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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.
promotion
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
Chip was what you'd call a non-traditional student. "You look familiar to me," Chip said.
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.
Cool Guy grabbed me, bent me over the lab bench and licked the full stretch of my throat.
"'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.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
