Free The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Mark Leyner Page B

Reno, Daphne Zuniga, Helena Bonham Carter, and the like sprawled languidly across the locker-room floor as players sipped sweat from their navels with teeny coke spoons. Sports fans will not soon forget the image of a simpering Don Mattingly injecting Ritalin into his neck for the benefit of press photographers. Steinbrenner’s capricious mean streak was exacerbated by the cheese-free diet he’d been put on by his cardiologist. One minute, he seemed too spaced out to recognize anyone; the next, he was clubbing or pistol-whipping whoever was handy. Predictably, players and coaches oscillated between rhapsody and despair, their heady self-confidence undermined by an involuntary nihilism. Righetti, the crotch of his uniform distended by the heavy cock rings he now insisted on wearing when he pitched, circumambulated the mound between pitches muttering what a
New York Post
headline described as “Hermetic Incantations and Insane Glossolalia!” Righetti was ultimately placed on the disabled list and committed bySteinbrenner to the psychiatric hospital in Rodez, France, where the visionary dramatic theorist and poet Antonin Artaud had undergone sixty convulsive shock treatments. Pledging that his star pitcher would receive “the finest care money can buy,” Steinbrenner stipulated that Righetti be given
sixty-one
convulsive shock treatments—one for each of the home runs Roger Maris hit in 1961. Three weeks later, Righetti rejoined the team in Kansas City. That night, in the eleventh inning, Yankee utility infielder Hector Peña hit a mammoth 600-foot shot to dead center field. Following a protest by Royals manager Dick Howser that Peña was using an illegally doctored bat, umpires confiscated his Louisville Slugger, sawed it open, and discovered two pounds of stolen Russian plutonium. The Yankees were forced to forfeit the game and effectively dropped out of pennant contention. That off-season, in an effort to restore morale, Steinbrenner took the team on a tour of Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Although several Yankees tore anterior cruciate ligaments slipping on the raspberry-colored snail-egg pods that litter ballparks in the Mekong lowlands of southwest Laos, and during a game in the Mujahedeen Dome in Kabul, Afghanistan, rookie prospect Andre Knoblauch lost his legs when he stepped on a land mine chasing a line-drive hit into the gap in left-center, the trip was a great success. Steinbrenner was particularly impressed with the custom practiced by Japanese players of wearing glass vials of potassium cyanide on cords around their necks. And in an exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants, a Yomiuri player, caught in a run-down between second and third base, didindeed swallow his suicide capsule rather than suffer the ignominy of being tagged out. The Yankees returned to the United States, proceeding directly to Fort Lauderdale, and throughout spring training they evinced a renewed esprit de corps and seriousness of purpose. The new season began with extremely high expectations. But on opening day, several hours before game time, as starting pitcher Dave Righetti napped on a training table, his fingers interlocked behind his head, Knoblauch—in a stupid rookie prank—put a caramel apple in Righetti’s left armpit. When Righetti awoke and discovered the caramel apple stuck fast to the armpit of his pitching arm, he panicked and, seizing the wooden stick, wildly pried the agglutinated candy-coated winesap from his body, taking several layers of torn flesh with it. Righetti was rushed to a nearby hospital where surgeons performed an emergency graft using 53 infant foreskins donated by a Bronx
mohel
who was a rabid Yankee fan and had heard what happened on his car radio. Righetti returned to the stadium in time to pitch two innings of hitless relief, and remained in the bullpen for the rest of his tenure with the New York Yankees.
    Q.
Could innocent people who happen to be near me at the time of my New