Last Thursday I walked through the Financial district around two in the afternoon. Suits wrapped around helpless bodies caromed through the streets all around me, and I felt like a midwestern boy on a nude beach for the first time. The guy playing the piano was the only element of the scene that somehow seemed familiar to me.

A wild-haired man was pounding out (literally; the plastic table was shaking under his his hands) chords that were vaguely familiar only by virtue of being the spine of most any modern music. He was trembling and biting his lower lip, so fierce was his passion, until his spasmodic fingers reached what was (apparently) some sort of crescendo. His back arched and he threw back his head and shouted, “TAAAH-KEEE-LAAAAAH!” and laughed like a madman. Very much like a madman.

The suits and I kept walking.

I don’t know where they were going—if they even had destinations; perhaps they were some sort of ceaselessly patrolling color guard for the essential nature of money (the image of a fiscal pinup calendar desperately demands birth)—but I got to Lilla’s building and shared the elevator to the ninth floor with a man wearing a suit that probably cost as much as my car, reading a discarded Wall Street Journal I’d found in the lobby and trying to not look like a stowaway.

Lilla is German, I think, and has that fierce matronly presence that powerful women sometimes have. She got the details of my case in minutes, and I signed and dated at the Xs five times. I felt a seachange; it was complete. I had a lawyer of my very own, or at least was sharing her only with a few dozen other clients. It was like losing my virginity, being promoted to corporal, graduating from college all at once: I was an American at last. Travel agent (John), insurance agent (Frances), and now lawyer. Time to put away childish things.

Lilla’s going to be handling my worker’s comp claim. And I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to calling my claims adjuster and telling her how happy I am to never have to deal with her again.

If you’re not familiar with worker’s comp law, you may be interested to discover that a typical settlement for permanent damage to a hand is in the range of eight thousand dollars. The rationale being that damage that will affect my work for the rest of my life and perhaps require a career change is worth at least a month’s salary. Let’s hear it for insurance companies.