THE JULIETTE SOCIETY 5 page

Even so, I find it absolutely compelling. I can’t stop watching. I’m glued to the screen. I need to see what will happen next. I’m drawn to it the way I’m always drawn towards things that scare me. I see myself in Anna, just as I saw myself in Séverine. And I want to understand why.

Today at school a girl killed herself. Her name is Daisy. Was Daisy.

Pretty girl. Sweet girl. And smart. I didn’t know her, but Jack knew her. She’d worked at the campaign office.

The whole campus is in a state of shock. You can almost feel it in the air. When something like this happens, it affects everybody, brings them all together. College campuses are like villages. Everybody is connected to everybody else by no more than two or three degrees of separation. So everybody knew somebody who knew Daisy. And they all need to understand, want to understand, to make sense of the senseless, so they can deal with it, move past it and get on with their lives. But death has a way of making its presence felt long after the fact. It tends to linger.

And, anyway, this keeps happening.

Daisy wasn’t the first. She was the third this year. The second this semester. All girls who seemed to have everything going for them. And decided they had nothing.

I can tell Jack’s really shaken. But he keeps saying he’s OK. He’s so macho in his own way. Refuses to show his weakness, wants me to think he can handle it, and I know he can but I worry all the same.

Bob DeVille has closed the campaign office for the night, out of respect. Not an easy decision to make with an election less than two months away, but the right one. The staff have decided to hold an impromptu wake for Daisy. Bob is going to make an appearance to say a few words, lead them in prayer and rally the troops. A natural leader in a time of mourning.

Jack always jokes he’d make a great President. I always tell him he’s thinking too far ahead. Bob hasn’t even made Government yet. But Jack has high hopes, he looks up to Bob as a kind of father figure, and who am I to dissuade him. Maybe he’s right.

I want to come with Jack tonight. I want to be there for him and support him.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You didn’t know her. It’s better if I go alone.’

And I understand why, but I’m worried about Jack. I want to help him. He’s not letting me in. He’s shutting me out. I’m frustrated. I just want to be by his side and he’s spurned me. And it tears me apart.

When Jack leaves, I feel abandoned. I don’t want to be here, all on my own like this, with my thoughts. All he needed to say is, ‘come with me’. But he didn’t. It’s his call. I don’t want to be angry with him but I can’t help but feel upset. The only way I can stop driving myself crazy by thinking about it is to call someone.

I call Anna. She already knows what happened to Daisy.

‘Did you know her?’ I say.

‘No,’ she says, ‘but we had a mutual friend. A guy.’

I want to talk to Anna but I don’t want to talk about Jack. I want to talk about anything else but Jack, so I blurt out the first thing that comes into my head.

‘I looked at that website,’ I say, ‘the one you told me about.’

‘SODOM?’ she says.

‘Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It didn’t look like porn, at least any porn I’ve seen. It looked scary.’

‘It’s not about what it looks like,’ Anna says, ‘it’s about how it feels. It’s not about the scenario, or the situation, but the effect it has on you. About what happens to your body and your mind. And if it’s done right, it feels really good.’

Anna wants me to understand what it feels like when you’re suspended in the air with no means of support other than the ropes that bind you, or constrained in a cage with no means of escape.

‘I feel completely helpless,’ she says, ‘and I just let go and it’s the best feeling in the world.

‘I feel hyper‑aware of my body, of every muscle and sinew, of every inch and pound. I can feel even the slightest shift and movement in my body weight. And I become sensitive to every stimuli. Every movement in the air around me. Every movement in the ropes, as they scratch and burn at my wrists, my ankles, around my breasts.’

Isn’t it painful, I say.

‘Everyone has their limit,’ she says. ‘Mine’s pretty high. When I’m tied up, at first, I feel this tingling sensation all over my body, like an electrical current going through it. My fingers and toes slowly go numb from being so tightly constricted, then this intense burning heat spreads along my arms and legs. Just pain on pain. Until I can’t bear it any more. And the pain turns in on itself and turns into the most intense pleasure I’ve ever felt.

‘Everything becomes inverted. Pain becomes pleasure. Pleasure becomes pain. And I will do anything I can to increase it, to make sure it never ever stops, because it feels so good.

