I Smell Esther Williams Read online

  Rakish crescent moon, does thin hair require combing or brushing? You want to comb my hair? You want me to remove my hat which I bought in Maine—so you can see my hair and sort of diagnose its needs? It’s difficult to hear—someone’s playing that whale album again.

  The very tender message is not drawn above a resort beach by propeller plane, but left, say, between the cup and saucer of one’s fancy. The element of suspense attending such a message’s reply is said to be what goaded Bob into just forgetting it and he celebrated the easing of his burden in a park adjacent to the bait store. Drugs … sure, Bob took a few. Cheated the government? No more than the rest of us. Swallowed his gum every once in a while. Puts his pants on one leg at a time. Socks. Shoes. Buttons his shirt. Knots and adjusts his necktie. Winds his watch. Slips his jacket on. Quick cup of coffee. Puts water in the dog’s bowl. The car-pool honks. Out he goes. Not the most nutritious breakfast in the world—but so it goes. Day after day. With the thump of each new headline upon the front porches of our people—the North-Americans.

  Digging for family roots, one may unearth an uncle who delighted in sniffing professional women’s tennis players’ “dew-laden” socks, (which, left to the winter night, provide an image of “frost encrusted socks”). National security, though, like the discovery of penicillin, may be served by providential accident. Video espionage mistakenly applied, for example, to room 325 instead of 225, may reveal an unemployable emigré, an idiot-savant with a funny accent in a long smock with a rattan cane, (one imagines him waving goodbye to the inflation-ravaged Western European nations whose citizens have been forced to choose between college for their children and air-conditioning for their homes), designing a bomb that would, regardless of the site of detonation, seek out and shatter Alexander Haig. But Secret Service agent and mermaid alike—my caveat for either would be identical: a summer cold can be pretty terrible if you don’t take care of it. Good health doesn’t have to be an accident.

  I’LL BE WEARING GOLDEN ARCHES

  I.

  I think I’m wearing largemouth bass instead of sneakers, this afternoon. I think they’re laced through the eyes. I had better butter my magazine and put a band-aid on my watch band, your honor. Yak. Yak. Yak. And eat the article and nurse the time. I’d better cool the braggadocio and savor the silt and retire my Kodak to its pouch case. Vat’s dis katzenjammer? (She can’t stand his bruxistic slumber …) Your honor, this is a kangaroo court … A Central-Asiatic couldn’t get a fair hearing within 10,000 miles of this room. It behooves ya to eeeck out a living before they usurp your jurisdiction. Before I pour a quart of koumiss on this tinsel town. It’s late, shut the gate. Listen for the katydid.

  II.

  The Inquisitor: What will you be wearing?

  Me: Just … peds.

  The Inquisitor: I can’t hear you.

  Me: Just peds!

  The Inquisitor: 50 more lashes!

  Me: Arrrrgh! No! No!

  The Inquisitor: What’ll you be wearing then?!

  Me: Wedgies.

  The Inquisitor: Prepare the thumb-screws!

  Me: Pumps!

  The Inquisitor: Ready the rack!

  Me: Wing-tipped Oxfords!

  III.

  Dawn breaks over the cabin and lake. The Rat Pack—Sinatra, Martin, Lawford, Davis—is drinking booze and horsing around with the bread dough bait that their guide has prepared.

  IV.

  As time robs moisture from our skin, death beckons. We sing: “It’s a hell of a way to go / noshing on herring and nagging each other / but we’re just hired stooges / getting laid off by death.”

  V.

  This is my feeling: Should the citizens, who people the slopes which descend from the abscissa, be segregated according to blood-sugar levels—those designated “X” doomed to an eternity of vending mother-of-pearl plaques and gold baubles at roadside stands—those dubbed “Y” left to rattle the bars of their proscenium calaboose? Wheat must be sold. Tradeswoman, meatman, fishmonger, and furrier must thrive. Commerce must hum as time traipses by.

  Additionally, there is life’s diverting aspect, e.g. making a toast in one of many languages, “hunting” a lightning bug, tickling someone who’s drinking at a fountain, even ballooning or carving and painting miniature wooden animals. Finally, there is a wetter aspect, which includes singing in the shower or participating in a swim meet.

