Down By Ralph Greco

“I have a thing for rabbits, what can I tell you?”

“Yeah, but those guys in the suits, whata they call um, ‘Furries’?”

“Everyone has their specific little desires when it comes to sex. So we just dressed up and…

“…ew, ew, don’t tell me anymore, please.”

Cara gulped her latte-double-shot-skim and I smiled into my tea thinking of the sex Garret and I had had the night before and how ironic it was that my little tale about bunny dress-up could bother my old college roommate so much. I wasn’t about to remind the petite black girl, but I recalled some rather strange noises emanating from Cara’s room when we shared that suite in junior/senior year; I had heard all kinds of grunts, moans and slaps…and not always when Cara was with a partner. She was just as kinky me, so my little bunny-suit adventure didn’t attack her sensibilities as much as she liked to pretend sitting here in our sedate Connecticut Coffee And… while she played suburban mom with her cute one year-old asleep in the stroller at her feet.

Hell, she knew to use the word ‘Furries’.

There was no way I was going to give up these Thursdays, regaling my best friend my latest encounter, especially if they happened to be as much fun as my last night rendezvous. I knew Cara regarded me as a 25 year-old woman with a voracious libido, looking for the next big connection-or at least a sizable one-and this was true enough. But she had no idea really what is was like trying to find peace of mind out here in east coast United States suburbia when you weren’t, technically, human.

“You comin’ with me to Home Depot or not?” Cara said, suddenly standing up.

Either her latte had gone cold, she was finally disgusted with me (at least for this morning, she’d be back cringing through my latest next week) or my best friend really had to pick up that what-ever-you-call it at the store for her husband Ron. I wasn’t such a fan of big spaces like Home Depot, I rather liked little out of the way coffee shops like this, and of course bookshops and tiny corners of libraries where I spent most of my time. I knew it harkened back to those of-so-formative few days I spent chasing you-know-who down the you-know-what but I regarded cavernous retail citadels like Home Depot like I did anal sex in that, it’s nice to know it’s there when you need it, but you don’t have to go there all that often.

I stood as Cara did, bent to kiss perfect sleeping baby Jessica on the cheek then stood to do the same to her mom.

“I got to get my ass to the library.”

Cara, my mother, actually nobody ever questioned me about this habit I had of burying myself in the library all hours of whatever day it was. During my lunch hour from the classroom, during these days off in summer, basically whenever I could, I was among the high shelves routing through as much classic literature as I could find…it almost preoccupied me as much as my sex life.

How I had come to find myself set free from the pages of Lewis Carroll’s book, a living and breathing girl, living some hundred years plus later on the east coast of the United States, I had no explanation for. My ‘parents’ never spoke about finding me, if it was a Superman-space-ship-crash-in-the-back-forty kind of a thing or I simply was there one moment when I wasn’t before. What could easily have been called a childhood fantasy had grown to a teenage obsession then a family secret not to be spoken of, telling though as it was that my very proper parents never once suggested therapy for what most parents would have thought a deep delusion. I had taken their acceptance to be a simple acquiescence of what they both couldn’t truly understand, that I was Alice come to life but as there were no pictures of me pre the age of seven my memories prior to my adventures were null and void-except for my dull recall of a sister-I knew, deeper then I knew anything in my addled sex-starved psyche that I was indeed that Alice. I simply had grown like any normal girl the late eighties in American culture (1980’s that is) having nothing ever unusual about my existence expect that my blonde locks never dulled nor never needed cutting.

Like anything else, fiction or not, life intrudes. Didn’t Lennon say, “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans?”

The book, rich as it is, doesn’t give one much clues beyond what happens to Alice (me) when she (me) has her adventure. Yes, there are all the mathematical conundrums, the ‘nonsense literature’ aspect, the Queen, the playing cards but I feel as I felt in the book when I run away from my sister and tell her to consider to experience it all for herself. The “Eat Me’ cake always kind of gives me a tickle you-know-where, but even reading the sequel, which I wasn’t around for (I mean I am in it but I dropped out of the book after running away from my sister) doesn’t give me much to go on save for peaking my interest in chess. It’s really just a book I happened to sprout from, and not unlike any belief system born of text I try to live my life with the knowledge of what was written but not so as to get all stifled by it.

