Monty: She says I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble. I mean she's right, but what can I do? I got no... what's the word...
Nicky: Class.
- Easy Money (1983)
Litigation's as much about not losing as it is winning. If you've pled anything before a Court, you know sometimes you have to argue junk. The papers, the law, the rules - it all says your client's doomed. But you're paid to reply - to advocate something in opposition... Suspend disbelief and bark out the absurd with conviction, as forcefully as possible, as though it were credible, accurate and correct on every point... The sheer force of your argument compelling the opponent to engage you. Once you're engaged, you are credible. And once you're credible, you're past offensive or sanctionable - skirting legitimate - an advocate pleading an argument that just might win. You won't ultimately, but you've dodged sanctions, embarrassment and probably a few of the bigger claims against your client. A win of sorts, or at least a non-loss - all for acting impassioned and repeating yourself a lot.
It's a great all purpose strategy; works as well in or out of a courtroom...
It was Washington D.C. 1995. Stacy, a good friend from college was throwing a party the same weekend I happened to be in town visiting other mutual school friends.
"We'll stop by at 8:00 then." My buddy Les announced this to her over sandwiches outside Dean & DeLuca in Georgetown.
"Why don't you come at 11:00."
"11:00? The party will be half over!"
"Well I just don't think it'd be a good idea before 11:00."
"We have a handle of bourbon on ice. You don't need any extra booze! It'll just be Phil, ________, Bennett and me. You have some food there, right?"
"Really, I don't want you coming by until 11:00. I don't think it's the sort of crowd that... Well... I don't know if you should show up with a handle of bourbon."
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
Stacy excused herself.
"Good job. Now what are we going to do?" Bennett snickered.
"We're going to fucking go." Les was on a mission. "Who the fuck is she to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?"
Stacy had moved to DC after college, to save the world. She worked for a think tank, advocating some platform of amorphous progressive policies, regulations and initiatives. She'd told me about the work she was doing, but I can't recall any of it. I was a law student wasting three, sometimes four days a week wading in the residue of mental masturbation. I had no intention of paying attention to hers. I stared, smiled and said "Interesting" a lot (cue picture of monkey eating banana and scratching it's ass above my head).
DC's a terrible place for the apathetic... A lonely town for pragmatists, which is odd, since it only operates as it should when mired in absolute paralytic gridlock. Washington seems to be filled with "soft protestors" - people whose personalities' only weight is their current zeal for some position or issue that dominates everything they say. That's hardly surprising. DC's a stop-off city, a fifth year in college with a paycheck and a McJob. People work for nickels on the Hill or in some quasi-governmental organization for a time and, when their friends start moving and they decide they need to get paid for real, leave. Which kind of explains why the people you talk to at parties there know so much.
I've never known how to handle protesting or zealous types. They seem to get a lot more out of whatever "movement" they're flogging than the movement gets from them. The ones I met in DC are perfect Left Wing bookends to the warped fundamentalists they rip as troglodytes over crab-stuffed lettuce leaves and brie. Maybe even less credible. The soft protestors are incapable of uttering anything outside the parameters of what their college ethics professor preached. It's hard as hell to get a good drunk going in the company of people talking "rights" and "inequity" and "policy change." Being forced to drink somewhere else and show up late for a party full of them was probably a gift.
Les didn't see it that way. We showed up at 9:00, carrying cheese, red wine and the frozen handle of Jim Beam. Bennett, Les and Phil staked out seats in a sitting room at the front of the house. I snuck back to the kitchen and grabbed a shot glass, to start a proper "bourbon club." Stacy and I made brief eye contact as I was pushing through the crush of bodies in the middle room. Neither of us acknowledged the other. I brought the shot glass back to the front room. We started into the bottle.
Five or six shots in, Stacy cut loose from a conversation nearby and asked us what we were doing. "I see you're all very social."
"We're not allowed to socialize, are we?" Les laughed.
"You're so funny." Stacy smiled and walked into a conversation behind her. I followed suit, meandering through the crowd, looking for an interesting discussion.
A lot of the partygoers wore thick black glasses, the sort architects and interior designers favor. They leaned on the furniture and pursed their lips between exclamations.
"The rejection of Hillary's health plan was a terrible blow, but we soldier on..."
"I think we're making real headway on the bill. It's tough, though. It's an issue of worker empowerment, and I... I think that resonates. We've all worked, you know?"
