The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (10 page)

I peer fervently into my fathers eyes and squeeze him hard, as hard as I’ve ever squeezed another human being. And I recite those words, those stirring, unforgettable words, in defense of which—in the ensuing months—so many brave Bougainvillean boys will lose their minds:

“Any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can’t mail meat to,” I intone, “but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”

The room bursts into applause and I can see several people daubing tears from their eyes.

There’s now—as if conveyed via the sort of subliminal, instantaneously communicated signal that causes an entire herd on the savanna to suddenly change direction—an implicit sense of adjournment, and everyone gathers his or her personal effects and begins to filter out of the warden’s office.

“You’re going to the library from here to work on that screenplay, right?” my father asks.

“Yeah …” I answer, anticipating the inevitable corollary.

“So … you want to share a cab?”

I stare down at the floor, shifting my weight uneasily from foot to foot.

“I can’t, Dad … no way.”

I cringe, awaiting his response. And when none is forthcoming, I look back up.

He’s gone!

I scan the room and he’s nowhere to be seen.

“Hey, where’d my dad go?”

“He left,” says the superintendent, who’s just returned from his studio in the tear-gas control console booth. “I just passed him in the hall.”

That’s it. He’s gone, I say to myself, shaking my head. My father has now begun the grim, tormented, and macabre life of an NJSDE releasee, a life that may very well come to a violent and agonizing end within the next five minutes, within the next hour, or in a month, or a year, or—who knows?—flourish without untoward incident for another fifty years and
then
the blast of shrapnel or the Colombian necktie.

“Oh, by the way, I searched the patch files,” says the superintendent, “and we have a bronchitis wheeze sample.”

“Bronchitis … that sounds cool,” I say. “Just make sure the tempo is right—very, very slow, larghissimo, funereal. Like ‘I feel shitty / wheeze … wheeze / oh so shitty / wheeze … wheeze …’ ”

“Gotcha,” he says, extending his hand. “Mark, take it easy and good luck on the screenplay.”

“Thank you very much.”

We shake and he exits.

Ditto the operations officer.

“All the luck in the world on that screenplay.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

The doctor.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you on that Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America thing.”

“Thanks so much.”

And the executioner: “How much was that—$200,000 a year?
Madonna!
Whack that script out of the ballpark, chief.”

“I’m gonna try. Thanks a lot. And thanks for everything today.”

And then the rabbi.

He gestures elaborately at the mythical multiplex marquee in the sky.
“Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat,”
he says, flashing a pair of avid thumbs-up.

“Thank you.
Vaya con Dios
, Rabbi.”

Now only the warden, the warden’s male secretary, the stenographer, and I remain in the office.

“Absolutely no calls and shut the door on your way out, please,” says the warden.

For a second I assume she’s talking to me.

“Absolutely no calls,” parrots the secretary, winking at me as he closes the door behind him.

When I turn and look back at the warden, she’s perched atop her desk, smirking cryptically, one eyebrow arched high, little diamond chips like crushed ice gleaming across the straps of her stilettos. And she’s got my two little notes in her hand: “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?” And she’s waving them in the air like a pair of theater tickets. Like front-row
orchestra, opening night, Aeschylus’
Prometheus Bound
at the Greater Dionysia in Athens in friggin’ 468
A.D
. I mean, like a pair of real hot ducats.

Gulp.

Boing.

    Three quick procedural items before we move on to substantive issues—namely, my impending drug- and alcohol-addled liaison with the warden. (What symmetry, right—the exile of my father and my initiation into manhood!)

First, to paraphrase Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, during the minute that it takes you to read this sentence, “thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites … It must be so. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.” Now if you take another minute and reread that sentence, even more animals will be eaten alive and devoured by parasites. In fact, it’s almost as if reading that particular sentence actually
causes
the animals to be eaten alive and devoured by parasites. Is this possible? Well, yes, according to CERN physicist John Stewart Bell’s theorem of nonlocal interaction. Anyway, my point is—doesn’t it all make what we’re doing right now seem pretty ludicrous? I mean, there’s all that predation and whimpering and devouring going on out there, and you and I are just sitting here, writing and reading. It’s not the writing per se that bothers me, it’s the venue, the sedentarinous, the insularity. If
only there were a more public, a more athletic, more agonistic way of doing it. What do you think I’d rather be doing right now: sitting in this book-lined atelier, stroking my chin, lost in this solitary reverie
or
striding into a domed stadium with a bag full of laptops, wearing a shirt emblazoned with logos—Apple, Microsoft Word, Xerox, Roget’s Thesaurus, Chivas Regal, Marlboro, Zoloft—and going head-to-head against the world’s top-ranked professional prose stylists, as 75,000 raucous, beer-swilling fans cheer our sentences as they instantly appear on the huge Diamond Vision screens?

So why do I do it then? Why do I sit here like this?

Because if writing this book—which, according to several people who are knowledgeable about literature, is the first tetherball novel
ever—
can help just one other kid who’s gone through a similar experience, i.e., having a dad who survived an attempted execution by lethal injection and is resentenced to NJSDE, and losing your virginity to a 36-year-old warden, then it will all have been worth it.

Second, some of you may find the following depiction of my sexual encounter with the warden to be too explicit or even pornographic. Before reading this section, click the Scramble icon if any of the following activities or anatomical areas are objectionable to you: (1) human genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal; (2) actual or simulated acts of human masturbation, sexual intercourse, or sodomy; (3) fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals, pubic region, buttock, anus, or female breast; (4) less than completely and opaquely concealed (a) human genitals, pubic region, (b) human buttock, anus, or (c) female breast below a point immediately above the top of the areola;
or (5) human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state, even if completely and opaquely concealed. By clicking the Scramble icon, your mind will supplant any of the above depictions with images of Buddhist monks paginating toilet tissue. This exclusive bowdlerizing feature is available only in
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
. And remember, at any point you can reread the Dawkins sentence and kill more animals. Whatever you want. It’s way interactive.

