— Yes, sir.
— General, it strikes me as exceedingly odd that, asked to describe a particular morning on a particular day, you would say, “I was a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face.” Are we to understand by this that you were a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face only on April 26, 1987?
— Objection, Your Honor. This kind of semantic nitpicking is an obvious form of harassment. The district attorney knows full well that the General was a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face prior to April 26, 1987, that he was a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face during April 26, 1987, and that he continues to be a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face subsequent to April 26, 1987.
— Sustained.
— General, that afternoon, did you receive a call at the office from your wife?
— Yes, sir.
— What did she say?
— She said that she thought she’d been on her liquid formula diet long enough … that she was so light that the static electricity from the television set was pulling her across the floor toward the screen.
— And she called one more time later that afternoon?
— Yes, sir.
— And what did she say?
— She said that she didn’t have much time to talk, that she was tied to the railroad tracks and the Bullet Train was coming.
— And that was the last time you ever spoke to her?
— Yes, sir.
— General, one final question. Do you have any tattoos?
— Yes, sir.
— On what part of your body and of what?
— I have E = nhf (Max Planck’s formula for the energy in radiation) tattooed on my penile glans.
— General, you are a pathological fucking liar!!
— Objection!!
— Overruled.
— General, I’d like you to look at your penile glans and read to the court what’s tattooed on it.
— It says: d = 16t2.
— Not E = nhf?
— No, sir.
— And what’s the significance of d = l6t2?
— It’s Galileo’s formula for the distance an object falls from its starting point as time elapses from the instant it’s dropped.
— Your Honor, I have no further questions.
— General Lopez, you may step down.
The giant awoke, got high on drugs, masturbated, and then went into town to forage for a human-flesh breakfast. He stopped at an intersection where his eye was caught by the puffy orange Day-Glo parka of a postmenopausal crossing guard. He knelt down and plucked up the screaming crossing guard in his fingers and dropped her into a gunnysack slung across his back. He surveyed the town until he discerned the bright orange regalia of another prey whom he captured and then on to the next intersection and then on to the next and the next and the next until his gunnysack was filled with squirming crossing guards. He returned home and laid the gunnysack on the counter. He urinated and then he put some music on the stereo; it was a kind of music I’d never heard before — a single high-pitched oscillating tone.
The giant peeled the crossing guards. After his breakfast, the floor was littered with puffy orange Day-Glo parkas.
Why crossing guards? Japanese scientists speculate that their conspicuous puffy orange Day-Glo parkas make them particularly attractive prey. Why postmenopausal women? Japanese scientists point to reduced estrogen levels. They think that estrogen is bitter to the tongue of the giant and that he simply finds the low-estrogen women tastier. But there’s an even more intriguing explanation. Estrogen deficiencies in postmenopausal women cause osteoporosis, which is characterized by brittle bones. In other words, postmenopausal women are crunchier.
Well, Marty, how does that sound to you? I’m ready for it, babe — I’m massaging IQ-enhancing balm into my temples and I’m loading up on Winstrol, the steroid that got sprinter Ben Johnson disqualified from the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.
It’s a forty-minute hydrofoil ride from Hong Kong to Macao. Look out toward the horizon. There’s big Arleen rising up out of the water. Her white gown is fluttering violently in the wind, her lace veil is congested with sea spume. Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she just fucking absolutely beautiful?
Oh, one last question, Marty. My agent has a supernumerary nipple below and slightly medial to her right breast. The nipple produces approximately one watt of heat, about the same as that given off by a miniature Christmas tree bulb. Is this a standard energy output?
Yours very truly,
Mark Leyner
Chapter One
Q: If you could offer the young people of today one piece of advice, what would it be?
A: When I was eight, I was sent to live on the melon farm of an uncle…
When I was eight, I was sent to live on the melon farm of an uncle — a sixth-grade dropout who attributed his IQ of 70 to sniffing gasoline and glue from the age of five, and whose manner of compulsively clawing at the skin behind his neck was a characteristic sign of amphetamine toxicity. One morning he served me a cereal that consisted of sweetened corn puffs and marsh-mallow, hook-nosed, bearded “Jews.” I asked him never to serve that cereal to me again. The next morning, he set a heaping bowl of the same cereal on my place mat. I killed him with a 12-gauge shotgun blast before lunch. That night I buried him in the cyclone cellar. I stole his pickup truck and drove out to a huge diesel-run electric turbine plant near the outskirts of the city and I had my first sexual experience. Afterward, I lit a cigarette and looked up into the sky — there was God, wearing a pink polo shirt, khaki pants, and brown Top-Siders with no socks, his blond hair blowing in the powerful wind of charged particles and intense ultraviolet radiation from the galactic center. I hated him. And he hated me.
I have spent the majority of my 36 years in orphanages, reformatories, prisons, and mental institutions. I had four oboe teachers and each one fell into an irrigation sluice and drowned. I’d tried explaining to my social workers that I hated double-reed mouthpieces. I pleaded with them not to make me take lessons on any instrument in the oboe family, which also includes the English horn, the bassoon, and the double bassoon. But nobody listened.
I hated the other children. Especially the ones whose parents could afford to provide proper orthodontic care. I had to gnaw constantly. My incisors grew four to five inches a year: if I’d stopped gnawing, my lower incisors would have eventually grown until they pushed up into my brain, killing me. Over the years, I was treated for a slew of psychiatric and behavioral problems: dyslexia, depression, excessive anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcoholism, illicit drug abuse, obesity, eating disorders, exhibitionism, persistent aggressive and violent behavior, and hyperactivity combined with severe attention deficits. Yet there was a voice within me that said: Someday you will be considered the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer in America. And I listened.
Today I live in a lemon-yellow stucco mansion with sweeping views of the bay. Each morning, I nibble iced raw turtle eggs and chocolate-dipped strawberries in a garden ablaze with hibiscus and bougainvillea — a far cry from the anti-Semitic breakfast cereal forced upon me by my half-witted uncle on his squalid melon farm.