The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (3 page)

My father has always been a good provider. And in terms of a work ethic, he’s been a wonderful role model. He taught me that every morning—no matter how you feel physically and no matter what mood you’re in—you have to get yourself out of bed, shower, shave, put on a dark suit, hood your face in a black ski mask, and go out into the world and make some money.

Back when I was in the fifth grade, Dad had just come off one of his best years—he’d been swindling insurance companies by faking auto accidents and claiming nonexistent “soft-tissue” injuries, and also traveling around the country, using a high-voltage taser stun gun to rob Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes winners—and we all moved to St.-Leonard-de-Noblat in the Limousin region of France. This was supposed to be a very chic place. In the late nineteenth century they’d flooded 50 acres of pasture to create a beautiful lake with three islands. So when Mom and Dad gave me some brochures and I read about the man-made
lake, I thought whoa! excellent! swimming, water-skiing, fishing. But the neighborhood had really gone downhill lately. Several large ancien-régime families, all suffering from lead poisoning, had moved in recently. There were two contending explanations for their condition: one, that they’d been eating foie gras from pottery finished with lead glaze (goose liver soaks up lead like the proverbial sponge), and two (this is the one that I believed), that they suffered from congenital pica and had been nibbling away for generations at the peeling lead-based paint and plaster from their dilapidated chateaus. Whatever the cause, they exhibited all the classic symptoms: reduced IQ, impaired hearing, and trouble maintaining motor control and balance. But, worst of all, these lead-poisoned erstwhile aristocrats had developed the unfortunate custom of washing livestock, defecating, and dumping corpses in the lake. By the time we moved back to the States, the coliform bacteria count in the lake was nearly 700 times the permissible limit. (And bear in mind that the French, being far less squeamish than Americans, have much higher acceptable coliform bacteria levels than we do.)

I think that we tend to select certain emblematic images to store in our memories as visual icons representing each of the journeys and sojourns in our lives. And when I remember our year in St.-Leonard-de-Noblat, I think of the topless contessa and her boom box.

Every sunny afternoon I’d go down to the lake and watch the contessa, a voluptuous woman from one of the most severely lead-poisoned families, struggle for 45 minutes to mount her chaise longue and then endeavor spastically for another half hour to remove her bikini top. This finally accomplished, she’d pillow an
ear against her huge radio, which was turned up so loud that it literally drowned out the dredging equipment that the sanitation department used to remove bodies from the turbid water.

There I’d loiter, leering, until I’d hear my mother’s calls—her voice so shrill that it easily pierced the roar of the dredging equipment
and
the blare of the bare-breasted contessa’s ghetto blaster. I’d reluctantly trudge home to find Mom on the veranda, draining her second pitcher of kamikazes.

“Get your steno pad,” she’d bark, lighting a cigarette and singeing the ends of a platinum tress that had swung into the flame of her Zippo.

And so each afternoon my mother would dictate yet another revision of her “living will.” And although all sorts of frivolous codicils were continuously appended—often to be nullified the following day—the gist of the will remained constant: “In the event that I ever become seriously ill and my ability to communicate is impaired, please honor the following requests. No matter how onerous a financial and emotional burden I become to my family and no matter what extraordinary means are necessary, I want to be kept going. I don’t care about mental lucidity, dignity, or quality of life, I don’t care how flat my EEG is or for how long, I don’t care if I’m just half a lung and a few feet of bowel—I want to be kept alive.”

“Do you understand?” she’d snarl.

“Yes, Mom,” I’d nod.

I’d file the latest version in a strongbox in her lingerie drawer, and then scamper back to the lake, hoping that I’d hadn’t missed the departure of the contessa, a sad and beautiful spectacle. Her lead-suffused flesh luridly burnished in the gloaming, she’d
attempt to free herself from her folding chaise, which would have collapsed around her like a Venus’ flytrap enclasping some engorged and lustrous bug.

    The warden reads the death warrant. The doctor daubs my father’s limbs and chest with conductive jelly and attaches five EKG electrodes. He then gives him a pre-injection of 10 cc of antihistamine to minimize spasming.

“Do you have a final statement you wish to make?” the warden asks.

“Yes. I’d like to direct my last words to my son.

“Mark … Mark?”

“Just a sec, Dad,” I say, my head bowed, eyes glued to the Game Boy that glows in my hands. “I’m on the brink of achieving a new personal best here.”

I’m playing a game called
Gianni Isotope
. It’s pretty awesome. The ultimate object is to enable the hero, Gianni Isotope, to save as many rock stars as possible from being turned into edible breaded nuggets at a space-based processing plant in the Lwor Cluster. You earn the opportunity to attempt the Lwor rescue mission by scoring a requisite number of points on the two preceding levels.

First, before beginning play, you have to choose the outfit that Gianni Isotope wears throughout the game. I usually just put him in what I wear to junior high every day—no shirt, Versace leather pants, and Di Fabrizio boots.

