by Richard Fore
The women laugh maliciously. Two brothers leap and seize my arms, forcing me to drop the console which then smashes into thousands of pieces. Thulsa Doom then steps out from the shadows. He stares into my eyes.
“The Riddle of Pong,” I murmur.
“Yes! Would you like me to tell you, boy?” Doom asks. He materializes a joystick out of thin air. “A joystick isn’t strong, boy. Flesh is stronger. What is a joystick to the hand that wields it?” The joystick morphs into a ping-pong ball that Doom effortlessly tosses into the cup at the dead center of the beer pong table. Impressed, two of the dancing women flock to Doom and he places his arms around them both.
“Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe,” says Doom. “Crucify him.”
My professor enters and calls me back to reality. A woman of perhaps fifty with curly red hair, I find her quite attractive. Her eyes are always wide open, as if she had forever written off sleep in order to be more productive.
“Sorry about that. A grad student caught me in the hallway,” she says.
“That’s all right, Professor McMullan.” I wonder if she was talking to Montana Wild and think about asking, but remember I don’t know her real name. And asking if she were speaking to a buxom blonde with a bob seems inappropriate.
“Didn’t I tell you not to call me that? Call me Mary. Professor sounds so formal and just makes me feel like I should have a PhD instead of an MFA. Mary. My name’s Mary.”
“Sorry.” I like Professor McMullan, though I’m reluctant to address her by her first name. While I’m appreciative that she’s so friendly, I prefer the title Professor McMullan because of its formality. I am her student and she is my teacher, which makes my harmless fantasy of being with her all the more enjoyable. If she were simply an older woman named Mary, she would likely laugh at my sexual inexperience. But as a professor there exists both a professional obligation to mentor me as well as her innate desire to help me advance along the path. At least that’s how it works in my daydreams.
“It’s all right. Now, what can I do for you?” asks McMullan, placing her leather jacket on the back of her chair and swiveling around to face me.
“I’m having trouble coming up with a good story to write,” I say.
“Ah, you’ve got writer’s block. That can be a real pain in the ass.”
True, but I’m simply unmotivated. “Yeah,” I say. “What do I do about it?”
“What do you usually write about?”
“I don’t know. This, that. To be honest I don’t write all that much, really.”
“Well, if you want some generic but useful advice, try writing something autobiographical. I’m sure that a guy who reads the words beer pong in a rape story and instantly associates them with the old-school videogame could write a pretty good comedy of errors. Just fictionalize some truth and begin writing.”
“No. I don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t want to read any story that would have me as a character.”
McMullan laughs. “Why is that?”
“Because then it wouldn’t have a happy ending.”
“I see. So are you just a cynic like me or eight months from now am I going to look back on this moment as a missed warning sign of an instability that eventually consumed you and drove you to climb our bell tower with a sniper rifle?”
I laugh. “I’ve always seen myself more as the mad bomber type. And I don’t think we have a bell tower.”
“We don’t. That’s probably why we don’t. Sorry. I needed a little gallows humor after discussing that rape story. The version you read was even toned down after I suggested some revising. Anyway, happy endings belong in fairytales and cap off erotic massages in places of ill repute. Who says you need a happy ending? If I were to name you my top ten favorite authors, half of them committed suicide, and at least one attempted it. Now, that isn’t to say that life cannot have a happy ending. It can. And a good story helps the reader see that. Stories should be didactic. A troubled protagonist who comes to a bad end can serve as a model to readers of what not to do in their own lives. Look at Aesop’s Fables.
“So don’t go thinking your story has to have a happy ending. But also don’t think it can’t either. Let your story decide where it needs to go, but at the same time remember that a story does eventually need to end. I can’t begin to tell you how much I now loathe Robert Jordan and how much I once adored him and The Wheel of Time series. What was supposed to be a six book series at present encompasses eleven volumes, and it still isn’t finished. I’m not certain he’ll actually live to finish it, either. But I stopped reading several volumes ago anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.” McMullan looks at me and chuckles. “Sorry, I went off on a little tangent there, didn’t I? I do that sometimes.”
