earth and relocating elsewhere. He was not at all nostalgic about the terrestrial world, and he was quite unsympathetic and impatient with my ecological concerns. He’d say, “Carl, the world’s population is putting such a strain on the global infrastructure and, in particular, on the world’s water supply and sewerage capacities, that by the middle of the twenty-first century, if someone flushes a toilet in Mombasa and you’re in the shower in San Diego, you’ll get scalded. All the more reason to get off the planet, babe. Why stay if conditions are going to be so impossible? Rather than flagellating ourselves for having plundered the earth of its precious resources and for having toxified the globe’s air, water, and soil, why not channel our intellectual and spiritual energies into figuring out how to get the hell out of here. Once we’re a safe distance from this place, on a nice hospitable planet with a respirable atmosphere and fauna capable of being ground up into some kind of burger, then we can determine culpability and mete out the punishment.”

There are still so many things we don’t understand about him — even those of us who know him well. Why, for instance, did he write a weekly letter to General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime prime minister who was hanged in 1948 as a war criminal? [These bizarre missives — each of which was returned unopened and peppered with the Japanese postal service’s “Return to Sender” stamp, and dutifully filed and cataloged in a vault in the catacombs of the Team Leyner Library by Team Leyner archivist Yvette Bokassa — were no hastily scribbled apostrophes, but lengthy, detailed, searingly self-appraising synopses and analyses of that week’s events, often running in excess of 75 single-spaced pages!] Why correspond with an infamous Japanese general who’s been dead for over half a century? Why?

I was on my way to Sea World in a rented Ford Escort, blow-drying my bangs, when the news came over the radio that he’d disappeared. I had to pull over.

CHRISTIAAN BARNARD:When Leyner made the decision to have the mole in his right eyebrow removed, the news was apparently leaked to several fanzines. Apprised of the impending surgery, his followers immediately began clamoring for the mole — as evidenced by the thousands upon thousands of phone calls and letters received at headquarters, his fans wanted that mole and they wanted it bad.

Team Leyner elected to sponsor a lottery, the winner of which would actually receive the mole in a transplant. The mole would be grafted onto any part of the winner’s body that he or she chose. I was personally recruited by Leyner himself to perform the mole transplant. The winner of the lottery was a sixteen-year-old girl from Terre Haute, Indiana, who sent in her high school yearbook picture with an arrow drawn indicating the center of her forehead.

After I excised the mole from Leyner’s eyebrow, it was frozen and flown by helicopter to University Hospital in Terre Haute, where I performed the procedure. Tragically, the recipient died four days later.

A typical mole is a collection of cells that contain an unusually high concentration of melanin. Leyner’s mole not only contained high concentrations of melanin, but staggeringly high concentrations of Hexalone, Bolasterone, and Dehydralone — powerful anabolic steroids, plus significant levels of cesium 137 and strontium 90.

By the second day following the transplant, the mole had almost completely subsumed the girl. The only vestige of her that remained visible amid the throbbing brown neoplasm was the big toe of her left foot, which she could still wiggle in response to questions.

I asked her: “After all that’s happened to you, do you still idolize Leyner, do you still consider him some sort of messianic savior?”

“Yes! Yes!” She wiggled emphatically.

I’ll never forget that fuchsia toenail twitching zealously, as her EEG became flatter and flatter.…

CHIP GIBSON:Let’s go back to 1983 or 1984. I’m fuckin’ selling stolen $5,00 °Chanel quilted leather biker jackets out of the trunk of my car for $600 a pop. And I’m bangin’ this manicurist on weekends — fuckin’ bangin’ her in a hot tub at a friend’s condo in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and I’m drivin’ at the time a fuckin’ … a fuckin’ … uh … a fuckin’ … what the hell was that called … a fuckin’ … fuckin’ uh … Toyota Celica GT. Red. And I got this air freshener on my rearview mirror — you send a photograph of yourself to this company in Florida and they make an air freshener out of it — so I got this little cutout of myself dangling from my rearview mirror and it smells like a fuckin’ coconut. And this broad’s got a big fuckin’ brown recluse spider bite scar on her ass…

You want “oral history”? I can fuckin’ go back to 1958, for Christ’s sake. There I am, I’m in the doctor’s office, I’m fuckin’ five years old. My parents take me to this doctor to see why I talk like this. ’Cause, see, my parents don’t talk like this. My father’s a pretty well-known anthropologist at Yale — he’s pretty famous for translating the hieroglyphs from the fuckin’ … the fuckin’ … who the fuck … they’re like the earliest fuckin’ wetbacks … the fuckin’ … the Mayans. The Mayans. And my mother was like head of the Brandeis Alumni Association, y’know, nationwide. So they don’t know why I talk like this and they take me to this specialist. And we’re sittin’ there. And I remember I’m eatin’ a fuckin’ corn muffin and I’m hittin’ the doctor on the side of the head with the back of my hand while I’m talkin’ to him like whap! c’mon, you stupid prick, what’s your fuckin’ problem? and I’m sprayin’ corn muffin in the guy’s face, I’m like pollinating this fuckin’ guy with these yellow crumbs and I’m like whap! whap! y’know? ’Cause I hate this guy, I hate this prick. And he says to my parents: I don’t think there’s any neurological damage, maybe he should see a speech therapist. And I’m like fuckin’: don’t quit your day job, Doc. Whap! Whap!

At any rate, I did eventually see a speech therapist, and in 1992 I became Senior Vice President, Trade Sales and Marketing Division, Random House, Inc., and that’s how I originally met Mark Leyner.

Leyner’s recent problems, beginning with the Lincoln’s morning breath theft and culminating with his disappearance, disrupted the most elaborate, energetic, and expensive sales and marketing program we at Vintage had ever undertaken for any author. Since Leyner had his own Saturday morning cartoon show and a Leyner doll, Vintage had secured a deal with Toys “Я” Us to sell his books in the toy stores next to the dolls. One of the most exciting things about the project for Vintage was that — with Toys “Я” Us — we had the opportunity to reach a subteen group, giving us a whole new market. Then we signed a fifteen-year deal with Mattel to sell a line of Team Leyner preschool and infant toys based on characters from Leyner’s books. There was a cuddly little stuffed “Carmella,” a “Joe Casale” tub toy with movable flippers, a “Kid Woman” talking doll that spoke Spanish or Quechua depending on which braid you pulled, bionic elderly bodyguard “action figures”—we anticipated annual sales of close to $200 million. But now the entire marketing program is on what’s called “permanent hiatus.” It’s a shame.