Read The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Online
Authors: Mark Leyner
So what I’m trying to say here is that, given the fact that I’m the kind of person who starts each day exulting in the aroma of his own sweaty pants, coming up with an unpleasant memory to preempt an erection is not easy. But finally, after racking my brain for almost a minute, I manage to dredge something up from last Thursday.
Something from television, actually.
What turns a person
off
is as inscrutably subjective as what turns a person
on
. There are four major
turn-offs
in the following synopsis of a story that aired last Thursday night on ABC’s
20/20
. See if you can deduce what they are. Put yourself in my Di Fabrizio boots as you read. Give yourself a time constraint—say fifteen seconds—and as you analyze the text for anaphrodisiacal elements, imagine the pressure I’m under as I frantically scan my own memory bank, scrotum tingling, the execution of my father only moments away.
To further enhance the interactive realism of the text, begin to masturbate as you read the following passage. For each
turn-off
you’re able to find before coming, award yourself 1,000 points. If
your point total equals or exceeds 3,000, proceed to the section beginning
All of this—the warden escorting me into the witness room, the momentary glimpse of the slope of her breast, possibly her areola
… If your total is under 3,000, return to the words
Felipe, his older sister Gretel, and I are watching TV Thursday night
, and begin masturbating again.
Felipe, his older sister Gretel, and I are watching TV Thursday night.
20/20
is running a profile of Silvio Barnes, the painter who was blinded after being hit on the head with a frying pan while surfing the 35-foot breakers at Waimea Bay in Hawaii and then, less than a week later, suffered a massive stroke during a full-body wax at an after-hours depilation bar in Manhattan. Thanks to the Dove unauthorized biography, we all know the story by now of how, when Silvio was only fourteen, his father—the inventor of the Miracle Collar, the push-up collar for men’s dress shirts that gives the appearance of a larger, more protuberant Adam’s apple—offered Silvio a yearly stipend and a studio of his own. But Silvio, perceiving his father’s patronage as an instrument of control, refused, and catching the next plane and hydrofoil to Chiang Mai, a resort city in northern Thailand, took a job as a busboy at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Society for Heavy Ion Research), a gay dance club. Snatching a minute here and a minute there during breaks, he’d sneak off to the club’s sulfurous boiler room cum atelier, where he’d eventually complete his two astonishing masterpieces:
Teenage Neofascist Skinheads Suffering From Progeria (That Rare Premature Aging Disease) Play Mah-Jongg at a Swim Club in Lake Hayden, Idaho
is a 94-by-66-inch, acrylic-on-canvas work that, notwithstanding a title that leads one to expect several freakishly wizened nazi youths wanly shuffling mah-jongg tiles outside a lakefront cabana, actually depicts, in delicate flecks of color, several peonies in a vase.
Anna Nicole Smith Before and After Fire-Ant Attack
is a 90-by-120-inch acrylic-on-canvas diptych. In this case, the title does literally describe the painting’s content. In the left-hand panel, the former Texas checkout girl turned Guess? Jeans model is splayed lasciviously on a dirt road. The right-hand panel features the identical pose except that the lasciviously splayed Smith is stippled with hundreds of Seurat-like inflamed pustules.
Barbara Walters conducts a brief interview with Silvio, whose garbled responses are subtitled. In the closing minutes, wiping drool from his chin, she says, “Silvio, you completed only two paintings in your entire career, both of which you sold for a fraction of their current value [the paintings now hang in opium warlord Khun Sa’s splendid new museum in northern Myanmar] and then squandered the money on an endless succession of skanky male prostitutes. As a result of a frying pan and a body wax, you’ll never paint again. And your desperate attempt to reinvent your career as a movie director was an unmitigated critical and financial disaster.”