‘I’ve had the most intense orgasms I’ve ever had while tied up,’ Anna says. ‘Orgasms so intense I passed out, woke up still hanging there, and then the whole thing started all over again.’

She says you lose track of time so quickly when you’re suspended or restrained, like someone’s put you under hypnosis.

‘It’s like I’m in a trance,’ she says, ‘an erotic trance. Like I’ve been there for minutes, but it could be hours. I’m outside time and it all feels endless. And I’m afraid of what might happen when it does.’

It’s at that point, Anna says, caught between the fear of wanting and not wanting, that she feels she might go insane.

‘But I feel so alive,’ she says. ‘More alive than at any time in my life, and at peace. I feel transcendent.’

I’ve never heard Anna talk like this before. She’s normally so giggly and carefree. Now she’s serious and I can hear that she really means what she says.

I remember that look on Anna’s face. Now I understand what she was feeling. Now I want to know even more. I want to know what it feels like to be in Anna’s world.

Anna thinks she’s said enough. I know this because she trails off and goes strangely silent, then abruptly changes the subject.

She says, ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Not much,’ I say.

‘I want you to meet Bundy,’ she says, slightly mischievously.

‘Sure,’ I say.

And I don’t even give it a second thought. I know it’ll be a few hours at least before Jack gets home and I don’t want to sit here stewing all on my own.

Bundy says, ‘Take a look at this.’

And he swipes through a series of photos on his phone so fast that at first I can’t make out what I’m looking at, except a blur of clashing colors and close‑ups taken at extreme angles.

Bundy’s swiping through the pictures on his phone like a rookie salesman so nervous about giving his first Powerpoint presentation to a room full of important clients that he forgets to let go of the remote and races through all his slides at once.

The slides he’s been up for three days non‑stop without sleep to get finished in time for this, his first big sale.

All gone, in less than half a minute.

And he’s left standing there, looking up at a big blank screen before he’s even finished talking through the first slide, hoping he’s still going to make his commission this month.

Bundy’s not nervous, he’s just excited. But he is trying to sell me something. He’s trying to sell me on the idea of snorting a line of cocaine racked out along his penis.

This is what the photos are of mostly, I realize, when he lingers on one just slightly longer than the rest. A portfolio of girls doing exactly that. And this is his pitch to the unwary. Not an easy sell, but he’s giving it his all.

We’ve only just met. Actually, we’ve only just been introduced, by Anna. Bundy doesn’t say, ‘hi’ or ‘nice to meet you’. He says, ‘take a look at this’. And out comes his portfolio of conquests.

This is what Bundy does.

He trawls clubs, bars, clothing stores, fast‑food outlets, supermarket checkouts for cute girls. But it’s not enough for them to be cute. They also have to be willing.

He calls it ‘making new friends’.

Proof of these encounters appears daily on his website, Bundy’s Got Talent, for a worldwide audience of bozos.

Sounds innocuous. It’s anything but.

In the armed forces, they call it ‘mission creep’. When a military campaign oversteps its original boundaries and shifts objectives.

This is porno creep.

When pornography oversteps its boundaries and pretends it’s something it isn’t.

Almost as soon as Bundy’s new ‘friends’ have made his acquaintance, he pulls out his camera and tries his damnedest to encourage them to do one of three things, right there and then.

Flash tits. Parade pussy. Suck cock.

On a good day, all three.

On a bad day – and, it has to be said, most days are bad days – Bundy will take anything he can get. He’ll settle for less because less is better than nothing at all and Bundy’s really not fussy. On a bad day he’ll get what’s known in the biz as a sneak shot, a photograph taken of the subject unawares. A photograph that comes in a number of specific sub‑categories: the down‑blouse, the up‑skirt, the crotch shot, the nip‑slip, the pussy‑slip, and so on.

Bundy seems to fancy himself as the Simon Cowell of internet porn. A curator of adult entertainment, a Svengali of sexual talent – because that’s what he likes to call the girls who have submitted to his dubious charms. Talent.

This is what Bundy does.

