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L’Amour. The man wrote nine hundred seventeen books that we know of, and every one was like poetry. Now let’s us put our heads together in fellowship.”
    He pulled me aside, out of ear-range of my co-scribes, so close I could feel his salt-and-pepper mustache against my earlobe. Up close he was minty. But you could smell the nicotine underneath, which made me like him more. When he put his hands on my shoulders, they stank like rancid Pall Malls.
    â€œLloyd, we need a new mission statement, and I think you would be just the man to help get what we are trying to do here down on paper.”
    â€œMission statement?”
    â€œYou know, somethin’ that says, ‘Come on in!’ ”
    B ut I should back up. Give you a little more about where I was. I’m no storyteller, after all, I’m a side-effects man. I write the stuff on the little piece of paper nobody reads when they pick up their prescription. I’m good at lists—arranging the bad things on them in such away that the bad of this cancels out the bad of that , and what could have been scary sounds benevolent. But arranging isn’t the same as describing. Or telling a story. Still . . . let me at least set the scene. The Christian Swingles Center was actually in a strip mall, two deceptively spacious floors wedged between a Hoover vacuum outlet and a party supply store. (Into which, during my entire, brief stint in Oklahoma, I saw not one potential partier stroll. Nor did I see much of Tulsa. We lived next to the Oral Roberts campus, walked to the mall.) Outside, cars and sidewalks were clogged with a lot of hefty Christians. The O.R. food was on the starchy side. Maybe that was one way the college administrators hedged against the wanton sex that plagued so many other, secular campuses. If you keep the coeds plumped and the boys logy on carbohydrates, there aren’t going to be many premarital sex problems. For all I know the churchgoing cooks mixed Depo-Provera in the mac and cheese, just like the chow boss in the pen.
    The only tourist attraction I saw in Tulsa was the Golden Driller. The Golden Driller is a seventy-six-foot, 43,500-pound statue of an oil worker. Of course we went there to look at his crotch. We being Jay, the natty content manager—who insisted the Driller had been built by a closet queen named Mervyn Phelps—and Peter Riegle, the overall content director and the first real genius I ever met.
    You could stand right underneath the Driller and look straight up to where the rig jockey had, apparently, been gelded. Ken doll smooth.
    M aybe it shouldn’t have been amazing that Jay and Riegle, the two other guys at Church Sex Central (as we sometimes called the place), were stone addicts. (I recognized them, the way addicts do, the way werewolves, when in human guise, are said to be able to smell each other across a crowded train station and recognize their kind.) Jay wouldn’t talk about his personal life. Well, not that much. He alluded to “pierogi nights,” shared an apartment with his mother, and had—he said—undergone extensive, if unsuccessful, “de-gay-ifying” at a number of Christian enterprises set up to combat “the homosexual lifestyle.” About which all he said was “I looked at a lot of pictures of Taylor Swift. Which was supposed to turn me straight but didn’t. Though she is adorable.”
    Riegle, meanwhile, had a wife at home with jaw cancer and a cerebral-palsied 29-year-old daughter they’d raised together and still took care of. He was slightly stooped and had an air of long-suffering dignity about him. (Which, he later explained, got people to trust him. That was just human nature.) But what made him more amazing, actually heroic to me, was something called the safe harbor clause, tucked away in an obscure addendum to the Lifshitz brothers’ quarterly report.
    I didn’t even know what a safe harbor clause was, but