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Punch and Judy
Judy thought Jack was a cute dufus. Jack thought Judy was cute but not a dufus. A dufus was a term for a really big strong guy. Jack had been called that many times in his life. Jack was exactly that, but Judy certainly wasn’t. She was definitely cute and smart and no guy. She also taught college while he never finished it.
All of Judy’s friends agreed with the dufus part of Jack. One of Judy’s MFA students once referred to Jack as Punch. The nickname stuck and the couple became Punch and Judy to their small world of familiars. Jack liked the attention and didn’t object to this name either. He thought Punch was a strong name also. Jack could always take a punch. Jack was tough and extremely strong, by definition, a dufus. Punch and Judy also fit with the dynamic of their relationship. Judy would exorcise her academic and professional frustration demons upon Jack. The manifestations of those frustrations were displayed both physically and verbally. That was okay with Jack too. He never understood most of what Judy said anyway. She was a college English professor; he was only a college grounds keeper. And when Judy hit him with her fists, it felt like a deep tissue massage. Jack had gotten to enjoy massages after a long practice or a tough football game. Sports were Jack’s life, really. Jack felt he was born at the center of that frontline. He was always the biggest and heaviest of all the boys his age. Every since he started playing football at nine years old, he was the Center. Every down started with his hands on the ball. It made him feel important. He was called the CENTER. He was for the moment at least, the center of everyone’s attention. As Punch to Judy, he felt again, that being the CENTER of attention, even if it was only one person now and not a stadium full of people, as before.
Jack met Judy one day on the college’s Central Quad when he told her she couldn’t have an open fire on the lawn; that it left ugly black scorch marks in the grass; that he would have to re-turf it after she was done with her burning. Judy had been furious with the Chairman of the English Department and thus was ceremonially burning her staff card, classes syllabi, and a three foot stack of printed out e-mail Departmental memo’s she had never read. She hadn’t read the electronic versions of them either, just to be consistent. But when Jack spoke to Judy, she, at once, saw him as another, more pleasurable vehicle for the expression and relief of her passions, a more sociable alternative to fire. Her first interaction with Jack was to punch him in the stomach. He smiled at her punch and thus she liked him immediately for his benign and inappropriate response.
Judy never hid the fact that she liked Jack, as she put it, “. . . for his hard dick and flaccid personality. If they did come up with an intellectual Viagra, I won’t let him have it.” She liked his dufusness as much as his hard dick and equally hard body. They had sex within a half hour after that first punch and the fire being put out. Judy had to call the Head of Maintenance for the first of many times to personally request Jack’s assistance with “important English department facilities maintenance matters.” Otherwise, Jack was afraid to take off the afternoon. He liked his job and didn’t want to do anything to disappoint his boss and possibly lose his job. He had gotten the job as a freshman while he was still playing football for the college. He couldn’t keep up with the class work, even in the sports classes, so, so much for college and college football. Still, they let him keep the grounds keeper job, everyone liked Jack. Everyone loves a dufus, by definition.
In Judy’s Departmental office, Judy had Jack move the desk in front of the door. Its repositioning provided more security as well as more space for their “enthusiastic physical displays of affection.” Judy said to Jack as he easily relocated the desk. “The alternative to fire.” Jack smiled broadly at her statement. He knew what the combination of the word affection and a locked door meant; being a dufus meant being a real man. Also, the large boxes of condoms Judy pulled out of that desk’s drawer clarified any possible misunderstandings. With the removal of the desk and their clothes, Judy unleashed her pent up rage, released her emotional fire against Jack muscular, smiling bulk with a sexual intensity that consumed most of Judy’s condom stocks and the day. Judy remained on top, riding Jack’s bulk like a naked cow puncher and she did punch. She pounded on his chest as they bucked. Jack would laugh with each punch. He loved the attention. Judy would grunt with fury with each strike. Her hands were always balled in fists as she displayed her fiery affection. Jack just kept his enormous hands open and on her hips, helping her move when her energy waned, which happened just as she reached her climax. Jack had to assist her multiple times that afternoon. That first encounter lasted the entire afternoon and into the evening. This first time almost lasted longer than any other intimate relationship Judy had had with a male. Jack was so very different. He allowed her to quench, if only for a few hours, the fires that burned forever within her. When she was eventually finished, she simply slid off Jack’s massive chest and fell asleep beside him on the floor. Again a unique situation for Judy; to have her inner self and her body synchronized so they dropped into sleep at the same time.
