I Have Been Grievously Insulted

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This is a true story. I am traumatized by this event

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There I was, at an outdoor concert on a perfect summer evening, minding my own business and enjoying the music, when it happened. An incident so egregious, so personally devastating, that I am still processing the trauma. I have consulted my attorney. I have considered my options. I may sue. I may write a strongly worded letter. I may do both, because that is the kind of aggrieved citizen I have become.

Let me set the scene.

The audience, and I say this with love and the clinical detachment of a trained observer, skewed older. Considerably older. We are talking about a demographic where the folding lawn chair is not a piece of furniture but a way of life. Where the cooler contains more prescription medications than beverages. Where the pre-show conversation revolves around hip replacements, great-grandchildren, and whether the sound is going to be “too loud,” a concern raised approximately forty-five minutes before any music actually started.

I, by contrast, was a veritable spring chicken, even as I approach 70 at warp speed.

A youthful, vibrant presence. A man in the absolute prime of his life, radiating vitality, coiled with energy, practically vibrating with the kind of youthful exuberance that could power a small municipality.

Or so I thought.

Because somewhere between the opening act and the main event, a police officer and an EMT began making their way through the crowd with purpose. Scanning. Searching. Looking for someone in distress. A medic alert alarm had gone off, you see, and duty called.

They surveyed the sea of humanity before them. Hundreds of people. Hundreds of candidates. A veritable buffet of octogenarians, any one of whom could reasonably be assumed to have accidentally elbowed their emergency pendant while reaching for a Werther’s Original.

And they walked. Right. Past. All of them.

Past the gentleman with the walker. Past the woman whose oxygen tank had its own little wheeled cart. Past the couple who had been married so long they had merged into a single organism that communicated exclusively in sighs. Past what appeared to be an entire assisted living facility on a field trip.

And they stopped. In front of me.

“Sir,” the officer said, with the gentle, patient tone one uses with the elderly and the confused, “did you set off your medic alert alarm?”

I beg your pardon.

My medic alert alarm.

Sir, I do not have a medic alert alarm. I do not have a Life Alert. I have not fallen, and even if I had, I could absolutely get up. I have not been issued a pendant, a bracelet, a fob, or any other device designed to summon help in the event that I cannot summon it myself. I am, and I cannot stress this enough, a fully functioning adult human male with all of my original joints and most of my original hair.

But that is not what wounded me. What wounded me, what pierced me to the very core of my being, was the calculus that led to that moment. Somewhere in the split-second triage of that officer’s brain, he looked out at a crowd that included people who remembered where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor, and he thought:

“That guy. That’s the one.”

I want to know what tipped him off. Was it the way I was sitting? Was my posture giving off “cardiac event”? Was I holding my beer in a manner that suggested imminent medical distress? Did I look, in the flickering stage lights, like a man who needed to be reminded to take his statins?

I have replayed the moment in my mind approximately four thousand times. I have workshopped it with friends. I have described it to my wife, who was, I regret to report, laughing far too hard to offer meaningful emotional support. I have looked in the mirror, at length, trying to see what he saw.

I see nothing. I see a man in the flower of his life. I see a man who could, if pressed, still do a push-up. Possibly two. I see a man who has no business being singled out from a crowd that includes people whose first concerts were performed on a lute, by firelight, in a cave.

And yet.

I have decided to be gracious about it. I will not name the officer. I will not name the EMT. I will not name the venue, the band, or the specific concert, because I am, above all things, a professional. I am simply putting this out into the world as a cautionary tale, and as formal notice that my legal team is reviewing the matter.

The charges, as I see them, are as follows:

Defamation by proximity. Emotional distress. Reckless endangerment of a man’s self-image. And, most seriously, aggravated assault with a deadly assumption.

I want damages. I want an apology. I want the officer to walk back into that crowd, tap the nearest ninety-year-old on the shoulder, and say, “My mistake, ma’am, I meant you.”

Is that so much to ask?

My lawyer will be in touch.