This is what I said to her: I like my work because it allows me to share in other people’s misery. 

I guess maybe it didn’t come out right.  She had been the one to bring it up in the first place--asked me what I did for a living and did I like it, et cetera.  She misunderstood me, of course.  She gave me a look like you would give a kid who had pulled the wings off a fly or kicked a puppy.  And then she looked away from me and stared at her dinner plate like she didn’t know what to say next.  I didn’t feel like I should have to explain myself, though talking to people was never my strong suit, to put it one way.  But I could tell by the look she gave me that it was the end of things, and all there was left to do really was act polite until we went our separate ways.

     It’s not too much past eight in the morning, and already I’ve got a headache from this old lady whining at me.  She’s going on and on about this Cadillac of hers and how she doesn’t see how she can possibly get rid of it because it belonged to her late husband and all.  It’s a 1980 El Dorado, and I can tell by the look of it that her husband took good care of it.  Babied it, as she puts it.  I imagine he liked to rub it with a diaper or some such nonsense.  Old guys are always doing stuff like that to old cars.

     So this lady takes this Cadillac and wraps it around this big tree at the edge of her driveway.  Didn’t even get it out of the driveway.  The trunk is gone, and from just looking at it I can see there is some pretty heavy frame damage.  I can’t tell exactly how she did it, because she couldn’t have been going more than fifteen miles an hour.  It never ceases to surprise me how bad old ladies can manage to mess up a perfectly good car.  Meanwhile, she’s standing here going on and on the way old people like to do.  I think somehow she got around to talking about her cats or something, but I’m not sure because I stopped listening a few minutes ago.  I’m trying to get across to her the fact that the car is junk, all sentimentality aside, but she’s not hearing me.

     “Ma’am,” I say, “your car is totaled, which means it’s worth less than it would cost to fix it.”

     “I don’t see why it can’t be fixed, though,” she says. “It’s a perfectly good car.  My husband took such good care of it.”  She looks like she’s getting ready to cry.

     “I’m not saying it can’t be fixed.  I’m saying the cost to repair it exceeds the value of the car.  You want to pay to get it fixed, that’s up to you, but we only insure you for the value of the car.”

     “I don’t understand.”

     “Clearly not.”

     “What?”

     “Nothing.  Look, ma’am, you’ve done several thousand dollars worth of damage here, and the blue book on it is about five hundred dollars.  Do you want to keep the car?”

     “Well, I don’t see how I can get rid of it.  I just don’t see how I can do that.”  This is what she keeps saying over and over again.  I guess old people have a hard time letting go of old junk sometimes, like junk that reminds them of when they were younger.  Every time I go to some old lady’s house it’s always crammed full of old, dusty stuff.  I don’t see how one person can have so much junk all to themselves.

     “Look,” I say to her, “the salvage value of the car is one hundred and fifty dollars.  I’m going to cut you a check for three hundred and fifty, and you can do what you want with the car.”

     “What’s that?  What’s salvage value?”

     “Salvage is what’s left of the car.”

     “But the car is right here.  I don’t understand.”

     “Salvage is defined as any automobile, truck, motorcycle, or other motor vehicle or part thereof or equipment thereto owned by an insurance carrier after a determination of total loss.”  I give her the manual definition, not because I think it will make her understand any better, but most times when you launch into technical talk it tends to shut people up.  Maybe it’s because it’s like you just said something in another language, but I think a lot of times people just don’t want you to think they’re stupid.

     “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me,” she says. “What’s your name again?  I’m going to have a word with your supervisor.”

     “It’s Alvin Murray, ma’am.  It’s right there on my business card, which I will attach to your check.”

     “I’m going to talk to your supervisor.”

     “Fine.”  I finish writing the check and head out of there.  A lot of people say they’re going to talk to your supervisor.  Some actually do, but then they just hear the same thing you told them, so it doesn’t really matter in the end.

     As I’m walking away she says, “How do I get my car moved?”

     “I suggest you call a tow truck.”

     I guess maybe you’ve got to feel bad sometimes for people.  I mean, she just got in an accident and all, and I suppose that can shake you up a bit.  But if you go around feeling sorry for everybody, where does that get you?

     I wanted to tell her she misunderstood what I said or maybe I didn’t say it right.  But I thought it was probably better if I let the matter drop.  I didn’t mean it like I enjoy seeing people be miserable or anything like that, like it makes me feel good when other people are unhappy.  That’s not what I meant at all. 

It’s just that it seems to me you can either see people when they’re sad or when they’re happy, and I don’t get to see much of the second kind.  It’s a connection, I guess, some kind of connection to people, the human condition and whatnot.  I never connect much with anybody, so I suppose when I see someone when they’re miserable I feel like I am experiencing something real.  I guess I don’t know how to put it.  I wanted to tell her all that, but I’m just not good at explaining myself.  She probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear it anyway.

