Read The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Online
Authors: Mark Leyner
MARK takes a drag and glances at his watch.
MARK
(realizing that it’s not going to be feasible for him to get to the Maplewood Public Library before it closes)
Shit … Do you have any, like, food?
WARDEN opens small chrome Miele refrigerator atop credenza and peers in.
WARDEN
I have a strawberry Ensure, I have a hazelnut Sustacal … and somewhere in here I thought I had a chocolate Slimfast.…
MARK
I’ll have a hazelnut Sustacal and vodka.
In slow motion, WARDEN fills two highball glasses halfway with ice and Stoly, shakes then pops a can of hazelnut Sustacal, shakes and pops a strawberry Ensure, pours simultaneously—a can in each hand—not quite filling the glasses, and then tops off each drink with more vodka, and stirs with
New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton—Capital Punishment Administrative Segregation Unit
swizzle sticks.
As she serves him his drink, she reaches down and gives his dick an affectionate squeeze.
He ejaculates again, this time on the sixteenth-century Kashan silk carpet.
MARK
Sorry. Is that an expensive rug? Will that come out?
WARDEN
Don’t worry about it.
MARK
Can I ask you a stupid question … Have you ever done this before?
WARDEN
(laughing)
I’m thirty-six years old.
MARK
No, I mean like—I know you’ve had sex before—I mean have you ever had sex with someone whose father survived an abortive execution and was then sentenced to NJSDE?
WARDEN
(lighting a cigarette for herself)
Yeah, I have.
MARK
In a prison where you were the warden?
WARDEN
Uh-huh.
MARK
In this office?
WARDEN
Yes, in this office. Does that bother you?
MARK
(hurt, but masking it behind phony truculence)
I don’t give a fuck what you do, as long you do it after hours, on your own time, and not on taxpayer time. The taxpayers of the state of New Jersey pay your salary—don’t you ever forget that! And the taxpayers of this state don’t pay you to suck cock. Just punch out first, bitch.
WARDEN
You’re angry.
MARK
I’m not angry.
MARK chugs entire hazelnut Sustacal and vodka, smashes glass against wall, and then takes a shard of broken glass and carves into his forearm the words “Satan,” “I Love Satan,” “Jews for Satan,” “Satan Rocks My World,” “Hey Satan, You’re So Fine, You’re So Fine You Blow My Mind, Hey Satan!” “Destroying Everything That’s Good and Beautiful Is, Like, Funny;” “Committing Suicide on Your Birthday in Your Parents’ Bed Is Excellent,” “I Support a Woman’s Right to Breed Babies for the Sole Purpose of Ritually Sacrificing and Eating Them,” and “Buy
Only
Procter & Gamble Products.”
WARDEN
Mark, you’re obviously very angry and very alienated.
MARK
I am
not
angry, and I am
not
alienated.
MARK takes pair of Rollerblades, tied together at the laces, from credenza and swings them wildly at the WARDEN’S head.
WARDEN ducks, kicks MARK in the solar plexus, grabs Roller Blades, and—wielding them like nunchakus—twirls them in blurred arcs over her head and behind her back before delivering, in rapid succession, two precise and devastating blows to MARK’s forehead.
Repeat sequence, this time:
REVERSE ANGLE—in slow motion—
WARDEN ducks—kicks MARK in solar plexus—grabs
Roller Blades—twirls them like nunchakus ambidextrously in blurred arcs over her head and behind her back—then delivers two concussive blows to MARK’s forehead.
EXTREME CLOSE-UP of MARK as—in
super
slow motion—we again see the Roller Blades impact his head, driving it first to the right and then to the left of the frame.
MARK
(before he loses consciousness)
Your in-line kung fu … is very powerful.
FADE TO BLACK
INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE
RACK FOCUS to MARK slumped on couch.
WARDEN is bringing him to with smelling salts.
WE HEAR dark, hip-hop ambient-techno mix of “A Whole New World (Aladdin’s Theme).”
And then, WE HEAR the following original lyrics written and performed by the WARDEN to the melody of “I Will Always Love You” from
The Bodyguard
.
WARDEN
(gazing into Mark’s eyes,
and singing)
Look, I really don’t understand
Why you’re getting so upset about all this.
