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I essentially lived on the interstate back in highschool when I first got my car. My mother lived off i-12E, my father i-10W. They had been divorced for about five years, but never agreed on the length of time my brothers and I would spend with each parent. So we switched houses every other day. Considering the inevitable habit of one of us forgetting something at the other parent’s house, leaving one parent’s house to go to school then picking my brothers up after school to go to the next parent’s house, going to work, etc— it was a lot of driving. There were some days I found myself driving up and down the interstate three or four times a day.
Between my mother’s exit on Airline and my father’s on Acadian, there are at least fifty Gordon McKernan billboards. For the most part, those ads just blended into the highway’s dull, rolling edge like the resentful thoughts and general teen angst that I pushed in the back of my mind as I drove to pick up my brother’s spelling book. I only noticed when someone from out of town brought up the persistent ads, but even that observation faded away from my attention as the conversation went on to something else.
One evening, my passive disposition changed while I was driving to my father’s house to pick up my jump drive I’d forgotten. A twenty foot, technicolored statue of Gordon McKernan guarding his very own billboard right by the Marriott at the college exit with spotlights at his feet, making him look like a scout master holding a flashlight up to his face as he tells a scary story to his troop. His glossless eyes looked down on the commuters of Baton Rouge just like I imagined the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg looked down on the Valley of Ashes. He was a cold, omniscient observer of my shitty teen life that I still took for granted and forgot about after I moved out of my parents homes.
A couple weeks ago, me and a friend were driving down the interstate to visit her mother. We saw a Gordon McKernan ad, just like the rest on the way, except this one was printed upside down. It absolutely blew us away. Who did that? How could that be an accident? Was it a bizarre yet subtle advertising tactic?
It was like looking at an inverted crucifix, the way it promised itself as unchanging, but there it was, corrupted. The dogma he had beaten into our minds was suddenly compromised. It’s like learning about evolution and the age of the earth, then suddenly wondering how the fuck Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden if humans weren’t around for the years of Earth’s development. You never thought about Adam and Eve up until that point when their existence was put into doubt by unavoidable scientific facts.
My friend and I started to speculate on who Gordon McKernan was as we took the airline exit down to see her mother. Did people really go to him for personal injury defense? Did he really save them like he promised he would? What does he eat for breakfast? Does he fuck women? Men? Nobody? What if he’s just a computer generated image firm or this entity that poses as a firm for some ponzi scheme? I imagined his broad shoulders stood proud, his strong arms folded across his thick square chest as his distant yet weirdly paternal stare pierced through my windshield. What went on in that paper mache head of his back at the college exit?
We were overwhelmed with questions about the unspoken lord and father of personal injury lawyers, curious to understand who or what Gordon McKernan was in real life, and who he thought himself to be, rather than the emotions and memories we faintly impressed upon his image during our daily commutes. It makes me wonder how his presence has affected everyone else; if it’s resonated with me the same way it has with others to some degree. Which is why I hope to gather submissions of people’s thoughts on St. Gordon, Patron Saint of Personal Injury.

“get gordon, get it done!” what exactly is so captivating about this one particular personal injury lawyer in an age of saul goodmans at every interstate exit and on every channel? gordon first caught my eye when the giant statue billboard was put up between the college and acadian exits on i10 east. id seen him during the day and actually didnt think much of him. but at night, his image was arresting. i remember picking up my friend one night and driving toward campus and i saw him. like, really saw him. standing atop his signature giant 18 wheeler, arms sternly crossed, and lit from below like someone holding a flashlight under their chin, his bulky and cartoonish statue looks like he could have been plucked from aside the cabazon dinosaurs. outside of palm springs, ca, the cabazon dinosaurs are best known for their appearance in pee-wee’s big adventure, although you wouldn’t know from the movie that they’re a part of a young earth creationist museum. imagining gordon among these creationist dinosaurs is silly and also oddly fitting. he has an iconic presence in baton rouge and throughout most of south louisiana - you cant throw a stone without hitting one of his billboards, the stock image of his face set on top of its bold primary colors, yelling out that everlasting question to everyone and no one: TRUCK ACCIDENT? gordon is ubiquitous to the point of perceived omniscience - is there something gordon knows that we dont and hes been trying to tell us for all these years while we pass him by in our cars, only half-noticing his presence? who is gordon mckernan? is he the 6000 year old origin of man who walked among the dinosaurs? is he a modern day messiah, the next coming of christ? could “the guy on the truck!” turn out to just be a stock image whose existence solely depends on our faith in him?