Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

By the way, I have pictures, if anyone would like to see them after the reading, pictures from the years in between. Pictures of Mark and I playing shuffleboard in Deal, of him and his father and me going to New England, going to the Cape…That was the summer after I lost the baby and you could sort of tell looking at me, how skinny I was, you know, that I was still sad. Would you guys like to see the pictures?

(Scrolling through his Instagram.)

Huh?

Would you guys like to see the pictures of how skinny I was and still sad?

No, that’s all right.

Well, looking out at this food court tonight, I can’t help but think about how intermixed books and food have always been for Mark. Books were mixed with everything that we did and some of that was purposeful, because I went to stores with him and without him and bought him books, so that was, of course, uh, a thought-out thing. Books were very important in my life and in my house growing up, and it would never have occurred to me to raise him without a lot of books around, but it was clear very early on that books were very important to him. So we had mutual interests even when he was a year and a half or a year old. And he named some of his books. They were “eating books.” He was a slow eater, and, um, I don’t know whether he consciously was concerned about whether he had an appetite enough to really eat a good dinner or a good lunch or whether he just felt he would enjoy it more, which is more likely, if he had those particular books, The Tawny Scrawny Lion or The Musicians of Bremen, in front of him. And, uh, those were wonderful, funny days, and there were also other funny things about it that I’m sure he doesn’t know. We didn’t have any real money; his father was just about beginning his practice, and when Mark was born, Joel had been clerking for a judge, and you make virtually nothing. So when I would get lamb chops, from my mother’s kosher butcher, or wherever else I got them, I would cook them for Mark, I would get them and give them to him for lunch and for his dinner. It wasn’t what his father and I were having for dinner, and he would get the meat. I would cut…like if it was two or three little rib chops, I would cut up all the meat, and that was for him, and I would be salivating, and I would eat the bone when we were finished. And sometimes he would nibble on a bone, but he didn’t seem to care about that as much as I did. I should have known from those days that he was the person who was going to like rare meat. But I liked the crispy well-done part, and I couldn’t wait to get hold of those bones and eat them, but I was…When I was growing up, and I could see from the way that my mother behaved, that everything was for the children, I mean, that’s simply the way it was, and without consciously making a decision that the kinder or the children were the important thing, that was certainly the case. Everything was done to make him comfortable and clean and some of that was for my own ego I’m sure. I liked the way it looked, I liked the way he looked, I liked the way it appeared to me that I was capable, you know…as I said, his crib was beautiful and his room was lovely, and everything that he had was crisp and at the same time soft, and he never ever had dirty, torn play clothes, it just wasn’t like that. But it also turned out that he was a pretty clean kid and a pretty clean-lookin’ kid. And he was very easy to take places. He sat there quietly, I mean, he didn’t have temper tantrums and carry on like his sister, Chase. I used to have to carry Chase out of places under my arm. But Mark and I would go to the office in Journal Square, take the bus sometimes, and go up to the office and have lunch downstairs with his grandpa Ray or with his father and with his uncle Lewis. And we’d have lunch at the Bird Cage at Lord & Taylor’s — that’s when we moved to the suburbs and I had a car, so it was a little easier, and we would just go to the Bird Cage. And I know Mark loved it there. I was always very careful and very caring about the food he ate. When Mark was an infant, Harry Gerner wouldn’t let me feed him regular food the way, for example, Phyllis Leyner did. She stuffed huge globs full of food into those kids’ mouths, like they were grown-ups, and Rose couldn’t bear it. And Uncle Harry said, No, one food at a time, and when we know his reaction to that, ’cause his father is very allergic and you know we’ve got to watch out for those things, and that’s the way I do it. So the first thing he had was rice cereal, he liked it a lot, and then, like, two weeks or three weeks, whatever, he had applesauce, same thing, same thing, then after that I think it was some other fruit, I don’t remember exactly…pears was one of them. But I don’t remember the others. But then finally when we got to meat and vegetables and that stuff, I knew the drill, but he was eating the ground chicken and potatoes and sweet potatoes and carrots — carrots he loved and sweet potatoes he loved. I remember that the applesauce he loved, but by that time the rice cereal was okay, but it certainly wasn’t a big treat. That was the first regular food, so then it seemed like a big deal, but months later he knew the other things seemed more interesting. But then it was time to start some of the more esoteric vegetables, so I bought beets and green beans or whatever, and I had the little tiny baby spoon, which is really little! And I just dipped the end of it into the beets, so I had about that much on a spoon that was about that big, and just the little edge over there was beets, and I put it in his beautiful little pink mouth and he sort of — his eyes got very round and he sort of rolled it around for a couple of seconds and then he went spew! …I had beets in my eyelashes. I had beets up my nose. I had beets on my clothes. You would have thought that I had given him a quart of beets! And I thought, That does it, he’ll never get… I rolled it around, it was on him, it was on his clothing, it was on the table. And I don’t think I gave him beets again until he was pretty grown up. He likes beets now. Well, it just shows you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mark Leyner.

Before I start, I’d like to say: Fuck everyone who said I was too paradoxical a hybrid of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté to succeed in life (even though they were right). Also, I’d like to dedicate this to all the nematodes and hyperthermophilic bacteria who live in deep-water sulfide chimneys around the world. Good days are coming, boys.

My mom gave me a ride here tonight, and, uh…I don’t really like to talk to her when she’s been drinking and she’s driving over ninety miles an hour, because I don’t want to distract her, so I was just sitting there in the passenger seat, looking out the window, sort of musing to myself…I think that mothers and sons, silent in a car, sometimes exchange telepathic soliloquies, but perhaps because we sensed that this could be our last night together, that one or both of us might very well be assassinated tonight, we left each other to our respective musing… that whole implosion of semioticity that is musing, that hypercaffeinated chatter of anthropomorphic cartoon animals in one’s head that is musing, that whole danse macabre of singing little piglets in one’s head…At ninety miles per hour, the empirical world rushes past in an impressionistic blur. You’re thinking, There’s some weird, retro-looking, brown transgendered individual jerking off in the woods. And then you’re like, No, that’s a tree. But sitting there — the eternal little man, inflated with dreams of flamboyant success but forced back on his own futility — my memories of childhood were not impressionistic at all, they were hyperrealistic. My mind’s eye — my mind’s eyeball —had shot back, it had shot back to 1961…and I, uh…I could see myself at the age of five, I could see myself there so vividly…I was a little boy, playing on a hot concrete alley on Westminster Lane in Jersey City one day…God spoke to this little boy, as He speaks to all pure-hearted children, in his simple, binary language of blue sky and radiant sun. And suddenly, in a kind of seizure, in an explosion of unfurling clairvoyance, he saw everything that would ensue in his life. Everything . His entire autobiography fast-forwarded in the most extraordinary detail. The birth of his daughter, his prostate cancer, his books (every word of them!), these final moments in this food court, in this mall, tonight. Everything . So we have two of the mind’s eyeballs, the mind’s eyeball of a fifty-eight-year-old man seated in the passenger seat of his mother’s car, daydreaming as he stares out the window and the mind’s eyeball of a drooling five-year-old boy with blond bangs seated rigidly on a concrete alley, one speeding back in time from 2014, one speeding into the future from 1961. Assuming they are traveling at approximately the same warp speed, they would collide at around 1988, the year Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and an earthquake in Armenia killed sixty thousand people. These are the uncanny transtemporal ballistics of the mind’s eyeballs. And this is one of the things we (my mother and I) mean by Gone with the Mind .