by Mark Leyner
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Does it really take seven years to digest chewing gum?
Why does your pee smell when you eat asparagus?
Does sugar really make kids hyperactive?
What causes an ice cream headache?
Does eating chocolate cause acne?
Why do you cry when you cut onions?
Do cucumbers relieve puffy eyes?
Why are you served juice and cookies after you donate blood?
Why do women crave chocolate during their periods?
Why do you get bloated when you eat salty food?
What is a food coma?
Why are you hungry an hour after eating Chinese food?
What is MSG, and does it cause headaches?
Can carrots help improve your vision?
Does coffee stunt your growth?
Why does skipping your morning coffee cause a headache?
Why does spicy food make your nose run?
Does spicy food cause ulcers?
Does artificial sweetener cause headaches?
Does licorice cause high blood pressure?
CHAPTER 2. BODY ODDITIES
Is it bad to crack your knuckles?
Why do some folks have an “outie” belly button and some folks have an “innie”?
What causes morning breath?
Why are yawns contagious?
Why do men have nipples?
Can you lose a contact lens in the back of your head?
Can you lose a tampon inside your body if the string comes off?
Is it true that the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body relative to its size?
Why do your teeth chatter when you are cold?
Why do you have an appendix if you can live without it?
Are canker sores contagious?
What are goose bumps?
What really is happening when my foot falls asleep?
Why do you get bags under your eyes when you are tired?
Why do you laugh when tickled?
Why does sweat stink and stain?
What is snot?
What are eye boogers?
What are those little half moons in your nails?
CHAPTER 3. ALL YOU (N)EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX
Is sperm nutritious? Or fattening?
Can you get pregnant while you are having your period?
Do oysters really make you horny?
Big hands, big _____?
Why do men wake up in the morning with an erection?
Can people in wheelchairs still have sex?
Is it true that you can break your penis?
Does masturbation cause stuttering, blindness, or hairy palms?
Does using a tampon for the first time make you lose your virginity?
Why do nipples become erect?
What causes shrinkage?
Does circumcision lessen the fun of sex?
Does the kind of underpants men wear affect their fertility?
Is there really a G-spot?
Do kegel exercises really work?
Can hot tubs make you infertile?
Do men need sex more often than women?
Can a man ever run out of sperm?
Are there any specific things that affect the scent of a woman?
Can a woman ejaculate?
What is a hickey?
CHAPTER 4. CAN I TREAT IT MYSELF?
Can you take the tetracycline meant for fish tanks?
Does cranberry juice cure urinary tract infections?
Will yogurt cure a yeast infection if you put it “inside”?
Does candle flame remove earwax?
Is it smart to put butter on a burn?
Does melatonin work for jet lag?
Should you put a steak on a black eye?
Will toothpaste get rid of zits?
Is it dangerous to pop zits?
If someone is choking at a dinner party, can you do a tracheostomy with an oyster knife?
Does urinating on a jellyfish sting stop the burn?
Why is it bad to insert cotton swabs in your ears?
Is it dangerous to perform colonic irrigation on yourself?
Does breast milk cure warts?
If you get bitten by a snake, should you suck out the venom?
What are hiccups, and how do you get rid of them?
Does bathing in tomato juice remove the smell of a skunk?
Does eating fresh parsley cure bad breath?
Does warm milk really help you sleep?
CHAPTER 5. DRUGS AND ALCOHOL
“beer before liquor, never sicker/liquor before beer, never fear”?
Can poppy seeds make you test positive for heroin?
Why do you get the munchies when you are stoned?
Can a hair sample be used in a drug test?
Will a shot of bourbon cure a cold?
Does putting someone in a shower or giving him or her coffee stop a drug overdose?
Why do you throw up when you drink too much?
Does taking ecstasy cause you to lose your memory?
Does drinking kill brain cells?
Why does the bed spin after a long night at the bar?
Why do you snore so loud when you are drunk?
Is red wine really good for your health?
Does marijuana help glaucoma?
Should you drink brandy when you have frostbite?
Can you get high from licking a toad?
Why do people seem more attractive to you when you are drunk?
CHAPTER 6. BATHROOM HUMOR
Can you drink your own urine?
Why can you ignite a fart?
Why do you get all “pruney” after a long bath?
Is it more sanitary to be spit on or peed on?
Why do beans give you gas?
Would you die if you ate your own feces?
Will you get hemorrhoids from sitting on the toilet too long?
Why does poo stink if the food doesn’t?
Why does poo float?
Why is poo brown?
Where does gas go when you can’t fart?
If you are stranded on a desert island, should you drink seawater or your own urine?
Can you catch diseases from a toilet seat?
Why do i have to go to the bathroom immediately after a cup of coffee?
Why do cigarettes have a laxative effect?
Why do you have to pee when you hear water dripping?
If you stick a sleeping person’s hand in warm water, will he or she wet the bed?
