Beware the Hides of Zarch

Happy birthday, Judy W.

Even though I haven't gotten so much as a Christmas card from my old college roomie, I somehow always remember that her birthday is on March 15, the Ides of March.

For those of you in college, and therefore immune to the important factlets of history, it was on the Ides of March, 44 B.C. (which does not mean "before calendars," as one of my students once wrote), that Julius Caesar became a bloody cutlet at the hands of his friends in the Roman Senate. He had been warned by a soothsayer to "Beware the Ides of March." But no, he just had to test fate and show up to work that day instead of staying home and eating grapes with the eunuchs. Or the grapes of the eunuchs.

My old roomie Judy, born on the Ides of March, 1953, was such a sex fiend she could have given a eunuch a hard-on. There I was, the non-drug-taking, non-blowjob-giving, campus-job-working drama major, sharing a dorm room with a girl who looked and acted like a hillbilly Liz Taylor. Judy had enormous tatas, which she emphasized by arching her back just so whenever anyone with a penis entered the room. Judy seduced undergrads, grad students, teaching assistants, visiting directors and professors. As I recall, she gave head to the heads of two departments. She sneaked into the house of one of them and was waiting naked in the shower when he came home--an act I'd file under "stalker" and to which the middle-aged man responded by stripping off his clothes and soaping her up.

Judy wasn't dumb. She made the dean's list every semester. Perhaps by making the dean.

My favorite outfit of hers: cut-off short-short bluejeans, halter top, rainbow-striped kneesocks, wedge-heeled cork sandals. Picture a shorter, black-haired Jessica Simpson in "Dukes of Hazzard." Now make her sluttier. Now make her even sluttier than that. And give her bigger honkers.

At night in the dorm, I'd be studying like a fiend on one metal twin bed and on the other side of the room, Judy would be stretched out watching "Dragnet" reruns (no cable back then...we were in college so long ago our black and white TV had rabbit ears). She maniacially file her nails and coo into the phone (rotary dial!) to her latest conquest. It was from Judy that I learned that men respond idiotically well to babytalk. Talking to a man, including her dad, Judy's voice would rise three octaves.

After graduation Judy and I briefly shared an apartment during grad school in Dallas. All the men in our grad school class were gay, so she went back to dating her hometown goobers, who would drive up in their pickup trucks for a quick howdy-do in our one and only bedroom (for obvious reasons, she got the bedroom, I slept on a twin bed in the living room). I could always hear them in there, the guy grunting like a boar, Judy squealing and babytalking like a pro. She never understood why this made me uncomfortable. Screwing was as natural a part of the day to her as brushing her teeth or filing her nails.

She quit grad school after a semester, moved back to her hometown and started teaching public school. That's the last I heard of her. I think I heard she married an assistant principal and settled down in a suburb.

And I wonder if he knows that his wife is the source of a secret smile on the lips of a dozen old profs who taught at our alma mater in the 1970s.

Beware the girl born on the Ides of March, for she will slice up your heart.