Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

When I was ten or so…maybe even younger, maybe eight, nine…I was already thinking to myself: Can a series of completely unrelated, violent, hypersexualized, scatological lines of prose be a kind of writing, a kind of literature? Just one violent, hypersexualized, scatological line of prose after another. Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi —no climax, no resolution, no meaning. Because, I have to say, even then, at eight years of age, every other kind of writing struck me as banal and outdated, and just boring beyond endurance. And I remember very clearly, I must have been in second or third grade, so this would have been about 1964, ’65, and I was at some classmate’s birthday party at this slot-car racing place…I don’t know if you guys even know what slot cars are…I don’t even know if they even have slot cars anymore…They were these miniature powered cars that raced around in, uh, little grooves, little slots on a track. And I think this place was in Livingston…or maybe Montclair, I’m not sure. Somewhere in New Jersey. Typical slot-car place, decked out in strobe lights, with all this shiny, polychromatic paraphernalia…And I was standing off by myself, as usual, because I was terribly, terribly shy and extremely introverted, and maladjusted, and basically asocial…but I remember just being off by myself, mesmerized by the cars whizzing around this track (which must have suggested to me, I realize now in hindsight, a kind of warp-speed synaptic circuitry), just lost in this particular reverie. This is a time in one’s life when one only has a very inchoate, wavering sense of one’s métier, of course. But even then, at this slot-car raceway in, in…in Livingston, New Jersey — and I can remember this so vividly — thinking of that marvelous phrase coined by the manga artists Sakata Yasuko and Hatsu Akiko: Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, and realizing that I wanted to do…what?…I didn’t know for certain then…but definitely something involving the interlacing of brutality and mysticism. It became obvious to me, at that very moment, amid that delirious hypersynaptic circulation of tiny cars, that my life’s work would exhaust itself upon two themes: nerves and nerve — that is, neurology and audacity.

There was a girl in my class, a girl who was not invited to this slot-car party or to any parties for that matter, she was pretty much a pariah, in fact…This girl was the first person I ever talked to about things like that. She was the first person — I think Sarah was her name — the first person I felt comfortable enough with, and I suppose kindred enough with, to, even very tentatively, use language like that to try to describe my sensations. Once, we fed each other teaspoonfuls of green Novahistine Elixir, and she said something to me about my bangs that made me feel special…I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I remember her auburn hair and her dense freckles and her chapped lips at that moment when she kissed me.

This was a girl who exuberantly chased boys around the schoolyard at recess, boys who were terrified by her webbed fingers, and ran from her in genuine visceral revulsion.

I wonder what’s happened to her, I wonder if she’s had a decent, happy life, if she’s even alive today.

If I were ever asked to give a commencement speech (which I’ll never be), I’d say basically: They’re all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie’s prom. So…stay secret.

The Imaginary Intern and I used to love this commercial for Dove Dry Spray Antiperspirant…There’d be a series of women, and each woman would raise one arm, in a gesture pretty closely resembling the Roman salute, spray on the antiperspirant, stroke her underarm with the index and middle fingers of her other hand, and then snap her fingers to demonstrate that the product “goes on instantly dry.” Both of us thought that it was exceptionally beautiful. And if he was watching TV and it came on, and I was doing something somewhere else in the house, he’d call me, he’d call out, “Mark!”…One time he actually called me Tweezers like those kids at summer camp…he was like, “Tweezers! The Dove commercial is on!!” And we started doing the gesture for each other — a quick swipe of the armpit, then a finger snap. It was a cute little thing between us, our little gang sign, I guess. But it’s odd…as time went on, it somehow came to mean something much more to us. It came to represent…and this was a completely tacit understanding, not something we ever broached out loud…the gesture came to represent, to symbolize equanimity in the face of death…and perhaps — and I say this in hindsight — perhaps even an infatuation with death.

Once when I came home from school, I opened the front door, and there was my mother at the top of the stairs…as soon as you entered the house, there was a flight of stairs up to the second floor…so I opened the door and there was my mom, standing there completely naked. I think I only glimpsed her for a second, a half a second…because she let out a little yelp of surprise and instantly disappeared into her bedroom. So all I really remember seeing — and it was a shock and a mystery — was that triangle of pubic hair. For the briefest instant. And then her blurred disappearance. But I think the instantaneousness of what I saw contributed to its impact…amplified its subliminal and indelible imprint. In the constructivist juxtaposition of that black triangle against that white oblong there was something spiritual and hieratic, something irreducibly and eternally true, something maybe messianic. (This happened on a Friday afternoon, on the eve of the Sabbath, so it did cross my confused, prepubescent mind, that there might have been some religious significance to it.) Then, that weekend, my parents went to Puerto Rico. I was surprised (shocked, actually) that they just suddenly left for Puerto Rico without having told me that they were even planning on going to Puerto Rico…this wasn’t like them at all…So, I assumed that they were going to Puerto Rico (it seemed to me, fleeing to Puerto Rico) because I’d seen my mother naked. At that age, correlation almost always implies causation…what’s that Latin expression?… post hoc ergo propter hoc …after this, therefore because of this.

The naked wraith of my mother flew through time and reappeared at the top of the towering escalator in the Dupont Circle subway station in Washington, DC, on a Friday afternoon ten years later… enchased, like a saint, within the great circular portal of that station. She descended slowly, projecting her fervent gaze into a more distant future, until she was enshrouded in a black blanket, and disappeared in a swarm of braying cops. I remember telling someone once that urologists put such a tremendous amount of Vaseline on their fingers before they do a digital rectal exam that your asshole ends up feeling like an éclair or a cannoli. We have an animal’s power of introception — the ability of visceral afferent information to reach awareness…the awareness, for example, of feeling full of Vaseline. But do we have comparable exegetical powers sufficient to understand the symbology of the world outside of ourselves? The world to me has always been a kind of indecipherable cryptogram. For instance, the kids in my bunk at summer camp nicknamed me Tweezers, which, to this day, I simply can’t understand…Nor do I understand completely how a naked mother at the top of a flight of stairs and then, ten years later, a naked woman at the top of an escalator…I just don’t understand completely how that could happen, or what it means.

I don’t know what made me think of this…oh, oh, I actually do know. My mom and I got here a little early tonight, so I went over to the, uh…the Foot Locker, just to look around, kill time…and you know how they have all the different sections for the different kinds of sneakers, like a running section, a basketball section, etc.…So I saw this sign for cross-training sneakers, and that’s what made me think of this…I don’t know if you guys have ever run into people who do this cute sort of thing when you’re talking to them, where if you say, “XYZ,” they’ll say, “ You’re XYZ”…I knew this girl who used to do it all the time…like I’d say something like “There’s a hegemonic imperative in cross-training,” and she’d say, “ You’re a hegemonic imperative in cross-training.” Or we’d be out at a restaurant, and I’d say, “That pasta looks like a bowl of infant foreskins,” and she’d say, “ You’re a bowl of infant foreskins.” So once, the Imaginary Intern said to me — and I don’t remember what the context was — but he said that “memory (and, in a sense, autobiography) is like a rash that blossoms and fades,” and I said to him, “ You’re like a rash that blossoms and fades.” And then, after he was gone, I realized that he actually was like a rash that had blossomed and faded…an ache that time won’t assuage.