Gone with the Mind

Now hold on…hold on… (MARK motions for quiet as if to quell a stir his remarks have provoked, which they have not.)

MARK

We’re all adults here — we all know the score. We know what they do to people like me and my mom, to paradoxical hybrids of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté. We know what happens to unreconstructed surrealist militants. Tortured. Marked for assassination. Imagine what awaits me out there.

In the thrall of biological determinism and acculturation, we’re left very little wiggle room.

We now know (and didn’t back then in 1973, when Strand and I sat in his office, casually discussing sestinas and ekphrasis) that genetic variations in brain morphology, weight, age, diet, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use, toxic exposure, exercise routines, etc., have more to do with a writer’s style than the comics he read when he was young.

In 1955, the year my mom was pregnant with me, Bertolt Brecht voted Mao Zedong’s essay “On Contradiction” the “best book” he had read in the past twelve months, a period of time that saw the publication of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! Mao…a guy who never brushed his teeth, who just rinsed his mouth out with tea when he woke up…who, according to his personal physician, Li Zhisui, never cleaned his genitals. Instead, Mao said, “I wash myself inside the bodies of my women.” The Imaginary Intern and I were great admirers of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art and we diligently tried to apply his dictum “Discard what is backward and develop what is revolutionary” to the production of Gone with the Mind, and although I agree with Mao that one should bathe infrequently, and that when one does, one should use the vaginal flora of other creatures instead of soap, I subscribe unswervingly to the conviction that a gentleman should never go out in public at night without pomaded hair and heavy cologne… (MARK cocks his head to one side, as if he hears, in the sudden cascade of hail against the skylight, the siren song of death itself.)

MARK

In hindsight, I think probably the most significant thing about The Fighter Jets cycle is how the multicolor gunfire spewing from the fighter jets in those early crayon drawings resembled a kind of weaponized vomit, obviously an allusion to my mom’s hyperemesis gravidarum (which she’d eventually sublimate into her logorrhea), and also — and this is another of those things that just occurred to me in the car on the way here tonight — how those fighter jets so clearly presage the motif of Mussolini’s flying balcony in Gone with the Mind.

