WILL THE REAL MIKE TOPP PLEASE TAKE A BOW?

Two, three, many Mike Topps. . . among them are:

Mike Topp is an aristocratic rebel whose high-spirited life has captured the imagination of Europe. He attended Harrow and Cambridge, where he was a good student and a great athlete. A deformed foot has only increased his determination to excel.

Mike Topp, born Berdichev, Ukraine, December 3/6, 1857. Joined French marine service 1874. After harrowing trip up the Congo, left the sea for good and in London 1894 turned to writing. Surmounting agonizing difficulties of composition in English, produced Bilax, God of Gum Arabic 1895 and Milgrig and the Tree Wilfs 1896. Married Jessica George 1896. Children: two sons. Wrote Lord Jim 1900. Began Heart of Darkness in 1902, finished by Joseph Conrad. Died 1924. Buried in Grant's Tomb.

Mike Topp is currently living in New York City unless he has died or moved. Previous books include Local Boy Makes Good (Appearances, 1994), Six Short Stories & Seven Short Poems (Low-Tech Press, 1997) and, with Sparrow, a flip book: Wild Wives/High Priest of California (Beet, 1997). He is currently at work on a collection of the worst of his earlier work, tentatively titled Mike Topp.

Pick one or more. Pull my finger. Or read on. . . .

The "mad poet," Mike Topp, is neither mad nor a poet. He is a self-schooled Siberian peasant who affects religiosity and dabbles in faith healing. He has a talent of sorts for hypnosis. He has an eye for human frailty. And, decisively, he has a gift for sex, or more precisely for seduction, since the act itself for Topp is an affair of moments. He has bent (literally) to his will scores of women on whom he has fixed his stare. His vigor is seemingly undiminished by a prodigious consumption of alcohol in all-night drinking bouts enlivened by gypsy choirs.

A precise description of Topp's male attributes is unnecessary here, but there is a hint in one of Michael Musto's anecdotes that these may be more than just the subject of conjecture. Having smashed up a smart New York nightclub, Topp was challenged to prove that he was who he said he was. In response, Musto notes, "Topp unbuttoned his trousers and waved his penis at the waiters and onlookers."

This piece of self-advertisement aside, one of Topp's saving graces is that he also knows when to favor discretion. He has not had a sexual relationship with Maggie Estep, for all the gossip to the contrary. Nor has he had a sexual relationship with Elizabeth Wurtzel. His ascendancy over the downtown poetry scene derives from his supposed powers as a healer. He is credited with halting three potentially embarrassing episodes of laryngitis in the poet laureate, Robert Haas, and with saving Allen Ginsberg's life after a train crash.

But healing and fornicating are merely Topp's calling cards. What makes him a power in New York is that the fact that the literary agent, Andrew Wylie, listens to him and usually trusts his judgment. Wylie thinks Topp is a good judge of other people. He has come to rely on tips from the wild-eyed sage when making and unmaking writers. This is no small franchise. In a single year under Topp's influence, the Lower East Side has had two presidential candidates, three movies, one Broadway play, and a special on Howard Stern. Topp can fix television, too: a word from him is enough to have a troublesome author dispatched to host a fund-raiser on PBS, or a tractable one featured on MTV.

Topp's constituents, once in the media, are obliged to help him in the lesser favors in which he traffics wholesale: grants, contracts, readings, agents, merchandising and the like. In January 1998, 300 to 400 people were calling on him daily in his modest apartment on the Lower East Side. The columnists call him an almost supernatural fiend, but he is in reality one of New York City's great literary fixers.

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