Back in the Knack days, Jackson had enjoyed an elevated status for having the ear of the boss, almost like being an unofficial VP. But when Shep sold up, and Jackson’s managerial job description did become official? His co-workers’ deference flew right out the window. By contrast—this was the mystery, and Jackson had to admit that it griped him a bit—despite all the razzing about that “escape fantasy” and despite all the public groveling before “Mr. Pogatchnik” and despite having become an overnight nobody like a fairy-tale prince who’d turned himself into a frog, Shep still commanded a regard that never sank below a surprisingly high baseline level. Christ, the guy couldn’t have humiliated himself more completely. Still, whenever a really sticky job came in—like the one this morning where knocking a hole for a pass-through window between the kitchen and the dining room entailed busting through a solid foot of concrete—to whom did the guys turn for advice? Helpful hint: it wasn’t Burdina.
When lunch came around at last, Jackson forced himself to sidle up to Shep’s station. He’d begged off lunch to do “errands” so many afternoons that his avoidance of his best friend was becoming too obvious. The trouble was, he was now committed to omitting from his conversation everything he was going through with Carol; just as in boxing, none of his topics could target below the waist. While he could always resort to Mugs and Mooches, a tirade wasn’t as satisfying when its purpose was purely diversionary. “You have to make some call, or can you grab a bite?”
“Forty minutes isn’t enough time to get through to a human being at that switchboard,” said Shep. “The thing is, I got sent a bill they totally refused. It’s for fifty-eight K and change, too. The secretary at Goldman’s office said it may have been some number entered wrong. One digit off, anywhere on the form, and they refuse to pay the whole thing.”
“You realize what a fair whack of their ‘administration costs’ are, don’t you?” said Jackson. “According to Carol, these companies hire scads of people whose whole job it is to find ways not to pay the medical expenses of people they’re supposedly insuring. She says these fucks are so good at it that on average they manage to weasel out of thirty percent of the bills they get sent.”
“Yeah, well, whenever they ‘weasel out of it,’ or some middleman transposes a number, the full bill goes straight to yours truly. I’ve got forty-five days to appeal this thing, and it’s already been a month. After the forty-five days are up, I’m stuck with it. And this is just one glitch. These minions at Wellness query everything. Goldman says they even tell him which drugs he can prescribe. He wanted Glynis to use Dermovate along with a course of cetirizine for her skin rashes, but no—Wellness nixed them both. They said use calamine lotion. Which is a joke. No explanation, as usual. I guess they’re not obliged to provide one. But these people aren’t doctors. I don’t understand how business graduates of two-year junior colleges are making decisions about what to prescribe my wife.”
“Health insurance is health insurance,” boomed from behind them. “You got any coverage whatsoever, and you’re complaining?” It was Mr. Pogatchnik, who regarded eavesdropping as a privilege of high office. “That contract costs me a fortune, Knacker.”
“Yes, I realize it’s a major line item. In my day—”
“It’s not your day. Haven’t we got that straight yet? It’s not your day. Repeat after me?”
“It’s not my day.”
“So don’t imagine you have any idea. When you ran this joint, you were covering a fraction of the workforce I run now. I may have replaced that Cadillac plan you had for Knack with a serviceable little Ford Fiesta. Still, in just eight years, per head? The small-business employer premium has doubled.”
“Hey, it costs what it costs, right?” said Shep, and Jackson was relieved to detect, for once, a seditious glitter in his friend’s expression.
“What it costs is too damn much,” said Pogatchnik, who would no more be aware of his reputation for the flabby, faux-profound tautology than he would understand the word itself. “I just renewed, too, and your wife was cited as one of the justifications for jacking the price. I sure hope you’re sweet on the lady, ‘cause she’s costing me a mint.”
“I am very fond of my wife, thank you.”
“Anyway, all the new hires are on contract, no benefits. So count yourself lucky.”
“I do count myself lucky,” said Shep numbly. “But the new guys. If they get sick, or their kid does. What do they do?”
“Emergency room, or suck it up. Point is, it’s not my problem. The way it oughta be, in my book. They want some fancy insurance package, they can buy it themselves.”
“Private plans …” said Shep. “You don’t pay them enough …”
“I pay them what I pay them. Pretty decent wages, too, since otherwise most of these wets would be packing pork or picking grapefruit.”
