"Can you hold this for a second?" She handed me her drink and took off her jacket. I have to assume women either don't care or don't realize what happens when they push out their rib cage taking off a coat. Thrusting a set of breasts in a man's face puts him in an impossible situation. He has to try not to leer, but also not look away so obviously that it makes the moment uncomfortable. In this case, I had no choice. I had a head full of vodka and I hadn't been laid in forever. Her dress was tight and sheer and yes, it was damn cold in that bar.

I must have stared for five seconds - forever in a situation like that - before I realized what I was doing and snapped out of it. How couldn't I? Rock hard nipples are like fireworks or lightning. It's impossible to stop looking, no matter who they belong to. Every man's had that horrible moment in the dead of July, where the air conditioning is on full blast and some 60ish, 200 pound secretary or 401(k) administrator comes into your office and starts talking about some document you need to review or sign. She's running on about something serious and work-related but all you can think of is those huge udders at the end of her massive, Double E torpedos poking through her bra at asymmetric angles, pointing toward the floor. Your mind stays on one repeating message. Don't look down. Never look down. Stare at the eyes. The eyes, damnit.

Even more disturbingly, the phenomenon isn't limited to women. A nauseating result of the "corporate casual" movement is the prevalence of ample bosomed males in pleated dress pants and golf shirts. Four of five lawyers have "office physiques." Not walrus-like or Michelin Man fat - more sagging, swollen and flabby in bad places, the sort of people who should never wear anything form fitting. And yet, at least once a day in the summer you'll find yourself talking to a co-worker in a tight golf shirt, rolls pouring over his belt, with B-cup man breasts and his high beams on full blast, thinking to yourself, Jesus, man, have you no fucking shame? Put those things away. I'm about to lose my fucking lunch here.

The only people who seem to be aware of high beams are young women. They walk through the office in the summer with their jackets on or their arms crossed tightly over their chests, leading to awkward conversations where both of you pretend not to notice their odd hunched-over, forearms-folded posture through the whole discussion. They understand. Nipples are important. Everyone focuses on the size and hang and curve of the breast, but it's the hood ornament on top that makes all the difference. Replace the Flying Lady on a Rolls Royce with a crucifix, pyramid or Venus de Milo and you've ruined the car, no matter how amazing the rest of components are. A bad nipple on a perfect breast works the same way. It's an awful letdown unhinging the bra on a spectacular set only to discover they're topped with tiny, pinpoint nipples. The nipple is crucial, and only a fool or a eunuch would say otherwise. The law knows. It doesn't ban the public display of breasts. It bans nipples.

I'm not going to rate every type. That's a matter of taste. There are the brown ones you get with darker skinned girls and pink ones you get with fairer women. Some are so light they're near indistinguishable from the skin around them. Some are riddled with fleshy little pebbles around the nipple itself and some are puffed out all around or cone-like, as if the areola and nipple are one in the same. Most tend to be circles, but I've seen ovals now and again. Some point up, some down, some 90 degrees dead ahead. I've seen them tilted outward and I've seen them centered. The larger the breast, the more the areola tends to look stretched. Smaller, pert breasts have always been my favorite. They seem to always have these fat knobs that point out sharply, just as hers were in that dress. As I stood there holding her drink as she took off the jacket the only thought running through my head was, Christ, you could hang wet towels off those things.

Look, maybe we could do something else together, Mrs. Robinson. Would you like to go to a movie?

- The Graduate (1967)

My first experience with the female lawyer libido in the law firm atmosphere was, not surprisingly, the office Christmas Party. We were at a ballroom in a hotel and I was standing near the bar, picking up a Dewars and water when Peter appeared to my left. "Don't move." He pushed my shoulder outward so my torso would better eclipse the line of sight between him and the dance floor behind me. "You're the only thing blocking her from seeing me."

"Who am I blocking?" I'd never seen Peter flustered like that. We'd been friends since shortly after he arrived at __________________ a few months after me. We went out drinking all the time and I'd never known him to be anything but the picture of control, the sort of permanently calm fellow who never got rattled by anything.