He buys access, relationships, patronage to people, places and things through his extensive portfolio of girls in explicit poses. To him, it’s a case of supply and demand, the logic of the market. He’s a true capitalist.

But he has far too much pride, and too large an ego, to call himself a pornographer. Bundy considers himself an artist. A fearless chronicler of sex and the single male – himself – in the modern age.

In reality, there’s a vast gulf between what Bundy thinks he is and what he really is.

A photographer by trade. A pornographer by default.

A paparazzo in theory. A sexual predator with a camera in practice.

Bundy likes to call himself an internet entrepreneur and social media engineer.

I’d lean more towards calling him a bottom‑feeding hipster.

You hate him already.

Don’t.

Anna tells me Bundy has lots of great qualities. They’re just not immediately obvious. But they are there, if you look past the smirk, the leer and the extreme cynicism that colors anything and everything he does. And because he’s Anna’s friend, I want to like him too. At the same time, I’m more than aware that Bundy’s the kind of guy your mother always warned you about, the one she told you was ‘bad news’.

At least with those kind of guys, like with Bundy, there’s no pretense to be anything else. What you see is what you get. And Bundy’s certainly driven. Just possibly in all the wrong directions.

I’ll give him this. He’s great fun to be around. And you never know what’s going to happen, where you’ll end up, or with who.

We’re in a bar. One of Bundy’s haunts. The Bread and Butter, a regular corner bar named like a soup kitchen. There’s dirt on the floor, dirt on the walls, cracked vinyl seats, chipped glasses and a toilet that doesn’t flush; grime and dysfunction accumulated over years that conveys a certain authenticity to people who have none – Bundy’s kind of people, who have invaded this once‑unpretentious local drinking establishment and made it their own.

The Bread and Butter is tended by a guy who’s only got a first name, Sal, a grizzled Italian‑American war veteran who’s been here since the place opened and really resents the way the neighborhood’s changed, especially his bar. So Sal’s decided he would much rather insult his clientele than serve them drinks. He insults their appearance, their manners, their parents and, if that doesn’t work, suggests they’re the product of incest; anything to get a rise out of them. And these people think that’s part of the charm, which just makes him even more mad. But Sal has had to bow to the inevitable, because he’s making more money now than he’s ever done. He’s making money hand over fist, even though he doesn’t understand how because, as far as he can tell, none of these kids have a job.

Sal treats his customers like shit, but has a soft spot for Bundy. The reason why is pretty simple. Bundy gives Sal free publicity by featuring the talent he finds there on his website. In return, Sal gives him free drinks. And, I have to admit, Bundy’s really got this down to an art.

Using free drinks to score free pussy. To score free drinks. To score free pussy.

Technology being what it is, he can post the photos as content right from his camera. They go live almost the second he takes them.

This is Bundy’s philosophy.

Submit first. Ask permission later.

Because Bundy already considers the act itself informed consent. And anyway he’s going to make her a star before she’s even gotten round to wiping the come from the corners of her mouth.

Bundy says, ‘You’re not like all the other girls.’ And I know he’s spinning me a line that’s probably worked a thousand times before. But not this time.

‘How so,’ I say, ‘because my mouth is connected to my brain and not your cock?’

He pretends not to hear.

Bundy gets us both a drink, me and Anna. He gets mine wrong. I ask for orange juice. I get a Screwdriver. He thinks I wouldn’t notice.

Cute trick.

I figure he thinks, she’s drunk already. What’s the harm of one more. More will loosen her up. And he’ll make sure that the refills keep coming thick and fast. Then the photos will come out again and they won’t seem so dumb and abusive. And so it goes. The gradual wearing down. I can see it coming.

What Bundy doesn’t know is this:

I don’t drink.

And the last thing I want is to end up on his website as bait for some loser trolling the internet for jerk‑off material.

He likes to think that each site expresses a different aspect of his personality, the way people wear a different pairs of glasses according to their mood. Only, like glasses, what you see is essentially what you get. The only thing that’s really different is the color of the frames. And Bundy’s personality only comes in one shade.

So Bundy’s websites, they’re all essentially interchangeable. Different titles. Same content. More opportunities to sell advertising.

