“Tell him, Grandma,” one of them said.
And she said: “Mark, you’re on ‘America’s Favorite Secret Videos!’ ” (Or “America’s Funniest Covert Surveillance Videos” or something — I don’t remember the exact name of the show, some rewarmed version of “Candid Camera.”)
I was deeply hurt by the whole episode. I felt that my Grandma had betrayed me. But no one in my family understood how I felt. My parents and my sister were all excited about Grandma and me being on TV and they couldn’t understand what my problem was. They had no idea how embarrassed I felt about the video and how mortified I’d be when all my friends saw it. And they had no inkling of how painful and profoundly disillusioning it was to have my own grandmother behave in such a dishonest and treacherous way to me.
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE HOST: OK, let’s get started!
THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $100, Bob.
THE HOST: “When he was in the third grade, he had stationery printed up that said ‘From the word processor of Mario Puzo …’ and he’d write these unbelievably prolix, baroque, hallucinatory, torridly erotic mash notes to the female teachers at his elementary school.
“Today, farmers let their land lie fallow after having visions of his semen raining down from the sky and fecundating their fields. Wives refuse to get out of bed, remaining supine, their legs spread in the air, declining to even roll onto their sides lest a drop of his precious fluid leak from their vaginas, after dreaming that he’s floated into their bedrooms like a muscle-bound incubus and made love to them, bringing them to seismic, apocalyptic orgasms with one single stroke of his unearthly dick.…”
THE CONTESTANT: Who is Mark Leyner?
THE HOST: “Who is Mark Leyner?” is correct, for $100!
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $500, Bob.
THE HOST: “The worst thing that can happen to a man is to die anonymous. You can be a sensitive guy, really in touch with your feelings, gentle and loving to your wife and kids, active in all sorts of charitable organizations, you can tithe 75 percent of your income to Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity, etc. etc., but then one day, you die — and outside of your friends and family, who gives a fuck? Nobody. You came, you went, no one remembers, no one cares. It’s a tragedy. Because this is the critical difference between a human being and an animal — the capability to be famous. There are exceptions, like Secretariat or Willard or Flipper, but generally, only a human being can make himself immortal with renown. This is your destiny. But die unknown, and you will disgrace me, and I will endlessly grovel through the streets of eternity, eating garbage and mumbling incoherent nonsense.”
THE CONTESTANT: What did Mark Leyner’s mother whisper as she nuzzled him to her breast immediately after his birth?
THE HOST: That’s absolutely right, for $500!
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $750, Bob.
THE HOST: “The size of a Ping-Pong ball, it’s fifty times as large as that of a normal heterosexual male’s.”
THE CONTESTANT: What is the third interstitial nucleus of Mark Leyner’s hypothalamus?
THE HOST: You got it, for $750!
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $1,000, Bob.
[There’s a deafening arpeggio of sirens.]
THE HOST: It’s Double or Trouble!
THE AUDIENCE: [Jubilant shouting and stomping]
THE HOST: You can risk your entire winnings to double your money with a correct answer for a total of $4,700 or you can play it safe for the $1,000.
THE CONTESTANT: I’ll risk it all! Double or Trouble, Bob!
THE AUDIENCE: [Thunderous ovation]
THE HOST: Her father founded TV-OLFATO, the first global smell-a-vision network, whose inaugural broadcast was “Que Oloroso!” an olfactory portrait of Julio Iglesias, beamed across Central and South America on September 10, 1994. Known variously as “Kid Woman,” “Yuka D.,” and “Squirmelia,” she consummated her affair with Leyner on a “bed” of plastic bubble wrap in a Bloomingdale’s stockroom.
THE CONTESTANT: Who is the Ecuadorian girlfriend?
[There’s an explosion, then a huge flash and Shockwave. Black, acrid smoke fills the studio. When the air finally begins to clear, shattered glass and other debris can be seen littering the ground. The metal grid that supported various lights and microphones is mangled and twisted, the audience is cheering ecstatically.]
THE HOST: That’s exactly right! Double or Trouble for $4,700!!
THE AUDIENCE: [More wild cheering]
THE CONTESTANT: Let’s stick with “Team Leyner” for $5,000, Bob.
THE HOST: This Team Leyner honcho defected from the organization and wrote a shocking exposé. After hearing the title of his or her book, identify the honcho: Megalomania’s Mascot: My Life with the Team Leyner Cult (As told to Cleveland Amory).
THE CONTESTANT: Who is Carmella?
THE HOST: “Who is Carmella?” is absolutely correct, for $5,000!
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE CONTESTANT: “Team Leyner” for $10,000, Bob.
THE HOST: “After their resignations were angrily rejected by a raving, wild-eyed Leyner who’d taken to wearing a lavishly be-medaled military uniform and a booby-trapped truss (apparently to be detonated in case of capture), Desiree Buttcake and the elderly bodyguards were placed in a Polyvinylchloride kiddie pool filled with powdered poi mix (a desperate, ruthless Leyner threatening to add water) and surrounded by an 18-foot-high fence topped with concertina wire and electrified with 400 volts and guarded by a rudimentary cyborg pig who’d been jerry-built from spare laboratory cadaver organs and obsolete computer components. (In the final days, Leyner personally constructed the so-called ‘hog of vigilance,’ naming it ‘Mahapuna’ after the sow warrior-goddess of Hawaiian mythology.) It featured an old bulky Radio Shack ‘brain’ with only 32 kilobytes of RAM, its cardiopulmonary system was powered by 17 hamster hearts rigged in tandem, and its prosthetic cloven hooves were made out of plastic vacuum cleaner casters. Although capable of limited ambulation and of digesting small amounts of slop, it was incapable of snorting, rooting for truffles, and other characteristically porcine behaviors, making it the object of constant derision from disgruntled Team Leyner staffers. Using small amounts of cleverly concealed Czechoslovak-made Semtex plastic explosive, Butt-cake and the bodyguards managed to escape from Team Leyner Headquarters in the middle of the night. After three weeks of wandering the countryside, during which time they subsisted on hailstones, discarded pizza crusts scavenged from frat house dumpsters, and ultimately, when even this meager food source became unavailable, licking the dried sweat from the earpieces of each other’s sunglasses, they sought and were granted asylum in this posh Westchester County community founded by the owner of a popular Italian fast-food franchise.”