Running the Bulls Read online

  ***

  Howard pulled into his usual Holiday Inn parking space, next to the big rental truck. He would have to call the rental company and lease the monster for a month, a kind of storage house on wheels. It would be expensive, but he had no choice. Until the marital dust settled, or until he found himself a new home, where could he go with all those boxes? He had just opened the padlock on the truck so that he could crawl inside and dig around for the blue denim shirt he’d been missing in his life at the Holiday Inn, when he heard laughter. He looked up to see that Pete Morton was just coming out of the lounge. Behind him was Larry Ferguson and Freddy “The Mattress Mogul” Wilson.

  “We been looking all over the place for you,” said Pete.

  “Howard’s been a busy man,” said Larry, and winked.

  Howard said nothing as he relocked the rental truck.

  “Hey,” said Freddy, his face brown as dirt. “How you been?” He put a hand out to Howard’s and they shook, the two gold bracelets on Freddy’s wrist jingling.

  “If I need to buy a good mattress and box spring,” asked Howard, “can you fix me up?” Freddy grinned, white teeth appearing in the brown field of his face.

  “Can I fix you up?” asked Freddy, as if this were the silliest thing he’d heard since his wife had told him to give up the girls he hired to sell mattresses or she’d take half his empire. “I just got a new shipment in,” he added, looking over his shoulder, as if maybe his wife’s lawyer were spying on him. But Howard had to hand it to Freddy. He had not stopped bedding his mattress salesgirls, and he seemed to be doing very well with only half an empire.

  “Get in your car and follow us over to Freddy’s warehouse,” said Pete. It wasn’t a request; it was an order.

  “Why?” asked Howard.

  “Just trust me,” said Pete. He looked at Freddy and they smiled, tossing a guy’s look back and forth as though it were a football.

  “It’s a new kind of entertainment,” said Freddy. He reached in his shirt pocket for his own cigar. “A little game to entertain you boys.”

  They rode one behind the other to Freddy’s Mattress Warehouse, with Pete in the lead in his Jeep, Freddy behind in his big cream Caddy, Larry in his older model Volvo, and then Howard pulling up the rear, top down on the little Aston Martin. As he watched them drive down the interstate, Howard felt a sudden sympathy for them all, himself included. They weren’t aficionados, after all, the kind of boys Hemingway hung out with. Instead, they had become a kind of geriatric Rat Pack, Bixley’s own answer to Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Joey.

  Freddy’s warehouse was an immense building piled high with mattresses of all kinds, cheap mattresses, expensive mattresses, white mattresses, blue mattresses. They were what made Freddy a mogul in the first place. Freddy waved the boys into his office at the back of the building. Once inside, he closed and locked the door. He pointed to what looked like a large video game. It came with wires attached to a helmet, a headset of some kind with thick lenses across the front, like goggles.

  “There it is,” said Freddy. “You’re the only one who hasn’t tried it, Howie. Even Wally took a break from the bar and drove out.”

  Howard accepted the headset from Pete.

  “You ever hear of virtual reality?” asked Pete. “Well, here it is, baby.”

  “Virtual what?” asked Howard. The truth was that he was computer illiterate and intended to stay that way. Ellen was learning to email, but mostly, they had been old-fashioned when it came to cyberspace and the information highway. Good books had always seemed three-dimensional enough to Howard.

  “Virtual sex,” said Freddy, again looking over his shoulder, even though he himself had locked the office door. “If this were in a bar in Boston, it’d cost you fifteen bucks a pop.”

  “Hurry up,” said Pete. “I want to go again.”

  He reminded Howard of a kid waiting to ride the Ferris wheel. Well, why the hell not? He’d just come from Ellen’s rejection of him, not to mention arguing with a giant mouse. Why not something to make him laugh? He fitted the helmet on his head and suddenly everything was dark. Pete put a rod of some kind in his hands.

  “This is the joystick,” he heard Pete say, from somewhere out in real reality. “You’ll see what it is once Freddy turns the thing on.”

