THE CONTESTANT: What is Sbarro-on-Hudson?
THE HOST: Right you are, for $10,000!
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE CONTESTANT: Let it ride, Bob. “Team Leyner” for $25,000!
THE AUDIENCE: [Applause]
THE HOST: “Certain muscles were so convex, so protuberant, so cantilevered, that they kept the areas beneath them completely shaded from the sun. So his body was mottled red and white. His torso was cubist. And I’d come home from a grueling ten-hour day of back-to-back sessions with clients, and I’d find this two-tone cubist troglodyte on the floor of his office, completely naked, a tampon string hanging out of his ass, softly ranting into a tape recorder, and I’d think to myself, I just can’t take this much longer. Nothing in all my training as a psychotherapist prepared me for marriage with a man so relentless in his effort to construct a self out of the fabric of pure delusion, a man whose valuation of other human beings was so warped that he was, at any instant, capable of terrifying outbursts of cruelty and violence. We went to a computer store one day because Mark needed a new daisy wheel for his printer, and he asked the salesclerk if they sold a daisy wheel with the Tifanagh font. Tifanagh is an obscure medieval script used by Berber women for writing love poetry — of course they didn’t carry it, no company even manufactures such a thing. But Mark became absolutely crazed. He grabbed a surge protector off the shelf and beat the clerk quite badly. It’s only because the cops who responded to the owner’s frantic 911 call were big fans of Mark’s books that he wasn’t arrested. A similar incident occurred at Sears one morning. We were shopping for gardening supplies and Mark asked a salesperson — a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen — if Sears sold bags of Raptor Pellets. Raptor pellets are hair-and-bone balls regurgitated by birds of prey. The poor kid gave us this befuddled shrug and Mark went nuts. Mark’s got a tremendously powerful throwing arm — he pitched, I believe, four or five no-hitters in a single season when he played semi-pro ball down in the Galápagos Islands. Now, I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to be hit by a crocus bulb that’s traveling 98 miles per hour, but this poor kid caught the first one above the left temple and crumpled. It took some dozen men from heavy appliances to finally restrain my husband from further violence. But again, when these guys found out that this was Mark Leyner, it was all high-fives and autographs — forget about the kid, who’s propped up unconscious against a 50-pound bag of peat moss.
“It seemed like another lifetime when Mark and I would lie in bed at night reading Bleak House and The Spoils of Poynton to each other. More recently he’d insist on regaling me with the most vile, adolescent, fetishistic sorts of trash as I lay there with the covers pulled over my face. Just to give you a random example of the type of bedtime story I was subjected to, here’s the jacket copy from a typical offering:
She pulled Snap’s pants off and tossed them on the floor.
“What are these?” she asked, her hand probing between his legs.
“Balls … t-t-testicles,” he stammered.
“They look good,” she said, brandishing a straight-edge razor that glinted as she began to sharpen it on a long leather strop.
From the day that he got his first Polaroid camera, Snap was the quintessential all-American shutterbug — Cub Scout photo club, high school newspaper photography editor, U.P.I, stringer. But when he went 200 miles beneath the surface of the earth to get photos of a flesh-eating, gynecocratic, subterranean culture, his life began to go out of focus and he had to pull out all the f-stops just to survive!
“I’d make one final attempt at persuading Mark to hospitalize himself and begin long-term in-patient psychotherapy. I arranged to meet him at one of his preferred haunts, in the hopes that a congenial environment would make him, if not wholly sympathetic, at least somewhat receptive to my recommendation. It was a South Philadelphia after-hours club frequented by a nefarious assortment of methamphetamine traffickers, Cosa Nostra hitmen, extortionists, bookmakers, and Bryn Mawr students who found the truculent, garishly garbed habitués of this lurid night spot a perfect libidinal antidote to their professors — whose repertoire of facial tics, speech impediments, halitosis, and dandruff (which clogged the wide wales of their corduroy jackets) made the Oresteian trilogy and Isthmian odes so insufferable.
“I told him that it had all became more than I could bear: the insane obsession with his body, with compulsively altering the size and shape of its parts, with its secretions and their sundry smells and tastes; the government’s punitive confiscation program that was dispossessing us of everything we’d worked so hard to acquire; the pills, the booze, the Bolasterone, and testosterone cypionate; the philandering; and most of all — the strident, evangelical exaltation of his own psychopathology, as if there were some revelatory alchemical truth in his stunted development, ordaining him to proselytize a benighted humanity.
“He stared vacantly past me, sucking on the silver skull he wore on a chain around his neck, looked at his wrist-watch, and mumbled something about having to meet a new business partner with whom he was purchasing a syndicate of decrepit nursing homes.
“And that was the end.”
THE CONTESTANT: What is an excerpt from Arleen Portada’s When Telling Your Husband That He’s “A Delusional, Narcissistic Sadist with Deep-Seated, Unresolved Issues About His Mother” Just Isn’t Enough Anymore: My Seven Turbulent Years as the Wife of Cult Author Mark Leyner?
THE HOST: That’s absolutely correct, for $25,000! And we’re all out of time for today! See you back here tomorrow!!
THE AUDIENCE: [Wild cheering]
THE PRERECORDED VOICE: A tintinnabulation of kisses deep in the brain. A tiny leak of neurotransmitters, perhaps. An infinitesimal burst gasket in the latticework of cerebral piping. But the densely packed, intricately knotted ribbons of self-congratulatory cognition writhe into perpetuity … into the perpetuity of night.
[Roll credits]
[Dissolve]
WHERE THE BEE SUCKS, THERE SUCK I
“In your culture, it’s not considered appropriate for a heterosexual man to be in the presence of his heterosexual sister if she is naked, correct?” asked the anthropologist.
The tribal headman nodded. “Yes.”
The anthropologist, who was tape-recording the conversation and taking written notes, made a quick notation and then looked up, smiling at the headman.
“It is also not considered appropriate for a heterosexual woman to be in the presence of her heterosexual brother if he is naked, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Why is this?”
“The modesty of a man or a woman in the presence of his or her opposite-sex sibling is a built-in preventative mechanism that has the effect of precluding sexual arousal. Sexual arousal between siblings is incestuous and incest is an absolute taboo in our culture.”