Mark Leyner: The Mr. Skin Interview

I've got to ask: Why do men have nipples?
What I say on talk shows and drive time, "Well, when we started doing this research I thought it was just so men didn't put their shirts on backwards." Everyone laughs. I'm quoting myself now.

The reason is, and I think this is pretty fascinating, we all start out as female, in utero. We all share an embryonic common ancestry as females. And it's not until about six weeks into the development that males diverge off and develop male characteristics. Nipples are really a vestige of the old days--a mammary memory of the old days back in the womb.

There are some other interesting examples of that, like testicles for instance. I guess people know this, but it bears repeating. Testicles are ovaries that dropped. There are various kinds of hernias and un-descended testicles and all sorts of things that can go slightly awry because of that fact of development. But it all involves our common ancestry.

What motivated a humorist like yourself to work with Dr. Goldberg and write a health and fitness book?
I would readily admit to naked commercial calculation if that were true. In retrospect, I should say that I sat in my kitchen one night intently smoking cigarettes and coming up with various plans to make money, but several years ago I was working on a TV show. I don't know if you remember this show, it was called Wonderland, on ABC. It wasn't on for very long. It was a great show. Peter Berg created it, and I wrote several of the episodes. It was a dark, gritty, harrowing medical drama.

Billy Goldberg was the medical consultant on the show, so we met each other. Hit it off. I spent a night with him as he did his rounds, which are literally rounds in the ER. It was an extraordinarily inspiring, bizarre night. He claims there's never been a night like this since, which I don't actually believe. I just think I was there to share it with him; otherwise it's just work for him.

But on this night ... I talk in more detail about this in the book, we discuss the whole night. A guy came in, for instance, a Chinese guy, who's a chef in a restaurant in Chinatown, with a meat cleaver embedded in his head. I mean walked in. Not a difficult thing to diagnose, what his problem was. And he was the most stoic person you could imagine. There was a little trickle of blood coming from it. I mean, it looked like something from a horror film.

A guy came in whose pit bull had bit his ear off. He wanted the pit bull vivisected. He wanted his ear back. [The dog] swallowed his ear. I always try to imagine the half hour before he came in when he's probably chasing the dog, saying, "Give me back my ear!" And the dog thinks it's some kind of great game.

There's a great story that I won't tell, because I think Billy and I tell it very colorfully in the book, about a deranged guy who came in claiming to be Superman, who did have sort of extraordinary strength, as sometimes psychotic people do, and I eventually came up with a solution, a kind of magic formula mantra that sedated him when all of the drugs at their disposal failed.

So it was a great night, and Billy told me that he's always asked questions at parties, that people pick their shirts up and drop their pants, show him things when they find out he's a doctor. He thought it would make a great book. We started collaborating on it, and here it is.

During the course of your research were there answers to some of these rarely asked questions that surprised you?
For a layperson--isn't that a horrible term?--I do know a lot. I've always loved this stuff. I've always had a secret desire to be a doctor, although clearly I love the life of being a writer. I can pretty much do what I want every day. I'm fascinated by biology and anatomy. I wasn't floored by anything.

There's a question in the book about whether there are actually werewolves. There are. There are two conditions that result in symptoms that do really mimic what we think of as a werewolf in the movies. There's something called porphyria and there's also something called congenital hypertrichosis universalis, which basically is a fancy way of saying you have hair all over your body and face.

That's what was fascinating to me, because you could see how, in addition to there being archetypical myths that are based on sexual fears and desires, there are also examples of people that probably contributed to the mythmaking of these sorts of things. You know, medical conditions. There's so much in history and in literature and in our culture that has a medical basis in it. It's a story that's under-told. There's so much in military history. In the past, like in Napoleonic Wars for instance, so many of the battles in that time were really decisively decided by disease and not combat.

Wars have also helped advance the science of medicine, because they had so much meat to work with.
Enormously. I don't know if there'd be any such thing as surgery if there weren't doctors having to be out in the field. It's always been fascinating to me. So the werewolf thing fascinates me, I don't know why. I'm somewhat hairy, but no one would mistake me for a werewolf. Somehow I found in my intellectual travels, I guess it's a family in Mexico. They're called the Wolf Boys of Mexico; you can go online, they have a website. These brothers look exactly like werewolves. They're completely covered in hair. One of the wolf boys was recently married, because there're wedding shots of him on their website. He married a very attractive woman. You know that show The Munsters that used to be on? You know how there was the one completely normal one and no mention of that was ever made? That's sort of what this is like, a fairly attractive woman who married a wolf boy. So what? What's the big deal? They love each other.