“But this medical stuff can be—life and death,” Shep submitted with a nauseating tentativeness. “Offering no benefits seems—a little harsh.”
“I am what I am, right? I’m not handing out ice cream. I’m a businessman. If I don’t turn a profit you’re all out on the street. Besides, am I responsible for buying my employees groceries? Am I supposed to find them apartments? Aren’t food and shelter matters of ‘life and death,’ too?”
“Fair enough,” Shep conceded.
“Next thing you know I’m supposed to spring for their flat-screen TVs and premium cable fees. Which, by the way, would be a hell of a lot cheaper than fucking health insurance, even if I threw in a new dinette set and a book of all-you-can-eat coupons for Pizza Hut.”
“Yeah, I been meaning to ask,” said Jackson, “I wanted to swap my sausage for pepperoni.”
“I hire people,” Pogatchnik bullied on, not the least interested in banter that put his ingrate employees and management on the same side. “I don’t adopt them. Least of all do I adopt their whole goddamned families. You two—for now—I’m stuck with. But I’m telling you, this shit, this big communist cradle-to-grave employment shit, is over. It doesn’t make any earthly sense that just because I take on an employee to clear other people’s hairy drains, suddenly I’m supposed to pay for his ingrown toenails. The insulin for his diabetes because he eats too many Krispy Kreme Bavarian custards. His hernia operation after he bangs his squeeze on the side with too much gusto. His ten-year-old’s ADD medication, if only because nobody admits to having a kid anymore who’s thick as pig shit. The five months his blind, harelipped, one-legged premature baby with the mind of an eggplant spends in intensive care, when it should have been thrown out with the bathwater. Not to mention the billions of dollars his wife’s terminal cancer costs before she kicks the bucket anyway, since nobody in this country can die anymore without dragging the entire economy down with them.”
Pogatchnik’s pause baited Shep to take offense, but ever since “So long, asshole!” his self-demoted employee had been a paragon of restraint.
“Unless I quit being held ransom for health insurance, for this whole crowd?” Pogatchnik carried on. “Handy Randy would go under. Realize that’s one of the main reasons American companies are moving overseas, don’t you? Health insurance. Hell, I’d move this outfit to China, too, if only my Mexicans could commute to Queens from Beijing. You guys came to me today, you could have a job. That’s all. A job is a job. As for cancer, you’d die on your own dime. So you chumps don’t like the World Wellness Group, you know where the door is. I’d replace you with a couple of Guatemalans at a fraction of the salary who’d be grateful for the paycheck, who wouldn’t give me any lip, who wouldn’t misspeak the name of the company kind enough to employ their sorry asses, and who wouldn’t have an attitude problem because one of them is delusional and still thinks he’s the boss.”
“Just used up fifteen minutes of our lunch break,” Jackson muttered once they’d escaped to Seventh Avenue. “Not enough time for the line at Brooklyn Bread. Guess we’ll just walk. Bastard.”
“He is who he is, right?” said Shep
, and they launched toward Prospect Park.
“I hate to admit it,” Jackson said on Ninth Street, “but Pogatchnik has a point. I don’t know what those new-hire sons of bitches are supposed to do when they get run over by a delivery truck. Still, plenty of those guys have big families. How’s a little operation like Randy Handy going to cover all their medical expenses? I’m not sure why it should have to.”
“Somebody’s gotta pay for it.”
They’d been so anxious to get away from Pogatchnik that Shep had forgotten to leave behind his down vest, which he now stuffed in his backpack. The sweltering sun had been a relief after the ice cave of the office, but only for a minute or two. Shep rolled up his sleeves; even after forgoing their joint weight-training sessions for months, he still had powerful arms. As for the poor fuck’s steady weight gain since January, Jackson battled between an unattractive satisfaction and dismay.
