HOLED UP IN her altogether pathetic room, it was not lost on Lulu what a shitstorm her accusation was about to unleash.
She was counting on it.
If she felt badly for what she was about to put Ephraim Russell through, those thoughts were fleeting. Mostly, there was the despair at her new circumstances—her dénouement at the society and callous treatment at the hands of OTA. The weight of these things, the public embarrassment, required dispatching. Throwing in with the feminists didn’t exactly thrill her—they were so unattractive—but it was a necessary course correction.
But … she needed some time to think. This had to be played just right.
She needed a plan. Simply being another run-of-the-mill “survivor” would not suffice. That market was getting crowded. Some of the early girls got a lot of play, sure, but only Mattress Girl had transcended her own campus. The mattress angle was clever, but it had been done. Lulu needed a bigger play, something original.
She wasn’t sure why, but a story that Sheldon had once told her about his freshman year popped into her head. She did some googling to refresh herself on the details.
Late one night, all those years ago, someone had lowered a window on the fifth floor of Anderson House, a freshman dorm in East Quad right across from Duffy. Yelling into the darkness, he executed a perfect Tarzan call, right out of the back-lot jungles of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It went largely unnoticed, but then he did it again the next night. And the next, and the next after that, all at precisely the same time: 11:09.
After a week or so, a small crowd began to gather, eager for the nightly Tarzan call. That no one knew the would-be Tarzan’s identity added to the crowd’s general sense of ironic self-amusement. (No one liked arch, ironic humor more than Devonites.) It was always dark and Tarzan never stuck his head out far enough to be identified. No one in Anderson was talking, either. When the Daily wrote a piece about it, the crowds got larger, numbering in the hundreds each night, their excitement often fueled by alcohol. Tarzan developed a sense of drama, now delaying his nightly calls by a few minutes to build the anticipation. Other pseudo-Tarzans would call out from Pope and Kimball, but these pretenders were always roundly booed. Only the Anderson House Tarzan was worthy of the crowd’s adoration. They chanted, “Tar-zan, Tar-zan,” building in volume until, at last, he would come.
As the fame of the Anderson House Tarzan grew, someone at the Daily wrote, “I was reminded of those old film reels from Mussolini rallies in the thirties, where the crowd would scream ‘Il Duce’ over and over until he appeared on the balcony.” Tarzan-themed parties sprang up around campus, serving “jungle juice” (naturally), and campus conversations were of little else. Things in East Quad eventually got so unruly that the administration felt the need to intervene. They narrowed the possible Tarzans down to five and let it be known through the Anderson RAs that Tarzan could have one final call, and then no more.
That night, over a thousand people gathered in East Quad, many dressed as Tarzan or Jane. There were one or two ape suits as well. The Devon Marching Band showed up, playing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” over and over, it being the only jungle-themed song they knew. A reporter from the CBS Evening News even came, planning on doing one of those human-interest pieces that come at the end of the broadcast, the ones that always start with “And finally tonight…” All this had the effect of whipping the crowd into a barely contained frenzy. One observer later described them as a “mob, coiled as a spring.” Finally, the window opened, and a single hand emerged to silence the faithful. As a midnight calm fell, there came the most beautiful, perfectly executed Tarzan call that anyone had ever heard. When it stopped, there were a few moments of reverent silence, the crowd moved by the beauty of what they had just heard.
And that’s when everyone pretty much lost their minds.
They became a mob in seconds, throwing rocks at Anderson, smashing most of the windows. Were they angry that they could no longer have their Tarzan? Perhaps. Or were they just whipped up into a frenzy of self-amusement? Those asked later didn’t have an answer. It just seemed like the thing to do.
Having dispensed with Anderson, the mob moved out onto Dudley Street, trampling cars, tearing off their shirts, making apelike jungle noises and beating their chests. By the time the Havenport police arrived, over a dozen vehicles had been damaged. Two dozen students spent the night as guests of the city. The CBS Evening News got its story, but it was no longer of the human-interest variety. The lead-in was “Violence Erupts on Devon Campus.”
No one ever did figure out who Tarzan was. Sheldon said that at his twenty-fifth reunion at least seven classmates claimed the Tarzan mantle for themselves, though he knew the real Tarzan would never be one to take personal credit.
Reading the story, and further considering the tale of Mattress Girl, Lulu hatched a plan. She’d have to put herself out there, really out there, but that’s what it would take to separate her from the pack. It might just work. In Silicon Valley, they called this a pivot.
Lulu 2.0.
She flipped open her MacBook Air and jumped on eBay, entering a search term. They had everything on eBay. Sure enough, they had over a dozen of what she was looking for, although she required only one. She opted for “Buy It Now” and arranged for overnight delivery. The only thing left was deciding what to wear.
That always took some thought.