The Odds of Everything

The Odds of Everything

It used to lie there on the edge of my black filing cabinet, next to the alarm clock. Upon my little black filing cabinet resided my Little Black Book.

How many different connotations does the term “little black book” have for people anyway? Vinnie Barbarino and 70s/80s catchphrases for a booty-call list? Job contacts? Stock tips? And why “little”? Would a simple “Black Book” be more … sinister? A mafia thing, a Spanish Inquisition thing, military codes, hit list, or an even darker secret? Does little black ____ bring the “little black dress” (suited for funerals and weddings and all things Chardonnay) into the equation, or -

Alarm. Snooze. Alarm. Alarm. Obnoxious tool for humans to …. Alarm.

Push “stop”, stop that infernal “Bwrak! Bwrak! Bwrak! Bak” next to my head, now ow, foot swings to floor, prosthetic leg locks into place, step up, bounce, prosthetic is a secure click, I won’t fall on my ass now, ok.

It was almost in such a manner that I woke up on the last day that I had, and used, my own LBB. Except that I had two feet, then. Really gotta pee. Ah, satisfaction, system flowing free. Faucet squeak, hot water. Smell of steam, hot and sweet as a breakfast oven. Shave. Nice.

Subway ride to work. I remember thumbing through the empty pages of the book that day, leaning against the window of the E train, fresh sun coming through the glass onto, and reflected off of, the pale blank paper. Well anyway the pages of this particular book had come that way. Blank. As every little black book does, initially, right? And then, ever since the fifth day I had had it in my possession, an entry appeared in the lower left corner, every morning. Origin of the entry: unknown. Other people on the rocking train, with newspapers, phones, devices, connections to anything outside the turmoil in their own heads, had their own external input to go with the smell of ham-egg-and-cheese-on-a-roll breakfasts. I had, instead - and infinitely more satisfying - my one word for the day, to contemplate, revealed to me for the day’s use. Lower left corner, left page. Surrounded by paper the color and expanse of an inscrutable moon. An example - at the beginning of one particular day, the word was: “more”.

Hot coffee in the cold air, fresh from the station, smelled like the sun, which glinted off of its shimmering black dark and deep surface in the cardboard We Are Happy To Serve You cup as I ascended the steps of retro-glory Bloomingdale’s. “More”, I was contemplating. More what?

The Bloomingdale’s sparring went nicely on the “more” morning. Suitor A brought plans that contradicted Suitor B; the former argued for MORE investment with more immediate yields (high risk), and Suitor B argued, of course, for the inverse. Less investment for extended long-term, dependable yields, and lower risk. Of course I went with A. More.

My deal ended up being the better choice, of course; as usual, the book had lived up to its reputation, a reputation known only to myself. This book had informed, to some extent, my selections of professors, my business moves, my wife. All, I would venture to say, successful choices.

But then, on the last day I ever consulted it, the entry was somewhat curious in that it consisted of numbers rather than the usual word or words. It had never occurred to me to take my book to Vegas or play the stocks with it, since its messages were always random, unexpected, the meanings left for me to ponder somewhat; it gave answers unprompted by questions. Using it in some pre-established gambling capacity and expecting easy leads would no doubt have been a vainglorious attempt on my part ending, doubtlessly, in futility.

Yet there it was, that day, numbers - - and with - - a dollar sign? 4576508 $20,000. Could it be? Lotto ticket numbers? No way. Way too obvious. But … how could I … not?

Punched out of my soul-sucking job at Bloomingdale’s at 4:57 pm. I remember that number. Stupid old-school punch cards. Who uses those anymore? Bloomingdale’s did. 4:57, burned in my brain. Then, lotto ticket purchase at a bodega. Then, New York deli musty smell vanishing as the shopworn door closed behind me. I’d placed my bet. Pick Six (plus one). 4576508. I’d written it down on a yellow post-it and double, triple checked it of course. Ran it through the deli machine. Nothing. No win. Not even two bucks, let alone 20 G. Nothing.

