Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

Kingsley Amis once said that religion and masturbation were alike in one regard: feel free to practice them, but no one really wants to hear you go on about it. Which I just think is completely wrong. I mean, I just couldn’t disagree with that statement more vehemently. I think religion and masturbation are probably the two most interesting things a person could ever talk about. And you’ll be able to make your own assessment once you’ve actually heard the excerpts, but I think a very strong case could be made that Gone with the Mind is fundamentally an autobiography of religion and masturbation, that is to say, an ontogenetic history of religion and masturbation, a study of religion and masturbation as it pertains to an individual organism, an individual organism whose first erection was inspired by a viewing of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which was shown to us by our seventh-grade English teacher, a bulimic ex-nun who, as it turned out, was very fond of my poetry. This, of course, predates by a good six months or so the dawning of my erotic obsession with Nadezhda Chizhova, a twenty-two-year-old Soviet shot-putter, whose photograph I first beheld in an old issue of Life magazine, which I’d unearthed one summer at a house in Deal, New Jersey, that my parents co-owned with my grandparents (my mom’s parents, Raymond and Harriet) and my uncle and aunt (Lew and Fran, my mom’s sister), and which, like all shore houses, boasted an extensive archive of moldering magazines that any pubescent boy with a lot of time on his hands (free time being surely the greatest gift that summer bestows on a pubescent boy) can scour for prurient images, which in my case could be simply a sweaty, androgenized Eastern European woman flinging a discus or putting a shot.

In retrospect, I can see that it was my incipient questioning of the unified subject and of normative meaning (as well as the onset of puberty) that led me from Sad Sack and Baby Huey to Mickey Mantle to these autoerotic assignations with Nadezhda Chizhova. And soon I’d feel as if I’d betrayed Nadezhda, I really did…I think we’re much more chivalrous when we’re young than when we get older…because I also started leering at photographs of her great rivals, the two East German shot-putters Margitta Gummel and Ilona Slupianek, both of whom were given Oral-Turinabol, the androgenic anabolic steroid used by the East German government in its State Plan 14.25 under the supervision of Stasi, the GDR state secret police. (I really think it helped me immeasurably to relate to other people when I realized that we all probably remember, with an especially fine-grained attention to detail, the first time we masturbated to pictures of a doped athlete.) This was a period of time when I began associating photographs of androgenized Eastern European women throwing javelins and tossing hammers with my own gratification. For me, the steroids they took bestowed an aura of martyrdom upon them. The Oral-Turinabol seemed to endow them with an excess or superfluity of sexuality, an excrescence of sexuality…a burden, which I found tremendously arousing…I was beginning to realize that sexuality (the drives, the impulses, the appendages themselves) is a kind of cross to bear, a heavy shackle one’s obligated to drag around…and the heavier and more cumbersome, the sexier — if that makes any sense. It was also a time when I began to view my own penis as an instrument of self-annihilation. As a “way out” for my mind.

It is evidence of my own curatorial slackness that I neglected to save these images of Chizhova, Gummel, and Slupianek, which, over time, had actually bleached in the feral, polymorphous intensity of my…my scopophilic gaze.

I should add that, for me, there was an aura of martyrdom about Mickey Mantle too, with his fractured kneecap, his torn ACL, the cartilage damage, the osteomyelitis and cirrhosis and hepatitis…the photographs of Mantle applying thick wraps to both of his knees before each and every game, and then soaking in a stainless-steel whirlpool bath after each game…And, of course, I ogled those photographs as one might ogle paintings of Saint Sebastian bound to a stake and impaled with arrows. I had a treasured issue of Life magazine (July 30, 1965) with a cover story about Mickey Mantle entitled “Mantle’s Misery.” The subhead was “He Faces Physical Pain and a Fading Career.” And because I strove to emulate Mantle so absolutely, I very much desired similar physical pain and, even as a little boy, very much aspired to a fading career. I think I took care of the first part when, in the assassination attempt my mom mentioned in her introduction, I was hit by a car in Culver City, California, and tore the meniscus, anterior cruciate ligament, and medial collateral ligament in my left knee, almost identical injuries to those Mantle sustained when he tripped over an exposed drainpipe in center field during the second game of the 1951 World Series against the Giants. And as far as the second part goes, the “fading career,” if tonight’s turnout is any indication, I’ve succeeded in that regard beyond my wildest expectations.

As a child, I was a huge, obsessive Yankees fan. And I remember, especially when we were at that summerhouse in Deal, that house on Neptune Avenue…I could only stay up until about the fifth inning, so my mom would listen to the rest of the game on the radio, the whole game, even if it went into extra innings, and then in the morning, as soon as she woke up and came downstairs for breakfast (I’d have been up for hours waiting impatiently, listening for her instantly recognizable footsteps on the creaky stairs), she’d narrate those last innings for me, pitch by pitch, play by play…with all her Proustian divagations and endlessly ramifying digressions, tangents splitting off into other tangents…with all her allusion and analogies…the bad hop of a ground ball to Bobby Richardson or Tony Kubek or maybe Joe Pepitone conjuring up the story of a second cousin who was hit in the forehead by a stone expelled by a power mower, causing a gash that required plastic surgery which was, of course, botched by an incompetent doctor, resulting in an endless lawsuit (medical malpractice being a favorite subject of my mom and myself). An inning could easily take an hour. My mom has formidable, world-class raconteurial skills. She really does. She’s a consummate, virtuosic storyteller. The fastidious descriptions, the lavish scene-setting, perfectly punctured by some choice vulgarity or solecism…the vivid, impeccably pitched portrayals of disparate characters, the timing, the accents and intonations, the shifting registers of body language…she can make a trip to the dry cleaner seem like The Ring of the Nibelung . And because my mother is such a good and loving person, a woman of such unparalleled magnanimity, these stories were never ultimately disparaging or censorious, however heinous the protagonist’s behavior had been. There was always some redemptive concluding note, some flourish of sympathy and approbation. Whether the person had deliberately drowned her own dog or fucked her dying husband’s oncologist, my mom would somehow find a way to append some sort of favorable coda to it all. “The woman’s become the most devoted grandmother I’ve ever seen,” she’ll remark. “My God, how she dotes on those grandkids with the Ice Capades and the Nutcracker tickets and the PoshTots ball gowns, the uh…the Petit Bateau rain slickers, those adorable little fuchsia Stella McCartney bomber jackets…She spends a fortune on those kids!”

And would these kids even care that their grandmother carried on with their late grandfather’s doctor in his office at Sloan Kettering a couple of times a week? I seriously doubt it. Good for her! they’d probably say. We love Grandma. She takes us to all kinds of cool places and buys us all kinds of cool stuff. She can fuck whomever she wants to…Grandpa didn’t really do shit with us. He always seemed too busy and preoccupied with work…or too sick.