from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

MARK LEYNER

Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, was one of the favorite books of my now-Mesozoic college days. Although all my friends were striving to develop sophisticated, New Republic –y prose styles, I was still lapping up Leyner’s playful indulgence as the alpha and omega of good writing. Now, a decade later, as the first grays start to insinuate themselves in my Etonian coif, I occasionally still find myself reading Gastroenterologist and doubling over with laughter.

The selection below is classic: it’s the one I always read out loud to my friends to turn them on to the book. Now all I have to do is say the opening words, “Hello Mark. This is Elizabeth Hurlick,” and I get immediate laughs. As a whole, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist suffers from having too many discontinuous one-liners and not enough glue; in this passage, however, Leyner stays focused and harnesses the full force of his wit. Enjoy, then, this heady shot of Leyner: he’s a rush like no other.

Hello Mark. This is Elizabeth Hurlick. I’m one of Trudy’s friends from school. Trudy asked me to call and tell you that when she gets home from work she’s going to want to make love tout de suite and then eat ’cause she’s got an early squash practice so she wants you to . . . put the chicken in the oven . . . run a hot bath . . . and soak in the tub for a while . . . She said that while you’re in the tub you should masturbate almost to the point of orgasm and stop and that way you’ll have a more copious ejaculation later when you have sex with Trudy because Trudy says you have to propitiate the squash god and the squash god is in the mood for a really super-copious ejaculation, and she said to tell you that . . . she doesn’t want you to use any deodorant under your arms because when you’re having sex she wants you to smell kind of macho sort of raunchy kind of ruggedly homo sapien kind of rural and she wants you to wait for her wearing the . . . red kimono . . . and when she comes through the door . . . you should nonchalantly let your kimono fall open so your meat sort of pokes out, and then she wants you to lift her skirt up and take her underpants off and rub your knuckles up and down her perineum, if you’re writing this down that’s p-e-r-i-n-e-u-m . . . I hope you don’t mind me leaving this sort of intimate personal message on your answering machine, but I’m a really really good friend of Trudy’s and Trudy’s told me all about you and I hope we can all get together sometime . . . Trudy says you’re creepy in a sort of attractive way and that sounds fun.