I usually start the workshop by showing slides in response to questions. Thanks to the media attention that’s been focused on my car collection, someone inevitably asks about my most recent automotive acquisition. So, for instance, at the last workshop I taught, I showed slides of my newest car, which is made by Visigoth Motor Works (VMW), a survivalist automobile manufacturer located in northern Idaho. I’ve got their sports coupe, the Piranha 793 (commemorating the year that Viking raiders sacked the English monastery of Lindisfarne). It features state-of-the-art technology that not only protects its passengers in the event of a collision, but ensures the death of the passengers in the other car. The Piranha 793 is the perfect automotive statement for the “I’m OK, You’re Lunch” generation. It incorporates computerized infrared homing systems that guide the vehicle toward the heat generated by the engine of an oncoming car, ensuring head-on collisions with “optimized lethality.”
Climaxing my slide presentation, I showed a photograph that I thought perfectly captured the glamour and éclat of Visigoth Motor Works: it’s me arriving at the People’s Choice Awards in my Piranha 793 convertible, almost anonymous in my Kevlar driving mask, were it not for the bare-midriff football jersey revealing my inimitably rippled abdominals.
After the Q and A, I’ll pose a question to the workshop participants: Do any of you think you could ever be as good a writer as I am — or perhaps even a better writer — and would you explain why you feel the way you do? Yes — over there, the fellow in the green sweater.
“Well, I think it’s possible — although it would take just a tremendous, tremendous amount of work to reach your level of virtuosity — I think it’s possible that I could someday be as good a writer as you are, although a very different kind of writer. I’ve lived all over the world and I’ve had a very interesting life, full of passion and joy and a great deal of sadness and pain, and I think that if I could ever develop a style to accommodate all the material that I’ve stored in my head and in my heart, I could be a damn interesting novelist.”
“OK … anyone else? The lady in the back with the boots and the vest.”
“Well, yes, Mr. Leyner, although I have a great deal of respect and admiration for your accomplishments, I certainly think that my work has as much literary validity as yours does. I’ve studied with some very fine writers at various programs around the country and I’ve worked assiduously at my craft for a good number of years now and etc. etc. etc.”
A couple of other people will affirm themselves and proclaim their ambitions, and then I’ll ask if there’s anyone else and, if not, we’ll proceed with some writing exercises.
At the conclusion of the workshop, my bodyguards, who’ve been working undercover, will take into custody each of those participants who has stated that he or she could be as good a writer as I am. Quietly, so as not to alarm those who have remained to get my autograph, the detained participants are handcuffed, loaded into the security van, and taken to headquarters. The standard procedure begins with the placing of a bag over a detainee’s head; interrogation and reeducation can last from several hours to a few weeks. Sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, mock executions, and various psychological techniques are used to persuade the detainees never to write again. When the staff is certain that a detainee’s reeducation is complete, the detainee is branded on the buttocks with my insignia as a reminder of his matriculation at headquarters and then released. It’s the antithesis of a writer’s colony, an anti-Yaddo.
Bookstore shelf-space is limited, as are the column inches available in today’s book reviews, and we at headquarters are adamant in our belief that all competition — active or potential — must be neutralized.
My insignia is a guy surfing on an enormous wave of lava — it’s an avalanche of this lurid molten spume with this glowering chiseled commando in baggy polka-dotted trunks on an iridescent board careering across the precipice of this incredible fuming tsunami of lava — and there’s an erupting volcano in the distance in the upper right-hand corner. It’s excellent.
I have it tattooed on my heart. And I don’t mean on the skin of my chest over my heart. I mean tattooed on the organ itself. It’s illegal in the States — I had to go to Mexico. It’s called visceral tattooing. They have to open you up. They use an ink that contains a radioactive isotope so that the tattoo shows up on X-rays and CAT scans.
Do you want to get sick to your stomach — I’ll describe the fetid, vermin-infested office of the “physician” who did my first visceral tattoo: Dr. Jose Fleischman. I went to sit down on what I thought was a couch in his waiting room … it wasn’t a couch. It was thousands — tens of thousands — of cockroaches that had gathered in a mass that was the shape of a couch. The same thing happened with what I thought was a magazine. I reached for what I thought was the latest issue of Sports Illustrated and it moved. It wasn’t a magazine at all, but a rectangular swarm of centipedes with a cluster of silverfish lying near the upper edge, and I guess from a distance, and in the dim light, the silverfish against the dark background of centipedes looked as if they formed the words Sports Illustrated. There was no receptionist and there were no other clients.
Finally, Fleischman emerged from the back room. The lenses of his eyeglasses were the thickest I’d ever seen. They actually bulged several inches out from the frames. It was as if he were wearing two of those snow-filled glass paperweights on his face. His clothes were soaked through with sweat. I explained that I wanted a surfer on a wave of molten lava tattooed on my heart and I handed him a color Xerox of my insignia. He lit a cigarette and studied the rendering from various angles, holding his head askew and squinting through the smoke.
“My friend,” he said, speaking for the first time, “what chamber?”
“Chamber?” I asked.
He pointed with his cigarette to a yellowing diagram on the wall.
“The two atria are thin-walled. The ventricles are thick-walled. I recommend the ventricles. Either one — it’s your call, amigo.”
I scrutinized the diagram for a few seconds.
“The left ventricle,” I announced.
“Bueno,” said Fleischman. “Today, we gonna put you out, open you up, and I’m gonna just do the outlines, then I sew you up. Then in two weeks, we open again, we fill in the colors, and sew up, all finished.”
I was still looking over the diagram.
“Say, Fleischman, while you got me on the table, could you do ‘Mom’ on my pulmonary artery?”
“What kind of calligraphy you like? You like somethin’ like this?”
He showed me an X-ray of someone’s thyroid gland with the word Mother done in what he called “Florentine style”—a very serpentine, filigreed style of lettering.
“That’s very nice.” I nodded.
Those were my first visceral tattoos. I’ve had many since. A tip to the guys out there — visceral tattoos really turn on female medical technicians and nurses. I’ve had numerous hot relationships start because a med-tech or a nurse saw one of my X-rays and went nuts over all the tattoos. They know that any wimp can go out and get “Winona Forever” stenciled on his arm — but it takes real balls to have yourself put under general anesthesia, sliced open, have a vital organ etched with radioactive isotope ink, and then get sewn up again every time you want to commemorate that special lady.