Chapter Five
INTRODUCTION
In order to rescue my book from the ineluctable current of its own narrative, and in order to resuscitate myself (depressed by an impending divorce, “stupefied in an inner marsh of ennui”), I have decided to work in miniature. Accordingly, Chapter Five shall be comprised of 24 concise segments with headings, in abecedarian sequence.
May God help me. I almost gunned down my father and my elderly grandmother in an expensive nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida, last week. Incensed by the paucity of my $ 15 appetizer, which consisted of three gossamer-thin shavings of raw filet mignon on a single frond of arugula, and by my grandmother’s remark that my pants were inappropriately “heavy” for the summer, and my father’s comment that the mole over my right eyebrow had become a “disfigurement,” I threw my napkin down on the table and stormed off to the men’s room. There, a molten rage seethed within me. I inadvertently reached behind the toilet tank and found, to my utter surprise, a gun taped to the wall. Who had taped the semiautomatic 9-mm pistol to the wall behind the toilet and for what purpose, I had no idea. But I removed the weapon, concealed it under my jacket (à la Napoleon, but with a larger and more conspicuous bulge), and I staggered back toward our table, lurching, careening from side to side, fury playing havoc with my equilibrium. Reaching the table, I withdrew my hand, leveled the weapon at my father, and was about to fire, when I remembered my own preprandial admonition to the thin-lipped, 60-year-old attorney from Jersey City: “Dad, this is our last night with Grandma. She’s recovering from cataract surgery. Please don’t squabble. Let’s make this a special dinner for her.” I laid the gun on the table. The restaurant had become deathly quiet. The only sound came from the cappuccino machine, which gurgled intermittently like life-support apparatus in a coma ward. “Short, individually titled sections … arranged alphabetically,” I murmured dazedly. The maitre d’, a heavyset man, cultivated in vitro from embryonic cell buds on a planet within the globular cluster Omega Centauri, wearing a sequined dress inset with points d’esprit, and suffering from spasmodic torticollis — painful neck-muscle spasms that twist the head to one side — would later tell me that the expression on my face was beatific — radiant, yet preter-naturally serene. “Like the Little Prince, señor.”
That night as I slept in my bed, someone or something apparently drilled an evenly spaced series of tiny holes in my forehead. I hadn’t felt anything or even woken up, and only discovered the holes as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror where I begin each morning, monitoring those inevitable daily manifestations of decay — the brown age spots, the broken blood vessels, the wrinkles; some days more appalling matutinal discoveries: maggots, for instance, and once a large piece of pinkish-white brain tissue extruding from one ear — the equivalent of a cerebral hemmorrhoid. Typically these rather sensational “A.M. surprises” subside by the time I have to meet friends or editors or critics for dinner. Even the cerebral hemmorrhoid shrunk back into my head that same day by about 7 P.M. and I was able to join two very powerful Japanese publishing executives at La Côte Basque without embarrassment. But these holes in my forehead were extra-corporeal in origin and, as such, more disturbing. I called Dr. Nils Wachtel. Wachtel was one of the White House “Dr. Feelgoods” who pumped JFK full of speed every day. (Personally — and I think Anna Quindlen might disagree with me on this one — I believe that Congress should make it mandatory that the President of the United States be kept on a continuous amphetamine drip IV. The Commander-in-Chief should be wide awake, 24 hours a day. I don’t want a President who wakes up with green gook in his eyes, all groggy, and who’s like “What day is it?” [According to an article by military veteran Xiao Ziming in the overseas edition of The People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), Mao slept only 25 minutes a day — devoting the rest of his time to statecraft, poetry, food, and to pleasuring himself in a specially made vulval-necked Ming vase designed to collect his seed for cryonic preservation. Today the Great Helmsman’s sperm is reportedly in the custody of Shining Path guerillas who move the specimens among several secret locations in the Andes via mobile refrigerators strapped to the backs of blindfolded llamas.]
Later at Wachtel’s office: “Whoever or whatever did this to you has either an incredibly hard, long, and thin drilling proboscis or used a very sophisticated drill with an advanced-ceramic bit, because these are very tiny but cleanly and precisely drilled holes that go deep into your skull … it could even have been some kind of laser.
“Look,” he said, after further examination, “there’s nothing I can do except patch up the holes with Plastic Skin, which is a kind of dermal spackling. You don’t seem to have suffered any kind of neurological damage, so I wouldn’t worry.”
He suggested that I wear bifocals whose bottom halves were microscopy lenses, enabling me to keep an eye out for any untoward devices or creatures that might appear in my bedroom. But I’ve found this intolerable because when I use them I become aware of how everything — silverware, drinking glasses, telephone receivers, toothbrushes, even the manuscript pages of the text you are presently enjoying — is covered with a thick layer of dust mite feces.
And as I compose the penultimate paragraph of this Intro, my girlfriend, who’s wearing the same iridescent chiffon cocktail dress that she’s had on for three days, is lying on the couch, headphones blasting Black Sabbath, guzzling Bacardi 151 until she passes out. Her muzzled rottweiler, sought by the FBI and Interpol in connection with the brutal 1998 mauling of Condor Tisch, Postmaster General under President Hallux Valgus, dreams at her side, its paws twitching spasmodically. Holographic images of celebrities (e.g., Newt Gingrich, Axl Rose), mistakenly transmitted into my home, bang against the closed windows like trapped flies oriented toward the transparency of glass but ignorant of its materiality.
And the tranquillity of the summer evening is shattered by another ten-minute nonstop barrage of projectile vomiting from the fifth-floor suite of the opulent Casa Grundy … followed, again, by the ominous whine of a power saw.
AAH!
He’s just arrived, apparently having come straight from the gym. The iconic proliferation of his face and body in magazines and newspapers and posters across the country has ironically inured us to the real majesty of his physical presence. Only when confronted by him in person, his face flushed, his hair slicked back, his torso veiny, topographical with muscle, visibly hot from the tremendous workout that professional bodybuilders have called kamikaze-like in its intensity, do we apprehend — with a spine-tingling frisson that I can only compare to my experience as an adolescent of seeing a huge lathery stallion and then a dirigible in rapid succession — how gorgeous he really is. It’s almost impossible to conceive that this is the body of an acclaimed writer. And not just an acclaimed writer, but perhaps the most influential writer at work today, certainly the writer who single-handedly brought a generation of young people flocking back to the bookstores after they had purportedly abandoned literature for good. Between mouthfuls of fennel-flavored monkfish, he chats amiably with a group of admirers who’ve surrounded him. His Ecuadorian girlfriend, wearing a lavender bustier and short chiffon skirt, gazes at him lovingly …
— Martha Stewart
It came as something of a surprise to discover that Martha Stewart’s August 3rd birthday/housewarming party in East Hampton was merely a pretense to meet me — and not simply to meet me, but to gather material for her adoring profile entitled “Totally Brilliant … Totally Buff” which appeared in the September issue of Condé Nast’s Traveler, and from which the foregoing is excerpted. After all, I’m a ruthless, corrupt, self-indulgent hypocrite; an opportunist, compulsive womanizer, liar, bully, and amphetamine addict. I approach fiction as a great ravenous lion might approach a helpless effete antelope who’s lying in the grass stupidly licking the gelatin that oozes from her hooves. Yet sometimes fiction is such docile prey to my depredations that it sickens me, and I feel like abandoning it to the hyenas and focusing my creative powers exclusively on poetry.