The Taste of Penny (18 page)

Dear Jana,

 

Hi, I found your address online. It might be weird to get an email from me after so long.

 

I don't rightly know where to begin. I often remember those days in ‘94 and '95: You and I, two spry young HTML coders who couldn't get enough of each other. What really did it for me was how you brought our work back to the bedroom. Serious. I loved that. If you had been one of those “Fuck me with your big dick” kind of girls, I don't think we would have made it as long as we
did. But there was this one thing you would scream—I can hear your voice right now: “Open carrot, div, align equals right, close carrot, indention, open carrot, image, space, source equals harder dot harder dot harder dot jpeg, close carrot, indent out, open carrot, backslash, div, close carrot.” I couldn't control myself. And you didn't have to worry about referring to external javascripts or style sheets or database query strings which is what it's all about now, so technified and unerotic. Those days, the early days of the Internet, were much simpler times. Give me a basic scripting language over object orientation any day.

 

I should probably give you the old me-update huh? I kept on with the coding, moving up here and there as the technology changed. Eventually I bought a book on SQL and learned databases. It was a good move at a good time from a career perspective. The past five years I've been in database design. It's interesting, when you're building databases all day you focus in on one thing, the primary key. Everything else is relation, relation, relation. Does this other thing relate to my primary key? If so, how? If not, how to organize the relation?

 

It's not the reason I'm writing. My wife—yeppers, married—wants to have a baby. We've been trying for a while and with no results. I suggested she get a fertility check up and she kind of half got offended. Ah, that's not true. Lisa doesn't get offended. Everything is ironic with her. But she got ironic offended and said I needed to get a fertility check up too. I said, “Look, it's not me okay. I've been responsible for two abortions in my life.” Lisa thinks this is a trip. She accuses me of bragging
about my abortions. But I'm a good sport and I went and did the jerk off into a cup thing. The results came back showing her pond fully stocked. Me? Low sperm motility, which means the percentage of moving sperm and their quality of motion. I'm telling them that their results must be off, to retest, and they say things like, it's not the first time they've had a guy who can't make babies suggest a history with a woman who claimed they made a baby. I about punched him for, in effect, calling into question your good name—you know how fond I've always been of you, Jana, even after we split. I checked around on the Internet and certain people's sperm motility does decrease over time, especially if they're mountain bikers or some new studies show that cell phones actually have an impact. But I don't ride and I don't talk so much on the cell, surely not enough for that. Quite the opposite. I sit ten-hour days in a one-thousand dollar ergonomically correct office chair, comfortably resting my balls on an indentation which keeps them, as I code, warm and balanced.

 

Sometimes things seem so far away though it's like you don't really even remember them. You can start to feel crazy because part of you is so sure your life went like this and another part of you feels this panic because maybe you misread something all these years. I don't know what I'm really trying to get at. I just think about you sometimes, especially when something like this comes up. I hope it doesn't create bad memories or something. Where are you in the world?

 

Solid Gold,

 

Dealer

Dealer,

 

Conceivably it'd be nice to hear from you. But do you have to be so pornographic? I'm not like that anymore. Let's agree to keep this brief electronic reunion strictly business. You wrote me for a reason and I'll discuss that point with you because it's having some bearing on your life, which I don't feel completely comfortable about. (But I'm not accepting your friend request on MySpace, and you really should write people before just adding them.)

 

There's something I never told you. I came down with a condition while we were together. It's kind of rare, often misdiagnosed, leads to all kinds of break-ups, divorces, single-parent children, lifelong sex phobias, blah blah blah. So the fallout in our situation pales totally in comparison. We hardly even knew each other.

 

The fact is, I was never pregnant. It was a ridiculous excuse to keep from having sex with you, because of this condition, because I started getting headaches when we did it. At first I thought what was causing the headaches was the screaming. I always hated HTML. I did that for you, because I very well knew you loved it. If I have a gift it's knowing what people love. It's called Sexual Headache and means a sudden, excruciating headache when approaching orgasm and afterward.

It's actually dangerous. Women have ruptured cerebral blood vessels.

 

I was stupid and insecure. I didn't want to tell you I was getting headaches. I thought you'd hate me. On top of that the old sex-headache cliché. So I told you I was pregnant. I invented the abortion saga, carried it out for months. Those times I wept, it was because I was imbalanced. I began to hate me and to hate you. The doctor told me it was impossible to tell what caused Sexual Headache, but that he was sure if I didn't have sex, it would solve the problem. The abortion story bought me time. When you dropped me off that day, why do you think I ordered you not to come in? I had scheduled a routine exam, a consultation on birth control. That took about twenty minutes, and I sat in the waiting room while you sat in the parking lot until I figured I'd sat roughly long enough to have an abortion and walk away from it.