“That’s okay. I have a friend who feels as you do and have heard much longer lectures than that on the evils of Jordan. Plus it’s hot that you’re into fantasy.” That last sentence was not meant to be spoken aloud.
“I like you,” says my professor. “Sometimes you say funny things out of ignorance, sometimes you’re just ballzy. Either way it’s entertaining. And I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way about Jordan.”
“So which of your favorite authors attempted suicide?” I ask.
“Kurt Vonnegut, several decades back.”
“I’m a Vonnegut fan myself. Actually, his name came up a few days ago when I was chatting with a girl who’s doing her thesis on him here.”
“How do you know Abby Burke?” asks Professor McMullan.
Abby Burke. Was that Montana Wild’s real name? I don’t know. It must be. I shouldn’t have brought her up. Why’d I bring her up? Now I know her real name. One more thing I know about the real her. But my professor has asked me a question. A simple question, asked innocuously enough. Last year another writing professor of mine had seen me talking to a fellow English major in the hallway, an extremely attractive girl named Danielle.
I had a conference with the same professor later that afternoon. The first words out of his mouth were how do you know Danielle Strauss? He placed great emphasis on you. As if he found it absurd that I could possibly be socializing with such a hot girl as Danielle. Never mind that we both had the same major at the same college and likely had a few classes together, which we did. That was the obvious answer and yet the man remained perplexed to the extent that he was actually compelled to ask me how I knew Danielle.
But the question now before me lacked an accusatory tone or expression of disbelief, although ironically enough it’s this answer that is illicit. I know Abby only because I paid to grope her breasts. As she appreciates irony, I wonder if Abby would find this amusing. I still need to give Professor McMullan an answer. “Abby, uh, yeah, I think so. Blonde with a bob, right?” I ask.
“Yes, that’s Abby. How do you know her?”
I paid her for a lap dance. “A friend of mine and I were talking about Vonnegut and she joined in on the conversation. I wouldn’t really say I know her.” All of that was the truth. Professor McMullan may not even know what Abby does to pay for her tuition.
McMullan looks at me and grins, and I know that she does know. She knows exactly how I met Abby. She senses my discomfort and appears amused by it. Or rather she is amused by the fact that I am feeling uncomfortable when I really shouldn’t be. Professor McMullan likely finds it humorous how I met Abby, nothing more. If she does not judge me for my definition of beer pong, she will not judge me for this.
“Abby’s someone to talk to if you like Kurt Vonnegut,” says my professor. “But to get back to your problem I really think that-” a knock on her door cuts her off. She opens the door a crack but I can’t see who she’s talking to.
“I’ll be right back,” McMullan says to me as she leaves and shuts the door behind her. I imagine Professor McMullan must be rather popular. Although once when I was partnered with a jock indistinguishable from a club-wielding ogre for a class activity
I remarked to him that I thought she was hot. Yeah, she’s okay was his indifferent reply.
Waiting for McMullan to return I glance at her bookshelf. She has a number of volumes on film, including several specifically related to science fiction. She also has quite the collection of Phillip K. Dick. I recall a course I took with her last year where we watched Blade Runner in class and the near coma-inducing boredom it invoked in the majority of my classmates. One, a female, had texted throughout the film in a desperate bid just to maintain consciousness, a behavior she often repeated throughout the semester. No doubt on the weekends she serves as a cheerleader for sanctioned beer pong tournaments.
McMullan had to be a professor. She couldn’t be a student my age with her kind of interests. On her desk is a photo of her with a man who appears to be her husband (he wears a tuxedo, she a wedding gown) and I hold the man in utter contempt. He looks several years younger than her, and the thought of the couple having sex disgusts me. But while he smiles in the wedding photo, his eyes reveal the sadness of a life-long battle against impotence, and the significantly differing levels of melanin between him and the children in accompanying photographs confirms his lack of potency and the adopted status of the children. Long has Professor McMullan likely lived a life of extreme sexual deprivation, or so I shall choose to believe.
