The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (19 page)

“The day before he leaves for the Solomon Islands,
Mark makes a last-ditch plea for the ever-unattainable marathon freaky sex. ‘I may never see you again,’ he says gravely. ‘Nonsense, silly boy. It’s merely a summer internship. I’ll see you in September,’ says Sylvia, deftly parrying his grubby little hands.

“In desperation, Mark scrawls the following in the margin of Sylvia’s
New York Review of Books:

“ ‘Are you a petite, buxom, free spirit with liquid-food-secreting glandular ductules and a piezoelectric ceramic-fiber fecundating cleft who’s interested in romance, egg creams, Glenfiddich, the Cirque du Soleil, ‘31 Duesenbergs, Newports, forties, blunts, GHB, khat, keepin’ it real at Rancho la Quinta, Bauhaus furniture, Janet Jackson, quiet walks in the Everglades, ceviche, and fiery curry, and who has the self-confidence to feel just as feminine and desirable in a cranial halo, nasogastric tube, and cervical collar as she would in a Hervé Leger evening gown, and who wouldn’t mind occasional binges that end with the two of us stinking-drunk, incoherent, and penniless in the offal-strewn gutter of some squalid equatorial port? Extremely attractive, slim, 5’1,” athletic, vivacious, affectionate, intelligent, down-to-earth, erudite, warm, upbeat, energetic, sincere, loyal, evolved, solvent, nurturing, 13-year-old mensch wants to come on your tits.’

“ ‘Settle down,’ chides Sylvia.

“That night, we see a close-up of Mark’s open mouth and vibrating uvula, as we hear his long onanistic howl, and then a match sound-cut to what is discernibly someone else’s open mouth, with corresponding vibrato of the uvula, as whoever it is sings ‘Aaaaahhhh-ooooo-unnnnng-ohmigod-gh-ghrrr-oh-oh-oh-like-whoa-di spela pisin savvy tok bullseet!!’ The camera pulls back to reveal the bushy-haired Melanesian megastar Offramp Tavanipupu on a video screen in a multimedia information kiosk at Bougainville International Airport.

“And at long last, we have arrived at our eponymous destination.
“Bougainville … Volcanic island in the Solomon Sea … 3,880 sq. miles … Population 150,000 … First explored in 1768 by the French navigator Louis de Bougainville, namesake of the vine … Declared independence after seceding from Papua New Guinea … Major exports: copper, ivory nuts, green snails, copra (dried coconut meat), cocoa, tortoise shells, and trepang (sea cucumber)
.

“All according to the info-kiosk touchscreen.

“Mark encamps in Kieta, the island’s main port, and sets out the following day in his rental Jeep with driver to interview the venerable coach of the national junior tetherball squad. Not far from his hotel, the Jeep is forced off the road by a Cherokee Chief full of Bougainville Treasury Police—a sextet of surly, Uzi-toting motherfuckers, wearing San Jose Sharks caps and chewing wads of the narcotic leaf khat. The Cherokee’s license plate number is 77 R-K5.

“I mention this only because in the very next shot of the car, the license reads 78 KxP and in the next, 79 R-KKt5, and then successively 80 R-KB5, 81 RxP and 82 R-K7. There was something so familiar to me about this alphanumerical series, yet, as I watched the scene, I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Then it hit me … Of course! These were Alexander Alekhine’s final six moves (playing the white pieces) in the 34th and conclusive game of his world championship chess match against José Raul Capablanca, which took place in Buenos Aires in 1927.

“And at about the same time that I realized the source of the license-plate sequences, there were corresponding murmurs of recognition throughout the theater.

“Capablanca resigned on his eighty-second move, giving six wins and the championship to Alekhine, who was renowned for the brilliance, viciousness, and zeal of his attacks on the board, and for the heavy drinking, sadism, and phallo-narcissism that characterized his social behavior.

“Clearly, a correspondence is being drawn here between Alekhine’s psychopathology and Mark’s burgeoning emotional disorders. I found the use of chess notation on license plates to elucidate the psychology of this movie’s 13-year-old protagonist to be an especially effective device and not at all cryptic.

“One of the goons casually shoots the driver in the head
(ars longa, vita brevis)
and then hands Mark an embossed invitation that reads:

Col. Nusrahana Vanipapobosa Alebua
requests the pleasure of
Mr. Mark Leyner’s
company at luncheon
on Tuesday, the Twenty-sixth of June
at one o’clock
The Presidential Palace

“Now, I’ve always been amazed at how long written material is kept up on the screen in theaters—whether it’s a no-smoking announcement, one of those cinema trivia quizzes, or some piece of text in the movie itself. And this particular item is no exception. I mean, c’mon, how long does it take to read those seven lines? And yet as I sat there in the theater, I could hear people all around me struggling out loud to phonetically decipher the words: ‘ree-kwests th-th-thuh ple-ah-zhoor … kumpah-nee at lun-chee-on.’ Sadly, today, even people who are capable of picking up sophisticated cultural references, such as Alekhine’s last six moves in his 1927 match with Capablanca, have terrible difficulty reading simple text. Surely this is further proof of the deteriorating literacy of our intelligentsia.

