Now that I have finished, I suddenly feel very tired. It is a hot day, and the heat haze has muted the greens, grays, and browns of the steep hillsides. Looking out of my window, I can see the tourists lounging on the village green. The young men are stripped to the waist, some bearing tattoos of butterflies and angels across their shoulder blades; the girls sit with them, in shorts and T-shirts, laughing, eating sandwiches, drinking from pop or beer bottles.
One young girl notices me watching and waves cheekily, probably thinking I’m an old pervert, and as I wave back I think of another writer — a far, far greater writer than I could ever be — sitting at his window seat, writing. He looks out of the window and sees the beautiful young girl passing through the woods at the bottom of the garden. He waves. She waves back. And she lingers, picking wild flowers, as he puts aside his novel and walks out into the warm summer air to meet her.
Dave Shaw
Twelve Days Out of Traction
from South Dakota Review
I was twelve days out of traction in a 7-11 outside Poughkeepsie cradling Slim Jims and a six-pack of RC’s, pretending to ponder the price of a three-week-old loaf of Wonder while I was deciding how to slip on the freshly mopped floor so that the unhidden video camera behind the front counter might give me the best possible out-of-court settlement, when in comes this hoss wearing a ski mask and sombrero, waving a .22 and telling everybody freeze or we’ll be having our heads blown off. I’d just about settled on a basic ass-first prat, which would’ve been risky because sometimes they’re unbelievable when they replay it slow frame, but I didn’t really have my heart in one of those realistic, wrenching, twisting falls that actually does hurt when you land on a shoulder or something, because my left wrist and lower right leg were still casted and my back was still sore from the traction and the memory of the Honda’s bumper I had stepped into three and a half months before outside an Acme in Binghamton. Some old bat had decided to give me a love tap with the gas instead of braking and that laid me up a little longer than it should have and gave me black outs for a while and six total broken or fractured bones, not to mention fusing vertebrae numbers 7 and 8. It’s a living, or so I thought. Then into the Poughkeepsie 7-11 came the Bandit and his .22, which meant no falls for me that day with all the cops that’d be crawling around the place in a matter of minutes, all of them disturbed about missing the “Mexican Bandito” as everyone was calling him even though he had a Canadian accent, and none of them having time to fill out a report on a guy who might have permanent back pain as a result of a slip on the negligently wet floor by the Wonderbread. It was too bad because by the time Prudential would have figured out that most of my injuries were old ones, I would have turned the settlement check into small bills and gotten a new p.o. box.
Next thing I know after the Poughkeepsie 7-11, I’m thinking about retiring at the ripe old age of 41. When you think about it, there are a lot of disincentives to working your chosen profession in this country. Chief among them in my case being the occasional competition for attention with Mexican-Canadian gun-waver types, and the complete lack of benefits, too, such as health care. For instance, with the Acme run-in with the bumper the whole hospital thing came to damn near forty-seven thou, and the settlement was only for sixty, which meant I would have only netted thirteen K for three months of sucking pureed chicken out of rubber bags. I say would have, because when you don’t have health care, you learn to tiptoe out of the hospital at midnight before everything’s completely done healing and the blue suit guy drops in to see about settling up. I’m sure in the end they’ll just mail the bill to me, Earl Lester, Binghamton. Unfortunately for them, today I’m Lester Earl, Ithaca, living off sixty grand in twenties.
I do have to share some of the pie. My lawyer is any number of men named Homer Pierce. They all go by Homer Pierce because of a little joke of ours, having originated six years ago from a newspaper story about a lawyer in Utica named, you guessed it, Homer Pierce, who had been cited by the State Bar for seventeen ethics violations and only been placed on probationary status. One night in Troy while we played a little seven card with twos, fours, nines, one-eyed jacks and suicide kings wild, I and three of the eleven future Homer Pierces decided why risk inadvertently tarnishing a good lawyer’s name by using an alias other than Homer Pierce for all our lawsuits. The joke, of course, was that we knew full well there weren’t any “good” lawyers.
So far Homer Pierce has represented me on seventy-eight suits. He’s been victorious in procuring settlements in fifty-nine of these, a pretty nice rate of return for a lawyer, but you got to have someone who knows how to fall, too. Homer Pierce’s height varies from suit to suit, from 5′6″ to 6′3″, his weight from about 165 to 310. Like his size, his settlements vary, too, from the paltry $500 dust-yourself-off money to the big rips, like the Acme gastapper and the time the cop inadvertently ran into me last year on a sidewalk outside a bank in Schenectady after I had advertently gotten in his way while he was chasing a burglar, bank bells clanging and everything. The burglar, of course, was wearing a sombrero, but he wasn’t famous yet, and the police and everybody made time to pay me some attention while he got away. You should have seen me moaning about my back on that one. Homer Pierce had to do damn near nothing for the check from the bank’s insurance company. None of the Homer Pierces have any real licenses to practice anything, but they’re good at the verbal muscle game and making official looking stationery, and they’ve got a rudimentary knowledge of law which is more than is needed, I assure you. I can assure you because once in a pinch I had to be my own Homer Pierce after a tractor ran over my toe during a free tour of a dairy farm outside Herkimer.
The clincher, of course, is that in reality I am no victim and in reality I am sick to death of all the victim talk sweeping the damn country. No wonder the Mexican-Canadian has been coming down (or up) here to do all his damage. He probably thought the money would practically jump into his hands, this countryful of victims we got just waiting to give it away, and so far it practically has. Kills me, really. The way I see it, if you don’t have your own scam, that doesn’t make you a goddamn victim; it only makes you a goddamn idiot. Case in point: Newt Gingrich. Genius. And since the Poughkeepsie episode, I’ve been thinking that this is at the root of what I think will make retirement a little harder to handle — worrying about eventually feeling like the rest of the average ducks out there, blending in and not giving a damn, whining my ass away. I’d rather somebody just blow my goddamned head off if it comes to all that. Damn these back pains.
The guy who certifies my injuries as one hundred percent bona fide and worth the price of settlement is Dr. Richard Greggson, who got his degree through mail order from the Pacific Coast Institute of Medicine and Pharmacology. He’s got two diplomas because, on occasion, circumstances arise which dictate him being Greg Richardson. Essentially it’s the same service either way, although sometimes Greg Richardson will throw a free twenty-one day Valium prescription into the deal, whereas Richard Greggson, who got a Certificate of Ethics via mail while I was in the hospital waiting for the clock to tick, will usually raise objection to the pills.
Both Richard Greggson and Greg Richardson were delighted about the Acme gastapper incident because there were actual broken bones involved. The two of them have so many repros of the hospital x-rays filed away that every settlement from here on out would start negotiations at a decent five figure minimum. Neither Richard Greggson, Greg Richardson, or Homer Pierce are happy, though, about my thinking about retiring. I am the key man in our little industry.