"I'm really excited by the Senator's initiative. Solid waste is a huge industrial problem. I was walking to dinner at Perry's and the trash outside, I mean, most of it was just bulk. Boxes. Do we need that much cardboard? You think, 'how much of the Rainforest is in there?'"
A white wine crowd... And they all held their drinks the same way - bowl of the glass cupped in the hand, stem dangling between the fingers. If conspicuously sniffing, chopping and tasting a cigar between belts of an overpriced single malt is the cheap signaling of a self-envisioned alpha male, the hand-on-hip, wine-glass-between-the-ring-and-middle-fingers pose is the effete pseudo-intellectual's. It's an adult variety of the "Emo" look, but instead of angst, they offer you cites to last month's Harper's or Atlantic.
Everyone was trying to seem cutting edge, or what passed for it in think tank and policy wonk circles. Which made them all pretty much indistinguishable from one another. It was the usual fashion show of hipness you'd get in a New York or LA club except nobody was hot or had drugs, and James Taylor was playing instead of Prodigy... More a dog and pony show for people with ambitious vocabularies and fiscally unfortunate graduate degrees.
I fired back a couple more drinks, to reach the proper cruising altitude for mingling:
"I actually liked Ross Perot. It was just... I don't know. He was so short."
"The last thing I saw would have to be Dolomite. My buddy's obsessed with it. He watches it all the time now."
"Andrea Dworkin's still alive? The one who looked like Mama Cass? Remember when she used to do Morton Downey's show all the time with Curtis Sliwa? Head of the Guardian Angels. That guy was so annoying."
Stacy was irate that we'd arrived two hours early, but she hid it well. "Hello, ______. Have you met Chad and Marlin?"
"No, nice to meet you."
"They're lobbyists. They do a lot of work on 'alternative issues'." 'Alternative' was drawn out, offered proudly, as though it were exotic, or described something huge and important I knew nothing about. I knew what it meant. And if I didn't know the word, there was no way to mistake it in context. Chad eyed me like a steak and Marlin had Anderson Cooper's hair. Both of which were signs I'd finally stumbled into an interesting conversation.
It's a terrible stereotype, but as most stereotypes are, it's rooted in truth - gay men are usually the funniest people in any party. I've stolen tons of odd cultural references and jokes from them. Men's men run thin after a couple hours... Golf, scores, scotch, the stock market and embellished womanizing... It's a limited universe, and most of the dialogue isn't a conversation so much as an exhibitionist rant with a "Now Validate Me" ending. I try not to, but I find myself doing it a lot - it seems to be hard wired into the male animal. It isn't right or wrong and if you do it well it can be damn funny. Hell, it's basically half my cocktail party material... But it isn't as humorous as the stuff a really witty gay dude will flip off. They're like women, but with the balls to unload all the nasty, biting observations only women have but are too shit scared from social conditioning to offer.
If you're homophobic, you're a fool for two simple reasons. First, stealing their jokes will get you laid. Second, try to imagine how much harder it would be to meet women if every gay man suddenly went straight? You think she'd select your gut hanging over the pants, jorts wearing, wing-chomping, Budweiser Select swilling, hypnotized-into-a-coma-by-the-televison lard ass from the end of the bar if she could grab some skinny dude who cracked her up and knew how to dance?
Unfortunately, Stacy's gay friends hadn't a stitch of Paul Lynde wit. They were strident DC queers, relating everything in the world to their sexuality as a political issue and defining characteristic.
"Being a gay man in DC used to be awful. It's just now that things are beginning to change. We had Reagan here, so the 80s were a total loss."
"It's just now that the culture's being mainstreamed, with bars and clubs and places where it's accepted. Everybody had to meet everybody at parties in the old days."
No pop culture references. No pithy quotes. Nothing worth plagiarizing. It wasn't them. It wasn't what they were. It was the town. Unless you're an objective journalist or a cynical lobbyist, it's probably impossible not to wind up self important and humorless about whatever big movement you're involved in hanging around that swamp.
I offered levity to break the monotony:
"You think its easy meeting chicks? I wish I were gay. At least you know the playing field. There's always some guy in the bar who wants to fuck. You never know what a woman's agenda is, and most of them don't even know what they want. Plus, nobody ever gets knocked up on your side of the fence. And you never have to put down the toilet seat. It's a win/win."
"Excuse us for a second." Stacy asked me to accompany her to the kitchen.
"What the fuck is the matter with you?"
"What? I thought that was a compliment."
"That's the problem. Just stay in here and drink."
To Be Continued...
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 2:17 PM