"Veronica... Veronica Kelly."

"Who's that?"

"She's one of the partners from my floor. Reddish hair, graying, tall? You know."

"I'm not sure." I turned to get a look at the woman.

"Don't look over there." He stopped me. "She's looking in this direction."

"What about her?"

"She wants me to go to the parking lot with her so she can suck my dick."

"What?"

"She asked if she could suck my dick."

"Why in the parking lot?"

"How should I know? I was just dancing with her and she leaned in and whispered in my ear, 'Let's go to the parking lot. I want to suck your cock.'"

"It's just strange. Why not suck your dick in the building?"

"I think she has a minivan."

"Some of those are pretty comfortable."

"This whole night's been fucked up. I told you about the ride over, right?"

"Possibly. I've had a few drinks."

"I was giving the money to the cab driver and when he turned around I realized it was one of my law school classmates. This dude from Vietnam. Real nice guy. Can you imagine that? Couldn't get a job and now he's driving a cab."

"I hope you tipped him well."

"And now this."

"I don't know... I think you should take Veronica up on the offer."

"She's twice my age. I wished her fucking kids a Merry Christmas when they visited the firm a week ago."

"You've never done the Mrs. Robinson thing?"

"There isn't enough vodka in this bar for that."

"I'll bet she gives a hell of a blow job."

"You want to pinch hit for me and find out?"

"Older chicks are amazing in the sack, particularly the lawyer types. They're all fucked up in the head. They think like guys."

"Exactly what I want - a middle aged woman who sucks dick like a man."

"I'm serious. They're crazy, but they know what they're doing in bed." It was hard to explain in the moment, on short notice, but there's something amazing about fucking a woman with years on you. Some of the best sex I'd had was with a crazy female law student many years my senior, and it happened every bit as randomly as Peter's situation had arisen.

Continue reading "Lawyers in Heat, Part 3"

The protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female must surely be copies of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia. If the male of the species was already primed to respond sexually to these signals when they emanated posteriorly from the genital region, then he would have a built in susceptibility to them if they could be reproduced in that form on the front of the female's body.

- The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris (1967)

The first time I witnessed the lawyer libido in action it was a man's. Bill Morris was a junior partner from a different practice group and if I had to sum him up in a word it would be "silly," professionally capable, but on a personal level terminally immature. And I'm not talking about some frat boy with his development arrested in junior year of college. Bill was stuck somewhere between seventh and ninth grade, in his snapping-girls'-bras and toilet-papering-the-principal's-house-on-Halloween years. His jokes were goofy, he was always trying too hard and underneath it he had this frustrated competitive streak. Whenever we talked he'd criticize my department, which I guess he viewed his competition, as if I cared about firm politics. As if I cared about the firm. Taking all of that into account, along with his clear lack of a mental "filter," it was obvious Bill was a walking time bomb. The question wasn't when he'd make a fool of himself and endanger his job, but how.

And as fate would have it, the firm placed the instrument of Bill's inevitable embarrassment directly under his control, four offices away from him. Her name was Leslie, she was a young associate and if I had to sum her up in a couple words I'd fail. There aren't enough superlatives to describe a woman like Leslie. She was drop dead gorgeous - tall but impressively curved, with these amazing hazel eyes and wavy blonde hair. As a rule, you didn't find women like Leslie in a place like _________________, or any law firm for that matter. She stood out like a Hasidic Rabbi at a Wagner festival. I remember walking by her office my first week on the floor and doing a double take the moment I saw the woman, thinking What the fuck is she doing here? It seemed wrong for a creature like her to be rotting behind a desk in a law firm. And after I talked to her for a few minutes I realized I wasn't the only person who'd reached that conclusion.

"Don't buy any of the 'rah, rah firm' bullshit they sell." Leslie didn't hesitate a second in letting me know exactly how she felt about the place. "Bill works us around the clock. Calls me at home at night and makes me come in when he's working on the weekend all the time and you know what? My bonus still sucked."

