Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

“Dude, I love that song.”

He extended a fist that I bumped with mine.

“How does it feel while you’re being eviscerated by this, this creature?” he asked.

“It’s like I’m being unspooled…it sort of conjures up the unraveling of my father’s and mother’s DNA in the zygote at the end of the Gone with the Mind video game.”

We cracked open two more cold Spaten lagers.

“Does it hurt — the disemboweling?”

“It’s a strange sensation…not agonizing at all actually, not even painful really…but not pleasurable…it’s a very, very peculiar feeling…but the whole regime of obligation seems to disintegrate, as if adhesions and knots of scar tissue are coming loose…I feel as if I’m diffusing into the flux, diffusing in and through language, in and through verbs, if that makes any sense…And I feel as if this is the crossroads to which all other paths in my life have been leading. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do, absolutely. First of all, I think the horizon represents the spurious line separating hysteria and politics. And I think being torn apart by a prehistoric winged reptile symbolizes for you an ecstatic capitulation to imperious events beyond your control — in other words, a way out…a way out for your mind. And it’s not hard to see the correlation between disembowelment and the a posteriori disgorging of one’s contents that is autobiography…How does it feel seeing your mother disappear with that lowlife scumbag who’s got his hand down her pants?” (MARK clasps his hands to his heart and gives his MOM the most fervent look of esteem and affection one could possibly imagine.)

I think that mother is the most virtuous woman in the world. I venerate that mother. I salute her Maoist nostalgie de la boue .

Tonight I salute that mother’s magnificent refusal to be buried alive…and her implacable resolve to transform that resistance into discourse. (MARK’S MOM bows her head in appreciation.)

Okay, last couple of things before I get started…

In 1966, my grandmother Harriet took me and my cousin Adam to the Stanley Theater in Jersey City to see One Million Years B.C. starring Raquel Welch, who spoke only three lines of dialogue, but wore a mammoth-fur bikini for the entire movie. And at some juncture during the film, when Welch attempts to fend off a pterodactyl with a big stick, my grandmother started laughing. And I really don’t know what she found so funny, but she laughed so hard, so helplessly at this, that she peed in her pants. Now, although this is a fairly typical example of what they call enuresis risoria, or giggle enuresis, it made a big impression on me, it really did inscribe itself in the soft cement of my juvenile mind. And I…I mention this only because, in looking over my notes in the car on the way over here tonight, I realized that several of the excerpts I’m going to read — most of them, actually — revolve around this whole nexus between paleo-ornithology and urinary incontinence, and I just thought it might be helpful for you guys if you knew the origin of all that, and also how it sort of prefigures not only my own interim catheterization following the robotic prostatectomy, but the impending diluvial catastrophe alluded to by my mom in her introduction.

When I was a child, the only place where my mother could actually “abandon” me without fearing for my sanity — without fearing that, in my wild grief, I might rip out my own entrails and stuff them into my mouth — was Lord & Taylor. I would just sit there among the mannequins, as patient and as perfectly tranquil as they were, and wait for her to shop, forging in my mind the link between death and theater. Imagine the lucid stillness of that tableau…that fey boy with his wispy bangs, finally in his milieu, finally among his peers — those mute inanimate figures, cataleptically casual in their permanent-press sportswear, their minds so far away. And I’d think about what songs I wanted played at my funeral — of course, the Civil War songs that I so adored listening to at that age, that I listened to so obsessively…“John Brown’s Body,” “All Quiet Along the Potomac,” “Hard Times Come Again No More.” And when, in high school, like the lobotomized protagonist of some teen drama, I fell under the sway of a periodontist’s daughter named Elizabeth Ross, who’d spent several summers at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, I became partial to the larghetto second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major, Mozart’s last piano concerto (this was during a period in my life when I was very much trying to devise a new identity for myself, and insisted on people calling me “Dick Al Dente” [an alias betokening the ambivalence about the sexual awakening of someone who already yearned nostalgically for the slumber of innocence]). The music I now want played at my funeral is Robyn’s song “Call Your Girlfriend.” I know, right?! (Dream scenario — Robyn herself comes and performs the song live at some decrepit funeral home under a highway overpass in Jersey City. Otherwise, I’ve got it on my iPhone.) I know to some of you this probably seems like a silly, arbitrary, kind of gay choice…I mean, the song isn’t elegiac or wistful, it’s not a rumination on mortality and finitude, it’s not valedictory in any sense, there’s no bittersweet retrospection or tallying of regrets, it isn’t a celebration of life or the oceanic feeling of cosmic interconnectivity or anything even remotely like that. What “Call Your Girlfriend” is — in case you’re some sort of dense fuck who doesn’t know anything about music — is a super-catchy electropop synth ballad about a love triangle, addressed by a woman to a guy she’s seeing, urging him to call his current girlfriend and have “the talk” about how he’s met somebody new, and about how different it is when they kiss, and let her down easy and break up. (He winks at the PANDA EXPRESS WORKER and the SBARRO WORKER, indicating that he considers them members of the cognoscenti and not dense fucks.)

And even if it ends up just being you two guys and my mom at the funeral, I can so imagine that song playing and I’m lying there in my coffin, my hair slicked back, in my Alex Rodriguez Yankee jersey and my plaid pajama bottoms, the outfit I wore when we (the Imaginary Intern and I) composed Gone with the Mind, which was our last piano concerto, the outfit which was my version of prozodezhda, the “production clothing” worn by the great Russian constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko — the original A-Rod.

Y’know, I was sitting next to this guy at a bar the other night, and he’s, uh…he’s telling me…a stranger, a guy I never met before…he’s telling me this story about how his wife must have spent, like, four hours in the store, in some CVS or Walmart, finding a birthday card for him that evinced absolutely no feeling whatsoever and had absolutely no relevance to him. And they make these cards specifically so they seem to apply to everyone, so they’re germane and emotionally resonant to absolutely anyone! They’re like horoscopes in that way, they’re always right. But somehow, this woman, his wife, had taken the time and scrupulously searched out a birthday card for a husband that was completely cold, completely emotionally detached and dissociated, without any correlation to anything in his life. And I think he was actually proud of her…that this was his way of boasting about how persevering and conscientious she was, that she’d expend that kind of effort finding a birthday card, probably the one birthday card in that entire store, so completely purged of any true feeling or relevance, but still acknowledging the occasion. And I realized that he was maligning his wife (as husbands frequently do in bars and barbershops) as a way of flattering her, as a way of exalting her and thus elevating himself, which is pretty fucked up, but that’s the problem with hanging out in bars that are overpopulated with men, you have to listen to a lot of fucked-up shit like this. But it did make me think about whether, if one could completely drain a birthday card of emotion and still have a birthday card and completely purge a funeral song of lament and wistfulness and still have a funeral song…whether one could eradicate all the quaint handicraft synonymous with an autobiography (the anecdotes, the vignettes, the euphonious composition of literary motifs) and — as the Imaginary Intern and I were fanatically committed to doing — still have an autobiography. (Of course, only you guys can be the true judges of whether or not we’ve succeeded, once you’ve had a chance to hear the excerpts.)