And finally, as you’ll soon see, in the midst of the tryst, I peek at my Tag Heuer and realize there’s no way I’m going to get to the Maplewood Public Library before it closes and that I’ll probably not be able to come up with a screenplay in order to win the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. Did I ever really expect to ensconce myself in a library carrel and produce an original screenplay in one afternoon? Actually, no. I’d always anticipated making a cursory attempt at researching “story ideas,” looking for books to “adapt,” like, y’know,
Spin’s Alternative Record Guide: The Movie
, and then, quickly tiring of that endeavor, simply plagiarizing an existing screenplay—something prestigious like Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Red Desert
or Jean-Luc Godard’s
La Chinoise
. Sure, in a halfhearted attempt at “originality,” I’d have tried to make some cosmetic alteration, like changing the young Parisian Maoists in
La Chinoise
to followers of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or to fanatical devotees of leveraged-buyout titan Henry Kravis or maybe fanatical devotees of Amy Tan or Rabbi Schneerson or Ukrainian figure skater Oksana Baiul or whatever, and then finding even this an intellectual conundrum beyond my patience and attention span, just
copying Godard’s screenplay word for word, and then, after two pages, annoyed by the prospect of having to retype the whole script, finally just photocopying it and then doing a fast cut-and-paste job on the title page so it read
La Chinoise by Mark Leyner
, because I figured with the clout of an ICM agent, I’d
still
be able to win the award.

But I realize, given the time, that it’s going to be impossible to do even that—you’ll be reading all this in a couple of pages—and the warden, grabbing a handful of hair and lifting my head from her crotch, says, “I’ve got an idea, why don’t you make a screenplay out of this?”

And I look at her, or try to look at her, try to focus, squinting through this gooey scrim of secretions that covers my eyes. And I’m like: “This?”

And she says, “Yeah, this,” indicating, with a panoramic gesture, the whole drug- and alcohol-addled liaison we’re presently engaged in. And she says, “Do a screenplay that appears to be a
faux
autobiographical documentary, but that’s actually—here’s the irony—completely factual.
Faux
irony.”

My head is spinning. I’d gone from never having even seen a real live vagina one minute to being literally immersed in one the next, which is like having gone from wiggling your toes in a little backyard kiddie pool to scuba diving in the Marianas Trench without any intervening training, and on top of it all, now I’m trying to figure out “
faux
irony,” which apparently is like multiplying negative numbers, which—I think—we did in Mr. Hawes’s math class. But then a little lightbulb goes on.

“It’s like plagiarizing life, sort of. Right?” I ask. “It’s, like, no work.”

“Basically,” she concurs. “As soon as you get home from here, just write down everything that happened and just put it in screenplay form. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt if you started thinking in terms of camera angles from here on,” she says, pushing my head back down.

Not only do I find transposing my experiences into camera angles simultaneous to actually having those experiences to be an extraordinarily soothing exercise in self-consciousness, but I realize that it’s a correlative to that near-death state during which your spirit hovers over your body and observes the frenzied efforts at resuscitation with this sort of dégagé bemusement, all of which further corroborates my theory of the afterlife that I first proposed in Ms. Kazanjian’s Comparative Thanotology and Eschatology class. As a final project, I built this papier-mâché diorama—well, my friend Felipe actually constructed it; it was my idea, but I seem to have this problem with deadlines—
we
built this papier-mâché diorama basically illustrating that in our mortal, corporeal existence we’re all sort of like actors and actresses—marionettes endowed with rudimentary attributes like sycophancy and sanctimony, but lacking the capacity for generative thought. But then at the moment we die—unless, of course, we’ve been grossly iniquitous, in which case we plummet on this gondola flume-ride, as Billy Idol sings Venetian boat songs, to some infernal grotto where we become infomercial studio audience members, rapturously applauding nose-hair clippers and sonic plaque removers for eternity—but otherwise we become screenwriters, which is why your life flashes before your eyes in the form of a storyboard. At some point thereafter, you begin your ascension of the empyreal
hierarchy—you direct, you produce, you head a studio, you achieve moguldom, and ultimately you implode and, depending on how dense you are, you become either a white dwarf or a black hole. And Ms. Kazanjian said—and she said it in front of the whole class—that of all the seventh-grade final projects linking postmortem ontogeny,
Entertainment Weekly
, and stellar evolution, mine was one of the best she’d ever seen.

So on the way home from the prison, I stop at Nobody Beats The Wiz and buy this screenplay-formatting software program called SkriptMentor. All in all, I’d recommend SkriptMentor to aspiring screenwriters. In addition to formatting features like slug lines, scene numbers, dialogue breaks, etc., SkriptMentor also offers “idea generator and story guidance” options that include over 50,000 plot and subplot possibilities, 20,000 character combinations, and some 5,000 conflict situations. But I do have some serious reservations. I find several of the tutorial features rather intrusive and cumbersome.

For instance, whenever there’s a sex scene in your script, a dialog box is displayed on-screen reading:
Penis size?
You’re given several standard options: Harvey Keitel, Jeff Stryker, and Porfirio Rubirosa. There’s a 5-inch default setting. You’re also able to customize the penis size of your characters in much the same way as you adjust tabs and margins in word-processing programs, by manually dragging a size box. Some users may appreciate features that enable you to cut and paste penises from one character to another, or the Find and Replace command that allows you to change penis sizes throughout your script with a single keystroke, but I find it annoying that every time I have a male character
engage in or even discuss sex, this penis-size dialogue box plops into the middle of my screen and I have to scroll through the entire Tool Palette just to choose the default setting and continue with my scene.