The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (20 page)

“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.

“ ‘That summer, Lens parents take him on a vacation to Wiseguyana.

“ ‘Hundreds of years ago, Mafia turncoats—mobsters who’d “rolled over” and testified for the prosecution—were put into the federal witness protection program and exiled to an isolated region of a country on the northern coast of South America—what is today called Wiseguyana. And over the generations, as the ex-Mafiosi interbred with the indigenous population, they gradually devolved into a primitive tribe of hunter-gatherers. And although today they depend on very basic means of sustaining themselves—spears, blowguns with curare-tipped darts, and manioc cultivation—they retain a number of cultural vestiges of their forebears. They wear loincloths made from their ancestors’ $3,000 double-breasted Brioni suits, for instance. And the shaman keeps the tribe’s sacred amulets in the last surviving monogrammed sheer Gucci sock. But this culture’s fascinating lineage is most conspicuous in its speech patterns and idioms. Here’s a young hunter as he trusses a wounded tapir in the moonlit forest: “You don’t stay still, I’m gonna whack you in the fuckin’ mouth, you scumbag. I don’t need this shit. You think I enjoy this? I could be at the track or with some broad, but no, I’m here so you can break my fuckin’ balls? You piece of shit, nocturnal, ungulate cocksucker.” Here’s the tribal headman, a wizened elder in feather headdress and ornamental earsticks, pacing in front of his palm-thatch clubhouse, concerned about the outcome of the tapir hunt: “I send this bum out for tapir … this Johnny
Butterass, Johnny Blowjob, whatever the fuck his name is. Where the hell is he? I’m like a fish in the desert here, for Christsake! I gotta read the
New York Post
to find out how he fuckin’ made out? I hate this
[inaudible]
with a fucking passion!”

“ ‘After two weeks of boogie-boarding, snorkeling, golf, and sight-seeing in Wiseguyana, the Gutmans are in a taxi on the highway en route to the airport and little sunburnt Len sees a billboard at the Convention Center that reads: “Due to Plane Crash, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, Patsy Cline, Jim Croce, and Lynyrd Skynyrd Will Not Be Appearing Tonight.” Now, not only should this be an extremely compelling scene because of how powerfully it will resonate in the audience’s collective memory of that ill-fated flight, which was piloted by 7-year-old novice aviatrix Jessica Dubrofif, but in terms of the plot, this is
the
pivotal scene in the entire movie. This is the precise moment at which young Leonard Gutman realizes his almost mystical affinity for signage copywriting. From that moment on, Gutman studies and rewrites every single marquee, billboard, and sign he encounters.

“ ‘And, basically, the rest of the movie deals with his teenage years, which are uneventful except for an uncharacteristic, albeit tragic, indiscretion; his long, illustrious career and unparalleled accomplishments and awards; and finally his controversial death at the hands of New Jersey cardiologist and Tae Kwon Do black belt Dr. Richard Cuozzo.

“ ‘Obviously I see you, Colonel, playing Gutman, but I also thought—and tell me if this sounds crazy—that maybe you could play Cuozzo, too—y’know, do a sort of Alec Guinness in
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, multiple-role, tour-de-force thing.

“ ‘So, what do you think?’

“Alebua grins broadly.

“ ‘I think it could be huge,’ he says, greenlighting the project on the spot.

“But Mark is desperately worried, of course, that he won’t be able to actually write the screenplay.”

“One day in his trailer on the lot, he meets Polo.

“Polo—who’s come in to interview for a position as a dialogue writer—is a completely hairless, chain-smoking Bonobo chimpanzee. Shipped, as an infant, from a research facility in Kinshasa, Congo, to a biomedical laboratory in Bougainville, where he spent much of his adult life, Polo is cross-hatched with vivisection scars, his health ravaged by pharmaceutical experimentation. But he’s been taught a vast and erudite vocabulary of sign language by the researchers who abandoned him when they fled Bougainville’s civil war. Melancholic, physically decrepit, squinting through the smoke of a ubiquitous cigarette, Polo is a sort of simian Dennis Potter.

