JESSICA HAHN: I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling everybody all along: I was the last person to be with Mark Leyner before he disappeared. Fact. OK? And I’ve offered to take a polygraph. I don’t hear any of these bogus last-to-be-with-Leyner wannabes from “Nightline” and “Larry King” offering to take a lie detector test, do you? If you had polygraph equipment here in the van, I’d take the goddamn test right now. I was the last one to see him — that’s the truth.
This is from my diary entry for that day: “He was haunted by a ceaseless ambition and a deep loneliness that he hoped fame and an ostentatiously vulgar lifestyle would alleviate. He promised me that someday we’d make love for thirteen straight hours in Death Valley, and we’d sweat so much that we’d end up skeletons — two grinning skeletons, pumping and rattling under the red thermonuclear sun. If only that were possible now …”
Mark had been tutoring me in creative writing. I’d never had that much confidence in my ability to express myself, but Mark really made me feel as if I had a natural aptitude for verse. Here’s a poem I wrote — after a couple of lessons with Mark — describing one of the gardens at Team Leyner Headquarters. The part at the end about the mule is a sort of imaginative embellishment: “Innumerable shades of green./An infinite taxonomy of greenness/trebled by the effects of direct, deflected, and umbral sunlight./The ambient “contrast” modulated by the evanescing day./Each leaf in sovereign motion,/yet all according in synchronous oscillation—/from branch to tree to copse./Flies wheel above/compoundly eyeing the furfuraceous eczema that covers/the buttocks of a moribund mule.”
I know that during that last afternoon, he got a dirty phone call from Camille Paglia. It was on the speaker phone, so I heard most of it. It was pretty explicit. I know I heard the words “tart mucosity.” It sort of faded in and out, so I figured she was calling from her car phone and going under trestles. Mark didn’t seem to mind the call, though. But I don’t think he was really paying attention.
And suddenly headquarters was illuminated by arc lights, and surrounded by heavily armed officers in flak jackets, and hundreds of riot troops and sharpshooters from the Punitive Confiscation Tactical Division.
He was wearing Hugo Boss moss-green suede pajama bottoms. He had reached the climactic section of his Team Leyner memoirs, and he was typing like a lunatic, flailing at his keyboard in ecstasy like some enraptured pentacostal organist.
He was in mid-sentence when they wrested away his final remaining possession — yes, his laptop! — and he di
TEAM LEYNER TODAY!
The sensational disappearance of Mark Leyner following the expropriation of his laptop by the Federal Punitive Confiscation Tactical Division has ignited a firestorm of protest around the world! Mobs of rampaging fans have besieged U.S. embassies in London, Paris, Warsaw, Mexico City, Riyadh, and Tokyo, forcing the evacuation of terrified diplomatic personnel by troops wielding truncheons, attack dogs, tear gas, and water cannons! Shadowy underground organizations have threatened the lives of American political leaders and Fortune 50 °CEOs and — in clandestine radio broadcasts — urged children to subliminally indoctrinate their parents by murmuring key passages from Leyner’s texts into their ears as they sleep!
YOU can be a vital link in the Team Leyner chain of solidarity that girds the globe in Power and Bold Unity! HOW?
• The Punitive Confiscation Act is an outrageous attempt by the federal government to squash Team Leyner, persecute its leader, and drive him into the arms of his enemies. Write to your congressmen and senators demanding that they immediately repeal this misbegotten legislation that exists solely to impede a historic visionary in the fulfillment of his destiny.
• Book sales are crucial. If Mark Leyner is alive — and we must assume that an individual who, as a toddler, honed himself into a ferocious, cunning, and pitiless animal will survive whatever befalls him — he’s certainly monitoring the best-seller lists and Publishers Weekly. There’s no better way to register your support for Leyner and everything he stands for than by urging — and, if necessary, coercing — your family, friends, and co-workers to bulk-order Et Tu, Babe from their local bookstores.
Remember, when you purchase a copy of this inspirational volume, 100 percent of the proceeds go to funding important Team Leyner projects such as:
• The production of large-print, Braille, and pop-up editions of Leyner’s work
• The construction of the Buffway, a 600-mile-long suspension bridge in the form of Leyner’s outstretched body that will span the Arabian Sea linking Ras al Hadd, Oman, to Karachi, Pakistan
• The development of the World Institute of Advanced Science, a research facility in Palermo, Sicily, that will reevaluate evolution from the Big Bang through the Cretaceous demise of the dinosaurs to the present moment as one continuous teleological process leading inevitably to the birth of Mark Leyner and to the propagation of his genetic lineage through sexual intercourse and auxiliary methods including “mole seeding”
Call 1-800-T-LEYNER today for an exhortatory message from Mark Leyner to his fans recorded in the heroic hours before his disappearance! Stay on the line to record your personal words of support for the man whom food-and-lifestyle authority Martha Stewart has described as having “the face of an angel and the glands of a god!”
Seed the Minds of the World with Team Leyner Thought!
Help disseminate the incendiary words of this visionary warrior by ordering additional copies of Mark Leyner’s majestic master works for your family, friends and co-workers.
Available at
Your Local Bookstore