Wanda's Rest had been, by all accounts, one of the best bordellos in the state of New York—a remarkable boast—when the Society of Mary of Geneva got a terrific deal on the hundred acre parcel just up the hill and built a large Catholic college on it, back in the late '40s.
Wanda was a realist, and had many powerful friends, including more than one whose collar was worn backwards. Negotiations were undertaken; conditions were sworn to; an accommodation was reached. The upstairs business was shut down forever. The bar downtown became the whole business. It was the only bar remotely within walking distance of the college, and it was agreed that no other bar would ever be granted a license near there.
The change suited nearly everybody, really. A monopoly bar just down the hill from a large college is, oddly enough, more lucrative than a good brothel, so Wanda was content. Her girls were much happier selling beer than themselves. And the powerful people who now would have to stop coming to Wanda's were, if the truth be known, getting just a bit long in the tooth to keep up a reputation in a whorehouse anyway.
By 1967, just about the only lingering clue as to the -previous nature of Wanda's Rest was that every one of Wanda's employees and staff was a hard-boiled softhearted woman in her fifties, who took drunken college boys absolutely in stride. Contrary to what a cynic might expect, not once was it ever even rumored that one of Wanda's gals had reverted to her former ways, even for a night. I'm sure it would have been hugely lucrative, and now that I'm in my fifties myself I begin to see how appealing some of us brash cute shit-faced randy boys could have been. But Wanda had given the bishop and the mayor her word, and Wanda could make a cage full of lions leave a fresh steak alone if she wanted to.
So for the hundreds of desperate lonely yearning bursting young testosterone slaves who passed through Wanda's door every Friday and Saturday night, their only faint hope of sexual relief—dream more than hope, really—was virgin Catholic girls. Classmates, who already knew exactly what jerks they were, and furthermore were being looked out for by uncannily wise barmaids and waitresses. Hope springs eternal within the human pants, of course. But I'd have to say that the underlying mood in Wanda's on any given weekend evening was a blend of manic optimism and maudlin despair, and the sexual tension was always thick enough to sink pitons into.
A lineup of the most desperate guys would hover along the bar just inside the door. (Bill Doane called the process by which this line sorted itself out "peckering order.") It was exactly like a line of taxis waiting outside the terminal door at the airport. Climb aboard, dear lady, I will be giving you a most particularly enjoyable ride. Each time a girl came in the door, whoever was first in line would leave the bar and go hit on her. "My name's Jack, and you're the prettiest girl to come through that door all night—can I buy you a drink?" Something over ninety-five percent of the time, he would be shot down, and would slink to the tail of the line, while the girl went on to join her girlfriends in the back room. Once in a long while she would nod, and they would stop briefly to collect drinks and then head for the back room together.
It could have been any one of us. A junior named Fred Speciale happened to be the guy Fate selected to be on deck at Wanda's Rest, the November night the Bunny walked in for the first time.
She was unremarkable in Fred's opinion. Average height and weight. Her body looked okay, though it was hard to be sure with a winter coat over it. Blonde hair, long and straight, caught back in a ponytail. Her face was quite nice, beautiful in a way, and missed being pretty only because of the strange expression on it. She looked like somebody brave reporting for her mammography. She stood just inside the door and scoped the room, dubiously.
As long as they weren't actively vomiting or brandishing a knife, it was all the same to Fred. Baring his teeth, hoping against hope as always, he approached her. Guys just after him on line monitored his progress with a mild professional interest. "Hi. I'm Ace Speciale, and you're the best-looking woman to come in that door all night. May I buy you a drink?"
She looked him square in the eye, unsmiling. "No," she said, in a voice that carried to the end of the bar, "but you can fuck me."
And before he knew it she was leading him by his necktie out to the parking lot, and directly into the back seat of a car, where without preamble or foreplay of any kind she pulled down both their pants and fucked him three times in a row without giving him a chance to lose his erection in between.
At some point he found himself lying on gravel with his pants down. She had pushed him off her and out of the car. He saw her get out, pull up her pants, and zip them up. "Jesus," he croaked, "that was incredible." She tossed a large sodden wad of kleenex to the ground beside him, stepped over him without a glance, and walked back into the bar on unshaky legs.
Fred gave thought to lying there until he died, but his ass was cold. He managed to climb up the open car door until he was on his feet, pulled his own pants up, and set off for Wanda's front door, tacking a little against a sudden wind. By the time he got there, the girl—it suddenly came to him that he did not have even a first name for her—was already coming back out again, leading Tommy Flaherty by his necktie this time. She ignored Fred as she passed him.
She fucked twenty-three guys that night.
At some point after the first dozen or so, old Wanda herself, a slim redhead pushing seventy, came out to talk to her. They walked off to a corner of the parking lot together and spoke in low voices for maybe five minutes. Then Wanda went back inside, and the guy whose turn it was went back inside, and the marathon resumed.
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 professsionals, 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 Joesph 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 real 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.