He was his usual confident, ebulliently bellicose self, with his sights set very much on the future. For instance, while I was there that day, he’d occasionally — as a momentary respite from his literary labors — devote his attention to a linen design he was working on for J. P. Stevens’ “Team Leyner Bed and Bath Collection.” [The flat and fitted sheets depicted four 275-pound Nigerian infantrymen bathing naked in a sylvan pond, their uniforms and weapons hanging from the branches of a spreading sycamore tree. The pillowcases were a canary legal-pad print, emblazoned with miscellaneous “numerical fun facts” rendered in Leyner’s exuberantly juvenile calligraphy — e.g., “There are 40 million denture wearers in the United States,” “Bats roosting under the Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin eat 14 tons of insects a night,” “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a form of spongiform encephalopathy) strikes one person in a million worldwide,” etc.]
Later on in the afternoon, we took a couple of bottles of scotch up to the rooftop patio and we played this drinking game that Mark invented. You listen to one of those talk-radio stations and every time you hear the word “the” or “and” you have to take a drink.
I remember … that afternoon, we … we … I’m sorry … I get kind of emotional when I … Do you have a tissue? I just really miss that son of a bitch. If you can imagine being kidnapped by some gorgeous psychopath and you’re in this stolen semi, and each tire is inflated with laughing gas, and you’re plummeting down this endless gradient, and he’s not saying a word, but there’s this … this peripheral blur of subliminal billboards … and it’s the most beautiful spaced-out erotic poetry in the world, and it’s his poetry, and it’s speaking to you in this incredible way that every woman yearns to be spoken to, and … well, that’s what it was like being with Mark Leyner. He was real intense.
GEORGE PLIMPTON: Leyner didn’t have a regular shower head in his shower — he’d attached one of those Water-Piks that people use for cleaning their teeth. He liked an extremely concentrated, piercing stream of water in which to bathe. He found it more effective in dislodging dirt from those hard-to-clean parts of his body — all the furrows and crevices — and, frankly, I think he just liked the way it felt. Sometimes he’d lie prostrate in the tub for hours letting this thin pulsing line of hot water hit the top of his coccyx bone — the area from which his vestigial tail was removed soon after his foster father found him on the Pebble Beach golf course.
His foster dad was an avid golfer, and one afternoon he was out on the back nine and he hit a wedge shot and carved a hefty divot out of the fairway, and there — unearthed and wriggling in the sun for the first time in its life — was a cute itsy-bitsy little fetal humanoid whose biological mother had, just moments before, buried it alive. That was Mark Leyner! The poor little … Do you have a tissue? [Leyner’s natural mother had suffered accidental gamma ray exposure as a teenager. Doctors warned her that there was a possibility that the radiation had scrambled the DNA in her eggs, dooming her to mutant births. Dr. Shlomo Hemplemann, noted forensic psychiatrist and author of One Monster, Many Mommies: Whose Fault Is Mark Leyner?, contends that overwhelming anxiety concerning the potential abnormality of the newborn motivated this attempted infanticide.]
From these humble beginnings to international superstardom to his current contretemps — a fascinating and complex journey. I’ve come to know hundreds of artists in my life, but I must say that I’ve never encountered a single one — writer, painter, composer — possessed by anything approaching the colossal scope of Leyner’s ambition. I remember sitting with him on a marble bench sipping local grappa under an old pomegranate tree in a beautiful little courtyard on the Lou Ferrigno estate, and I asked him what he hoped to ultimately accomplish in his career. He talked about his vision of a nation where every home has a speaker that broadcasts passages from his books throughout waking hours, where his texts are read over loudspeakers on the main streets.
CARL SAGAN: He was absolutely serious about leaving Earth and relocating elsewhere. He was not at all nostalgic about the terrestrial world, and he was quite unsympathetic and impatient with my ecological concerns. He’d say, “Carl, the world’s population is putting such a strain on the global infrastructure and, in particular, on the world’s water supply and sewerage capacities, that by the middle of the twenty-first century, if someone flushes a toilet in Mombasa and you’re in the shower in San Diego, you’ll get scalded. All the more reason to get off the planet, babe. Why stay if conditions are going to be so impossible? Rather than flagellating ourselves for having plundered the earth of its precious resources and for having toxified the globe’s air, water, and soil, why not channel our intellectual and spiritual energies into figuring out how to get the hell out of here. Once we’re a safe distance from this place, on a nice hospitable planet with a respirable atmosphere and fauna capable of being ground up into some kind of burger, then we can determine culpability and mete out the punishment.”
There are still so many things we don’t understand about him — even those of us who know him well. Why, for instance, did he write a weekly letter to General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime prime minister who was hanged in 1948 as a war criminal? [These bizarre missives — each of which was returned unopened and peppered with the Japanese postal service’s “Return to Sender” stamp, and dutifully filed and cataloged in a vault in the catacombs of the Team Leyner Library by Team Leyner archivist Yvette Bokassa — were no hastily scribbled apostrophes, but lengthy, detailed, searingly self-appraising synopses and analyses of that week’s events, often running in excess of 75 single-spaced pages!] Why correspond with an infamous Japanese general who’s been dead for over half a century? Why?
I was on my way to Sea World in a rented Ford Escort, blow-drying my bangs, when the news came over the radio that he’d disappeared. I had to pull over.
CHRISTIAAN BARNARD: When Leyner made the decision to have the mole in his right eyebrow removed, the news was apparently leaked to several fanzines. Apprised of the impending surgery, his followers immediately began clamoring for the mole — as evidenced by the thousands upon thousands of phone calls and letters received at headquarters, his fans wanted that mole and they wanted it bad.
Team Leyner elected to sponsor a lottery, the winner of which would actually receive the mole in a transplant. The mole would be grafted onto any part of the winner’s body that he or she chose. I was personally recruited by Leyner himself to perform the mole transplant. The winner of the lottery was a sixteen-year-old girl from Terre Haute, Indiana, who sent in her high school yearbook picture with an arrow drawn indicating the center of her forehead.
After I excised the mole from Leyner’s eyebrow, it was frozen and flown by helicopter to University Hospital in Terre Haute, where I performed the procedure. Tragically, the recipient died four days later.
A typical mole is a collection of cells that contain an unusually high concentration of melanin. Leyner’s mole not only contained high concentrations of melanin, but staggeringly high concentrations of Hexalone, Bolasterone, and Dehydralone — powerful anabolic steroids, plus significant levels of cesium 137 and strontium 90.