"How bad is the weekend stuff?"

"Mine seems to be worse than everyone else's. Bill's in here all the time, nagging me and always making me come in even when we're the only people here."

I didn't think much about those comments when I first heard them, but they explained a lot of things a few months later as I sat in my office on the phone with Peter and Ian, a couple fellow associates from different departments, discussing how Bill had finally lost his mind - lost complete control of himself - one fateful Tuesday morning.

"Bullshit." Peter didn't believe the story at first.

"No bullshit, dude." Ian laughed. "It's exactly the way I explained it. Just that simple."

Continue reading "Lawyers in Heat, Part 2"

Johnny Dangerously: I don't understand. You're tops in your class. You made the law review. Why do you have to get married now?
Tommy Kelly: Because if I don't get laid I'm gonna die.
Johnny Dangerously: Laid! Is that what this whole thing is about? Gettin' laid?

- Johnny Dangerously (1984)

"Come on. No one's around." She closed my office door, took off her jacket and opened the button at the top of her shirt.

"Forget it." I put my nose back into my papers. "That's not happening."

The first time Lisa stopped by my new firm, ________________ was late at night, when I was stuck working on some court filing. She'd been at dinner with friends, picked up a decent wine buzz and figured "christening" my office was a good idea.

"You're such an ass. I know lots of guys who'd jump at this."

"You're free to go find one."

"I thought office sex was a fantasy for guys." She popped another button. "Imagine I'm a naughty secretary who needs to be reprimanded."

"In real life it's an old man with a unibrow fucking some fat paralegal."

"It's not like we'll get caught."

"Look, it's 8:00 and--"

"Exactly." She popped another button. "No one's around."

"That's not the point." There was no way to explain it to a non-lawyer, that it had nothing to do with fear of being caught... That it was the place - what it was, what it represented and all the ugly images dredged up in my head when anyone mixed the words "lawyers" or "law firm" and "sex." But I'd never be able to describe that for her, just how revolting it was to imagine all of the fucking, fondling and fingering that may have happened in these offices... All the ghosts of awkward and demented sexual congress in our midst... The residue of the ugly and the desperate working out their biological urges in these little grey boxes, all over these black pleather chairs and this beige industrial carpeting. You have to experience the phenomenon, see the animals attacking each other up close, like a safari, to truly understand it.

"Let me put it this way." I shut down my computer and started packing my briefcase. "I couldn't get hard here for a harem of women."

"Come on." She opened one more button. "Like no one's had ever had sex in this place before?"

"Oh, there's been plenty of sex here. That's the problem."

* * *

The first thing that grabs you when you walk into a law firm is how mechanized everything is, how the goal seems to be creating a system where the people and office equipment are almost interchangeable¹. I remembered feeling I was a cog in a machine from my first day at ________________, from that first moment when the human resources representative showed me the office, turning to her side and waving her hand like one the models on The Price is Right.

Continue reading "Lawyers in Heat, Part 1"

Law firm interviews are double album length lies, forced sales pitches for a thing nobody really wants. I mean, people want the salary. They want the benefits and the opportunity to make more money. But all the talk about "firm culture," "goals," and "how [insert firm here] is 'different' or 'better'" is white noise - a candidate and an interviewee ping-ponging polite bullshit back and forth over a cherry wood table. I used to have anxiety attacks during them. Not the usual variety people relate. My heart didn't race. I didn't need to breathe into a paper bag or rub double vision out of my eyes. Mine were battles to keep control of my mouth. I'd breathe deep and stare at the lawyer talking, nod, smile, scratch my chin - give off any pantomime of interest to hide the urge to stand up, call "time out" and get to the meat of it...

