Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“And if this isn’t dispiriting enough, all efforts to get in touch with Sylvia are futile — she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. And he realizes that he misses Lehrerasha desperately.

“Deeply depressed, he abandons Maplewood and takes a suite at the Mondrian in Los Angeles.

“It’s a Saturday night. Mark is watching a re-edited version of Gutman that’s being shown on the Sundance Channel. The first movie he and Polo wrote and directed for Colonel Alebua, this searing portrait of a tortured signage genius has been turned into a mawkish musical starring Tony Danza and Dixie Carter. He flicks off the television, disgustedly hurling the remote against the wall. He crumples onto the couch and thumbs absently through magazines fanned out on the coffee table— Buzz, Wired, Harper’s Bazaar, New York . But there, in glossy shot after glossy shot, brooding theatrically, mugging with haughty smirks and moues, are the very impersonators masquerading as ‘Jennifer Belle,’ ‘Elizabeth Wurtzel,’ ‘David Foster Wallace,’ ‘Junot Díaz,’ etc.

“It’s all too much for him to bear. First, his movies gelded. And now these phonies, these rank pretenders, defrauding him of his critical acclaim and his royalties.

“He decides to ingest a huge wad of khat he salvaged from the trawler.

“ ‘Perhaps,’ he thinks to himself, ‘I’ll sleep for a day, for two days, for a thousand days …’

“He’s just about to swallow the revolting bolus, when …

“There’s a knock on the door.

“ ‘Who’s there?’ he asks.

“There’s another diffident knock.

“Mark gets up from the sofa, walks to the door, and opens it.

“There, trembling before him, is an exhausted, gaunt, dehydrated Bonobo chimp, wearing a pair of frayed Hugo Boss boxer shorts, his hairless body splotched with impetigo and covered with ticks, an unlit cigarette in his cracked lips.

“ ‘Polo … you’re alive!’

“ ‘Got a light?’ the chimp signs feebly, whereupon he collapses across the threshold of the suite.

“After resuscitating him with food, drink, and a hot bath, Mark tearfully explains to Polo how their novels have been stolen by the pseudonym impersonators.

“ ‘We’ll never get credit for our work, Polo. It’s hopeless. It’s … just hopeless.’

“Polo slaps Mark across the face, and then slowly and emphatically signs the following words: ‘Any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can’t send meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.’

“ ‘What did you just say?’ a stunned Mark asks.

“ ‘I said, “Any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can’t send meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”

“ ‘Dad …?’ Mark asks tremulously.

“And then, in full-throated astonishment: ‘DAD!!!! DAD!!!! IT’S YOU!!!!’

“This, of course, is attended by the shrieking violins that accompany any even mildly unexpected plot contrivances in this movie.

“At the screening I attended, this scene, in which Polo is revealed to be Mark’s father, was greeted in the theater by a mixture of gasps and embarrassed laughter — some viewers seeming to experience a profoundly cathartic epiphany, others finding this latest revelation to be bathos bordering on farce.

“ ‘I did it all for you, son,’ says Polo/Dad. ‘I had to be there for you in Bougainville. Just like I was during the school year.’

“ ‘What do you mean, during the school year?’

“ ‘I was Sylvia.’

“More shrieking violins.

“And another proportional outburst of tears and titters in the audience.

“ ‘That’s why Sylvia wouldn’t ever have sex with me!’ says Mark. ‘Because …’

“ ‘Because it would have been so wrong,’ signs Polo/Dad. ‘See, I had to stay near you, son, but I also had to alter my DNA in order to elude the NJSDE boys.’

“ ‘How, though? How did you do it?’

“ ‘Chemical mutagens, irradiation, viral agents — the standard transgenic protocol. You target specific genes and then specific sites, known as codons, on a gene’s DNA sequence, and basically, you transpose the sequence. It’s like a genetic anagram. You reshuffle the code. For instance, Sylvia was homozygous for the amino acid methionine at polymorphic residue 129 of PrP …’

“Polo/Dad’s explanation of how he was able to genetically rearrange himself first into the stripper at The Carousel, then into Sylvia, and finally into a Bonobo chimpanzee runs some 90 minutes, and although personally I found it easy to follow, it’s so thoroughly larded with arcane jargon, biotech neologisms, and unexplicated acronyms as to be completely impenetrable to the average layperson.

“In the ensuing weeks, Mark nurses Polo/Dad back to health, and persuades him to allow Mark to act as his attorney in a lawsuit against the phony authors and their publishing companies.

“It’s the Trial of the Century. A legally intricate — and, from a dramatic perspective, almost unbearably intense — maelstrom of concepts and case law ranging from the Scopes Monkey Trial to the Janet Malcolm-Jeffrey Masson and Joan Collins litigations to, of course, the Milli Vanilli case.

“Chandrapal Ram — whose rendering of Mark has heretofore been almost Noh-like in its sullen laconicism and choreographic rigor — explodes here, giving one of the most uninhibited, convulsive, transformative, and courageously over-the-top performances I have ever seen.

“Stalking the courtroom shirtless and in his signature Versace leather motocross trousers, he combines not only the tenacity and snarling, ruthless brilliance of Barry Scheck and the majestic oratorical abandon and mesmerizing, free-associative whimsy of a young Muammar Qaddafi, but the taunting, gutter sexuality of a Susan Dey.

“During the climactic closing arguments, the courtroom is overflowing with spectators and press. The fake ‘Chabon,’ ‘Tartt,’ ‘Coupland,’ ‘Belle,’ ‘Ellis,’ et al., sit together in a specially reserved section of the gallery. David Levine is the courtroom sketch artist. The publishing executives and their attorneys occupy the defense table. Polo, of course, sits slumped at the plaintiff’s table.

“Mark prefaces his summation by thanking the judge (played by a somnambulant Lou Diamond Philips) for his equitable and expeditious rulings and the jury (one of whose female members wears a T-shirt throughout the trial that says ‘Men Suck’) for its patience and sacrifice.

“And he begins by rephrasing the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé’s beautiful poem ‘Brise Marine’ (Sea Breeze), which originally reads ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres’ (‘The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books’).

“ ‘Ladies and gentleman of the jury,’ he intones, ‘The flesh is sad, alas!’ And then pointing to Polo, ‘And he has writ ten all the books.’

“At first he affects a casual, amiable, at times intimate manner — seeking to connect personally with each member of the jury. He jokes about a newfound interest in petit-point embroidery. He shares odd, seemingly irrelevant bits of gee-whiz scientific trivia (‘Most things swell in the heat, right? Well, zirconium tungstate contracts when warmed!’) and then a strange anecdote about being chased through the Museum of Natural History by a girl with webbed fingers. He launches into a long, pointless digression about Seattle Supersonics point guard Gary Payton and Los Angeles Laker Nick Van Exel. And then he relates a dream he says he had the previous night (‘There were these aliens, female aliens in, like, Carmelite nun headgear and long silver Gore-Tex capes, and they had these Super Soaker water guns filled with stagnant vase water and they were forcing these real narcissistic musclemen to whack off — y’know at, like, gunpoint — and then all the female aliens turned out to be, like, all my teachers from school and stuff …’).