Willard and His Bowling Trophies (2 page)

One day somebody loaned Bob a copy of the
Story of O
, which he read. It is a gothic sadomasochist novel that sort of turned him on because he thought that it was so strange. He would get a partial erection when he read it.

After he finished the book, he gave it to Constance to read because she was curious about it.

“What’s it about?” she asked.

She read it and got sort of turned on, too.

“It’s kind of sexy,” she said.

A week after they had both finished reading it, they were drunkish one evening and sexually playing around in their special ways because they were denied the regular sex act.

Usually, she would jack him off or orally copulate him and he would very carefully, like cutting a diamond, clitorally masturbate her until she came. He could have gotten a job at Tiffany’s.

They were lying there in bed, sort of drunk, when he said, “Why don’t we play the
Story of O
?”

“OK,” Constance said, smiling. “Which part do I play?”

The
Story of O
Game

They had a lot of fun playing the
Story of O
game for the first time. Constance found some scarfs for him to tie her up with and she found a large silk handkerchief for him to gag her with. Bob tied a knot in the center of the handkerchief as he had seen on television and in the movies and put the knot between her teeth and tied the ends of the handkerchief tightly at the back of her head, so that her mouth was forced open by the knot.

Her hands were tied behind her back.

She was breathing very heavily. She had never been tied and gagged before. He caressed her breasts and her thighs. She liked the feeling of helplessness and pleasure.

Then he whipped her very gently with his belt and she moaned pleasurably from behind the gag. While all this was happening, he still had his clothes on. She lay naked on the bed.

After a while he took his clothes off and joined her on the bed. She rubbed up against him, moaning all the time through the gag. She was very excited. He put his finger on her clitoris diamondly, so as to avoid touching the burned-off wart areas and hurting her.

He was not interested in hurting her.

Bob rolled Constance over, so that her back was to him, and he guided her bound hands to his penis and he had his left hand touching her clitoris and his right hand caressing her right breast, which was quite beautiful, not too small and not too large: with a small pink-rose nipple.

Constance awkwardly and beautifully jacked him off while he masturbated her carefully and beautifully and they almost came together.

Their bodies raged like an apocalypse of fire, pleasure, and small-time perversion.

Warts

When the warts were discovered inside of Constance’s vagina, Bob checked himself out for them, but there weren’t any warts on his penis.

Venereal warts are spread by a virus through sexual intercourse, but only a small percentage of the people who come in contact with the virus actually get them, so some people will carry the virus and not get the warts and some people will come in contact with the virus without getting them.

Bob was very relieved that he did not have them. Weeks passed and no warts appeared on his penis, so they assumed that he would not get them, but then one night when she was almost clear of them, he was peeing and discovered that he had some warts inside of his penis.

It had never dawned on him to look inside of his penis, down into the urethra. The warts were like an evil little island of pink mucous roses. He couldn’t believe it. He stood there staring at the warts in his penis. He thought that he was going to throw up.

Long after he had finished peeing, he was still standing there above the toilet bowl, staring at his penis.

Then he put
it
back into his pants as if he were folding a dead octopus tentacle into his shorts and flushed the toilet.

The urine swirled like an evil punctuation mark and disappeared. The sun was going down, too. He waited for Constance to come home from visiting a friend. The apartment was very quiet He didn’t turn the lights on. Normally, he hated the dark. He stared out the window at the early evening traffic that sounded like rain. He shivered as if he were cold. The cars passing down below made him think of a very lonely rainy afternoon in his childhood.

He went back there again.

When she opened the door with her key and came in, the apartment was dark, so she turned a light on. She didn’t think he was there. He was sitting in the room a few feet away from her, staring out the window with eyes that looked as if they had transparent lead in them.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“I’ve got warts in my cock,” he said.

She sat down very carefully on the floor beside him as if she were sitting on a decayed spider web.

‘Deeply do I mourn, for my friends

are nothing worth’

“These are just fragments,” Bob said, almost a year later to Constance lying bound and gagged on a bed without any clothes on, her head resting in his lap.

“Lines,” he said. “Parts of lines . . .” He paused and then forgot for a moment what he was talking about.

Constance waited for him to remember what he was talking about. He was turning the pages of the book but he didn’t know why. They turned like leaves in an absent-minded wind.

Then he remembered what he was doing and started over again, repeating the very same words that he had just used. “These are just fragments. Lines,” he said. “Parts of lines and sometimes only single words that remain from the original poems written by the Greeks thousands of years ago.”

“ ‘More beautiful,’ ” Bob said. “That’s all that’s left of a poem.”

“ ‘Having fled,’ ” Bob said. “That’s all that’s left of another one.”

“ ‘He cheats you,’ ” Bob said. “ ‘Breaking.’ ‘You have made me forget all my sorrows.’ There are three more
.”

“Here are two really beautiful ones,” Bob said. “ ‘Deeply do I mourn, for my friends are nothing worth.’ ‘Takes bites of the cucumbers.’ ”

“What do you think? Do you like them?” Bob said. He had forgotten that she could not answer him. She nodded her head yes that she liked them.

“Would you like to hear some more?” Bob said.

He had forgotten that there was a gag in her mouth.

She slowly nodded yes.

“Here are four more fragments,” Bob said. “They are all that remain of a man’s voice from thousands of years ago: ‘Storms.’ ‘Of these.’ ‘I was.’ ‘He understood.’ Incredible, huh?”

She very slowly nodded yes.

“One more?” Bob asked.

She slowly nodded yes.

“ ‘And nothing will come of anything,’ ” Bob said.

Willard and his bowling trophies

What about Willard and his bowling trophies? How do they figure into this tale of perversion? Easy. They were in an apartment downstairs.

