Un-fucking-believable, right? What would you think if I told you that I conceived of that entire scenario — word for word — in about two minutes, between sets of incline bench presses? I still have to figure out how to incorporate Camp Schreckensherrschaft, a weight-loss camp for terrorists that I found advertised in the back pages of The Sunday Times Magazine. The camp’s run by a guy called the Schreckenmeister (the Terror Master), an erstwhile operative for the notorious East German security service Stasi, who’d reputedly been cashiered because of a weight problem, and who then dedicated himself to training obese terrorists to lose weight and keep it off. A list of this guy’s clients reads like a who’s who of international terrorism: Carlos the Jackal (who was once known as Carlos the Hippo), Ulrike Meinhof, Abu Nidal, Abimael Guzman (the founder of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso), plus scores of formerly overweight members of the Japanese Red Army, the IRA, the ETA (the Basque-autonomist underground organization), plus many more! You’ll be shocked and amazed by the story of how the Schreckenmeister helped Renato Curcio — the Red Brigade mastermind of the Aldo Moro kidnapping — lose over 75 pounds simply by replacing whole milk ricotta and mozzarella cheese with low- or no-fat substitutes in his favorite dishes!
Here’s the chilling account of my first meeting with the “Terror Master”:
It was beautiful the way the sunlight filtered through the louvered blinds casting vertical slats of thermal illumination on the section of his face left intact. Most of the face was gone, mangled and riven on the battlefield or in the torture chambers of his enemies. There was a jagged swath of forehead, a bubbled crimson knob of cheekbone, and an eye, merciless and abstracted — these the last remaining vestiges of natal physiognomy; the rest was prosthetic — a filtrated perforation in lieu of nostrils, servomechanical jaws with ceramic-fiber-reinforced metal teeth, and polyurethane tongue. I stood there transfixed, as if before a masterpiece in a museum.
“I’m Mark Leyner,” I finally managed to mumble.
He extended his hand, tautly sheathed in a blue latex glove.
“I am the Schreckenmeister.”
Pretty chilling, huh? I also have to figure out how to incorporate the former NBA player who’s been programmed to kill whenever he hears Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” played at the wrong speed.
And I have to figure out how to incorporate the quartet of fifties-style a cappella vocalists who were performing for bauxite miners in Ghana when there was an explosion and cave-in, trapping the satin-suited lounge act almost two miles underground.
Here’s the stirring account of their rescue:
The singers are alive! The excavation team — grimy, exhausted, yet ever determined — is raising its blistered hands in joyous unison. The foreman puts his stethoscope to the ground and bids the crew, media representatives, and assembled onlookers to quiet down. He’s listening … he’s smiling … he’s beginning to snap his fingers. “They’re alive all right!” he’s saying, apparently discerning a very faint but unmistakable “doo wop doo wop … doo wop doo wop.”
Pretty stirring, huh?
FEELINGS
Today my marble citadel looms high above the asphalt, which is littered with the sun-bleached skeletons of my enemies. My dog Carmella wears a gold Rolex just above each of her four paws. I’m often seen dining at Spago, L.A.’s enduringly glamour-packed eatery, or strutting around Yemen in a full-length ermine coat, a hooker on each arm. Just yesterday, I was invited by ABC’s “The American Sportsman” to go to Australia to hunt bandicoots with aboriginal boomerangs along with Ken Follett and Whitley Strieber. Bergdorfs is charging $3,500 for a hand-carved Baccarat crystal bottle of “Team Leyner,” the perfume. (Forty million scent strips have been inserted in October and November issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vanity Fair, Mirabella, Glamour, and Mademoiselle.)
What’s a typical day like for Mark Leyner?
Yesterday, after a long afternoon of volunteer bereavement counseling and then reading to blind residents at a local nursing home, I go to Le Cirque. I drink something like 14 martinis. I get into a fight at the bar with the president of the Jersey City firefighters’ union over a woman we’re both trying to pick up. I kill him with a single roundhouse kick to the side of his head. I leave with the woman, who’s cooing to me in a gravelly basso profundo voice. When we get to my apartment, I dump out the contents of her pocketbook: loaded jade-handled pistol, Quaaludes, Thai “golden eggs” (vibrating anal-stimulation balls), a packet of pharmaceutical-grade morphine, a little black book with the private phone numbers of Pentagon officials. I get up on the bed and dance to the electronic music they use to drive fleas and cockroaches crazy, my hard-on glowing in the dark and keeping time like a metronome, and then we fuck until dawn, strangling each other almost to the point of unconsciousness with kimono sashes each time we climax.
The next morning, I prepare a Jerusalem artichoke and spinach salad, stewed rabbit in white wine, and a pureed chestnut and chocolate layer cake, and I bring it over to Sister Norberta for the homeless shelter she runs at the church. I write for the rest of the day — extended, lyrical, almost psalm-like meditations on the redemptiveness of love.
Will I ever reconcile my inner contradictions? Is it so terribly wrong to live the way I do?
GAMMA GLOBULIN, UP, OLIVES
Many of the great American poets of the late 20th century murdered Hollywood stars (perhaps to silence their shrill insipidity), but what were their writing habits?
The man who killed Kevin Costner, flayed him, and wore his skin eschewed the computer keyboard; he preferred to write his poetry in longhand, producing an indecipherable rebus of printed letters, script, numerical formulae, and pictures.
But Jesus! What a strange rich beautiful music was frozen in the inscrutability of these hieroglyphs, waiting to be awakened by the warm kiss of an expert’s exegesis, like cryonically preserved Vedic birds, thawed, and tweeting recondite ragas!
After a day of painful labor (he was a rigorous, fanatically self-critical, self-flagellating slave to his muse, and his progress from line to line and stanza to stanza was torturously slow), he would drive to town and stand in the middle of 7 Eleven, garbed in Costner’s flesh from head to toe — in a unitard of Costner’s skin — and he would affect Costner’s bovine gaze and Costner’s uninflected speech pattern, and recite those weirdly buoyant and long long lyrics to hapless customers, many immobile with horror, some amused and snickering.
How profoundly sad that he considered these often chemically dependent nocturnal nomads his public!
How profoundly sad that during his lifetime only isolated and ineffectual academics would apprehend the preternatural vivacity and divine fabric of his mind.
And the woman who smothered Julia Roberts — she is perhaps my favorite fin de siècle poet of all!
In “The Florist of Agony,” in measured stanzas simultaneously candid and marmoreal, she tells the story of two anthropologists — one very smart and domineering and one very stupid and obsequious — who travel to a part of Amazonia heretofore “unmolested by civilization.” They encounter a tribe of fierce, head-shrinking, hallucinogen-snorting people who befriend them and allow them to live in their village as kin. But soon, through a series of comically abortive sexual encounters with pubescent girls, the tall, sleazy anthropologist discovers that the tribespeople are robots. Who built them? No one knows. Perhaps a tribe of sophisticated rain forest inhabitants who lived thousands of years ago and committed mass suicide rather than face a time when people like Costner, Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Emilio Estevez would be considered “stars.” Or perhaps they were cannibalized by their own robotic progeny — severely tonsured, squat, broad-nosed “Indians,” the women naked save for feather appurtenances, the men wearing only penis strings.