‘The thing about Bundy is,’ says Anna, in that dreamy, ditzy, completely endearing way of hers, ‘you’d never know it, but he’s kind of a genius.’

I’m not convinced.

Bundy’s version of genius came up with a website called Red Hot Cherry Poppers, to cater to his predilection for young girls, dumb girls, girls who don’t see him coming.

He came up with one called Caramel Candy Cotton Coochies to express his cutesy romantic side. His girly Hello Kitty keychain side.

And not forgetting NFA – aka, No Fags Allowed. To express Bundy’s fear of seeming gay. Not just casual homophobia. Homophobia disguised as irony.

As if there’s any difference.

All part and parcel of the hipster credo to which Bundy subscribes to.

Racism as social commentary. Intolerance as a badge of pride. Misogyny as a lifestyle choice. Irony as a fashion statement.

You know how gang members who’ve committed a particularly grisly murder get a teardrop tattoo inked under their eye, a clear warning to all their peers that they’ve earned their stripes and are NTBFW – Not To Be Fucked With.

Well, Bundy doesn’t have a tear. He has a tear‑sized Krispy Kreme doughnut. With a swirl of pink frosting.

In Russia, convicted members of criminal gangs, bored out of their minds sitting in isolated gulags, bide their time by tattooing a trail of tears, misery and violence on their bodies – skulls and knives, severed heads and crucifixion scenes – that purport to tell the true tale of their bearer.

Well, Bundy’s tells the story of his personality, and it’s not a pretty picture either. Like a parody of body art. A parody of a parody of bad body art. As if God set out to make an example of him, a walking, talking tattooed fool, covered in tattoos that are embarrassed to call themselves tattoos.

Not least, Bundy’s pride and joy. The ink that makes you think that maybe, just maybe, Paris Hilton might not be the dumbest string of DNA to walk the planet. Or else, maybe the kind of genius Albert Einstein always aspired to be.

This tattoo is truly the secret of Bundy’s success, if you can really call it that, with the ladies.

But not with me.

Bundy’s already decided I’m a lost cause and he’s looking for fresh meat. He’s descended on a girl who looks like she might have potential. A pretty, geeky hipster girl with square‑rimmed glasses, black lipstick and a Mayhem T‑shirt. Trying to be black metal but failing miserably.

Anna says, ‘Just watch.’

And I get to see Bundy in action. I get to witness the routine. And it’s simple, really. And I realize Anna’s right. So simple, it is almost genius.

Bundy’s talking to this girl, and he knows he’s got her where he wants her but she’s still playing hard to get. And so he pulls his trump card.

Bundy says, ‘I promise that once you see my cock, you’re gonna want to put it in your mouth. I guarantee it. I double guarantee it.’

He says it in the cutest pussycat voice he can muster. And, just to be sure, he’s also making puppy dog eyes. Because he knows that if they’ve come this far, if they’re still standing in front of him, listening to what he has to say, if they’ve fallen for this then they’ll probably go all the way, and they won’t need a whole lot more persuading.

And Bundy pulls out his cock. Leaves it hanging there out of his pants for this pretty‑geeky‑dumb‑wannabe‑black‑metal‑but‑failing‑miserably‑hipster girl to work out exactly what it is that she’s looking at.

The head of Bundy’s penis.

With EAT tattooed across the top.

And ME inscribed on the underside.

Like the mushroom in Alice in Wonderland , except it doesn’t make any difference which side you take a bite of.

And I don’t know who I feel more sorry for.

The tattooist who put it there.

The girl who’s about to put it in her mouth.

Bundy.

Or his parents.

His poor parents.

Bundy’s parents were yuppies.

You hate him even more.

Don’t. Let me finish.

Bundy’s parents were yuppies who made their money in a banking boom, back in the days when yuppies, AIDS, Madonna and crack were the biggest things going. But ‘were’ in the operative sense. Shortly after Bundy was born they lost everything. In crack‑fueled shopping sprees, acquiring crap they couldn’t possibly need and certainly didn’t want. Crap they later sold at rock‑bottom prices for rocks of crack that, as inflation goes, cost more than a large uncut diamond smuggled out of Sierra Leone. So yeah, growing up, Bundy had something of a hard luck life. This is what he tells me, in one final ploy, to play the sympathy card.