She returns and mock barricades the door by sliding her chair in front of it. I watch her sit atop her desk and imagine a discussion between us on how awful Harrison Ford’s narration is in the theatrical version of Blade Runner and how we’d both agree that the often mentioned rumor of him botching the lines on purpose so the narration would be cut from the final film is true. An office makeout session would follow, on her desk of course, unless professor-themed porn has lied to me. Back in reality however McMullan merely sits on her desk and looks at me, pondering whether or not she wishes to vent as the conversation she just had has clearly made her frustrated.
“Sorry. There shouldn’t be any more interruptions now,” she says. Sadly, McMullan sees me as nothing more than a lowly student. Had I been a colleague perhaps I could have been her confidant.
“It’s no problem. I was just looking at your books. It looks like you’re pretty into sci-fi.”
“Yep,” she says. “Are you?”
“Yeah. Watching movies like Total Recall as a child got me into Phillip K. Dick. And I like movies with a mixture of science-fiction and action. And fantasy. Although admittedly, I never saw Blade Runner until we watched it in class.”
“So you like Terminator, Predator, Highlander?” she asks with enthusiasm.
I don’t immediately respond, just look at her dumbstruck. Some quick mental rewinding confirms she actually did just ask if I liked Highlander. “There can be only one,” I say, quoting the franchise’s famous tagline, but in this usage I’m referring to the number of men who have the privilege of being married to Professor McMullan. I consider asking if her husband is named Scott, but I imagine he is and don’t really want confirmation.
“Clan MacLeod,” says my professor. “I’ve actually been to the village of Glenfinnan. It’s a beautiful place. But I’m Scottish, so I’m biased. Do you ever write any sci-fi or fantasy yourself?”
“No. I don’t have any ideas for that. Well, I did have one. A somewhat comical idea about a guy who wakes up to find that he’s been written out of his own life, with his employer and family having never heard of him before. I got the idea from Happy Days, after the character Chuck Cunningham was written out of the show and erased from ever having existed in the show’s continuity. Only my character was written out of his own life, but didn’t disappear.”
“I like it,” says Professor McMullan. “It sounds funny, and there are a lot of questions of identity that can be explored with it. How much of our own identity do we garner from other peoples’ impressions of us? You should write that. Or something autobiographical, I’m sure there are a lot of potential stories you can draw from your own experience. Now, between Happy Days, Pong, and paraphrasing Groucho Marx earlier, you sure seem to have a proclivity for things that are before your time.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It helps to alienate me from people my own age.”
McMullan laughs. “Well, feel free to come by and chat again whenever you feel like you can’t relate to your contemporaries. Although I get the impression you largely choose to be a social pariah, you don’t appear to have much difficulty socializing when you make the attempt. And hopefully I’ve managed to help you out a little.”
“Yes, thank you, you have. I should be able to complete something before my story workshop.”
“Good. Oh, if you know anyone who needs a date, give them this.” Professor McMullan hands me a copy of the school newspaper. “One of my students is in a sorority that’s having a bachelorette auction as a fundraising activity. She asked me if I’d help spread the word.”
I take the newspaper. Was McMullan acting solely on the assumption that I was single? Perhaps she really had promised to assist in promoting the event.
“I’ll pass it along to someone who can use it,” I say.
Chapter 4: Jackpot (or not)
“Man, I wish I was like Boba Fett sexy,” says Chris.
“Boba Fett sexy?” I ask.
“Yeah, Boba Fett sexy.”
“What does that mean?” We step out of his car and begin the approach to The Vault. It will be the first time I’ll have seen Sabrina since first chatting with her nearly two weeks ago.
“Well, you know how he’s all like really cool and quiet,” says Chris. “He doesn’t need to say or really even do anything to be that way either, he just is and he knows it. Women like the Boba Fett type. A little mysteriousness, a little danger. That’s sexy to them. Just walk into a room and own it via your sheer presence.