Jack just smiled. Most women he had been with seemed to not enjoy sex with him. They were always asking him, telling him, to do this and do that, go faster, go gentler, do, do, do. Judy didn’t talk. She did all the moving. He just had to stay there and stay hard. He could do that. Also, no woman had ever just gone to sleep without more talking; as if they hadn’t done enough already. Judy’s immediate snores gave Jack a sense of pride; a sense of satisfaction for a job well done. He had only ever before felt that way on the football field. He was so happy that he wanted to listen to the radio. There was always a game on. Without moving, he reached over and got his radio out of his overalls pocket. He put in the earplugs and searched the AM band for a game. Jack liked AM radio because they yelled a lot and used words that he could understand, mostly. He liked sports for exactly the same reasons.
Judy hated being an academic, but she had no other useful skills, except writing well and telling other people when they didn’t. When she was an adolescent, she read a book or two a day or more. She literally read all of the novels and poetry in her middle school library. She lived in the world of fiction; inevitably she started writing it herself. During her high school years, she burned everything she wrote that she didn’t need for her class assignments. She would even burn those after the teacher had returned them with the typical A+ in place. She would do the burning once a month in the back yard, summer or winter. Being an only child, her parents didn’t know what a normal child was like and since she was always careful with the flames, they quickly grew complacent to Judy’s monthly inflammatory activities.
Judy read about people both competent and incompetent: loving; struggling; anguishing; scheming; losing love, a child or their sight; having sex with themselves or one or two or more people; killing themselves or one or two or more people; lying, always lying; a lot of lying in fiction. Fiction was lying, by definition. Still, Judy never connected the fictional world with her reality. What characters did in novels was like something that Gods did in Olympus or Valhalla; not for a mere mortal, like Judy, to be involved in. That is, until she was seventeen. At seventeen Judy’s body was strong enough to overwhelm Judy’s brain. Judy’s body wanted to have sex with a boy, safe sex, of course. Judy knew she wasn’t beautiful or popular. She wasn’t fat though, nor was she ugly. She was plain and unglamorous. Still, Judy’s body seemed to know something about boys that Judy’s brain didn’t. Judy’s brain soon learned it though, through many experiences. Being beautiful didn’t matter. Being popular didn’t matter. A girl being available was all that mattered to any boy. Soon Judy could have sex anytime she wanted. Her parents were so happy that she was showing interest in anything other than books and fire that when she had boys ‘over to study’ her parents wouldn’t question the locked bedroom door or the fact that it was a different boy each time. Judy wasn’t looking for a friend; she was looking for an orgasm. By any high school student standard Judy was a slut. Judy didn’t care. The sex was always on her terms, not the boys.
“They were just dildos in blue jeans; vibrators without batteries.” As Judy had written in one of her early, burned novels. Judy referred to herself as a Discretionary Slut. This accolade became the title of her first published novel. It was the first volume in her Overthrowing Femininity trilogy. The other volumes were: An Uzi of her Own (The O being the sign for female) and Magnum, P.M.S. An Uzi of her Own had been made into soft core porn - slasher film. Only males died in it. The only rape was of guys. After saying “Okay” for them to make the film, Judy had nothing more to do with it. She loved the whole idea of it, but she never saw the completed film. To Judy, words were like baby snakes; she laid them as eggs and then they were on their own. It was the reason Judy never read, nor cared about literary critics. After the film’s release, the Woman Writers Guild accused Judy of “exploitation and simply being excessively gross.” That she was “being played by the male pornographers and general exploiters of women.”
Judy, who had her tenured academic position by then, told the Guild to “Fuck your collective self! The money I got from the movie alone is more than I will ever make as an English Professor. And if being exploited means, men giving their money to me for a bunch of words I once threw together; Long Live Exploitation! Oh and go Fuck yourselves again.” The Women’s Writer’s Guild never again invited her to speak at any of their functions.
