Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

WARDEN

I find it simply amazing … that you actually masturbate looking at abstract paintings.

MARK

Abstract paintings by women . Once I got an erection looking at a painting, and then I realized that it was a Frank Stella, and for a while I thought I might be homosexual. But it never happened again.

WARDEN

Do you have paintings up on your walls — I mean like reproductions, prints, posters?

MARK

Nuh-uh. I have one wall reserved for posters, but it’s all Bougainvillean tetherball players.

Do you follow Bougainvillean tetherball at all?

ANGLE ON WARDEN FROM MARK’S POV

WARDEN

No.

CUT TO INSERT SHOT of MARK’S REFLECTION in silver PILL TRAY

MARK

Do you know anything about International Grand-Prix Tetherball or the Melanesian tetherball circuit?

WARDEN

No.

CUT TO metallic blue HOUSEFLY alighting on MARK’S WINEGLASS and CIRCUMAMBULATING RIM

MARK (off-screen)

Have you ever watched a professional tetherball match on television?

COMPOUND-EYE SHOT of WARDEN from FLY’S POV

WARDEN

No.

COMPOUND-EYE PAN to MARK as FLY FOLLOWS CONVERSATION

MARK

Have you ever listened to a professional tetherball match on the radio?

COMPOUND-EYE PAN to WARDEN

WARDEN

No.

COMPOUND-EYE PAN back to MARK

MARK

Have you ever played tetherball?

EXTREME COMPOUND-EYE CLOSE-UP OF WARDEN as she takes mental inventory of all the games and sports she’s ever played: Candyland, hopscotch, the home-version Wheel of Fortune , mumblety-peg, video boccie; Doom, Mortal Kombat , and Gianni Isotope; the pommel horse, calf-roping, spelunking, and skeet shooting; being carpooled to Thai kick-boxing lessons on Tuesday afternoons, and increasingly esoteric martial arts like Filipino PVC Vent-Pipe Fighting and Okinawan “Mason-Style” Jukendo, a lethal form of self-defense in which bricks, mortar, and a trowel are used to subdue and sometimes entomb your assailant; there were the five-hour bus rides to Washington Heights each Thursday night for Dominican cockfighting classes; the short-lived infatuation with falconry; that semester abroad in the Transvaal, hunting springbok with chloroforminfused handkerchiefs; the salmon-roe eating contests; the silly nursing-school sorority contrast-media drinking games, guzzling shot after shot of barium sulfate; and then, of course, the bearbaiting, the Russian roulette, the elevator surfing … but never tetherball.

WARDEN

No.

CLOSE SHOT of MARK FILLIPPING FLY INTO HIS WINE

CUT TO FLY’S POV as it thrashes and sinks in wine.

We see its life flash before its compound eyes — a rapid chronological montage of highlights — feeding on rotting hamburger meat in a cafeteria Dumpster with several hundred other wriggling white larvae, barely eluding the bifurcated tongue of a skink at some miasmic fen in Manahawkin, buzzing around various mounds of garbage and excrement, laying several hundred eggs in the putrefying viscera of some unidentifiable roadkill, more mounds of manure and miscellaneous heaps of rancid offal, and finally, flying toward the window of the warden’s office after the olfactory receptors on its antennae detect wafting sugar molecules from the evaporating white Burgundy …

And then FADE TO BLACK.

FADE IN on MEDIUM SHOT of MARK and WARDEN

MARK

Well, you know what it is, right? There’s a ball suspended by a string — or a tether —from an upright pole, and the object for each player is to wrap the tether around the pole by striking the ball in the opposite direction from his opponent. See?

Now, in the United States, there’s no real organized tetherball. You find tetherball poles occasionally in schoolyards and playgrounds and at summer camps, but there aren’t any, like, pee-wee or little leagues, or high school or college teams, or anything like that. It was only at the last Olympics that we even sent a squad, and, of course, we totally sucked. And professional tetherball doesn’t exist at all in this country.

But in Bougainville — Do you know where Bougainville is?

WARDEN

Nope.

MARK

It’s part of Papua New Guinea, but it’s one of the Solomon Islands — it’s actually the largest of the Solomon Islands.

In that whole part of the South Pacific — what’s called Melanesia, which also includes Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji — tetherball is the game. But especially in Bougainville. I mean, tetherball in Bougainville is like soccer in Italy. It’s like football in Texas.

And that’s what every kid from Bougainville wants to be when he grows up — a tetherball star.

And so, basically, Bougainvillean players completely dominate international tetherball. Just to give you an idea of how ascendant they are in this sport, of this year’s eight Grand Prix tournaments, Bougainvilleans won seven, and in the past three Summer Olympic Games since tetherball was made a medal sport, Bougainvillean competitors have captured all 18 medals — the men’s and women’s gold, silver, and bronze in each Olympics. Then there’s the Ma Ling Master’s Tournament — Ma Ling is a Japanese canned-goods company that is very big in the Solomon Islands, your canned mackerel, canned luncheon meat, canned chicken feet, corned beef, goose meat in gravy, lichees in syrup — it’s the final tournament of the tour and it’s only open to players who’ve won a Grand Prix title, and it’s invariably got three or four Bougainvillean semifinalists and a Bougainvillean champion. And then you’ve got this whole, more informal Melanesian winter circuit, which provides an even richer substrate of totally excellent tetherball.

WARDEN

Who are the big stars over there?

MARK

Oh man, let’s see … There’s Fagi Pinjinga, there’s Mapopoza Tonezepo … there’s Lyndon Kakambona, Wuwa-Bulolo Puliyasi, Wamp Kominika, Onguglo To’uluwa, Ezikiel Takaku, Wia Kemakeza, Ataban Tokurapai … And then of course there’s Offramp Tavanipupu — you’ve probably heard of him , he’s, like, the biggest tetherball star in the world, and he’s also a really big pop star in the Solomon Islands, he’s kind of the Leonard Cohen of Melanesia, I mean in addition to his tetherball — I guess you’d say he’s like the Mike Tyson/Leonard Cohen of Melanesia.

WARDEN

He actually sounds familiar. What is it — Avram Topopovuni?

MARK

Offramp Tavanipupu. I’m sure you’ve run across articles about him in magazines. About how when he was a kid, he almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning huffing fumes from barbecue propane tanks, and how he was later diagnosed with having a monoamine oxidase A deficiency — what’s called a MAOA-deficiency — which made him abnormally belligerent …

WARDEN

What made him abnormally belligerent, the deficiency or the diagnosis?

MARK

Huh?

WARDEN

Never mind.

MARK

… so he was always in and out of reform schools and jails. But he developed into this incredibly ferocious player. He’s probably the hardest pure hitter ever in tetherball — y’know, if you’re talking just raw pounds-per-square-inch force. And then the year after he won his first Ma Ling Masters, he was in a Koru’s Department Store, which is like the Bougainvillean equivalent of Sears, and he was buying a pair of maracas and the salesperson suggested that he purchase a service contract for the maracas, and Offramp very courteously declined — he’s normally a very soft-spoken, urbane person — but the clerk got increasingly aggressive about this service contract, and finally Offramp just lost it and bludgeoned him to death with the ceremonial war club he always carries around with him. So he had to leave the country and he missed two full seasons. And then when he came back, he was appearing on The Patimo Nambuka Show (which is like the Good Morning America of Bougainville), and an anaconda swallowed his mom in the green room.