I purchased a Harley Davidson Motorcycle. I’m filing a dissertation in Pedagogy in the fall. I love Pedagogy. And I’ll be a doctor of Pedagogy. I’m not the Harley Davidson type. And I’d never ridden one before I purchased it. But I didn’t purchase it to go to Sturgis with the fat and bacon smelling horde. No, not to ride. I purchased it to rev up in front of my fiancée Marta’s apartment at 5 a.m. I purchased it to drive her crazy.

On the day before our wedding, I rolled the Harley from its parking spot, it sparkling, new, to the front of Marta’s apartment building. I climbed aboard it, the white haze of a summer dawn hanging around me and I started it up, careful not to slip the bike into gear, and I revved it, deep blasting Hawg echoing through the neighborhood. I pumped the gas and it roared.

Windows shot up. Peopled screamed, “Turn that off, you fucking idiot.” Then Marta stumbled from the front door, her blanket wrapped around her, sleep in her eyes. She stumbled up to me, kissed my cheek and yelled, “I love you Raymond Butts MacLean. You can’t stop me. Tomorrow we get married.” It was a defeat.

I didn’t want to fall in love. Never again. I had a terrible girlfriend in high school. Her name was Michelle. Her name is likely still Michelle if she hasn’t died from gonorrhea and syphilis. Before Marta, I didn’t date another woman after Michelle. I’d sworn off love and gone to great lengths to make myself unattractive.

My first cognizant experience with Marta was at the library, while I paged through old Pedagogy journals, standing in the stacks. Marta is short, and I didn’t see her at first. She stood on the opposite side of the stack from me, apparently eyeballing my chest. She knew my reputation. She already knew who I was. As I read a quote about education as civic religion in 19th century France, she spoke and startled me

“You don’t have sixteen nipples,” she hissed between books.

“What?” I jumped. Looking around, “Yes I do.”

“Show me your nipples, then or I’ll tell the world you’re a fake,” came the voice.

I crouched, stared through the stack at these deep mocha eyes. “I don’t show my nipples to anyone,” I said.

“Pig!” she shouted and disappeared.

I closed the Pedagogy journal; blood drained from my face. I didn’t know Marta, but she was familiar to me.

Michelle, in high school, told me she loved me. She told me she was attracted to my brain. She said she would marry me one day and couldn’t wait for me to get rich on my smarts so I could buy her a sparkling ice blue Chevrolet Camaro. I told her I’d buy her that and a Monte Carlo and a Pontiac Fiero and a Trans Am and a diamond. She’d sigh, bat her eyes and give me a painful, perfect hickey.

Although I didn’t know Marta, she knew all about me. She worked in the coffee shop I went to each morning. Two days after she accosted me in the library, I walked into that shop and ordered a latte to go. I did not look up when I ordered it. I did not make eye contact. A moment later a mug was placed in front of me. It was a mocha, with whipped cream.

“Uh…” I mumbled, “I ordered a latte. I asked for it to go.”

“You’re very pretty, Raymond,” whispered a familiar voice.

I looked up from the counter. My eyes bugged from their sockets, “You,” I shouted.

“I’ve been watching you, Raymond,” said the girl. “I’m Marta. In three months we’ll be married.”

“I said latte to go, Miss.”

“Sit down over there,” Marta pointed at a chair underneath a painting of a nude woman, her torso twisted, her pear-shaped ass aimed out to the tables. “I’m on break in an hour” Marta said, “Sit down, drink your fucking mocha, and wait.”

I did sit down under that painted ass. I did drink that mocha. I don’t know why.

Michelle, from high school, was a football cheerleader and she high-kicked for me, even though I was far too fragile to play football. I’d sit in the stands on crisp fall nights, the harvest moon hanging over the scoreboard, and Michelle would dance on the field, high kicking, flashing white panty and shouting about how she had spirit and asking if the crowd had spirit and she’d point at me and I’d scream we got spirit and she’d kick and woo.

Marta approached me under the painted pear-shaped ass. “I’m on break,” she said, “I need a cigarette. Let’s go outside.”