  “Here goes,” said Freddy’s voice. Howard heard a click. And in that instant he saw before him a naked woman sitting on the edge of a bed. She wasn’t a real woman, of course. Still, it was amazing since she looked so human. She wasn’t moving, just staring toward the face of whoever might be wearing the helmet and goggles.

  “Now lift your joystick.” It was Pete’s voice, from that other place, that world of everyday problems. Howard did so and was stunned to see an enormous penis bob up in front of him.

  “Whoa!” he said, and jumped back. He heard laughter from the boys, and wondered if the appearance of this monster had scared them at first too. Now the woman was moving in the virtual scene. Once Howard had operated the joystick, she had lain back on the bed and opened her legs to him. A look of longing on her face, she was now reaching out to him with open arms, asking him to come to her.

  “Hell of a game, ain’t it?” Larry said. “Just put the airplane in the hangar and she’ll put on quite a show for you. You’ll also get five extra minutes playing time.”

  “Learn to control the penis,” Howard heard Freddy say. “It’s all in the wrist.”

  And then, Pete’s voice again.

  “We’re gonna leave you alone now, buddy, you know, in case you end up with a free hand.”

  There was more laughter, and then Howard heard the door to the office close. He imagined them all still standing there, watching, waiting. But he knew they were gone. Freddy had an asthma problem that could be heard from several feet away. Howard could hear him now, wheezing from the other side of the door. And Pete’s voice was out there, too. And Larry’s. He moved the joystick to the left and the huge penis went with it, slowly. It must have been fifteen inches long if it was one. And it was real-looking, the true color of flesh. He wondered if a male model had supplied the graphics for it, the kind of guys who end up donating body parts to the Smithsonian. He didn’t know enough about virtual reality. The girl, for instance, was she once a real model? She looked to be in her twenties, enormous breasts, full red lips. Her hair was dark and long and spread beneath her on the bed. Howard steadied the joystick right in front of him and she again opened her arms to him. So that was it. Learn to balance and steady. He pushed forward on the stick and the large penis moved toward the young woman. This made her smile. She spread her legs wider, and he could now see between them the redness of her, almost too red to be real. But then, she wasn’t real. Howard pulled the joystick back, and this action caused the penis to loom up so quickly before his face that he jumped again. Then, he felt foolish. After all, to a spectator watching from the real world, he was a sixty-three-year-old man standing there with a goofy-looking helmet on his head. He slowly guided the penis back down in the direction of the woman by pushing forward on the joystick. Is this a dagger that I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Howard wondered what Macbeth would do at a time like this. With this in his possession, the poor sot could’ve defeated Macduff, beat him over the head out there on the heath until he expired.

  This time when the young woman, luscious and fleshy, reached out for him, Howard suddenly remembered the prostitute, the one his Uncle George had taken him to when he was seventeen years old, a high school graduation present. “We’re gonna make you a man, son.” It had been his first encounter with sex, with a female who was also not real, at least not to Howard at the time. And yet, he had been afraid to touch her, afraid to enter her, as if a part of him might never come back out of her if he did. The prostitute, too, had seemed a fabrication, something planned as a joke by his uncle. She was like one of Macbeth’s witches, created only to enterta
in the passersby. Now, here was another woman lying on a bed before him, eager to have him take her, eager to offer up to him the millions of bytes it took for some godlike computer nerd, his own penis the length of a paper clip, to create her. Like the prostitute, this young woman was not a personality, not a woman with a past, a future, a woman with geraniums on her kitchen window sill, nylon stockings hanging to dry from the curtain rod in her shower, a woman with a dog, a cat, a penchant for old movies. She was simply arms, and legs, and vagina, created for his purposes, for his pleasure.

  “I can’t do this,” Howard heard a voice say and realized it was his own voice coming back to him from that real world, the planet earth, better known as The Big Landfill, back where all his problems were boiling and simmering on the surface of his life. He took the helmet off and tossed it down on the chair near Freddy’s desk. He hoped he hadn’t hurt the young woman who lived inside, who waited until someone else came looking for her, the way Macbeth’s witches waited on that cold and barren landscape. Howard opened the door to Freddy’s office and stepped out in the bright sunlight. Pete and Freddy were standing there, waiting, smiles on their faces.