Enough with the 'fit' and 'attitude' and 'where the firm will be in five years.' I only asked questions about those things because it's common sense one should pretend to give a damn about his employer's future. But the truth is, I'm just like everybody else. I don't want to be here and neither do you. I want as much money as I can get and you want to pay me as little as possible. So what's the number? What are you going to cough and what's the bonus structure? The rest of this fucking charade is irrelevant.

I haven't been anxious during an interview in long time. After a dozen or so, you learn to say Nothing with authority, which is exactly what you want to do. Nothing's ideal; Something's problematic; Anything's death. Nothing offends nobody and there's no follow up. Something's got substance and begs a question, which eventually leads to you admitting you don't know what you're talking about. Anything's what a fool spouts in a pregnant pause - fragments of phrases he thinks better of speaking a couple words in, canned questions from career guides or Dale Carnegie sales lingo... All of them are doom. Anything sits in the air like a fresh wet fart. Nobody can even look its speaker in the eye. It takes a few years of experience, but once you've given up trying to say Something and learned to avoid the impulse to say Anything, you can get through any interview. I try to smile and nod as much as possible. When I think I've got a point to make, I remember what a girl told me in a bar years ago - "It's a shame you can talk."

* * *

"How has your experience at your current firm been?"

Excellent. I love it, which is why I'm here interviewing with you.

"Your writing looks good. Do you enjoy the research part?"

Yes, I also enjoy surgery and dental appointments.

"We're very meticulous here. Can you handle that?"

That depends on the size of the check you're giving me.

It's hard dancing for suits. The process wears out the saccharine glands in your tongue. Saying things like "Law school was grueling at times, but rewarding" almost trips the gag reflex and by the time you're done coughing pap like "I really get a charge out of researching cases" you feel creepy, soiled, like your grandmother just caught you jacking off. And no matter how many different ways you try to gloss it over, it's obvious - no sane person wants any of these positions. The only honest answer - "It's a job, and it sucks, but if you pay me a load I'll deliver" - would have gotten me black balled as soon as the syllables left my tongue. ...Even though that's exactly the bargain under which almost every decent, normal person in a law firm is operating.

* * *

What do I really want out of a legal job?

Knowing what I know now... Well, if I had to do again, I'd be on the other side, bringing the suits, and I'd be looking to get that one monster claim. A chemical company dumping Dioxin next to a kindergarten... A drunken hedge fund manager pitching his cigarette boat through a sloop full of Jesus Freaks on a church retreat... Maybe a huge food company allowing ergot fungus to seep into industrial sugar shipments, causing thousands of people to hallucinate after eating Twinkies. I'd find a claim I could pimp to twelve unemployed Jerry Springer addicts for a barrel of dollar bills big enough to buy myself a compound near a beach and never have to walk into an office or sit through one of these bullshit sessions again for as long as I live.

You know who David Crosby is, right? Well, I read a story once, set in the peak of the late '60s, in some artist community in California. Marin County, I think. Or maybe Los Angeles... Anyway, it was about Crosby waking up, fixing breakfast for himself, eating, leaving his home, filling his car with gas, driving to Joan Baez's place a few miles away and walking into her house for a recording session before realizing he hadn't put on a stitch of clothing... That's kind of where I'd like to be.

That's what we all want. We just can't say it.

Eliot Spitzer was walking shit, a cur with the moral compass of a monitor lizard and the ethics of a Haitian loan shark. He was a spoiled brat with a sense of entitlement that wouldn't fit in the Hindenberg and a know-it-all scold in the stripe of closet degenerates from Roy Cohn to Jimmy Swaggart. Blowhard, crusader, public ambulance chaser, he was everything rotten and wrong in political ambition - soulless swine karma couldn't curse with enough ruin.

Spitzer'd be just a footnote, like Bill Lerach, Dick Scruggs or the rest of the indicted or jailed "justice pimps" feeding off the courthouse but for one thing... Eliot Spitzer wasn't working in the private sector. He crushed decent people, ruined lives and nakedly exploited a prosecutor's office for his personal gain, putting people in jail for trading in the same twisted kicks he indulged in after hours. In a truly just world, that abuse of trust would be an all but capital crime, punished with a public caning on the courthouse steps and permanent exile to an Antarctic weather station... Exactly the sort of merciless treatment he'd level on anybody else in his shoes.

