*One Of Wilt's Girls

Category: Story

Author's Request: To my family: Just forget it's me writing this, okay?

"My wife was one of Wilt's Girls," the guy I’m working for says. He stares at me. I think I'm supposed to react.

"Ok, I'll bite,” I say. “Who's Wilt?"

“Wilt Chamberlain.”

“Oh. And who's that?”

“Wilt Chamberlain? God you’re young. One of basketball's first superstars. AND legendary in the sack.”

He shouldn't be talking to me like that. I'm only 17 and he’s, like, twice as old. But at least his lame conversation, the pathetic story of his boring life, just got interesting.

I'm working for this dude for two days. Very exciting work, right. He hired me to help with a mail-out for his new construction business or maybe it's reconstruction or reproduction. I haven’t read the flyers. I just fold and stuff them into envelopes. 1000 of them. That's a lot of folding and stuffing. We’ve been at it for hours in his office.

It’s not a real office, it’s the trailer where he lives. Temporarily, he says. It’s gross here. Part of the floor is rusted right through to the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised to see toadstools growing up in the hallway, toward his living quarters. Excuse me, “The Bedroom Suite,” he calls it. The whole place reeks “newly divorced.”

After the folding and stuffing today, I'll start addressing the envelopes tomorrow. Hand-written names and addresses, he wants, in a nice handwriting. He asks me where I learned calligraphy. That's what I told him to get the job, that I knew calligraphy. Where did I learn it? I said I went to a special school. Well I did. St. Monica's across the Boulevard. So I didn't actually lie. It didn’t offer calligraphy instruction, but it's still a special school, cost my mom and dad a fortune as they remind me constantly. But it didn’t really prepare me for the working world, and I can only find little jobs like this.

Tonight, I'll search for a "how-to calligraphy course on the Internet and practice what it says. Then finish the job tomorrow. He promised me a hundred dollars.

But now, we're still folding and stuffing together. It’s boring, which I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t talk so much. I’d rather think my own thoughts, until he started talking about sex.

“In what way is Wilt legendary,” I ask.

“He fucked 20,000 women, that's what way.”

“I still don’t see the point.”

“My wife, she, my EX-wife was…umm, she was...”

“One of them?”

“She was one of them, yeah.”

It's like he’s proud of this.

“What number was she?”

“How do I know? I’m not sure she knows.”

It seems to me if she were #1 or #20,000, that would be cool. But if she was, like, #482 or #11,044, how would Wilt even remember her?

When my grades and SAT’s weren’t good enough to get into college, I told my parents I didn’t want to go to a community college. I wanted to learn something useful in life.

I just did.