The next one that day is a bad one.  This big four-and-a-half-ton stake truck rear-ends a Honda going about forty and sends it smashing right into the back of a big rig.  They like to send two adjusters out to the scene of an accident when there are fatalities involved.  So I go out there with this guy James, who’s pretty new, but they want to give him some experience.  Most people in the office don’t like to go out when there are fatalities, but somebody’s got to do it.

Our insured car is the stake truck, so it looks like we’ve got a fairly big exposure.  I take some pictures of the scene while James gets a statement from our driver.  The driver of the Honda is gone.  His air bag didn’t deploy for some reason, and his head went straight into the steering column.  His skull is all crushed.  He must have died instantly.  I take a picture to show that the bag didn’t deploy.  Maybe there’s some liability on the part of the manufacturer that will offset our cost.  The driver’s pregnant wife is still alive; her air bag worked.  They’re taking her away in an ambulance, as I take some more pictures of the inside of the Honda.

James looks about ready to throw up when he comes over and sees the driver.

“How can you look at that?” he says.

“I’ve seen worse.”  I have.  You have to get used to it, or you can’t really do your job very well.  You’ve got to think of things in a numerical sense, in terms of liability and exposure.  I once saw a guy in a motorcycle collision who got his face torn clean off on the asphalt.  He should have worn a helmet with a face guard.  He lived, though.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” James says.

I point at the ambulance as it drives off.

“We’re going to have to pay out a lot when she loses that baby,” I say.

James just looks at me like I’m crazy.

“You don’t have many friends, do you?” he says.

“Not really.  No.”

James is a pretty outgoing guy, so I guess he thinks it’s odd that I don’t have any friends.  He’s always going out with people from the office when they go to happy hour and whatnot.  I suppose I just prefer not to mix social life with work life.  I don’t want to sit there talking about all the morons I have to deal with all day.  It’s bad enough as it is.

I could tell she was probably feeling pretty awkward about the whole situation at that point.  Here she was stuck in the middle of dinner with some guy she didn’t know who was now starting to look like some kind of loser or weirdo.  I was sorry I’d let myself get talked into this in the first place.  Normally I wouldn’t care what she thought, but it was the way she looked at me, like she was sorry for me or something.  That’s what made me want to tell her I wasn’t as bad as what I said made me out to be.  Sometimes I don’t get what makes people feel the way they do.  But I had the feeling then that I was missing out on something, like I was going to lose something that I never had.

This place in Lakewood is called the Sea Winds Motel, but it’s really more of a transient apartment building, like for people who can’t pay by the month so they pay by the week instead.  I think maybe they’ve got to pay by the week so as to make sure they don’t spend what they got on speed or smack or whatever before they can pay the rent.  I get jumpy when I’m in this kind of neighborhood.  You never know who’s going to decide it’s a good idea to mug you or steal your car, especially when it’s got all this expensive equipment inside and a big company logo on the side of it.  Might as well paint a target on it.  This other claims guy, John, got mugged in Watts one time.  You won’t catch me going down there.

Anyway, this place is run by this old Cambodian couple who can barely speak English.  Every time I come here I’ve got to ask the lady where so-and-so lives a couple of times before she understands who it is I’m looking for.  I’m used to the routine.  This is something like the fifth time I’ve been here.

Finally, I get out of the Cambodian lady that the guy I’m looking for lives in room sixteen, and I go up there to meet him so I can get a look at his car.  This kid is maybe eighteen, and he’s got a girl and a baby packed into this room along with all their stuff.  They’re both at home in the middle of the day on a Tuesday.  And all I’m thinking about is I’m glad I’m not that baby, because it doesn’t look like there’s much sunshine in his future.

The car is this beat-up Country Squire station wagon that the kid inherited from his dead uncle or something.  It’s got a temporary registration, and he has to take a minute and root through all the crap in the glove box to find the paperwork that shows he actually does own the car.  Allegedly, the guy who we insure backed into this kid’s station wagon in the motel parking lot.  He didn’t see it happen, but some other woman who lives here says she did. 

This is what the kid tells me, but this woman is nowhere to be found.  And there’s so much old damage on the car I can’t tell which damage he’s trying to say is new.  It’s all bullshit anyway, but I take some pictures and tell him I’ll have to get back to him after I talk to our insured.  He won’t see a dime, I could tell him right now, but you never know how someone is going to react to that.  And I’m not trying to bring anybody down, despite what you might think.  This kid probably just thought it would be a good way to score a few hundred bucks and maybe buy his baby some formula or whatever.

It’s when I’m leaving that Short Dog comes up to me.  I met him the second time I had to come down here.  He never recognizes me, but he keeps coming up to me.  Last time he thought I was the health inspector.  Kept complaining about the plumbing or something.  Today I’m his parole officer, probably because that’s the only other person with a tie on who would bother coming by this place.

Short Dog is one of those walking paradoxes.  But then I guess that’s not really true because he doesn’t walk.  One thing is they call him Short Dog even though he is something like six foot two, which isn’t really tall, but it’s not what I’d call short either.  With Short Dog, you’ve got to measure him lengthwise.  That’s the only way you’re going to get him straightened out, because he sure isn’t going to stand up. 

