Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

WARDEN

It all sounds vaguely familiar.

MARK

The guy’s like an international superstar. He dated Lolita Davidovich and PJ Harvey. He dated Fusako Shigenobu, the female head of the now-inactive Middle East faction of the Japanese Red Army. He dated Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s daughters Keiko and Sachi. And, during a period of heavy Ecstasy use, he was rumored to have been simultaneously engaged to wayward tennis phenom Jennifer Capriati and Yasmin Buschbacher, coxswain for Liechtenstein’s Olympic women’s quadruple sculls crew.

So then, after going out with all these glamorous starlets and celebs, he marries a member of the bhangis , an untouchable caste of sewer scavengers in India. The bhangis are considered the absolute lowest of the low in the caste hierarchy — they’re so ostracized that even the tanners and animal cremators won’t go near them.

It’s such classic Offramp —for him to have fallen in love with someone like that. He’s such a romantic, such an iconoclast. I mean, here’s Bougainville’s paramount tetherball player and pop star — unquestionably the country’s most eligible bachelor — and this is a girl ghettoized in some fetid slum colony, never went to school, completely illiterate, who’s spent her entire life helping her family eke out a living cleaning pit toilets by hand.

He meets her sightseeing during qualifying rounds for the Bhopal Open, falls in love, and asks her to marry him on the spot.

WARDEN

He sounds like a real egalitarian.

MARK

Totally. She carried a bucket of excrement on her head at the wedding!

WARDEN

That’s so cool.

MARK

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

NEW ANGLE on MARK and WARDEN

WARDEN

So do you have posters of him up in your room?

MARK

I have a small Wuwa-Bulolo Puliyasi poster, a small Ezikiel Takaku, and two big Offramp Tavanipupus. They’re really cool. In one, he’s sitting on this frayed blue plastic beach chair holding his war club, and he’s just got on a pair of these dingy, like, jockey briefs, and he’s wearing eyeliner, eye shadow, and lipstick with this ratty teased hair that’s like black cotton candy, and he’s got a bone in his nose, and it was shot using this low-pressure sodium lamp so the betel-juice stains on his teeth and all the ornamental scars on his face really stand out — he’s got a radiant sun carved into one cheek and a tetherball on the other — he kind of looks like a cross between Robert Smith from The Cure and Queequeg from Moby Dick . And then in the other one, he’s walking along a dock in Kieta playing the guitar and he’s wearing this pair of pinstriped suit pants cut off just below the knees and he’s got his shell anklets and a lei of frangipani blossoms and his war club in this sort of rattan scabbard. I think that poster was a promotion for his album Bikpela Numbawan .

The man’s music is excellent. His lyrics have been subjected to more exegetical effort than the work of any other Bougainvillean songwriter. I have all his albums. I have Bikpela Numbawan … Do you understand any Pidgin?

WARDEN

Nope.

MARK

Bikpela Numbawan —that means like “Big Fella, Number One” or “Big Man, Number One.” There’s Dispela Pisin Savvy Tok Bullseet , which means “This Bird Knows How to Talk Bullshit.” There’s Mi Laik Kai-Kai Dim-Dim , which is “I Like to Eat White Persons.”

The singer-songwriter’s current album, Haus Pekpek Toktok Numbawan , a two-CD set released in the U.K. as Spent Fuel Rod in a Cooling Pond , in which lyrics of depression, abject self-pity, misanthropy, and suicide are interwoven with wistful, elegiac, almost diaristic sketches of dreamy trysts and doomed affairs and augmented by Tavanipupu’s dissonant acoustic strumming and maudlin synth string arrangements, entered the Melanesian charts at #1 nine months ago and has remained in the top 40 ever since.

Lyrics like “When people ask you what I do, you’re like, ‘I guess he just hits tetherballs’ / And y’know, it’s funny, I’d always preferred very earnest and ingenuous girls to louche, scabrously nihilistic girls / but you changed all that / The way you just loll on the sofa like a narcoleptic Doberman when my parents come over to visit / and then later the way you snarl when you’re being fucked / Frenzied bodies, paralyzed minds / I can’t believe I never told you that the nape of your neck is redolent of the sweltering pavement / And now when people ask me what I do, I’m like, ‘I guess I just hit tetherballs,’” and “Remember that time at the Odeon when you unclasped your gold chain & crucifix, doused it in your drink and slid it, wet and cold, down the back of my pants / and I cried out ‘I adore you!’ and you put your hand over my mouth and said ‘Not so loud, there are gossip columnists from New York magazine here’ / and you traced the cicatrized tetherball on my cheek with your long black shellacked fingernail / and I whispered ‘I adore you … I adore you!’ succumbing completely to a dream I knew would invariably dissipate in the exigencies of our respective marriages / Oh, but I adore that dream / that dream, dream, dream, that forlorn dream” have become sing-alongs for the tens of thousands of Offramp Tavanipupu fans who pack concert halls and stadiums throughout the South Pacific.

ANGLE ON WARDEN

as she suddenly gets up and peruses several shelves of racked CDs.

WARDEN

I think I know where I’ve heard of Offramp Tavanipupu. I belong to one of those CD clubs … and y’know how if you don’t order something they just automatically send you their selection of the month? Well, I think recently they sent me one of this guy’s albums and I just stuck it in here, without ever even listening to it … Yup — here we go.

INSERT SHOT of HAUS PEKPEK TOKTOK NUMBAWAN CD in Warden’s hand.

WARDEN

Should I put it on?

MARK

Definitely.

The WARDEN’S sound system features an 8-CD carousel. She loads the two CDs of Offramp Tavanipupu’s Haus Pekpek Toktok Numbawan .

In addition, she loads the Mr. Holland’s Opus soundtrack album; the Batman Forever soundtrack album; the soundtrack album for Chernobyl , Knut Holberg’s chilling, critically acclaimed documentary about the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history, which features songs performed by Whitney Houston, Mary J. Bilge, Toni Braxton, TLC, Brandy, and Tony! Toni! Toné; Flogging Tenors , recorded live at the Hermanos Rodriguez Autodromo in Mexico City to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Nancy Spungen, tenor virtuosi Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti pay tribute to early English punk by reinterpreting such classics as the Sex Pistols’ “No Feelings,” “Pretty Vacant,” and “Anarchy in the UK,” The Damned’s “Stab Your Back,” the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict” and “Why Can’t I Touch It?” The Clash’s “White Riot,” and The Adverts’ “Bored Teenagers” and “One Chord Wonders;” Karaoke Collaboration , ten lush instrumental tracks that enable you to perform the anthems and popular songs of Vichy France, the Croatian Ustachi, and wartime Lithuania — a must-have for nostalgic anti-Semites who love to sing; and finally, Ministry maestro Al Jourgensen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta debut Jourgensen’s foray into the classical idiom with his brooding symphonic composition, The Meek Shall Inherit Shit .

These eight CDs play continuously for the remainder of the movie.

WARDEN returns to couch and caresses MARK’s cheek with the back of her hand. She reclines, kicks off her pumps, and lays a bare foot across his thigh.