My academic career was in ruins. I had just been expelled from McDonald’s University having been caught in lewd acts with Ronald McDonald, that depraved clown. Frankly, I had not enjoyed McDonald’s University. I did well in hamburger class, however I found the ambience highly impersonal. Earlier, I had been booted out of the University of Miami, where I was a sailing major just unable to get port and starboard straight. Also, I had run over a lady with a Sunfish.
I was down and out, reduced to selling life insurance to dogs. Then I saw the ad in the paper: ENROLL IN ATLANTIS STATE WITCHCRAFT UNIVERSITY.
The ad noted that witchery was a fast-growing field. BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE. There I was on a bus, all black except for splatterings of what I was told was bat’s blood, heading west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to ASWU. Next to me was another incoming freshman, a breathtaking blond girl, fragrant smelling and quite cordial, although she indicated to me that she was a vampire. Looking at her bobbing breasts as the bus bounced, I said honestly, “I am not prejudiced against vampires.”
“That is good,” said the beautiful young lady, Sabrina Jugularis, “If I had my way,” she explained, “I wouldn’t choose to be a vampire. My mother was quite normal. It was my father, Irving, he is a vampire. For me it is an inherited practice.” Sabrina explained that she was entering ASWU on a special scholarship set up there for vampires.
The bus veered off the Turnpike, seemed to dissolve in time as it approached a toll booth, and then reappeared on Route 66 near a little town called Goatsville in Pennsylvania. It rumbled through this town very fast (I was trying then to make a pass for Sabrina’s knee but she had her hand on mine and was digging in her nails and I decided not to push my luck) and suddenly we were in front of the gates of Atlantis State Witchcraft. The bus screeched to a halt.
“Hello,” said this toothy-looking lady with only one ear and a name tag saying that she was the dean of students. “I am Dame Annabel, the lost Queen of Atlantis.”
Dame Annabel took us to our rooms. I had a room in the dungeon at historic South Hall on campus. My roommate turned out to be a unicorn from the Midwest. I met Sabrina in the cafeteria for lunch. She said she was majoring in physics. I had decided to major in madness. Sabrina asked if I wanted to meet her that night for a walk. At 9 p.m. I, a little nervously, showed up in front of her hall, which featured a coed dungeon. We went to the movies and saw GODZILLA MEETS ADLAI STEVENSON.
My favorite teacher of all times was Dr. Oliver Thirdeye, III, professor of talisman making at ASWU, I learned much about aura colorations. Prof. Thirdeye had an aura of sparkles in a field of magenta around his etheric self. Sometimes, when he really got going, there were eruptions of yellow gold, sunspot sort of explosions, from his aura. Except for a particularly fine fireworks display I had seen at Coney Island as a child, I had never viewed the spectacular flaming color I saw one day when Prof. Thirdeye came to class with his favorite talisman, the breast bone of a chicken he had once eaten as a boy. Dame Annabel, the alleged lost Queen of Atlantis, on the other hand had a black-brown sort of aura, and was a very dark person. She taught Comparative Survey of Black Magic 101. But mostly in class she would fuck ducks. The ducks would then disappear. She failed me in a paper I had done on achieving magical rapport. She wrote that my paper “stunk.” Dame Annabel was the worst teacher I ever had.
I got along well with the school physician, a retired Hopi witch doctor who sometimes lectured on monsters, especially when he was high.
The influence of voodoo on varsity sports at ASWU was immense. The main social event occurred on Halloween when large groups of students, following a skull held high on a stickball bat, marched around the campus making weird sounds. Most ASWU students worshipped skulls.
Soon, Sabrina also began having troubles with Dame Annabel. The Dame taught a seminar in vampirism, and had the temerity to fail Sabrina after Sabrina indicated she preferred to suck blood not from the jugular, but from the large veins of the penis. Dame Annabel called Sabrina a “revisionist vampire pervert.”
It all came down for Sabrina and me at ASWU when a group of faculty led by Prof. Thirdeye and a group led by Dame Annabel got into a messy fight over tenure.
For usual academic politics, this was a notably vicious affair — curses and spells being splattered like lightning in a typhoon. For weeks, members of the faculty and administration would be accosting each other for pieces of hair, nails, clothing, even belly button lint, for use in the wild orgy of curses and spells. By wintersession the Dame Annabel forces seemed to have won. Prof. Thirdeye was advised that he would be terminated after the next year. I firmly believe to this day that Dame Annabel’s victory was based on an unholy liaison between her and the chairman of ASWU’s board of trustees, Harris I. Hairless, also president of the largest oil company in America.
Prof. Thirdeye made arrangements to teach exorcism at West Point. Sabrina and I quit ASWU in protest to the situation. We had no intention of continuing on at a school with Dame Annabel and her gang in charge.
We now own, together, a health food store in Santa Monica, California and are very happy. I have never received a college degree but make up for it by affecting a cultured Pittsburgh accent. Sabrina and I try to achieve self education through group sex.