 

Remember that one fight, when I screamed, “I can't live with what we've done”? That's the part I regret. That lie. In truth I couldn't live with the headache I got while we were doing it. And the thing is, I'm grateful for all of it. I didn't have the strength to break up with you otherwise. I didn't have sex with anyone for more than a year, but when I did, it was fine, great even—and no headache. It never occurred again. The cause of my Sexual Headache was you.

 

I don't want to seem heartless, Dealer. I do have nice memories of you. But honestly, the capillaries in my brain feel constricted just emailing you. I'm sorry to hear
about your motility and I wish you and what's-her-name the best of luck, but don't write again.

 

Jana

You always were a neurotic bitch. Thanks for fucking out my world.

Dear KkrazychickK,

 

Hey. Nice email handle. It's got great symmetry. So yeah, this is Dealer. It's been a while huh? I tracked you down online. Looks like you're working for some yoga place—sounds hot!

 

To be honest I'm in a bit of a panic here. I'll give you the condensed version: my new wife—yeppers, married—wants to have kids. We haven't used protection in years because
I guess you could say we were never really not trying. I assumed the reason nothing ever happened in the kid way was that she couldn't have children. This made sense to me in terms of karma, that I would fall in love with a woman who couldn't conceive. I figured I'd aborted my chances at children and now by the natural laws of the universe, I would not have them. I remember the abortion you had when we were together. That really broke me up. The funny thing is, I've been diagnosed with low sperm motility. In other words, my boys lack
oomph
. But I'm trying to figure out if this is something that's happened over time, or if it's always been this way. Obviously, it can't be the latter, because you got pregnant when we were together. We had that little scare afterward, with the blood in the toilet. And you called the doctor and it was just a normal clot. I know this must seem weird and probably unpleasant. I'm just trying to clarify. I've had some disturbing revelations of late.

 

Hope everything's okay in your life and in your bidniss.

 

Solid Gold,

 

Dealer

Hey you, that's so strange. I was just thinking about you the other day. The owner of a studio I work at was
interested in building a database of her clients and asked me if I knew anyone who did that stuff. I said that I did but I hadn't talked to him in a few years.

 

I'm teaching Pilates and Bikram Yoga at a few places in Oakland. Do you know what Bikram is? It's like hot yoga. So, yeah, it is hot, about 106 degrees to be exact. The poses are designed to tourniquet your body with long, low-impact stretches, which you hold, cutting off the blood flow, then release, and your blood surges through you again, rushing oxygen to every tissue. It's the life. Nothing but good feeling from me. You're probably right about the karma. I don't want kids. You'll think I'm crazy. I have four dogs: a great dane, a pug, some kind of dalmation mix and a shmorkie-poo.

 

Listen, about that abortion back then, I've got to be honest with you. I wish I'd known how to get in touch with you because I've needed to for a while about this very thing. I ended up in a twelve-step program not long after we split. I had it coming even then. One of the steps was to apologize to everyone you had hurt and/or lied to in one way or another. You were at the top of my Had Lied To list. I was cheating on you with four or five guys. You tended to use condoms whereas they didn't. So I doubt it was yours. In fact I can say almost for sure, I doubt it was yours. I know whose it was. I remember exactly when it happened. You would have been at work, which is when I would meet with this particular one. It happened just like I always imagined it would, mystically, under a tree, in the rain. But it wasn't you. You were the only one who stepped up to the plate though. I figured
because you had experience from that other girl, the one you got pregnant before me. You knew how to deal with things. Good because I didn't want to have anything to do with that guy. You were really sweet during all of that. I'd like to send you the money you paid for it. What was it, like 400 dollars? What's your address?

 

Kisses,

 

Kim

You've got to be kidding me. Four or five guys? Under a tree? In the rain? Are you sure that wasn't a movie? Or maybe you're misremembering. Time is like that sometimes. Especially with all the pills you were doing.

 

The database stuff isn't hard to learn. Well, I take that back, the query languages take some time, but the actual design of the database is pretty simple. You have a number of entities with different sets of data, but each entity shares one thing in common. That's your primary key, which forces entity integrity by uniquely identifying entity instances. Then there's your foreign key, which enforces referential integrity by completing an association between two entities. These keys can be
as meaningless as an ID number or meaningful, like a last name.

 

I am still trying to picture this: you under a tree in the rain, being mystically impregnated by one of four or five men you are sleeping with during the time I am at the office learning the principle of the primary key. You could say that I feel right now like the keys of my life have just been blipped. It's primary key rule numero uno, that each instance of its entity must have a non-null value. When it's pulled out from under you, it's a crusher.

 

Pilates and Yoga? You must be in great shape. Could you send me a pic? Are you born again and everything now?

 

Solid Gold,

 

Dealer