Willard was a papier-mâché bird about three feet tall with long black legs and a partially black body covered with a strange red, white and blue design like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and Willard had an exotic beak like a stork. His bowling trophies were of course stolen.

They were stolen from three brothers, the Logan brothers, who had formed a very good, actually a championship bowling team that they played on for years. Bowling was their life’s blood and then somebody stole all their trophies.

The Logan brothers had been looking for them ever since, travelling around the country like three evil brothers in a Western.

They were lean, sharp-eyed and seedy-looking from letting their clothes fall into disrepair and from not shaving regularly and they had turned into vicious criminals to finance their search for the stolen trophies.

They had started out in life as wholesome all-American boys, an inspiration to young and old alike, showing how you could make something out of your life and be looked up to. Unfortunately, the torment of three lost years looking for their bowling trophies had changed them. They were a far cry from the Logan brothers of old: those handsome heroic bowlers and the pride of their hometown.

Willard of course always stayed the same: a papier-mâché bird surrounded by his bowling trophies.

‘And nothing will come of anything’

The room was too bright. It was not a large room, and the light bulb hanging down from the ceiling was too big for the room. Cars passed down below in the street. The street had a lot of traffic early in the evening.

He stared down at her.

Bob’s face was very gentle and distant and dreaming backwards. He was thinking about people who lived in another time and were dead now and he grieved for them and himself and the entire human condition: the past and future of it all.

Constance, staring up at him, was deeply moved by the expression on his face.

Suddenly she wanted to tell him that she loved him, even though he had come to this, but she couldn’t. Only about one out of every ten times was he able to effectively gag her and this had to be that time.

What luck,
she thought.

So she caressed his leg with her cheek which was all that she could do to tell him that she loved him. She wanted to tell him that they would get through this and put it all back together and make it beautiful again, but she couldn’t because her tongue was pressed hard against the back of her mouth by a handkerchief soaking wet with her own spit.

She closed her eyes.

“ ‘And nothing will come of anything,’ ” Bob softly repeated again but this time only to himself.

The Logan brothers in pursuit

One of the Logan brothers sat in a chair drinking a can of beer. Another one lay on the bed in the cheap hotel room reading a comic book. From time to time he laughed out loud. The aging wallpaper looked like the skin of a snake. His laughter rattled off the walls.

The third brother paced back and forth in the room, which was a slight feat in itself because the room was so small. He was displeased by his brother laughing at the comic book. He thought that his brother should not abandon himself to such easy pastimes.

“Where are those God-damn bowling trophies?” he yelled.

The Logan brother on the bed dropped his comic book in surprise and the one drinking beer stopped the can in mid-flight to his mouth and turned it into the statue of a beer can.

They stared at their brother who was still pacing impossibly in the tiny room.

“Where are those God-damn bowling trophies?” he repeated.

They were waiting for a telephone call that would tell them where the bowling trophies were. The telephone call was costing them $3,000, money that had been earned from panhandling, misdemeanor thievery, then filling station hold-ups and finally murder.

It had been a long three years they had spent in search of the trophies. The Logan brothers’ all-American innocence had been one of its casualties.

“Where are those God-damn bowling trophies?”

Saint Willard

Meanwhile—less than a mile away from the tiny dingy hotel room where the Logan brothers waited for a telephone call that would provide them with the location of the bowling trophies—Willard, a huge papier-mâché bird, stood leaning up against the trophies. There were about fifty or so of them sitting on the floor: large elaborate ones like miniature bowling altars and small ones like ikons.

Willard and the bowling trophies were in the front room of a big apartment. It was night and dark in the front room but even so there was a faint religious glow coming from the bowling trophies.

Saint Willard of the Stolen Bowling Trophies!

The people who lived in the apartment were off seeing a Greta Garbo rerun at a local art theater. Their names were John and Patricia. He was a young filmmaker and she was a school teacher. They were very good friends with their upstairs neighbors Constance and Bob. Bob would come down by himself three or four times a week. He liked to sit in the front room on the floor with Willard and his bowling trophies and drink coffee and talk with John about Willard. Pat would usually be off teaching. She taught Spanish at a junior high school.

Bob would ask questions about Willard and his metal friends. Often it would be the same question because Bob would forget that he’d asked it before.

“Where did you get these bowling trophies?” Bob asked for the hundredth time or was it the thousandth time? It was his favorite question to ask over and over again.

“I found them in an abandoned car in Marin County,” John would patiently answer for the hundredth or was it the thousandth time? John had known Bob for three years now and Bob had not been like this when John first knew him. Bob had been very skillful with all the aspects of his life and had a mind so sharp that it could have picnicked on a razor blade.

It bothered John to see Bob this way. He hoped that it would pass and Bob would be like he used to be.

John sometimes wondered what had happened to cause Bob to act this way: always asking the same questions over and over again, “Where did you get these bowling trophies?” etc., moving awkwardly about and being absent-minded and sometimes he tipped his coffee over and John would clean it up and Bob would barely be conscious that he had done it.

Bob had once been a hero to John because he had been so good at doing and saying things. Those days were gone and John longed for them to return.

The bowling trophies continued glowing faintly in the room where Willard was a shadow among them like an unspoken prayer.

John and Pat would be back later on, talking about Greta Garbo, and turn the front room light on and there would be faithful Willard and his bowling trophies.

‘Celery’

Bob took his belt off and slowly began to whip Constance with it: leaving slight red marks across her buttocks and the backs of her legs. She moaned abstractly from behind her gag, which was firmly in her mouth and she could not spit it out.

Sometimes it still turned her on when he whipped her. It had really turned her on the first few times he had done it to her when they had played the
Story of O
game before he had gotten the warts in his penis and they wouldn’t go away.

He never broke the flesh when he whipped her or left any bruises on her body. He was very careful about that. He was not interested in hurting her.