I do know my birthday is May 4^th though.

Of course Alonzo was waiting for me when I reached the Southside Branch ten minutes later. The lanky black boy and I had taken to meeting here as much as his part-time job and propriety would allow. Ten years my junior, other then my parents he was the only one who knew who I was, or at least he tolerated my suspicions as my folks did.

The handsome boy was an ex-student and more likely to take pity on his junior-year English teacher then most had they heard my wild claim.

“So, what’s on the agenda today?” I asked as we took our usual two-seater table far in the back of the adult section, off the right of the true crime books.

“The stupefying humbling realization that you are not the only one,” he said, as always mesmerizing me with his deep brown eyes, his quick thin-lipped smile, his ‘jump-right-into-it-ness’.

When he was my pupil Alonzo had been just as inquisitive, now some three years on I found his desire to share the big cosmic questions with me sometimes as unnerving as they were deeply erotic. That we hadn’t yet touched beyond our usual kiss hello had me burning for this young man more than I burned for Garret and he was currently indulging my bunny fantasies. Was I under-sexed or simply in need of more mental stimulation as I got older?

“I have agreed that yes, it is logical to assume that I am not the only one,” I said smiling back, “we have been over this dear.”

Alonzo always smiled when I called him that, as he did then. Leaning across the table he whispered:

“But you haven’t considered the potential if you could all meet, and make your presence known. It just amazes me that right now we might be sitting a table away from Christopher Robin or…”

“’t amazes me to, but like any minority… “ I interrupted him and stopped to stare hard at the deep black face before me, “…I am just trying to get through the day without calling too much attention to myself.”

“Well,” and here the young man lean back in his chair and exhaled “well, yes, that I can relate to, I guess.”

I was burning for the young man. I hoped he didn’t catch the blush on my white neck, the dilation of my pupils. For me, the one complete and sure aphrodisiac is acceptance, the full non-judgmental embrace of my oddity. Garret wearing a bunny suit, my parents not speaking a word, even Cara agreeing to still meet me no matter what perversity I revealed, all of it made me feel warm and fuzzy in a way I could not explain. Alonzo never once raising his eyebrow to his weird English Lit. teacher’s wild tale, his continued meeting with me here and now his excitement over a wild strategy he was considering, made me want this guy even worse than I usually did.

For whatever reasons when I get hot, sex crazed, horny, whatever you want to call it my senses heighten to ridiculous proportions, which only make me hornier. Alonzo slid back in the plastic seated chair and the tight “Shspurt” his jean-ed rump made as he did so ran up my spine that I shot up off my chair, grabbed his hand and pulled him down along the back wall.

“A… “ he tried but I had him up between the very last row of hardcovers and the alcove where a dead copy machine is kept. We were alone for the moment, at least.

“Take it out,” I said as softly yet forcibly as I could, “take it out now.”

Poor guy had no idea what to say or do, so I reached down and unzipped for him.

“Alice,” he whispered, the sound of this ex-student using my name so thrilling to me; right up until a month ago Alonzo was still calling me Miss Jules (my parents’ last name). I looked deep at him as I managed his jeans open and he squirmed back into the wall.

I don’t know what motivates normal women, but I do what motivates me. I need to be more than Alice from the book as much I need to be more than a human lady. I need to be all things to myself, a sexual vixen, an off-for-summer slightly sad school teacher still living with her folks, a fictional character brought to life by some unknown alchemy, and a woman right then getting on her knees to coax Alonzo’s beautifully thick erection over his briefs and into my hand then my mou…

“Christ Alice, Christ!” the man/boy above me growled as I swallowed him then and he lie back against the hard back wall, so unlike a waiting dark hole I could have cried over the difference in realities.