“While the invitation is on screen, we hear Wu-Tang Clan’s vertiginous remake of the old Chinese Cultural Revolution standby ‘Sailing the Ocean Depends on the Helmsman.’ Dissected and reassembled by Wu-Tang production wizard the RZA, and brought back to life
like some Red Guard Frankenstein defibrillated with jumper cables, this hortatory Maoist classic never sounded better. If this deranged sonic vortex of stuttering revolutionary dogma, wafting samples, and interlacing, static-drenched beats is any indication, we can only look forward to the entire Clan or individual MCs—the Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Genius, Raekwon—deconstructing more vintage funk from the Cultural Revolution like ‘Liu Shao-chi Is a Deviationist-Clique Reactionary,’ ‘Long Live the Third Corp of the Rebel Army of the Shanghai Artisans’ Apprentices,’ and, of course, ‘Those Who Want to Damage the National Economy by Sabotaging Production, Opposing Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and by Corrupting the Revolutionary Will of the Masses with Material Interests and Letting Bourgeois Ideas Run Amok Must Be Arrested Without Delay by the Ministry for Public Safety and Severely Punished (I’m Talkin’ 2 U, Bitch).’

“Mark looks at his watch and, seeing that it’s already 12:50
P.M
., Tuesday, June 26, realizes that no RSVP will be necessary, and he accompanies the thugs to
chez dictator
.

“Colonel Nusrahana Vanipapobosa Alebua (played by a bewigged and artificially dusky Chaz Palminteri) is the despotic junta leader who engineered Bougainville’s bloody secession from Papua New Guinea. Hamstrung somewhat by having to battle internal opposition groups—groups that receive political and material support from Papua New Guinea—Alebua nonetheless endeavors to amalgamate a ‘Greater Bougainville’ by capturing the neighboring islands of Choiseul, New Georgia, and Ysabel. A draconian autocrat, the Colonel is committed to lining his pockets and those of his cronies—the scions of Bougainville’s oligarchic families who were Alebua’s classmates at the military academy. What distinguishes Alebua from the Papa Doc Duvaliers and the Idi Amins, from the Jean-Bedel Bokassas,
Mobutu Sese Sekos, and Macias Nguemas, and from the paradigmatic caudillos of Latin America, is that Alebua was raised on satellite feeds of American educational television and is a wild aficionado of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Given to squandering millions on grandiose monuments, his palace is an exact replica—down to the andirons, breakfront hinges, and toilet-tank float balls—of Brideshead, the great country house from the lavish and lengthy 1980
Masterpiece Theatre
adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited
.

“His shapely 16-year-old daughter (
Baywatch Nights’
Donna D’Errico) is named Lehrerasha, after
NewsHour
anchor Jim Lehrer.

“Lunching with Alebua, Mark is confronted with an unnerving hybrid of feral tyranny and chuffing Edwardian pretension, as Alebua—in bowler hat, sunglasses, fatigues, a brace of ivory-handled pistols holstered at his hips, and a raised-welt lightning bolt on either cheek—washes down tinned kippers and crisps with a magnum of kava, the official intoxicating beverage of the South Seas. Alebua breaks into a betel-stained grin as he discusses his ruthless suppression of tribal minorities and a cooking show he hosts, which is devoted to the preparation of dissidents. This is all something of a stretch for Palminteri, who seems confounded by his own minstrel pigmentation.

“Meanwhile, members of the elite Palace Guard wander in and out, their TEC-9 assault pistols slung in WNET and WGBH tote bags. (One of the first edicts issued by Alebua upon his ascension to power was a decree mandating that each and every man, woman, and child on this impoverished island contribute to PBS fund drives. Bougainvilleans who neglect or refuse to make these donations are ‘kabobbed’—groups of five are lined up in single file, run through with eight-foot skewers, marinated in kava, grilled, and sold by vendors at tetherball tournaments. Bill Moyers said at the time, ‘Although I don’t necessarily condone kabobbing, I
think it’s an understandable reaction on the part of a government that believes very deeply in public television.’)

“The Colonel knows who Mark is. He’s seen the ‘I Feel Shitty’ video on which Mark was musical director, and he
loves
that video—he’s, like, a
huge
fan. That’s why he had him abducted. He needs the dude’s help.