Barnes wrote and directed a film entitled
¡Hola Mami!
about an eccentric middle-aged optometrist who marries a sullen, zit-spangled 16-year-old who loiters around his office every day after school, chain-smoking in a fuchsia PVC bustier, a huge gaudy crucifix bobbing on her bosom. The “plot” revolves around the optometrist’s use of a varietal rice chart instead of the traditional lettered eye chart. Long, uninterrupted stretches of the movie consist of the following sort of dialogue:
OPTOMETRIST
: Let’s start with the top row, moving from left to right.
PATIENT
: All right. Arborio. Valencia. Lundberg’s Christmas Rice. Black Japonica. And Wehani.
OPTOMETRIST
: Perfect. Second row.
PATIENT
: Red. Sri Lankan Red. Wild Pecan. Jasmine. White Basmati.
OPTOMETRIST
: Perfect. Let’s skip down a few rows. How about row five?
PATIENT
: American White Basmati. American … Umm … American Brown Basmati, I think. Maratello. And that next one’s either Black Sticky or Thai Sticky. And I’m not sure about the last one.
OPTOMETRIST
: OK. How about the next row down, row six?
PATIENT
: That’s really tough. Converted? Sambal? Gobind Bhog? They’re really fuzzy.
OPTOMETRIST
: OK. Back up to the fourth row—
PATIENT
: Japanese Sticky. Sticky Brown. Short-Grain Brown. Long-Grain White. And Wild Rice.
OPTOMETRIST
: Is row six sharper now or … now?
PATIENT
: The first way.
Following the clip from
¡Hola Mami!
they cut to Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters back in the studio.
And Walters says with her patented withering aplomb, “Hugh, in all our years together on the show, we’ve profiled so many wonderful people whose lives have been shattered by tragedy, but I’ve never before come away with the feeling that—hey, this guy is such an overweening, self-absorbed asshole, he deserves his misfortune, and, in fact, there’s something so divinely
just
about it, that it’s actually funny. It’s so rare that we can derive some cathartic enjoyment from another person’s suffering. But every so often our fervent prayers are answered and an obnoxious enfant terrible’s meteoric success is abruptly and irrevocably snuffed. Silvio Barnes—now blind, incapacitated, and anathema in New York
and
Hollywood—is an individual whose precipitous ruin all Americans can celebrate with big, hearty, guilt-free gales of laughter.”
And Hugh looks at Barbara and says, “Fascinating.”
As they break for a commercial, Felipe, Gretel, and I do an instant postmortem.
“I’m into Barbara’s rancid schadenfreude,” says Felipe.
“I hear you, dude,” I say. “It had wings. But Downs killed it with that perfunctory ‘Fascinating.’ ”
“Hugh’s hot!” objects Gretel.
“Yuuuk!” Felipe and I make the international sign for hemorrhagic vomiting.
“You’ll appreciate Hugh Downs when you’re more mature,” she says, haughtily readjusting her brassiere.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be
that
mature,” I say, huffing glue from a brown paper bag and passing it back to Felipe.
All of this—the warden escorting me into the witness room, the momentary glimpse of the slope of her breast, possibly her areola, and the flesh of her armpit as she sits down, and then the frenzied search through my memory for just the right
20/20
segment to temporarily neuter myself so that a healthy, perfectly normal, and involuntary heterosexual reflex won’t be misinterpreted in such a way that I’m seen as an execrable son—all of this takes place in a span of no more than ten seconds. I wonder if, like, Bill Gates when
he
was 13, had the ability that I have at the age of 13 to anatomize minute fluctuations of consciousness that are occurring literally in femtoseconds. Anyway …
It’s 5:25
P.M
. Appeals exhausted, reprieves forsaken, last words ardently orated, the execution of Joel Leyner C.P. #39 6E-18 commences.
Inside the control module room, the executioner activates the delivery sequence by pushing a button on the control panel. A series of lights on the panel indicates the three stages of each injection: Armed (red), Start (yellow), and Complete (green).
As the lights for the initial injection sequence switch on and
a piston is loosed from its cradle and falls onto the plunger of the first syringe, the delivery module introduces 15 cc of 2-percent sodium thiopental over ten seconds, which should cause unconsciousness.
