Mark Leyner: Et Tu, Babe

June 6, 1993

Hoboken

Dear Marty Asher,

As you know, I am not your average author. I dress like an off-duty cop: leather blazer, silk turtleneck, tight sharply creased slacks, Italian loafers, pinky-ring. I drive a candy-apple red Jaguar with a loaded 9-mm semiautomatic pistol in the glove compartment. When I walk into a party I’m like this: my head is bobbing to music that only exists in my mind. For our seventh anniversary, I gave my wife, Arleen Portada, a rotating diamond-impregnated drill bit — the kind that German and Russian geologists use in their deep drilling programs — programs that produce ultradeep holes with depths of up to 15 kilometers. But that’s just the kind of guy I am. Dynamic. Robust. No nonsense. A steak and chops man. Double scotch rocks. A man who makes things happen. Big hairy hands. A powerful fist that comes down on a conference table with peremptory authority. Then there’s stunning Arleen Portada. Mystic. Sensualist. Why is she covered with centipede stings?

If you spent all day on a sun-baked prairie wearing a sizzling orange minidress supervising a platoon of beefy workmen as they paint immense grain silos vibrant yellow and fuchsia, you’d be covered with centipede stings, too.

My whole life has been one long ultraviolent hyperkinetic nightmare. But yes, I am an author. (And a dog trainer — Marty, I taught my puppy Carmella to drink scalding hot black coffee out of her bowl on the floor!) The other day, I imagined that it was the year 2187—a dozen people were gathered at the grave site of porn star John Holmes to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his death. Well, Marty, I want to be remembered by more people than that. I don’t know … perhaps that’s why I write.

The unwashed armpits of the most beautiful women in the world … a urinal with chunks of fresh watermelon in it … a retarded guy whining “Eddie, Eddie, get me an Ovaltine”—almost anything inspires me. Immediately after finishing MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST , I outlined a new book about people with trichotillomania — people who compulsively pull out their hair. There are 2 million to 4 million Americans who have trichotillomania. That’s a lot of books! (That’s a lot of hair, too!) I abandoned that idea though — that’s not the kind of book that Vintage wants from a Mark Leyner, right? Well, I’m confident that, after perusing the following excerpts, you’ll agree that the novel I hereby propose is indeed the kind of book that Vintage wants from a Mark Leyner.

ET TU, BABE —a master jam of relentless humor and indeterminate trajectories — teeming with creatures and the burlesque of their virulent lives — will undoubtedly be, page by page and line by line, the most entertaining book that Vintage has ever published.

The four-foot hermaphroditic organism from a distant solar system twitched in my arms as I soul-kissed it. The laboratory director would have killed me if he’d known that I’d snuck into the Galactic Lifeform Chamber with a bottle of wine, a cassette player, and an eclectic selection of tapes (Felix Mendelssohn, Steppenwolf, Barbara Mandrell) for a clandestine tryst with the cylindrical being whom the lab technicians had christened “Kitty Lafontaine.” I pipetted a few drops of 1982 Napa Valley Zinfandel into its alimentary aperture. Its synesthetic sensory apparatus was distributed evenly across the entirety of its shiny outer sheath so it could see, hear, smell, touch, precognize, etc., from any point on its body. To say that holding Kitty Lafontaine in my arms was like nestling a large holiday beef log from Hickory Farms would certainly not convey the spine-tingling xenophilic libidinous awe I felt, but it would accurately convey the shape, mass, and weight of this fascinating creature who would irrevocably change all our lives that summer.

Dear Science Editor of the Times ,

Frequently the counterman at a sandwich shop will ask “Do you want everything on it?” Well, what if you had a sandwich with literally “everything” on it? In other words, how large a sandwich roll would you need to accommodate all matter in the universe? And, as a corollary, imagine an inconceivably immense being capable of eating this almost infinitely capacious submarine Sandwich. If this colossal creature began eating at the instant of the Big Bang, by what century would he be able to consume, digest, metabolize, and excrete the hypothetical hoagie? And would not this meal, by its very nature, exhaust time itself?

Dear Editors at Swank ,

Your article on the sensitive areolas of large-breasted women was excellent. Also, thanks for the recipe for paella valenciana that you published in the October Swank . I’m no gourmet chef, but I made the dish for my girlfriend and after dinner she couldn’t keep her prosthetic hands off my veiny nine-inch chorizo.

I had once intended to write an entire novel while having to urinate very badly. I wanted to see how that need affected the style and tempo of my work. I had found, for instance, that when I’m writing about a character who’s in a Ph.D. program and I don’t have to urinate badly, I’ll have him do a regular three- or four-year program. But if I’m writing a novel and I have to urinate very very badly, then I’ll push the character through an accelerated Ph.D. program in perhaps only two years, maybe even a year.

In 1987, I enrolled in a 12-step program for people who pistol-whip their tailors. First I had to admit to myself that pistol-whipping my tailor was, in fact, a problem. Today I take life one day at a time. Each day that passes without my having pistol-whipped my tailor is a victory … a solid step toward recovery.

— Do you believe in God?

— Yes, sir.

— Do you believe in an anthropomorphic, vengeful, capricious God who can look down on one man and give him fabulous riches and look down on another and say “you’re history” and give him a cerebral hemorrhage?

— Yes, sir.

— You may take the stand. What is your full name?

— I am General Ramon Humberto Regaldo Rosa Cordoba Lopez.

— General Lopez, you are descended from a very illustrious family, is that not true?

— Yes, sir. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was a noble-man in Spain in the fifteenth century and it was he who first discovered that the atomized saliva of hunchbacks enhances the growth of flowers. He, in fact, retained a large staff of hunchbacks to sneeze on his tulips.

— General, are those your real nails?

— Sir?

— Are those your real fingernails?

— Yes, sir.

— General, you are a fucking liar!

— Objection, Your Honor!

— Your Honor, I can see, defense counsel can see, and the ladies and gentlemen of the jury can see that the General is wearing Lee Press-On Nails.

— Objection overruled. Continue.