  The Autocron’s girlfriend slipped out of her peignoir and tossed it across his miniature schnauzer which he adored more than his hordes of minions. When he went outside to get the paper, he noticed that the clew had become frost and, noting that the frost was architecturally complex although it could not literally house anyone, reasoned that a bubble’s tenant was simply air. His adjutant walked up the front path and said “Good morning, you have to drive your sister somewhere today.” The Autocron said, “Where? I thought I had today to myself.” The adjutant’s breath smelled mediciney and he said, “She needs a ride to the Lodge Hall where she’ll be singing tonight … she needs to rehearse.” After breakfast, when the Autocron got into his car, he noticed scores of sand nicks in his windshield. He wondered whether he should ask his father for the money for a new windshield. He wondered whether insurance would cover the replacement. He wondered whether bearing the cost himself wouldn’t prevent him from being able to afford the rent if his girlfriend got the H.E.W. job in Washington and moved out.

  “Rouse the stevedores from their atmospheric bistro—we sail at dawn!” I said. While I was heating up some beans, later, I decided to have a braunschweiger sandwich with a yogurt dressing. (I’d just gotten back from visiting my parents in New Jersey.) I was reading Rex Morgan M.D. in the Post—Morgan’s standing behind some woman who’s on the phone—she’s saying, Vince please—listen to me—CLICK—Morgan looks up at her looking at the phone and says, Did he hang up on you, Connie? And she says, We—We must have been cut off. I’m one of those purists who can’t ignore a blurry television picture and still enjoy the show. If the networks were taking a survey and asking which programs I preferred, though, I’d be hard put to say. What could I do with the survey-taker? I don’t know morse-code, or the language of the deaf or Esperanto for “If I do not come out soon, keep going around the block” or “I love girls who smell like chewing gum.… like the ones at the all-night dermatologist’s office.” Three years ago in Hempstead, N.Y. where I was doing research in low-temperature physics, I had an experience with survey-takers. A couple appeared at my door one evening, with sheafs of questions. The second I let them in, the gentleman flew to the metallic globe I kept on my coffee table. The young lady was sweet and self-effacing and beguiling. But it was ridiculously beautiful the way he brandished the globe above his head as if to whack himself with a how-would-you-like-a-punch-in-the-nose attitude—his cerebral hemispheres parting like red seas, like masses yearning to be free, revealing down the center of his head, a black-top shuffleboard court with miniature retired people on it.

  “A lot of aches and pains go with the territory,” Craig assured a pair of junior partners cornered against a cupboard in the butler’s pantry. And Kay teetered by, hailing Craig’s attention y’know—shaking hands with herself, the way she does, and went, “Craig Newcomer, if you’d put that drink down for one little second and come over here and …” Now Craig’s coming over and Kay goes “Look, I’m sittin here and I think I’m payin real good attention and all of a sudden I turn my back—it’s autumn. Y’know—wha’did it do, creep up on me or what? Get coy? What?” Craig takes her by the shoulders and points her towards the veranda, “What do you want the seasons to do, Kay,” he says, “hit you on the head when they change?” And, oh my, there’s Beatrice and her driving instructor friend dressed to commit homicide. But soon, fear of Yankee patrols makes further conversation taboo. Bang. As sweating rack boys push carts loaded with suits, coats and dresses, a Schlitz sales representative in a goat costume is convulsed by a neuromuscular spasm after being shot by a burp gun.

&
nbsp; Rachel left on Friday … I’m saying this because I want everyone to know how sad I am.

  You think that’s bad?

  What do you mean?

  I know someone who was swimming in his pool and drowned—that’s sad.

  Who was he?

  That Rolling Stone—Brian Jones.

  You really knew him?

  Naaa … I just read about him, really.

  I don’t know what to say.

  How about “I’m very sorry.”

  I am … very very sorry. I know he played a seminal role in the formation of the group.

  (The water-skiers gave us a shower as they passed. Then we were deloused and had to go to prison.)