I nudge the superintendent with my elbow.
“Thanks,” I whisper, returning his pen.
“Keep it,” he says.
“Are you kidding?”
“No. It’s yours.”
“Cool!” I gush.
After a minute, the red light pulses again, then the yellow, and the machine injects 15 cc of pancuronium bromide, a synthetic curare that should produce muscle paralysis and stop his breathing.
Following another one-minute interval, the lights flash and the final syringe, containing 15 cc of potassium chloride, is injected, which should induce cardiac arrest, with death following within two minutes.
Thirty seconds pass.
A minute.
In the dark witness room, we are mute and absolutely still. And in this riveted silence, the physiologic obbligato of human bodies—the sibilant nostrils, the tense clicking of temporomandibular joints, the bruits of carotid arteries, and the peristaltic rumblings of nervous bowels—becomes almost a din.
Ninety seconds elapse.
Two minutes.
The muscles in my father’s neck appear to become rigid, actually lifting his head slightly off the gurney.
His eyes open wide.
“I feel shitty,” he says.
The doctor, who’s been monitoring the EKG, frowns at the operations officer, who turns to the warden and shakes his head grimly. Scrutinizing an EKG printout incredulously, he emerges from behind the screen and approaches my dad. He checks his pupillary reflexes with a penlight and then listens to his respiration and heart with a stethoscope.
“Physically, he appears to be absolutely fine,” he says, grimacing with bewilderment.
The operations officer in turn gives a thumbs-down to the warden, who’s now risen from her seat in the witness room.
“Mr. Leyner,” says the doctor to my father, “I’m going to give you several statements and I want you to respond as best you can, all right?”
My father nods.
“Bacillus subtilis grown on dry, nutrient-poor agar plates tends to fan out into patterns that strongly resemble this fractal pattern seen in nonliving systems.”
“What is a diffusion-limited aggregation?” responds my father.
“Music played by this Vietnamese ensemble consisting of flute, moon-lute, zither, cylindrical and coconut-shell fiddles, and wooden clackers is the most romantic and, to Western ears, melodic of all Southeast Asian theater music.”
“What is cai luong?”
“This Hollywood legend kept a secret cache of Dynel-haired toy trolls.”
“Who was Greta Garbo?”
“According to the American Mortuary Society, these are currently the two most widely requested gravestone epitaphs.”
“Wake Me Up When We Get There
and
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.”
The doctor brightens momentarily.
“I’m sorry,” amends my father. “What are
Wake Me Up When We Get There
and
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now?”
The doctor sags.
“Neurologically, he’s perfectly normal,” he announces, punctuating his diagnosis with a dejected, frustrated fling of his
NJ State Capital Punishment Division of Medicine
loose-leaf binder, which skitters across the floor.
“Cool binder!” I marvel sotto voce, helplessly susceptible to logo merchandising.
My father is returned to his cell. The operations officer confers with the warden, who informs me that the doctor would like to see me in his office.
I slip two hastily scrawled notes into her left hand.
The lights have come back on in the witness room and programmed music resumes over the ambient audio system—Kathleen Battle and Courtney Love’s haunting performance of Mozart’s aria “Mia speranza adorata” from the
Ebola Benefit—Live from Branson, Missouri
CD (Deutsche Grammophon), which segues into “Sarin Sayonara” from the Aum Supreme Truth Monks’
Les Chants d’Apocalypse
CD (Interscope), which is followed—as I enter the elevator—by the Montana Militia Choir (accompanied by
Yanni and the Ray Coniff singers) singing—I swear to god!—“The Beasts of Yeast.”
Read along with me, as I peruse this
People
magazine article in the waiting room of the prison doctor:
When Viktor N. Mikhailov, Russia’s Minister of Atomic Energy, invited Hazel R. O’Leary, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, to a dinner party arranged to facilitate a discussion of Russia’s plutonium stocks, he probably expected Mrs. O’Leary and her retinue to arrive with the first editions and bottles of rare vintage champagne that are the traditional accoutrements of diplomatic courtesy.
