Monday, December 23, 2013

Some Jimmy for you

As you know, I'm crazy about my youngest brother, Jimmy, partly because he sends me e-mails like these (I reprint here with permission) (although when did I start respecting people's privacy?) (This is an interesting development!)  Anyway.  I've always admired his knack for observation and the way he has with the words.

"I was in court today, and I decided to run by our process server's office.  The office is on East Fremont Street, a place where several drug transactions, prostitution hookups, and petty thefts occur on a daily basis.  Probably hourly.  Broken windows, broken beer bottles, and broken lives abound.  Regularly, there are condoms in the gutter.  I am one of the few attorneys that chooses to pay directly at the offices.  The elderly secretary asked me why I choose to pay there instead of paying online.  She would not go there if she didn't need to work.

I told her that I enjoyed coming and looking out the windows onto Fremont Street.  It's a window into a world of which I know little.  "It's like 1000 stories an hour unfolding in front of my eyes,"  I said.  She liked that.

After I paid my bill today and dropped off a subpoena for service, I was walking back to my car.  You have to walk through an alley to get from the process server's office to the parking lot.  As I was walking through this alleyway, a man angrily walked towards me and shouted, "Your tie is too long and you have a sucker in your mouth."  I knew it was just the alcohol talking.  He carried a 45-ounch Colt malt liquor can in his hand.  He was clearly wrong.

My tie was not too long, and the sucker was in my hand."

1 comment:

Lisa B. said...

I am clearly behind because I am only reading this now but I LOVED the denouement of this story. "My tie was not too long, and the sucker was in my hand."

Shouldn't Jimmy be writing hard-boiled detective fiction? That's the first few paragraphs of the first chapter right there. Think about it, Jimmy.