During my junior year at Louisiana State University, I vacillated between majoring in English, so I could be a fever-dreaming, impoverished poet, and microbiology, so I could be a focused, serious doctor, like the ones on TV.
"That's all well and good," I would say to my egotistical blowhard colleagues. "But there's a life at stake here!"
Spring semester found me back on the pre-med track. Dr. Rheinhardt taught the only section of pathology, a required course. Everyone spoke of him in frightened tones. He scheduled class for the prime collegiate hangover hour of 7:30 a.m.
I'd sit there with a $1.99 Student Union early-bird breakfast special in my belly: two eggs over easy, grits, toast and a large Diet Coke, sliding around on top of last night's gallon of nickel beer. I was transported by Dr. Rheinhardt's monologues on death and disease. The only thing he paused to do was ridicule the Bow Heads, sorority girls who sat in an overachieving line across the front row. Scarlett Kerrit was the head Bow Head, with the crispest, perkiest grosgrain bow perched above her claw bangs.
"Dr. Rheinhardt, Dr. Rheinhardt!" cawed Scarlett one morning, flapping her returned pop quiz in the air. "I don't understand why you deducted points on question three."
Dr. Rheinhardt turned around from the blackboard and removed the unlit pipe from his mouth, methodically, lovingly, lying it on the podium.
"Because, my dear," he said, "I can."
"Dr. R., don't be that way," Scarlett sugar-talked. "I believe I have a valid complaint."
Dr. Rheinhardt put his pipe back between his lips and gave it a wet, smokeless suck.
"Complaints," he said, "are never valid."
Scarlett's mouth opened and closed and opened and closed like a moray eel's.
I felt a frisson of glee. That's when I noticed Cool Guy noticing me.
I had noticed him the first day of class. I don't know why I called him Cool Guy.
Not My Type, Part 1: he had a beard.
Not My Type, Part 2: he reeked of Drakkar Noir.
Not My Type, Parts 3-12: he always sat with the Bow Heads.
"Fraternity dropout!" I'd heard Scarlett Kerrit screech at him, many times.
That he was ever in a fraternity implied passable skills in the art of date-rapery; that he dropped out and had a beard made me think he had tempered those skills with an atypically sensitive, nonconformist approach.
"No darling, you tell me how forcefully you would like to be entered against your will," I imagined him saying, then immediately tried to unimagine it.
Cool Guy smiled at me, like he was reading my mind.
Totally My Type, Parts 1 through Infinity: he carried himself with the same intellectual hauteur as my abusive ex-boyfriend, Stephen. They had both gone to the Catholic boys' school in New Orleans renowned for turning out bright, Latin-spouting young men with acute Madonna/whore complexes.
Within a month, Dr. Rheinhardt had bullied and battered almost half the students into dropping his class. Those of us brave enough to stay were condensed into new groups to perform our lab experiments. Cool Guy and I ended up in the same group with another guy named Chip.
Chip was what you'd call a non-traditional student. Forty-two years old, he'd flunked his way through every Catholic school in southeast Louisiana and had been doing time at a series of community colleges ever since.
"You look familiar to me," Chip said.
We retraced the steps of our lives, figuring out that ten years ago, he used to go out with my next-door neighbor's daughter.
"I must've seen you one night," I said, "when you came to pick Sandy up for a date."
"We didn't really date. Mostly we just sat out in her driveway in my Firebird doing blow," Chip said. "Which reminds me, I can get government-grade ecstasy if you ever need some. Two dollars a hit."
I took one look at Chip's rotted lower front teeth and wrote down his phone number.
For our first experiment, we had to collect blood from a rabbit.
"'Scuse me, 'scuse me," I bellowed, elbowing my way up to the rabbit with a syringe of ketamine, an animal tranquilizer. Right away, I wanted to make it clear to Chip and Cool Guy that I was no shrinking violet. The rabbit scrambled as I shot the ketamine into its haunch. In two seconds it was lying there panting, its irises rolled up into its skull.
"Special kayyyyyyy," Chip said, giving a low whistle. "Looks pretty good to me."
The Iranian grad student supervising us gave Chip a sharp look through the eye hole in her veil. She quickly pocketed the vial of ketamine.
"Silence!" she said. "The time for the bleeding has come."
To prep the area, I used a Bic razor to shave the fur off the rabbit's ear.
"Nice shave, how much you charge?" Cool Guy said, coming up with a twenty-five-gauge needle, its diameter nearly the same as a drinking straw's. His arm brushed against my chest as he reached out to put a hand on the rabbit's leg. "Take it easy, Cottontail."