In fact, because of the movie and her novel money, Judy didn’t need her academic position, either. She had more than enough cash already for her minimalistic style of life. Her novels sold despite the purposeful venom they exuded. “You never know what people like.” Was Judy’s reply to the question, Why is such anti-male sex and violence so popular with both men and women? “And in my novels I have never used a bath tub for any meaningful encounter other than chopping up a body and draining blood.”
Thus despite political insecurity in the world, or because of it, money from her novel sales was almost guaranteed. She could quit the college anytime she wanted. She hated the English Department. They hated her back. Still, she didn’t take it to heart. Judy knew their hate for her wasn’t personal, that it originated from the old Adage: “There’s nothing worse than someone else’s success.” And the ever reliable professional jealously. Judy didn’t really know why she hated them so much. She barely knew most of their names, let alone their character flaws and annoying habits. The only thing she was certain of about her colleagues was their dullness, their single simple mindedness, their academic inertia made her furious. She would grow into a red rage as one of them gave their detailed, and annotated, explanation of why the Marvell line, “The grave is a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.” Was significant to the modern world.
“Death, like love, is a cliché used in excess!” Judy screamed in interruption. “They are both something that everyone fantasizes on but no one understands! I repose with the Donne quote. ‘Am I, by being dead, immortal, can ghosts die?’ That’s originality!” In an academic argument, it’s always best to fight a quote with another quote.
With later self-examination, Judy realized that the rage at her colleague’s academic nitpicking on that line was the answer; it was the reason she didn’t quit, couldn’t quit this stupid endeavor to teach anyone anything and live off her writing. Her Condo was a fine and private place and a grave! She hated going back there alone. There, there was no embrace. She slept in her office many nights, curled up in her chair.
On one evening tryst in her office, as Judy snored on the floor, Jack finally looked at the books in her office bookshelf. His AM radio shouted in his ears as he took out each book and turned it horizontal so he could read the title and the author’s name. He could never understand how people read writing that was going up and down. It gave him a headache whenever he tried. Judy never told him anything about herself. When he did ask, she would punch him in the shoulder and answer in the short words. “That’s boring, let’s fuck.” Still, Jack wondered about her. He thought, maybe knowing what she had on her bookshelf would help him get to know her.
Her drunken friends seemed to know as little about her as he did. When Judy took Jack out with her friends, all they wanted to do mostly was to get so drunk they could barely stand and then take turns calling him Punch or warning him that a punch was coming and then punching Jack in the stomach. They would hit him as hard as they could. The recoil of their fist from Jack’s rock hard abs would knock them over. They would laugh and laugh until they could stand up and try again. Judy’s friends were more silly than fun to Jack.
“Like monkeys in a cage or chimps on a stage.” He once said to Judy. She laughed until she couldn’t breathe and then stopped. Nothing else was said.
Judy’s choice of friends confused Jack. Judy didn’t drink. Jack didn’t mind a beer or two after work but too much beer interfered with his workouts. It confused Jack that Judy preferred to hang around with drunks and not someone from her work like he did. Jack was usually confused about Judy’s behavior, well, for every other thing but sex. He understood that, well most of it. But Jack wanted to know more, so he was reading book titles in the dark. He was startled when he read her name on the books on the top shelf. Most of the titles didn’t make anymore sense to him than most of what Judy said, but then there was An Uzi of her Own. Jack had seen that flick many times with his football buddies. What was this? It had never occurred to Jack that a Porn movie might come from a hard bound book. Jack took the book over to the window and there, naked in the moonlight, he slowly read, “Now a minor motion picture” on the back fly leaf. Porn flicks came from exotic places like the San Fernando Valley, not here at some back woods college. He looked down at Judy’s naked, curled up body on the floor, also framed by moonlight; this revelation about her and porn did Jack enormous help. Now he understood the sex part. He suddenly became disappointed. Maybe it was all research for another book or flick. Jack didn’t like being sad, but he became sad anyway. Was this just business to her? Jack would ask her tomorrow but he knew she would just hit him and want to fuck. Oh well, being studied wasn’t too bad. The coach’s use to video tape his football performances and point out his mistakes and then tell him how to correct them. He had gotten use to that, eventually. At least, this research made him come. “Equal pay for equal work.” He had once heard someone say. It seemed to fit here. Good. What more could he ask for? His buddies will go wild to know that he was banging a porn star, of sorts. The bunch of them were going turkey hunting this weekend. He would tell them then. It’ll be a major event. Hot Damn! Jack smiled down at Judy’s small balled up form. Her fists were balled tight even in her sleep. He had an erection from his enlightenment on Judy and porn. He put the book back on the shelf and lay down beside the sleeping Judy. He was under strict instructions from her, when his dick was hard again he had to wake her up. Jack always followed her instructions.
