Enough Killing Joe

I’m pretend relaxed, sitting on a filthy sofa in the LOW-LOW insuranceoffice at a strip mall on Route 1.  I lean back on the brown, dried out, pleather sofa, that’s been stained and deformed by hundreds, if not thousands, of customers ensnared by the same trap.  

I ventured in when, driving home from work, I saw the LOW-LOWbanner hanging across their storefront, and wondered if I could get a better car insurance rate.  Having just turned thirty, and recently signed a mortgage – the first intrusions of adulthood into my heretofore blissfully clueless life – managing costs had suddenly become important. 

The high-stacked-bleached-blond receptionist, stilettos in front me the thirty feet down the storefront into the dimly lit back office.  The salesman, a pudgy faced, thick-glassed man, of about my own age, eases back in his chair, and holds up his index finger as the universal signal of ‘wait, I’m much too busy for you.’  But, just as I’m turning to leave, he half stands out of his seat, and still jabbering on the phone, but now with a smarmy salesman smile, waves me onto the distressed sofa.

His office is too small for the sofa, but his closely studied Acme Strong Arm Life Insurance Sales Manualcalls for creating a faux-cozy environment to facilitate the tricky consideration of how many more years the mark … eh, I mean the customer is willing to bet they will live.

A few minutes of unavoidably eavesdropped mumbo-jumbo sounding business talk, ends with the surprisingly emotional admission: “So, a new cylinder head gasket is the only to get that piece of shit back on the road again, heh?  Ok, but then you’re covering the goddam oil change!”  

He slams down the phone, stands up, buttons his Caldor suit jacket over an ample, I-like-big-lunches paunch, and leans forward, holding out his hand, still sweaty from the phone.

“Hi, I’m Mike Nowell, CPI, AII – I only say them letters to let you know I’m not just some guy stuck at the back of an insurance office,” he says, completely devoid of irony. 

“Hello, yes, I’m Joe, Joe O’Fa… .”

He turns holds up the wait-index-finger, takes one big step and leans out the doorway.

“Phyllis, hold my calls,” he yells down the office, and pulls the tinny door closed behind him.

“Now,” he rubs his hands together. “Tell me about yourself Tom, or, Joe right, Joe.  Tell me about yourself,” again flashing the smarmy salesman smile.

“Well, eh, I live in…” I start, but again the wait-index-finger shoots up.

“It’s actually your parents I need to know about, how long they lived, what, if they are deceased, was the cause of death.  You know, that kind of insurance stuff.  Not that you’re not an interesting guy,” he sorta half grimaces, “but that’s the sort of info these big insurance companies need to know.”

Confused, but still with the hope of getting a better monthly car insurance rate, I’m muddling along when, he leaps right for the jugular.

“So …,” he holds up the wait-index-finger.  “Just what age did you say your father first had heart disease, … early forties?” he raises his eyebrows interrogatively, like we’ve just made a major discovery.  “That’s only around the corner, really.” 

He holds up the palms of both hands to keep me stopped.

“And your mother, that must have been so hard,” he shakes his head, “so young, so young.  I mean relatively speaking, not as young as you are now, but not a million years away neither.”

He stops, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, while he’s taking a breath.

“See an occurrence like that could leave the missus, and maybe by then you’d have a couple of little ones running around … .”  

His thick eyebrows shoot up, as he lets that hang in the air for a few seconds, before his face starts to deform into a frown that seems to ask: Could you possibly not be thinking about stuff like this?  Or, … or God forbid, you couldn’t actually … could you?  You could not be thinking at all, could you? Really?  With a wife, and now a mortgage – remember pal, the bank that owns your house – and maybe a few kids on the way, and you don’t even think about stuff like this?  

With me rattled into silence, he quickly moves into the business of just how many, or as he phrases it, “how limited a number of years there might be before there’s the possibility of big payout to your missus, … and the future little Joes.” 

By then, he has me numbed by repeatedly trawling through scenarios that inevitably end up with me abandoning my family, through the vehicle of death, in their time of greatest need.

“Let me tell you a story,” he sighs loudly; definitively tapping the stack of the papers I’ve just signed on the glass coffee table.  “Just two, … no three,” he holds up the index finger, “weeks ago, I had to go a good friend’s, well, a good friend of my parents’ wake. And I’m moving along the line, and the widow, … Mrs. … Jones, she was sitting, you know she’s quite elderly,” he cups both palms to somehow emphasize her elderliness, “so she’s sitting on the sofa in the funeral home.  And when it comes to my turn in the grieving line, she stands up and gave me a big hug, and says; ‘thank you Mike, thank you for protecting my family at this difficult time.’”  

He stares off into nowhere; his lips in a rueful half-smile; his eyes a little moist.

“You know, that’s kinda why I chose this business.”

He purses his lips, but quickly releases them.

