Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Lehrerasha saunters in, sipping Cherry fX Bomb, a popular kava-based soft drink. She and Mark exchange smoldering looks of sexual communion, winking, pouting, and flaring their nostrils at each other with a frenetic, almost Tourette’s-like intensity that portends an imminent liaison.

“We’re never told which, if any, of Mark’s canny marketing gambits Colonel Alebua actually employs. But he obviously admires the kid’s extemporaneous verve, because he installs him in an opulent apartment of the sort reserved exclusively for junta families, plutocrats, and tetherball stars. The elegantly appointed three-bedroom duplex is in the ultra-prestigious Adam and Eve Towers, two 115-story, anthropomorphic, anatomically correct, and transparent edifices built by a fabulously wealthy and fanatically evangelical, born-again copra exporter. Realistically depicting the prelap-sarian Adam and Eve in an act of upright sexual congress, the structure’s interior architecture also maintains strict fidelity to human anatomy. Elevators travel up and down the two spinal columns. A ‘coital concourse’ connects the towers with a moving walkway and shopping arcade that run through the conjoined genitalia. Although New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp assailed the Adam and Eve Towers as ‘the single most egregious act of pornographic kitsch in the history of architecture,’ many critics judge the Towers more favorably, finding antecedents in Tantric sculpture and the celebrated erotic carvings at the 13th-century Temple of the Sun in Konarak, India. Of course, the Towers have no prurient connotation for Bougainvilleans, a simple-hearted and spiritual people, who see only a sacred and engendering act of union, and not two 1,500-foot freaks fucking the living shit out of each other in broad daylight. Mark’s condo, which is in Eve’s pancreas, puts him in giddy proximity to the tetherball superstars he’s idolized his entire life. Ataban Tokurapai lives down the hall in Eve’s spleen, and Ezikiel Takaku owns an apartment two flights down in her duodenum. Wamp Kominika lives in Adam’s left eyeball, which affords a spectacular view of downtown Kieta and the harbor. Lyndon Kakambona and Fagi Pinjinga own magnificent suites in Adam’s medulla and cerebellum. And Offramp Tavanipupu occupies a palatial, 15,000-square-foot penthouse that he created by knocking down the wall corresponding to the central sulcus between the frontal and parietal lobes, and which was recently featured in the Style section of Der Schweißblatt .

“The public-relations campaign is a stunning success. Mark’s video news releases are regularly featured on CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, FOX NEWS, etc. Efforts to ostracize Colonel Alebua and his clique from the community of nations abate, as Mark is able to reposition Alebua as an emancipator and populist, defending his fledgling nation against the imperial predations of Papua New Guinea. With the assistance of ILM, Digital Domain, Sony’s Image Works, and Pixar (which did Toy Story) , Mark shrewdly restages recent history to portray Alebua as an indispensable player on the world stage. Utilizing sophisticated computer graphics technology — akin to that used to digitally transplant Paula Abdul into a pas de deux with Gene Kelly in the Diet Coke ads and make possible the Kennedy cameo in Forrest Gump —Mark produces a fiendishly brilliant series of VNRs that not only place Colonel Alebua at the side of eminent Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein as they work together on an experimental drug, riluzole, that slows the deadly progress of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but that also show him assisting Richard Jewell in his lawsuit against NBC and anchor Tom Brokaw; as a pallbearer at Dean Martin’s funeral; carousing at Club Macanudo with New Edition members Bobby Brown and Ronnie DeVoe, Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian, and former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker; and stoning an adulterer to death with Taliban militiamen in Kabul, Afghanistan (Alebua is seen throwing three stones: the first one, delivered from a full windup, misses high; the second, a slider, is just outside; on his third rock, Alebua — from the stretch — comes with his split-fingered fastball, and nails the unregenerate fornicator flush in the forehead, receiving a standing O from the turbaned fundamentalists).

“Although the campaign succeeds in rehabilitating Alebua’s image abroad, his job ratings at home remain dismally low.

