I composed a very beautiful poem earlier this morning when I was in my garden, weed-whacking:
Why did best-selling author Martin Cruz Smith
testify before a secret Senate subcommittee
that superlawyer Alan Dershowitz has
continuously lactating breasts that could someday
produce up to 50 gallons of milk a day in space?
Legendary legal eagle F. Lee Bailey and
sf virtuoso Ray Bradbury debate the issue
that’s tearing the American legal and dairy communities apart.
Martha Stewart,
you awaken in me a new fury,
a new desperation to stun my enemies!
No family but fans!
I a hunk, a psycho!
It is rare that a poem so fully realized and of such complexity would arise spontaneously and intact, leaving me to merely rush to my laptop, the loam from my garden darkening the keyboard as I furiously type, verses beginning to fade from memory much as a dream dissipates upon awakening. Aah, if only one could apply a kind of oneiric fixative to dreams before they vanish …
C’EST SI BON
In a garden of video sculptures, sleek geometries, Mylar surfaces, and falling water, G. takes off her sweat-soaked tennis shirt — her nipples are covered with two banana daiquiri transdermal patches that transmit the cocktail through her skin into her capillaries — and she breaks off a shard of brittle matzoh and scratches a name on her arm: Jose Canseco. He appears, guitar in hand. She hears the faint echo of her doctor’s voice, “G., don’t give up, fight, please, G., stay with us.” It seems so ridiculous, now that G. knows what really happens after you die, now that G. knows how wonderful it really is. Raising her outstretched palm, she urges Canseco to increase the volume of his song. His music is primal and throbbing, his lyrics speak of the open road, of sin, of guns, of steroids, of Madonna. The masturbating zebras, their long slender penises like black and white barber poles, join in on the chorus, the gist of which is simply: “The government is suppressing information about how sweet life after death is.”
Of course they are. Why did every single scientist who was working on the secret Life After Death Project commit suicide? Once they found out how fantastic it is, once they realized how shitty life before death is compared to life after death, they raced home to their pistols, pills, razor blades, plastic bags, and exhaust-filled garages. Some were too impatient to even endure the commute home and — too eager to even wait for the elevator — they raced 30 stories up the stairwell to the roof of the institute and leapt with the exultant whoops of children pouring from the schoolyard in the last days of June.
DIAMOND HEAD
She was Rachel, the Lubavitcher girl. Rachel lived a pious studious life, studying the Torah. She’d never ventured much beyond the confines of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. But one night she and two of her girlfriends went to Chinatown. And there she met Nguyen Du, a member of Born to Kill, the craziest, most violent Vietnamese gang in New York. So began the love story that would turn two families, two communities, two cultures inside out. Only Mark Leyner — who underwent cosmetic surgery (blepharoplasty) and lived with Born to Kill for a year, eating, sleeping, and stealing with them, frequenting their haunts (Maria’s coffee shop on Lafayette Street and the Tung Nam Har mall on Canal) — could capture the pathos, the humor, and the garish violence of this incendiary romance. Imagine Chaim Potok collaborating with Amy Tan and Iceberg Slim. Imagine Fiddler on the Roof starring Bruce Lee. Imagine Miss Saigon with book by Martin Buber and music by Booger Storm, a garage “cai luong” band from suburban Da Nang. Your heart will melt when Rachel’s eyes meet Nguyen’s for the very first time. You’ll squirm in your reading chair during the extraordinary mystical battle scenes between Rachel’s Kabbalah-wielding father and Nguyen’s cousin, an I Ching — toting Taoist alchemist. You’ll weep big-time when Born to Kill assassins machine-gun the synagogue during Nguyen’s bar mitzvah. You’ll become dizzy, perhaps even nauseous, as you’re catapulted from the kosher pizzerias of midtown Manhattan’s diamond district to the chaotic fish markets of Mott Street. But love conquers all in this vertiginous bildungsroman of the human heart. In an unforgettable tour de force of impressionistic reportage, Leyner follows Rachel and Nguyen on their honeymoon to a bed and breakfast inn near the malfunctioning Platte River nuclear power plant. Nguyen visits the sarcophagus-like reactor and absorbs massive amounts of gamma radiation, which inexplicably enables him to travel through time. You’ll gnash your teeth and tear the hair from your head when Rachel decides that she has no other choice but to accept Nguyen’s decision to travel back in history and attempt to have sex with civilization’s most luminary women, women whom Nguyen has secretly lusted after ever since his junior high school history class. You’ll teeter on the edge of your seat as Nguyen, working against a tightly scheduled itinerary, tries to score with the likes of Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria, Madame Curie, Florence Nightingale, Edith Piaf, Babe Didrikson, and Amelia Earhart. Meanwhile, inexplicably, Rachel has been sent to live on a commune populated by a terrifying assortment of psychopaths: serial killers, neo-Nazi skinheads, cocaine-cartel hitmen, “angel of death” hospital orderlies, etc. Imagine Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Utopian, socialistic community in his novel The Blithedale Romance—but now imagine it inhabited by Ed Gein, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, Mark David Chapman, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc. Rachel’s escape from this egalitarian pit of evil (engineered by an intrepid team of Hasidic Ninjas, masters of night stealth in their black fedoras and frock coats) and her ultimate reunion with Nguyen comprise one of the most electrifying narrative sequences in modern literature. But all is not quite peaches and cream (or perhaps we should say, kreplach and nuoc mam). Rachel is anguished by what she perceives as Nguyen’s abandonment of her. Although Nguyen has converted to Judaism, learned Yiddish, and forsworn the drug peddling and gunplay that characterized his youth, Rachel feels that she will never again trust him sufficiently for an intimate relationship. Enter Dr. Harriet Raeburn, couples therapist extraordinaire. Remember Sybil’s therapist — the one who patiently integrated Sally Field’s swarm of personalities? Remember Dr. Martin T. Orne, poet Anne Sexton’s psychiatrist who first persuaded Anne to write down her feelings and add line breaks? Harriet Raeburn is such a therapist. You’ll cry tears of joy when after only nine years of weekly couple therapy, Rachel and Nguyen are able to again communicate without physical violence and are able to look into each other’s eyes with the longing and passion of that first night at the New Viet Huong on Mulberry Street.