“Anyway,” his eyes flash back to me. “We’ve killed Joe enough.  Onto the missus.” 

An hour later, shaken to the core of my soon-to-expire being, I leave with two stacks of carbon copy paperwork that predict the optimal time for economically beneficial deaths in my family.

“Remember to mail me those voided checks,” he yells across the parking lot at me, raising his arm high in a salute-wave.  “My boss is gonna be pissed at the low rate you got outta me.  But remember, that awesome protection for your family doesn’t kick in until the first payment.”

Three days, two bottles of wine, and a case of beer, later, I walk into the office of a regular insurance salesman, and walk out with sensible, affordable coverage and minor optimism around life expectancy.   

For twenty years I get by without ever forcefully thinking about my mortality. 

Then divorce.  

Suddenly, we’re sitting in the mediator’s office postulating upon my mortality.  

The mediator’s questions, raised in a far more reasonable manner than done by “Mike Nowell, CPI, AII, not just the guy at the back of an insurance office,” lead to a similar conclusion: A new life insurance policy is required.

“You fill,” Valentina, the life insurance company nurse, says in the punitively directive way that only a Russian can. 

She’s a short, squat woman, who must be at least seventy, makeup caked on her face, costume jewelry earrings, bracelets and necklaces, but no rings on her thickened arthritic fingers.

“No toy-let water,” she wags a thick index finger at me.  “Lab tell toy-let water.”

“I, … I never, … I wouldn’t …,” I meekly take the urine sample cup, still not attuned to her directness.

We’re standing the kitchen of my shitty little divorce apartment, where she’s already weighed, measured, blood pressured and temperatured me, with a record number of tsk-tsks and judgmental sighs. 

“You vash hands,” she sighs, and flops down onto a kitchen chair.  “I no vant sick too.”

I stare at her saggy-craggy face.  The ruby red lipstick strays well beyond her lips, and forms cracked heaps at the edges of her mouth.  Large, complicated earrings drag down her earlobes.

“Go,” she waves her arthritic hand impatiently toward the bathroom.  “I have old-old man to wisit in Bri-town.”

I comply, wondering whether the old-old man is buying insurance?  A relative?  A date?

When I return, anxious to get rid of the freakily warm urine sample cup, she’s leaning over a blue manila folder on the kitchen table, a stack of forms at the ready.

Without looking up, she points at the stovetop for me to leave the urine sample there.  I stall momentarily; considering the implications of that should I ever decide to cook.  

She waves her hand quickly.  

“Come, come: Old man vaiting.” 

I obediently sit.

“I ask,” she stares at me with her glassy eyes, holding a black Bic pen at the ready. “You tell.”

I nod as she stares hard at me

“You father; he live or he die?”

“Dead.”

“How old?”

“Eighty four.”

“How?”
            “Heart attack.”

She shakes her head, and looks up to consider me.

“You mother; she live or she die?”

“Dead.”

“How old?”

“Fifty one”

“Five … one,” she tsk-tsks, stops writing, looks up at me.

“How?”

“Brain hemorrhage, well ultimately it was a heart attack … .”

Her glassy eyes stare at me.  She turns the leaf of paper with my basic information.

“Is wery bad,” she shakes her head, tsk-tsking.  “You are sure?”

“Eh, … well, it’s eh, … I mean I’ve told other insurance companies this.”

“Wery good. Is so,” she gets back to writing, but sneaks a glance up at me under her penciled-on eyebrows.

We muddle on through the rest of the interrogation, my sense of wellbeing plummeting to historic lows.

Finally finished, and sliding the blue manila folder into the front pocket of her wheelie bag, she turns and stares at me.

“Vhy?”

“Why what?” 

“Now.  Life ensur-ance, vhy now?”

“Oh, it’s a divorce thing. I need to have it so that if I was to … know you, if … anyway, so the kids’ college costs are covered, and stuff.”

“Ahhh,” she nods knowingly, casting me a sympathetic look.

“But you don’t think the stuff with, you know … my parents, … my mother being just a couple years older …, you know, the insurance company, they won’t deny. Would they?”

She stops, sits down heavily again. Pulls the blue folder from the wheelie’s front pocket; carefully opens it.  

Slowly, her thick fingers turn each leaf.

I feel a drop of sweat run down my chest.

“No prob-lum,” she says, looking up, her face tightly distorting into what I assume is a smile.  

“Fifteen years poll-icee, come-pany no vorry.  Fall down stair, throw-pical dis-ease, accident – come-pany vorry alvays.  But fifteen years, no prob-lum.  After … .”

“Excellent!” the word gushes out of me, with a shoulder slumping sense of relief at one big divorce task completed.

“After,” she holds up a thick index finger.  

“After,” she repeats, but then turns her glassy eyes away. 

“Prob-lum.”