The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (13 page)

MARK (voice-over)

I’m not sure what it was that made me feel so comfortable discussing subjects such as art and masturbation with her. Certainly the drugs and the wine had relaxed me, made me less reserved, given me an enhanced feeling of self-assurance … but also I felt that I was getting to know her so much better now as a person. At first she was just The Imperiously Voluptuous Warden. And she was obviously, like, preternaturally brilliant—I mean, she was one of the most successful women in the entire New Jersey state penal system. So it was like being in the presence of a movie star in the sense that she initially seemed so intimidating and inaccessible. And I certainly never ever thought for a second that she’d respond positively to my notes. And when she did, I was absolutely terrified. But then she seemed so genuinely interested in my sound system and in my room … and I began to find it easier and easier to talk openly with her about almost anything.

MARK

 … but then my taste started evolving beyond mimetic art, beyond the figurative and representational, beyond
naturalistic renditions of nude women, actually beyond any biomorphic imagery at all. And I arrived at this revelatory and—to me—profound appreciation of pure abstraction. The very notion of an abstract painting done by a woman became a huge turn-on. And that’s when I started using paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, Elizabeth Murray, Jennifer Bartlett, early Jo Baer, Rebecca Purdum … 

WARDEN

It seems to me an unusually sophisticated autoerotic deployment of art for someone your age—eschewing woman-as-subject-matter for woman-as-generative-agent.

MARK

I think it was just an inevitable consequence of intellectual and psychosexual maturation. I was twelve, I was becoming very active onanistically, and I was reading all the classic criticism of Clement Greenberg and then people like Michael Fried, E. C. Goossen, Sandler, Alloway, Perreault, Barbara Rose, Lucy Lippard, and my entire notion of what constituted erotic visual content changed radically.

WARDEN

Are there certain paintings that you find particularly provocative?

MARK

Absolutely! There’s a Jo Baer painting,
Untitled (Double Bar Diptych—Green and Red)
, which is two panels with vertical black bars parallel to each side, a thin red or green line limning the inner edge, and recapitulating the shape, of each bar … There’s an Agnes Martin,
Untitled
#9, which is a composition of contrasting horizontal brick-red and sky-blue bands separated by much
narrower bands of flat white … A fleeting glimpse of either painting gives me a frightful hard-on.

WARDEN

I find it simply amazing … that you actually masturbate looking at abstract paintings.

MARK

Abstract paintings
by women
. Once I got an erection looking at a painting, and then I realized that it was a Frank Stella, and for a while I thought I might be homosexual. But it never happened again.

WARDEN

Do you have paintings up on your walls—I mean like reproductions, prints, posters?

MARK

Nuh-uh. I have one wall reserved for posters, but it’s all Bougainvillean tetherball players.

Do you follow Bougainvillean tetherball at all?

WARDEN

No.

MARK

Do you know anything about International Grand-Prix Tetherball or the Melanesian tetherball circuit?

WARDEN

No.

MARK (off-screen)

Have you ever watched a professional tetherball match on television?

WARDEN

No.

MARK

Have you ever listened to a professional tetherball match on the radio?

WARDEN

No.

MARK

Have you ever played tetherball?

WARDEN

No.

MARK

Well, you know what it is, right? There’s a ball suspended by a string—or a
tether
—from an upright pole, and the object for each player is to wrap the tether around the pole by striking the ball in the opposite direction from his opponent. See?

Now, in the United States, there’s no real organized tetherball. You find tetherball poles occasionally in schoolyards and playgrounds and at summer camps, but there aren’t any, like, pee-wee or little leagues, or high
school or college teams, or anything like that. It was only at the last Olympics that we even sent a squad, and, of course, we totally sucked. And professional tetherball doesn’t exist at all in this country.

But in Bougainville—Do you know where Bougainville is?

WARDEN

Nope.

MARK

It’s part of Papua New Guinea, but it’s one of the Solomon Islands—it’s actually the largest of the Solomon Islands.

In that whole part of the South Pacific—what’s called Melanesia, which also includes Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji—tetherball is
the
game. But
especially
in Bougainville. I mean, tetherball in Bougainville is like soccer in Italy. It’s like football in Texas.

