Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

You/Gianni Isotope attempt to save the likes of Dave Mustaine of Megadeth; AC/DC guitarist Angus Young; Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen; Tony Araya, the bassist from Slayer; Joe Perry of Aerosmith; Eddie Van Halen; Terence Trent D’Arby; Jon Bon Jovi; and, inexplicably, Val Kilmer. (The updated version, Gianni Isotope II: The Final Dimension , includes Pantera, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, and David Roback of Mazzy Star.)

For each rock star you rescue from the processing plant, you’re awarded 1,000 points.

The highest score I’d ever gotten was 30,000. I’m about to pluck Metallica frontman James Hetfield from the deboning machine — which would give me a record-shattering 40,000 points — when my father breaks my concentration. Hetfield’s filleted and flipped into the fry-cooker and time runs out. Game over.

“Fuck!” I mutter, flicking off the Game Boy.

I take a deep breath.

“What is it, Dad?”

“Did you bring your camera?”

“Yeah, but they won’t let me take any pictures in here.”

“That’s too bad. I thought you could get a shot of me dead on the gurney and sell it to Benetton and maybe they’d use it in an ad.”

There’s a pause.

“Are those your last words?” the warden asks.

“No, that was just an aside.”

“OK. We don’t want to start administering the drugs if you’re not finished. Unfortunately, that’s happened before.”

“You’ve killed people in the middle of their last words?”

“Well, if a person pauses for an extended period of time, we might just assume that he’s finished, and execute him. We had a guy recently who ranted for a while and then he sighed and said nothing for about a minute, so we administered the drugs. But then the next day, when we went back and read the transcript and parsed the sentence, we realized that, having finished this long string of subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases and appositives, he’d apparently just paused in anticipation of introducing the main clause. So, as it turns out, unfortunately, we did execute him in mid-sentence. In mid-ellipsis, actually. So if you could give us a general idea of what you’re going to say and about how long you think it might take …”

“You mean like an outline?”

“No, just a rough idea of where you’re going. And that’ll make it much less likely that we kill you in medias res.”

“Well, I don’t know … I was thinking of maybe starting off with some maudlin and desultory reminiscing — that should only take a couple of minutes — and then I thought I’d tell a brief impressionistic anecdote about hair, and then I figured I’d finish off with some sort of spiritual or motivational aphorism for my son. I think we’re looking at about four or five minutes, tops.”

“Excellent,” says the warden.

“It’s very nice,” says the rabbi.

“All right, let’s take it from the top,” says the executioner, gamely.

“When your mother was pregnant with you—”

“Hold it,” interrupts the executioner. “Are you referring to my mother?”

“No, I’m talking to my son.”

“Well then don’t look at me, look at him. And, Mark, while your father’s addressing his last words to you, why don’t you hold his hand?”

I make a face.

“What’s the problem?” asks the executioner. “Are you two uncomfortable touching each other? Is that an issue?”

“No,” we both say, simultaneously defensive.

“Well, then, c’mon. Mark, slide your chair up next to the gurney and hold your dad’s hand. Now, Dad, you look at Mark and talk to him.”

I pull my chair up alongside the gurney next to the IV drip stand and grasp Dad’s left hand, which is secured at the wrist with a supplementary nylon-webbed restraint with Velcro fastenings. Dad looks at me and begins again.

“When your mother was pregnant with you—”

“Much better!” the executioner says in a stage whisper.

“—I fell for this bank teller who used to keep her deposit slips in her cleavage. And I’d go down to the bank every day to watch her and it would just drive me fuckin’ nuts. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she had this whole incredibly elaborate, idiosyncratic filing system — regular savings account withdrawal and deposit slips in her cleavage, money market deposit slips under her right bra strap, IRA and Keogh deposit slips under the left bra strap, payroll checks went in the front waistband of her panties, mortgage payments back panty waistband, Christmas club deposits gartered at the thighs, etc. All I knew is that I was completely sexually obsessed with this woman. All day, all night, it’s all I’m thinking about. So I learn from a friend of a friend of a friend that this bank teller loves steak. And you know those ads in the back of The New Yorker for Omaha Steaks? Well, I start having four filet mignons packed in dry ice sent to her house every week accompanied by little romantic poems. Call me old-fashioned — but I still think there’s no better way to say ‘I want you’ to a woman than sending her meat in the mail. So one day some idiot from Omaha Steaks calls and leaves a message on the answering machine about whether I’d like to include eight free 4-ounce burgers in my next delivery and your mother plays the message, finds out about the bank teller, and the next thing you know, I’m getting a call from her psychotherapist forbidding me to send any more meat to this woman because it’s jeopardizing your mother’s mental health, and I say, ‘I’m forbidden? What is this, some kind of edict, are you issuing a fatwa?’ and he says, ‘Call it a fatwa if you wish,’ and I say, ‘Well, fuck you and fuck your fatwa.’ Meanwhile these filet mignons are starting to set me back like sixty, seventy bucks a week. So I start moonlighting at this very exclusive, very posh beauty salon uptown. Very high-profile clientele — Lainie Kazan, Kaye Ballard, Eydie Gormé, Eddie Arnold — y’know, you reach a point where you don’t even notice anymore, it’s like, ‘There’s Piper Laurie, pass the rugelach.’ Anyway, one day this woman comes in, she’s got a 4:45 P.M. appointment, her name is Meredith, and she’s missing the top half of her cranium, and her entire brain is exposed. Y’know the line from that Eurythmics song that goes I’m speaking de profundis. / This ain’t no joke. / A medium-boiled egg with the upper portion of its shell and albumen removed reveals a glaucous convexity of coagulated yolk. / Oh yeah … It hurts … Oooo, c’mon … A glaucous convexity of coagulated yolk! Well, that’s the image. It’s as if someone had taken this woman’s cranium and meticulously—”

“That’s Duran Duran,” the operations officer interjects.

“What?” says Dad, turning to the voice that comes from behind a one-way mirror separating the control module room from the execution chamber.

“I’m pretty sure that line’s from a Duran Duran song, because I remember that in the video, the guy who sucks out the yolk is Simon Le Bon.”

My father furrows his brow for a moment and then nods.

“You’re right,” he says, “you’re absolutely right. Simon Le Bon sucks out the yolk, starts choking, and then Nick Rhodes Heimlich-manuevers Le Bon, who expels the yolk which arcs through the air and settles in a corner of the sky where it begins to throb and radiate, and the video which had heretofore been sepia-toned takes on this incredibly garish, heavily impastoed Van Gogh-at-Aries coloration as they sing the refrain, Spit the sun into the sky / I’m so hard, I think I’ll die! over and over again. It’s Duran Duran. You’re absolutely right.”

He turns back toward me.

“Anyway … it’s as if someone had meticulously sawed around the circumference of this woman’s cranium at about eyebrow-and-ear level and just lifted the top right off. But the really amazing thing is that she has a full head of long brown hair growing directly out of her brain. So apparently her condition was not the result of a freak workplace accident or a sadistic experiment — which is what I’d initially assumed — but the result of a congenital defect. She was either born without enclosing cranial bones or had suffered some sort of massive fontanel drift. And, remarkably, her hair follicles are distributed in a perfectly normal pattern directly on the pia mater of her cerebral cortex. The other beauticians are too squeamish to work on her and, in fact, fled to the pedicure and waxing rooms the minute she walked through the door, so I volunteer. As soon as she’s in the chair, it’s obvious to me that she’s feeling a bit uncomfortable, so the first thing I say is, ‘Meredith, take your eyeglasses off.’