“See, Alebua has an image problem. He has garnered a dreadful international reputation. The poor man can’t clap-on his 60-inch Hitachi Ultravision without seeing that brazen Christiane Amanpour incriminating his villainous regime, or some sanctimonious Amnesty International spokesman bellyaching about death-squad atrocities, or some sallow IMF wonk carping about ruinous economic policies. So he asks Mark to write a series of VNRs—video news releases—that will recast his despicable government in a more flattering light. (‘Mi wanem numbawan bullseet!’)

“Mark is fully aware that Alebua is a homicidal megalomaniac. He weighs the moral opprobrium that he’d incur working for a brutal, conscienceless dictator against the prospect of finally having some produced work to show around. He considers Pirandello, Marinetti, and Ezra Pound, Riefenstahl, Céline, and Paul de Man, and finally assuages any lingering qualms of conscience by reasoning that just as every defendant is entitled to effective counsel, every despot is entitled to a creative public-relations consultant.

“He calls Heather Schroder, ICM foreign-rights specialist (Gwyneth Paltrow in an impish cameo reminiscent of her ebullient walk-on in Kenneth Branagh’s
The Porcine Mammary Gland as a Bioreactor for Complex, Therapeutic Proteins)
, brings her up to speed, and then hands the phone to Alebua, who screams in unintelligible but pugnacious pidgin for several minutes before handing the phone back to Mark.

“ ‘Well, what’s the deal?’ Mark asks.

“ ‘Here’s what we got,’ says Heather. ‘You do the
work, you get 15,000 Bougainvillean kipas per video, unlimited expense account, sumptuous living quarters. You don’t do the videos, you’re kabobbed. My inclination is to take it.’

“ ‘Fifteen thousand kipas … is that good?’

“ ‘It’s pretty standard for a coerced VNR.’

“ ‘What about a kill-fee?’

“Heather reviews her notes.

“ ‘If your video is not acceptable for release, they will give you an opportunity to revise it. If the revised video is likewise unacceptable, they kill you.’

“Mark accepts the job after Heather is able to cajole Alebua up to 15,500 kipas—because he
loves
that video (‘Mi laik lukim “I Feel Shitty” mas time. Sena bwoyna! Numbawan!’).

“The Colonel forsakes his Melanesian pidgin only once in the course of the movie. While playing miniature golf with Mark and Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt (portrayed with unexpected gravitas by Charles Nelson Reilly), Alebua, who’s about to putt into the mouth of a political prisoner, looks up solemnly from his ball and says, apropos of nothing in that sunny afternoon’s affable, inconsequential banter, and in crisply enunciated, declamatory English: ‘The world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night.’ Zumwalt says nothing in response, impassively plucking shreds of artificial turf from the honed crampons of his miniature-golf shoes. After a time, though, Mark, visibly discomforted by this brooding silence, weighs in with: ‘Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner. Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels. Lonely as I am, together we cry … I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day. Take me to the place I love. Take me all the way.’

“The three of them then stare blankly in different directions for several minutes.

“Summoned to the Presidential Palace at dawn the following day, Mark immediately starts peppering Alebua with ideas: ‘One—if you’re gonna do the whole cult-of-personality, ubiquitous monument thing, I’d spend a few extra kipas and go with Portrait of Dorian Gray Statues. They’re piezoelectric polymer animatronic figures. The more vile, ruthless, and paranoid you become in your murderous drive for absolute power, the more horrifically scabrous the statues of you become. They’ll scare the living shit out of your population. Two—you know what most dictators do that’s really stupid? They’re too secretive about their medical condition. That’s exactly the wrong way to go. Absolutely everything about you—from the consistency of your bowel movements to your HDL count—should be announced in shrieking front-page headlines. The daily vicissitudes of your dermatologic health should be treated like biblical events. If you have an ingrown hair on your ass, I want to see flags at half-mast, I want to see endless streams of grief-stricken workers and schoolchildren converging on the Presidential Palace, singing dirges, laying wreaths, weeping, throwing themselves onto their knees, beating their brows against the ground until they’re bloody and unconscious. Three—you gotta start licensing merchandise. You come up with a logo—say, six intellectuals en brochette. You grant manufacturers the right to incorporate it on their products. We’re talking royalties of, like, 7.5 percent on the wholesale price. I’m telling you, chief, in terms of merchandising, Bougainville could be the Oakland Raiders of the new millennium. Every homey, wannabe, slacker, club kid, yuppie, and soccer mom in the U.S.A. is gonna want to wear Bougainville caps, Bougainville insulated parkas, Bougainville windbreakers, T-shirts, and boxer shorts. And you do, like, baby bibs, toothbrushes, sheets, lunch boxes, drink coasters, chip-and-dip bowls,
kids’ vitamins. And you do a rotisserie chicken and a book club. Four—you absolutely, positively, must do a scent. I’m thinking a mass class fragrance at around thirty-five bucks for a two-ounce eau de toilette spray. We call it
Génocide
(zhen-o-sid). The name’s got a kind of goth panache to it, and it focus-groups exceptionally well with your target audience—18-to-35-year-old married working women with dashed expectations. For top notes, I’m thinking, like, nuoc mam, bull semen, halvah, and Altoids. Tag line: ‘The acrid aroma of savage machtpolitik and unwavering intransigence gives me goose bumps … It’s
Génocide
.’ Herb Ritts does the campaign. Print ads, outdoor posters, television … I see a whole id-driven barbarian stud-muffin-conqueror creamy European chattel-concubine concept. The whole pillage our city, burn our library, take me with you’ fantasy. I see a couple—you and maybe, like, Claire Danes—caressing in the sea against a limitless sky, tinted crimson to match the bottle and packaging. The idea is Clean, Fresh Romance, and the Annihilation of the Civilized World. It’s like Ralph Lauren meets Pol Pot, if you will.’

