I Smell Esther Williams

by Mark Leyner

  Sun Tzu Drilling the Concubines of King Ho-lu

  I SMELL ESTHER WILLIAMS

  for Rachel “Calamity” Jane Horowitz

  Shivering Beneath The Blue Clouds

  Having An Aperitif With A

  Name From The White Pages

  Reading about nitrogen fixation, that process that lays the foundation for the synthesis of proteins, the sadness of my friends popped into my mind and I admitted the possibility that I had read instead of the authoritative text, Speer’s memoirs entitled Inside The Third Reich.

  Here’s to the syphilitic world and its sullen lugubrious days and the recrudescence of family turmoil in pockets across an individual’s map—and I am not the individual and things cease being what they are not, and I stop

  this

  here, and sip

  To ask, once out of the bar mitzvah brunch, is our convivial relative waiting, like Vitamin A in the retina, to be discovered or is he making profit out of sacred things or is he too much the naif for simony; or to accept someone who says, I saw him before picking his nose at a red light—and to ask, who is this splenetic image deflator. These treaties exist in name only. And, under the circumstances, they doubt him “stalwart” enough to resist the temptation to flee, but only one burro has the energy to bray for him.

  How bummed, to be fuelless in these futuristic boondocks with this synesthesia of some before and the taste of this medium point like a dentist’s finger in my mouth.

  I drew my shades a crack (life’s been good to me so far) (Everyone thinks orange juice is good and cigarettes are bad—but I like both of them) and poured a glass of orange juice and looked for a cigarette (“If only I could find one!”). I don’t remember anything after that. Let’s see, I opened the shades a tiny bit … I got some juice … or maybe made some and then had it, I couldn’t find my pack of cigarettes … nope, I can’t remember a thing after that.

  Isn’t so and so a snob? She won’t even admit she liked Grease. I’d like to empty out her tube of Ortho cream and fill it with Oscar’s guacamole dip.

  When I was looking at the quart container of milk I’d gotten that morning, it reminded me of when I was a boy because it’s so little and skinny compared to the half-gallon we usually buy. It led me to think about glandular disorders and growth dysfunction—I was perusing the label on the bottle of Topco Multiple vitamins. Topco Associates, Inc. is based in Skokie, Illinois which, of course, had gained recent notoriety for the Nazi-Jewish controversy. I looked at the clock and bolted. I quote what’s-her-name verbatim on the issue of promptness—If you don’t pick me up at 5:30 on the button, I’ll beat you and beat you until even your colleagues at the university won’t recognize you. This shows how inhuman she is because everyone knows how ignominious it is not to be recognized by one’s colleagues.

  I was talking to Napoleon’s sister—she’s living with these African natives; the kinds that have saucers in their lips and their hair shaped at the top into Milkbones. They carried her on a vine litter to her house. She had a comparatively nice place.

  “He wouldn’t have liked what they did with him,” she was saying, “he was so into the earth—y’know—he’d wanna be with it.”

  She turned her attention to a cheese cart that her son was inching towards.

  “Didn’t you just play with the dog?”

  He nodded.

  “Well wash your hands … c’mon now.”

  TEENAGE CHRIST KILLERS

  Mother: Where were you?

  Out.

  Mother: Where!?

  Just out.

  It’s Wednesday in Tokyo. Here it’s Tuesday. In Denver it’s Monday. On Saturn, it’s Christmas for the 93rd consecutive day this week. We should begin to think of jogging, beyond the therapeutic and recreational. NASA knows this and is developing a sneaker. Bio-feedback will be used to teach runners to produce, within the body, a glandular form of Tang. A camphorated tincture of colorless remarks like “it’s murder, but I love it” and “it’s the only body I’ve got” will be used to tranquilize hostile aliens. You’ll hear more about this, as we do, darling. For now, my aims are nude. A breeze from the window at the foot of the bed excites the hairs.

  MOVIE SCRIPT

  Two plastic containers of shampoo sitting at the edge of a tub—I don’t know, one might be Revlon or Breck, the other, a little fancier, maybe Vidal Sassoon or something: one says to the other “I like your back-to-school sweater,” the other says, “I never get to watch sports on t.v. anymore.” The phone rings—I’m on the can—for the 53rd day, trying to break Dimaggio’s other record. A guy on the radio says that the concrete shortage is over—I get the hell off the John, saying “fuck this.” I go get some concrete shoes made and form a rock band called “Mafia Victims.” We volunteer to tour oil-rich nations as “musical ambassadors” in the tradition of Louis Armstrong. Things don’t pan out quickly enough—I get itchy. I try to form a Sonny and Cher type act with a really talented ticketing agent from Frontier Airlines. We flounder around for a while and she eventually takes an accounting job in Atlanta. I volunteer to become the world’s first human study lamp. I’m sold to a sophomore pre-law student at Harvard. He turns out to be Edward Kennedy. The rest of the movie can be about Joe and JFK and Bobby, and Ted’s back problems, his senatorial career, Chappaquiddick, his wife Joan’s battle with alcoholism, etc.