We sat down on the benches outside the café and Marta lit a Marlboro Red then crinkled her nose at me. She did not say a word.

So I said, “I don’t understand you.”

She said, “I understand you perfectly.”

I said, “How’s that?”

She said, “You’re my perfect mate.”

I said, “That’s completely fucked.”

She said, “Oh no it's not, Raymond Butts MacLean.”

The terrible summer before my senior year in high school, my girlfriend Michelle had sex with football captain Rod Diggans. It happened during a cornfield keg party to which I was not invited and it likely happened before. But this time my classmates snapped Polaroid pictures of the event: Rod and Michelle drunkenly groping one another in the corn. And in the morning when I woke and opened the curtains of my teenage bedroom, I found not the sun, but rather, glued to the outside of my window, a Polaroid photo montage of Michelle humping and arching in the corn, the mammoth Rod Diggans hoisting her about in various pornographic positions. My classmates glued candids on my parents’ window and on that of my little sister, Sarah. In fact, humping Michelle arched in every window in the ranch style house. My mother fainted. My sister screamed. My father bent at the waist for a closer look. I didn’t say a word to anyone for a year. I lost twenty-seven pounds. My grades dropped.

So when I went to college at Madison, of course I built barriers to social engagement, to protect myself. First I legally changed my name from Christopher Carlson to Raymond Butts MacLean. Second, I told anyone who would listen that due to an accident of in vitro fertilization, I’d been born with sixteen pig nipples, all of which produced pig milk. Finally, I studied pedagogy, because I liked its mysterious sound. Pedagogy: insidious and perverted. Coeds would gag at the sight of me. This went on through all of undergraduate and deep into grad school, until the year of my dissertation.

And then Marta Rattner. She did not gag.

Marta began calling me incessantly. “Raymond Butts MacLean,” she would say into my answering machine, “We’re destined. My aunt is psychic. My aunt told me I would marry a pig. My aunt told me he would be he of the ‘clean ass’. My aunt told me he would be my intellectual equivalent. My aunt is locked up in a crazy hospital. My aunt kills pigeons with her shoes and eats them like chicken. I thought she was crazy, but then I met you, Raymond Butts MacLean, my destiny.”

Old feelings, dead feelings grew in me listening to Marta on my machine. I thought of her mocha eyes and her tiny hands wrapped around a hot mug of mocha, whipped cream spilling all over. I thought of her pursed, angry, sensuous lips. I fell in love with Marta Rattner. I stayed up late at night thinking about her, while my neighbors produced their soulless humping noise in the adjacent apartment. I thought of making love to Marta and how it would not be soulless.

Shocking liquid fear poured down my spine. I had to drive Marta away.

Marta invited me to her apartment for dinner. Prior to leaving my apartment, I drank a tiny jar of ipecac my grandmother once gave me to “discharge the poison” and ate a bar of ex-lax chocolate. Marta served Cornish hen that looked suspiciously like pigeon. Before I’d eaten three bites, my stomach wrenched and my intestines boiled. I fell into the bathroom and vomited and shit myself repeatedly. This, of course, was my intent. But during the ensuing hours of painful heaving and burning ass, Marta pressed a cold washcloth to my forehead and kissed my temple, muttering, “My poor Raymond, you are in love, aren’t you?”

While I lay naked and semiconscious, coated in my illness, Marta set the date: on July 31st we would be married.

“Do you think your family can make it?” she asked.

I vomited on her leg, which she took to mean yes.

The next day we went for a bike ride on a forest path. “While you were naked last night, I noticed you have only two nipples,” Marta said.

I turned my bike hard to the right and we both careened off the path and down a steep embankment into a hive of nettles. We were stung head to toe. The stings swelled up. I had sixteen on my chest and stomach. In the emergency room Marta looked at me, her eyes almost swollen shut from the nettles, and she touched my oozing welts and whispered, “Just like pig nipples. You’re perfect.”

And my resolve crumbled. “I love you Marta Rattner,” I cried. “I want you to be my bride.” And for eight weeks, we went on long walks and made love by moonlight, by daylight, on the shores of the lake and we held hands afterwards, Marta smoking with the other, me thanking the gods above for what I’d been given: this tiny, smoky, noisy girl.