“And Boba Fett doesn’t have to prove anything, either. When Leia’s masquerading as Boushh and she pulls that stunt with the thermal detonator, is he at all concerned about being shown up by another bounty hunter? Hell no. He just gives that I’m impressed nod to Boushh and is completely at ease, because he’s Boba Fett and he knows he’s the best.
“Now I couldn’t be like that. I see some guy chatting up my girl at a party and I’m heading straight over there and taking her hand to let any potential usurpers know she’s mine. But Boba Fett wouldn’t care because he’s confident. He’s sexy. I’m not Boba Fett sexy.”
“That’s all just the armor, I think.”
“See, now anyone who doesn’t like Boba Fett always says that he’s overrated, that take away the armor and he’s just another bounty hunter. Now is the armor a part of his appeal? Yes. Wearing Mandalorian armor is like being a really good-looking guy. But Boba is more than that. He’d have the same charm even without the armor. He’s got the armor so he may as well wear it yeah, and he’ll look good in it for the big reveal when he emerges next to Vader and the good guys realize Lando set them up. But it wasn’t the armor that made him realize the stunt Han was pulling by hiding the Falcon in the Empire’s garbage. Now my entire theory is undermined by the whole clone of Jango prequel BS. But we can just ignore that, of course.”
“Of course.” We pause outside the door.
“You ready to see your girl?” asks Chris. “See, you don’t even have to be Boba Fett sexy. Sabrina responds to your nerd charm, but you refuse to act on it.”
“We’ll see. Like I told you, if she likes me so much, she can ask me out.”
“Well, she’s not going to do that. She’s shy. She’ll want you to ask her. But you’re about to see her again, I suppose that’s something. And who knows, maybe she’ll even pick up on your stubbornness and make the first move. But I doubt it. I was all like he’s really shy and she was all like but so am I.”
Inside Sabrina mans the store like a perky sentry, standing attentively and wearing a blue t-shirt that reads I Love Nerds with the word love substituted with a red heart. No one else is currently in the store. Certainly Sabrina must have
other admirers, so where could they be? I’d appreciate the opportunity to view her interacting with her other fans to see if she acted differently around them than me.
Sabrina homes in on us immediately. “Hey, Chris,” she says. She looks at me and smiles, is adorable in her t-shirt. “Hi,” she says. “It’s been awhile. I hope Chris didn’t have to drag you back in here against your will.”
Sabrina’s adorability: such a thing must be commented on. “Not at all,” I say. “It’s just last time I was a little unclear whether or not you really liked nerds. But if your attire is to be believed then you do.”
She looks down at her chest. “Ah, yes, I was thinking that maybe I was being a little too subtle during our last encounter. Rest assured though, I do have a thing for nerds. But how do I know you’re really one of us? You could just be faking it to impress me. You should definitely take my nerd test. Right now.”
“Oh, believe me when I say he doesn’t need to take that,” says Chris. “Just tell her about beer pong, that’ll give her all the proof she needs.”
“She doesn’t need to hear about that,” I say. “So, what’s this about a nerd test?”
“It seems that Mr. Cartwright has embarrassed you,” says Sabrina. “Now I really want to know about beer pong. Tell-me-tell-me-tell-me-tell-me,” she exclaims, bouncing up and down.
“I don’t see how I could ignore a request like that,” I say. “Go ahead Chris, tell her about beer pong. I don’t know if I could actually get the words out.” It’d be too much to ask for Sabrina to have never heard of beer pong. I hope she’ll see some humor in the anecdote beyond the lameness.
“He was in a story writing class the other day,” says Chris. “In the story being talked about some guys were playing beer pong at a party. And this guy,” Chris says as he pats me on the back, “this guy isn’t the party type. So the only Pong he’s ever heard of is the Stone Age videogame version. So he raises his hand and asks the author what a bunch of frat boys are doing playing Pong at a house party, thinking they’ve turned it into some kind of drinking game.”