Very Bad Deaths Read online

  Of the twenty-three, it later turned out that seven had thought to ask her name. None had gotten even a first name out of her. By the time Wanda’s closed that night, she was known to everyone present as the Bunny.

  By lunchtime next day, every single person on the campus—male or female—was either talking or thinking about the Bunny.

  Everybody had an opinion, even if they kept it to themselves. Nobody had fact one. Attempts to elicit a useful description of her, from the almost two dozen closest witnesses, proved largely frustrating. No clear consensus could be reached on any individual feature of her face, which didn’t surprise any of the girls much. But they found it baffling that nobody who’d been with her in that humid back seat could positively state even the simplest basic parameters of her body—breast size, ass size, waist-to-hip ratio, thigh flab, quantity and placement of hair—with any degree of confidence…except for one specific body part, about which each of the twenty-three proved capable of writing sonnets. Even those who had actually had some authentic previous sexual experience (everyone claimed to) agreed hers was in a class by itself.

  One in particular, Eddie Faulkner, was such a notorious cocksman he was comfortable admitting his own unique experience—at least to us guys. “Fellas, I was so damn drunk, and tell the truth, put off a little, I went limp before I could get it in. Didn’t make the least bit of difference. I swear to God it sucked me inside—thwppp!—and wrung me out twice before I even had a chance to think of something sexy to think about. You ever want a diamond dildo, give her one made of coal.”

  “I was next-to-last man in,” Bobby Joe Innis agreed, “and even by then, she could have made the batteries fly out of a flashlight.” Suddenly his expression was strange, almost sad. “Funniest thing though. Just about the time she had me thrashing and squealing like a throat-cut dog, I happened to open my eyes and see her face, and it was like she was alone in the gymnasium, doing jumping jacks.”

  All around campus, guys met each others’ eyes, and then looked away. And then they began to talk loudly to one another. Some spoke a lot of words, and some only a few short ones. But all of them were spoken with a curled lip, and what they all boiled down to was, Eww—gross. Guys who had girlfriends said it most emphatically, especially if their girlfriend was present. But the rest of us, too, felt an odd need to reassure one another of how disgusted and repulsed we were by the Bunny’s conduct, what an incredible skanky pig we considered her to be. We made cruel and stupid jokes about her, and about the twenty-three losers who had disgraced themselves by consorting with her. God, how desperate could you be?

  And then we all made our excuses, went back to our rooms, and spent long periods of time looking at ourselves in the mirror, frowning.

  The Bunny had appeared on a Friday. Needless to say, the following night the line to get into Wanda’s Rest stretched around the building and two blocks back up the hill.

  Fistfights occurred over place in line before anyone even knew for sure she would reappear that night. When she arrived, a little after nine, three guys stepped forward simultaneously and said in chorus, “Hi, can I buy you a drink?”

  “No, but I’ll fuck you, you and you, in that order,” she said, then took her first choice by the necktie and led him back out the door to the parking lot.

  The place went nuts. Wanda had to come out from her office in back and restore order. The shotgun she held casually down at her side helped. She required a line to form, of those interested in visiting the parking lot with the Bunny, and decreed that anyone leaving the line lost his spot, and anyone cutting in was 86’d forever.

  That night the Bunny accommodated thirty-seven guys. By the third man she had dispensed with the social formality of coming back in the bar each time to get the next one. It became more like waiting in the confession line: it was your turn when the guy before you came back.

  Except that now he had a goofy grin on his face, and walked funny.

  The Bunny established two rules.

  First: no voyeurs. She kept her car parked around behind Wanda’s, and passed the word that if she ever saw so much as a single face peek around the corner, she would drive away and never return. One or two clowns naturally tried to get away with it, but found themselves significantly hampered by having the living shit kicked out of them by a vigilante squad.

  Rule two: no oral sex. In either direction. In extreme cases of wagging wand she would, reluctantly, offer limited manual assistance for as long as thirty seconds. After that, they said, you were on your own.

  It will not surprise you that no one ever admitted to impotence. But I think that was the simple truth. That is a bit hard to believe…but if anyone had failed conclusively, I think she would have kicked him out of the car well before his five minutes were up. That never happened once.

  All part of her legend.

  She did not return on Sunday night. It didn’t surprise anyone much; Wanda’s bartenders, all former professionals, had assured us that nobody could sustain that kind of pace three nights in a row. Much beer was consumed in sorrow nonetheless.

  She did not return on Monday night. Or any subsequent weeknight. By Wednesday everyone understood and reluctantly accepted that the Bunny was a strictly weekend phenomenon.

  The next Friday, the crowd around Wanda’s was so thick and intense it was difficult to see the building, and the line stretched all the way back up the hill.

  The Bunny showed up at 8:20, this time, and took on fifty-two guys. Someone worked the math, and reported she had it down to an average of five minutes a man.

  The next night, she only managed forty-six. The cops showed up at around ten, and her private negotiations with them used up a whole hour, while the men of St. William Joseph waited inside in wild impatience.