  July 2: I have the Pathet Lao dream again. Insurgents, some fidgeting with the drawstrings that hold their pajama bottoms up, expropriate all the apartment’s furniture. I establish psychic communication with the couch and extrapolate, from bits and pieces of information, the whereabouts of the rebels’ sanctuary. I make reservations with an airline. I pack and rush to the terminal. I walk back and forth, from one end to the other—apparently the airline doesn’t exist.

  The bone of contention lodged in the throats of Wall Street pundit, armchair investor, and consumer alike was simply this: would the new, lighter, less caloric beer sell or did the putative American penchant for vigor and lankness pale in the face of pretzel sticks and a foamy head? Light beer advocates could obviously point to the success of its sister industry’s parallel “line”—the low tar cigarette. But was obesity the compelling concern that cancer of the lungs or throat had turned out to be? I think that for one brief moment, no one knew!

  My head felt like an aluminum pod filled with loose Klaxon peas. I felt like running to someone and hiding it between her breasts.… That morning I’d seen the doctors—they’d looked into my ear and seen the perforated drum, the spot of blood, the protective clog of wax, the trapped pool of water. Veteran explorers of ancient rocks believe that cell nuclei may have originated 1.4 billion years ago—not 600 million, as is widely supposed. There is also Paul Jennings’ observation: “When numbered pieces of toast and marmalade were dropped on various samples of carpet arranged in quality from coir matting to the finest Kirman rugs, the marmalade-downwards incidence (Mdi) varied indirectly with the quality of the carpet (Qc)—the Principle of the Graduated Hostility of Things.”

  Certain sectors of the citizenry, such as the housewife, must not be neglected. They must be enabled to matriculate and take courses like Introduction to Is Johnny Mathis Really Black? and Advanced How Come Sophia Loren Has Made Nine Pictures With Marcello Mastroianni If She Is So In Love With Her Husband, Carlo Ponti. They must be prepared to take the standardized Clank Shtup Exam.

  Husbands must not act like moronic fans who jeer when their wives are losing and cheer when they win. Nor like hypercritical shades from the underworld.

  That night I dreamt of the mullican—a huge crinite dugong-like sea mammal, thought to resemble, when beached and basking, those recumbent nudes of fin de siècle portraiture.

  Dear Gregg: The waitress has got psychic powers. She put me in touch with my dead mother at lunch.… I don’t want to talk about it. I nurture many dreams, but paramount is the hope that, someday, our camps have another skating party.

  Mother called with her versi
ons of Mickey Rooney’s galvanizing exhortations from Babes in Arms. Though, without the advantages of phone-a-vision, I was helpless to determine if she had gone as far as to affect Rooney’s two-story brilliantined pompadour.

  Susan and Jill were so excited! They’d primped for weeks and the day had finally come! Is there anything more beautiful than a pair of girls consumed by romance! Jill stood in front of the mirror! Her underpants were a “yellow-pages” print! “Howard will flip!” Susan assured Jill! Susan was not to be outdone! She wore a diaphanous blouse! She was well-endowed and knew it! So did Jill! They were some luscious pair!

  Across the street, Howard and Steve nervously gulped beer! Howard looked as if he’d stepped out of a training film! Steve seemed dissipated though! His hollow eye sockets distilled a purulent fluid! What turpitude had precipitated this dissolution?! What did Susan see in him?! Jill tended her own beeswax in this matter!

  Jill couldn’t eat a thing! Susan fried eggs and sausage! The smell pervaded the small house! “What a silly stench!” Jill giggled! “I get hungry when I’m excited … and I’m starving!” Susan blushed! Jill sniffed at her armpits and shook her head, “You can’t smell anything in this room!” “Speaking of smells,” Susan said, “I hope their parts are pleasant!”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind having Clare for the week?”

  “No, no.”

  “Because I could always get a professional baby-sitter … it would be a strange woman … but …”

  “No no no, I’d love to have Clare. Where are you two going anyway?”

  “Brussels.”

  “Do you know where to stay?”

  “Arthur Frommer recommends The Hotel Cecil, 13 Blvd. du Jardin Botanique corner of the Blvd. Adolphe Max directly on the Place Rogier.”

  “That sounds like a nice place.”

  “You sure you don’t mind staying with Clare? We could get a woman from an agency—she might turn out to be a mutilator or junkie or something—one of those women who puts the kid in the oven and tucks the turkey in … but if it’s less trouble …”

  “No no no … it’s no bother.”

  A gentlemen from the apartment complex is stockpiling torpedoes, X-ray specs, switchblade combs, flesh eating plants, exploding pens, black soap and sneezing powder. All morning he knocks boiled eggs into the garbage disposal with a facsimile of the tamping iron that shot through the head of Phineas P. Gage at Cavendish, Vermont, Sept. 14, 1848.

  “Shouldn’t he be working?”

  He should be, but someone at Oil of Olay Summer Camp taught him to maintain a constant vigilance. When he puts his records on, he thinks of her sucking his cock. He paints a phone booth on the wall and goes in it and calls her. Then he bugs her all afternoon. Eventually they marry. He finds work in the field of “auto salvage.” She bears a daughter. At twelve, the daughter’s body blossoms. She spends her afternoons smoking cigarettes and listening to records with her friends, exchanging a regicidal wink now and then with a girl who plays with her hair—the clouds becoming darker and darker blue—one girl repeats something she’d heard from an older friend about love-making being like watching a World War II movie with Red Buttons.

