To further enhance the interactive realism of the text, begin to masturbate as you read the following passage. For each turn-off you’re able to find before coming, award yourself 1,000 points. If your point total equals or exceeds 3,000, proceed to the section beginning All of this — the warden escorting me into the witness room, the momentary glimpse of the slope of her breast, possibly her areola … If your total is under 3,000, return to the words Felipe, his older sister Gretel, and I are watching TV Thursday night, and begin masturbating again.
Felipe, his older sister Gretel, and I are watching TV Thursday night. 20/20 is running a profile of Silvio Barnes, the painter who was blinded after being hit on the head with a frying pan while surfing the 35-foot breakers at Waimea Bay in Hawaii and then, less than a week later, suffered a massive stroke during a full-body wax at an after-hours depilation bar in Manhattan. Thanks to the Dove unauthorized biography, we all know the story by now of how, when Silvio was only fourteen, his father — the inventor of the Miracle Collar, the push-up collar for men’s dress shirts that gives the appearance of a larger, more protuberant Adam’s apple — offered Silvio a yearly stipend and a studio of his own. But Silvio, perceiving his father’s patronage as an instrument of control, refused, and catching the next plane and hydrofoil to Chiang Mai, a resort city in northern Thailand, took a job as a busboy at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Society for Heavy Ion Research), a gay dance club. Snatching a minute here and a minute there during breaks, he’d sneak off to the club’s sulfurous boiler room cum atelier, where he’d eventually complete his two astonishing masterpieces:
Teenage Neofascist Skinheads Suffering From Progeria (That Rare Premature Aging Disease) Play Mah-Jongg at a Swim Club in Lake Hayden, Idaho is a 94-by-66-inch, acrylic-on-canvas work that, notwithstanding a title that leads one to expect several freakishly wizened nazi youths wanly shuffling mah-jongg tiles outside a lakefront cabana, actually depicts, in delicate flecks of color, several peonies in a vase.
Anna Nicole Smith Before and After Fire-Ant Attack is a 90-by-120-inch acrylic-on-canvas diptych. In this case, the title does literally describe the painting’s content. In the left-hand panel, the former Texas checkout girl turned Guess? Jeans model is splayed lasciviously on a dirt road. The right-hand panel features the identical pose except that the lasciviously splayed Smith is stippled with hundreds of Seurat-like inflamed pustules.
Barbara Walters conducts a brief interview with Silvio, whose garbled responses are subtitled. In the closing minutes, wiping drool from his chin, she says, “Silvio, you completed only two paintings in your entire career, both of which you sold for a fraction of their current value [the paintings now hang in opium warlord Khun Sa’s splendid new museum in northern Myanmar] and then squandered the money on an endless succession of skanky male prostitutes. As a result of a frying pan and a body wax, you’ll never paint again. And your desperate attempt to reinvent your career as a movie director was an unmitigated critical and financial disaster.”
Barnes wrote and directed a film entitled ¡Hola Mami! about an eccentric middle-aged optometrist who marries a sullen, zit-spangled 16-year-old who loiters around his office every day after school, chain-smoking in a fuchsia PVC bustier, a huge gaudy crucifix bobbing on her bosom. The “plot” revolves around the optometrist’s use of a varietal rice chart instead of the traditional lettered eye chart. Long, uninterrupted stretches of the movie consist of the following sort of dialogue:
OPTOMETRIST: Let’s start with the top row, moving from left to right.
PATIENT: All right. Arborio. Valencia. Lundberg’s Christmas Rice. Black Japonica. And Wehani.
OPTOMETRIST: Perfect. Second row.
PATIENT: Red. Sri Lankan Red. Wild Pecan. Jasmine. White Basmati.
OPTOMETRIST: Perfect. Let’s skip down a few rows. How about row five?
PATIENT: American White Basmati. American … Umm … American Brown Basmati, I think. Maratello. And that next one’s either Black Sticky or Thai Sticky. And I’m not sure about the last one.
OPTOMETRIST: OK. How about the next row down, row six?
PATIENT: That’s really tough. Converted? Sambal? Gobind Bhog? They’re really fuzzy.
OPTOMETRIST: OK. Back up to the fourth row—
PATIENT: Japanese Sticky. Sticky Brown. Short-Grain Brown. Long-Grain White. And Wild Rice.
OPTOMETRIST: Is row six sharper now or … now?
PATIENT: The first way.
Following the clip from ¡Hola Mami! they cut to Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters back in the studio.
And Walters says with her patented withering aplomb, “Hugh, in all our years together on the show, we’ve profiled so many wonderful people whose lives have been shattered by tragedy, but I’ve never before come away with the feeling that — hey, this guy is such an overweening, self-absorbed asshole, he deserves his misfortune, and, in fact, there’s something so divinely just about it, that it’s actually funny. It’s so rare that we can derive some cathartic enjoyment from another person’s suffering. But every so often our fervent prayers are answered and an obnoxious enfant terrible’s meteoric success is abruptly and irrevocably snuffed. Silvio Barnes — now blind, incapacitated, and anathema in New York and Hollywood — is an individual whose precipitous ruin all Americans can celebrate with big, hearty, guilt-free gales of laughter.”
And Hugh looks at Barbara and says, “Fascinating.”
As they break for a commercial, Felipe, Gretel, and I do an instant postmortem.
“I’m into Barbara’s rancid schadenfreude,” says Felipe.
“I hear you, dude,” I say. “It had wings. But Downs killed it with that perfunctory ‘Fascinating.’ ”
“Hugh’s hot!” objects Gretel.
“Yuuuk!” Felipe and I make the international sign for hemorrhagic vomiting.
“You’ll appreciate Hugh Downs when you’re more mature,” she says, haughtily readjusting her brassiere.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be that mature,” I say, huffing glue from a brown paper bag and passing it back to Felipe.
All of this — the warden escorting me into the witness room, the momentary glimpse of the slope of her breast, possibly her areola, and the flesh of her armpit as she sits down, and then the frenzied search through my memory for just the right 20/20 segment to temporarily neuter myself so that a healthy, perfectly normal, and involuntary heterosexual reflex won’t be misinterpreted in such a way that I’m seen as an execrable son — all of this takes place in a span of no more than ten seconds. I wonder if, like, Bill Gates when he was 13, had the ability that I have at the age of 13 to anatomize minute fluctuations of consciousness that are occurring literally in femtoseconds. Anyway …
It’s 5:25 P.M. Appeals exhausted, reprieves forsaken, last words ardently orated, the execution of Joel Leyner C.P. #39 6E-18 commences.
Inside the control module room, the executioner activates the delivery sequence by pushing a button on the control panel. A series of lights on the panel indicates the three stages of each injection: Armed (red), Start (yellow), and Complete (green).