Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Called to the stand by the Gutmans’ attorney, Cuozzo was asked to demonstrate — on a CPR dummy laid out on a table in front of the jury — the force of the precordial thumps he administered to Len Gutman that fateful afternoon. Cuozzo made a fist and thumped the dummy, breaking the table in two. The CPR dummy was then laid across several cinder blocks. Cuozzo delivered another precordial thump, this time splitting the cinder block under the dummy’s sternum. At the request of plaintiff’s counsel, Cuozzo then demonstrated how he’d administered external cardiac massage to the deceased. This time the CPR dummy was placed on a four-inch-thick marble tabletop with thick reinforced-steel legs. Cuozzo began his forceful depressions of the dummy’s chest. By the twentieth massage, the steel legs began to buckle, and marble dust was sprinkling from a spreading fissure in the tabletop. In less than a minute, the legs snapped completely.

Indeed, Gutman’s autopsy disclosed extensive hemorrhage investing the pectoralis regions, intercostal musculature, and parasternal muscles. The sternum had two fractures with extensive localized hemorrhage. The left first through seventh ribs were fractured with severe accompanying soft-tissue hemorrhage. The right first through ninth ribs were fractured with similar soft tissue and muscular hemorrhage.

The autopsy further disclosed liver lacerations, splenic and pancreatic injury, cardiac rupture, pneumothorax, aortic laceration, and systemic fat embolism — each of which could be distinctly certified as a cause of death and of all of which were directly attributable to Cuozzo’s ungainly attempts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

In the unequivocal opinion of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses, Len Gutman was already dead when the NJSDE agents gave him the 5,000 joules of electricity and 20 grams of lidocaine.

The jury deliberated for less than fifteen minutes and awarded the Gutman family $40 million in damages.

Although Dr. Richard Cuozzo experienced a dramatic surge in his malpractice premiums, he was given an honorary fourth-degree black belt by the Passaic County Tae Kwon Do School in recognition of his accomplishments in the emergency room and during the trial.

And in a final irony, as he accepted his honorary black belt — the first ever bestowed by the Passaic County Tae Kwon Do School on a nonpractitioner — Cuozzo stood under one of Leonard Gutman’s earliest signs, which, though immediately recognizable as fledgling Gutman, betokens the compression and allusiveness that would so distinguish his mature oeuvre:

Students Must Remove Shoes

Before Entering Dojo

So here we are — you, my father, and I — having arrived simultaneously at the word Dojo .

Now you can perhaps feel the kinetic sensation of reading apace with us. Share the sensation of neurolinguistic motion with me and my dad. The hair in the breeze! I don’t know what you’d call it exactly … Is there a strictly cerebral kinesthesia … a lexical kinesthesia? A proprioception associated with reading-speed?

Every male Leyner from the very beginning (I’m talking about the original botched eugenics experiments in Galicia and Estonia in the mid-nineteenth century) reads at exactly the same speed—620 words per minute. A moderate clip. (Female Leyners read at about 750 words a minute.) I don’t care what you give my father and me to read — a three-syllable Leonard Gutman sign or the 2,815-page Fermilab Fixed-Target Proton Accelerator service manual — we’ll reach the final word with perfect coterminous symmetry.

Dojo .

And then we look up with what appears to be this impassive bored expectancy but is really a moment of cognitive processing during which our facial muscles go slack.

“Any questions?” asks the warden.

“Nuh-uh,” Dad and I say in unison.

“Very comprehensive,” says my father, slipping the brochure into the inside breast pocket of an orange blazer with a three-guillotined-heads-chatting-amiably-in-a-basket NJSDE escutcheon sewn onto the breast pocket.

The superintendent then asks if we’d like to purchase a video of the execution. (Videos of all executions, successful or abortive, are made available — at a fee, of course — to the families of the condemned inmate and his or her victims.)

This occasions a lightning-fast colloquy between my father and I that, in its susurrant urgency, will remind you of — depending on your taste in nonfiction TV — either the ad hoc huddles convened by teammates on game shows or the microphone-muffled, privileged powwows between witnesses and their lawyers at Congressional hearings:

“I don’t really want it,” I say, cupping a hand to my mouth and whispering into his ear.

“Get one, for Christ’s sake,” says my father, eyeing the superintendent, but addressing me under his breath, through a clench-toothed ventriloquist’s grin. “I wish I had a goddamn video of my father’s execution.”

“I don’t have any money on me.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“But it’s so stupid,” I complain, spitting on his ear-lobe.

“I WILL PAY FOR IT!” he insists, grin frozen, lips motionless.

“But, Daaaaaady …” I whine, regressing in the face of his peremptory largesse.

“Superintendent, we’ll take a video,” Dad announces.

Now the superintendent wants to know whether we’d like a soundtrack. (The video is $24.95 without the soundtrack — for an extra $10 they’ll dub in any song you want.)

“What exactly is in the video?” my father asks.

“It’s the entire lethal-injection sequence up to and including when you say ‘I feel shitty.’ You can choose any song you’d like — we have a CD library with over 10,000 titles.”

Now my father’s pondering this. He’s taken a seat and he’s poring over this catalog of CD titles. And I’m beginning to feel really pressed time-wise. In order to collect the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award, I need a screenplay written by tomorrow. I know, I know — I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute … Anyway, I need to get to the library today before it closes. I never expected this thing to take so long. I thought I’d be in and out of here.

And also I’m getting in a bad mood because … well, for two reasons: First of all, I have a feeling that my father is going to ask me to share a cab with him — which I absolutely won’t do. I mean, you’re aware of the highly complex social structure of 13-year-old boys with its intricate, hierarchical, and unyielding code of decorum in which various forms of behavior and activities are proscribed by taboos, so you know how mortifying it is for someone my age to be seen with a parent in public by his peers, the ignominy of which is made even more unbearable by anything that calls attention to the fact, and nothing calls attention to itself more conspicuously than a fiery execution attempt — so you can understand my feelings of dread about the possibility of sharing a taxi with a father who might be brutally assassinated by NJSDE operatives while we’re stopped at a traffic light. God, I’d absolutely die with embarrassment! And, second, I’m starting to feel really weird about the warden not having responded to or acknowledged in any way the two clandestine notes I slipped her: “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?” Maybe — I’m thinking — if you do something so fulsomely inappropriate — like slipping her these billets-doux — maybe the reproach is this massive silence, this nullifying indifference that expunges the act right out of existence, making you question whether you’d ever committed it in the first place. So I start to wonder if I’d ever given her the notes — I rummage around for them in the mealy pockets of my leather trousers, but find only a phenobarbital, an ossified yellow Starburst, and my folded-up fake movie review (more about which later) — or if I’d ever really written them at all.