The Insurance Dick

By James Sarver

He's a dick. In the insurance biz. He's an insurance dick. It's not what you think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678111960

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THE INSURANCE DICK

James E. Sarver

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to any person or event, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

THE INSURANCE DICK

Copyright © 2022 by James E. Sarver

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-6781-1196-0

for

dad

THE INSURANCE BIZ, AND DADDY TOO

I got into the insurance biz because of my mother. She was a big-time insurance agent who pulled down almost fifty bucks a month on commission. That may not sound like a lot, but remember that’s after taxes. On that fifty bucks she supported two kids and a goldfish, although the goldfish helped support himself by selling magazine subscriptions.

Ma always talked so favorably about the insurance industry, as if she couldn’t imagine doing any other kind of work, almost like it was a religion or something. You have to understand, Ma had a negative opinion of everything—she once looked at a beautiful sunset and said it was too flashy. But about the insurance biz, Ma was nothing but positive, and over the years that stream of happy talk seeped through even into my concrete-shielded brain. On my thirteenth birthday I told her, Ma, I wanna be an insurance dick.

Tears filled up her eyes. (She was chopping onions.) Oh, Sonny Boy, she said, though that was not my name. That makes me so…

She broke down. In laughter.

She pointed at me and said, "You? An insurance dick? Bah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

(I counted the ha’s.)

I said, "Ma, why not?

Then she said the words that would drive me, like a drug fiend behind the wheel of a getaway car: Your daddy was an insurance dick, and look what became of him!

*      *      *

Well, she’d never mentioned my daddy before, so I couldn’t look what became of him. Up till then I hadn’t even known I had a daddy. I knew other kids did, but I figured I was a special case, like Jesus.

I said to her, Daddy was a dick?

I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth. Forget it.

I can’t forget it now that you’ve said it, Ma. It’s in my head.

See this watch? See how it spins? That’s it…you are getting sleepy…

Ma, I’m not falling for that again. My Daddy was a dick?

She snorted as she lowered the watch. "He was a big dick. The biggest dick of all, maybe."

How come you never told me this, Ma?

’Cause I knew you’d get the fool idea in your head to follow in his footsteps, that’s why. And I didn’t want to happen to you what happened to him.

What happened to him, Ma? What happened to my Daddy?

She took a deep breath. She spat out her next words as if they were poison, or bad pieces of cheese. He met a younger, prettier gal, and he moved with her to New York City. Had two kids and, last I heard, he’s so goldurn happy he all but weeps every time he thinks on it.

*      *      *

Gee, Ma, I said, why wouldn’t you want that to happen to me?

Because! she bellowed. "You should have to be as miserable as me! Stuck in a crummy job with a crummy son and a crummy daughter and a crummy goldfish who can’t close a single sale! For Chrissakes, GRIT sells itself! It’s a quality publication! What the hell’s the problem?"

How about if I buy one, Ma? I said. Would that help?

She looked at me as if I was dumb as a post. It was the way she usually looked at me.

That ain’t, she said, "how you become an insurance dick, Sonny Boy. You don’t buy. You sell."

Well, Ma could be mysterious. One minute she’d be telling me I shouldn’t be following in Daddy’s footsteps, the next minute she’d be pointing them out to me on the ground.

The truth, to my way of thinking, was that she was still nuts about Daddy. Since she was half-nuts to begin with, that might mean she was only half-nuts about Daddy, but that’s not what I mean to say. She was fully nuts about Daddy. She hated him for running off with the younger, prettier girl—which could have been anybody, because if there was an older, uglier woman in the world than Ma, they’d have drowned her in the river at birth—but Ma also was still nutso in love with Daddy.

You see it all the time. Love makes folks do crazy things.

Crazier things.

People don’t need no excuse to be crazy, that’s one of the first things you learn as an insurance dick.

WHAT DICKS DO

But it wasn’t the first thing I learned as an insurance dick. Wasn’t the second, either. Or the third. It was down the list, after Always get a retainer and Nobody likes insurance salesmen and Avoid horizontal stripes and Don’t trust anybody who smiles too much.

The first thing I learned as an insurance dick was that insurance dicks didn’t do what I thought they did. This happened my very first day on the job, when Eustace Eveready, the guy who’d hired me because, as he put it, Your ma’s got somethin’ on me, told me as much over drinks at a local bar—which pastime he told me took up about ninety percent of an insurance dick’s time. Suicide rate in our profession is atrocious, he said. Some years it goes into the triple digits.

Hundreds of insurance dicks kill themselves every year? I asked, startled.

No, he said. Some years one hundred percent of insurance dicks kill themselves.

Since he told me this before he told me the terrible truth about what insurance dicks really do, I guess the suicide rate thing counts as the first thing I learned as an insurance dick. The second thing I learned was the terrible truth about what insurance dicks really did.

I learned this when Bobaloo Whimpers, a farmer acquaintance of Ma’s, entered the bar with a morose look on his face.

There’s Whimpers! hissed Eustace in my ear.

Yeah, so? I said. I waved hello to Mr. Whimpers, who sort of half-waved back.

Your ma’s been tryin’ to sell him Unlimited Whole Term Life for the past ten years! Eustace said. But he refuses, the cheap bastard. Ten years, we been workin’ on him! If you could find the dirt and make the sale—

I frowned at Eustace. I was confused, and frown was what I did when I was confused. What are you talking about, Eustace? ‘Find the dirt’? There’s plenty of dirt out in the parking lot, if dirt’s what you want. Heck, the whole thing’s dirt.

Eustace put his head down on the table and bumped his forehead against it a few times. Dear God, you’re thick, he said to me. "Don’t you even know what dicks do?"

We investigate claims, I said. I’d read this at the library in The Big Handbook of Insurance Investigation, Sixth Edition Revised, with a Foreword by Web Webber.

Eustace started laughing. He had an infectious laugh, so I started laughing along with him. Even though he was laughing at me. We were both laughing at me.

Kid, he said, "you’re not an investigator! You’re a dick!"

Dicks ain’t investigators?

"No, you brainless hick! Dicks dig up dirt!"

I didn’t understand. He could see it on my face. But I don’t know how, since my face was such a blank.

Look, kid, he said, putting his arm around me, "what dicks do is, they work with salesmen, like your ma. Or—saleswoman, in her case. He paused and thought this over. But just barely. He nodded over at Mr. Whimpers. When a potential client like