The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (11 page)

A SCREENPLAY

by
Mark Leyner
(7th Grade, Maplewood Junior High School)

Submitted in competition for
the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers
America Award

WARDEN

Do you have any drugs?

MARK

(patting pockets of leather trousers)

I have one linty phenobarbital, which we could split. Or if you have any, uh, air freshener or Pam, we could, like, huff the butane … 

WARDEN

(De haut en bas, but generous. Keep in mind that this is a woman from a dreary rust-belt town in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, who, as the child of emotionally withholding working-class parents, grew up with no sense of entitlement, but, motivated by a passion for discipline and punishment and impelled by sheer Polish-Catholic chutzpah, clawed her way up the New Jersey Department of Corrections hierarchy to become the first female warden of a men’s maximum-security facility in the state’s history. At this precise moment in the movie, she transcends the stereotype of the “compulsively glamorous yet tormented warden” and achieves a hard-won noblesse. It’s worth doing hundreds of takes to achieve the finely nuanced delivery that this line requires.)

Hmmm … I think we can do a little better than that.

MARK (voice-over)

As I browse through this astonishing array of contraband, I can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of the inmates. In the Body Cavity/Rectal section, for instance—I can imagine someone smuggling in a wrapped shank, a box-cutter, or a honed nail swathed in plastic wrap, lubricated with Vaseline, and inserted in the rectum. But four 5-piece place settings of Bastille stainless-steel flatware? And a 7-piece Henckels Cutlery set (boning knife, paring knife, chef’s knife, serrated bread knife, utility knife, and shears) in an 11-inch high, slotted beechwood block? Unbelievable! And in the Body Cavity/Oral section—I can see how, during a visit, a girlfriend could convey, through a kiss, a condom partially filled with heroin. But a 959-piece 3D Alsatian Village Puzzle? How? Piece by piece, one kiss per visit per week? Imagine the incarcerated hobbyist’s Zen-like equanimity required to abide such glacial progress! And what if, on the other hand, the puzzle had been conveyed
all at once? All 959 pieces. In one single passionate and protracted kiss! Wouldn’t a supervising guard have found it even slightly suspicious that as the grotesquely distended cheeks of the girlfriend subsided, the inmate’s grotesquely swelled?

MARK (voice-over)

I know, from having seen Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alicia Silverstone on
The Charlie Rose Show
, that certain drugs, particularly the botanically derived hallucinogens used by shamanistic tribal societies in South America, induce a remarkably wide incidence of consistent and specific images—geometrical patterns, jaguars, tigers, anacondas, naked sorceresses, the color blue, phantasmagorical cities, etc. In that regard, I’d be curious to know if my Gravy experience is similar to those that other people might have had; i.e., I wonder if these are the archetypal Gravy motifs encountered by everyone who does the drug:

First, I become fixated on the word
mohair
.

Then, every surface in the room is overlaid with checkerboards of neon orange, lime green, and hot pink, and patterns like shattered stained-glass windows of plum and magenta.

I begin to hear a high-pitched carrier tone, I’d say about 600 Hz. And soon I hear a clicking sound, like call-waiting. I realize that someone or something is trying to contact me and that I must “free the line,” in other words, sever and jettison my habituated consciousness in order to make myself available to more advanced modes of knowledge.

Stucco patterns detach themselves from the ceiling, hover in the air, and reconfigure themselves into a vaulting dome of dazzling microelectronic circuitry. The floor melts into a percolating ooze of filamentous blue-green algae. The walls are animated Paleolithic cave murals, alive with yellow ochre and hematite bison and ibexes. I
discern a faint melismatic voice, like a call to prayer from a distant minaret, but originating seemingly from within the huge Meridian DSP-6000 speaker suspended from ceiling brackets at the far end of the room.

Suddenly I sense that I am in the presence of a host. A palpable, yet transcendent entity—ubiquitous, omniscient, and eternal.

The entity smiles at me and says: “Yes, don’t you see now how we are absolutely
not
all part of the same whole. Your ultimate spiritual value is based on your body-fat percentage, how much money you make, and how well you do on tests.”

