“Yes, Mr. Leyner.”
“Joe, can I get you another drink?”
“No thanks, Mr. Leyner, I think I should get to bed. I’ve got a pretty full schedule in the morning.”
“OK, babe. Sweet dreams. And thanks again for all your effort.”
I love that guy.
I ordered an anisette with three spent shells. The shells, still muzzle-hot, warm the anisette for a nice nightcap.
I felt good.
The first applicant whom we accepted for the agoraphobic housewife-poet program was Mary Elizabeth Thuring, whose manuscript Coarse-Cut Marmalade Enema Binge opened with the erotic sonnet “The Wilted Crudités.”
Eyeballs stew in hot sockets
During long sexual dream of bearded
Blacksmith in crotchless high-bib overalls
Hammering hot metal on an anvil.
Funny … isn’t this Belmar?
I lie ungarnished in the sand,
Sweet carrion for beach hyenas.
The plaited strands of his licorice noose
Become sticky in the heat of the sun.
Soon thousands of flies form a buzzing black garland
Around the neck of the condemned candy cowboy.
Yes, Emily Dickinson,
Once I did love a Pakistani badminton champion.
You got a problem with that?
I spent some six-and-a-half hours with Mary at her lovely home, poring over her manuscript, rearranging the order of the poems for maximum effect, suggesting various emendations and deletions (for example, I cut the following two lines: “Whiskey-swilling itinerant beauticians/Wax the bikini line of Isis” from the first stanza of “The Wilted Crudités”).
When I return to Team Leyner HQ from Mary Elizabeth Thuring’s home, it’s approximately 5:20 A.M.
Arleen is being led out the front door, her wrists handcuffed behind her, surrounded by FBI agents. A miscellany of Team Leyner employees is milling around, smoking cigarettes, muttering, glaring, cursing. Joe Casale is screaming at the top of his lungs one of his cryptic algebraic curses: “Go MW your PGs, you pimply D’ed, CL-flapping, U-quaffing YIs!” My immediate chain of thought is: missing fiction workshop participants … federal kidnapping indictments … prison.
I throw one of the agents — a burly guy about 6′ 6″, 275 pounds — up against a column and slap him hard across the face about a dozen times.
His playmates draw their weapons.
“You gonna shoot me, you motherfuckin’ morons? There’d be riots in every major city of this country!”
“Holster your weapons, men,” orders the senior agent. “Holster your weapons!”
“That’s better,” I snarl. “Now, what’s the fucking problem here?”
“Mark Leyner and Arleen Portada, you are both being charged with theft of a federally protected bio-historical specimen.”
Ahhhh, I thought to myself, greatly relieved, this has nothing to do with kidnapping fiction workshop participants, it’s the Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s just a bullshit larceny rap.
“Joe, get Gary Knobloch [chief corporate counsel for Team Leyner] over here right away — OK, babe. The rest of you get back to work. Everything’s going to be all right.”
* * *
Knobloch was leafing through the U.S. Criminal Code.
“Let’s see … Tailgating a Presidential Motorcade … Talking Dirty to a Congressional Page … Terrorizing a U.S. Mail Carrier … Testifying Falsely Against a Fetus … ah, here we go. Theft of a Federally Protected Bio-Historical Specimen. First offense: Weekly punitive confiscation. Second offense: Removal of the nasal septum, leaving offender with one large nostril. Third offense: Underwater spear-gun execution by scuba-diving firing squad. Listen, Mark, I don’t like telling you what to do — you’re my favorite writer, you’re my favorite client, you’re the godfather of my two children — but I strongly advise you to plead guilty on this thing and live with punitive confiscation once a week. If we go to trial and there’s any way they can prove that you did something like this before, you could be walking around with one big hole in the middle of your face. Wouldn’t make a very attractive book jacket photo, kid.”
“Arleen, Joe, Dez … what do you think?” I asked.
“I agree, Mr. Leyner,” Joe said. “One big nostril wouldn’t look that great on a book cover … but I guess I’m not really one to talk.”
“Thanks, babe, but I meant what do you think about copping a guilty plea?”
“I agree with Gary,” Desiree said. “I think you guys should play it safe. And you have so much stuff — maybe losing something once a week would be a blessing in disguise, sort of like spring cleaning.”
“Arleen?”
“Yeah, I guess so … but I don’t know why I’m even being charged. It wasn’t my idea to steal that shit.”
“Oh, like you said, ‘Mark, it’s so wrong, take the Lincoln’s morning breath back to the National Museum of Health and Medicine this minute.’ ”
“I didn’t say I said that.”
“And like you didn’t get off on it as much as I did.”
“I never said I didn’t get off on it, you creep.”
“Hey, you two, c’mon. So we plead guilty to First-Offense Theft of a Federally Protected Bio-Historical Specimen and accept weekly punitive confiscation — yes?”
“Yes, Gary.”
The punishment consisted of having one item confiscated each week. At 10 A.M. every Monday morning, the authorities would arrive in a large truck. They’d read the statement that the courts required them to read prior to each punitive confiscation, they’d handcuff us, and they’d put us in the truck in a special enclosed compartment, where we were strapped to chairs in front of a 27-inch television screen. The identical 30-minute video was shown to us each week. And while we were watching the video — a porno film with all the sex edited out, leaving only the wooden narrative segues — the one item was confiscated and placed in the truck’s main compartment. (The Supreme Court has since ruled that forcing someone to view only the narrative segues from a pornographic film is in violation of the Eighth Amendment.) We were then allowed to return to our home. We were never told which item was confiscated. Sometimes it was obvious: the piano, the living room sofa, the wall phone in the kitchen, etc. But often we wouldn’t know what was taken until we needed it and it wasn’t there. For instance, one morning I badly needed my styptic pencil. (I groom myself with the same manic intensity with which I do everything else, and often after I shave, it looks as if I’ve gone face-first through an automobile windshield.) I looked in the drawer and the styptic pencil was gone — confiscated. Then one evening I was making pesto sauce, and I opened the cabinet to get the pignoli nuts and they were gone — confiscated. And one night we were making love, and Arleen went into the bathroom to get her tube of prescription maximum-strength spermicide (my spermatozoa are exceptionally robust and have developed a total resistance to over-the-counter spermicides) and the tube was gone — confiscated. We were prohibited from replacing confiscated items. If we were discovered to have replaced a confiscated item, our punitive status would be upgraded to second offense — nasal septumectomy.