Chez Chance

by Jay Gummerman

A freak accident has left Frank Eastman a paraplegic - a "wild card" who needs to "pair up with someone or something or he won't pass back into existence." Los Angeles is where he imagines this existence to be, but when he arrives there, he finds it's not quite the life he expected. Home - at least temporarily - is a rundown motel near Disneyland, and his neighbors a wild assortment of eccentrics, who, though more able-bodied than Frank, have learned the effectiveness of willful inability. What Frank learns from them, in magnificently odd and mesmerizing conversations, will leave him as transformed emotionally as he has been changed physically.