And that’s what every kid from Bougainville wants to be when he grows up—a tetherball star.

And so, basically, Bougainvillean players completely dominate international tetherball. Just to give you an idea of how ascendant they are in this sport, of this year’s eight Grand Prix tournaments, Bougainvilleans won seven, and in the past three Summer Olympic Games since tetherball was made a medal sport, Bougainvillean competitors have captured
all
18 medals—the men’s and women’s gold, silver, and bronze in each Olympics. Then there’s the Ma Ling Master’s Tournament—Ma Ling is a Japanese canned-goods company that is very big in the Solomon Islands, your canned mackerel, canned luncheon meat, canned chicken feet, corned beef, goose meat in gravy, lichees in syrup—it’s the final tournament of the tour and it’s only open to players who’ve won a Grand Prix title, and it’s invariably got three or four Bougainvillean semifinalists and a
Bougainvillean champion. And then you’ve got this whole, more informal Melanesian winter circuit, which provides an even richer substrate of totally excellent tetherball.

WARDEN

Who are the big stars over there?

MARK

Oh man, let’s see … There’s Fagi Pinjinga, there’s Mapopoza Tonezepo … there’s Lyndon Kakambona, Wuwa-Bulolo Puliyasi, Wamp Kominika, Onguglo To’uluwa, Ezikiel Takaku, Wia Kemakeza, Ataban Tokurapai … And then of course there’s Offramp Tavanipupu—you’ve probably heard of
him
, he’s, like, the biggest tetherball star in the world, and he’s also a really big pop star in the Solomon Islands, he’s kind of the Leonard Cohen of Melanesia, I mean in addition to his tetherball—I guess you’d say he’s like the Mike Tyson/Leonard Cohen of Melanesia.

WARDEN

He actually sounds familiar. What is it—Avram Topopovuni?

MARK

Offramp Tavanipupu. I’m sure you’ve run across articles about him in magazines. About how when he was a kid, he almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning huffing fumes from barbecue propane tanks, and how he was later diagnosed with having a monoamine oxidase A deficiency—what’s called a MAOA-deficiency—which made him abnormally belligerent … 

WARDEN

What made him abnormally belligerent, the deficiency or the diagnosis?

MARK

Huh?

WARDEN

Never mind.

MARK

 … so he was always in and out of reform schools and jails. But he developed into this incredibly ferocious player. He’s probably the hardest pure hitter ever in tetherball—y’know, if you’re talking just raw pounds-per-square-inch force. And then the year after he won his first Ma Ling Masters, he was in a Koru’s Department Store, which is like the Bougainvillean equivalent of Sears, and he was buying a pair of maracas and the salesperson suggested that he purchase a service contract for the maracas, and Offramp very courteously declined—he’s normally a very soft-spoken, urbane person—but the clerk got increasingly aggressive about this service contract, and finally Offramp just lost it and bludgeoned him to death with the ceremonial war club he always carries around with him. So he had to leave the country and he missed two full seasons. And then when he came back, he was appearing on
The Patimo Nambuka Show
(which is like the
Good Morning America
of Bougainville), and an anaconda swallowed his mom in the green room.

WARDEN

It all sounds vaguely familiar.

MARK

The guy’s like an international superstar. He dated Lolita Davidovich and PJ Harvey. He dated Fusako Shigenobu, the female head of the now-inactive Middle East faction of the Japanese Red Army. He dated Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s daughters Keiko and
Sachi. And, during a period of heavy Ecstasy use, he was rumored to have been simultaneously engaged to wayward tennis phenom Jennifer Capriati
and
Yasmin Buschbacher, coxswain for Liechtenstein’s Olympic women’s quadruple sculls crew.

So then, after going out with all these glamorous starlets and celebs, he marries a member of the
bhangis
, an untouchable caste of sewer scavengers in India. The bhangis are considered the absolute lowest of the low in the caste hierarchy—they’re so ostracized that even the tanners and animal cremators won’t go near them.