Now, The Bethesda BlowJobs were a series of blow jobs I received in the late seventies, in a car parked in a lot outside a large office complex in Rockville, Maryland (why my mom and I came to refer to them as The Bethesda BlowJobs, I really can’t say). The person giving me the blow jobs was a woman who was my boss, my supervisor, at the time. And she was a particularly intelligent, very precise, very punctilious kind of person, actually a very imposing person, and I remember thinking at the time that here was a sort of grande dame in the making. This basically all came about because I shared a tiny little office with this very nebbishy, sallow, stoop-shouldered middle-aged guy, whose name I can’t remember at the moment. This was a document-analysis company that was used primarily by law firms involved in very complex litigation like huge class-action suits, for instance, where’d there’d be massive amounts of documentation like reports and memoranda and correspondence and interviews and interrogatories that all needed to be collated and synopsized and classified or coded. So anyway, this unfortunate guy I shared the office with was just an especially unprepossessing, awkward and excruciatingly goofy, completely uncool person who was effectively shunned by everyone and who didn’t have a single friend, a single person to even talk to in the entire office. And I think he’d just undergone some pretty serious gastrointestinal surgery because after lunch his stomach would start rumbling, I mean seriously rumbling…he’d get this, y’know…what’s the medical term?…this, uh…this borborygmus…he’d get this borborygmus like I’d never heard in my life, it was like the shifting of tectonic plates or something…and then there’d be this whistling sound, this high-pitched sibilance, like there was some kind of pressurized internal leak in there…and then he’d fall dead asleep sitting in his chair…for quite a while…for, like, an hour, an hour and a half. And for whatever reason — I honestly can’t say — I developed this keen affection for him. He was actually the only person in that entire office that I felt at all comfortable with. I really felt a genuine kindredness with him. And when he’d fall asleep, I’d code his quota of documents for him, and I remember thinking one afternoon, as he was snoring and drooling on himself at his desk, that maybe this was my act of atonement for having swindled all the bright Crayolas from that color-blind boy back in second grade at James F. Murray No. 38 Elementary School. Anyway, late one afternoon, as I was about to head home, my boss—our boss — pulled me aside and said that she was attracted to me because I’d “befriended a misfit,” to use her exact words, which I thought sounded like something out of one of those fantasy novels, like I’d “betrothed a gnome” or something. And she told me that I deserved a merit badge for it…which was such a particularly funny, particularly uncanny thing for her to have said, because when I was about eight years old and I was a Cub Scout, all the boys in our den were sitting around in the kitchen of our den mother one afternoon, and she lit a cigarette bending over the flame from the front burner on the stove, and she set her hair on fire, and I put it out — I don’t remember if I just smothered it with my hands or doused it with some Sprite or what — but she stared at me with this sort of demented look of gratitude on her face (she drank) and she said, “I’m going to recommend that you get a merit badge for this,” and sure enough I did, I actually got a merit badge for extinguishing the fire in our den mother’s hair. So, back to Bethesda — I’m sorry, Rockville—and that merit badge. Just about every afternoon — and this went on for a couple of months, I think — my boss and I would stroll to her car after work, and she’d sit in the driver’s seat and I’d sit in the passenger seat and she’d unbuckle my belt, and…it was all very rote…she would always say — each and every single time—“Let me expedite that” when I’d start to fumble with the buttons on her blouse, and she never failed to remind me that she was attracted to me not because of how I looked (although she’d always interject that I was “more than adequate in that regard”), but because of how alluring she thought it was that I’d, y’know, “befriended a misfit.” And I remember being extremely impressed that even in these encounters, which I suppose were a bit risqué at the time, she maintained the hierarchical tenor of our relationship by using words like expedite and in that regard. And so there I’d sit, in that passenger seat (she was obviously so much the pilot of this particular flying balcony), and I’d just gaze vacantly out the window at the procession, at the cavalcade of exhausted, bedraggled, bleary-eyed people who’d just spent the last eight hours coding documents, making their quota, and were plodding like zombies to their cars, and I’d meekly wave good-bye to any of them who happened to make eye contact with me. And I should mention that this woman — my boss — has since become an extraordinarily successful, high-powered, and internationally influential CEO, someone akin to, say, Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard or Marillyn Hewson at Lockheed Martin. And I mention this primarily because chronic financial insecurity and improvidence and the sense of ever teetering on the precipice of catastrophic failure are such integral motifs in Gone with the Mind—the fifty-eight-year-old son who still needs to borrow money from his mother, who still depends on his mother for rides to the mall, etc., etc. And this is a…a situation, a dilemma that is getting worse, more intractable for me as I get older, and I really can’t see any solution to it on the horizon at this point in my life. I’ve never really had anything even remotely resembling a feasible financial strategy, with the possible exception of a very inchoate plan that involved trying to arrange a marriage between my daughter and the television host and producer Ryan Seacrest, a marriage which one can only imagine would make things considerably easier financially for me, and even this plan, I’m pretty sure, was the Imaginary Intern’s idea which he dubbed Operation Seacrest and which never really progressed much beyond the planning stages, although the sobriquet almost immediately became the code name for any moneymaking scheme, however penny ante, and then very quickly became the code name for just about anything we might be doing. So if I was going to, I don’t know, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or…or eat a package of Peeps, or go work out at the gym or just do a couple of sets of Kegel exercises up in the attic, or, y’know, just take a shower or do some laundry — any of that would qualify as Operation Seacrest. And, of course, if we were feeling the least bit paranoid and that we needed to be especially clandestine, or you know something, just because we felt like it, just because, I don’t know, it was Friday and we were feeling a little reckless and crazy, we’d refer to the autobiography itself as Operation Seacrest or maybe even just OpCrest. The only thing that we would never ever even think of referring to as Operation Seacrest was the Soviet defense of Stalingrad during the Second World War, a topic that was — and I’m pretty sure I mentioned this before — a topic that was completely sacrosanct.