Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Once safely outside the television studio, Mark and Sylvia sit on the sidewalk and introduce themselves to each other. Sylvia’s new in town and, like Mark, about to start the 8th grade at Maplewood Junior High.

“When Mark asks her where she moved from, she hesitates for a long time, I mean a long time.

“So long that I actually got up, went to the men’s room, sat on the John, lit a cigarette, and wrote a poem — a poem whose premise had been in gestation for several days, but the refrain of which had actually suggested itself to me months ago as I gazed down from the Euganean Hills to the plain of Lombardy, with Venice in the distance:

The ground is blanketed with the deciduous wings of pupal cicadas.

Two or three lissome, chemically castrated perverts are always draped over the railing at the rink.

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

Heathcliffean men wearing two-toned alligator shoes, Mirabella baseball caps, and well-pressed military attire, with flutes of champagne in their prosthetic left hands, trawl the baccarat pits, whispering into the ears of scantily clad dowagers, wearing only their golden-stringed Venetian tampons.

Florid, hyperbolic allusions to vampiric sex merely elicit “been there, done that” rolls of the eyes from the dowagers as, meanwhile, miniature velociraptors run wild in and out of their profusely powdered buttocks.

“Their mannerisms are totally nha que ,” they giggle to each other, mixing California syntax with Vietnamese slang for “country folk.”

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

It’s hard to believe that someone named “Gushy” Grubenfleisch is considered by so many to be “the great genius of our time,” that cassettes of his lectures in the grand amphitheater of the Sorbonne circulate clandestinely throughout the kingdom.

We see him on television in his multicolored Coogi sweater and freshly laundered blue do-rag and are told to imagine future generations of similar “geniuses” spawned from his cryonically preserved sperm.

And yet when he opens his mouth to speak, he’s like … way-stupid, totally nha que .

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

When rats are threatened, they emit very high frequency (20,000 to 30,000 cycles per second) screams.

Emerson said in Nature: “… my head bathed by the blithe air.”

I’m somewhere in between, I guess, with my own “Stoned on GHB, soft tiny duck tongues seem to lave my saddle-scorched perineum.”

Strangely, that afternoon’s $25.95 All-You-Can-Eat Foie Gras at Lespinasse doesn’t preclude an overpowering yen, later, for an eggplant parm hero and Twizzlers.

Oh well … soon enough the acacias and Jacarandas, even the shimmering ingots stacked high, will be replaced by brambles and shriveled, bitter berries.

But for now, to the strains of a scratched, warped 45 of The Boxtops’ “Cry Like a Baby” that’s been slowed down to 3 rpm, a springboard diver— molto bèllo notwithstanding a bad-hair day — arcs slowly through the air and slices through the slime of filamentous blue-green algae that covers the surface of the pitiless canal.

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

“I submitted the poem, via E-mail, right from the stall, to Logopoeia , Francis Ford Coppola’s new poetics journal, and sat there waiting for a response. Finally I got one — a rejection, but fairly encouraging, I thought. It was from the poetry editor, Sofia Coppola, and it read: ‘We went back and forth on this one, but ultimately decided that all-you-can-eat foie gras at Lespinasse would cost more than $25.95. Please try us again.’

“When I returned to my seat, Sylvia was still staring into the middle distance, her eyes misting.

“ ‘Well, where’d you move from?’ Mark reinquires, thrumming the pavement.

“And finally she says tragically, ‘Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Nice.’ Then, brightening, she says: ‘Well, we lived most of the year in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, but we spend summers in Seaside Heights.’

“Two quibbles here.

“Her family lived on the French Riviera and summered on the Jersey shore? I don’t think so.

“Secondly, I hate to cavil about continuity, especially with a filmmaker this young and exuberant, but inside the TV studio when Mark helps Sylvia in the stampede, she’s wearing a sky-blue and black bustier, black satin pants, and a delft-blue jacket. Outside, only minutes later, she’s wearing a tailored pinstriped jacket and a leopard-patterned chiffon skirt with ruffles. Hello?

“School begins that September and the plot accelerates.

“Up to this point, Tetherballs has suffered from an unaccountable tendency to suddenly lock onto a particularly banal object — a disfigured Nerf ball, a piece of brisket on the highway, a price tag dangling from a bra entangled in a treetop and buffeted by a hurricane — and then subject it to exceedingly minute and prolonged scrutiny. We’re talking about a movie in which a peripheral character — a lovelorn quantum electrodynamics professor at nearby Seton Hall University, played by a woefully miscast Willie Nelson — paints a wall in his apartment, and we’re then treated to — I kid you not — a one-hour close-up of the paint drying. Although I appreciate the concept of rubbing an audience’s nose in its own clichés, and the witty cross-reference to the Musée des Beaux-Arts trampling scene (Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus is an illustration of the Flemish proverb ‘Not a plow stands still when a man dies’), thank God it was a flat coat and not gloss enamel, or we’d still be there.

“The junior-high milieu, though, is one in which this filmmaker obviously feels comfortable, and the story line picks up major momentum, each scene invested with kinetic vitality and propelled by split-second transitions, dizzying montages, and frenetic line readings by superenergized actors. (Not to harp on the film’s amateurish lapses, but there are times when production assistants’ hands are visible in the frame, administering methedrine suppositories to those actors and actresses whose recitations have flagged.) By the way, apparently all of Maplewood Junior High’s boys wear Versace leather motocross trousers and no shirts, and all the girls wear sepia lipstick, plaid skirts, and no shirts.

“Sylvia and Mark become inseparable, with Felipe a resigned, albeit happy-go-lucky, ‘wised-up-about-girls’ third wheel. Mark desperately wants to have marathon freaky sex with Sylvia, but Sylvia rebuffs him, arguing that it would jeopardize their friendship. She advocates a kooky regimen of abstinence and fennel. Crudely updating an exchange from Michael Curtiz’s 1945 classic Mildred Pierce , in which Joan Crawford says to Jack Carson, the horny, cynical bachelor, ‘Friendship is much more lasting than love,’ and Jack replies, ‘Yeah, but it’s not as entertaining,’ Sylvia here assures Mark that ‘Our relationship is too precious to be spoiled by a tablespoon of warm goo,’ to which Mark replies mordantly, ‘Yeah, but a tablespoon of warm goo is, like, more entertaining.’ Although Sylvia is resolute in her refusal, Mark’s efforts to undermine her resolve are indefatigable. He’s constantly moaning as if in actual physical agony, the purple head of his raging boner rakishly protruding from the waistband of his Hugo Boss boxer briefs, and he’s incessantly licking and biting and humping her, and reading her excerpts from Anka Radakovich’s old Details columns, or just turning up on her doorstep naked and hogtied, but the unflappably good-natured Sylvia’s always like ‘Tsk tsk tsk, now c’mon, settle down, settle down!’