  “I can’t do that,” said Howard. Pete frowned, not understanding.

  “Geez, Howie,” said Pete. “It’s not like you gotta buy her dinner or anything.”

  ***

  Howard went out into the sunshine of Bixley, away from the dark places where men have sex with imaginary women. He went flying into the fresh air and sunlight, spinning through town in the little Aston Martin. He knew now that nothing was real. Nothing can be counted on. His marriage wasn’t real, not the way he had imagined it to be. The golf course wasn’t real. Donna’s breasts weren’t real. Loretta’s eyes weren’t blue. The gold trim on the mirror behind the bar at the Holiday Inn was just paint. Even the ice in the ice machine was manufactured. It seemed the only thing left that you could depend on to be genuine, the only thing eternal, was pain. And maybe love, if you knew how to get it and hold on to it.

  It was not until he pulled into the parking lot of Bixley Community College and shut off the engine that Howard realized where he had been headed. After so many years of driving out there, after so many mornings, he had gone like a rat in a maze back to some of the best days of his life. He paused for a time at the big front door before he opened it. Summer school had not yet started, and so he felt a measure of safety that he would not run into former students or colleagues. As he suspected, there were ghosts in the hallways. Ghosts were turning the pages of books long outdated. He looked in on Ellen’s old room first, then the one where Ben Collins had substituted for Samuel Frist, thinking to find clues, perhaps, still embedded in the walls there. He even spent a few minutes gazing into the teacher’s lounge, where the affair had sparked to flame in the first place. It didn’t seem like a place to fall into lust, what with the tattered chairs and worn curtains, the walls a bleak lime color. We were friends first, Howie, or it never would have happened.

  It was his own room that stirred him the most, remembered him, as if it were whispering: “Welcome back, Howie. Take off your coat and grab some chalk.” It still smelled the same, a sterilized yet safe smell. On the blackboard he saw written: For Friday. Tennyson. The Coming of Arthur. The class must be reading Idylls of the King. He turned and stared at the rows of empty seats, imagined faces from years gone by, all his best students reassembled from three decades, all wearing the fashions of the day: bell bottoms, miniskirts, polyesters, denims, crew cuts, shags, French buns. And then he remembered Jennifer Kranston for the second time in less than a day, called her image up before his eyes, a Virtual Student, sitting at the desk she always chose as her own. It had been in 1969, his very first year of teaching, when he was thirty-four years old. Jennifer. Jenny. Who had wanted to be a poet, but who had died of a drug overdose in the early seventies. She looked up at him now, her soft brown eyes sober and staring. Howard felt a grip of emotion pull at his gut. His eyes watered.

  “But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist,” he whispered, remembering his own love for “The Coming of Arthur.” And then Jennifer was gone again, the ghost of a memory. Howard walked down the aisle and stopped in front of the desk where she used to sit. Funny, but he had forgotten her for quite a few years now, her memory emerging less and less to confront him. Even the ghost of Hamlet’s father must grow tired, weary of those cold, Danish winters, that icy suit of armor. Jennifer Kranston. Christ, but he had felt something in his groin every time she walked into the classroom. After all, he was only ten years older than she. And it was not just her love of poetry but the sway of her ass that had pulled him to her. And those perfect, round breasts, back when you could be almost certain that breasts were real. Howard could tell she wanted him too. He knew this in that part of him that knows such things, that natural part, the one that drove even dinosaurs to mate while gnawing at each other’s necks, rending flesh and smashing trees. That part. Jennifer wanted him, too, and would have been his had he flicked even one of his fingers. But he hadn’t. And it was because of Ellen. And the kids, those babies he had chosen to create during hot nights in bed with his wife. Howard felt overcome with sadness. It was, wasn’t it, because of Ellen and the kids? Or had he been afraid of Jennifer, too, the way he had been afraid of the prostitute, afraid and yet ejaculating almost instantly into her warm, anonymous hand. The way he was afraid of Donna Riley’s silicone breasts, of the Virtual Woman, reaching out to him from a blur of white computer blanket. The way he was afraid of Pork Chop Hill, the Bay of Pigs, the Mekong Delta. But he had fought his skirmishes and battles and wars in the classroom, hadn’t he, and he’d been damn proud of it. So he had not taken Jennifer Kranston to a motel in Buffalo, or in Bixley, or anywhere, no matter how much poetry she had memorized. And he had prided himself on that for quite some time, until Jennifer learned a new poetry, Hell no! We won’t go!, and went off to protest another war Howard wouldn’t fight, her new Afro hair grown frizzy with the electricity of life, her fingers perpetually forming a peace symbol. Until she took too much something one night and then died from it. Maybe it was an overdose of passion, a surfeit of life, all those things Howard had avoided as he plodded onward in his own safe existence.

  He traced a finger along the edge of Jenny’s old desk, tried to imagine how her breasts would’ve felt, light, probably, at least compared to a sack full of silicone. Or even compared to the heaviness of Ellen’s own breasts, breasts that had nursed their children. He remembered how Jenny used to look at him, that inviting look, her arms loaded down with books simply to impress him, books on Shelley and Keats and Tennyson.

  “But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist,” Howard said again, his finger still moving, a blind man reading Braille, still tracing the old energy of the desktop. “Like that which kept the heart of Eden green, Before the useful trouble of the rain.” It was all somehow connected, wasn’t it? Tennyson was certain that Camelot was unblemished and doing just fine until evil seeped in. And that evil was adultery, adultery committed by Lancelot and Guinevere. But Howard had never agreed with Tennyson. He had even told his class so, back before the adultery had happened to him. Passion wasn’t evil, he’d maintained. Tennyson was too much a representative of that dominant Victorian social class. Too sentimental, too intellectually shallow, too narrowly patriotic. But this was at a time when American liberals had just bitten firmly into that wonderful and crazy apple of the 1960s, a full century after Tennyson’s own 1860s. But Alfred’s sixties had been a crazy time, too, a time when science was kicking the pants off religion. Before the useful trouble of the rain. If he had believed that, if Howard had disagreed with Tennyson, then why didn’t he know what it was like to press little Jennifer Kranston onto her back in some motel room?

  “Accountability,” Howard whispered aloud. “We need to be accountable, that’s why.” But he knew that maybe that wasn’t why. Maybe it was because he was a coward after all. Afraid of passion. And now he ha
ted Ellen Woods, hated her for having the courage of his convictions, for marching onto a battlefield where he, Howie Woods, had never trod. Ellen had seen the blasted elephant, no doubt about it. Ellen was a goddamn soldier. A bell rang loudly, and Howard jumped. But then, there couldn’t have been a bell. It was summer. The system had surely been turned off. But he had heard a bell, hadn’t he? Was it real? For thirty years, Howard Woods had jumped to bells like some well-behaved Pavlovian dog. Bells ringing to announce cheese. Bells ringing just for the hell of it. Maybe Ellen was right this time. Maybe the two of them needed a break from their marriage, from each other. He would miss her. No, goddamn it, he would mourn her every day. But what else could he do? Howard lifted the top of Jennifer Kranston’s desk, then let it drop with a heavy thud that echoed in the empty room, bounced at him from all angles, no bodies there now to absorb the sound waves. Empty. But even ghosts need a day off. Sometimes, ghosts even retire.

  ***

  By the time Howard Woods strolled into the Holiday Inn lounge, the mood among the happy hour regulars was downright festive. Celebratory might be the better word. To Howard’s astonishment Larry Ferguson was behind the bar, fixing himself a drink, the jukebox blasting away in his stead. Wally was having a martini while entertaining two attractive women at a table over in one corner. Howard could hear him all the way across the room, giving them his beloved martini chant.

  “Oh, perhaps it’s made of whiskey, and perhaps it’s made of gin,” Wally was saying, “perhaps there’s orange bitters and a lemon peel within, perhaps it’s called martini, and perhaps it’s called, again, the name that spread Manhattan’s fame among the sons of men.” The women clapped, enjoying the free show.