Freelance Hall of Famer

True story. I heard it from the protagonist just the other day. For reasons that will become obvious, I have changed his name and the setting a bit.

So this guy is sitting at his desk one fine weekday morning a few months back, working on an article for a magazine. He’s got it all, house in the country, wife and kids. He works at home, gets lots of magazine gigs, and has a spacious ground-floor office looking out onto a verdant, rolling lawn.

Only this morning he sees a figure on the lawn, hesitating, a man in some kind of uniform. He flits past the window, twice, three times.

My friend goes out to the porch. The man is there. He is clearly on the defensive, almost cowering.

The intruder speaks. “Are you… are you… Joe Blow?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

He tentatively reaches out and hands my friend an envelope.

“From your wife’s divorce attorney.”

“What?!”

“You’re being served papers for divorce.”

My friend looks at the packet in his hand, dumbfounded. He looks back up at the stranger and says the first thing that comes into his mind.

“What? Am I supposed to tip you?”

The man relaxes, allows himself a smile.

“Well at least you’re taking it with a sense of humor. That’s a first for me.”

Eyes fixed in disbelief on the papers, my friend says reflexively, “So how does it usually go?”

The man, as if unburdened, launches into several tales of woe, about how he’s met by hostility, outrage, profanity, how suddenly everything is somehow his fault, how he’s to blame for the break-up of the marriage.

My friend listens, absently, but lets the man go on, automatically interjecting the usual encouragements to continue.

But at last he can take no more. There’s that package in his hand. After about ten minutes on the porch, the stranger leaves.

My friend takes to bed. He stays there for a long time, the door closed, the lights off. No one bothers him.

The sun sets, then rises, then sets again, then rises… or maybe it doesn’t. He’s lost track of time.

Part of him is utterly surprised and confused, but, he realizes at last, another part of him is not confused in the least.

He gets up and calls the guy who served the papers. They meet for coffee.

Then he comes home, sits down at his desk and types up a a pitch letter.

About how tough it is on a sensitive person to be a court officer serving papers on divorcing people. And maybe he could find a touchy-feely repo man and include him in the piece. What do you think? 3500 words?

He hits the send button on his e-mail to various editors.

By day’s end he gets a bite. He has sold the article.

It’s Thursday.

He was served the papers on Tuesday.