In Level One, you manipulate Gianni Isotope as he flies a helicopter into a city whose skyline comprises cylindrical and rectilinear towers of deli meats and cheeses. You/Gianni have to fly
upside down and, using the whirring rotor blades of the helicopter, slice these skyscrapers of bologna, salami, ham, liverwurst, American cheese, muenster, etc., as thinly as possible. The object is to slice the city’s entire skyline down to ground level. Points are awarded based on speed and portion control. You need 5,000 points to advance.

In Level Two, Gianni Isotope works for a private investigator in Washington, D.C., who’s compiling scurrilous information about Supreme Court justices. You/Gianni can pick any of the eight optional sitting justices, or you can play the default setting—Clarence Thomas. If you choose Justice Thomas, for instance, you’re given the following five stories:

• Thomas’s fascination with breast size is well established. But he is also intrigued by more-arcane aspects of the female anatomy. His standard interview queries—proffered to job applicants when he chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—were gynecological in their scope and specificity: 1. Objectively describe your urethral meatus. 2. Is your perineum very hairy? 3. How violent are the contractions of your bulbocavernosus and ischiocavernosus muscles when you experience sexual orgasm, and how might that affect your performance at the EEOC?
  
• Thomas delights in sharing his frisky frat-house humor with fellow Supreme Court Justices. Recently, while the high court was hearing arguments about the constitutionality of a statute regulating interstate commerce, Thomas was seen scribbling a note and passing it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who read it, became slightly red in the face, and then
  shrugged back at a grinning Thomas. Sources with access to several of Ginsburg’s clerks contend that the note read: “How big was Felix’s frankfurter?”—a reference, of course, to Felix Frankfurter, the distinguished Austrian-born jurist who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and who served as an associate justice from 1939 to 1962.
  
• Thomas’s self-titillating fear of pubic hair has been immortalized in his legendary entreaty “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” Ever attentive to the requirements of politesse and protocol, Thomas can couch his scatological solecisms in more delicate terms when he deems it appropriate. At a recent Embassy Row cocktail party, Thomas was overheard asking his hostess, the patrician wife of an ambassador, “Who has put a tuft of epithelial cilia on my Chivas?”
  
• Seated in the first-class section of American Airlines Flight #3916 en route from O’Hare to Dulles, Thomas, thoroughly engrossed in Willa Cather’s
  My Antonia
  , suddenly looks up and exclaims, “Antonia’s gotta be at least a 34C”—speculating upon the bra size of the novel’s plucky protagonist.
  
• As a college undergraduate, Thomas submitted a final term paper for his American Literature of the Nineteenth Century class which was titled, “Hester Prynne, Spitter or Swallower?”
  

You/Gianni Isotope have to track down leads, interview witnesses, and unearth documents that will corroborate these anecdotes before rival investigators from the tabloids and liberal media elite do it first.

Then an indignant Justice Thomas, black judicial robes billowing in his wake, pursues Gianni Isotope through an aquatic labyrinth on jet skis.

During the labyrinth chase, Thomas’s and Gianni’s energy supply can become low. To replenish, Gianni can buy Citicorp stock from surfing Saudi princes in matching madras trunks and kaffiyehs. Justice Thomas can refuel by snaring Big Gulp Cokes from vending machines on buoys. If either character’s energy supply becomes too depleted, he is engulfed in a large cloud of greenish incandescent gas and can only jet-ski very, very slowly.

If you/Gianni Isotope are able to scoop the Fourth Estate with Supreme Court scandal, elude the avenging Justice through the aquatic labyrinth, and then, finally, negotiate a creature with the upper torso of a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and the lower torso of a coatimundi without being shredded by its claws, you advance to the ultimate level.

Welcome to the Lwor Cluster in the Goran H47 Helix.

Rock musician is the protein of choice for the typical Lwor creature. Certain parts of the musicians are considered delicacies. Their burst eardrums are eaten by Lwors like popcorn while they watch movies. Their alcohol-ravaged cirrhotic livers are especially delectable to the Lwor palate and are mashed into a paste and served on flat bread and Wheat Thins.

At a processing plant, the live musicians are emptied onto a conveyor belt that leads to a darkened room, where Lwor workers hang them upside down from U-shaped shackles on an assembly line. The rock stars are stunned with an electric shock, their throats slit by machine, and they move through boiling water to loosen their scalps and tight pants. Machines massage off the hair
and trousers, eviscerate and wash the musicians inside and out, and slice them into pieces. Seventy rock stars a minute move down the line. Nothing is wasted. Studded jewelry, latex underwear, blood, internal organs, even the decocted tattoo ink is collected and sent to a Lwor rendering plant to become ingredients in cattle feed and pet food for export to other planets. Processed rock musician is Lwor’s most lucrative commodity. They debone it, marinate it, cut it into pieces, press it into patties, roll it into nuggets, bread it, batter it, cook it, and freeze it.

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?”