  The clandestine organization (The Hardware Moguls) that was playing her for a chump taped her boyfriend’s conversation: “Oon WHIS-key kon SO-dah, por fah-VOR” (“Please mix me a drink of whiskey and soda”) and “PAH-rah me SO-loh, kon AH-wah natu-RAHL” (“I shall take mine straight, with plain water”). When they interrogated him in the A&P parking lot, he broke down:

  “What in god’s name do you want from me—I told you—I have no … no journal—I’m a … bank clerk … an ordinary garden variety bank clerk.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s an Individual Retirement Account?”

  “An Individual Retirement Account is a personal tax-sheltered retirement plan. It was developed by Congress to bring to every American worker the opportunity to build a more secure future for himself and for his family.”

  “Who can establish an account?”

  “Retirement accounts are available to any wage-earner.”

  “Can my spouse establish one?”

  “Your working spouse may establish a separate account too, provided she is not currently a participant in an employer-sponsored plan.”

  “Do I pay taxes on the income earned by my account?”

  Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil wasn’t Typhoid Mary’s son and we never, never had a duel with shish kebab skewers over the same girl, but he did work his way through two years of UCLA as a make-up man’s assistant with the Mack Sennett crew, though something about that droopy-lidded, wheels-turning-in-the-head gaze of his reminds one of Brad Darrach’s description of Bobby Fischer, “Alone, uncounseled, jouncing to rock music in a borscht-belt hotel, Bobby had outgeneraled the mighty Soviet chess establishment.” Phil! Phil! Phil! Here’s Phil—holding a dish towel and pan as he listens to “Refillable Dispenser Raga” coming from the radio in a neighbor’s car … when suddenly Phil yells in the direction of a body hidden under the hood of the idling Chevy Nova, “Hey!… etc……….” To try to alleviate nervous tension and insomnia, Phil submits himself to the Kneip treatment—a form of hydrotherapy that requires him to take cold baths.

  A man and woman (who looks like Katherine Ross) sink down into the hot foliage in a film version of Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers.

  The stag party goes on until breakfast and she’s beginning to feel hungry again. Well, the organist is high and he’s playing “Needles and Pins”. The bride’s name is Sirloin Stockade. Her real name is Bonnie from Phase I.

  If a muscular Italian is pushing you higher and higher on a swing and you fall—high in an arc to the hard packed sand—the nuns will take care of you and you will have my baby. Don’t cry.

  THE MONSTER

  The Monster hates you because you melted her Conway Twitty 45s. But here we are again! You in your cardigan sweater with the letter you won in gymnastics. Hickory smoke from the barbeque curling towards the perfume of the bath. The Hatfields and McCoys downstairs at their annual conclave. The village chiropractor pedaling up our front path, the litter of dachshunds asleep in their box under the striped tent. But doesn’t it bother you that you weren’t enough of a fusspot to see that the lawn service people raked near the patio and got rid of those detestably allergenic puffballs?

  It was a time of uncertain leisure, a time of faulty parachutes, of an uncertain public’s mandate for pyrotechnic child care, of the two-handed backhand with tons of topspin. And over the years the sun cooled as if it were a tablespoon of bisque that Yahweh was blowing on.

  A macadam path lined with quackgrass and pokeweeds stretched down the hill towards P.S. 231 Harry Moore School and in the shadow of Togo Mountain, beneath a pastel sky, Amos the Weimaraner puppy, played by Jackie Cooper, felt like Pascal among his variety of books. Then the Monster came and offered him vichyssoise from a swollen can, but Amos balked and, dropping his bundles of text into a pasteboard portmanteau, loped … towards the Newark drive-in movie showing Kung Fu Zombies Drink Campari. And later, when the delivery man came to install the pad and shag carpet, the Monster (unable to get a job because of her weight) cozened the workmen, with untapped girlishness, into converting her storm windows to tinted insulating glass.

  AUGUST

  The pig’s out of the pen. Grandma can’t speak. My heart is about to explode. Negative-three: see how you look—crooked blouse minus a button, disheveled trousers, zipper jammed halfway. Negative-two: “maybe we’ll have a meatless-friday with your baited ponytail.” Negative-one: they’ve been watching your programs all night. Zero: whose idea was it to stock the pool with carp for the labor day potlatch. First of all, I don’t believe in the star system or nepotism and I’ve seen political patronage first-hand, having lived in Jersey City. Second of all, a potato-dumpling-riding show is a crystal meth image and not something to mention while I’m calling home. Third of all, when you’re done throwing flour at those chops, t
hink about going to the store for air freshener. Deodorant for this chapel. “We smell from the speed. And we’re about to jump into a bracing pool of matrimony, of tax relief, of surfing and snoring … marry me you piece, you unwitting pawn in a brand … new … negligee!” I like that big pink cyst on his fishing pole. August … drum corps season, you can see the veterinarian’s office I designed, from this B-52 of an apartment.