Jerrold (not his real name) was a coworker at the hospital. He was a trim, slightly built black man in his late forties with thinning hair. He and I were both transcriptionists and later I was his supervisor.

Jerrold clearly had high standards for his own behavior. He was invariably polite and friendly to everyone. If a contentious question arose he would find a way to bow out, and it was hard to drag a critical statement out of him about anyone. A few times someone played a prank on him and he just grinned for about an hour. The only time he was really concerned or upset at work was when we had a crazy prejudiced lady working there who made accusations (that’s another story), and when he realized no one was going to listen to her he went back to his phlegmatic self.

He’d gone into the service during the Vietnam War and done a tour overseas with the Air Force. He was in a group that was sent behind enemy lines to retrieve airmen, and it’s clear he had a rough war. After he got out of the service he went to work as a police dispatcher, working 12 hour days seven days a week. He then spent ten years as a Los Angeles bus driver. These experiences gave him a lot of stories to relate. Because life as a black man in Los Angeles is also bizarre and stressful, he had some stories like that, and some others about his family, all of which were extremely dramatic. But Jerrold told them in a curiously flat way. He had a kind of Midwestern male reserve that did not allow his voice to raise, or his tone to become excited, or even his adjectives to get terribly descriptive. This made the stories punch harder, because he was so clearly just relating a series of facts. I’ll try to recreate a couple of them.

Stories