  MOVIE SCRIPT

  George Washington Carver stands in an Alabama field scratching his head, fanning a thin, sensitive visage with his cap. A rain-washed gully, (of the sort that scourges Southern farm land starved for inorganic mineral salts—desperate for the cyclic replenishment of crop rotation), is always an annoying place to break a plow handle, but poor Professor Carver’s troubles are just beginning. “Oh, no!” he says, “Here comes a bunch of Tuskegee coeds!” He knows they’ll be mean, meaner than any of the girls he’d ever dated. He looks around for a place to hide, but before he thinks to climb in the wagon and cover himself with seed bags, they’re on him. These girls have foraged enough leaf mold to be expert botanists, but the only instruments they plan to use on Carver’s stalk are their mouths and slits. For women who lead lives like this, it’s nothing to take an unwilling guy and put him through their paces. In fact, a gang bang is like normal sex for these creeps. But for Carver, it’s a whole new trip. At first, it was one he’d wished he missed. He’d never even been to bed with two girls, let alone make it in public. But there’s little discourse in situations like this, and no choices either. Once they’ve spotted his firm slender ass, there’s no way they’ll leave without seeing—and feeling and fucking—a lot more. As each item of clothing is torn away, he feels his demure personality as a research professor at Tuskegee Institute also disappearing—along with his former sexual inhibitions. Since the greedy coeds don’t bother to take turns with him, but rather have him all at once, the action makes his head spin—or is it the rough hands and soggy, steaming cunts that make him dizzy? After this, going back to the old way would seem anticlimactic. But later that evening, Carver is attacked by Blacula.

  These are very dear to me—these notes—very expensive and uncertain and childish. I’m writing them every day. Tonight I feel very lonely—Rachel’s gone to Bermuda with her family and the apartment is empty. I’m a little apprehensive about my visit with Barbara in Lansing—but more hopeful than apprehensive, really. I’m looking forward to human contact that’s un-habitual and un-mapped—my latest estimate is that certain forms of human relations are redemptive. I probably still have firm expectations in mind vis-a-vis un-mapped human contact and vis-a-vis Barbara in Lansing and vis-a-vis these notes—what a typically topical malady. This will be tonight’s final entry then:

  Bob was saying, I’ll never bring Sharon over again—I’m so sorry … About what, I said. About her knocking the idol off your speaker cabinet. C’mon, I said, that’s nothing—that’s ridiculous. What bothered me was her breaking that glass. Those glasses were the first things I bought for the apartment. I got the pieces of the broken glass which I kept wrapped in a few pages of the Denver Post. As I was showing them to Bob, he suddenly turned white. What? I asked. I swear to god, he said, I swear to god I saw them move! He spoke very little the rest of the evening and hasn’t broached the subject since.

  Because nothing is so overtaxed as the network of cybernetic checks and balances that averts and thwarts rash judgment, system fatigue is an inevitable fact of life whether it literally advertises itself as in the case of those improvident, precipitantly released Hollywood pageants (“am I nuts or what?”) that, in the phraseology of the trade magazines “snooze into the market;” or whether it hides its head under the covers of police paperwork, hearsay, and miscellaneous clue, as in the instance of the FBI-wired county official with severe tachycardiac spasms who chose mistakenly between instant gratification and a fifteen minute ride to medication; or whether it surfaces in a cherub-cheeked appliance heiress unwittingly surrendering her heart and purse strings to a philandering chiseler, whose unctuous good looks are matched only by his unprincipled greed, in the shadows which caress the kiosk’s colonnettes like a gossamer bunting during this lush Virginia fall twilight.

  I unbuttoned my jacket, loosened my tie, scratched a mosquito bite on her calf and rose to brush my tongue before kissing beautiful Maria Ragazza, Carlo Gambino’s ex-wife. As I spit hurriedly into the sink, I turned to see her clawing a red pit in her calf where the bite had been. You did this to me, she hissed. I rushed to her side and buried my kisses into the raw gouge. When the skin heals, I said, my kisses will be interred in your calf! Her face trembled like a leaf on an antenna. We kissed. I apprehended the kiss modally. The Labial Protasis: initially, the predominant sensation is of full slick tumid quivering catholic lips / Le Temps de la Langue: the tongue sweeps the lips with excruciating luxury and delves assertively into the mouth, playfully jousting its counterpart—its “jumeau d’amour” / The Orifice Complexus (also Swinburne Phase and rarely Tartar’s Play): simply—the active hungering mouth in febrile animalistic dilation and systole.

