The young acolytes reappeared, rooting their molars with long toothpicks, and escorted the stocky biotech exec into the rain forest.
The headman flicked a pebble at his administrative assistant, who’d been staring off into space, scratching his crotch. The round stone glanced sharply off his forehead.
“Who’s next, babaçú heto-hokã [worthless one]?”
“Chief, a Mr. Geoffrey Hoag and a Ms. Pamela van Zandt of Pretty Polly Inc., a British hosiery producer, were supposed to have been here half an hour ago. Maybe they’re lost.”
“Maybe …” echoed the headman bemusedly, gazing out toward a clearing in the jungle where a jaguar, who’d eaten the 50 pounds of rugelach that Korngold had brought for the chief, lay sprawled among white bakery boxes and string, immobile, his belly extremely fat, panting in the heat.
YELLOW FEVER
Ashley had just eaten the last chocolate egg.
“Mama, whatever possessed Mia Farrow to marry Frank Sinatra?” she asked, her words slurred somewhat by the thick volume of confection filling her little mouth and encumbering the agility of that trilling little tongue.
“Dear, not another word until you swallow what’s in your mouth. You’re a very naughty, very gluttonous little sugar addict.”
Ashley, with visible effort, swallowed the large sweet bolus, quite prematurely, especially as she was accustomed to savoring her chocolate upon her palate until it had seemed to melt away.
“That’s better. Now, what makes you ask why Mia Farrow would marry Frank Sinatra?”
“Well, Mama, when I look at the other men in Mia’s life — sensitive, artistic men like Andre Previn and Woody Allen — I just can’t understand what she saw in such a coarse, vulgar man who flaunted his Mafia connections and referred to women as ‘broads’ and ‘cunts.’ ”
Ashley reached into a crystal wassail bowl filled with jellybeans and candy corn and conveyed a fistful to her mouth.
“Ashley!”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she mumbled. “These are my last ones, I promise.”
“They most certainly are, young lady. Why, if you keep this up, you’ll be the only little girl in Gregory Day School wearing dentures.”
“Last ones, promise.”
“Ashley, what I don’t think you understand quite yet is that in their heart of hearts, women don’t lust after men who are merely sensitive and artistic. Men like that are ultimately quite boring. On the other hand, women can’t truly be loved and nurtured by men who are brutes and nothing more. And often in the course of a woman’s life, she vacillates back and forth from one extreme to the other in an effort to satisfy the spectrum of her needs. How rare it is that a single man can embody both of these seemingly antipodal profiles. Your grandfather, Ashley, was such a man.”
“Grandpa Mark?”
“Yes, Grandpa Mark — may his soul rest in peace.”
“Mama, what sort of man was Grandpa Mark?” Ashley asked, stealthily plucking several caramels from a jar across the table, as her mother took a tissue and dabbed her eyes, which had moistened at this recollection of her late, illustrious father.
“Your Grandpa Mark was a violent maverick loner with a fatal weakness for Hispanic women … and he was the finest, most audacious, most illuminating, most influential and imitated writer of his time. He was all these things.”
“Will there ever be anyone like him again, Mama?”
“Never.”
I was awakened by the gentle caress of a familiar flipper-like appendage.
“Oh … Joe … I just had the weirdest dream. I was dead, I guess, and I had this granddaughter on a perpetual sucrose binge and …”
“Mr. Leyner, I’m leaving.”
“Wake me up when you get back, OK, Joe?”
“No, Mr. Leyner. I mean I’m leaving. I’m quitting.”
I discerned through groggy eyes Joe’s luggage in the doorway.
“Et tu, babe?” I said.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Leyner. But I just can’t handle it anymore.…”
“Forget about it, Joe. Do what you have to do. And if you ever need a reference …”
The image of yeoman Joe Casale struggling with his suitcases as he made his way down the hall dissolved in a mist of emotion.
I loved that guy.
ZWANGSWIRTSCHAFT
On September 24, 1994, federal operatives, acting under the authority of the Punitive Confiscation Act, seized Chapter Five manuscript entries for the letters B, E, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, U, and X.
Team Leyner deeply regrets the impossibility of including these sections in what the author had intended to be a complete abecedarian series.
Chapter Six
AN ORAL HISTORY
CONNIE CHUNG: I’m fairly certain that I was the last one to see him on that final day. He was in the throes of his work — writing frenetically, wearing his trough. (So that he never had to leave his computer keyboard, he’d devised a small trough that hung from his neck and from which he ate continuously while he typed.)
Whether it was tragedy or comedy that he’d been commissioned to produce, the sine qua non was elegance. The apotheosis of elegance and élan in his own rough-hewn attire and phlegmatic demeanor, he had written extensively on the subject, including a 1,300-page disquisition on armpit fetishism composed in the form of intricate commentaries on the hitherto suppressed Polaroid photographs of Bruce Lee’s underarms that were taken by Steve McQueen in the late 1960s when the two were scouting locations in Bangkok for a Kung Fu version of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—a film that was never made. (I might add here that McQueen’s other dream project, Honey, I Shrunk the Children of a Lesser God, the story of a maniacal scientist obsessed with miniaturizing deaf children, was also never made.)
Incessantly haunted by hallucinations of apocalyptic mayhem and driven half-mad by a desire to simultaneously terrorize and seduce women in uniform, he has attempted to live a decent, productive life. To those whom he has offended, those who have found his almost masturbatory exaltations of Darwinian natural selection cynical and misanthropic, I offer the following incident from his youth as he himself recounts it in his shocking memoir, Et Tu, Babe:
As the anesthesia wore off, a bushy-haired man in a gauze mask, with a stethoscope around his neck, and a percussion hammer and sphygmomanometer jutting from the pocket of his white lab coat, came into focus.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Leyner. Mark Leyner,” I answered groggily.
“Do you know where you are?”
“All I know is that I answered an ad in
High Times
for volunteers for experimental brain surgery and that a week later a Nissan mini-van picked me up and I was driven blindfolded to a secret laboratory in Tijuana.”
“You don’t remember undergoing the procedure?”
“Procedure? What are you talking—?”
At that moment, half a dozen FDA agents, automatic weapons blazing, killed the “doctor” who had operated on me, and then escorted me to the border where I was given $20 and a small bottle of effervescent apple juice.
JOAN JETT: Notwithstanding all the bullshit to the contrary, I was the last person to be with Mark Leyner before he disappeared. I remember that afternoon vividly — Mark was at his escritoire, his fingers a blur across the keyboard of his laptop, thick daubs of chili paste on his temples, his nipples, and his balls. [Leyner would apply a poultice of chili paste to his temples, nipples, and testicles whenever he felt “blocked,” claiming that it unclogged the channels through which his “interior elixir” flowed.]