“Lehrerasha saunters in, sipping Cherry fX Bomb, a popular kava-based soft drink. She and Mark exchange smoldering looks of sexual communion, winking, pouting, and flaring their nostrils at each other with a frenetic, almost Tourette’s-like intensity that portends an imminent liaison.

“We’re never told which, if any, of Mark’s canny marketing gambits Colonel Alebua actually employs. But he obviously admires the kid’s extemporaneous verve, because he installs him in an opulent apartment of the sort reserved exclusively for junta families, plutocrats, and tetherball stars. The elegantly appointed three-bedroom duplex is in the ultra-prestigious Adam and Eve Towers, two 115-story, anthropomorphic, anatomically correct, and transparent edifices built by a fabulously wealthy and fanatically evangelical, born-again
copra exporter. Realistically depicting the prelap-sarian Adam and Eve in an act of upright sexual congress, the structure’s interior architecture also maintains strict fidelity to human anatomy. Elevators travel up and down the two spinal columns. A ‘coital concourse’ connects the towers with a moving walkway and shopping arcade that run through the conjoined genitalia. Although
New York Times
critic Herbert Muschamp assailed the Adam and Eve Towers as ‘the single most egregious act of pornographic kitsch in the history of architecture,’ many critics judge the Towers more favorably, finding antecedents in Tantric sculpture and the celebrated erotic carvings at the 13th-century Temple of the Sun in Konarak, India. Of course, the Towers have no prurient connotation for Bougainvilleans, a simple-hearted and spiritual people, who see only a sacred and engendering act of union, and not two 1,500-foot freaks fucking the living shit out of each other in broad daylight. Mark’s condo, which is in Eve’s pancreas, puts him in giddy proximity to the tetherball superstars he’s idolized his entire life. Ataban Tokurapai lives down the hall in Eve’s spleen, and Ezikiel Takaku owns an apartment two flights down in her duodenum. Wamp Kominika lives in Adam’s left eyeball, which affords a spectacular view of downtown Kieta and the harbor. Lyndon Kakambona and Fagi Pinjinga own magnificent suites in Adam’s medulla and cerebellum. And Offramp Tavanipupu occupies a palatial, 15,000-square-foot penthouse that he created by knocking down the wall corresponding to the central sulcus between the frontal and parietal lobes, and which was recently featured in the Style section of
Der Schweißblatt
.

“The public-relations campaign is a stunning success. Mark’s video news releases are regularly featured on CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, FOX NEWS, etc. Efforts to ostracize Colonel Alebua and his clique from the community of nations abate, as Mark is able to reposition Alebua as an emancipator and populist, defending his
fledgling nation against the imperial predations of Papua New Guinea. With the assistance of ILM, Digital Domain, Sony’s Image Works, and Pixar (which did
Toy Story)
, Mark shrewdly restages recent history to portray Alebua as an indispensable player on the world stage. Utilizing sophisticated computer graphics technology—akin to that used to digitally transplant Paula Abdul into a pas de deux with Gene Kelly in the Diet Coke ads and make possible the Kennedy cameo in
Forrest Gump
—Mark produces a fiendishly brilliant series of VNRs that not only place Colonel Alebua at the side of eminent Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein as they work together on an experimental drug, riluzole, that slows the deadly progress of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but that also show him assisting Richard Jewell in his lawsuit against NBC and anchor Tom Brokaw; as a pallbearer at Dean Martin’s funeral; carousing at Club Macanudo with New Edition members Bobby Brown and Ronnie DeVoe, Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian, and former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker; and stoning an adulterer to death with Taliban militiamen in Kabul, Afghanistan (Alebua is seen throwing three stones: the first one, delivered from a full windup, misses high; the second, a slider, is just outside; on his third rock, Alebua—from the stretch—comes with his split-fingered fastball, and nails the unregenerate fornicator flush in the forehead, receiving a standing O from the turbaned fundamentalists).