All this happened sometime in the eighties, but if you were to ask Bundy, he’d be a little vague on dates, not so hot on those important little details, like when he was born. The most I can get out of him is this.

‘It was after eight‑track tape and before CDs,’ he says. ‘When The Police were still cool and before they sucked. Somewhere between blockbuster albums, possibly after Thriller and before Purple Rain . Or maybe the other way round.’

Bundy says he can’t remember because he was just a baby. MTV was on all the time and he was planted in front of it in his bouncy inflatable crib while his parents were doing lines of coke the size of Cuban cigars off a stained glass coffee table through monogrammed silver coke straws.

But MTV at that time was just a blur of big hair and eyeliner, of Linn drums and Roland synths, and it was hard to distinguish Duran Duran from Kajagoogoo or Mötley Crüe.

Bundy says, ‘It was after Martha Quinn and before Downtown Julie Brown. No, wait… between Adam Curry and Kurt Loder.’

He’s trying to make me think he’s got Asperger’s and a savant‑like recall of all the VJs on MTV in the order they first appeared. But I’ve got no idea who he’s even talking about because when I was born, VJs on MTV were all but a thing of the past and MC Hammer was making his ill‑advised comeback as a born‑again gangsta rapper.

From everything he’s told me, I can deduce three things. Bundy is much older than he looks. Too old to look like he does. And definitely old enough to know better.

Bundy’s parents also gifted him with a middle name, Royale – with a superfluous ‘e’ – thinking it would confer kingly status on their first‑born: Bundy Royale Tremayne.

And there you pretty much have the root of all Bundy’s problems. Charles Foster Kane had his mommy fixation. Bundy Royale Tremayne has his name. Given to him on a whim the night after the morning before his parents went on a massive bender. And feeling terribly sorry for herself, that’s when his mom decided to kick drugs.

This was sometime into her second trimester. This was her big idea. That maybe a steady diet of crack cocaine, Hostess Twinkies, cheese whips and Beaujolais Nouveau wasn’t so good for her unborn baby’s future health.

For Bundy’s folks, this was such a momentous decision they decided to commit the night to memory by naming their firstborn. Crack cocaine not being that conducive to long‑term thinking, they named him after whatever was on TV that night. They named him during an ad break in a true crime documentary, after a particularly odious serial killer and some cheap marketing gimmick dreamt up to sell junk food to junkies.

And the Tremayne, even though it sounds like the name of a doctor on General Hospital , that was just part of the deal.

As if all that isn’t going to lead to a massive personality crisis somewhere down the line once their sweet baby boy starts to walk and talk and shit and think for itself.

To say that Bundy was born with a handicap is a massive, massive understatement. But I have to say, he’s coped with it admirably. He’s achieved a lot, given the circumstances.

He’s almost famous. Certainly notorious.

The world is at his feet.

And slutty girls with low self‑esteem are on their knees before him.

Bundy’s on to victim number three in less than an hour. And he’s warming up now, so it doesn’t take long, maybe ninety seconds, before his cock is already hanging out of his zipper, tattoo ready for inspection.

From what I can see, from where Anna and I are sitting, at the bar, Bundy’s cock looks like one of those boiled German sausages, the ones made of a very pale sweet meat spiced with herbs and stuffed into a thick rubbery skin, like a pigskin condom. You don’t eat the skin and you wouldn’t want to. To cook it, you leave the sausage in a pan of hot water that’s been taken off the boil, then you lance the skin and peel it off.

Or else you hold the hot sausage ever so gingerly between the thumb and forefingers of both hands, put your lips to the tiny hole at the top, and suck and suck and suck, until the skin slips back and the meat pops into your mouth.

Bundy’s cock looks like one of those sausages. Short, fat, stubby and pale, with a head that’s flat and wide, like an oyster mushroom, or a paper hat at a party that somebody sat on. And it has EAT ME carved around it in thick, black gothic script.

If that sounds pretty unappetizing, if it sounds like the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to put in your mouth, then that’s about right.