“With Mark serving primarily as Polo’s amanuensis and occasional junior writing partner, they complete the script for
Gutman
in less than a week. This becomes the first of scores of movies that they write, direct, and produce for the Colonel. (These are perhaps less ‘movies’ than the ultimate product inserts—Alebua being the product, of course.) It’s common for security guards, passing by Mark’s trailer late at night, to see through the window the glowing ember of Polo’s cigarette tracing irregular shapes in the darkness as he signs, with Mark struggling to keep pace with his shorthand. The studio becomes a huge, thriving enterprise, employing the finest actors, actresses, Stuntmen, cinematographers, choreographers, grips, gaffers, and best boys in Melanesia.

“In addition to their working partnership, Polo and Mark develop a close personal relationship. Polo exhibits a keen sensitivity to Mark’s conflicted feelings about his missing, NJSDE-releasee father. Grateful for the empathic companionship, Mark keeps a Louis XIV porcelain candy box (with zaftig shepherdesses cavorting
on the lids) continuously stocked with panda nuts, sugarcane, and sun-dried termites for his dissipated, four-foot confidant/mentor, and makes sure that he has the latest downloaded issues of German and Turkish pornography specializing in explicit photos of estrous female Bonobos.

“In addition to screenplays, Polo ‘writes’ novels. Same modus operandi: Polo signs, Mark takes dictation, offering the odd emendation and bon mot. Polo has an astonishing capacity to write proficiently in
any
style—techno-suspense, New Age inspirational, Sadean transgression, high lyricism, faux-naif ebonic, slacker confessional, magic realism, cut-up, avant pop, trailer-park minimalism, neo-gothic southern, you name it. And his novelistic output is prolific—some sixteen novels so far, ranging in length from several hundred pages to over a thousand.

“One afternoon, Polo and Mark decide to fabricate noms de plume for their novels by making anagrams out of the surnames of Bougainvillean tetherball players. Determining it wise to avoid the better-known players like Offramp Tavanipupu, Wuwu-Bulolo Puliyasi, and Onguglo To’uluwa, they select the last names of minor-league players who appear in the back-page box scores of that day’s sports section: Mafuta Mel’Chachanibo, Yamabola Trantando, Udang Gascand-Pupulolo, Waso Libré-El’Fennjé, Moses Nirrshinca’olo, Paza Christifebro, Ushaga Eresed-Yeffé’Jingu, Hazu Tonnra-N’JenFhaza, Bonabuzo Tsirinamma, Ng’ombé Tandizüjo, Elijah Tetsi-Lélé’Bona, Sr., Mühür Nampinsomso, Xavier Tergheepo, Ali Falla’d-Certdevi-Waso, Ozzy Emshamo, and Satmak L. L.’Herbé-Tetziwuza.

“This is an extremely long scene, during which a coffee-guzzling, Liquid Paper-huffing Polo and Mark endeavor long into the night, endlessly rearranging and re-rearranging letters in order to anagrammatize the players’ surnames into appropriately authorial-sounding
pseudonyms. By early morning, Mel’Chachanibo has been transposed into ‘Michael Chabon.’ Tranttando has eventually been worked into ‘Donna Tartt.’ Gascand-Pupulolo is anagrammatically reshuffled into ‘Douglas Coupland.’ Libré-El’Fennjé becomes ‘Jennifer Belle.’ Nirrshinca’olo becomes ‘Colin Harrison.’ Christifebro—‘Tibor Fischer.’ Eresed-Yeffé’Jingu—‘Jeffrey Eugenides.’ Tonnra-N’JenFhaza—‘Jonathan Franzen.’ Tsirinamma—‘Martin Amis.’ Tandizüjo—‘Junot Díaz.’ Tetsi-Lélé’Bona Sr.—‘Bret Easton Ellis.’ Nampinsomso—‘Mona Simpson.’ And Tergheepo—‘Peter Hoeg.’ Some of the concocted pen names go through scores of iterations before a suitably literary sounding version is achieved. Falla’d-Certdevi-Waso provisionally becomes ‘Darlesca “Lew” D’Fatvio’ before ‘David Foster Wallace’ is deemed more urbane. Emshamo is ‘Amos Hem’ before one last reshuffling into ‘A. M. Homes.’ And Mark and Polo almost settle on ‘Walter Huzzbeitle’ as the final anagrammatical product of L. L.’Herbé-Tetziwuza, before several more reconfigurations yield ‘Elizabeth Wurtzel.’