“But the employer thing, it’s just a historical fluke,” Jackson said authoritatively; what the heck, he could probably fill out this entire walk with factual information. That was what real men traded with each other anyway. Properly edified, Shep would never be able to object that he’d been filibustered. “Until about the 1920s, there was no such thing as health insurance. You got a medical bill, you paid it. Even then, private plans were few and far between, really just meant to cover catastrophe. The employer-sponsored thing developed during World War Two, when labor was scarce. Big companies were making bids for the handful of guys left who weren’t in the army, but they were hog-tied by government wage controls, so they couldn’t offer higher salaries. To get around the laws, they added health cover as a come-hither. It was a little perk. Didn’t cost much, since everybody in those days keeled over fast and young. You couldn’t spend that much on people’s medical care, because nobody had invented chemo, or heart transplants, or the MRI. Pogatchnik thinks he’s being funny, but throwing in health benefits back then really wasn’t so different from tossing the flunkies a coupon for pizza.”
“Yeah, well now the pie comes with mushrooms, and anchovies, and extra cheese.”
“The problem’s not the pizza, it’s the insurance companies, man! They’re fucking evil, man! They’re parasites, parasites on other people’s suffering!”
“They’re not evil, Jacks, they’re just companies. Jesus, you sound like my father.”
“Do they produce anything? Do they improve anything? Do they do anything for anybody, besides their own employees and shareholders? Even McDonalds makes hamburgers. Those cunts at Wellness, they just shuffle paper. All they accomplish is a little redistribution of wealth, mostly to themselves. They’re Mooches pure and simple.”
“They’re private enterprises. They’re supposed to turn a profit.”
“That’s the whole point, dickhead! That is the whole fucking point!”
They’d hit the park; maybe Jackson had grown a mite vociferous, since a lady nearby side-eyed him with recognizable urban alarm, shimmying her stroller rapidly in the opposite direction.
Jackson made an effort to moderate his tone to a level that didn’t threaten the safety of small children. “You remember what you told me about gambling? How if most people didn’t, on average, lose, there wouldn’t be a gambling industry in the first place? For there to be money in it, the big picture has to be fixed.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Shep. “But you’re not, still—?”
“Give me a break, I’ve sworn off the dogs completely,” Jackson said hurriedly. So long as he was keeping his trap shut about everything else in his life, he might as well make it a clean sweep and lie about the works. “I just mean, health insurance works the same way, right? Any insurance. For these companies to run in the black, the majority of their customers have to lose. On average, you have to pay in more over your lifetime than you draw, or these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.”
“Well, I guess the hard cases are subsidized by guys who live on rice milk and pay high premiums for forty years, and then drop dead in the street. You know, guys like that.” Shep nodded toward an ostentatiously lean, shirtless runner showing off his gray-haired pecs and carrying a dumbbell in each hand. You didn’t stay that taut and skinny past fifty without being a pain in the ass, and at a glance Jackson pitied the man’s family. Puffing to overtake a female jogger up ahead in the midday heat, this geezer didn’t simply run; he was “a runner.” It was obvious that the pill’s miserable circuit around Prospect Park was the most important thing in his life. Fucking pathetic.
“On the other hand,” Shep went on, “Flicka, Glynis—they’ve both cost scads more than either of our families have paid in. We’re the Mooches here. We’ve lucked out.”
“Here we go, yet another improbably upbeat take on a national disaster. You seriously feeling lucky?”
“Good fortune is relative.”
Jackson got a little tired of Shep’s ceaseless reasonableness, his prissy, Sunday school sense of perspective. “My point stands. The very fact that these companies have to turn a profit means most people pay in more than they get out, period. So health insurance is, ipso facto, a scam.”
“Ipso facto!” Shep chuckled. “Sounds like a fifties detergent slogan. ‘Use Whiz, and, ipso facto! Stains vanish!’ I don’t know where you pick this stuff up.”
“I read a lot. You should try it.”
“Yeah, right. After I work all day, hit the A-and-P, make dinner, fetch Glynis her meds, and water, and skin cream … Give her a shot in the ass of Neupogen after drugging her out with lorazepam to keep her from getting hysterical about the needle … Keep her company because she can’t sleep, do the laundry at two in the morning and pay the bills at three … Then I can put my feet up with a big, thick, educational tome before the alarm rings at five.”
“What’s the diff? Flicka, pal, is a full-time job by herself, and I fit in plenty of books.”
“You’ve got Carol.”
It was the very subject of recent reflection that indeed Jackson did not “have” Carol, now less than ever. “Yeah, well, this isn’t a contest.”
“A contest over which of us feels more sorry for themselves? Now, that could be vicious.”