What he certainly didn’t expect was for Mrs. O’Leary to arrive, Fender Stratocaster slung across her back, along with bassist Ivan Selin, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, guitarist John Holum, Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and drummer J. Brian Atwood, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Instead of propounding her views over cocktails or across the dinner table—as would be the norm at such a gathering—Mrs. O’Leary and her bandmates delivered a blistering set of original songs, thematically linked, each exploring a different facet of her overarching position that Russia must render its surplus weapons plutonium unusable.
Mrs. O’Leary, soignée and austere in a black Jil Sander dress, opened with a smoldering rocker about the global
security risks of stolen fissile material that seemed to gradually implode with intensity as it slowed to the tempo of a New Orleans funeral march, achieving the exaggerated slow-motion sexual swagger of the Grim Reaper bumping and grinding down Bourbon Street. Next, Mrs. O’Leary almost shattered the huge Czarist-era crystal chandelier with an opening riff that tore from her amp like shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb. She repeated the riff—an irresistible and diabolically intricate seven-note figure—over and over again, plying each shard with the obsessive scrutiny of a monkey grooming its mate, it becoming more squalid, more lewd, more intoxicating with each iteration, until finally the band launched into the song, a hammering sermon about how Russia must mix its plutonium in molten glass and bury it deep underground.
In the midst of the song, which, like an asylum inmate gouging at his own scabs, exacerbated itself into a raging cacophony, Mikhailov; Viktor M. Murogov, director of the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk; Yuri Vishevsky, the head of Gosatomnadzor or GAN, the Russian equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and Aleksei V. Yablokov, an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, and their spouses formed a throbbing mosh pit in the center of the living room.
Following the set, when asked what had made her appear with the band, Mrs. O’Leary, drenched in sweat, paused to catch her breath and then replied, “I’d asked Viktor [Mikhailov] if I could bring my guitar … and he
said sure. And one thing led to another … and, well …” She gestured toward the throng of guests still pumping their fists in the air.
After dinner, a bizarre incident occurred that has had the diplomatic community and entertainment industry abuzz with wild rumor and rampant speculation.
Sergei Smernyakov, a well-known nightclub hypnotist invited to the soirée by Mikhailov to provide postprandial entertainment, hypnotized guests Dorothy Bodin, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy; Cynthia Bowers-Lipken, a weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council; and LaShaquilla Nuland, wife of Adm. C. F. Bud Nuland, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each woman was given the posthypnotic suggestion that at the tone of a spoon striking a wineglass she would become a frenzied Dionysian orgiast with an uncontrollable compulsion to instantly gratify her every carnal desire.
Brought out of their trances, the women, each one a paragon of professional accomplishment, dignity, and decorum, blushed at the suggestion, and laughingly assured their companions that—with all due respect to Mr. Kavochilov’s mesmeric prowess—they could certainly never be induced to behave in such an outrageously uncharacteristic manner.
But sure enough, when Yeltsin aide Yablokov tapped a tiny silver jam spoon against his wine goblet, Ms. Bodin, Ms. Bowers-Lipken, and Mrs. Nuland immediately disrobed, rending the garments from their bodies as
if they were aflame, and then, like deranged children, spreading caviar and blintz filling over each other’s naked flesh. Then, after a brief huddle, they overpowered a chosen male guest, shackled his legs, cuffed his hands behind his back, and took turns sitting on his face as they swigged caraway and jimsonweed-infused vodka from cut-crystal decanters.
Having finally sated themselves and tired, the women released the man, who staggered back to his hotel covered in their juices, followed by a howling cavalcade of rutting dogs, cats, raccoons, and possums whose demented caterwauling awakened sleeping Muscovites throughout the city.
Although invited guests refuse to comment on the identity of the male victim,
People
has learned that it was none other than celebrated television personality and Tony Award-winning actor
continued on p. 115