The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (16 page)

Read The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Online

Authors: Mark Leyner

Tilberis goes on to say: “I liked wearing pastels this summer, and at long last I’ve had it with black. Brown seems a good way to go instead. Beyond that, I’m thinking it’s just a matter of choosing a bag and a pair of shoes or boots to go with everything.”

Yes. Totally.

Pledge of Integrity

If the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award selection committee is leaning toward giving me the award, but some members are vacillating, and if the only thing holding these members back from unequivocal support for me are qualms about the CUNNILINGUS SCENE, I will remove the scene in its entirety and I pledge never to bring up the subject again.

Up until this point, I’ve scrupulously refrained from making any appeals that smacked of self-pity, pathos, or groveling. But at this time I wish to make an additional pledge: Because my father has been effectively exiled thanks to his NJSDE sentence,
my mentally infirm and alcoholic mothers financial well-being is in, like, grave jeopardy. If you, the selection committee, choose to award me the $250,000-a-year prize (this sum to be bestowed annually for the entirety of the winner’s life), I solemnly promise to issue my mother a small and time-limited monthly stipend until she is able to get on her own feet. (I say
small and time-limited
—I’m thinking of something in the neighborhood of $300 a month until she secures employment, up to a maximum of six months—because I don’t wish to rob my mother of her self-esteem by plunging her into an interminable cycle of dependence and shiftlessness. I love and respect my mother far too much to do that to her.)

Financing Suggestion

If your producers are depending on rich Persian Gulf backers for financing, keep in mind that most financiers arrive with a long list of prohibitions necessary to make any work palatable back home. (A three-and-a-half-hour cunnilingus scene between a drugged adolescent and a 36-year-old female prison warden will probably not be acceptable in a country where it’s considered blasphemous to simply show an unmarried man and woman alone in a room together.) There’s also the MPAA ratings problem back home to consider. And you may be thinking Palme d’Or at Cannes. And what about the possibility that the movie might someday be selected by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for recognition and preservation?

Don’t despair.

You can delete the footage for general release—I know, I know, it’s a very cool scene—but you can always restore it, in toto, for the deluxe letterboxed director’s-cut laser disc.

And none of this precludes you from simultaneously releasing a straight-to-video
The Vivisection of Mighty Mouse, Jr. (Hard-Core Mix)
, which would be
just
the CUNNILINGUS SCENE. No establishing zoom from the KH-12 photoreconnaissance satellite, no Contraband Control Room, no “Gravy” trip, no white Burgundy, no fiberoptic lapping slurry or endoscopic pull-back shot, no instant Spätzle or in-line nunchakus, and
none of what follows. Just 210 commercial-free minutes of nonstop cunnilingus and music.

There are only two substantive exchanges of dialogue in the CUNNILINGUS SCENE.

In one, after MARK peeks at his Tag Heuer and whines about how he won’t be able to get to the library in time to plagiarize a screenplay, the WARDEN advises him to concoct a script “out of this,” suggesting that, as soon as he gets home, he type out everything that happened—i.e., everything that’s transpired between the two of them in the WARDEN’S office—and simply reformat it into a screenplay.

I’ve decided not to incorporate this dialogue into the screenplay. This colloquy between the WARDEN and MARK in which they discuss how to turn their encounter into a screenplay is essentially an ad hoc story conference and putting a story conference into this movie just seems too “inside Hollywood,” too “fashionably self-reflexive,” for me. Would Steven Spielberg’s
The Harelip of B’nai Jeshurun
be the whimsical delight it is if in the middle of the movie he’d inserted an animated rendition of the development meeting at which Katzenberg first suggested a DreamWorks answer to Disney’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame?
No, that would have ruined the whole spirit of the movie. Same here.

The other exchange occurs during a momentary respite, when MARK asks the WARDEN a provocative question concerning fitness tapes.

I include this conversation in its entirety because I feel that it enables the audience, for the first time, to fully appreciate the WARDEN’S erudition, and I think there should be some erudition in this movie, which, in its unflinching verisimilitude, has been so raw and dankly self-abasing. Also, this dialogue provides a necessary segue into the elusive and fleetingly beautiful FUCK scene.

INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE

CLOSE SHOT of MARK

MARK

(Picks a hair from his tongue and scrutinizes
it between his fingers, like Edison assaying a
test filament for his lightbulb prototype.
Then, looking up at the WARDEN)

You recently published a monograph in the prison staff newsletter on the evolution of narrative in exercise videos, and in it, you argue that early exercise videos like
Buns of Steel, Kathy Smith’s Aerobox Workout with Michael Olajide, Jr., Your Personal Best Workout with Elle Macpherson
, etc., were morphologically equivalent to early pornography, and that with the later introduction of narrative elements associated with the conventional film—e.g., plot and character development, measured pace, laboriously constructed scenes, the story arc with its conflict and resolution, etc.—the exercise video is no longer disparaged as a marginal, “specialty” category, but is now critically regarded as a valid genre. Do you think that with its new-found respectability, the exercise video has sacrificed the totally monomaniacal narcissism that made it such a galvanizing form when it first came out, and what do you think are, like, the most intense scenes in the neo-narrative exercise video today? And I have a follow-up question.

As the WARDEN replies, MARK resumes his marathon oral lovefest
.

WARDEN

I think, sure, we’ve lost some of that exhilaration. I’ll never forget when I saw my first exercise video. I think it was at the old Film-Makers’ Cinematheque at the Gramercy Arts Theater on 27th Street. One hour of frenzied, context-less exercise, unencumbered by all the clunky interstitial devices that are required to move characters around in a plotted film. It was a revelation. There was a kind of pure, classical proportion to it, an
Aristotelian unity—men and women in a single room for sixty minutes, laboring, sweating …

So, yes, the so-called maturation of the exercise video entails a certain loss—a loss of that formal rigor that was so thrilling. But the recent trend to graft exercise into the structure of traditional movies has resulted in some superb work. There’s a richness and complexity that’s absolutely new and unprecedented, particularly in the way that the neo-narrative exercise video illuminates the rote narcissism and abject fear of mortality in our most ordinary encounters. As I argue in my monograph, the neo-narrative exercise video is uniquely suited to analyzing the ways in which
all
of our interactions—intimate, social, economic, political—are carried out as a kind of
exercise
, as rites of vanity, and, on another level, as strenuous, albeit overweening, acts of protest against the brute, vanquishing inevitability of death.

As far as most intense scenes, I’d say the scene from the fitness version of Mary Karr’s memoir
The Liar’s Club
where Mary comes home to confront her fourth husband and former bodyguard after an Italian magazine has published photographs of him cavorting naked with Fili Houteman, a 26-year-old woman who holds the title of Miss Nude Belgium. Mary storms upstairs to their bedroom and finds Peter and Fili on the floor doing abdominal crunches. And instead of denouncing the two of them and demanding that they leave her home at once—which is what we’ve been led to expect—Mary joins them, and for the next twenty minutes, they take us through one of the most demanding ab routines you’ve ever seen. Designed to work the upper and lower abs, obliques and intercostals, this killer workout includes front and reverse crunches, incline board and Roman Chair sit-ups, and vertical bench leg raises. It’s intense!

And, of course, there’s that exquisite, defining scene from the Renny Harlin “Beautiful Backs” version of
Jude
the Obscure
, Thomas Hardy’s late-Victorian masterpiece. The video was shot on location in Great Fawley, the Berkshire village that is the prototype of Hardy’s fictional “Marygreen.” Jude Fawley, a rustic stonemason with aspirations to someday study at Christminster (a fictional Oxford), is walking hand in hand with his cousin Sue Bridehead, who’s just separated from her husband, the dull, middle-aged schoolmaster, Phillotson. They’re strolling down a forest path, tentatively broaching their love for each other. Just as they reach the end of the path, Jude looks at Sue and says: “I think and know you are my dear Sue, from whom neither length nor breadth, nor things present nor things to come, can divide me. And because, my darling, I desire nobody in this world but you, I have gotten you this splendid lat machine!”

And at that moment, the forest gives way to a daisy- and violet-dappled pasture in the middle of which sits this brand-new shimmering lat pulldown machine.

We’ve all been so culturally indoctrinated to only expect multistation gym equipment inside a gym, that to see this lat machine in a flowering meadow, its overhead cable and chrome-plated weight stack gleaming in the sun, surrounded by the verdant undulations of this arcadian countryside, is an astonishing epiphany.

Jude, clad in a dark frock, waistcoat, breeches, and boots, and Sue, in a lavender sunbonnet and mulberry-colored gown with dainty lace at the collar, proceed to work their trapezius muscles and latissimi dorsi with an unbridled enthusiasm that’s absolutely contagious!

Later, as the setting sun imbues the landscape with rich tints of crimson and sienna, Jude spots for Sue, as the hypersensitive, Swinburne-spouting, sexless coquette works her lower and upper back, traps, buttocks, and legs with a five-rep set of 400-pound deadlifts.

And as Jude urges Sue to complete that one last repetition, Harlin wisely sticks to the original dialogue from Hardy’s unbowdlerized final revision:

“It’s all you, baby!” Jude exhorted
.

