O … Old Friend

007

I’m the only one who remembers him now. Look at him! Slumped in his wheelchair, half asleep. He’s like that twentythree hours in the day. The other hour he tries to come alive, wheezing and panting and jerking his limbs around like crazy. Wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t three in the morning every day. He rants and raves, says he’s got to escape, out the windows, down the fire escape, wants to know where’s his helicopter, where’s his boat. Then he screams – that’s bad enough when it’s in English but half the time it’s in Russian or Korean or German. Neighbors get upset, call the police. That really sets him off, you should hear the things he says to them, most impolite. It’s the uniforms he hates most, really. Takes me a good hour to get him quiet again. Then he tries to make a pass at me, pathetic in his condition.

The doctors all say it’s Alzheimers but I know better. It was the drink that got to him, all those damned martinis, one after the other every day. How he managed to work at all is just beyond me. Of course, the violence took its toll too. Lots of broken bones in that old body. One doc took an x-ray of him, whole body, said it was like a thousand piece jigsaw with a few pieces missing. And the syphilis didn’t help either, never really got over that the third or fourth time around.

Nobody remembers him, like I said before. He never had any real friends, too much of a show-off, too superior, too distrusting. And vicious at times, too. But it’s worse than just lack of friends, lots of people get to that point in time, it’s the lack of support. You’d think he’d get a good pension, but no, he pretty much relies on me, and I’m not rich, you know, not on a civil service pension for a mere secretary. All he gets is public assistance, not enough to live on, only keeps body and soul in loose communication. I’ve written letter after letter, get stonewalled every time. ‘No such person’, they say, ‘no official records’. They ask me if he’s even a citizen, one time they were going to deport him but they didn’t know where to. Totally undocumented, paperless. He’s a victim of official amnesia, that’s what he is.

I’d better be going on now, got to make lunch. Look, he’s alive, I think he’s going to say something, I hope it’s not too vulgar. Are you going to say goodbye, Jimmy?

It’s not Jimmy, Moneypenny. It’s Bond, James Bond.

Also find these older posts…
A … Autonomy
B … Bear
C … Corporations
D … Doggerel
E … Elephant
F … Francis
H … Hope
I … Introduction
J … Judgment
K … Kelemenope
L … Liberty
M … Morning
P … Potholes
R … Review
S … Snoozers
W … Weather