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 totalled 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?"
"Your roommate and I were talking about the war. Zandor, is it? He mentioned your paper. I can't believe nobody ever interpreted Red Badge as an antiwar novel before," she said.
"I can't believe anybody ever read it any other way," I admitted.
"Me either. It's so obvious. I mean, the only times the guy ever succeeds as a warrior—"
"—are the times he goes nuts, loses his humanity—"
"—loses or abandons it—"
"—right! Exactly—"
"—that scene right before the first battle, when he feels like he's in a moving box—"
"Would you like to walk with me?" I asked.
And then I'm not sure about the choreography of what happened next—who did what, who went first—but when it was over her arm was in mine and we were walking out the west gate together.
"So what was it you . . . I mean, why . . ."
"I was hoping I could ask to borrow a copy. I've only heard about your paper, and I'd like to read it for myself."
"Are you a Crane freak?"
She shook her head. "Peace freak."
"Ah. Were you there when they liberated the library?"
We basically walked and talked all night—with intervals of doing neither, sharing silent companionship beside the reservoir, and again on a hill overlooking the state highway—and it wasn't until after I'd dropped her off at her dorm and was halfway to my own, whistling, that I remembered the existence of the Bunny.
When I did, I grinned wryly. It was like remembering my boyhood intention to be a cowboy when I grew up. As far as I was concerned, the Bunny was history.
I didn't know how right I was. Until I got back to my own dorm, and found the entire building in mourning.
The Bunny had failed to show the night before. People had waited—a few were reportedly still waiting, down the hill—but there'd been no sign of her.
Nor was there any that night.
Or any subsequent night. As mysteriously as she had appeared in the first place, the Bunny had vanished for good.
What did I care? I was in love. For the first time in my life. And, I could already sense, for the last as well.