Is it dangerous to hold it when you have to pee?
What causes the rumbling in your stomach when you have to go?
CHAPTER 7. MEDICINE FROM THE MOVIES AND TV
Is the show ER accurate?
Does the kind of amnesia you see in the movies really exist?
What would happen if you stuck someone in the heart with a needle as in Pulp Fiction?
Why does everyone in the movies go into shock?
Can people really wake up after being in a coma for years?
Do you really need to remove a bullet right away like they do in old Westerns?
Is there really a medication that acts like a truth serum?
What is on the rags that villains use to make their victims pass out?
Can you die from choking on your own vomit, like the drummer in Spinal Tap?
Do people really have multiple personalities, like in Sybil?
Can you get scared to death?
Can you drink yourself to death like Nicholas
Cage in Leaving Las Vegas?
Does hysterical blindness really exist?
What would really happen if a junior mint fell inside someone during surgery, as in the infamous Seinfeld episode?
Is it dangerous to eat another human being?
How many times can you be shot and still survive?
Is there such a thing as a werewolf?
Can you really explode from eating too much?
Do people ever have webbed hands and feet like the Man from Atlantis?
Why do you see stars when you are hit in the head?
What was wrong with the boy in The Boy in The Plastic Bubble?
CHAPTER 8. OLD WIVES’ TALES
Is it true that you have to wait a half hour after eating to go swimming?
Will staring at an eclipse make you go blind?
Should you starve a fever and feed a cold?
Does wet or cold weather cause a cold?
Can you die from chasing Pop Rocks with Coke?
Can lip balm be addictive?
Is it true that left-handed people are smarter than right-handed people?
Will sleeping in front of a fan or an open window cause a stiff neck?
Do microwaves cause cancer?
Will using a cell phone give you a brain tumor?
Will a plate in your head set off a metal detector in the airport?
Is it dangerous to hold in a sneeze?
Can you swallow your tongue?
CHAPTER 9. GETTING OLDER
Is it true that you lose tastebuds as you get older?
Why does hair turn gray?
Why do you shrink as you get older?
Why do old ladies grow beards?
Do your ears continue to grow after the rest of your body stops growing?
Why do you need less sleep when you get older?
What’s up with the ear hair?
Do your nails or hair grow after you die?
What are age spots?
Is life span determined strictly by genetics?
Can taking vitamin C help you live longer?
Is there such a thing as male menopause?
Why are older people such bad drivers?
Is there really a wrinkle cure?
Can aluminum cause Alzheimer’s?
About the Authors
Copyright Page
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all those special doctors who inspired us:
Dr. Marcus Welby, Dr. Dre, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Cliff Huxtable, Dr. J, Dr. Scholl’s, Dr. Phil, Dr Pepper, Dr. Strangelove, Doc Baker, Dr. Who, Dr. Doolittle, Dr. Johnny Fever, Doc Gooden, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. John Rooney, Dr. Kildare, Dr. Hibbert, Dr. No, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Ruth, Dr. Evil, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Dr. Ben Casey, Doc Holliday, Dr. Doogie Howser, and the fight Dr., Ferdie Pacheco.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Billy:
My sincerest thanks to: my family for supporting me when I rambled on about this idea for years, my friends for asking me hilarious medical questions, and my beautiful and wonderful wife, Jessica, for appreciating my quirks and giving me the strength to finally get this done.
Mark:
I want to thank my wonderful and wise friend Billy Goldberg, who did virtually all of the work on this book and still happily let them put my name on the cover next to his.
Together we would like to thank Amanda Urban and Jud Laghi at ICM; our editor, Carrie Thornton; and the entire staff at One Jefe Productions.
PREFACE
Billy Goldberg: How did Mark Leyner and I come to know each other and pursue this heroic project, Why Do Men Have Nipples?
This is a long dark tale, a quixotic quest. A journey of two friends attempting to accomplish a nearly impossible task. We are an unlikely pair. I am a New York City emergency room doctor and Mark is a successful novelist and screenwriter. Not exactly the perfect literary match, but, our paths crossed and the rest is history. . . .
It began one frigid, blustery night in a busy New York City emergency room. I had been thinking about doing this book for many years. I had compiled questions and pondered answers but was never able to fully steel myself for such a perilous exploration and actually write any of them down. I had just been hired as a medical adviser on the ABC medical drama Wonderland. This short-lived show was a realistic drama based on the daily lives in a psychiatric emergency room and a prison psychiatric ward. The show added an ER character and I was hired to integrate the medical ER reality into the show. It was my job to bring the writers into our world of chaos. Most movie and TV writers knew nothing of real hospital medicine and were taken aback by the controlled disorder and gore of the emergency department and my world of science and human suffering.
