Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

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.