Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“And so, eighth-grade transpires. Wracked by his unconsummated passion for Sylvia and the loss of his father, Mark is a surly, apathetic student. The only class in which he pays the slightest attention is ‘The Punic Wars,’ a seventh-period elective taught by a Ms. Hogenauer (Steven Dorff, for all intents and purposes, reprising his role as transvestite superstar Candy Darling in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol ). Hogenauer, a veteran of the downtown performance-art scene, has relocated to Maplewood after a series of disastrous marriages with Mafioso restaurateurs, and moved in with the director of a Satanic day-care center in neighboring Mil-burn, played with over-the-top lesbian-supremacist fervor by Kyra Sedgwick. This section is firmly in the To Sir with Love, Dead Poets Society, Mr. Holland’s Opus , pedagogue-as-charismatic-hero tradition with scenes like the one in which Hogenauer shimmies up the down escalator at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square on a purple-and-aquamarine ACG snowboard with a big stuffed Dumbo draped across her back, symbolically reenacting — I assume — Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants, and lines like: ‘Gosh, Ms. Hogenauer, nobody ever made the Carthaginian victory at Cannae come so alive before!’

“In all his other classes, though, Mark sulks and daydreams, filling his notebooks with drawings of grotesque heads.

“Sylvia is continually preaching this nauseating Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within —style self-empowerment, and urging him to accomplish something, anything —to actually start a project and finish it. Mark insists that he wants to write and direct a film that will do for tetherball what The Poseidon Adventure did for synchronized swimming. But, of course, he never does. He’s too busy getting fucked up with Felipe. Finally, disgusted with his inertia and excuses, Sylvia takes matters into her own hands. Through some relative’s friend of a friend, she’s able to finagle Mark a summer internship with Game Face , an inane MTV-style cable sports show whose target audience is 12-to-14-year-old boys, and which entails going to — guess where? — yes, Bougainville! — and gathering information, maybe even writing and producing a short feature about the glamorous and bewilderingly arcane world of Bougainvillean tetherball.

“The day before he leaves for the Solomon Islands, Mark makes a last-ditch plea for the ever-unattainable marathon freaky sex. ‘I may never see you again,’ he says gravely. ‘Nonsense, silly boy. It’s merely a summer internship. I’ll see you in September,’ says Sylvia, deftly parrying his grubby little hands.

“In desperation, Mark scrawls the following in the margin of Sylvia’s New York Review of Books:

“ ‘Are you a petite, buxom, free spirit with liquid-food-secreting glandular ductules and a piezoelectric ceramic-fiber fecundating cleft who’s interested in romance, egg creams, Glenfiddich, the Cirque du Soleil, ‘31 Duesenbergs, Newports, forties, blunts, GHB, khat, keepin’ it real at Rancho la Quinta, Bauhaus furniture, Janet Jackson, quiet walks in the Everglades, ceviche, and fiery curry, and who has the self-confidence to feel just as feminine and desirable in a cranial halo, nasogastric tube, and cervical collar as she would in a Hervé Leger evening gown, and who wouldn’t mind occasional binges that end with the two of us stinking-drunk, incoherent, and penniless in the offal-strewn gutter of some squalid equatorial port? Extremely attractive, slim, 5’1,” athletic, vivacious, affectionate, intelligent, down-to-earth, erudite, warm, upbeat, energetic, sincere, loyal, evolved, solvent, nurturing, 13-year-old mensch wants to come on your tits.’

“ ‘Settle down,’ chides Sylvia.

“That night, we see a close-up of Mark’s open mouth and vibrating uvula, as we hear his long onanistic howl, and then a match sound-cut to what is discernibly someone else’s open mouth, with corresponding vibrato of the uvula, as whoever it is sings ‘Aaaaahhhh-ooooo-unnnnng-ohmigod-gh-ghrrr-oh-oh-oh-like-whoa-di spela pisin savvy tok bullseet!!’ The camera pulls back to reveal the bushy-haired Melanesian megastar Offramp Tavanipupu on a video screen in a multimedia information kiosk at Bougainville International Airport.

