Next, I want to have the words Desert Storm — Thunder and Lightning tattooed on my left frontal cortex. But I don’t know where I’m going to go for that one. Brain tattooing is illegal even in Mexico. Someone told me maybe Malaysia.
Rocco left today. Baby Lago and I found a mercenary magazine left open on his bed with a page torn out. I was surprised, but not surprised, if you know what I mean. Lately, he’d seemed uncharacteristically subdued. He’d been talking a lot about his father. That in itself struck me as peculiar. Trezz wasn’t typically given to retrospection or wistfulness. But every so often I’d find him smoking a cigar by one of the bay windows overlooking the carp ponds and I’d say, “Trezz, what’s up, man?” and he’d gaze into the distance for a minute or two and then he’d take the cigar out of his mouth and stare at the soggy masticated stub and he’d say in a hoarse whisper: “I was thinkin’ about my old man.”
Rocco’s father had been a medical cheese sculptor — he sculpted cheese centerpieces for medical conventions. It was a profession that required not only fine craftsmanship and an encyclopedic knowledge of cheeses, but a comprehensive understanding of human anatomy. One needed to know which cheeses by dint of their hues and textures would allow the sculptor to render an organ with maximum fidelity. Havarti with dill, for instance, is particularly suitable for sculpting uterine lining. Mozzarella has just the right slickness and convoluted folds for the brain. A long and difficult apprenticeship is necessary. Rocco’s father studied with a master medical cheese sculptor for over ten years before he was allowed to solo, debuting with a cheddar prostate gland for the American Society of Urologists 1937 convention in Lake Tahoe. Tragically, at the height of his career, there was a terrible accident. Rocco’s father and mother had won a sweepstakes contest and had gone to London, England. One night they went to a pub. And the poor man, not knowing the local customs, walked where he shouldn’t have and took a dart in the right temple. He survived, but his virtuosity with a cheese knife was irrevocably lost. A proud man, he stubbornly refused to capitulate, attempting to recover some vestige of dexterity through a daily regimen of physical therapy, until age and infirmity made even that impossible. Rocco was at his bedside when he died. He had something in his fist and before the body was removed from the hospital room, Rocco gently pried open his fingers to see what he’d been gripping with such poignant tenacity: it was a torn anterior cruciate ligament made out of Muenster and Swiss that he’d been laboring to complete for the Canadian Association of Sports Physicians’ 25th Annual Meeting in Ottawa. Trezz kept his father’s final sculpture with him always, and when he came to work at headquarters he stored it in a special place in the commissary freezer.
We checked the freezer this afternoon; the Muenster and Swiss ligament was gone, along with Rocco.
In the middle of the night, the phone rings.
Arleen answers.
I roll over and go back to sleep.
I’m in the middle of a dream. I’m leaning out the window of my car, kissing a tollbooth attendant. She’s savoring my mouth with her tongue and gently biting my lips and sighing and her kissing is so sweet and languorous that it’s breaking my heart. Traffic is at a complete standstill for over fifteen miles.
Arleen nudges me awake.
“It’s for you, babe,” she says.
“Who is it?” I ask.
Arleen inquires.
“It’s a woman named Desiree Buttcake.”
“I don’t know anyone named Desiree Buttcake. If it’s a fan calling about the solid-gold belt buckle custom-minted with the lava-surfer insignia and the words Team Leyner, tell her to call the 800 number.”
“C’mon, Mark, she say she knows you. Take the phone — I want to go back to sleep.”
I take the phone.
“Hello, this is Mark Leyner.”
“Hi, Mark, this is Desiree Buttcake.”
“Desiree, I’m sorry, but I don’t really know who you are.”
She laughs.
“Mark, of course you don’t know me … well, I mean you don’t know me as Desiree Buttcake … you know me as Francine Masiello. I wrote you a letter a couple of weeks ago. I’m the psychic who recently had cosmetic breast-and-buttock-augmentation surgery … remember?”
“Oh yeah … you’re the Hummel collector who got carbon monoxide poisoning on ‘American Bandstand.’
“That’s right, that’s me.”
“Well, what’s up, Francine … I mean, Desiree.”
“I want to work for you, Mark. And I want to start tonight. There are important things I can do for you and your organization, but they need to be discussed immediately.”
“Well, listen, Desiree, applicants for employment at headquarters usually have to undergo an extremely rigorous interview process and security check.”
“Interview me tonight. It’s critical that I start working for you as soon as possible, believe me.”
“OK, where are you?”
“Every Thursday night a cell of right-wing intellectuals, novelists, playwrights, poets, painters, architects, and psychics meet in the sauna of a different Jack LaLanne Health Spa. The location of the sauna is kept secret from members of the cabal until 9:40 P.M. on Thursday night at which time it’s announced in an encrypted fax. Let’s see here … OK, tonight we’re meeting in the sauna at the Jack LaLanne Health Spa in the Linwood Mall, Fort Lee, New Jersey.”
“I’ll be there,” I say.
When I arrive at the Jack LaLanne Health Spa, there is no sign that a clandestine meeting of ultra-right-wing intellectuals and psychics is taking place in its sauna. Yelping aerobics classes, the echo of racquetballs, sweaty florid-faced hausfraus in garish leotards slumped at juice machines, men with hairy jiggling breasts and gelatinous rolls of stretch-marked belly fat grimly tramping on treadmills and Stairmasters — nothing out of the ordinary. I undress in the locker room, walk down a short hallway, come to a door marked SAUNA and open it. Through the thick steam, the first face I recognize is that of Dr. Claude Lorphelin, a gynecologist, surrealist poet, and neo-fascist pamphleteer who lives in the posh 16th Arrondissement of the Paris, France, simulation at Epcot Center.
“Bonjour, Dr. Lorphelin,” I say, extending my hand into the fog.
A latex surgical glove emerges, gripping my hand.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Leyner. We are very happy to see you. Your article was magnificent.”
“Merci,” I say, acknowledging the concordant murmurs of approbation with a crisp bow of the head.
Lorphelin was referring to an article I’d written deploring the fecklessness, physical cowardice, and political disloyalty of the current literary community. Published on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the article exhorted artists to stop their incessant whining; to stop crawling on their knees with their hands out, begging for grant money and fellowships; to stop exalting self-marginalization; to emerge from their academic sanctuaries where they huddle like shivering, squinting, runty, sexless, nihilistic mice — to emerge into the intoxicating, palpitating, nutrient-rich sunlight of the marketplace, to intermix with the great people of a great nation, and to be emboldened by the truculent spirit of the populace.