I smile to myself. I suppose this realization may be startling to some people, but it happens to be the basis of my own personal cosmology, so I am pleased. I’m perfectly at peace. Somewhere inside, intuitively, I knew the world was always like this—that the soul of every sentient life-form is locked into a rigid and immutable hierarchy based primarily on physical appearance, scholastic aptitude, and salary—but I lacked the divine insight to actually prove it. Blissfully, the Gravy has provided me with the incontrovertible corroboration I’ve been seeking for so long.

The entity departs.

I now have the following succession of stunning personal revelations:

• A moment comes in the life of every man or woman when he or she must decide whether to be an average middle-class American who adheres to moderate political views and believes in some form of “higher power,” or a drunken, pork-eating, whoremongering infidel.
  
• The coolest videos to watch when you’re high are:
  Caligula, Necrophagous Insects of the Borneo Rain Forest
  , and
  The Red Army Kegel Exercise Video
  .
  
• Although the 900-number hotline psychic was correct in gleaning that I was put on earth to provide an anodyne to sorrow with comedy rooted in the indignities of corporeality, and that I will have no friends or loved ones—just servants, subordinates, and sexual partners—she was mistaken in her prediction that I will die in a San Diego hospital of kidney failure following aneurysm surgery. I will die violently in prison.
  
• The world record for hyperthermophyllic bacteria—presently held by
  Pyrolobus fumarius
  , which live near hot deep-sea vents at temperatures of up to 113° Celsius (235°F)—is, like all records,
  made to be broken
  .
  
• My idea for a television series about a wandering, samurai-errant-like tetherball player, who travels through the Berkshires and Adirondacks from summer camp to summer camp, solving campers’ problems by defeating bullies and malefactors at tetherball, may be fundamentally flawed.
  

I originally thought of pitching it as a sort of
Kung Fu-like
concept, except that instead of a mastery of the martial arts, the hero possesses a mastery of the arcane skills and profound philosophy of tetherball. I’d worked up a pilot episode in which our itinerant protagonist arrives at this particular summer camp and finds a morbidly shy, agoraphobic boy who’s being mercilessly tormented by a sadistic bunkmate who takes special delight in ridiculing the unfortunate boy about his chronic bed-wetting. The bully is a brawny, swaggering, privileged loudmouth who thinks he’s God’s gift because his father owns a chain of Chi-Chi’s-like Mexican restaurants across the country. Although the bed wetter has several insufferable qualities, including a purse-lipped piety that’s particularly repellent in a 9-year-old, he exhibits admirable determination and courage in pursuing his two great
passions: art nouveau windows and Hummel collecting. After a futile attempt at persuading the troublemaker to desist in persecuting the enuretic Hummel maven, the hero—cryptically known only as “Teth-Ba”—challenges him to a tetherball match in front of the entire camp. And, of course, in a pyrotechnic display that’s both brutal and balletic, he vanquishes him—in slow motion, his sweat misting iridescently in the midsummer sun. The campers, who at first watch in stunned silence, explode in rapturous jubilation. And the following morning, as reveille sounds, the afflicted child—for the first time in his life—wakes up triumphantly in a dry bed. And—in a delightfully arch stroke of poetic justice—the humiliated bully awakens in a clammy pool of his own urine.

Teth-Ba turns down an invitation to stay the weekend for a mixer with nearby Camp Bon Temps Macoutes, a Duvalierist summer camp for overweight girls, whose chubby, wild-eyed camperettes are said to be among the most licentious in the entire Lake Little Lake region, and he unassumingly sets off for parts unknown.

The problem with the concept—which I can now see clearly for the first time, thanks to my drug-induced mental acuity—is that I may not be able to come up with enough crises that are resolvable via tetherball to sustain a series through an entire season.

Perhaps I should reconceptualize the pilot as a stand-alone, full-length, made-for-TV feature … 

    The ellipses of that final epiphany swell to the size of three bowling balls, which float before my eyes and burst in sequence, like a visual countdown—three, two, one.

And I am now launched on an incredible out-of-body journey.