On your dedication page you highlight the doctors that inspired you, such as Dr. Johnny Fever and Dr. Who. But I noticed a glaring omission, Doc Johnson, the adult products distributor. Was this intentional?
It's an error. We will correct that in ensuing editions. I'm so sorry about that.

Also missing is the British R&B combo Dr. Feelgood.
Send me a list. You can be a co-author--come on, get on the gravy train.

Since this is a Skinterview for Mr. Skin, I'd like to focus a bit on chapter three of your book, "All You (N)ever Wanted to Know About Sex". Was it a turn-on or turn-off for you dredging up all that dirty stuff?
Probably the more clinical and scientific you get about things it's sort of de-eroticizing to some degree. Although, I would have to say, there's no amount of discussion about the nutritional value of sperm that can ever make that whole issue un-sexy.

I actually wanted to call the book, and it's obviously a good thing that no one listened to me, because it would marginalize the book's appeal, but I lobbied very hard to call the book Is Sperm Fattening?

It certainly would have got a segment of the non-reading public out there to read your book. For that audience your book resolves a major controversy in the hardcore community by stating that yes, women can ejaculate. So those X-rated niche videos are real?
Yeah, there is some scientific evidence that does seem to indicate that there's something there and it's not urine and it's maybe related to a female version of prostatic fluid, a female prostate gland. I've seen films. I don't completely buy the validity of some of them because the force of some of the female ejaculations I've seen reminds me of the hoses they used to spray civil-rights protesters in the South. I'm certainly open to that being a reality. Nothing would please me more than if that were actually true. I'm only quivering with the volume. But I buy into the validity of it. Put me down on that side.

One question asks if masturbation causes blindness, to which you respond that frequent bouts of self-abuse may in fact lower the risk of prostate cancer.
There was a recent study that clearly shows that--and it doesn't necessarily have to be masturbation, but I guess for most of us that may be true, at least for the frequency we need here--more frequent ejaculators have, I think the study shows, a lower frequency of prostate cancer.

Billy, I have to give him credit for this. I'm the humorist, but he's pretty humorous himself. He said the study now enables adolescent boys to put signs up on their bedroom doors that say: "Mom, Do Not Disturb. I'm Curing Prostate Cancer."

I knew that when I was a child.
Yeah, me too. There's a question in the book about whether you can actually break your penis. It's not a bone, but apparently you can fracture that membrane when it's erect. Billy has a funny story of a middle-aged guy who lived at home, who was masturbating, and he heard his mom at the door. He's got his pants down around his ankles, and in a desperate effort to get to the door and close it he fell in some horribly awkward way and ended up in the ER with some grotesquely bent ...

I sense a volume two of this book is imminent.
We just signed a wonderful deal with our publisher and, yes, there's going to be more. We're constantly getting new questions. I really like the question someone on a radio show asked, why men sometimes shiver when they pee. That's a great question.

You've got your work ahead of you, then.
Yeah, I'm going to be busy.

This was all leading to a boilerplate Mr. Skin question, which is do you recall growing up the first nude scene you saw in a mainstream movie?
I don't think this is going to be right, though. I don't think she was actually nude, but here's my answer because she might as well have been. I reacted to it as if she was. Raquel Welch was in this dinosaur movie ...

One Million Years B.C.
Yes, One Million Years B.C. She was wearing very little and it was always wet, so she was basically naked in it (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3). Like I said, I kind of responded to it--a naked woman and huge dinosaurs is a pretty inspired combination. Now my grandmother took me to the movie, and it was a little grimy theater in Jersey City, and it was the two of us, I think. It was afternoon, and I think I had chosen this movie. She found this so funny, the very thing I found--I don't even know. I think I was too young to be turned on, to be aware of all that, but something was stirred up. She just thought this was hilarious and just peed in her pants.

Literally?
Yes. I don't know if she shivered or not.

This sounds like the beginning of an incredible fetish for you as an adult.
Well, imagine: dinosaurs, a peeing grandmother, a quasi-nude Raquel Welch--there you go. That's why I am what I am.

In chapter seven you write about "Medicine from the Movies and TV", but I'm curious if your cannibalizing interests include cult and exploitation film?
I have to say--and this is boring--I'm a pretty serious cinephile. I will one day explore cult and fetish films more than I have, but I have to admit I haven't.

I'm not talking about X-rated movies, but Russ Meyer and blaxploitation-type films.
I'm not that well schooled in that. But I've seen a bunch of Russ Meyer's stuff. Those are probably some of the first sexually oriented movies I saw. I have a better appreciation for them, in every way ... I think I'm having some kind of second adolescence. No, I've probably never really emerged out of the first adolescence.

Well, you have a great journey of discovery ahead of you.
Thank you.