And that's why federal and state prosecutors in Spitzer's case shouldn't charge him with a crime. No, not a single fucking misdemeanor. And if they do, and he's convicted or pleads out, no matter how small the admission and the punishment, the President should pardon him.

The lesson of Eliot Spitzer isn't a new understanding of just how satisfying schadenfreude can be. The bigger lesson is that most of us are better than his kind, which accounts for the universal "good riddance" reaction to his freefall. Spitzer wouldn't have pardoned a terminally ill criminal with a month left on his sentence. The cruelest punishment for such a malignant zealot is letting him walk where he'd have called for a hanging. No punishment, no rehabilitation. No rehabilitation, no public life, and that's all his kind care about. Let the weight of mercy and the scarlet letter of a pardon hang around his neck like an anchor. Eliot Spitzer was shit with legs and we're all better off for his absence, which is more than enough to celebrate. Don't give him the respect of revenge. Give him a pass, and if not that, a pardon.

I promised some outtakes from the book, and here are the first of them. These aren't complete stories, but akin to the extra or "demo" tracks one would get with a deluxe edition of an album, with titles to provide background.

...Years blur by in the law business, thousands of billed hours swirled into a haze of strange nights and nauseous mornings spent piecing together missing chunks of the previous evening, struggling to remember where you started and ended and how you got a half inch deep gash in your shin or the empty baggie in your pocket. It flies by in fast forward, punctuated with occasional lucidity, a momentary consideration of "Why?" You wake up one day and find yourself on the train, on a Monday morning, staring at the skyline of Philadelphia over the top of the Wall Street Journal, shaking off the last tremors of the weekend. The cell phone beeps a message, your Blackberry hums, you straighten your cuffs, brush lint from the knee of your suit and slide the paper into your bag. As the train sinks into the tunnel under 20th Street you look at your reflection in the window. You're what the fat women on the subway would describe as "prosprus." Smooth, cagey, conniving, one step ahead of the game. A shark.

Coming out of the train station, your first impression of the city, the only impression you can really take, is that it's been designed by a drunk. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it. No plan or common thread in the arrangement of its structures. The 50 story Mellon Bank Building, a towering cluster of columns slathered in surplus aluminum sheeting, is framed by concrete parking garages, red brick 80s office complexes and a stubby grey shoebox building that appears to be the aborted start of a skyscraper. The corner of Sixteenth and Market Street is dominated by Liberty One, a faux Chrysler Building pimped out in iridescent blue glass, next to which someone shoved the PNC Building, a 40 story version of Kubrick's monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Looking East, the rest of Market Street is a pastiche of stuccoed 70s era office towers and parking garages. Looking West it fades into blocks of porn theatres and empty lots. Up and down Market, consecutive one way streets follow each other, three at a time going in the same direction. A few blocks North, the Ben Franklin Parkway, a patchwork of boulevards zig-zagging across each other randomly at multiple intersections - seemingly designed to create car accidents and traffic jams - runs to the Art Museum on the other side of town.

Even the sculptures strewn about the City are confused. "Love Park," a collection of concrete steps, walkways and handrails evoking an old Soviet War Memorial, ostensibly a nod to the city's "brotherly love" PR ethic, sits across from a hulking bronze statue of Frank Rizzo, a mayor notorious for playing vicious race politics in the '70s. At the corner of 15th Street and Broad stands a 20 foot brown clothespin, the sole purpose of which seems to be providing shade to groups of militant street preachers and union slugs picketing on the corner. And above it all, bolted to a pedestal over the yellowed windows and ivy of scaffolding climbing the sides of City Hall stands William Penn, the open palm of his right hand giving the City "The Heisman."

Continue reading "Monday Morning (Nuggets, Vol. I)"