Mark Leyner: The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“She’s like, ‘Excuse me?’

“ ‘Take off your glasses.’

“She doffs the thick-lensed violet frames.

“ ‘Did anyone ever tell you how much you resemble Reba McEntire? It’s uncanny.’

“She giggles, blushing. The ice is broken. I intuit immediately that Meredith is a warm, friendly person with a wonderful, understated sexiness. We start talking about what kind of a cut she wants.

“ ‘First of all,’ she says, ‘I’m sick of always having to brush these bangs off my prefrontal lobes.’

“ ‘The bangs have to go,’ I say.

“Meredith explains that she’d like a hairstyle that doesn’t look ‘done.’ She wants to be able to just wash her hair and finger-style it, without needing a brush, because the bristles can apparently nick cerebral arteries and cause slight hemorrhaging and mild dementia. She also wants to be able to let it dry naturally — hair dryers can overheat and sometimes even boil her cerebrospinal fluid. And electric rollers and curling irons are absolutely contraindicated — they tend to induce convulsions.

“I start by trimming off all the extra hair that had been hanging down over Meredith’s shoulders and bring the length up to a point where the hair can curve gently against the sides of her neck. I want a fuller, more luxurious look to her hair, and since she’s got plenty of it, I control the volume with a graduated cut. Meredith’s hair had parted naturally between the cerebral hemispheres, along the superior sagittal sinus. I think a slight asymmetry will create a more sophisticated shape and line, so I sweep her hair over from a side part at the left temporal lobe. This is a very versatile style. It can be tied back for aerobics, worn full and smooth at the office — Meredith is a commercial real estate broker — and then swept up for evening. In other words, there are no limitations to what Meredith can do with this cut, which is exactly right considering her sports activities, her business, her charity benefits — she’s co-chairperson of the Rockland County chapter of the American Acrania and Craniectomy Society — and her busy social life. Meredith’s hair is a very dark, nondescript brown, so I suggest to her that we lighten it. She enthusiastically agrees. I start by coloring in a soft, cool blond to maximize the impact of the wet, pinkish gray tissue of her brain. Then I add a few extra highlights to play off the deep ridges and fissures that corrugate her cortex.

“Meredith is ecstatic about the make-over, but she has one lingering concern.

“ ‘I won’t need barrettes, will I? When I wear them, they put too much pressure here,’ she says, indicating the posterior perisylvian sector of her left hemisphere, ‘and it disrupts my ability to assemble phonemes into words. That can really be a problem when I’m showing property.’

“ ‘No barrettes, clips, combs, hairpins, headbands — that’s the beauty of this style. You wash it, let it dry, run your fingers through it — done. No fuss, no aphasia, no memory loss, no motor impairment. You’re ready to rock.’

“ ‘It’s just perfect!’ she says, turning her head this way and that, as she admires herself in the mirror.

“Before she leaves, we discuss which shampoos and conditioners won’t permeate the blood-brain barrier. She gives me a big kiss, a huge tip, and nearly skips out of the shop, at which point the other beauticians filter back to their stations.

“About two weeks later, I receive a note at the salon from Meredith. It says: ‘The office manager was very, very impressed — if you know what I mean! Some people took a while to notice how different I looked, but all of them love it! You’re THE BEST!’

“And so, son, the point is — 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 mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”

I’ve whipped out a pad and pen, and I’m trying to scribble this down as quickly as I can: 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 mail meat to—

And my pen runs out of ink.

“Fuck!” I squawk. “Excuse me, anybody have a pen or a pencil?”

“Here,” says the prison superintendent, reaching into his jacket pocket and handing me a syringe-shaped pen, the bottom half of which is emblazoned with the words New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton — Capital Punishment Administrative Segregation Unit , its upper half a transparent, calibrated barrel filled with a viscous glittery blue liquid that undulates back and forth as you tilt it.

“Cool pen!” I exclaim.

“Thanks,” he says. “I get them from the potassium chloride sales rep. It’s one of those ‘put your logo here’ freebies.”

I finish transcribing the maxim — but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde .

And as the superintendent and warden usher me into the witness room, I experience two serendipitous visual thrills.

First, as the warden extends a guiding hand, there’s a slight billowing of fabric at the top of her dress that gives me a sudden glimpse of the etiolated curvature of a breast and then (I catch my breath!) a sliver of a crescent whose slight variance in coloration might indicate — I suspect, I hope! — just maybe (gulp!) the very top of an areola!

(Or perhaps not. My seventh-grader brain could be creating an areola where there is none, my adolescent libido “filling in the blanks,” investing ambiguous retinal input with its own meaning. I may be processing visual stimuli with the little head instead of the big one. In fact, this could be a perfect example of an idiomatic expression that Ms. Frey, my Spanish teacher, taught us: Mirando con el bastón en ves de los bastoncillos y los conos . Seeing with the rod instead of the rods and cones. In other words, this phantom areola might simply be a cathected version of the Kanizsa triangle — a famous optical illusion in which the observer perceives a triangle even though the interconnecting lines forming a triangle are missing — that we just learned about in Mr. Edelman’s biology class. Weird …)

And then, moments later, as the warden lowers herself into one of the witness room’s orange extruded-plastic chairs: Visual Thrill #2. A taut, faintly stubbly swath (yum!) of pale and dewy armpit flesh!

I desperately need to preempt an erection. First of all, a hard-on here would be terribly inappropriate (just because I’m only in the seventh grade doesn’t mean I lack a modicum of decency), and second, it would be impossible to conceal — remember, I’m shirtless and these Versace leather pants are tight and ride really low on the hips. It might also suggest the perverse possibility that I find the imminent execution of my father sexually arousing, which would be a gross misreading. And at the very least, it might imply that I’m callous and self-absorbed. (Totally wrong. I’m empathetic and I’m sensitive, but I belong to a peer group that’s temperamentally and philosophically averse to verbalizing real feelings. [For a comprehensive discussion of this psychological paradigm, see Renata Mazur’s Fetuses with Body Hair: The Loathsome World of Pubescent Boys. ] We choose to speak a language that conveys as little information as possible. Like mites signaling each other across great distances with minuscule puffs of pheromone, we identify ourselves to each other with monosyllabic, opaque shibboleths of diffidence—“huh,” “cool,” “fucked,” “weird,” etc. This is our special language and we’re proud of it — in this way, we’re no different from the Basques or the Kurds or any other linguacentric separatist group. But don’t think that simply because we’re affectless and inarticulate, and harbor a deep distrust of romantic bromides, that we don’t have intensely passionate and turbulent inner lives.)