Free I Smell Esther Williams by Mark Leyner Page B

balmy!” “You will do no such thing, Captain!” “Draw your weapon from its scabbard!” “You are about to become extinct, Captain! Never again to strengthen alliances or encourage troops to succor the poor!” “You’re a shit, sir … a real shit!!” “I’m going to cleave your brains in two—I hope they don’t regenerate like worm-parts, Captain!!” “It is you sir, who will soon adorn my hook !!!” “Your fish-like countenance strikes me as familiar, Captain—have we sparred before?” “You too ring a visual bell, sir, but I too cannot locate the source.” “Let us agree then that the survivor of this skirmish trace the wellspring of this faint familiarity.” “If it is I, sir, I will employ in my investigation every possible means—electronic bloodpressure units, calculators that are as thin as credit cards, wrist microsplit stopwatches.” “Taste death, then, Captain!” “Taste death then to you sir.”

    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 discoveredor 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. Iquote 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