“It’s also tricky deciding which pen name to assign to which novel. The novel about the yuppie serial murderer is originally attributed to ‘Mona Simpson,’ the novel about the terrible father who owns a biotechnology company to ‘Bret Easton Ellis,’ the one about the middle-class, 19-year-old drama student who moonlights as a $1,000-a-night prostitute to ‘David Foster Wallace,’ and the hefty opus about the tennis academy and 12-step programs to ‘Jennifer Belle,’ before Mark and Polo decide that these are not felicitous pairings.

“Some reviewers have remarked that the pseudonymous anagrams constitute
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
’s major artistic achievement. Snideness aside, they
are
impressive. After seeing the movie, I spent three days checking the noms de plume to confirm that they transpose back into the Bougainvillean surnames. They do.

“I’ve previously discussed how the phenomenon of
the male-adolescent-sequestered-in-his-bedroom is fundamental to this movie. Surely, anagrammatizing the names of tetherball stars is the obsessive activity par excellence of the druggy 13-year-old ensconced in his lair.

“Mark considers these novels to be the best collaborative work he’s done since the paper on fraternity-hazing deaths at the Fashion Institute of Technology that he wrote with his dad.

“And he sends the completed manuscripts—now attributed to the fabricated noms de plume—to various agents and publishers in New York.

“Meanwhile, Mark begins dating Lehrerasha. And they become the toast of the Bougainville
beau monde
, fawned upon by the supercilious sommeliers at La Petite Sangsue, club-hopping through the shantytowns of Kieta, necking in the backseat of her Toyota Land Cruiser as drovers pass by, switching the rumps of their oxen—Lehrerasha naked except for her vibrating beeper and the Breathe Right nasal strip across the bridge of her nose. They party with the tetherball superstars, and become, along with Offramp Tavanipupu, official co-cynosures of Kieta’s cultural vanguard. And during the Ma Ling Masters, they swig Cherry fX Bomb in the luxurious sky-box used by Oshimitsu Polymer execs. Oshimitsu Polymers is, of course, the world’s leading manufacturer of tetherball tether.

“Thanks to Mark and Polo’s success in marketing Colonel Alebua and his regime, dictators, warlords, corrupt corporations, and criminal cartels from around the world seek out their services and become clients. Tyrants, despots, and terrorists of every nationality, ethnicity, and ideology; Cosa Nostra families, yakuza clans, and Hong Kong triads; chemical and metallurgy companies that pump dioxins and PCBs into reservoirs and aquifers; rapacious mining and logging conglomerates; makers of tainted baby formula, botulism-contaminated
vichyssoise, and mercury-laden facial creams; fast-food chains whose burgers are saturated with
E. coli
, shigella, and necrotizing fascitis Strep A; athletes who habitually molest, defenestrate, crucify, and then bury alive their wives, children, and in-laws; etc.

“They post $677.3 million in billing for the first quarter.

“It’s
Heart of Darkness
, and Mark is Kurtz.

“But it’s Kurtz as Maurice Saatchi.

“They expand into a full-service agency. Their ‘manpower’ agency, which has been providing temps for governments that need, say, an agent provocateur for entrapping members of an opposition group, evolves into a full-fledged talent-management company with a comprehensive roster of mellifluous BBC-accented foreign ministers, venal judges for annulling presidential and parliamentary elections, and pliant figureheads for giving your regime that imprimatur of legitimacy.