  The bassoon seems to say, what do you know about setting up a business letter? and the strings seemingly retort in unison, as much as you do! Who was it that couldn’t find the key to the xerox machine after being here six months. An impish staccato passage from the first violins recalls the Czech “Furiant”, a lively Bohemian dance in 3/4 meter, and, with its sudden changes from melancholy to exuberance, evokes Dvorak’s “Dumky Trio.” As the timpani and basses augur an almost subterranean ritardando, the orchestra segues into a bucolic conciliatory movement that seems to suggest, this office is like an eco-system—managerial duties, secretarial duties, maintenance responsibilities, switchboard and messenger service—all mesh in a synergetic, mutually advantageous hierarchy, that necessarily precludes petty squabbles and bitching.

  MERCERNARIES UNEARTH JOMO KENYATTA’S “PRIVATE STASH”

  The rugged family room atmosphere would have been shattered had the Guffs known that the poodles were suffocating in their station wagon. But soon they would find the still poodles. Let’s eavesdrop:

  Pop: Dogs don’t grow on trees, son.

  Little Roy: Why Pop? You said they put Confucius and Candy in the ground—just like we did when we planted seeds for Greta’s garden.

  Pop: Son, what do you say we both get some hunks of knockwurst and catch that Denver Bronco game we’ve been waiting for?

  Little Roy: Super idea, Pop!!!!

  Pop: Super Bowl, son!

  Re: Lansing visit with Barbara. I, Mark Leyner, repudiate everything I said about uncharted human relations. The first night in Lansing, we fucked three times—each time more tedious than the one before. She kept wanting more more more more more satisfaction. For four days she talked about her heat without let-up, like a disgusting pig … always with a bottle of Tab jammed into her mouth—a shiny red mouth that seemed like the only sign of life enshrouded in the dough of her fat flesh. Uh-oh Barbara’s coming—I better stop and put this away.

  Every person at the colloquium thought Kathleen an overweening prima donna. And when round robin discussion opened, more depressing invective than ever filled the shape of its container. In a parade, they unfurled their skeins of initials. With craven unanimity, they blasted Kathleen with their ill-conceived and pleonastic implosions. But still, amidst this wilting, Kathleen (a little drunk) delivered her statements inviting the very adversaries present before her to give up, to lie down, to die, to rot, to become ant food.

  Today, people look for “fiber” in their food like Ponce de Léon looking for the fountain of youth—the pool of puerility that’s been cussed and discussed. That’s as real as
a pomegranate poo-bah. But her rear looks like a cleft pomegranate, but her rear is a red herring. The real issue is her royal flush of boyfriends that runs from Jerk to Asshole.

  The aroma of green tinder imbued his albums and bloodmobile & when he saw wisps of her by the rigid percolator, his eyes rolled like egg yolks on a piano bench being moved from room to room, and his hand was observed by witnesses in a town five miles away, around the neck of a bottle of Chivas Regal.

  They kissed, but the warm contents of her mouth troubled him like an automat’s pot-luck. And the Tudor arches afforded an incomplete view of her bus.

  The affidavit states that he said “Ahoy there!” when he arrived. That she chewed and swallowed a photograph of his swami. He lists “choking on a piece of food at an embassy party” as his #1 phobia; she lists “the smell of gasoline” as her favorite olfactory turn-on, and “giving myself paper-cuts” as her most debilitating hobby.

  “What a beautiful gun … more beautiful than the three pointed at your back, amigo.”

  “Give it to me straight. I can take it. How long do I have?” “About two seconds.” “Put that gun down!” “After all the misery you’ve put me through …” “Misery? What misery?!”

  I made a mental catalogue of the spread: a rosewood desk on embossed “lion’s paw” legs / photograph of a woman in filoplume hat and child on a mechanical hobby-horse / golfball paperweight / an overturned rosewood Windsor chair / a disarray of legal and steno pads and pencils / a half-torn letter reading “… ght. Can’t we begin again—without suspicions and recriminations—can’t we say to each other—I made a mistake—that each night I spent apart from you was filled with sadness and emptiness—because that’s how it was for me. If only you hadn’t …” / a bust of Nefertiti / a calendar-penholder / a set of windows with drawn shades / a coatrack / an oriental-style taboret / a Morris chair with dark green chamois leather cushions / an open bottle of gin on a mock-filigree fold-out bar / an ashtray filled with butts, some bearing lipstick traces.