  She again failed to show on Sunday night. But there was a related incident. A lot of guys had showed up purely on the hope that she might change the pattern this week. When she didn’t show, they became surly and frustrated. So they were feeling territorial when some guys showed up from another college, ten miles away, drawn by rumor. The riot squad had to be dispatched, and the emergency room was full that night.

  Next Friday night, I found myself getting ready to take a stroll down to Wanda’s.

  It had taken me that long to fold.

  I can’t tell you how many hours I devoted to debating whether or not to bang the Bunny. And there were countless others like me in both men’s dorms. The antinomy was exquisitely agonizing for a young man.

  It will be hard for you to grasp, but our problem was not fear that she might be diseased. This was 1967. The Sexual Revolution was just dawning. None of us even knew anyone who might know someone who had ever had a venereal disease. We had certainly heard about them—and what we had heard was that they could be totally cured with a simple series of shots. That long ago, it was true. It did not bother anyone much at all that the Bunny flatly refused to let anybody use a rubber; if anything the quirk was endearing.

  The dilemma was more than just a matter of taste, too—although that too was clearly a factor.

  What it came down to for a lot of us was a question of pride. Of self respect. Of identity.

  Am I the kind of guy who would bang the Bunny? And equally important: If I am, do I want everybody to know it?

  Certainly there could be no trace of cocksman’s glory in it. Anyone with a pulse and a penis could have her. There’d been one or two candidates that many observers had expected her to reject, but she hadn’t. She didn’t require flattery, handsomeness, wit, charm, sexual expertise, or even basic hygiene. Breath was not a factor; she never kissed. Nor was performance anxiety a serious factor; by all accounts the Bunny simply did not permit failure.

  The central question was, what would a real man do? Did not a real man take advantage of every single receptive vulva he encountered? Or did he maintain some sort of minimal standards? Was some sort of chase, some symbolic conquest, some kind of surrender won, essential? Did it matter to a re
al macho stud what was going on north of the warm moist contracting tube?

  Would it not be degrading, disgusting, to wallow where so many others had wallowed? Would it not be embarrassing, shaming, to reveal yourself before the whole school as someone who accepted the description of himself as a penis with a pulse? What girl was going to go out with you, after you had publicly revealed yourself to be a rutting animal, willing to make use of any vagina with a pulse?

  In those days if you were Catholic or even ex-Catholic and wished to partake of the sexual revolution, you were required to tell yourself and any co-ed who would listen that what you wanted was not mere animal sex but making love. This was a profound, magical, deeply beautiful and spiritual thing, a deep sharing and growing-together, a natural expression of love, a…a hard stance to maintain after you’ve been seen lining up for the Bunny. A man could end up trading his total and entire prospects at a four year college for a single five-minute interlude in a ripe and humid back seat.

  And were the other girls wrong to be revolted? (As they surely and loudly were.) Was not what was being done to the Bunny a degradation of her womanhood, even if she solicited it? Was it not a kind of desecration of the whole concept of the male-female relationship, a blanket insult to women? If other girls watching took it to mean, this is what they would all like to do to us, if they could, would they be wrong?

  Finally, what of the Bunny herself? If she derived even a morsel of pleasure from what happened, and happened, and happened, in that back seat, nobody had caught her at it yet. Was there not clearly something wrong with her inside, some volcanic self hatred or corrosive self-disgust that drove her to so debase herself? And if so, was it then not dishonorable to take advantage of her affliction?

  All that on one side. And on the other side:

  …but Jesus, man, it’s a guaranteed lay!

  It was, as Bill Doane called it, a dilemma of the horns.

  5.

  Timing was important. And damned tricky.

  Ideally you wanted to be as close to the front of the line as possible. Get it over with as quickly as possible and crawl back up the hill to the dorm. Certainly it was essential to at least be in the first forty or so: to stand on public display as a lecher all night long, and then not get laid, was simply unthinkable.

  The problem was, some guys had absolutely no pride whatsoever, and would begin lining up well before the sun went down. If you wrestled your way into their midst…there you stood in broad daylight, in line for the Bunny. For hours. Being harangued and berated by flying squads of what were just then beginning to call themselves feminists.

  But if you waited for sundown and the anonymity of darkness, by then there’d already be at least two dozen guys ahead of you in line.

  So, half an hour before sunset, that third Friday night, I was in my room, checking my appearance in the mirror before departing.

  The long hippie hair that I’d spent all summer growing in the face of ferocious pressure from my parents was pulled hard back into a ponytail. The ponytail was stuffed up under a watchcap that looked nothing like my trademark Aussie bush hat. My beard had shortened by an inch, and lost its pathetic attempted sideburns. Instead of my usual brown imitation-vinyl imitation bomber’s jacket with imitation kapok falling out of the seams, I wore a big grey parka borrowed from Bill Doane, with enough furry collar to satisfy Liberace. My whole silhouette was different. I’d swapped my customary bell-bottom jeans for the pants my mother had packed for me. They had creases. And instead of Frye boots with heels that brought me up to six three, I wore loafers that changed my height, stride and style.

  I turned a few times before the mirror, in the dance of the nitwit who hopes for a glimpse of himself from behind. I added a scarf to the ensemble for flexibility, and took my glasses off and tucked them in my shirt pocket.