“There are daily assassination attempts on Alebua and his associates. Dissimulation, treachery, and paranoia are pervasive throughout every echelon of society. The ‘enemy’ is everywhere, and there’s no certainty whose side anyone is on at any given moment. In one particularly disturbing scene, babies with bloated bellies, covered with flies, and sprawled listlessly in the dust, suddenly produce assault weapons, leap to their feet, and rake a passing motorcade with automatic gunfire. It’s chilling to see a gaunt, glassy-eyed infant, who’s apparently starving to death, peel off its full-body latex mask to reveal a sneering, heavily muscled, 6?2?” mercenary commando.

“ ‘My people despise me,’ the subtitled colonel concedes. It appears as if he hasn’t slept for days — dark rings circle puffy, bloodshot eyes. His speech is slurred.

“ ‘Tennesseeans love Senator Fred Thompson. Why? Because, as baby-sitting adolescents, they spent thousands of hours in front of televisions watching movies in which he was an almost imperceptible presence, and he subliminally insinuated himself into their subconsciousnesses as an avuncular icon,’ continues Alebua, a perceptive student of American politics. ‘I’ve been reviewing the entire Fred Thompson oeuvre — everything from Curly Sue, Dayo , and Unholy Matrimony to Aces: Iron Eagle III —that’s why I haven’t slept for days. And I’ve come to the shattering conclusion that having failed to subliminally insinuate myself into the pubescent psyches of my people, I will never have their love.’

“ ‘Au contraire, Mein Führer,’ says Mark coyly. ‘I have an idea. I will create a retroactive canon of movies for you. You’ll star in them all. We’ll get the most beautiful women in Bougainville — those cigarette girls from the trepang hatcheries you love so much — to co-star with you. We’ll churn out product like the great studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age. And we’ll flood the video stores and fill all the time slots on the classic-movie channels, so that people will actually begin to believe that they originally saw the movies long ago, and they’ll feel this nostalgic fondness for you, and they’ll even develop false memories about where they were as children when they first saw such-and-such a film, and they’ll come to cherish you with a love as innate and unconditional, as ardent and as unfathomable, as the love they feel for their own mothers and fathers.’

“ ‘Good,’ says Alebua. ‘Pitch me some ideas tomorrow.’

“Although Mark knows that the Colonel has been delighted with his VNR work, he’s somewhat apprehensive when he arrives at the pitch meeting the following morning. There are skeletons manacled to the walls — apparently screenwriters who’ve made unsuccessful pitches to the Colonel and his Minister of Culture, a sallow, hollow-cheeked, pockmarked, acromegalic degenerate (played by the formidable Derek Jacobi) in a sleeveless flak jacket and domino mask, who spends the meeting shooting up speedballs and fondling his ‘wife,’ a cardboard cutout point-of-purchase display of the Oak Ridge Mountain Boys. (Dental records would later identify the skeletal remains as notorious Euroschlockmeister Joe D’Amato, and Americans Ethan Coen and Todd Solondz.)

“ ‘You’re on,’ says the Minister.

“ ‘OK … this is, like, completely off the top of my head, but … We do the life of Leonard Gutman, the great signage copywriter. I see a full-blown, lush, 70-millimeter artist-hero biopic — a kind of signage Lust for Life . Maybe we call it Gutman —y’know, kinda like Basquiat . We start back when he was a little boy, because the interesting thing is that Len Gutman grew up with all these legendary jazz musicians hanging around the house — all these jazz greats used to just drop in. It wasn’t unusual for Len to come down to dinner and find, like, Eddie Vinson, Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, and Jo Jones seated at the table. Or to wake up and find Ben Webster, Jimmy Heath, Roy Eldridge, Charlie Christian, Milt Jackson, and Fats Navarro in the living room, jamming late into the night. But no one could figure out why, because apparently neither Len nor his parents knew any of them. So one day Mr. and Mrs. Gutman have one of those “I thought they were your friends”—“I thought they were your friends” conversations, and Mr. Gutman asks the jazz musicians to please leave, which they do, cordially and without incident. This entire episode has absolutely no effect whatsoever on young Len, who never had and never would have the slightest interest in jazz or any other kind of music.