This happened in Saint Louis. I was a regular at a half dozen bars. I managed to fail my language examination in German, then French, a language I had studied since seventh grade. By this time I was meeting students after class for beers. The students were always female and underage. I made $450 a month as a Teaching Assistant. Rent was $225. Jobs in my field were almost non-existent. What I did next is that I fucked one of my students, then fucked another.
The first girl was named Ann and the second one I don’t remember.
Ann was trying to stop smoking. She sang along to the radio in my rusted Triumph. It was winter and I had the top up and the heater blasting. She wore a tartan mini skirt with a kilt pin and red knee socks. The skirt rode high up her waist and she twitched and sang off key. She was drunk and I was well on the way. Her hair was dark and shiny and she wore one pink barrette, which kept slipping out of her hair.
In the classroom, she tracked my movements around the room. She always sat in the third row, just to my right. I smoked in class, which was illegal even for the Jesuits, and came to class half lit after three beers at Humphrey’s bar. Ann liked that. Word was out among the undergraduates about my teaching. Student evaluations were among the best in the department, and my classes always closed early. Ann told her parents that she was staying overnight with a friend in West County. She called her friend from the library to make sure she had cover. Then she took my hand and walked me out of the library and into my car. She was nineteen with good ID. She set the radio to a station I never used.
Somehow we found our way to Rollo, Missouri, where we hooked up with a few of her friends who attended engineering school. Ann made me stop at a grocery store in town where she bought a toothbrush and toothpaste. She told me she hated brushing her teeth with her fingers after a night out. She pulled me into a long sloppy kiss when we stalled at checkout. Her small breasts crushed into my chest. She dropped her hands and placed them into the back pockets of my Levis.
We got back in the car and drove to a dive bar. I kicked empty beer bottles aside, jumped the accelerator. Ann lit another cigarette.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were wailing “American Girl.” Her friends looked at me, hard. Ann said, “He’s a great teacher.” I wanted to smile. She looked over and said, “You’re a bad guy, you know that?”
We wound up at some guy’s house. There was a single bed and we fell into it. I pawed at her. She pushed my hands away and said “Mmmm, later, I’m sleepy.” Ann was too drunk to fuck so I watched her sleep for two hours. Her small chest rose and fell.
I lit a cigarette and checked my watch. The watch was a high school graduation present with hands that glowed in the dark. Her eyes were shuttered black buttons. She hadn’t removed her makeup or brushed her teeth. I parted her lips with my finger and ran it along her teeth until she sucked my finger. She moaned and turned over. Her pale arms sprawled out behind her like a baby seal. Her body took up little space on the bed. I felt like a giant. The kilt pin was still fastened to her pretty skirt. I peeled off her knee socks, one at a time and placed them carefully on the hardwood floor. The bed had a small patchwork quilt. I pulled the quilt up over her hips to warm her.
After the second hour I pulled the quilt off. I pushed her skirt aside and looked at her plump white thigh. She was small but finely calibrated in that way petite women have that can drive you crazy if you let it, everything made to scale but fully operational. Her thighs narrowed into runner’s calves. I kissed the back of her knees and traced her tendons with my tongue and got as far as her feet, which had red lint between the toes.
Ann got up to pee. I watched her go and then she was back. She criss-crossed her arms to remove her sweater. Off came the black bra. The palest nipples, I could barely see them. Her doll’s eyes were sightless. I liked how the black bra looked against her white skin, but then the bra was off and tossed to the floor with the socks. She left the skirt on, but reached down with two fingers and twisted her panties aside. “Have at it, teach.”
The next night I was at Tom’s Bar & Grill. Stephanie wasn’t a student. She was an event coordinator, which I had never heard of. I bought cocaine from a guy I knew at the bar and told Stephanie. She was working this event, she said, but we’d get together later. I nodded. Stephanie was tall in strappy heels with long straight hair, a blonde, and her voice was whiskey and soda. Some guy saw the way she looked at me and said “Sure, her shit don’t stink.” I turned away to the wall. Where I watched her in the big mirror Tom had mounted above the bar. The liquor bottles stood like tired soldiers. Stephanie caught me looking and smiled. Her teeth were white and even and she was tan under all that blonde. She was pretty and slightly used, and I mouthed at her into the mirror, “Sure, I’ll see you later.”
But I did the rest of my drugs and then poppers and then my nerves were jangling and time speeded up and I drank my beer and grew tired of waiting for her. Just before leaving I saw her come out of the bathroom. I told her I couldn’t wait for her anymore. She said, “You seem angry,” and I said, “No, not angry, just tired of waiting for you.” I left her there and went out to my car.
I went back a week later, and the week after that, and she wasn’t there. I asked Tom whatever happened to Stephanie? The leggy blonde with the voice? Tom looked at me (I was a regular) and said, “Stephanie? I don’t know any Stephanie, sorry.”
Ann struggled to write an analytic paper on Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. She couldn’t understand the Pakistani guy in the help room, so she climbed three flights to my dingy office. I sat with her under blinking florescent, diagramming sentences. Multiple choice threw her, too. Ditto Venn diagrams and Aristotelian logic. We took a cigarette break and walked into the weak Saint Louis sunlight down by the river. She told me she had had twelve years of Catholic school and attended mass until she was sixteen, Standing in line for communion one Sunday, she saw a girl her age wearing a T-shirt that said “I love my pussy.” Then that was that. Oh, I liked her. I did.
Somehow I held on and finished my dissertation but there were no jobs in my field and I took a job in construction. On my twenty-sixth birthday my dad handed me a yellow hard hat and a union card. It’s been years since I cracked a book. I gave Ann a “B” in my course and that’s a pity, really, because she tried so hard.
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KF: My theme this month is “wildness.” Can you talk a little about what drives your character in this story? I get the sense he’s a risk-taker, out of what? Boredom or a sort of lost-ness? What about Ann?
J de F: Not sure how necessary this little piece of fiction is, but there is maybe a wildness to the story, and certainly to this narrator. He sounds unreliable, to me. He struggles to know how or what he feels about women. He’s a little lost, sure, or maybe a lot. There’s resentment, plus self pity, but why?
I think Ann is a sympathetic figure, even to him, so maybe what drives the story is this nagging sense of regret. The narrator recalls his unlived life, the life he never got to live, as a college professor, and he was good at maybe one thing, teaching, and it’s lost to him. I recall something Vaclav Havel said years ago, when he was thrown into prison and his plays could not be performed anywhere, and as he languished in prison, a writer, a playwright, and he wondered, who was he? A playwright without an audience, what is he? A teacher without a classroom, what is he? This narrator seems unable to feel except through women, and then what he feels is self contempt. He is in a bad place. And as a writer, I guess I have always felt that a sad story, told right, can be a comfort. Even cold comfort is comfort. I recently watched the movie Melancholia, and saw that again. I welcomed the end of the world and the end to this human noise we go on making. My favorite line in the movie, as the planet Melancholia approaches earth, soon to collide with it, is one of the character saying, “Melancholia is taking our atmosphere.”
KF: Can you give us a playlist of songs to go with “Bang, Bang”?
J de F: Well, there is Cher, of course, “Bang, Bang.” You shot me down. That awful sound, bang bang. My baby shot me down. Hard to top that.
But then too, the Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up.” And of course, the song referenced in the story: Tom Petty, with “American Girl.” And while we’re at it, the Stones doing “Wild Horses.” Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” comes fleetingly to mind. To the feeble mind.
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