  Perfect. I couldn’t see the mirror. Break a leg on the way downhill.

  I put the glasses back on, and affixed clip-on sunglasses. Better.

  I wished I could detect in my innermost self even a particle of sexual arousal. Partly for reassurance, and partly for distraction from the queasy churning a few inches higher up. My cunning brain, the result of millions of years of evolution, had sampled the mixture of anticipation, fear, guilt, excitement and repulsion I was running through it, realized I would shortly need to be in peak condition to deal with this crisis, and promptly abdicated control to my gut, which sagely decided that whatever the hell was going on up there between the ears, what would best help me right now was equal measures of nausea, heartburn and gas. Bad gas. Half a joint of Panama Red had failed to quell the situation, and I needed to save the other half. For afterward.

  Enough. Time to go. If I was going. I tried to smile at myself in the mirror and failed and turned to the door and it opened and Smelly walked in and stopped in his tracks and stared at me.

  Well, we stared at each other. And that’s the weird part, because I swear from the moment he came in the room his eyes never left mine. He didn’t have any opportunity to really take in my altered appearance. And yet somehow I was sure that he knew instantly—knew—what I was planning to do. His eyes squinted, in what I took to be disapproval. For maybe ten seconds, we stood there in silence.

  Then I glanced at my watch, and he nodded and stepped away from the door, and I left.

  The direct route to Wanda’s from my dorm was to go out the front door, straight across the center of the campus commons, past the gym building, out the north gate, and then three steep blocks down Dreier Street. I slipped out the back door, planning to go out the west gate (rarely used because it didn’t go anywhere useful), and walk around most of the perimeter of the campus. Nobody would see me until I got to the top of Dreier.

  But as I was nearing the gate, a female voice I didn’t recognize said, “Russell Walker?”

  For a wild instant I fantasized that the Bunny had been unable to wait for me, and had come up the hill to get me. But even I couldn’t sustain that one for more than a microsecond. Whoever this was, she was doubtless as far from being the Bunny as she could be. And whatever she had in mind, she was a distraction I could not afford, threatening to make me late. It had taken me two weeks of rationalization to get myself this far. I knew if I didn’t go through with it tonight, I never would. Even as I turned toward her voice I was already saying, “Look, I’m sorry, but whatever it is you want to—”

  And then the breath I would have used to finish the sentence left me in a little silent huff. I stopped walking and stopped thinking about walking and stopped thinking and stared.

  The Italians are wrong. It isn’t anything at all like a thunderbolt. It’s like getting slapped in the face with pixie dust. Your cheeks tingle. Time seems to slow about ten percent. Your vision sharpens about ten percent, but your peripheral vision shrinks an equal amount. Somebody turns the treble way up, and everything takes on a slight echo that lets you know the recording devices have switched on.

  “You roommate said I could catch you here about this time tonight. My name is Susan Krause,” she said. “I’m in your Lit 205 class.”

  “No you’re not,” I heard some incredible asshole say, using my voice.

  She blinked.

  Good, contradict her. That’s endearing. “I’d know,” I insisted.

  Her face went through that little evolution where the mouth opens just slightly wider, and the eyebrows go up and down a few millimeters, and it means ah, I get it. “I just transferred in.”

  Demonstrate capacity for inferential reasoning. “Ah. You were in Cassidy’s class.”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Cassidy had been colorful even for an English teacher. Picture a Peter O’Toole built like Jimmy Cagney, gloriously pickled most of the time. About a third of his students fiercely loved him because his wildly rambling lectures taught them so many fascinating things. The other two thirds found him wildly frustrating because the things he taught them almost never had any noticeable connection to American literature
(which, after all, they were, in effect, paying him to teach them), and very often undercut their most cherished misconceptions about life.

  “I had him last year,” I said. “They treated him shitfully.” It was important to me that she know which side I was on. I knew which side she was on. I knew a lot of things about her. Already. Just from that first look.

  That October, Mr. Cassidy had totaled his beloved Triumph one night, and racked himself up so bad they said anyone sober would have surely died. And his department chairman had waited until he’d been in hospital for thirty-one days to visit him. And tell him that the fine print said a medical leave of more than thirty days without advance notification and approval was grounds for loss of tenure, and Mr. Cassidy might want to use this period of recuperation to reflect on how to make the best use of the next phase of his life.

  “Yes, they did,” she agreed fervently. As I had known she would.

  We looked at each other in silence for…how long? Five seconds? Five minutes? Even momentary conversational lulls usually make me anxious, but looking at her seemed to require my full attention and be a perfectly acceptable use of my time. It was she who finally said, “If you were on your way somewhere—”

  I tried to think where I might be going, out the west gate—but it was all residential that way, out to well past walking distance. “Just out for a walk.”

  “Oh.” She took a half step back.

  Put a stop to that. “Was there something—?”

  “Well…yes. Did you write a paper on Red Badge for Boudreau?”

  A grenade of pleasure went off in my stomach. Dr. Boudreau had not only given me an A for a recent essay on The Red Badge of Courage, but had taken steps on my behalf to have it published, in a critical journal so prestigious that contributors were paid three complimentary copies. “You heard about that?”