My hands were trembling. The rabbit's skin became transparent, and I could see the pulsing network of veins and arteries inside its body, pumping and bulging with sweet, hot red liquid.
Cool Guy stuck the needle into the rabbit's ear vein the way a lady slips her outstretched leg into a stocking, decanting enough blood to fill two shot glasses.
My ears began to ring and my upper lip felt clammy. I clung to the edge of the gurney, willing myself not to pass out. I'm pretty macho that way.
We added some chemicals to the blood. It would take a couple hours to read the results. Chip, Cool Guy and I decided to pass the time over at The Library, a bar next to campus. Their slogan was, When your mama asks where you been, tell her you was at The Library!
Within an hour we had drunk five pitchers of Abita Turbodog ale.
"So, it just makes you wonder," Chip said, concluding a long, rambling gripe about his job at the vet school's crematorium. "Am I like, the Hitler of cats?"
Cool Guy and I were too busy making out on the banquette to answer. Out of politeness, I opened one eye. Chip sat across from us, his beer-glazed expression melancholy in the light from a neon sign.
"It's gettin' late," he sighed, after watching us for ten more minutes. "Y'all mind finishing up back at the lab? I gotta go give my mom her interferon shot."
Upon our bleary return to the lab, Cool Guy and I stumbled smack into Scarlett Kerrit. A hardy Bow Head, she had weathered Dr. Rheinhardt's withering put-downs and stayed in the class.
"Y'all smell lahk a beer gahden!" she said to Cool Guy, slapping his arm.
"What?" Cool Guy said.
"It'sh a very old-fashioned shaying," I said, pulling test tubes of spun blood out of the centrifuge.
"I can't believe y'all!' Scarlett went on, still addressing only Cool Guy. "Y'all're all . . . drawnk!"
"Duh," Cool Guy said, putting a rack of dirty beakers in the autoclave. He grabbed me, bent me over the lab bench and licked the full stretch of my throat.
Eat shit, Scarlett!
Cool Guy and I left the lab, heading straight to his place, a cute little one-bedroom cottage. Its dominant decorative feature was a twenty-foot albino python coiled inside a cage the size of a British telephone booth. He put on the twelve-inch extended version of Bob Marley's "Exodus."
"Fire this up for me, will ya?" Cool Guy said, packing marijuana into one end of an elaborate network of glass tubing and Pyrex vessels.
"So this is where all our lab equipment went," I said, trying to focus my eyes in the room's only light source, a flashing traffic signal.
"I carved this part myself out of an old toy boat from my childhood," Cool Guy said, wrapping his lips around a wooden mouthpiece five feet away.
As I lit the pot, he sucked the smoke through the series of tubes and flasks.
"Thanks, babe," he grinned, reclining into a mattress leaning against the wall, the only furniture in the room.
"Why do you hang out with Scarlett and them?" I asked.
"I don't hang out with them. I just sat there on the first day of class so I kept sitting there," Cool Guy said. "See that field out back? Ag-school pasture. Tomorrow morning we can go pick psilocybin mushrooms right off the cow patties. Trip our balls off all weekend long."
"I'll save you some money on pot because I don't smoke," I said, my voice sounding like a schoolmarm's.
"What?!" Cool Guy said.
"It doesn't get me high," I said. "So I don't bother."
In truth, it rendered me less articulate than I liked to fancy myself.
"Trust me, this'll get you high," Cool Guy assured me, leading me over to the wooden mouthpiece.
The next thing I knew it was morning, or almost. Somewhere, a foreign-sounding doorbell was ringing.
I sat upright. I was in a strange bed, between unfamiliar, hunter-green sheets. The doorbell rang. And rang. And rang. The doorbell sounded foreign because it was the opening notes of "La Cucaracha."
In the dawn's early light I could make out Cool Guy next to me, snoring heavily. Oh, right. Him. I looked closer. His beard had crumbs in it.
After a few minutes, the doorbell stopped ringing. An insistent rapping began on the small window above our heads. The rapping stopped, and seconds later, the doorbell started up again. Then, more rappity-tap-tap-TAP-RAP-RAP-RAP-SLAP-bedippy-DAP on the window.
Finally, Cool Guy stirred.
"Shit," he mumbled, rolling over.
"What's going on?" I whispered.
"Probably just my old girlfriend," he said.
He seemed content to ignore what now sounded like pounding on every window and door of the apartment. A hysterical voice seeped in through the walls.
"Matt! Matty! Matthew!" it mewled.
"Who's Matty?" I whispered.
