Mark Leyner: The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Some night, when you’re all alone and feeling particularly alienated and forsaken, close your eyes and cup your hands to your ears. You’ll hear a kind of muffled roar. That’s the cumulative sound of 30 billion souls — one from each human body that’s ever walked the earth; each now alone on its own individual tiny desolate planet, furnished with couch, telescope, minibar, and self-replenishing hoagie — laughing, crying, and belching as they watch their lives loop endlessly in universal syndication.

My father is strapped to a gurney, about to die by lethal injection, when the phone rings. Everyone — warden, lawyers, rabbi, Dad — looks at the red wall phone. That’s the one that rings when the governor calls to pardon a condemned convict. But when it rings a second time, they realize that it’s not the old-fashioned tintinnabulation of a wall phone, but the high-pitched electronic chirp of a cellular. I reach into my jacket pocket and answer: “Hello? [It’s my agent.] What’s up?” Everyone’s giving me this indignant glare like, “Hey, we got an execution here,” which I deflect with the international sign for “Bear with me, please”—the upraised frontal palm (gesturally closer to the Hollywood Indian’s gesticulated salutation than to the traffic cop’s “Stop,” which is more peremptory and thrust farther from the body). I’m nodding: “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh … That’s great! OK, I’ll talk to you later.” I slip the phone back inside my jacket.

“Good news?” my father asks.

“Yeah, kind of,” I reply. “It looks like I’m going to win the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award.”

“What’s that?” the doctor says, retaping the cannula in my father’s arm and sliding the IV drip stand closer to the gurney.

“It’s a very prestigious, very generous award given every year for the best screenplay written by a student at Maplewood Junior High School — it’s $250,000 a year for the rest of your life.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Dad exclaims.

“Mazel tov,” says the rabbi.

“Whoa … hold on, folks,” I say. “There’s one big problem here — there’s no screenplay. I haven’t written word one. I don’t even have a title yet.”

The warden — an absolutely stunning woman in a décolleté evening gown — eyes me dubiously. “How’d you win the award if there’s no screenplay?”

“That’s the advantage of having a powerful agent,” I say.

Everyone nods in agreement.

“Trouble is — I gotta get this movie written soon.… Shit, I could really use a title. I can’t write without a title, y’know, I gotta be able to say to myself, I’m working on Such and Such .

“How does Like Lemon-Lime Sports Drink for Carob Protein Bar strike you?” the executioner asks.

“I thought of that myself,” I say, “but it’s a little too close to Like Water for Chocolate.”

“Mark, what about Double Life: The Shattering Affair Between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman?” the warden suggests.

“Too long.”

Dad pipes up. “I’ve got the title,” he says decisively.

“What?”

“Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat.”

There’s a long silence.

“I love it,” the rabbi finally says. “It’s haunting. It’s archetypal. It speaks to the collective unconscious. Every culture has, if not a full-fledged myth, than a mythological motif involving the man/rodent — strong, honest, resolute in his convictions, striving diligently to excel in life — who, in the end, is confronted by the merciless, omnipotent giantess — a sort of postpartum, premenstrual proto-Streisand — with opulently manicured and fiendishly honed fingernails, who plucks him up and slices him open from his Adam’s apple to his pubic bone. Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat,” he reprises, gesturing as if at a marquee.

“C’mon, that’s much too long,” I say.

“Bullshit,” rebuts my father. “The length is irrelevant. Moviegoers condense titles regardless. They called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory became ‘Willy Wonka.’ Steroids Made My Friend Jorge Kill His Speech Therapist: An ABC Afterschool Special was simply ‘Steroids.’ So they’ll call this ‘Vivisected’ or ‘Dour Bitch.’ But you want succinct? How about No Exit Wound . Sort of Jean-Paul Sartre meets Jean-Claude Van Damme. Or you want a real contemporary, John Singleton sort of feel? What about something like Yo! You’re My Dope Dealer Not My Thesis Adviser. If I Wanted Your Opinion About My Dissertation, I’d Have Asked for It, Motherfucker!”

I’m starting to get a little impatient. I glance at my watch, a Tag Heuer chronograph. “Listen, I gotta get over to the library and try to come up with some ideas. Can we, uh …” I make the international sign for lethal injection: thumb, index, and middle fingers mime squeezing hypodermic and then head lolls to the side with tongue sticking out of mouth.

The executioner and operations officer check and recheck the IV line and make a final inspection of the delivery module, which is mounted on the wall and holds the three lethal doses in syringes, each of which is fitted beneath a weighted piston.

Everyone’s being especially punctilious here because of an accident that occurred recently at an execution over in Missouri, where leaks in the octagonal gas chamber’s supposedly airtight seals allowed cyanide gas to seep into the witness room, killing ten people, including members of the condemned criminal’s victims’ families. Only writer William T. Vollmann, who was covering the execution for Spin magazine, walked away unscathed.

Dad beckons me to come closer. “Here, son, I want you to have this,” he says, handing me his ring, a flawless oval Burmese sapphire flanked by heart-shaped diamonds.

Something about the way he contorts his body against the leather restraints in order to remove the ring reminds me of my first memory of my parents naked. I must have been three or four — they’d just gotten out of the shower and were toweling each other off. My father’s entire body was emblazoned with tattoos of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

“What’s that, Daddy?” I remember asking.

“That’s the Kaufmann house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, that’s Taliesin West in Phoenix, that’s the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, and that’s the Guggenheim,” he explained, pointing, his head twisted backward over his shoulder.

“Why’d you get those?” I asked.

“I was drunk, I guess …” he shrugged.

My mom’s buttocks were tattooed with an illustration of an 1,800-pound horned Red Brindle bull crashing through the front window of a Starbucks coffee bar and charging a guy who’s sitting there sipping a cappuccino and reading M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled . The caption reads: “Life’s a Bitch and Then You’re Gored to Death.”

Lately I’ve been trying to fix Mom up with the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who helped prepare an amicus-curiae brief in support of my father’s last appeal. Mom spends most of her time these days dressed in black, fingering her rosary beads, sighing, daubing away tears with a black, lace-trimmed handkerchief, and doing Goldschläger shots — so I thought it might be a good idea for her to start getting out more. My dad’s family is really pissed at me because they think Mom shouldn’t start dating until after the execution, and they’re also mad because I sold some nude photos of Dad to this bondage magazine and they claim to have a right to some of the proceeds, and my position is basically: I tied him up, I took the photographs, they’re my property, profits from their sale belong to me, end of discussion.