The Juliette Society(71)
I’m not interested in his welfare, I only want to know what happened to Anna.
‘Bundy,’ I say, ‘where’s Anna?’
He doesn’t answer, so I have no choice but to go in.
Bundy’s apartment has to be seen to be believed. He’s making money hand over fist but he’s too cheap to splash out on anything other than the studio apartment he’s always lived in. It’s so crammed with stuff that you can barely move, you can barely get through the door.
He ushers me inside and says, ‘Sit down.’
I look around and it’s not as if there’s nothing to sit on – like the way Anna described Marcus’ apartment – it’s just that it’s all covered in stuff. DVDs, magazines, comic books, toys, dirty underwear. And another thing, Bundy’s apartment really stinks. There are trays of half-eaten microwave food, open pizza boxes with rings of crust, completely intact, as if he’d somehow managed to eat the filling from the inside out.
It’s not as if I’m intending to stay, as if I even want to be here, so I say, ‘It’s OK, I’ll just stand.’
I lean against the wall and feel it start to give way behind me, then realize it’s not part of the wall at all but a floor-to-ceiling tower of those white paper boxes with the wire handles containing Chinese takeout food.
It’s been less than a week since the story broke on Forrester Sachs, Bundy’s only been hiding out for three or four days. He couldn’t possibly have eaten all this food in that time. Unless the anxiety made him binge-eat. Bundy’s a little chubby anyway so it’s hard to tell if he’s gained weight. I figure Bundy’s one of those eternal teenagers who never loses his puppy fat, it just gets less cute with age.
There are stacks of baseball hats that still have the tags attached and boxes of trainers he’s never worn, never even opened. Bundy tells me he wears a new pair of trainers every day and dumps the old ones in the trash like they’re candy wrappers. He says it’s his one indulgence. But I suspect the only reason anyone would wear a new pair of shoes every day is because they’ve got really bad foot hygiene.
Suddenly it dawns on me why it smells so bad in here. Not from moldy pizza and discarded Chinese food. From Bundy’s rotting feet. It’s the kind of odor that’s really hard to cover up and seems to linger on everything, like the smell of vomit. It smells so bad in Bundy’s apartment that I’m trying to breathe through my mouth. I want to get out of here as quickly as I can, but Bundy’s decided his woes are so great that he wants to tell me his entire life story, from beginning to now. From before he was even born. From the day his parents decided to name him.
Bundy’s sitting cross-legged on the floor like a sulking child playing with his toys. ‘I’m not a bad person,’ he says. ‘I was just made this way.’ As he says it, he’s absent-mindedly stuffing a Chewbacca action figure head first into a pussy-in-a-can.
Bundy’s apartment is crammed with toys – plush toys and sex toys – and to him they’re all the same. A pair of Care Bears are positioned on all fours, facing away from each other, both split at the seams to accommodate a double-ended dildo that’s been forced into their stuffing. There’s a Teletubby wearing a strap-on as a face mask. It’s as if he tried to upgrade his obsessions and got stuck halfway, somewhere in the middle between adolescent and twenty-something jerk-off, but ended up hopelessly infantilized, obsessively compulsively sexualizing everything in his reach that was previously wholesome and pure.
He has a huge life-size poster of Britney Spears on the wall, wearing Daisy Dukes with the buttons undone, and her hands on her hips as if she’s about to peel them off, a white cotton crop-top that seems specifically designed to show off the curve of her tits, and a look that says, you know you want to fuck me, but think again, Buster.
It’s Britney Spears in her prime, when she was every man’s fantasy; the all-American hot-bodied blonde cock-tease. And before she broke a million male hearts by reminding them of the psycho girlfriend you wished you’d never met, let alone thought of putting your cock inside.
He also has a large collection of Star Wars figures lined along his mantle, but only wookiees. He’s not interested in anything other than wookiees. Bundy tells me he’s always loved wookiees. And he thinks it might be the same reason he only likes women with natural pubic hair, women who never shave.
Bundy says that’s the reason he’s so fixated on blow jobs – ‘the receiving, not the giving,’ he takes pains to point out to me – is that it really doesn’t matter whether she’s shaved or unshaved. Because he never gets that far.