Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,39

insurance company. His bogus back-injury claim had begun that day at the doctor’s office. These days Bert spent his time drinking whiskey and Rheingold beer, watched the Mets on TV, and, as an under-the-table sideline, managing the rooming house where I lived.

He and Angel had never officially married so she was on welfare as an unemployed single mother. Her own second income came from a steady night gig, waitressing in a titty bar off Times Square. The girls, twins, Carrie and Connie, were now eleven years old. Nice kids. Sweet.

Bert knew about my hold-up in the taxi. It was he and my neighbor Dylan who had unlocked my door to let the police and the paramedics in after I tried to kill myself by taking the Valium and pain pills.

The afternoon I got back from the hospital and knocked on his door to get my mail and pay my back rent, Bert asked me inside. He always had beer, good and cold, so I stepped in.

During one of the commercials Bert smiled over at me and slapped his leg. He asked me if I had ever heard of Victim Stress Disorder. I said that I had not. Then he began to laugh. It continued for several seconds. When he stopped he was standing over my chair and pointing down. He said that to him, the second after I’d opened his front door, he knew. I looked like a man with incurable Victim Stress Disorder. For the rest of the afternoon we talked about VSD and drank and watched the Mets lose.

Bert’s attorney was Robert Edward Francis Duffy. Duffy’s office was on Twenty-third Street in the Flatiron Building. He practiced one kind of law only: work-related personal injury. Workman’s Comp lawsuits.

Bert bragged that Duffy had an address book overflowing with the names of orthopedists, shrinks and miscellaneous personal-injury experts. He said that if he wanted to Duffy could have six doctors in a courtroom tomorrow morning at eight o’clock who would testify under oath and certify that I was unemployable and crazier than a blue chicken.

The following morning I went with Bert, who had ambitions of collecting a referral fee, downtown to see Bob Duffy at his office. It turned out that attorney Duffy had settled two prior cabbie hold-up claims using Victim Stress Disorder as the basis for the lawsuits. The first trauma case was similar to mine; a guy had been robbed at gunpoint, shoved into his cab’s trunk and left freezing for twelve hours in a parking lot in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. Duffy’d won a juicy award from Workman’s Comp because of permanent frostbite damage to three of the man’s fingers and chronic VSD. The guy’s name was Joseph Kallit. Eventually Kallit moved with his mother and his wife Louise to Florida, where they purchased a condo with their end of the settlement money and he took up playing the trombone.

Me and Bert sat in the two leather chairs in front of Duffy’s desk while the lawyer ran down a list of Victim Stress Disorder symptoms. The three of us counted. Five of the symptoms applied to me. I signed up right there and became a client.

Before we left the office Duffy got on the phone and made an appointment for me to begin regular therapy sessions and counseling with a doctor - Doctor Gromis. The way it worked, he said, was that Gromis would immediately submit my forms and I could expect to receive my first Workman’s Comp benefit check in a week to ten days. $232 a week. $928 per month. Indefinitely. Duffy announced that I now had a chronic, medically documented case of Victim Stress Disorder.

Chapter Twenty-three

DOCTOR GROMIS HAD thick eyebrows and brown stains on his teeth from smoking cigars. He was skinny and smaller than me. His specialty was working with Viet Nam vet cases; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the more modern ailments they’d come up with like my VSD.

Both of us knew why we were there: (A) for me to pad my case, and (B) for him to bill my insurance company the hundred bucks an hour. Gromis said there were three rules: I was to show up on time for my sessions, not leave early, and not miss more than two in a row. At the end of our meeting he stood up, shook my hand, and said it would be okay for me to call him Harry.

My appointment time was 11 a.m., Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There were four