Dee Tyler Fucks Like A Bunny

* The names have, of course, been changed to protect the guilty.

Fall, late Eighties, my freshman year at college. I had applied for on-campus housing and found myself in an all-male dorm. Yes, it was every bit as nasty and stinky as you could imagine an all-guys’ dorm at an engineering school with a 5:1 male:female ratio could be.

One of the “features” of our floor was copious graffiti in the bathroom stalls. It covered many subjects, including our floor RA: a jockish dude who had an odd habit of wearing a sheriff’s badge, and with an unfortunate last name that rhymed with what ladies of the evening are known to do.

One was a sketch of a young woman enjoying a post-coital cigarette. Caption: “DEE TYLER* FUCKS LIKE A BUNNY”

That image stuck with me. Fast-forward three and a half years, and I was the TA of one of the senior-level computer science courses. On my class roster: Dee Tyler. She was intelligent, quite pleasant… but bore a striking resemblance to a young Ella Grasso. I kept thinking about the picture and saying to myself, “Seriously?! This is THAT girl?” Now it was burned into my brain.

A decade or so later – and almost twenty years ago now – my mother came home with a find from a shopping trip: two airblown inflatable Easter decoration rabbits, one pink and one blue. Of course they immediately became “Dee” and “Tyler” and, following a trip to the local discount store, we had them “doing what bunnies do” and therefore joined in the week before Easter by several little bunnies. The following year we placed an order with Oriental Trading, and they were joined by LOTS AND LOTS of little bunnies. North of a hundred. It’s become something of a neighborhood tradition, all these years later.

Oh, and the punchline: it turns out my student was a different Dee Tyler. The subject of the sketch apparently dropped out or transferred somewhere else.