Sue Bridehead, her face hideously contorted with exertion, slowly straightened until she was upright, the barbell at her thighs. She sighed and dropped the bar to the thick grass
.

“Good set,” grunted Jude, their crisp high-five flushing a bevy of quail from a nearby copse of linden trees
.

Dude,
that’s
an intense scene. I mean, that’s an awesome amount of weight for a woman in a Victorian novel to lift. And even on that final rep, she maintains perfect form—back tight and straight, head up. Like so. Check this out—

The WARDEN uses her feet to pry MARK’s face from her crotch. She gets up and mimes the starting position for a dead-lift—knees bent, leaning forward over an imaginary barbell, ass canted at about a 45-degree angle to the floor.

This rear view of a naked, partially jackknifed WARDEN inflames MARK’s inchoate sense of phallocratic imperialism.

MARK

Can I fuck you now? Are you, like, ready?

WARDEN reaches around, takes hold of MARK’s dick in her hand, and guides it in toward her pink, flared orifice. And at the very instant that his penis makes contact with her vagina, MARK ejaculates.

One would have to say that this constitutes a loss of virginity only in the most technical sense. In fact, to ascertain irrefutably whether penetration actually occurred would require such sophisticated equipment—e.g., the femtosecond X-ray photo-electron strobe spectrometer used to aid line judges at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, which is
très cher
and would send the movie spiraling so far over budget that it would have to gross, like, $300 million just to break even—that it’s probably best to simply call it “intercourse” and proceed.

CLOSE-SHOT of MARK making an arrogant, self-satisfied, vacuous face that is so thoroughly ludicrous, given the instantaneousness
of the coitus, that it makes you wince with embarrassment. But it’s significant because it’s the same facial expression that MARK will assume after sex for the rest of his life.

MARK (voice-over)

I felt as if my virginity had been a kind of cryonic capsule which encased my childhood. A frozen bubble which maintained my childhood in a perpetual state of suspended animation. And now that bubble had been shattered … And I began to feel as if I were bleeding. But bleeding time. Time was flowing from me, inexorably, unstanchably. A hemorrhage of time. I experienced the loss of my virginity as the violent culmination of my childhood, as the beginning of this inexorable hemorrhaging of time … but, of course, all I was able to say to the Warden was:

MARK

That was cool … like a video!

The WARDEN repairs to a private bathroom adjoining her office.

WARDEN (off-screen)

Remember when I asked you what you’d say at the presentation ceremony if you won the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award and you said something about thanking your agents for sticking by you even though you hadn’t produced anything except for an imaginary movie review? What was that all about?

MARK

It’s not an imaginary movie review. It’s a review of an imaginary movie. I pretended to be a critic who’s reviewing a movie I made—well, never
actually
made.

We HEAR a toilet FLUSH and then the spray of a stall SHOWER.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(her voice raised in order
to be heard over shower)

That’s interesting … that you’ve never written a screenplay—in fact, you’ve never exhibited the slightest interest in even attempting to write a screenplay—yet you’ve concocted this ersatz critique.

MARK

I guess I can picture things once they’re done—I just can’t picture actually doing them.

It’s not laziness. Concepts excite me. Theory. Form. But the actual
screenwriting
seems so tedious, so superfluous. I’m not into praxis. I’m more a dialectician of absence. Writing per se always struck me as terribly vulgar. To actually commit an idea to paper is a desecration of that idea, a corruption of the mind. It’s not laziness. Heavens no. It’s simply that I’m loathe to violate the Mallarméan purity of the blank page.
“Le vide papier que la blancheur défend … Le blanc souci de notre toile.”
And let me tell you, teachers, particularly in the 7th grade, do
not
appreciate the Mallarméan purity of the blank page. But I suppose I’ve always been rather precocious. After all, I’m only thirteen, and I’m already a screenwriter-manqué! One
must
resist succumbing to the blandishments of actual accomplishment.

WARDEN (OFF-SCREEN)

(shouting)

What? I can’t hear you.

MARK

(shouting)

Sitting down in the morning, sipping coffee, smoking a cigarette, and opening up the newspaper to read a review of my movie … that just always seemed like it would be the coolest fucking thing in the world. So one day I just wrote a review myself. I was like, let’s just skip the boring part (i.e., coming up with a story idea and a treatment, writing the script, shooting and editing footage, etc.) and go right to the cool part—reading about it in the paper. I figured that writing the review obviated the need to write the movie.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

I’d like to read it sometime.

MARK

I … uh … have it with me.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

What?

MARK

(shouting)

I have the review here. I carry it with me at all times … like a talisman.

WARDEN (off-screen)