sonofabitch

"how can people be so ugly? easy, easy to be hard..."

	6/12/02 I have no idea. I know my daughter is here and that is a great thing. She is amazing. She is an adult. She is learning, she is passionate, she is smart, she is full of wonder and disgust. She wants to study law and dance and spanish and japanese and art. We have been spending time together. She is home for a month, an abbreviated summer vacation. She heads back to school at the end of this month. It will be a sad farewell. She is a great person. Has developed into such an amazing person, and then she will be gone. The invites to visit her in New York, sure. But I can barely make the trip to the grocery store. Cross-country flights... My stucco is collapsing and I have no health insurance. After 22 years, my health insurance has ended. 22 years of not even thinking about health insurance. The Screen Actors Guild was a very good thing. And now. Kaput. Over. I didn't make enough in residuals to cover. So, at almost fifty, I have to discover the joys of paying for health insurance. Now, normally, I wouldn't give a shit. Or much of one. I'm relatively healthy. But there are those exams. Like colon cancer stuff and prostate stuff. All the joys I am just getting into. And then there is the unexpected. I was invited to dinner at a friend's house. He and his wife wanted to see Charlotte while she was in town. So, we had dinner planned. About five this afternoon, I got a call from Christie, saying that Richard and their youngest son had been in an accident and she wasn't sure what time dinner was going to be. Richard had called from the scene of the accident on his cell phone. He was bleeding. The son was okay. More or less. The scene was nearby, so I said I'd head over there to check things out. Sixth and June. Sixth street is a bitch. It's a blind curve, just begging for trouble. I got in the car and went to see what I could do. Richard's car was sitting in the middle of the intersection. The driver door wide open. There was another car, some older honda-esque car, also in the middle of the street. Lots of broken glass and other stuff in the street. Two cop cars and a young woman sitting on a corner. I pulled over and got out. The cops asked what i was doing there, as if I were some sort of ambulance-chaser. I asked where Richard and the boy were. They said they didn't know these people. I said they were the people who had been in that car. Richard's new station wagon. Smashed up. Sitting in the middle of the street. The woman on the corner said they had gone to Cedars Sinai Hospital. They were alive and well. I asked if she were the driver of the other car. She said she was a witness. A third cop car pulled up and two more cops got out. Rush hour on a major cross street. I asked if there was anything I could do. I got no answer, so I left. I called Christie back. Richard had just called from the ambulance. They were okay. He said. We decided that Charlotte and I would come over. Support, and to have someone there when Christie went to pick up Richard from the hospital later. He was going to have a cat scan. She thought he'd be back in an hour. From Cedars? Char and I went over. Things were a little tense. Kids seemed okay, but Christie was a little on edge. Things going wrong. Waiting for a plumber to fix the stopped up sink. Missing the plumber. Little things. And then the blink of an eye in which you can lose someone. Someone runs a stop sign and suddenly the guy you married is gone. And the child you created and raised for four years. It's all so easy. So fast. So fucking scary. It's easy to say some asshole ran the stop sign. But we all have those moments, those little slips. Squeeze through a light. Don't see a stop sign. Think we know an intersection. Those moments that are out of our control. When two cars collide and crunch. And this time they were lucky. Lucky they had a car with side impact reinforcement. Lucky they were not a few feet further into the intersection. Just lucky. Richard came back from the hospital with four staples in his head. "I'm the Staples Center." Blood on his shirt and in his hair. Slightly dazed. But okay. And the boy child is okay. They're all okay. The other driver is okay. The new car is shot, though. And the sink is still clogged. But there is a tomorrow. And turning this back to me (me-e-e-e-e-e-e-e). I don't have health insurance anymore. So, the ambulance ride, the staples, the IV. I'd be screwed. SONOFABITCH