I am not exactly sure how to interpret the meaning
of this journey. Perhaps the symbolism of the “difficult passage” represents an attempt to transcend opposites, to abolish the polarity typical of the human condition in order to attain to ultimate reality, to restore the “communicability” that existed primordially between this world and heaven. I’m not sure. But I’d be curious to know if other people who’ve taken Gravy have experienced a similar sort of transmigration. Here’s a brief summary:

I am suddenly flying through the air, moving at great speeds, tens of thousands of feet above the ground. It’s terrifying. I pass a flushed, sinewy woman furiously pedaling a LifeCycle as she reads Dr. Charisse Goldberger’s runaway bestseller
Why Big, Semiliterate, Uncircumcised Men Make the Best Lovers (And How We’ve Known It All Along)
, while listening on her Walkman to an audio-book,
Wake Me Up When the Zionist Entity Is Liquidated: Sheik Abdel Hassan Easton Ellis’s Courageous Battle With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
. And I’m thinking to myself, that name’s gotta be a joke—Sheik Abdel Hassan Easton Ellis. And then, without warning, I begin plummeting to earth. I shut my eyes and brace myself for fatal impact. But when I open my eyes, I’m not only walking safely on the ground, I’m in a Kenneth Cole shoe commercial with various diplomats like Strobe Talbot and Warren Christopher. The premise of the commercial is that we’re trying to negotiate the release of Michael Eisner and Joe Roth, who’ve been taken hostage by Amish fanatics who are trying to stop Disney from producing a Paul Verhoeven—Joe Eszterhas erotic thriller about “bundling.” We’re attempting to traverse a field covered with what appear to be cow pies, but are actually land mines. In our Kenneth Cole shoes (and, for some reason, bright yellow rubber minidresses slit open in the back like hospital gowns), we dance jauntily around the explosive cow pies à la Gene Kelly, but one by one each of us is blown up, until I’m the only one left. I pirouette several times and
then try to vault over a clutch of mines, but there’s an explosion that projects me into the air.

I’m flying again. And again, I approach the woman on the LifeCycle, this time as I hurtle in the opposite direction.

“Don’t I look awesome in my boyfriend’s ‘Greek Week’ T-shirt?” she asks.

And then she doffs the shirt and casts off her sports bra.

Deploying various aeronautical techniques, including using my arms as rotors and churning them about perpendicular axes, and forcibly exhaling from my mouth for retrothrust, I’m able to decelerate from a velocity of about Mach 2 to a complete standstill.

I’m hovering now, and watching her breasts undulate in rhythm with her strenuous pedaling.

We are enveloped in a thick cumulus cloud.

And when we emerge, she is holding my stiff penis in her hand. I’ve lost the power of flight, and I am dangling by my erection from her grip, some 36,000 feet above the ground. It’s not painful, as one might expect, but there’s definitely a significant amount of strain. But it’s a very pleasurable strain. And I know that if she lets go of me, I’ll fall out of the sky. But I feel very peaceful. Very dreamy. There we are, suspended in the perfectly empty azure void, which is absolutely quiet except for the sound of her pedaling and the occasional electronic chirp (she’s doing a “hill program” on her LifeCycle, and whenever she completes a “hill,” the display panel emits a short little beep).

And I want to ejaculate, but I know that if I do, I’ll become flaccid and shrink, and there won’t be enough for her to hold on to, and I’ll fall. And I’m also concerned that if I fall, I’ll hit innocent people on the ground and perhaps kill them.

But then I have another powerful revelation—one that perhaps every male in every species has in his life,
and one that might very well mark the passage from boy- to manhood. I realize that at this moment, ejaculating takes precedence over absolutely everything else in the world, including the death of innocent people. I realize that this overwhelming, heedless desire to ejaculate right now so dwarfs any other consideration, including my own death and the death or grievous injury of others, that I’m incapable of resisting it and unwilling to even try. And I succumb. It’s literally a letting go. A release. A surrender. A fall. A fall from grace.

And I begin to plunge again.

This descent is the stuff of nightmares—the terror excruciating, maddening. The acceleration of the free-fall seems to produce an internal decompression; I have the sensation of a vacuum in my hollow organs, cavities, and sinuses. Adrenaline spews across my nervous system, a gelid effervescence of animal panic.

I shut my eyes and cover them with both my hands.

And then, after what seems like hours and hours of falling, I finally open them … 

I’m in the warden’s office.

I’m seated on the couch.

And now I experience a steady return to baseline consciousness. The neon checkerboard patterns and microelectronic overlays, the Paleolithic imagery and blue-green ooze all revert back into familiar aspects of the room. And the keening carrier tone fades to silence.