“They even take Colonel Alebua and members of his junta to the mountains one weekend for a synergy- and trust-building training retreat.

“The evolution of The Bougainville Group into the world’s largest mercenary advertising and infotainment company is more than the world’s traditional ad agencies can stomach. They begin to fund a coalition of armed groups dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Alebua government.

“The first to open their coffers to the insurgents are McCann-Erickson, J. Walter Thompson, and BBDO Worldwide, jointly underwriting a full armored division, a dozen helicopter gunships, a Medevac, a twin-rotor Chinook, and an amphibious assault ship.

“At Young and Rubicam, a volunteer brigade, made up of passionately committed mail-room clerks and entry-level copywriters, sets out for the Solomon Islands. The war in Bougainville is, for these brave and idealistic Y&R volunteers, what the Spanish Civil War was to the
generation of Hemingway—the defining moral conflict of its era, a conflict for which many give their lives.

“Each week another agency aligns itself with the rebels: Ogilvy & Mather, Grey, Chiat/Day, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Ammirati Puris Lintas, Wells Rich Greene BDDP, Leo Burnett, DDB Needham, Foote, Cone & Belding in Chicago, Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis.

“Weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, logistical support, and advisory personnel pour in; sophisticated real-time satellite surveillance is provided.

“The tide of the civil war begins to turn. The Alebua regime begins to crumble.

“The rebels gain control of the outlying provinces and advance on Kieta. In broadcasts from their clandestine radio station (a ‘lite’ rebel station—more music, less inflammatory rhetoric) and in a front-page editorial in
Advertising Age
, it’s announced that, if they aren’t captured, Alebua and Mark will be tried
and executed
in absentia.

“With the rebel troops some 48 hours from the capital, Colonel Alebua prepares to flee the country.

“Lehrerasha asks Mark to come live with her in Europe.

“ ‘Daddy has a chateau in Luxembourg. We could be so happy.’

“ ‘I can’t,’ Mark says. ‘Look, Lehrerasha, it’s been a great summer, but … I’ve gotta get back to Maplewood. School starts soon … and, y’know, I miss my friends—Sylvia and Felipe and everybody.’

“He drapes a lei of frangipani blossoms around her neck and kisses her.

“ ‘Good-bye … it’s been, like, really, really great.
Really!’
he calls to her, as she sashays across the tarmac and boards the cargo transport plane that her father’s bodyguards are loading with $66 million in gold bullion and the original prints of all their movies.

“Polo is presumably dead. He’s reportedly last seen
knuckle-walking disorientedly through a mine field and into a free-fire zone.

“Mark manages to escape, hidden on a fishing trawler, the night before the country falls to the rebels. As the vessel pulls past boats swaying languidly in the soporific heat, and the menacing, blackish-purple palisades and jagged promontories of Bougainville recede in the distance, the rhythmic thud of mortar rounds is a lulling accompaniment to the khat he chews.

“(The fact that khat, a shrub cultivated exclusively in the Middle East and Africa, appears to be widely available in Bougainville, is one of several ethnobotanical incongruities in this movie. This is either a deliberate allusion to an active, multilateral global marketplace in indigenous intoxicants or simply the result of lazy fact-checking. I suspect the latter.)

“Arriving in the United States, Mark makes the appalling discovery that impostors are claiming to be the fabricated authors of all the novels that he and Polo wrote. Who these people are, Mark has no idea—out-of-work actors, streetwise professional con artists, perhaps even disillusioned and cynical young editors or agents. Whoever they are, they have successfully assumed the identities of each and every anagrammatized nom de plume, and secured fat six-figure book deals. The novels are published with intense media buzz, and launched with glittering, bibulous parties at the trendiest boîtes in Manhattan. The sham ‘novelists’ are feted and photographed by the intellectual, fashion and entertainment magazines, rocketed off on whirlwind 15-city national book tours, interviewed on
Fresh Air, The Today Show, Charlie Rose
, etc. A number of the books have become huge best-sellers, several even hit movies.

“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!!!!’