But the good times would not last. On the Thursday before we were to be married, Marta and I sat on a bench off the Capital Square. She smoked. I smiled and stroked her hair. And then a hairy man on a motorcycle, a Harley Davidson, pulled in front of us. “Ooh,” Marta said. “I love motorcycles. My high school boyfriend had a motorcycle; too bad I fucked his brother.
Motorcycles make me feel guilty.”

“You did what?” I screamed.

“Fucked his brother?” she answered, confused.

I jumped, cried out, “Michelle you football bitch. You cornfield bitch!” and ran away.

Marta called after me, “What’s going on?”

I ran and cried for hours, until I passed a Harley Davidson dealership. And a lightbulb. By the next morning I owned the bike, a good-sized Harley Davidson, and had decided to use it to drown Marta in her guilt, to drive Marta away once and for all. I rolled the bike in front of her house and let it roar. But Marta told me she loved me.

On the morning of the wedding, I woke up depressed. I wondered if I should give it one last try. I had too. If I married Marta, I would live in fear of her fucking my best friend (if I had one) or the captain of the football team. I could picture it in my mind’s eye, Polaroid Marta humping the bunny. I couldn’t take it. I had to drive her away.

But my emotion was such, I became disoriented while pushing the Harley. Instead of the flat route to Marta’s, I headed into the hills by the lake. Before I knew it, the Harley was rolling fast, faster than I could run, I hopped on the seat to control it and my heal popped it in gear and it roared to life. I screamed, “Oh my God Oh my God!” and the bike careened down the street heading for an intersection. The light turned green at the right moment and I rolled down Johnson Street heading out of town. The traffic lights worked and I never had to stopped, which was good because I didn’t no how to stop, and I rode into the country, all in first gear, cars behind me honking and screaming as I zigzagged all over. But the wind in my hair and the roaring in my groin and the green corn fields shivering in the summer breeze and I rolled past small town football stadiums and small town ranch homes with windows, dorky teen boys sitting on the front stoop, and the breeze pealed layers, pealed layers, my skin felt new and I thought: wish Marta could see this. This kicks Pedagogy’s ass. And I said, “Marta, Marta, Marta.” And I screamed Marta! My wedding was to begin in ten minutes. At an open intersection I steered the bike round, and aimed back to the city. I almost fell down and the engine nearly cut out. I gunned it and did a wheelie then rode back to town at first gear’s top, twenty miles an hour.

Marta had done all the wedding planning, but I knew where it was, by the lake at the student union. I ran red lights and was nearly killed by pick-ups and dump trucks and an Audi TT and had near-misses with pedestrians who screamed at me to fuck off, I screamed back, “I’m in love.”

I tore through the parking lot next to the Union, the Harley’s mighty thunder reverberating off stone walls, and sped onto the terrace and aimed the bike at the wedding party. Our families were gathered there and people screamed, “It’s Raymond Butts MacLean,” and I screamed, “Marta.” And I flew into the crowd, sisters and cousins and parents diving away, out of my path. I ran over folding chairs and flew towards the front, where Marta stood in her flowing white dress and I nearly hit the classical guitarist and then the lesbian Unitarian reverend and then, because I could not stop, I rolled out the peer, sunbathers falling into the water around me and I gunned it one more time in a panic, which launched me off the peer’s end into the lake. I held onto the bike and went under the splashing, green water and I sunk, sinking deep into the green. I couldn’t breathe – I was dying – but then splashing and flowing white wedding gown enveloping me and little Marta’s mighty hands wrapped around each of my arms, prying me off the bike and I felt myself floating up and up, the dark green going to white light until we pierced the surface and we were kissing and then Marta dragged me to the beach and we clung together there on the rocks and I cried, “Marta,” and the lesbian Unitarian reverend stood above us, arms akimbo, and said, “That’s it. That’s love. You’re married.” And a thousand people on the lake’s edge let out a scream of celebration followed by wild applause.

My wife, my wife, my wife is Marta!