Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

KATARINA WITT:It’s been over two years since I spent that final afternoon alone with him as he furiously endeavored to complete his memoirs, and yet I still find him as maddeningly seductive and utterly unfathomable a man as ever. I don’t think a half-hour goes by in the course of a day when I don’t catch myself fantasizing about him.

I recently competed in the World Figure Skating Championships in Stuttgart. It was the climax of my program, I was doing a triple Salchow and, right in the middle, in midair, I just left my body and there I was with Mark again — this was during the most important international competition of the year! Well, it turns out that, in my disembodied state, I didn’t do a triple Salchow, I did a septuagesimal Salchow — that’s seventy rotations in the air! — obviously a feat that had never been accomplished before and has not been since. My coach, who’d always been a bit superstitious, saw the devil’s work in the freak Salchow, and she quit and entered a monastic order in Baden-Baden.

DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS:Substance abuse problem? In my medical opinion, no. He’d been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on himself to finish this particular book before, what he called, “an imminent siege by the spineless degenerates arrayed against me.”

If I prescribed Percodan, Demerol, Valium, Quaaludes, Placidyl, pentobarbital, Anadrol, Primobolan, erythropoeitin, amineptine, and clenbuterol for him, it was simply to ease his mind and give him some enhanced stamina. Like I said, there was the pressure of this book and the pressure of just being who he was.

RON HOWARD:Gosh … what can one say about “ Le Leyner ”? I just hope that the Team Leyner sign in Times Square isn’t taken down. To me, that sign is synonymous with New York City. It is New York City — it’s brash, it’s ballsy, it’s like “Yo!” [The huge neon Team Leyner sign at 2 Times Square simulates positron emission tomography images of Leyner’s brain function as he writes, laid over a magnetic resonance image of his brain anatomy — so pedestrians below can actually observe glucose metabolism at various sites within Leyner’s cerebral cortex as he’s producing one of his critically acclaimed best-sellers. The 85-ton, 105-foot-high, 6l-foot-wide sign, built at a cost exceeding $5 million, features nearly 70 miles of fiber-optic tubing, more than eight miles of neon tubing, and more than 34,000 light bulbs.]

Actually, you know what I’d do with the Team Leyner sign? I’d put it into orbit, so it could be like the earth’s Statue of Liberty — so it would be the first logo of humanity that the extraterrestrial aliens see when they immigrate here.

Come to think of it, there is one personal experience that stands out in my mind when I think about him. I was with a group of Hollywood directors and actors on a sightseeing bus tour of Team Leyner Headquarters. Leyner happened to be on the grounds that afternoon — he was doing some kind of martial arts sparring with one of his elderly bodyguards — and he recognized me and invited me in for iced tea. While I was there, a UPS truck pulled up to the front entrance and the driver unloaded a calutron. [A calutron is a device that produces highly enriched weapons-grade uranium through a process called electromagnetic isotope separation.] Leyner signed for the merchandise and sat back down with me, making no mention of the delivery. I recognized the Chinese ideogram for “This Side Up” so I’m fairly certain that it was either from Taiwan or the People’s Republic. About a half-hour later, another UPS truck pulls up, and the driver unloads a shipment of zirconium from an export company in Frankfurt. [Zirconium can be used to make uranium fuel rods.] Again, Leyner signed for the delivery, returned to finish his drink, and then vanished. I was allowed a last swallow of tea and then escorted back to the bus by one of his minions. Weird, huh? Weird guy, though. But fun weird. I don’t know if other men had this experience, but Leyner made me feel really small physically, really stupid, and really sexually inadequate. But it was still so cool being with him! [Though accurate intelligence is sketchy, Defense Department experts say they believe Leyner was probably two to five years away from producing a crude nuclear weapon.]

JESSICA HAHN:I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling everybody all along: I was the last person to be with Mark Leyner before he disappeared. Fact . OK? And I’ve offered to take a polygraph. I don’t hear any of these bogus last-to-be-with-Leyner wannabes from “Nightline” and “Larry King” offering to take a lie detector test, do you? If you had polygraph equipment here in the van, I’d take the goddamn test right now. I was the last one to see him — that’s the truth.

This is from my diary entry for that day: “He was haunted by a ceaseless ambition and a deep loneliness that he hoped fame and an ostentatiously vulgar lifestyle would alleviate. He promised me that someday we’d make love for thirteen straight hours in Death Valley, and we’d sweat so much that we’d end up skeletons — two grinning skeletons, pumping and rattling under the red thermonuclear sun. If only that were possible now …”

Mark had been tutoring me in creative writing. I’d never had that much confidence in my ability to express myself, but Mark really made me feel as if I had a natural aptitude for verse. Here’s a poem I wrote — after a couple of lessons with Mark — describing one of the gardens at Team Leyner Headquarters. The part at the end about the mule is a sort of imaginative embellishment: “Innumerable shades of green./An infinite taxonomy of greenness/trebled by the effects of direct, deflected, and umbral sunlight./The ambient “contrast” modulated by the evanescing day./Each leaf in sovereign motion,/yet all according in synchronous oscillation—/from branch to tree to copse./Flies wheel above/compoundly eyeing the furfuraceous eczema that covers/the buttocks of a moribund mule.”

I know that during that last afternoon, he got a dirty phone call from Camille Paglia. It was on the speaker phone, so I heard most of it. It was pretty explicit. I know I heard the words “tart mucosity.” It sort of faded in and out, so I figured she was calling from her car phone and going under trestles. Mark didn’t seem to mind the call, though. But I don’t think he was really paying attention.

And suddenly headquarters was illuminated by arc lights, and surrounded by heavily armed officers in flak jackets, and hundreds of riot troops and sharpshooters from the Punitive Confiscation Tactical Division.

He was wearing Hugo Boss moss-green suede pajama bottoms. He had reached the climactic section of his Team Leyner memoirs, and he was typing like a lunatic, flailing at his keyboard in ecstasy like some enraptured pentacostal organist.

He was in mid-sentence when they wrested away his final remaining possession — yes, his laptop! — and he di

The sensational disappearance of Mark Leyner following the expropriation of his laptop by the Federal Punitive Confiscation Tactical Division has ignited a firestorm of protest around the world! Mobs of rampaging fans have besieged U.S. embassies in London, Paris, Warsaw, Mexico City, Riyadh, and Tokyo, forcing the evacuation of terrified diplomatic personnel by troops wielding truncheons, attack dogs, tear gas, and water cannons! Shadowy underground organizations have threatened the lives of American political leaders and Fortune 50 °CEOs and — in clandestine radio broadcasts — urged children to subliminally indoctrinate their parents by murmuring key passages from Leyner’s texts into their ears as they sleep!