by
Mark Leyner
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[...] So I went on a TV game show in the hopes of raising cash. This was my question, for $250,000 in cash and prizes: If the Pacific Ocean were filled with gin, what would be, in terms of proportionate volume, the proper lake of vermouth necessary to achieve a dry martini? I said Lake Ontario—but the answer was the Caspian Sea which is called a sea but is a lake by definition. I had failed. I had humiliated my family and disgraced the kung fu masters of the Shaolin temple. I stared balefully out into the studio audience which was chanting something that sounded like "dork." [...]
The spirit, pride, and discipline I acquired during the rigors of the Academy would remain with me for the rest of my life. I'd never forget the Four Cardinal Principles: Teamwork; Positive Attitude; Hair That's Swinging and Bouncy, Not Plastered or Pinned Down; and Hair That's Clean, Shiny, and Well-Nourished. Years after I graduated, I'd occasionally rummage through the trunk in the attic and dust off the vinyl, flesh-colored pedicure training foot that was issued to each new beauty cadet. I'd give each toenail a fresh coat of polish, and the memories would come cascading back... memories of being unceremoniously roused in the middle of the night and sent off on 25-mile tactical missions with full pack which included poncho, mess kit, C rations, canteen, first-aid kit, compass, lean-to, entrenching tool, rinse, conditioner, setting lotion, two brushes (natural bristle and nylon), two sets of rollers (sponge and electric), barrettes, bobby pins, plastic-coated rubber bands, and a standard-issue 1,500-watt blow-dryer.
On our last mission—our "final exam"—we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms.
Soon psychopathology replaced ethnicity as the critical demographic determinant. There were no longer Italian neighborhoods, or Cuban neighborhoods, or Irish or Greek neighborhoods. There were Anorexic neighborhoods, and Narcissistic neighborhoods, and Manic and Compulsive neighborhoods. There was no longer a Columbus Day parade or a Puerto Rico Day parade; there was an Agoraphobics Day parade. Fifth Avenue lined with police barricades, traffic diverted. But, of course, the designated route was empty, utterly desolate, because the paraders, the spectators, even the Grand Marshal himself—agoraphobics each and every one—had all stayed away, each locked within the "safety" of his or her own home.
And soon after we met, we made a pact that if we were on a plane that was crashing, we'd grab the Walkman off someone's head, we'd grab three or four little bottles of Scotch, and we'd fuck—so that we'd die in our kind of glory—in that ecstatic maelstrom of booze and rock ʼn' roll and orgasm. But remember that time when we ripped the Walkman off a Hasidic boy's head, plundered the cocktail cart and slugged down the booze, tore each other's clothes off, and then started going at it right in the aisle, and the stewardess came up to us and said: "It's only turbulence"?
Luckily for us, Bev was distracted by another lawsuit she'd recently initiated. Bev was a speech pathologist. She had a twelve-year-old patient named Bob. Bob had been in school one day standing in front of his speech class giving an extemporaneous talk. The assignment he'd been given was to describe driving on Interstate 80 through the Midwest. Suddenly Bob couldn't speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn't total aphasia. He could speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here's how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: "Corn corn corn corn Stuckey's. Corn corn corn corn Stuckey's." His parents took him to a hospital and they performed a CAT scan and an MRI scan and a PET scan and digital subtraction angiography and they found nothing wrong. So they took him to see a speech pathologist. Bev. One day, Bob was in session with Bev when a waterbug crawled out into the middle of the floor and signaled somehow to Bob. Whether it used its legs to communicate via sign language or exuded some sort of pheromone, no one knows. But Bob was cured. He began to speak in full sentences, saying things like: "Oh yes, with respect to the Interstate... Whereas prostitution constitutes the commoditization of desire, the tollbooth exchange constitutes the eroticization of commoditized mobility—the tactile exchange of coins, a tryst in the night on the highway, albeit a surveillance, a regulation," etc. etc. Bev was charmed by the waterbug and decided to keep him as a pet. One day, Bev discovered a lump on the waterbug's thorax. She took him in to see the top entomological dermatologist in Kansas City who said that it was a benign tumor. He said he'd burn it off right there in the office using a magnifying glass and sunlight. But while he was performing the procedure, something distracted him and he momentarily lost control of the magnified sunbeam and the bug was incinerated. Bev sued for malpractice.
n appreciation of his efforts in settling the Bev and Jimmy matter, I gave him an old Radio Shack brand air conditioner/personal computer. Pour megabytes of RAM, 256 kilobytes of ROM, and about 1,600 BTUs. You put it in the window and it cooled a good-sized room and did spread sheets and word processing.
Takeo and his assistant, Yukio Yamamoto, found it hysterically funny that I'd actually taken a taxicab dressed in deep-sea diving gear. In fact, I thought I heard Yamamoto mutter the phrase "deficit-generating American, your protectionistic tariffs and economic jingoism will never obscure the fact that archaic management techniques and shoddy workmanship have caused American consumers to eschew their own country's products in favor of our own" under his breath, but in deference to my long friendship with Takeo and the importance of the Shinkai project, I refrained from pursuing the issue. I offered to go back to the hotel and change clothes, but Takeo pointed out that the Shinkai was scheduled for an 11:30 a.m. launch, leaving me no time to make the 90-minute round trip.
[...] Unemployed laboratory mice laid off after cuts in federal research funding huddle in skid row alleyways guzzling miniature bottles of airline whiskey. [...]
[...] When my wife left her people in Ethiopia and returned with me to the U.S.A. she was very homesick and cried for weeks and weeks. She was unable to acclimate herself to this culture. She became irritable and I often had to resort to my most powerful kung fu to subdue her tantrums. As time went on she became increasingly despondent, listless, and withdrawn. I'd come home and find her washing barbiturates down with tumblers full of whiskey. Her sadness was breaking my heart, it was murdering me. Finally, upon the advice of my cousin, chief of gastroenterology at Mount Sinai, I had my wife committed to the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Institute of Psychiatry. There psychiatrists told me that it was essential that my wife eat tremendous amounts of Italian food if there was to be any hope of her ever leading a normal life. They said that since Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia they'd seen this condition in many of their Ethiopian patients. Throughout their formative years their parents ceaselessly revile Italian people and culture. The children in time come to associate their parents' derogation of Italy with parental derogation of themselves, resulting in increasingly bitter episodes of masochistic self-appraisal and ultimately functional ego death. By gradually introducing small amounts of Italian food into the diet of an Ethiopian adult, the psychiatrists are exploiting precisely those crossed wires which are buried deeply in the associative processes of the patient who has a desperate subconscious need to eat and enjoy Italian cuisine, thereby correspondingly revivifying his or her own sense of self-worth. Because of the severity of my wife's condition, doctors recommended a massive infusion of Italian food into her diet. Antipasto, pasta fagioli, and manicotti for breakfast. Ziti, ravioli, and chicken cacciatore for lunch. Fried calamari, stromboli, veal scaloppine, chicken parmigiana, and linguini in white clam sauce for dinner. And tremendous amounts of Chianti, Soave Bolla, espresso coffee, cannoli, and spumoni between meals. [...]
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Owiginally we thought death was caused by pawalytic shellfish toxin, said the forensic pathologist, kills in half a second—death and wigor mortis are simultaneous—but we wuled that out. The forensic pathologist was only four. He was an astounding prodigy, the youngest forensic pathologist ever, but he had trouble pronouncing his Rs. Did you know that this car once belonged to Lyndon Lawouche, many owners ago? I shook my head at the little genius.