Cool Guy looked at me, disgusted.
"That's not funny," he said.
You're telling me, I thought.
"Let me in, Matty," whined the voice. "I know you're in there!"
The banging, now back at the front door, crescendoed in a shattering crash.
"Fuck!" Cool Guy yelled, leaping out of bed.
Something told me it was best to stay put.
"What are you, crazy?" his voice came from the living room. "You broke the fuckin' window!"
"Is she in there? Lemme see 'er!"
"No! Gina — don't!"
"I'maw fight her!"
Thumping and dragging noises came from the living room. I looked around for a weapon. That four-foot-bong in the corner would do nicely.
"I just wanna talk to her, Matthew."
"No — stop it, Gina! I broke up with you, remember?"
The bile of superiority rose thick in my throat.
"Matthew, you love me," Gina sobbed. "I love you, Matty. I know what you need. Matt. I love you."
Matty and Gina. Gina 'n' Matt. Togethuh Forevah. The sobs died down to whimpers, then rustling, like they were fighting over a bag of potato chips. My stomach growled. I wondered what the albino python thought of all this.
"Enough," Cool Guy said, sounding tired. "Gina, stop."
"No, honey. I'm gonna show you how much I love you."
"Don't do this, Gina," he said. "Put your shirt back on."
"Kiss me, Matty. Please. Just kiss me."
Yes, they were definitely sick and deserved only each other. Still, I jealously strained to hear any slurping noises. I mean, he better not be all kissing her and shit.
I couldn't hear anything. Drowning out all noise from the living room was a catchy, fingerpickin' lick that began playing in my head.
Dare-dare-dare-delare
dare-dare-dare-dare-dare
It was the guitar intro to the Allman Brothers' song "One Way Out," the song about being trapped upstairs in some chick's bedroom when her man comes in the door downstairs.
Ain't but one way out baby, and Lord I just can't go out the door.
My life was now officially a ten on the Southern-Fried-Boogie-Rock Scale.
In the song, there's only one way out: the window. Not such a bad idea. I kneeled on the bed and moved the towel that hung like a curtain over the window.
Alas, I couldn't escape through the window like Gregg Allman. The pane didn't actually open. Furthermore, I could now see this was no cute cottage — it was one of those fake houses that was really a TRAILER!
I ripped the towel down off its staples and wrapped it around my fist, intending to punch out the glass.
I froze, picturing myself standing outside in the Ag-school pasture, surrounded by cowshit sundaes topped with cherry-colored psychedelic mushrooms. Naked.
Where wuz my clothes at?
Had I actually thought that, in that accent? This whole situation reeked like a stained rag hanging out of the gas tank of a rusty old Chevy truck, and nobody stunk worse than me. I.
"Dammit, Gina!" Cool Guy roared.
The music in my head stopped like someone had yanked the needle off a record.
"You know I never liked your striptease act," Cool Guy continued. His mouth sounded full. "I hate you, Gina. Get out. Now. Leave."
A trail of sniffled, impotent threats ended with the soft slam of the front door.
Cool Guy came back into the bedroom. I pretended to be asleep. He got back in bed, still nude, and spooned up against me. His beard grazed my neck, sending a chill down my spine. He started rubbing in that insistent way that heterosexual women all over the world have known at some point or another. He rubbed and rubbed, sawing away at my butt cheeks. I pushed out my behind in a fake-sleepy"knock it off" gesture, which he completely misread.
"Ohhhhhhhh," he said, his voice quavering like an old gold prospector's. "Ya wan' me t'stick it in yer asshole, babe?"
If someone's body could fill up with vomit, it would have been mine, at that moment. I clenched my butt cheeks together and let out an embarassingly fake snore.
Fooled, Cool Guy rolled onto his back and took care of himself.
Rocked to sleep by the motion, I dozed off for real. It was a pleasant, unexamined sleep.
"Babe. Babe, wake up," Cool Guy said, rattling my shoulder. "I made you some breakfast."
Opening my eyes, I was nearly blinded by the ugliest blouse I had ever seen. It was gray with a wacky, cubist design sprinkled across it, a hideous pattern some horribly misguided person had deemed casual yet manly.
The buttons were shaped like scarab beetles.
There was also a doo-rag.
"I call it marijuana marmalade," said the lips in the middle of the beard atop the blouse below the turquoise bandanna. "I made it myself, with a gelling agent I stole from pathology lab."
There was no way out.
I took a bite. It tasted like a moldy shower curtain.
"Mmmmmm," I gagged, licking my fingers. "Dude. Nice blouse." n°
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