It’s such
classic Offramp
—for him to have fallen in love with someone like that. He’s such a romantic, such an iconoclast. I mean, here’s Bougainville’s paramount tetherball player and pop star—unquestionably the country’s most eligible bachelor—and this is a girl ghettoized in some fetid slum colony, never went to school, completely illiterate, who’s spent her entire life helping her family eke out a living cleaning pit toilets by hand.

He meets her sightseeing during qualifying rounds for the Bhopal Open, falls in love, and asks her to marry him on the spot.

WARDEN

He sounds like a real egalitarian.

MARK

Totally. She carried a bucket of excrement on her head at the wedding!

WARDEN

That’s so cool.

MARK

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

WARDEN

So do you have posters of him up in your room?

MARK

I have a small Wuwa-Bulolo Puliyasi poster, a small Ezikiel Takaku, and two big Offramp Tavanipupus. They’re
really
cool. In one, he’s sitting on this frayed blue plastic beach chair holding his war club, and he’s just got on a pair of these dingy, like, jockey briefs, and he’s wearing eyeliner, eye shadow, and lipstick with this ratty teased hair that’s like black cotton candy, and he’s got a bone in his nose, and it was shot using this low-pressure sodium lamp so the betel-juice stains on his teeth and all the ornamental scars on his face really stand out—he’s got a radiant sun carved into one cheek and a tetherball on the other—he kind of looks like a cross between Robert Smith from The Cure and Queequeg from
Moby Dick
. And then in the other one, he’s walking along a dock in Kieta playing the guitar and he’s wearing this pair of pinstriped suit pants cut off just below the knees and he’s got his shell anklets and a lei of frangipani blossoms and his war club in this sort of rattan scabbard. I think that poster was a promotion for his album
Bikpela Numbawan
.

The man’s music is excellent. His lyrics have been subjected to more exegetical effort than the work of any other Bougainvillean songwriter. I have all his albums. I have
Bikpela Numbawan
 … Do you understand any Pidgin?

WARDEN

Nope.

MARK

Bikpela Numbawan
—that means like “Big Fella, Number One” or “Big Man, Number One.” There’s
Dispela Pisin Savvy Tok Bullseet
, which means “This Bird Knows
How to Talk Bullshit.” There’s
Mi Laik Kai-Kai Dim-Dim
, which is “I Like to Eat White Persons.”

The singer-songwriter’s current album,
Haus Pekpek Toktok Numbawan
, a two-CD set released in the U.K. as
Spent Fuel Rod in a Cooling Pond
, in which lyrics of depression, abject self-pity, misanthropy, and suicide are interwoven with wistful, elegiac, almost diaristic sketches of dreamy trysts and doomed affairs and augmented by Tavanipupu’s dissonant acoustic strumming and maudlin synth string arrangements, entered the Melanesian charts at #1 nine months ago and has remained in the top 40 ever since.

Lyrics like “When people ask you what I do, you’re like, ‘I guess he just hits tetherballs’ / And y’know, it’s funny, I’d always preferred very earnest and ingenuous girls to louche, scabrously nihilistic girls / but you changed all that / The way you just loll on the sofa like a narcoleptic Doberman when my parents come over to visit / and then later the way you snarl when you’re being fucked / Frenzied bodies, paralyzed minds / I can’t believe I never told you that the nape of your neck is redolent of the sweltering pavement / And now when people ask me what I do, I’m like, ‘I guess I just hit tetherballs,’” and “Remember that time at the Odeon when you unclasped your gold chain & crucifix, doused it in your drink and slid it, wet and cold, down the back of my pants / and I cried out ‘I adore you!’ and you put your hand over my mouth and said ‘Not so loud, there are gossip columnists from
New York
magazine here’ / and you traced the cicatrized tetherball on my cheek with your long black shellacked fingernail / and I whispered ‘I adore you … I adore you!’ succumbing completely to a dream I knew would invariably dissipate in the exigencies of our respective marriages / Oh, but I adore that dream / that dream, dream, dream, that forlorn dream” have become sing-alongs for the tens of thousands of Offramp Tavanipupu fans who pack concert halls and stadiums throughout the South Pacific.