“I never said I felt sorry for myself,” said Jackson.
“Well, I do.”
“Why would you feel sorry for me?” Jackson snapped. Shep shot his friend a look. “I meant I feel sorry for myself, dickhead. Feeling sorry for you, too, would be a tall order.”
“Well, skip it then.”
They strode on in stiff silence.
Jackson had noticed that whenever he bought a new pair of shoes, he went through a period thereafter when he couldn’t stop looking at other people’s shoes—wondering why they might have chosen that particular pair, appraising them as handsome or hideous. The same phenom now pertained to other men’s dicks. With every jogger and dog walker they passed, he found himself compulsively checking out the mound under the fly, bitterly eying the well-endowed. Cyclists in their tight Lycra attracted his gaze to the groin, where they surely packed smooth, straight, functional equipment that they foolishly took for granted. Now a whole park full of jocks probably thought he was a fag.
“Glynis went in for another blood transfusion yesterday,” Shep said after a bit, making a stab at convivial conversation. “Her white blood cell count was knee-high. They had to cancel her chemo. She’s not strong enough.”
“At least she gets a break,” Jackson grunted.
“Yeah, but the cancer gets a break, too. Goldman’s decided she can’t tolerate the Alimta and cisplatin anymore, and when she does go back to chemo they’ll change the cocktail. How do you like that word, huh? Cocktail.” Jackson had to hand it to him, Shep was really trying—either to pretend everything was fine between them, or to make it fine.
Jackson made a grudging effort in return. “Yeah, I picture this gorgeous Tiffany martini glass, gleaming with sweat and toothpicked with a stuffed olive—only what’s shimmering inside isn’t Bombay gin an
d a splash of vermouth, but strychnine.”
Yet Jackson had no sooner congratulated himself for being so supportive than it grew hard to pay attention, because he was tortured by a memory from about ten years before. He’d been replacing the rickety risers of some schmuck’s staircase, and though a one-man job it stretched over three or four days; by happenstance, the landing was right outside this loser’s study. Jackson had always prided himself on being a lively presence in other people’s homes, not just your average tight-lipped hired brawn. So long as a customer seemed obviously glad to lend an ear, he kept up a running patter—sometimes about the job itself, but more often about your basic issues of the day. Sort of like whistling while you work, but less annoying. Given Jackson’s status as a well-rounded autodidact—like, he had taught himself the meaning of autodidact—edifying narration gave these homeowners a chance to learn something. The soundtrack provided free stimulation, free information, and they should have been grateful that he didn’t charge extra for it.
But when Jackson was heading out on the third day of the riser job, Shep had pulled him aside and said, “This guy in Clinton, he wants you to, well … He wants you to shut up.” Apparently the riser guy was some kind of fiction writer—and Jackson had the measure of the twit, so he was unquestionably some posturing amateur—and couldn’t “concentrate” with all the commentary from the staircase. The customer was completely full of shit, since he’d eaten up everything Jackson had said, and was doubtless already planning to use this improbably intelligent, verbally agile, larger-than-life “character” from the world of home repair in one of his otherwise dull, unpublishable short stories.
Yeah, Jackson had dispatched the rest of the job keeping his mouth shut—or when he remembered to keep his mouth shut—but he’d have appreciated a little more solidarity from Shep. Instead, when Jackson had objected that you know what these pompous writer types are like: horrified by the blank screen and just dying for any distraction, any excuse to escape the impoverished confines of their pygmy imaginations, and “I’m telling you that customer was rapt, like he was practically taking notes,” Shep didn’t agree, Yeah, I bet he was, too, but interrupted and said, “Look, keep a lid on it, right? Just this once? We got work to do, they got work to do. You’re not a talk show host, you’re a handyman.” That was really putting the boot in, since Shep knew full well that Jackson detested the word handyman, which he’d lobbied hard to replace on their business cards with something more dignified, something less low rent—you know, like domestic construction consultant. But no, the cards had to say handyman, because that’s the word that customers “understood.” Worse, Shep had pretty much implied that Jackson’s running commentary got on everyone’s nerves, and that this was merely the first guy to lodge a formal complaint. Well, Jackson had been supportive as all get-out through the sale of Knack and the deep-sixing of Pemba and now with Glynis, and frankly that support hadn’t always worked the other direction.