After this recent endlessly infuriating faculty meeting, Judy wanted to call Jack and have him throw her desk out the window so she could set fire to it in the Quad. She didn’t call him for multiple reasons; first and for most, she couldn’t destroy the most effective of office door locks; second, it was a metal desk; third, Jack had already left for his turkey shot. They were only using hand guns to shot the turkeys. They all thought it made the hunt more sporting somehow; Dufus and Dufi against big flightless birds. Judy wasn’t certain who would win. “Fuck it!” She needed to set something on fire, now. She looked for the most deservingly combustible thing in her office; her student’s stories! She didn’t need to read them, she always graded arbitrarily, anyway. She swept the stack off her metal desk into her matching metal trash can, lit a packet of matches she took from the box beside her box of condoms and dropped it into the metal cylinder. She watched the flames hop from the matches to the poor, yet struggling fiction. She set the can on the window sill, opened the window and pushed out the can of flaming student dreams and misrepresentations.
As the flames cascaded down the side of the English Department building, the students in the Quad applauded and cheered. The student body relished and revered Judy’s many and diverse displays of defiance. Although, they liked the fiery one’s, like this one, best. There was a special weekly column in the Campus Newspaper devoted to Judy’s perpetual rebellion. It was entitled Just Judy! These students seemed to enjoy understatement and irony as much as they liked fire. Judy knew that Just Judy! Was the main reason her colleagues in the entire college hated her. Every academic ever born hated the professor that was popular with the students.
“Fuck all of you!” Judy yelled out of her office window after the burning waterfall; this shout only made the students cheer again. Judy meant them too, but Judy hated to explain herself and slammed down the window to another round of cheers.
This wasn’t a concealed weapons state, so when hunting with a hand gun you couldn’t put it in your pocket or belt. You had to carry it in your hand. Jack and his buds thus were staggering along in the woods, guns in hands, still drunk from last nights beer drinking challenges. Jack had wanted to tell them about Judy then but the guys were too excited about seeing who threw up first, so Jack waited until today. Jack was hung over but proud that he hadn’t thrown up first. He didn’t drink that much, too often, but he could always rise to a challenge. Now, everyone was looking for a turkey. A Tom would be best, but whatever they stumbled across would do. It didn’t matter really; they’d kill it, male or female. He would tell them right after they had bagged a bird. It would add to the glee. There went a gobbler off to the right.
“Circle ‘round!” Someone yelled and everybody started to run. Despite the general uncertainty of which direction to ‘circle ‘round’ in, part of the group was able to cut off the big gobbler’s escape. The group straggled into finally encircling the big, proud Tom turkey. Defiant and dumb, the dufus of birds, it stood in the center of a small clearing among the trees. The circle of would-be big bird assassins leaned back against the closest tree to catch their breath. Many were trying not to throw up more. The Tom had nowhere to go. With this pause in the action, Jack thought he would tell them now, and then they could shoot. Jack was never good with words, so he tried being direct.
“Guys!” He called out. His call startled everyone including the Tom which gobbled violently in reply. Jack tried again. “I’m banging a porn star.”
“Fuck you are?” Someone gasped for breath.
“Ever see her?” Someone else barked
“A her, I hope?” Someone else giggled.
“Ah her for sure, but well, she makes porn.” Jack attempted to re-phrase. “Not
really acts in ‘em.”
“You fuckin’ a pornographer?” This was Frank. He had actually finished college. “Where’d you find one around here?”
