Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Etc.

This is like any other office—

You’re with the same group of people

Day in and day out,

You’re dealing with them in this very artificial,

So-called “professional” context,

Interacting in these habitual, stultifyingly banal

Situations, and eventually you just start wondering

Who these people really are and what they look like

When they have orgasms.

(Chorus)

And I will always love you.

Etc.

Because that’s when I think a person is

Most real, most genuine — at the moment of orgasm.

It doesn’t matter if it’s some gorgeous, flaxen-haired,

Blue-eyed, dimpled, buff, monstrously hung UPS man

Standing in my foyer sucking on a mint,

Or my Panamanian midget gynecologist with the

Black peach-fuzz mustache, gold caps, toothpick, and Velour pants — my sleazy little “Doggie Hauser” [sic]—

Or Bob Vila, Bernard Goetz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Henry Waxman, Ralph Reed, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario … I try to envision what they look like

When they come.

FLASH CUT TO

Computer-extrapolation sequence of Waxman climaxing — from the scurrilous PBS “rockumentary” Sex Lives of the Anti-Tobacco Zealots .

OVER-THE-SHOULDER SHOT of WARDEN

WARDEN

(continuing)

(Chorus)

And I will always love you.

Etc.

You see, orgasm is all about surrender—

You surrender all the pretense,

All the dissimulating,

All the vanity.

That’s the trouble with this country.

We’re a nation of poseurs.

I say: Off with the masks.

The orgasmic face is the unmasked self, the true self.

(Chorus)

And I will always love you.

Etc.

Imagine, for example, an orgasmic Mount Rushmore.

Wouldn’t that be so much more inspiring?

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt

Carved in granite coming .

Looking out from the Black Hills with these

Contorted rictuses of ecstasy on their faces,

Instead of the stolid, constipated expressions they have.

That would be a great monument.

A monument that actually said something about this country.

WARDEN stands, and extends her arms, entreating MARK to dance.

MARK demurs, tapping his temples and rolling his eyes, as if to say: thanks to the drugs and blows to the head, my equilibrium is, like, completely fucked.

WARDEN smiles at him tenderly, takes his hands in hers, and gently pulls him to his feet.

The WARDEN stands in back of MARK, her right hand raised above MARK’s head with the index finger pointed downward. MARK grasps her finger with his right hand. The WARDEN’s left hand is held forward to the left side of MARK with his left hand resting on it. MARK does a sous-sus to the fifth position on pointe, takes his right foot to retiré and executes a développé croisé devant. From this position he pushes from the WARDEN’S left hand, executes a fouetté rond de jambe en tournant, and continues turning with a series of pirouettes, still holding the WARDEN’S index finger. At the completion of the pirouettes he stops himself by quickly grasping the WARDEN’S left hand.

They gaze deeply into each other’s eyes and sing together.

WARDEN AND MARK

(in full-throated rapture)

Imagine, for example, an orgasmic Mount Rushmore.

Wouldn’t that be so much more inspiring?

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt

Carved in granite coming .

Looking out from the Black Hills with these

Contorted rictuses of ecstasy on their faces,

Instead of the stolid, constipated expressions they have.

That would be a great monument.

A monument that actually said something about this country.

(Chorus)

And I will always love you.

Etc.

MARK (voice-over)

I don’t know if I buy any of this, especially the orgasmic-rictus-as-true-self business. I mean, what makes the expression of someone coming any more genuine than the expression of someone being drawn and quartered? Or the expression of someone just sleeping and drooling.

But the Mount Rushmore idea is really cool.

Blood from gash in forehead trickles down MARK’s face and drips onto rug.

WARDEN

You could probably use a couple of stitches for that.

MARK

I’m OK. Listen, I apologize for getting so pissed off before. It’s not about you. There’s just a lot of shit going on in my head about my father, and I’m mad at myself for having waited until the last minute to do the screenplay, and now it’s too late to even plagiarize something from the library, and sometimes DMT, marijuana, white wine, Demerol, and cough syrup make me a little tense, anyway.…

WARDEN reaches behind her back, unzips her dress, and lets it fall to the floor. She steps out of her panties and stands naked in front of MARK.

MARK

Can I fuck you?

WARDEN

I’m not ready. Do you want to help get me ready?

Now the notorious and achingly beautiful CUNNILINGUS SCENE.

The scene is notorious because of its extraordinary length — over three and a half hours; the scene is extraordinarily long for several reasons.

There are a few brief intervals when it all just clicks, and the clitoral stimulation is perfect — inadvertent perhaps, but perfect — and MARK is this precocious, humming champion, and the WARDEN whimpers and yelps and nearly growls with pleasure.

But there are more frequent and more protracted periods during which MARK earnestly endeavors but, because of his relative inexperience, endeavors to no discernible effect. The WARDEN, never turning tetchy or disagreeable, maintains as positive and encouraging a tone as you could ever hope for — and this from a woman who brooks neither ineptitude nor carelessness from her subordinates. But sometimes her attention does wander.

In fact, there are stretches where, as MARK heedlessly works away, his head bobbing incessantly at her crotch, the WARDEN catches up on neglected paperwork.

During one infamous 95-minute span, amid an endless variety of loud sucking and slurping sounds, with his fingers in her vagina, and a finger in her anus, and his tongue darting and lapping everywhere at once — the clit, the labia, the perineum — in a blind, unmodulated fury of licking and trilling and swirling and churning, with frenzied, accelerating oscillations of his entire head, the WARDEN is on the phone calmly negotiating the end to a potentially deadly hostage crisis in Cell Block D.

Later, in a similar 12-minute episode, as MARK lavishes her pussy with the frenetic diligence of an insect colony servicing its queen, the WARDEN impassively eats a pretzel.

The scene’s aching beauty derives primarily from the fact that for over three and a half hours, MARK’s face never leaves the vulva of the WARDEN, no matter what she is doing. When she’s splayed across the couch, MARK ministers to her from his knees on the floor. When she’s seated at her desk working, MARK is under that desk, gripping the steel arm-supports of her chair so as not to be shaken from her pudendum as she swivels one way to attend to a stack of documents and then suddenly swivels in the opposite direction to shuffle through another. And as she grimly paces her office, this naked virago, phone to her ear, struggling to save the lives of several veteran guards being held by a gang of ax- and icepick-wielding psychopaths, MARK at first scrambles crablike between her legs, in an inverted crawl on his feet and palms, and then, finding this too ungainly, he actually dons her in-line skates so his feet can roll across the floor, an arm wrapped around each of her thighs, his mouth pinioned to her genitals.

To achieve maximum aching beauty: