Aphorism

Sometimes the thoughts come out of nowhere...

I worked, for a regrettable stretch of time, in the collections business. My mid-20s were a vocationally wayward era for me where I worked in retail, food service, the mental health field and collections. I recall that I was drawn to collections by two things: the freedom from any sort of qualifications other than a willingness to tolerate abuse from complete strangers, and the chance to be an asshole to people on the phone--which, I guess, I saw as a character strength at that time. Considering that I now avoid talking on the phone in all but the most unavoidable of situations, I'd say I've progressed at least marginally in my self-image.

Starting off in general collections, I worked my way through auto loan collections, mortgage collections and classified ad collections. General collections was dull and depressing. Chasing people for the last $17 of an unpaid medical bill and having them argue about it wears on you quite quickly. Mortgage collections was just depressing. I'd gone into it blindly believing that when you're calling people to try to keep them in their homes if possible, they'd be a bit more receptive than Mrs. Jones when you call about the leftover balance on her goiter surgery. Not so. I was met with the belief that the debtor, not the bank, really owned the house. Or that the bank wouldn't really foreclose. In one instance a woman told me that she wasn't going to pay her mortgage because she was behind on her electric bill and "I won't have my children going without electricity." I opted not to ask her how she intended to slave the Nintendo to a utility pole when they were living in a box on the sidewalk. As for classified ads... Well, when you spend your days arguing with a business owner whether or not a typo was the cause for the lack of response to their ad, you learn to give up quickly.

Oh, but auto collections. Auto collections were, in a comparative sense, fun. Because auto collections had the benefit of involving repo guys, and repo guys had the benefit of being able to tell some fantastic stories. Believe me, I could regale you for pages. The lady who had two pit bulls guarding her car--one chained to the front bumper with enough play to let it run completely around the car once in either direction, the other living in the back seat, which the owner had strewn with hay. The repo guy who told a collector he would have gotten to a car if it hadn't been for the 20 dogs in the yard and the fact that "I only had thirteen shots." The repo guy who stalked a debtor who would drive from his garage, from where it's illegal to hoist a vehicle, to his job on a naval base, where the repo guy couldn't go, waiting until that one day when the debtor decided to stop at a bar on the way home. Which he did. And, of course, there was guy who just verbally abused me every time I called, practically dared me to take his car. One Saturday morning in the office, my phone rang. It was him. Called me "Mr. Shanahan" for the first time. "I was wondering," he said. "Did you guys come and repo my car?" I checked the record. No, I told him. No, we hadn't. There was a pause on the line, then: "Oh. Shit." The police report came later. More stories, more guns, more dogs, the occasional baseball bat....it went on.

My territory was the Georgia/Florida area. I worked with one repo joint out of Jacksonville. I can't recall the name. But I do recall, and always will, a guy named Wes. I never met the man, but I had a real rapport with him. We shared a love of the blues, and if I asked Wes how he was doing, he'd say, "Blues Dog"--okay, I had a nickname--"I feel like I'm tied to the whippin' post." From what I understood, Wes was either an NFL prospect or had played a little pro ball. He stood about 6'6" and had a 54" chest. And the man loved his work. Had all the best stories. Like the time a guy kicked open the door to the repo agency, waving a .22, demanding--with an appropriate flare of profanities--that they give him his car back. There were four or five repo guys in the office, Wes said, and each one calmly reached into his belt or boot or jacket and pulled out nothing smaller than a .38 and proceeded to demonstrate the concept of peace through superior firepower. The man put his gun away, apologized, and left.

Stories aside, the thing that's always stuck with me from talking with Wes is a line I still use now and then. Delivered in Wes' slight southern drawl, it was one of the best compliments I've ever heard and it always seemed to have a real ring of honesty. I'd thank Wes for a job well done and he'd say to me, "It's your world, daddy. I'm just livin' in it."

Truck

I was looking at the collection of Hess trucks in the corner of the dining room. I never really knew him as much of a play-with-trucks kind of kid, but every year without fail his grandparents bought him the new one. It's a great tradition. The older ones are faded to a slight ivory now, the color of old scrimshaw. The newer ones still shine in fresh-plastic white. In some the batteries are long dead, not from an excess of play but from a surfeit of time. In others the lights still come on, the noisy bits still shout out engine revs and siren wails. He still loves them. He picked up the race car from just a year or two ago. "Do you know where the one it carries is?" he asked--then proudly popped open the top of the chassis to reveal the hidden, smaller car inside. He showed me the light that comes on in the inside of the hood.

I couldn't stop myself.

"Buddy," I said, "do you have many memories of us playing with your Hess trucks?"

I had a few of my own, dim at best, but I already knew they were too few and far too far between.

Big blue eyes. A twitch at the corner of his mouth.

"Not really," he said.

I hugged him and apologized.

Exactly.

"...don't waste your time writing stories that aren't vitally important to you. And by 'important,' I don't mean that you should set out to write great literature, because that's the one guarantee that whatever you do produce won't be it. That's the kind of thing that's decided by others, it's out of your hands. 'Important' means entertaining stories that you're dying to tell."--Comic book author/artist Bill Willingham, in an interview with Cyriaque Lamar at io9.com.