“At the college.” This wasn’t going the way he wanted. Even the Tom looked disappointed at Jack’s declaration. “I fuck her in her office on the carpet.” Jack shouted. Shouting always worked on the radio. “We fuck for hours!”
“God, just like a porn!” Someone else shouted.
See! Shouting worked. Jack thus shouted louder. “And she buys the rubbers!”
“Wow!” Someone else shouted.
“Yeah!” Someone else added.
“Gobble!” Remarked the Tom. He saw an opening and made a break for it. Everyone opened fire. Bullets went everywhere. The Tom was hit. Jack was hit. Frank was hit. All three were down in the dirt before the smoke cleared.
The Tom died. Jack died. Frank was wounded. Frank, thus, was the messenger to Judy. Frank had first had to talk with Jack’s boss to find out about Judy’s office location. Jack’s boss knew there was more than facilities maintenance going on with Judy’s weekly requests for Jack’s services. Jack’s boss said he felt like a Maintenance Pimp. Frank didn’t know what that was; neither did the boss, actually. So, it was Monday before Frank felt recovered enough to deliver the message of Jack’s demise. Judy had slept in her office the entire weekend. She neither read a newspaper nor watched TV. She thought radios were evil demons, piping white noise directly into the human brain. She had started another novel. It was about pygmy women in the adult entertainment industry. There weren’t any, of course, but that was the fiction part of it. Her working title was, Squat Twat. It might change.
Frank stood in her open office door until she looked up at him. Frank tried to break the bad news gently. He said. “Jack’s been shot. He’s gone.”
Judy said. “Gone where?”
Frank wanted to remain euphemistic. He thought it less shocking. “He has crossed over.”
Judy frowned. “Which river? Where’d he go?”
Frank switched to, what he thought, was a literary reference. “The River Styx.”
Judy shook her head. “I’m not good with local geography. Is that the creek by the freeway?”
Frank finally gave up on subtlety, “Jack is dead. He was killed with the turkey.”
Just because it wasn’t subtle didn’t make it more comprehensible. “A turkey couldn’t kill Jack. I don’t think a turkey could kill another turkey.” Judy said.
Frank sighed because of his inability to make himself understood. “Hunting accident. Jack shot. Jack dead.” Short words, just like AM radio.
Judy just blinked and then blinked again.
Frank didn’t know what to do, so he stood there in silence.
Judy blinked a few more times in silence. She looked down at the floor under her desk. She looked back at Frank and then down at the stack of papers that she was filling up with her Squat Twat, non-reality. She always wrote the first draft out long hand for no particular reason. She looked up at Frank with intensity. “Could you help me?” Judy said flatly.
“Sure. Anything.” Frank was happy to snap out of the silence.
“Open those windows.” Judy stood up. Frank nodded and did so immediately. Judy took her stack of papers and threw them out the window. She said to Frank. “Help me with this.” She walked over to the desk and picked up one end of it.
“Sure.” Frank picked up the other end. “Where to?” Judy nodded her head toward the open windows. It was Frank’s turn to blink in disbelief. “It won’t fit.”
“Won’t know until we try.” Judy shuffled toward the window with her end. She placed the corner of the desk at the very edge of the window sill. The building was old and the window frame was entirely wood, no metal. “Can you push your end up toward that corner?” Judy pointed at the upper part of the second open window.
“Sure.” Frank lifted with his legs.
Judy pushed her end of the desk out the window. The old wooden window frame creaked. The weight of the metal desk splintered the dry rotted frame. Judy screamed with uncommon rage which generated an uncommon strength within her. The desk crashed through the entire window casement and out of the building. The desk hit the ground with a dull, dead weight, thud. Immediately, it was followed by cheers whoops and applause. Judy turned and walked toward the still open office door. “Stay if you want.” She said to Frank and left.
Frank didn’t know what to do. Run after her? He had nothing else to say to her, so he looked down at the broken, distorted ex-desk so many floors below him. He then looked at the still cheering student body. They waved at him with youthful approval. The only thing Frank could think to do was wave back. So he did.
THE END
Copyright 2006 MWC