“And at long last, we have arrived at our eponymous destination. “Bougainville … Volcanic island in the Solomon Sea … 3,880 sq. miles … Population 150,000 … First explored in 1768 by the French navigator Louis de Bougainville, namesake of the vine … Declared independence after seceding from Papua New Guinea … Major exports: copper, ivory nuts, green snails, copra (dried coconut meat), cocoa, tortoise shells, and trepang (sea cucumber) .

“All according to the info-kiosk touchscreen.

“Mark encamps in Kieta, the island’s main port, and sets out the following day in his rental Jeep with driver to interview the venerable coach of the national junior tetherball squad. Not far from his hotel, the Jeep is forced off the road by a Cherokee Chief full of Bougainville Treasury Police — a sextet of surly, Uzi-toting motherfuckers, wearing San Jose Sharks caps and chewing wads of the narcotic leaf khat. The Cherokee’s license plate number is 77 R-K5.

“I mention this only because in the very next shot of the car, the license reads 78 KxP and in the next, 79 R-KKt5, and then successively 80 R-KB5, 81 RxP and 82 R-K7. There was something so familiar to me about this alphanumerical series, yet, as I watched the scene, I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Then it hit me … Of course! These were Alexander Alekhine’s final six moves (playing the white pieces) in the 34th and conclusive game of his world championship chess match against José Raul Capablanca, which took place in Buenos Aires in 1927.

“And at about the same time that I realized the source of the license-plate sequences, there were corresponding murmurs of recognition throughout the theater.

“Capablanca resigned on his eighty-second move, giving six wins and the championship to Alekhine, who was renowned for the brilliance, viciousness, and zeal of his attacks on the board, and for the heavy drinking, sadism, and phallo-narcissism that characterized his social behavior.

“Clearly, a correspondence is being drawn here between Alekhine’s psychopathology and Mark’s burgeoning emotional disorders. I found the use of chess notation on license plates to elucidate the psychology of this movie’s 13-year-old protagonist to be an especially effective device and not at all cryptic.

“One of the goons casually shoots the driver in the head (ars longa, vita brevis) and then hands Mark an embossed invitation that reads:

Col. Nusrahana Vanipapobosa Alebua

requests the pleasure of

Mr. Mark Leyner’s

company at luncheon

on Tuesday, the Twenty-sixth of June

at one o’clock

The Presidential Palace

“Now, I’ve always been amazed at how long written material is kept up on the screen in theaters — whether it’s a no-smoking announcement, one of those cinema trivia quizzes, or some piece of text in the movie itself. And this particular item is no exception. I mean, c’mon, how long does it take to read those seven lines? And yet as I sat there in the theater, I could hear people all around me struggling out loud to phonetically decipher the words: ‘ree-kwests th-th-thuh ple-ah-zhoor … kumpah-nee at lun-chee-on.’ Sadly, today, even people who are capable of picking up sophisticated cultural references, such as Alekhine’s last six moves in his 1927 match with Capablanca, have terrible difficulty reading simple text. Surely this is further proof of the deteriorating literacy of our intelligentsia.

“While the invitation is on screen, we hear Wu-Tang Clan’s vertiginous remake of the old Chinese Cultural Revolution standby ‘Sailing the Ocean Depends on the Helmsman.’ Dissected and reassembled by Wu-Tang production wizard the RZA, and brought back to life like some Red Guard Frankenstein defibrillated with jumper cables, this hortatory Maoist classic never sounded better. If this deranged sonic vortex of stuttering revolutionary dogma, wafting samples, and interlacing, static-drenched beats is any indication, we can only look forward to the entire Clan or individual MCs — the Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Genius, Raekwon — deconstructing more vintage funk from the Cultural Revolution like ‘Liu Shao-chi Is a Deviationist-Clique Reactionary,’ ‘Long Live the Third Corp of the Rebel Army of the Shanghai Artisans’ Apprentices,’ and, of course, ‘Those Who Want to Damage the National Economy by Sabotaging Production, Opposing Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and by Corrupting the Revolutionary Will of the Masses with Material Interests and Letting Bourgeois Ideas Run Amok Must Be Arrested Without Delay by the Ministry for Public Safety and Severely Punished (I’m Talkin’ 2 U, Bitch).’