Leyner - Tooth Imprints On a Corn Dog

In prose as fluid as liquid silicone, Leyner cranks up his white-hot wit and proceeds to have his nuclear way with pop culture. Leyners work shines so brilliantly.

Austin Chronicle

Leyner is an original and immensely amusing writer as well as a provocative social critic.

Washington Post

Leyners brilliantly discontinuous humor invites comparison with William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and comedian Steven Wright. Its rude, epic shtick that begs to be read aloud to friends and strangers alikeif only you could figure out where to stop.

Village Voice

Underlying his omnipotent wit is a versatile mastery of the forms in which he writes.

Paper magazine

Buckle up for another ride on the contorted roller-coaster of Leyners mindanother thrill from this elegant, mordantly witty belletrist.

Boston Sunday Herald

Leyner is a twisted wizard, a genre-busting virtuoso, working at the outer edge of narrative convention.

Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City

I Smell Esther Williams
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Et Tu, Babe
Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog
Tetherballs of Bougainville

Copyright 1995 by Mark Leyner

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover in slightly different form by Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1995.

The selections below first appeared in the following publications:
Hulk CoutureEsquire Gentleman
Immoral AllureEsquire Gentleman
The (Illustrated) Body Politic (previously titled Senate Tattoo)
The New York Times Op-Ed
Great Pretenders (previously titled Faux to Faux)The New Yorker
Dream Girls, USA (previously titled Miss America)Elle
Dangerous DadsEsquire Gentleman
Eat at Cosmos (previously titled Spook the Sponsors)The New Yorker
Oh, Brother (previously titled The Zeichner Twins)The New Republic
Einstein on the PhoneThe New Republic
Venus de Volleyball Esquire Gentleman

Einstein on the Phone and Venus de Volleyball
are appearing in book form for the first time.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Harmony edition as follows:
Leyner, Mark.
Tooth imprints on a corn dog/Mark Leyner.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76604-5
I. Title.
PS3562.E99T66 1995
813.54dc20
94-38570

v3.1

When Merci was wheeled into the operating room to undergo the C-section that extricated our daughter, Gabrielle, from the umbilical knot shed tied around her leg, the doctors set up this curtain that divided Merci into two sectors: the upper part for nonparticipantsMerci and meand the business end, which apparently was for M.D.s and R.N.s only. Now, I love surgeryso as soon as I deduced that they were about to make the first incision, I got up and started to walk around to where the action was, because I couldnt see a damn thing up at Mercis head, and by this point she was sufficiently anesthetized and tranquilized that I figured she didnt need my moral support anymore, plus the fact that, in order to be allowed into the operating room, Id scrubbed with hexachlorophene and donned full surgical regaliagown, cap, mask, and gloves. Now, putting me in surgical garb is like putting a drag queen in an Yves Saint Laurent evening gownI just light up. (Often I feel like a surgeon trapped in a writers body.)

Anyway, as soon as the doctors see me coming, they get very peremptory and very territorial about Mercis uterus: Mr. Leyner, please! Youre to remain on that side of the curtain or youre going to have to wait outside.

Merci hears this, lifts her head up, and says in her sweet little voice, frayed only slightly by some 30 hours of labor: Doctors, its perfectly OK for him to assisthe watches a lot of medical programming on cable TV on Sundays.

The logic of this statement is so cogent and irrefutable that the doctors all just shrug their shoulders as if to say: Well, thats about equivalent to the training we have, so welcome aboard, cmon down, have a hemostat, grab a retractor, etc.

This incident exemplifies Merciher sense of humor and sangfroid in the midst of difficult circumstances, her bracing pragmatism articulated in her dulcet Ecuadorian Tinker Bell voice. One of the coolest things about Merci is the way she talks. I need only slightly amend Michael Kimmelmans description of art historian Meyer Shapiros writing to characterize Mercis discourse. Something like: Her chirpy-timbred buoyant palaver, while uncompromising, dense, and dizzying in its references, is without cant or pomp.

People have said about me unfettered imagination, nice arms, but shes got a pretty unfettered imagination herself. Its probably just as likely for her to say, just out of the blue, something like bioluminescent acne as it would be for me.

Dont you find it really revolting when an author thanks his wife by saying: Only a woman with so-and-sos understanding and patience would have endured my manic highs and sloughs of despond, my chilly remoteness and insularity, and, alternately, my infantile need to be burped and changed, my obsessive philandering, my inexplicable need to fuck every woman in her step class, my having squandered her Christmas Club money on my methamphetamine habit, the Charivari sprees, the cognac binges with the inevitable vomiting and weeping, my paranoia, my hypochondria, my loss of interest in personal grooming and hygiene, and a recent compulsion to titillate myself by putting larvae in her foodall of which, rightly or wrongly, I felt was necessary to get through this long creative night. Her editorial acumen and rigor, her wise encouragement and enabling love, etc. etc.? This is your basic Im so complex and difficult, and my wife is so simple and forbearing (a.k.a. simpering imbecile puts up with anything overweening dickhead dishes out) formula.

Well, interestingly enough, a perfectly inverse equation underlies life at the Pinto-Leyner household. Merci is the complex one, and shes delightful to live with. (In an article for the Neapolitan textile-design fanzine Bistecca, I think I said that she had close to optimal interpersonal ergonomics.) How easily one pictures her researching Montessori schools in an ecru mohair tank top and peppering her conversation with Vivienne Westwood this and Benazir Bhutto that. Yknow what Im saying?

On the other hand, Im simple, but extremely difficult to live with. And its not like Im racked with self-reproach about it either. Im just the cream soda swilling, crotch scratching, irascible, coughing-up-indigestible-bits-of-grizzle-from-some-meat-on-a-stick, surly, greasy overalls-over-candy-colored-latex-minikimono (my work uniform when Im in the throes of a novel or a play), dont-bother-me-till-halftime kind of guy that society has made me. So hey, what the fuck? Im not apologizing for who I am. Im just trying to say that Merci is more complex, OK?

Ill give you an example: the gullibility ruse. Merci will feign gullibility in order to reveal and then revel in my own misreading of her apprehension. Its the sort of you must