Willard and His Bowling Trophies Read online

  “ ‘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.

  Whipping her did not turn him on nearly as much as tying her up and gagging her, but he went on doing it as part of the ritual that led up to their very pathetic sex act because he liked to hear her moan from behind the gag.

  The thing that she really didn’t like about it was being gagged but that was the part of it that turned him on the most and the part of it that he was the worst at doing because he got so excited and nervous when he did it. She could never figure out why he concentrated so much on the gagging and he never told her because he didn’t know himself.

  Sometimes he tried to figure out why he liked gagging her but he couldn’t find a rational reason. He just liked it and did it.

  Many times after he had finished tying her up, which was always what he did first, she would say, “Please don’t gag me. It’s all right to tie me up and to whip me but please don’t gag me. Please. I don’t like it,” but he would do it anyway and most of the time he bungled it and sometimes he hurt her and it was very seldom that she liked being gagged and those few, very rare times were only because she remembered liking it in the beginning.

  Then he put the belt down beside her on the bed. That part was over.

  Her eyes were beautiful above the gag, he thought, so sensitive and intelligent staring at him.

  He untied her feet.

  “ ‘Let us put little garlands of celery upon our brows and hold high festival to Dionysus,’ ” Bob said to her, quoting the Greek Anthology from memory.

  “Pretty, huh?” he said.

  She closed her eyes.

  Rubber

  Bob still had his clothes on but he could feel the erection in his pants. It bulged and pressed hard against his leg. Now the time was nearing that he really dreaded.

  The only way he could enter her vagina with his penis so that she wouldn’t get the warts again was to use a rubber which he hated and she hated.

  He walked over to a dresser and hidden under his socks was a package of rubbers. He fumbled a rubber out of the package. He felt dirty touching it.

  Constance was watching him from the bed.

  She knew how much he hated using them.

  Bob came back to the bed. He took his clothes off. He had a tall, healthy body. Looking at his body, there was no way of knowing that he had warts in his penis.

  He took the foil-packed rubber and broke the foil and took the horrible thing out and was slightly nauseated by the smell of the thing. He really hated that rubber smell. He shuddered when he fit the rubber over his penis and did not look at Constance while he was doing it.

  Putting the rubber on always embarrassed him and she looked away, too, not wanting to see this embarrassment.

  The rubber was on and he felt like a damn fool.

  The Logan brothers waiting

  The comic-book-reading Logan brother put the comic book down on the bed beside him. He stared at the cover. The hero on it looked somber as a stale cookie.

  The beer-drinking Logan brother finished one beer and started on another one. He liked feeling the cold of the can in his hand. It was one of the few pleasures he had left after three years of looking for the stolen bowling trophies.

  The pacing Logan brother was walking up and down the tiny room. He had a revolver in his hand. He kept opening and closing the loaded cylinder, staring at the bullets. He was anxious to use the gun. He wanted to kill the people who had taken his beloved bowling trophies.

  They would pay dearly . . .

  With their lives!

  Soon the telephone would ring. It sat darkly on a table like graves waiting to be dug.

  The comic-book-reading Logan brother reopened the comic book to an ad for selling salve in your spare time and on your way home from school. He read the ad very carefully. He wondered how it would be to sell salve.

  Kissing

  She hated the feeling of the rubber going into her vagina. She really had to be moist or it would hurt. He had such a beautiful penis. It had been so long since she had felt it inside of her. All she had felt for almost a year now was the rubber instead of him. It was a nightmare and he couldn’t do anything right any more.

  Oh, God!

  She rubbed her gagged mouth against his mouth in a tender kissing gesture.

  ‘Painting a lion from the claw’

  He couldn’t feel her and it always made him sad but that was nothing new because just about everything made him sad now. The rubber took away all the intimacy and eternity of her vagina. He hungered like a lost star for the evening sky of her inner touch.

  He was gently inside of her but he couldn’t feel her. She was lost from him, so he thought about the Greek Anthology and remembered words from ancient rimes that said, “Painting a lion from the claw.”

  What did it mean to him thinking about that as he rested upon her, trying to make love? What good would it do him to think of things like that?

  He didn’t know.

  Willard, the bowling trophies and

  Greta Garbo

  They were talking as they came up the stairs.

  “Greta Garbo looked so beautiful,” John said.

  “She was really a great actress,” Pat said.

  “Too bad Connie and Bob couldn’t come with us,” John said.

  John’s key opened the front door lock and Pat pushed the door open. Across the room was the darkened outline of Willard like a dwarf tree and the religiously glowing bowling trophies.

  The click of the light switch exploded Willard and the trophies into their full presence and the glory in that presence.

  Willard looked curious. Sometimes the expression on Willard’s face would change. He was artfully constructed.

  “Hi, Willard,” Pat said. “You would have loved Greta Garbo. Hey, we should have taken Willard to see Greta Garbo.”

  “Next time,” John said. “We’ll put Willard in a child’s dress and get him in free. I can carry him in my arms. Nobody will notice.”

  “What about his beak?” Pat said.

  “We’ll think of something,” John said.

  The birth of Willard

  Willard was made by an artist who lived in some isolated mountains in a part of California that was hard to find.

  The artist was in his late thirties and had had a very fucked-up life with many bad love affairs and much torment but he had somehow kept it together and was now supporting himself from his sculpture and he had a woman who took care of his basic physical and spiritual wants without fooling with his head too much.

  Willard came to him in a dream, a dream that was composed of miniature silver and gold temples built but never used and waiting for a religion.

  Willard just walked right into the dream as if he had lived there forever with his long black legs and strangely-patterned body and of course his dynamic beak and his face that could almost change expressions.

  Willard walked over and took a good look at the miniature silver and gold temples. Willard liked them. They would be his family and his home.

  The next morning the artist took some papier-mâché and rags and paint and stuff and re-created Willard from his dream until Willard was standing there, separated and made real, ready to occupy his own life.

  The history of the Logan brothers />
  The Logan brothers had come from a simple, very large family. Besides the three brothers and their mother and father, there were also three sisters. The sisters did not bowl. They had another specialty which will be gone into later.

  Their father worked in a filling station as a mechanic. He was very good with cars. Transmissions were his specialty. People said that he had a Midas touch when it came to working with transmissions.

  He had such a way with transmissions that he once fixed a transmission so well that when the man who owned the car, the chief of police, got into it and turned the engine on and shifted gears, he started crying because the transmission was in such great shape. The chief was not a man known for easy tears.

  Mother Logan was a pleasant woman who minded her own business and did a lot of baking. She just loved to have her oven on. The house was always filled with cakes and pies and cookies.

  The Logan brothers had a typical uneventful American childhood. They were no rougher or gentler than other boys. They had their share of illnesses and broken arms and getting into minor trouble or pleasing their parents with one thing or another.

  Once they all got together and built their mother a birdhouse to put outside the window she looked out from while she was mixing her doughs, crusts, batters, and frostings. The birdhouse pleased her a great deal.

  Unfortunately, birds did not like the house and not a single bird ever used it, but still it was something to look at and she would look at it while she baked away.

  Birds are not necessary for baking.

  The only outstanding characteristic of the Logan brothers was their interest in bowling. The brothers just loved to bowl and they were good at it, too. There was a bowling alley a few blocks away from their house and it was like a second home to them.