he spoke to a volleyball, or his wife Jenny died and left him with that bastard child, or he opened up a big soulless bookstore and forced that woman out of business, or that gigantic prisonerâs pet mouse got smushed, or he decided he didnât want to be big anymore after talking to that mechanical fortune teller, or he came back to Normandy and talked at a grave marker.
Iâll give Mella this: She learned to mask her public orgasmic outbursts into sounding like something else. In a movie theatre she could make the noise of a rusty film reel spinning, for example. At a New Yearâs Eve party, when that big ballâs going down and everyoneâs crying, Mella sounds like champagne corks exploding. Sheâs an Amazonian bird in that way. Sheâs like nothing else in all others, though.
She got disability early on, of course, even though a qualified doctor finally signed her off as having some kind of rare chronic pain syndrome because he knew heâd be laughed out of the medical community if he wrote down somewhere on an official document, âShe canât work seeing as every workplace is sad and sadness makes her orgasmic,â blah blah blah. Between marriage and age thirty Mella worked as a high school English teacher who never gave less than an A, seeing as she couldnât take the kids flipping out saying their parents would kill them or that they wouldnât be able to get into college. I met Mella in collegeâwe went to a place that had a perennial 0â11 football team, and let me tell you I got lucky every Saturday night after the autumn games. Hell, I thought every woman was like Mella and wondered how come the boys on my hall had such trouble getting laidââTake them to a football game,â I said. âThen when you get back to your room, bring up something about how the quarterback got a concussion, which meant heâd probably be suffering from dementia later on in life. Go ahead and start taking off your clothes at this point while putting a Tom Waits album on the turntable.â
Anyway, Mella âretiredâ from the workplace and diddled around, so to speak, until eBay showed up. I had a regular job doing regular things that brought us a regular paycheck. Iâm an actuary. An actuary! Iâm supposed to be able to predict how long people will live, and whether my company can make money off of them. Itâs more complicated than that, certainly, but not by much. Let me say this: I have professional friends in the business that I see daily. If I had to predict, and thatâs what I do, how many times they have a meaningful, productive, non-reproductive, sexual experience with a woman, Iâd say the odds were something like, oh, infinity-to-one.
âOh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker that was good, Tank.â
She rarely called me âTank,â but thatâs how good it was there, pulled off on a dirt road outside Calloustown, South Carolina, on a Saturday morning, driving around aimlessly in search of small boxable items she could sell on eBayâadvertising ashtrays, for instance, or first-edition books, or silver salt spoons. My father understood that people named Henry got called Hank. He wanted to name me âTank,â my mother said no, and he somehow convinced her that he had an old uncle named Tenry: âI want to name our first son after my old Great Uncle Tenry,â he supposedly said.
âTenry!â my mother said there on a bed after her water broke. âThatâs different! With a name like that, he wonât be something everyday.â
Like an actuary.
My father called me Tank, my mother called me Tenry, I went to college, and I met a beautiful woman who shouldâve been a Sioux named Mella-Who-Cries-and-Seizures-Loudly.
We had pulled off on the dirt road some seventy miles from where we lived and thirty miles from our destination because Iâd made the mistake of putting the radio