It’s been my experience that whenever you
Introduce drugs and alcohol into the workplace,
You end up in sexual situations with people whom
(in all likelihood)
you ordinarily wouldn’t have had sex with …
It’s just human nature.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
This is like any other office—
You’re with the same group of people
Day in and day out,
You’re dealing with them in this very artificial,
So-called “professional” context,
Interacting in these habitual, stultifyingly banal
Situations, and eventually you just start wondering
Who these people really are and what they look like
When they have orgasms.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
Because that’s when I think a person is
Most real, most genuine—at the moment of orgasm.
It doesn’t matter if it’s some gorgeous, flaxen-haired,
Blue-eyed, dimpled, buff, monstrously hung UPS man
Standing in my foyer sucking on a mint,
Or my Panamanian midget gynecologist with the
Black peach-fuzz mustache, gold caps, toothpick, and Velour pants—my sleazy little “Doggie Hauser” [sic]—
Or Bob Vila, Bernard Goetz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Henry Waxman, Ralph Reed, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario … I try to envision what they look like
When they come.
FLASH CUT TO
Computer-extrapolation sequence of Waxman climaxing—from the scurrilous PBS “rockumentary”
Sex Lives of the Anti-Tobacco Zealots
.
OVER-THE-SHOULDER SHOT of WARDEN
WARDEN
(continuing)
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
You see, orgasm is all about surrender—
You surrender all the pretense,
All the dissimulating,
All the vanity.
That’s the trouble with this country.
We’re a nation of poseurs.
I say: Off with the masks.
The orgasmic face is the unmasked self, the true self.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
Imagine, for example, an orgasmic Mount Rushmore.
Wouldn’t that be so much more inspiring?
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt
Carved in granite
coming
.
Looking out from the Black Hills with these
Contorted rictuses of ecstasy on their faces,
Instead of the stolid, constipated expressions they have.
That
would be a great monument.
A monument that actually said something about this country.
WARDEN stands, and extends her arms, entreating MARK to dance.
MARK demurs, tapping his temples and rolling his eyes, as if to say: thanks to the drugs and blows to the head, my equilibrium is, like, completely fucked.
WARDEN smiles at him tenderly, takes his hands in hers, and gently pulls him to his feet.
The WARDEN stands in back of MARK, her right hand raised above MARK’s head with the index finger pointed downward. MARK grasps her finger with his right hand. The WARDEN’s left hand is held forward to the left side of MARK with his left hand resting on it. MARK does a sous-sus to the fifth position on pointe, takes his right foot to retiré and executes a développé croisé devant. From this position he pushes from the WARDEN’S left hand, executes a fouetté rond de jambe en tournant, and continues turning with a series of pirouettes, still holding the WARDEN’S index finger. At the completion of the pirouettes he stops himself by quickly grasping the WARDEN’S left hand.
They gaze deeply into each other’s eyes and sing together.
WARDEN AND MARK
(in full-throated rapture)
Imagine, for example, an orgasmic Mount Rushmore.
Wouldn’t that be so much more inspiring?
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt
Carved in granite
coming
.
Looking out from the Black Hills with these
Contorted rictuses of ecstasy on their faces,
Instead of the stolid, constipated expressions they have.
That
would be a great monument.
A monument that actually said something about this country.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
MARK (voice-over)
I don’t know if I buy any of this, especially the orgasmic-rictus-as-true-self business. I mean, what makes the expression of someone coming any more genuine than the expression of someone being drawn and quartered? Or the expression of someone just sleeping and drooling.
But the Mount Rushmore idea
is
really cool.
Blood from gash in forehead trickles down MARK’s face and drips onto rug.
WARDEN
You could probably use a couple of stitches for that.
MARK
I’m OK. Listen, I apologize for getting so pissed off before. It’s not about you. There’s just a lot of shit going on in my head about my father, and I’m mad at myself for having waited until the last minute to do the screenplay, and now it’s too late to even plagiarize something from the library, and sometimes DMT, marijuana, white wine, Demerol, and cough syrup make me a little tense, anyway.…
WARDEN reaches behind her back, unzips her dress, and lets it fall to the floor. She steps out of her panties and stands naked in front of MARK.
MARK
Can I fuck you?
WARDEN
I’m not ready. Do you want to help get me ready?
