Worse than it appeared 7/1/04

I think that as we experience a traumatic event, in this case, the boys in the car as it went off the road, or Friend's Mom and I, as we heard the news and met in the trauma center, time seems suspended and we become so focused on each moment that the moments become stills stored like single frames of film, which only begin to make sense over time. As it turns out, Friend's neck is broken. He's expected to fully recover, thank God, but, in retrospect, he was badly mishandled by the emergency officials at the scene as well as in transport. Neither Three nor Friend have any recollection of how they got out of the car. Three can only remember seeing Friend, sitting on the ground, with his knees raised and his arms folded across his legs, his head resting on his arms. The police officers at the scene were telling him to produce his wallet from his back pocket, and, according to Three, Friend would lift first one hip and then the other and then say, "I can't." Of course it makes sense now, but the officers at the scene may have been mistaking the symptoms of his fractured second vertebrae for extreme drunkenness. In fact, at no time prior to being in the emergency room, was Friend's neck stabilized nor was he placed on a body board, and the paramedics in the ambulance were rolling him over and sat him up to cut his shirt off from behind. Now he's wearing a halo, bolted into his newly-shaved skull above his ears and twice on his forehead. The back is open so that he can lie down. He was bonded out yesterday morning, after finally being moved to an ICU unit, but it took the entire day for the paperwork to make it's way from one part of the building to another so his ankle cuff could be removed and his personal officer released. In all honesty, I understand police procedure, but this seems more than a little ridiculous to me. This kid was lying there with a broken neck, on a morphine drip. Both his father, back from out of town, and his mother were with him yesterday and will be again this morning, then Dad has to go back out of town mid-day today, and I think Three and I will go down there to be with his mom this afternoon. Three is doing well, although he's a little sore and scratched up, with some bruising still coming to the surface, and a particularly ugly bruise has grown beneath the smile of a cut on his right cheek. He's essentially back to normal. It's all so damn random sometimes. The concrete pole that they severed, impacted the car on the passenger side, but somehow the driver was more seriously injured. Three seems quite certain that no airbags deployed, although given the big gaps in his memory, I'll wait to hear from someone who has seen the car. I'd like to get a chance to see it myself. Today is Thursday, and, for some reason, it's hard to keep track of what day it is this week. Other than that oddity, a preoccupation with Friend, and trying to piece together the snapshots we have into some kind of whole that makes sense, things are pretty normal around here, which is not necessarily a good thing. This group of business men (and I'm using that term as loosely as is possible), who brought my husband in as a consultant on first two initiatives and now a third, continue to find a way not to pay him, while taking turns falling out with each other, making up, passing him around through their internal moneyless melodrama. Now, he's no stranger to working on spec, or working with or for scoundrels for that matter, but these comedic oafs are perhaps his professional low point. At this moment, he *is* working on spec with another man, a black professional who is an independent like he is and as poor as we are, who has brought him into a highly speculative but potentially very exciting (ground-breaking and innovative as well as potentially lucrative) opportunity. He has no problem working without knowing if he'll get paid on that project. On the other ones, the folks who brought him in have a corporate entity (actually a few of them), and they have been funded. They fly around the country, with offices in major cities on both coasts and in the heartland, and jaunt to Europe for meetings. They lack his expertise and continue to rely on it, but no clear path to getting paid has emerged, although we continue to be told it is imminent. He's put so much time into these projects (which are, in fact, very promising on their own merits, aside from the lowlifes who are developing them), that there is nothing else that holds much promise for any short-term payment, so we have to play this out until we either walk away (taking at least one of the deals with us, in all likelihood) or establish a manner and method in which he can get paid. I would love to believe that I could, over time, put in place systems that would prevent this from ever happening again, but I know better. He's a lone operator who doesn't like plans, but shoots from the hip, called by the almost romantic lure of each deal, separately, without regard to minor matters, like the quality of the characters involved or the possibility, or lack thereof, of getting paid. I can't change that.