Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mark Leyner.
Part II
Reading
MARK
Before I start, I’d like to say: Fuck everyone who said I was too paradoxical a hybrid of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté to succeed in life (even though they were right). Also, I’d like to dedicate this to all the nematodes and hyperthermophilic bacteria who live in deep-water sulfide chimneys around the world. Good days are coming, boys.
My mom gave me a ride here tonight, and, uh…I don’t really like to talk to her when she’s been drinking and she’s driving over ninety miles an hour, because I don’t want to distract her, so I was just sitting there in the passenger seat, looking out the window, sort of musing to myself…I think that mothers and sons, silent in a car, sometimes exchange telepathic soliloquies, but perhaps because we sensed that this could be our last night together, that one or both of us might very well be assassinated tonight, we left each other to our respective musing…that whole implosion of semioticity that is musing, that hypercaffeinated chatter of anthropomorphic cartoon animals in one’s head that is musing, that whole danse macabre of singing little piglets in one’s head…At ninety miles per hour, the empirical world rushes past in an impressionistic blur. You’re thinking, There’s some weird, retro-looking, brown transgendered individual jerking off in the woods. And then you’re like, No, that’s a tree. But sitting there — the eternal little man, inflated with dreams of flamboyant success but forced back on his own futility — my memories of childhood were not impressionistic at all, they were hyperrealistic. My mind’s eye — my mind’s eyeball—had shot back, it had shot back to 1961…and I, uh…I could see myself at the age of five, I could see myself there so vividly…I was a little boy, playing on a hot concrete alley on Westminster Lane in Jersey City one day…God spoke to this little boy, as He speaks to all pure-hearted children, in his simple, binary language of blue sky and radiant sun. And suddenly, in a kind of seizure, in an explosion of unfurling clairvoyance, he saw everything that would ensue in his life. Everything. His entire autobiography fast-forwarded in the most extraordinary detail. The birth of his daughter, his prostate cancer, his books (every word of them!), these final moments in this food court, in this mall, tonight. Everything. So we have two of the mind’s eyeballs, the mind’s eyeball of a fifty-eight-year-old man seated in the passenger seat of his mother’s car, daydreaming as he stares out the window and the mind’s eyeball of a drooling five-year-old boy with blond bangs seated rigidly on a concrete alley, one speeding back in time from 2014, one speeding into the future from 1961. Assuming they are traveling at approximately the same warp speed, they would collide at around 1988, the year Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and an earthquake in Armenia killed sixty thousand people. These are the uncanny transtemporal ballistics of the mind’s eyeballs. And this is one of the things we (my mother and I) mean by Gone with the Mind.
Okay…just a little background before I get started: Gone with the Mind was originally going to be an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter / flight-simulator game. And it was going to start at a breakfast meeting with my old editor Michael Pietsch during which I’m either assassinated or “commit suicide” in the men’s room. And my ghost has to travel back in time, revisit each transformative event in my life, and execute or otherwise degrade or disable the central dramatis personae in order to get to the next (prior) event. The, uh…the goal of the game is to successfully reach my mother’s womb, in which I attempt to unravel or unzip my father’s and mother’s DNA in the zygote, which will free me of having to eternally repeat this life. And I’m ferried from event to event by Benito Mussolini, who pilots a flying balcony. And along the way, he offers counsel and gaming advice kind of like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita or like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. And if the player succeeds in unknitting the entirety of his (my) life, thus flinging himself into utter oblivion, into an ontological black hole (or to put a more positive spin on it, reintegrating himself into the oceanic void), he wins.
I think an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter game that ends with unraveling the zygote in your mother’s uterus sounds really cool, and Michael and pretty much everyone I mentioned it to also thought it sounded really cool, but what is that, actually? I mean, what would a book like that actually be, y’know? Once you start thinking about sitting down and actually writing something, it’s an entirely different matter. But I remained totally committed to doing it, because that’s just the kind of person I am — I’m not going to bail on something I said I was going to do. I think I’m a sort of exceedingly boring person (which certainly doesn’t make me the best candidate for an autobiography!)…I mean boring in that I’m very dutiful, very responsible…and if I say I’m going to write an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter game that ends with unraveling the zygote in your mother’s uterus then I’m going to write an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter game that ends with unraveling the zygote in your mother’s uterus, and that’s that. And I expect that of other people too, by the way. If you say you’re going to be in the schoolyard waiting for me in a certain place at a certain time, then be at that place at that time. Don’t send some proxy who doesn’t even know where the hell to wait, y’know what I mean? If you say you’re going to stay overnight with me at the hospital when I get my tonsils out, then stay overnight at the hospital, for God’s sake.