MAILBAG
Dear Mark,
First of all, I’d just like to say what tremendous pleasure your books have given my entire family. My wife and I just think that you’re an out-and-out American genius of the highest magnitude. The kids think that reading your fiction is “excellent — like being on drugs,” and they both want to be writers, thanks to you. We all loved Martha Stewart’s piece on you in Traveler—please say “buenos dias” to your Ecuadorian girlfriend for us! We’ve recently read articles in the Enquirer and the Star about how distracting your divorce from Arleen has been for you and how it might significantly delay the completion of your new book and we’ve heard rumors about your violent mood swings from steroids and about how they and the Lincoln’s morning breath scandal may have cost you lucrative endorsement contracts for Ore-Ida Tater Tots and, more importantly, for Phallotropin — the new synthetic Penile Growth Hormone from Genitotech, and about how the government’s punitive confiscation program is eating away at your net worth, and how Team Leyner has become a miasma of antagonism, misunderstanding, and mutual suspicion, and about how there’s sectarian strife within the elderly bionic security force, and about how Baby Lago defected and went to work for Tom Clancy, and we’d just like to say that we don’t believe any of it, and we look forward to your new book with great excitement and anticipation.
Ed Audet
Cicero, NY
Dear [insert name],
Thanks so much for your kind words. Although my busy schedule does not permit me to personally respond to the tremendous volume of adulatory mail that I receive, I’d like to send you and your family an official Team Leyner gift. Please indicate on the enclosed business reply card which exciting premium you’d like rushed to your home.
A. One slow-release polymer matrix system LeynerHead Sublingual Software Lozenge that, placed under the tongue, provides you with the sensation of being a sinewy and licentious pop icon (do not use LeynerHead software lozenge if you have a hernia or difficulty in urination due to enlargement of prostate gland).
B. Finley Pantry Maid—Performance artist Karen Finley, who provoked the wrath of conservatives across the country when she received federal grants for performances that included shoving yams up her ass, has now angered many of her supporters by signing a multimillion-dollar licensing deal with the Pantry-Maid Company. PantryMaid will be making a plastic “Karen Finley Kitchen Canister.” The container, molded into a scale model of Finley’s ass with a screw-top anus, will allow you to store not only yams, but rice, candy, leftover beef Bourguignon … whatever you want. Here’s a microwavable, dishwasher-safe kitchen container with a dash of downtown-intellectual cachet. Team Leyner is proud to offer you — as an absolutely free gift premium — the Finley PantryMaid, which is not yet available in any store!
C. Ahfongool!: Petrarchan Love Sonnets by John Gotti—Experience a facet of the “Dapper Don” that you don’t often read about in the tabloids. This collection of ardent, elegantly crafted Petrarchan love sonnets, composed by the capo di tutti capi of the Gambino crime family between 1983 and 1992, is masterfully translated from the Italian by the esteemed Richard Howard, winner of a National Book Award for his rendering from Yiddish to English of Meyer Lansky’s Talmudic commentaries. This exquisite first-edition book, with Italian and English lyrics printed on facing pages, bound in leather with richly hubbed spines ornamented in 22-karat gold and produced with gilded page edges and specially milled acid-free paper, will be a treasured addition to your heirloom library. Ahfongool! is a “must-have” for bibliophiles everywhere!
D. The Complete Guide to Forensic Musicology—a comprehensive sourcebook exploring this fascinating and revolutionary field in which scientists, by studying molecular changes in the ear’s cochlea, can determine what music homicide or suicide victims were listening to at the time of their deaths.
Dear Mark,
My girlfriend and I have a bet over who’s older, soul crooner Isaac Hayes or Dash Crofts of Seals & Crofts. I say Hayes. (Whoever wins has to be the other one’s sex slave for 24 hours.)
Lewis Pavlik
Boonton, NJ
Dear Lewis,
I hope you sprinkled a lot of Spanish fly on your Wheaties this morning. Isaac Hayes was born on August 20, 1942, making him 49 years old. Crofts performed his first extrauterine concert on August 14, 1940, putting 51 candles on his B’day Twinkie. Enjoy your captivity while it lasts, big guy.
Dear Mark,
You’re playing tennis with your father. It’s a brutally hot and humid afternoon. The other courts are empty, apparently no one else is willing to play in this stifling heat. You and your father have each won a set apiece. The score of the third and deciding set is six games to five, you’re serving at 40–30, match point. Your father’s face is flushed, his breathing is labored. You hit a 112-miles-an-hour serve wide to his backhand. He grunts as he lurches toward the sideline, barely getting his racket on the ball, but managing to return it. He groans, apparently having severely twisted — perhaps even sprained or broken — his ankle. Sensing a diminution of his mobility, you float a delicate drop shot just over the net with so much backspin that it barely rises from the ground. Your father limps desperately in from backcourt, clutching his chest with one hand, and he lunges toward the ball, tumbling to the hot asphalt surface, scraping sections of flesh off his knees and elbows, but amazingly getting the ball back over the net, but not deep into your court. You decide to take advantage of his obvious fatigue and battered legs. You lob over his head, forcing him to backpedal as fast as he can in order to save the point, the set, and the match. In the still sultry air, you can hear him wheeze as he struggles back, back, back … and flicks his racket head at the ball, managing an absolutely last-ditch survival-lob that sends the ball back high into the shallow court — a perfect setup for your game-, set-, and match-winning overhead smash. As you keep your eyes focused on the ball and you bend your knees and arch your back in preparation for the authoritative winner, you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that your father has collapsed. Do you forgo the winning smash, leap over the net, and rush to your father’s assistance? Or do you hit the overhead, winning the hard-fought match, and then rush to your father’s aid? Mr. Leyner, you make the call.
Greg Hayes
Evansville, IN
Dear Greg,
Nietzsche wrote: “What is good? — All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad? — All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? — The feeling that power is increasing.”