The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (14 page)

ANGLE ON WARDEN
as she suddenly gets up and peruses several shelves of racked CDs.

INSERT SHOT of
HAUS PEKPEK TOKTOK NUMBAWAN
CD in Warden’s hand.

The WARDEN’S sound system features an 8-CD carousel. She loads the two CDs of Offramp Tavanipupu’s
Haus Pekpek Toktok Numbawan
.

In addition, she loads the
Mr. Holland’s Opus
soundtrack album; the
Batman Forever
soundtrack album; the soundtrack album for
Chernobyl
, Knut Holberg’s chilling, critically acclaimed documentary about the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history, which features songs performed by Whitney Houston, Mary J. Bilge, Toni Braxton, TLC, Brandy, and Tony! Toni! Toné;
Flogging Tenors
, recorded live at the Hermanos Rodriguez Autodromo in Mexico City to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Nancy Spungen, tenor virtuosi Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti pay tribute to early English punk by reinterpreting such classics as the Sex Pistols’ “No Feelings,” “Pretty Vacant,” and “Anarchy in the UK,” The Damned’s “Stab Your Back,” the Buzzcocks’
“Orgasm Addict” and “Why Can’t I Touch It?” The Clash’s “White Riot,” and The Adverts’ “Bored Teenagers” and “One Chord Wonders;”
Karaoke Collaboration
, ten lush instrumental tracks that enable you to perform the anthems and popular songs of Vichy France, the Croatian Ustachi, and wartime Lithuania—a must-have for nostalgic anti-Semites who love to sing; and finally, Ministry maestro Al Jourgensen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta debut Jourgensen’s foray into the classical idiom with his brooding symphonic composition,
The Meek Shall Inherit Shit
.

These eight CDs play continuously for the remainder of the movie.

WARDEN returns to couch and caresses MARK’s cheek with the back of her hand. She reclines, kicks off her pumps, and lays a bare foot across his thigh.

VARIOUS ANGLES
as WARDEN and MARK listen to music.

WARDEN undulates concisely to the bass grooves and disjunctive beats.

MARK, eyes shut, grasps the neck of the wine bottle as if it were a microphone. His face contorts into a succession of histrionic grimaces, as he lip-synchs the prolix lyrics of Offramp Tavanipupu.

WARDEN flicks MARK’s nipples with big toe.

MARK simpers dreamily.
He takes her toe in his mouth and sucks hard until

We HEAR sharp crack of joint connecting phalanx and metatarsal bone.

WARDEN kisses MARK.

As he repeats the words, the WARDEN traces his lips with her tongue.

WARDEN bites and sucks MARK’s neck, giving him two huge heliotrope hickeys. She softly scrapes his earlobes between her teeth, kisses his mouth again voraciously, and, with hurried random pecks, works her way down his neck to his chest and nipples as she lightly rakes his back with her fingernails. She kneels, clasps his ass in her hands, and licks the rim of his navel in languorous circles and then begins to slowly unzip his trousers.

ANOTHER ANGLE of WARDEN, still slowly unzipping MARK’s pants.

WARDEN gets up and produces a leather ball-gag and handcuffs from the top drawer of her desk.

She returns to couch and, cutting him off in mid-scatological-easy-to-prepare-German-entree, pushes ball-gag into MARK’s open mouth, cinches straps tightly around his head, and cuffs his hands behind his back.

She then finally finishes unzipping his clammy leather pants and yanks them off.

Gently fondling his balls with one hand, she takes his erection and pumps it in the other.

SUBTITLE:
There’s like no way I can win. I haven’t written anything—and it’s due tomorrow
.

SUBTITLE: I
don’t know … Probably something like: “I want to thank Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo, without whose remarkable vision and intrepid, unflagging support none of this would be possible. I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to the folks at Oshimitsu Polymers America for making this a reality. I’d like to thank everyone at ICM, particularly Binky and Sloan—even when I showed absolutely no interest in or the slightest talent for writing and hadn’t as yet produced anything except for a review of an imaginary movie—you guys stuck by me and represented me with more energy and commitment and savvy than I could ever have dreamed of. I’d like to thank all the other screenwriters at Maplewood Junior High School for providing such a vibrant milieu in which to work, and I’d like to say that any of you could and should have won this. I’d like to especially say hello to my main man Felipe—yo, Felipe, ma huang rules! I’d like to thank God for having had the insight in the first place to give humans the awesome intellectual capacity to write screenplays. And finally I’d like to thank my Mom, without whose morbid phobias and apocalyptic fatalism I couldn’t have become half the screenwriter I am today. And, Dad … the Damoclean sword of New Jersey State Discretionary Execution is hanging over your head wherever you are, but I know you’re watching tonight. You always said it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde, and well … I hope you’re proud of me. You’ll always be my bikpela numbawan.”

WARDEN wipes tears from eyes.

She looks up at him with an expression of profound sadness and infinite wisdom, and flicks the tip of his dick with her tongue.

MARK ejaculates immediately.

NOTE:

The “Aggghhhh” soliloquy beginning on
this page
and continuing onto
this page
is one of the most musical speeches in the entire screenplay, and much of its power derives from that musicality—its permutations and variations on a theme.

Like music, it produces a dual effect, that is, both instantaneous and cumulative, as the echoes of the earlier variations reverberate in the mind as one hears the latter.

Here, whoever plays the role of MARK faces what is widely considered a supreme test of an actor’s range.

The challenge is first and foremost to memorize the speech, with its many philosophical and often cryptic shadings. Perhaps even more daunting is the need to scrupulously observe the subtle shifts in pronunciation and time value as indicated by the meticulously nuanced spellings—“Aggghhh” as opposed to “Aggggghhhhh,” for instance.

A metrical tour de force, the speech requires an actor to reconcile two simultaneous but dissynchronous rhythms—the syncopated syntactical cadences that are inherent in an award-acceptance speech and the steady rhythmic effects of the WARDEN’S hand on MARK’s penis.

It’s critically important to remember that gagged speech is fundamentally different from dental-patient locution, although the two share some phonetic characteristics. And gagged speech during sexual stimulation is considered by linguists to be a completely distinct language, which some contend may actually predate the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic branches.

    Nowhere are the insuperable difficulties of the translator more conspicuous than in the “Agggghhhh” soliloquy. Notwithstanding the inevitable sacrifice of certain musical and poetic effects, the subtitled translation strives to reproduce with all possible fidelity both the words and their rhetorical form. Although the delicacy and poignance of MARK’s concluding “Aggghh. Agggghhhh. Agggggghhhhhh. Aggghhh” is irreparably altered and coarsened in translation, one hopes that, at the very least, the subtitled “You’ll always be my bikpela numbawan” evokes and sustains the thought and feeling within.

MEDIUM SHOT of WARDEN unfastening ball-gag.

CLOSE-UP of MARK, bursting to speak.

OFFICE briefly fills with pink mist.

There’s a fleeting sense now that this is all taking place in a Cocteau Twins video.

It’s like the afterschool afternoon you always dreamed of.

In slow motion, WARDEN unlocks his handcuffs.
MARK takes a swig of cough syrup from a bottle he finds on the credenza.
She lights a cigarette and hands it to him.