David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. My evening with Norman Mailer
Tributes are pouring in from around the globe to the late Norman Mailer, the esteemed egotist and pugnacious author of such acclaimed works as “Advertisements for Myself,” “The Prisoner of Sex,” “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” “Of Women and Their Elegance” and something called “The Naked and the Dead.” I chanced upon Mailer late one evening in 1987 in a tavern in Flatbush, and it was a memorable occasion, one Mailer later wrote about in his picaresque “The Castle in the Forest,” his last published novel.
Mailer was sitting alone in a booth in a corner, his face ashen and forlorn, no doubt because he was cradling a tepid Coors Light. I rambled in, full of youth and the bluster that comes with it, with a clutch of drunken friends looking to spoil someone’s evening. I sent them to the bar to clean out the establishment’s tequila supply, boisterously called out to Mailer, “Scoot over, Tubby!” and head-butted him, sending him careening into the nearby wall.
“Jesus, what the – ,” Mailer sputtered. “Can’t you just leave me alone? I’m content to sit in this hazy darkness with the ghosts of my failures and the memories of what was never to be.”
“Can it, Norm,” I bellowed. “I’m here to ramble elegiacally about manhood, about mistresses, about evil and Japanese manga. And you’re going to listen!”
“Please,” he whimpered, and off I was, delivering a magnificent soliloquy on faith and mortality. I punched a hole the size of a fist into the concrete wall (to this day, the knuckles of my right hand are granulated powder) and laughed the keening laugh of a colossus astride a braying goat.
My hail chums brought over a case of Jose Cuervo Especial, and one by one I knocked each bottle back, as an ordinary man would a shot glass. To this day, my blood-alcohol content level measures .23.
“If I’m not mistaken, you like to gaze into the abyss, stare evil in its face, and walk away with a sorrowful wisdom,” I told him. “This is me, unimpressed,” I continued. “What do you know about evil? I, sir, can teach you about evil, for I cover the television industry!” Mailer’s face curdled ever so slightly, and he swallowed anemically.
“You think you know women, don’t you, Mailer?” I asked rhetorically. “You stabbed a broad once, am I right, and that imbues you with insight into the spectral majesty that is our fairer sex? Well, do you see that dame over there – ” and, here, I pointed to a specimen of inordinate pulchritude at a nearby table trying desperately not to make eye contact with me – “do you see her? You do, don’t you?” I pulled a revolver tucked into my belt in the small of my back and shot her in the clavicle. “Well, now I think I know a little bit more about women than you do!”
I leaned into Mailer, my breath rancid with hubris, and bit off a chunk of his left ear, spitting it to the floor with a rueful laugh. “And now if you’ll forgive me, Norman, I have a previously arranged assignation with one Miss Tipper Gore.” I lurched from the booth, picked up the chunk of Mailer’s ear I had spat to the floor, wiped it off with a cocktail napkin and tucked it into a pocket. Chortling like fiends, my entourage and I ambled from the bar into the nascent dawn in search of greater truths and more tequila. Mailer crawled under his table and curled into the fetal position.
I learned much from Norman Mailer that night. Such as, don’t be such a douchebag.
Comments
Bravo, Mr. Mayor!
Posted by: Book Lover | November 17, 2007 3:35 PM