Jog-hustled down the subway stairs for the number 6 train. Could have been the 3 uptown, but it ended up being the 6. I looked at the time. 5:08pm. I remember that number, too. I will always remember it. I waited. I leaned over and saw the light. Small. Big. Bigger.

Darkness deep, hush, gentle velvet wraps, folding into each other as I drifted slowly down, down. Smell of antiseptic, gauze, visions of friend’s faces, travels to remote places … it seemed that from that subway platform I had entered a world of familiar images and also new journeys. I lived in Africa, where friendly women gave me sandwiches as we overlooked a lush forest from a veranda. I was an actor in Paris, teaching students in a freezing loft with peeling paint. I was taken captive by a former friend without a face who stole my shoes and kept me in the dark, in a restroom, on a bus headed down the California highway.

How many months was I in these alternate worlds? Years? Decades? The hindsight of unreal roads was endless, but now was air, smell again, clean white smell, a veil slowly falling away.

I had been in a medically-induced coma for two months. The shift back into understanding the real world took some time, though the hospital staff was always friendly. There were several times in which swinging my leg off the bed to go pee in the night resulted in my falling off the bed with a thud. It takes some time for it to connect with the subconscious that you are missing your left leg.

It wasn’t at all in my nature to sue people or even institutions. It was one particular hired-car trip, however, wherein the driver convinced me to call his lawyer cousin and sue the MTA for the accident, that this world-view of mine changed. I was especially inclined to pursue the legal option by a news article I remembered about some dumb student who’d got so drunk that he ended up getting hit by a train in Union Square and, like me, had lost a leg below the knee. He’d been awarded two million dollars for his own imbecilic act. Two million fucking dollars.

My lawyer cautioned me that cases like mine (cases like mine? Apparently, getting hit by a train and losing a limb, subsequently retaining zero memory of the incident, happens to people all the time) tend to result in plaintiff awards following a certain prevalent “trend”. Judges, it would seem, all hang out in the same bar. And in this moment, this given year, “cases like mine” were not yielding multi-million dollar results, such as they seemed to have done for the Drunken Idiot.

Another, more logical minus against me, was that cases like mine have to entail the actions accountable to the MTA itself. If Drunken Idiot strips naked and dances in the middle of the track, and the train has time to stop but doesn’t, there is clear accountability on the part of the driver. If, however, one is suddenly pushed in front of a train and the driver has no time to react, well … there is, in fact, no way you can really blame the subway system. Ok, I get it. The New York City subway service, with its slow, overstuffed trains, erratic schedule, frying/freezing temperatures, garbage smell, overpriced fares, rats that could take on a Doberman, and dangerous, hair’s-width-away-from-a-speeding-train walkways - making it the laughing stock of the rest of the civilized world - can’t even compensate an appropriate amount of money for the inevitable accident here and there. But hey, I get it. We are red-blooded Capitalists, dammit.

So the $40,000 check they offered to settle out of court seemed ok to me, considering my case’s low chance of success. The main problem with taking it to trial and proving MTA’s negligence was that there were no witnesses, and I could not remember falling on the tracks and therefore could not claim that the train would have had time to stop (and yet Drunken Idiot was somehow sober enough to remember that detail??)

Somehow, someway, Drunken Idiot had been able to prove that all-important factor, and I couldn’t. The lawyer wanted me to undergo hypnosis so I could say I remembered. And open up a hell portal in my memory cells that my brain has, thankfully, blocked. No thanks, sir.

The lawyer took half. So I came away with … $20,000.

If something costs an arm and a leg, at least now I know the price of a leg. The only catch was that it was a transaction I hadn’t elected to make.

And the Little Black Book? It won’t be in my life anymore. I won’t reveal what exactly I did with it, of course. Juju, Voodoo, who knows where its power came from or what retribution I might further suffer from revealing its current location.

Maybe I destroyed it. Maybe not. Maybe I sent it off tied to a helium balloon to land in a place near … who knows? Maybe near you.

And if it does ...

Good luck with that.