Now the notorious and achingly beautiful CUNNILINGUS SCENE.
The scene is notorious because of its extraordinary length—over three and a half hours; the scene is extraordinarily long for several reasons.
There are a few brief intervals when it all just clicks, and the clitoral stimulation is perfect—inadvertent perhaps, but perfect—and MARK is this precocious, humming champion, and the WARDEN whimpers and yelps and nearly growls with pleasure.
But there are more frequent and more protracted periods during which MARK earnestly endeavors but, because of his relative inexperience, endeavors to no discernible effect. The WARDEN, never turning tetchy or disagreeable, maintains as positive and encouraging a tone as you could ever hope for—and this from a woman who brooks neither ineptitude nor carelessness from her subordinates. But sometimes her attention does wander.
In fact, there are stretches where, as MARK heedlessly works away, his head bobbing incessantly at her crotch, the WARDEN catches up on neglected paperwork.
During one infamous 95-minute span, amid an endless variety of loud sucking and slurping sounds, with his fingers in her vagina, and a finger in her anus, and his tongue darting and lapping everywhere at once—the clit, the labia, the perineum—in a blind, unmodulated fury of licking and trilling and swirling and churning, with frenzied, accelerating oscillations of his entire head, the WARDEN is on the phone calmly negotiating the end to a potentially deadly hostage crisis in Cell Block D.
Later, in a similar 12-minute episode, as MARK lavishes her pussy with the frenetic diligence of an insect colony servicing its queen, the WARDEN impassively eats a pretzel.
The scene’s aching beauty derives primarily from the fact that for over three and a half hours, MARK’s face never leaves the vulva of the WARDEN, no matter what she is doing. When she’s splayed across the couch, MARK ministers to her from his knees on the floor. When she’s seated at her desk working, MARK is under that desk, gripping the steel arm-supports of her chair so as not to be shaken from her pudendum as she swivels one way to attend to a stack of documents and then suddenly swivels in the opposite direction to shuffle through another. And as she grimly paces her office, this naked virago, phone to her ear, struggling to save the lives of several veteran guards being held by a gang of ax- and icepick-wielding psychopaths, MARK at first scrambles crablike between her legs, in an inverted crawl on his feet and palms, and then, finding this too ungainly, he actually dons her in-line skates so his feet can roll across the floor, an arm wrapped around each of her thighs, his mouth pinioned to her genitals.
To achieve maximum aching beauty:
Include frequent CLOSE-UPS of the WARDEN’S LABIAL KEY RING—a double-strand gold coil pierced through her upper left labium—dangling from which are the front and back door keys to her condo, the ignition and trunk keys to her Mazda RX-7 rotary twin turbo, the key to a summer house in Belmar, New Jersey, that she shares with two other wardens and the director of a juvenile detention center, and mailbox and safe-deposit-box keys.
Anyone who’s seen the infamous video of Richard Speck—pendulous, hormone-spawned breasts swaying back and forth, snorting coke, threshing hundred-dollar bills and getting a blow job from one of his degenerate jailhouse paramours—has to be astonished by the capacity of human beings to enjoy themselves in seemingly infernal circumstances. This is not to say that it would be appropriate in
this
movie to feature a mass murderer sporting a pair of mutant tits, snorting coke as he’s fellated by transvestite convicts. (This isn’t Joyce Carol Oates, for god’s sake.) I’m just trying to locate a certain cinematic
tone
.
In a recent issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
, Liz Tilberis writes in her “Editors Note”: “In an issue like this, it becomes clear that we at
Bazaar
set almost unreachably high standards for ourselves. There may be times when we present images and ideas that you are not instantly comfortable with; the idea isn’t to shock, but to bring you along with us to the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts.”
With this scene, you want to position yourself—in terms of cinematic tone—somewhere between the Speck video and
Harper’s Bazaar
. As Tilberis says, you want to “set almost unreachably high standards” for yourself. And if a 13-year-old boy, whose father has just survived execution by lethal injection, going down on a warden whose car keys are jingling from a ring in her pussy lips, as she attempts to end a siege by Jheri-Curled homicidal maniacs with ice-picks pressed into the temples of their hostages, as Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti sing “White Riot” isn’t “the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts,” then I don’t what is.