Wabbits.

For the good of the rest of the world, writer’s block should really be a visible affliction. Something like leprosy. See someone with an angry look on their face and huge tumor-like growths all over their bodies? Stay the hell away until they get over it. It sure LOOKS contagious.

Deadline on Friday. Until then, enjoy this filler written at some immemorably happier time.

Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Bugs Bunny. No exaggeration. Well, some. But all most of the important stuff, I learned from Bugs. I mean, he taught me about music! About opera and vaudeville and the daughter or Rosy O’Grady and racial stereotypes and gangsters and boater hats. About comebacks and surrealism and cross-dressing, about fertilizer and delayed reaction times, about how to wait until the perfect minute to deliver the kiss or the punchline or the stick of dynamite. He taught me not to be afraid of the man with the gun, because the man with the gun is an idiot. He taught me not to fear the noseless Martian with the disintegration ray pointed directly at earth, not the homicidal cowboy nor the mad scientist, not even the gremlin or the Nazi. If Bugs could handle all those threats with style and come out fresh and ready to curl up with a carrot brandy and a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I learned I could handle pretty much anything this life could throw at me, if only I could be as cool as Bugs. It’s just that no one is as cool as Bugs. He’s better than Fonzi, you know?

I only got one chance to try out my Bugsian cool – seventeen years ago now, when I was eight and my brother Matt was ten. I’d spent all Saturday building a fort in the backyard, so when Matt did the brotherly thing and kicked me out, I wasn’t going to let it stand.
“Of course you know,” I told him, “this means war.” He threw his shoe at me.

Mom said we didn’t have any dynamite, so that was out, but there was a can of Reddy Whip in the kitchen. We didn’t have a pie tin either, so I sprayed the stuff in the shoe Matt had thrown at me, topped it with a maraschino cherry, and ran toward the backyard to throw it at him before it all melted out the hole in the bottom. I had a hand on the sliding door when mom caught me, disarmed me, and sent me to my room for half an hour, so she’d at least know that “the situation was contained.” The dynamite question must have tipped her off. Bugs didn’t have a mom, of course, which made things easier for him.

It was an hour until dinnertime when mom released me, and Matt would surely demolish the fort when called in to eat – while I learned everything from Bugs, my brother modeled his tactics on General Sherman himself. The situation was desperate. So I snuck into mom’s closet to construct the ultimate weapon. At five twenty, I set off to face the enemy. He was reading X-Men.

“Yoohoo! Big boy!” I purred in my breathiest coo. Matt looked over his shoulder, carelessly. Then again, quickly – the perfect doubletake! I knew I was on to something.

“What, I…I mean…Jake? Jake, what the HELL are you doing?”

“Come over here and you’ll find out.” I blinked seductively, half expecting my eyelashes to plink. They were mascara-ed so heavily I could hardly keep them from sticking together. My lids were a heavy pink, my lips were ‘Glistening Plum,’ and I’d found the dress, which was red, shoved in a cardboard box way in the back of mom’s closet. The bra kept riding up because I had no breasts to keep it in place. I hadn’t been able to find a wig; instead, a dishtowel hung off my head, held on by a giant rubber band – sort of a crossdressing Lawrence of Arabia look. Matt came out of the fort slowly, staring. His mouth was hanging open in something acceptably like a love-struck Elmer.

“Jake, seriously dude, we’ve got to get you inside before someone sees you. Or mom.”

He had a point, but by then I was caught up in the act to care. I giggled shrilly. “I think you’re funny, big boy. Come’re!” Propelled by comic energy I never knew I had, I grabbed his neck, threw myself forward, and kissed him. On the lips. Hard.

When I pulled away, Matt looked slightly dazed. A big, round ‘O’ of glistening plum was printed on his mouth. Everything was going according to plan. Then – giddily, slowly, anticipatory – I pulled out the baseball bat I’d stuck down the front of my dress. I raised it slowly…

It was then that Matt hit me. When I started crying, he picked up his X-Men and walked into the house without a word. The fort was mine. I no longer cared.

It took the entire half hour before dinner to clean up my disguise. If mom noticed the mascara smudged under my eyes that night, she chose to say nothing. Matt and I still don’t talk about what happened that day. I’m just no Bugs Bunny. Few people are. What can I say?

Da-dat, da-dat, da-da-Dat’s all, folks!