Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

It’s time. The superintendent reads the death warrant.

Everyone turns to the wall phone, giving it one last opportunity to ring.

“If you think the governor’s gonna call with a stay of execution, you’re nuts,” I say. “She’s probably not even awake yet. It’s only noon.”

(They’d lowered the voting age to 15 in order to bring the highest-spending demographic sector into the electorate. This resulted in the election of a 17-year-old as governor. It’s been a real joke. At her inauguration, the chief justice had to make her remove her Walkman and spit out a huge multicolored bolus of Skittles so she could hear and repeat the oath of office. And you know how barristers and judges in England wear those white powdered perukes? Our new governor signed an order requiring the lawyers and judges in New Jersey to wear these big-hair wigs — y’know like mall hair. You should have seen my father’s trial — I’m telling you, it was a joke.)

My father is not an evil person. He just can’t do PCP socially. At the risk of oversimplification, I think that’s always been his basic problem. Some people are capable of being social phencyclidine users and some people are not, and my father unfortunately falls into the latter category. Normally Dad’s a very sweet, patient, benevolent guy, but when he’s dusted, he’s a completely different person — belligerent, volatile, extremely violent.

I remember once he was helping me with some homework — I was in the third grade, writing a report comparing the ritualistic sacrifice of prisoners of war during the Aztec festival Tlacaxipeualiztli (the Feast of the Flaying of Men) with recent fraternity hazing deaths at the Fashion Institute of Technology — and Dad was being just extraordinarily helpful in terms of conceptualizing the theme of the report and then with the research and editing (he was a fastidious grammarian), and at some point the doorbell rang and Dad went downstairs. Apparently it was some of his “dust buddies,” because he disappeared for about a half hour and when he returned to my room, he was transformed. Sweating, drooling, constricted pupils, slurred speech — the whole profile.

We started working again, and all of a sudden Dad grabbed the mouse and highlighted a line on the computer screen, and he said, “That’s a nonrestrictive modifier. It needs to be set off by commas.”

I probably said something to the effect of, “It’s not a big deal, Dad, let’s just leave it.”

At which point he went completely berserk. “It’s a nonrestrictive adjectival phrase. It’s not essential to the meaning of the Sentence’s main clause. It should be set off by commas. It is a big deal!”

And he grabbed a souvenir scrimshaw engraving tool, which I’d gotten at the New Bedford Whaling Museum gift shop several summers ago, and he plunged it into his left thigh, I’d say at least two to three inches deep.

“All right, I’ll put the commas in,” I said.

Dad evinced absolutely no sensation of pain, impervious as he was, thanks to the PCP. If anything, impaling his thigh with the scrimshaw graver seemed to mollify him. He certainly made no attempt nor manifested the slightest desire to remove it, and later, while we were trying to come up with a more colloquial way of saying “bound to the wheel of endless propitiation of an unloving and blood-hungry divinity,” Dad absently twanged the embedded tool as he mused.

Another fascinating and potentially mitigating factor emerged during my father’s trial for killing a security guard who’d apprehended him shoplifting a Cuisinart variable-speed hand blender and a Teflon-coated ice-cream scooper from a vendor’s kiosk at an outlet in Secaucus. (The imposition of the death sentence in New Jersey requires “first-degree murder with heinous circumstances.” In this case, it was determined that the weapons used in the commission of the homicide were the purloined implements themselves — the hand blender and the ice-cream scooper. The lower torso of the security guard, who’d pursued my father down into a subterranean parking garage, had been almost totally puréed, the upper torso rendered into almost a hundred neat balls.) Unbeknownst to me, Dad had an extremely rare hypersensitivity to minute levels of gamma radiation. An eminent astrohygienist from Bergen County Community College testified that once a day there’s a 90-minute gamma-ray burst originating from colliding comets within the Milky Way. She was able to link each of my father’s most violent episodes (including the grisly murder of the security guard) to a corresponding gamma-ray burst. My father’s intolerance was so acute, she contended, that exposure to as little as 15 picorads of gamma radiation resulted in extreme neurological disturbances.

Unfortunately, the jury in its verdict and the judge in his sentence proved unsympathetic to this theory. In retrospect, I think that the spectacle of my father’s attorneys in their big-hair mall wigs leading witnesses through hours of arcane testimony about Gamma-Ray Sensitivity Syndrome tended to damage his cause.

My father has always been a good provider. And in terms of a work ethic, he’s been a wonderful role model. He taught me that every morning — no matter how you feel physically and no matter what mood you’re in — you have to get yourself out of bed, shower, shave, put on a dark suit, hood your face in a black ski mask, and go out into the world and make some money.

Back when I was in the fifth grade, Dad had just come off one of his best years — he’d been swindling insurance companies by faking auto accidents and claiming nonexistent “soft-tissue” injuries, and also traveling around the country, using a high-voltage taser stun gun to rob Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes winners — and we all moved to St.-Leonard-de-Noblat in the Limousin region of France. This was supposed to be a very chic place. In the late nineteenth century they’d flooded 50 acres of pasture to create a beautiful lake with three islands. So when Mom and Dad gave me some brochures and I read about the man-made lake, I thought whoa! excellent! swimming, water-skiing, fishing. But the neighborhood had really gone downhill lately. Several large ancien-régime families, all suffering from lead poisoning, had moved in recently. There were two contending explanations for their condition: one, that they’d been eating foie gras from pottery finished with lead glaze (goose liver soaks up lead like the proverbial sponge), and two (this is the one that I believed), that they suffered from congenital pica and had been nibbling away for generations at the peeling lead-based paint and plaster from their dilapidated chateaus. Whatever the cause, they exhibited all the classic symptoms: reduced IQ, impaired hearing, and trouble maintaining motor control and balance. But, worst of all, these lead-poisoned erstwhile aristocrats had developed the unfortunate custom of washing livestock, defecating, and dumping corpses in the lake. By the time we moved back to the States, the coliform bacteria count in the lake was nearly 700 times the permissible limit. (And bear in mind that the French, being far less squeamish than Americans, have much higher acceptable coliform bacteria levels than we do.)

I think that we tend to select certain emblematic images to store in our memories as visual icons representing each of the journeys and sojourns in our lives. And when I remember our year in St.-Leonard-de-Noblat, I think of the topless contessa and her boom box.

Every sunny afternoon I’d go down to the lake and watch the contessa, a voluptuous woman from one of the most severely lead-poisoned families, struggle for 45 minutes to mount her chaise longue and then endeavor spastically for another half hour to remove her bikini top. This finally accomplished, she’d pillow an ear against her huge radio, which was turned up so loud that it literally drowned out the dredging equipment that the sanitation department used to remove bodies from the turbid water.