It’s not the kind of thing I would want to put in my mouth. But it didn’t stop any of these girls.

It didn’t stop them snorting cocaine off it either. Maybe they figured that was an easy compromise to make. So they wouldn’t have to find out if it tastes as unappetizing as it looks.

And I feel sorry for them. Not because they’ve compromised themselves. But because they did it for so little reward.

Not really even a line.

More like a bump.

What is it about guys with small dicks anyway?

They always have something to prove, always want to show you what they’re made of. They always have to tell you how big their cock is. How women always tell them how big it is. And they get away with it, for one reason and one reason only.

Because ‘big’ is such a relative term.

When you finally get to see it, after all that hype, it couldn’t fail to be a disappointment and you try not to show it on your face. Because, in actual fact, ‘big’ is no bigger than a cocktail sausage with one of those tiny bows of skin at the end.

And the ones who don’t want to tell you how big it is, the ones who think they’re smarter than that, they’ll try and show you instead.

They’ll pull out a bunch of badly composed, self‑shot polaroids of them fucking a girlfriend and pretend it’s an art project.

Big guy. Tiny cock. Something to prove.

Because they’ve only just worked out what everyone in Hollywood, everyone in the porn industry, has known for years and years and years.

Everything looks bigger on film.

Everything but everything.

Because, despite what you may have heard, the camera always lies.

Or else they might try and show you photos taken on their phone of some random lonely girl they and their best bud picked up in a bar one night and plied with drinks using their dad’s credit card until she was almost totally shit‑faced. Then they dragged her back to their apartment, virtually unconscious, propped her up on the couch and both face‑fucked her. First in turn. Then at the same time.

They face fuck her until they both come. Simultaneously. Both telling themselves it’s not because they were rubbing up against their best bud’s cock in the same girl’s mouth.

But because she gave such good head.

Or else they face fuck her until she wakes up, realizes what’s happening to her, and vomits.

Whichever comes first.

Bundy has a website for that too: What Girls Want.

No irony intended.

Devoted entirely to Bundy’s personal archive of girls, in various stages of undress and inebriation, chowing down on his penis.

Even though I can’t imagine it has much of an audience, other than Bundy. And the women who appear on it, who only check it out as a memo to self:

Never accept free drinks from strangers in bars.

The bar is starting to get pretty full now. Bundy’s hardcore army of fans have already worked out where he is from the GPS data on the photos he posted not thirty minutes ago. He’s starting to draw a crowd. Things are getting out of control.

This poor girl is pumping Bundy’s cock with her pretty little mouth, and there’s a crowd of jocks standing around them. A bunch of jocks in a hipster bar looking terribly out of place. They’re slamming shots of Jäger and Jack Daniels and pumping their fists in the air, chanting:

BUN‑DEE.

BUN‑DEE.

BUN‑DEE.

And it cramps his style. As it would.

So Bundy gets a few shots off, because that’s all he needs, uploads and pulls out.

He slings his camera around his neck, dashes over to Anna and me at the bar and says, ‘Let’s go.’

And we split.

It’s early when I crawl to bed. Three, at least, maybe close to four. I didn’t expect to be out this long. The room is dark and still. I think Jack’s asleep.

I’ve barely laid my head on the pillow when he says, ‘Where were you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

He says it again. ‘Where were you?’

I can’t tell him.

‘With Anna,’ I say.

Only half a lie.

I wait for the conversation to continue. It doesn’t. He’s not happy. I know he’s not happy.

‘Jack,’ I say.

No reply.

‘Jack?’

I reach over and touch his arm. He recoils and turns away from me sharply, rolling onto his side and out of reach.

‘Jack, I’m sorry,’ I say.

What else can I say?

Still no response. The silence is deafening. I want to scream just so I can drown it out, just so he’ll have to react.

The room is dark and still. For the longest time.

Then he says, coldly, ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning, Catherine.’

We don’t talk about it in the morning. I oversleep and Jack’s already gone. I hate waking up and he’s not there. Some people are afraid to go to sleep alone. I’m afraid of waking up, never knowing whether the new day is going to greet me with an empty bed, and no one there to hold me.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 695