One of the other tenants here let on to me once that some two-bit dealer went half nuts over some money Short Dog owed him and went to town on his knees with a baseball bat.  Since then, the only getting around he does is with a wheelchair.  I think it’s more than likely--even if he hadn’t gone and got his legs all busted up--he’d still have more than just a little difficulty walking.  His bones are all shriveled up like nothing else from years of doing whatever kind of junk he can get his hands on.  Which gets me to the other thing about Short Dog, which is that he looks like he’s about sixty-five years old when he’s really only around thirty-three.

He rolls up to me, leaning to the left like he always does, I guess because his spine must be pretty twisted up just like the rest of him.  He’s got this braided dreadlock haircut, but it’s all nappy and overgrown.

“Two weeks,” he says.

“What?”

“You said you wasn’t going to be here for two more weeks.”

I’ve got to listen extra carefully because he mumbles all the time.

“I guess I got here early.”

“Ask anybody here, man.  I been good.  Just keepin’ to myself.”

“That’s good.  I just came to look at this car here.”

“The car?”

“Yeah.  Just looking at the car.”

“You ain’t my parole officer?”

“No.  That’s not me.”

“I had you mixed up.”

“That’s okay.”

“Sometimes I mix things up, man.”

“That’s okay,” I say. 

Then he just kind of stares at me for a little while, like he’s sizing me up.  It feels like he’s waiting for me to say something.

I say, “Sometimes I feel just about the shape you’re in, all busted up.”

“I always feel that way, man,” he says.

“I’ve got to go.  Take it easy.”

As I turn around to go, he says something like, “The greatest wise man needs the shepherd.”  It’s something religious sounding like that.

I turn it over a couple of times in my head.  I’m not sure what it means, but it sounds important.  It always gets to me how you can think you’ve got things pretty well figured out, and then somebody goes and says something to you like that.  Something that just kind of sinks in and sticks on you.

The way the whole thing gets started is like this: this older lady who lives in my building, Mrs. Matthews, stops me in the hall.  We say hello from time to time, but she never stopped me before.  She says she’s got this niece who just moved to the city from back east somewhere, and would I maybe like to take her to dinner.  I tell her I’m not really good at that sort of thing, going out on dates or whatever, and it’s probably not a good idea.  She keeps pushing it though, telling me what a nice girl this niece of hers is.  And eventually I agree to it; I think just to get her to stop talking.  Mrs. Matthews gives me her number, and I call her.  We go out to this Italian restaurant a couple days later.

Sitting across from her at dinner, I’m thinking she’s in the same boat I’m in.  She got hustled into this by her aunt.  Her name is Evelyn.  She’s quiet, and she looks a lot like what I imagine a librarian must look like.  Not so much that she dresses in old sweaters and wears her hair in a bun and wears reading glasses on the tip of her nose.  It’s just that she has what I’d call a lonely face, and I suppose I always picture librarians to be lonely people, cramped up all day inside with all those shelves full of books.  I guess some people would rather stick their head in a book than have to talk to people all day.

We don’t talk much at first, but then I start feeling that I better say something.  I ask her where she moved from and what she used to do and does she like living in California now.  She gives short answers.  I figure she doesn’t like to talk much, which I can appreciate because I really don’t like to talk much either, and I think sometimes people just don’t know when to be quiet.  After awhile, I start running out of things to ask her, and I get the sense she’s not too comfortable.

“I’ve got to apologize,” I say.  “I’m not used to this sort of thing.  Getting fixed up with someone.”

“Me neither,” she says.

“I’m sort of a simple person, I guess.  When something new comes up, I get a little shaken up.”

“Me too,” she says.  “I like to keep things simple, keep my life simple.”  That gets to me for some reason.  I start feeling like maybe we’ve got something in common.  And that’s when she asks me what I do.

“I’m a claims adjuster for a car insurance company.”

“How did you get into that?”

“I don’t know.  I sort of fell into it.  I never really knew what I wanted to do.”

“Do you like it?”

“I suppose I do.  I like some things about it.”

“Like what?”

And I can’t think of what the best way to put it is.  That’s when I say it.

“I like my work because it allows me to share in other people’s misery.”

She fixes me with that sad look.  And I can’t think of what to say to make her understand.

The rest of dinner we don’t say much.  I think I ask her how her ravioli is or something, and she just nods.  I can’t figure out how to salvage anything from the conversation.

I drive her to her apartment afterwards, and she thanks me for dinner and goes inside.  As she’s stepping out of the car, she looks at me in that sad way again.  I keep seeing her face in my head as I drive home, picturing the way she looked when she looked at me that way.

And I get to thinking that maybe here is somebody who sees things the same way I do.  It’s the first time I ever think that I should try and make something more of my life, like maybe what I’ve got is not enough.