I had been told by one of the producers that my visitor for that shift was going to be Mark Leyner. I consider myself to be well read, but I had never heard of this Dionysian postmodern superhero (Mark’s description). A quick Google search revealed that he had published many novels, one of which was called My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. I also found that he had written a television pilot for MTV entitled “Iggy Vile, M.D.” I was confused and had no idea what to expect, but I was intrigued.
That night, I was at the bedside of a patient, assisting a resident in the placement of a nasogastric tube, when the nurse told me that there was someone to see me. I took off my gloves, pulled back the curtain, and there was Leyner. Nothing in my medical career could have prepared me for the character I was about to meet. He had the heavily muscled torso of a Bulgarian weight lifter and the weepy histrionic temperament of a teenage girl. He was babbling to no one in particular as he scarfed down fistfuls of Skittles from a paper bag. It soon became apparent to me that Leyner wasn’t like the other TV writers I had met. He was a medical autodidact with an astonishingly bizarre and encyclopedic store of arcane medical knowledge. Within five minutes Leyner had regaled me with the precise pharmacokinetics of jimsonweed, a Fijian folk remedy for cannibal indigestion, the history of turf toe and crotch rot, and the inexplicable prevalence of supernumerary testicles in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
I knew it was going to be an interesting night.
As I made rounds with Leyner at my side, the first new patient to arrive was an “EDP.” This is the term that we use for an emotionally disturbed patient. He was wildly agitated and a dozen burly New York City EMS personnel and cops were barely able to keep him restrained on a stretcher. Mark and I hurried over to see him wide-eyed and ranting psychotically. He was screaming in Spanish and English, “I am Superman, motherfucker. Get me Jimmy Olsen. I am faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive.” I stepped up to the bed with the goal of getting an IV in and calming Superman down. He screamed again, “I am Superman, goddammit, your medications won’t work on me.” Leyner, who had been coolly observing the scene with clinical detachment, popped some Skittles in his mouth and made a stunningly unorthodox suggestion. “Give him kryptonite.” I know that as you tell a story many times it begins to get embellished, but I remember that these words and these words alone calmed the patient enough so that we could get the drip going and get him under control.
The night continued to be a strange mix of the bizarre and touching, and I left my shift feeling that this strange little man would somehow have a profound effect on my life.
Mark Leyner: Even though I come from a long line of lawyers—and, in this society, lawyers and doctors are like warring sects in the Balkans—I’d always had a deep fascination with medical matters. Whereas most boys would subscribe to Sports Illustrated and Boy’s Life, I waited eagerly for the mailman to deliver Annals of Gastrointestinal Surgery and Journal of the American Society of Investigative Pathology. Most kids begged their parents for trips to Disney World. I annually implored mine to take me to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, which houses this country’s most glorious collection of medical oddities, including conjoined fetal quintuplets in formaldehyde and the preserved remains of the world’s largest colon. I did seriously consider
becoming a doctor, until I went to Brandeis, that is. There I saw firsthand the future doctors of America. Bunch of whining, ass-kissing, unscrupulous, morbidly neurotic premed students. My fascination didn’t die though—in fact it became my secret inner life resulting in my first book of fiction being entitled My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.
So I guess that my obsessive inclusion of graphic medical detail in all my subsequent books and a script I wrote for MTV entitled “Iggy Vile, M.D.”—featuring an ale-swilling football hooligan punk of a surgeon—is what prompted Peter Berg to invite me to write for a television hospital drama he’d created called Wonderland. I’d just begun working on my first Wonderland script, when Peter called me one night raving about this guy who worked in the ER—this guy Billy Goldberg—and I took it all with a grain of salt, expecting him to be a grown-up version of the Brandeis pre-meds, but I agreed to meet him anyway. It turned out to be a glorious night. Billy was not the simultaneously insipid and officious physician I expected at all. The night was a revelation. What I saw that evening was amazing—a Chinese chef hit in his head with a meat cleaver, a Russian guy who came in with his ear in a bag of ice after his Rottweiler bit it off, and of course Superman. But it wasn’t just the voyeurism. There was an immediate genuine connection between Billy and me, and there was something deeply compelling about the way he responded to the human needs of the people he treated in that chaotic and bizarre environment.
Billy: Several days later I showed up at the Wonderland production offices and I apparently had attained a newfound level of credibility. Leyner had told the tales of our evening and I am sure he had added a little bit of writer’s embellishment. I was introduced to some of the other writers whom I had not met and sat briefly in their lavishly decorated and organized offices to answer the mundane medical questions from their respective scripts. My next stop was Leyner, and when I entered his office, it was like entering a tomb. The room was almost devoid of decoration and furniture, and it had a monastic feel. Leyner was lying on his stomach typing rapidly on the keyboard of his laptop. He looked up and without a greeting said, “Tell me everything you know about Kluver-Bucy syndrome!” We proceeded to discuss the clinical findings of this rare neurological disorder that causes individuals to put objects in their mouths and engage in inappropriate sexual behavior—obviously, a disease that was irresistibly attractive to the likes of Leyner.