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.
"Well, here it is. There's your desk and your window and your computer. There's a calendar for you and your time sheets and the phone codes are in your in-box. Have you used a client billing phone system before?"
"No. But I'm sure it's simple."
"Oh, it is." She chuckled. "And we're getting new chairs next week, so don't get too attached to that one." She pointed behind my desk and broke into laughter again.
Is that funny? Should I laugh? It didn't matter. She'd probably just read in some manual that laughter makes a new hire "feel welcome" and wasn't listening to a word I said. I could have barked like a dog in response or said "I hope I'm not working around colored people" and she'd have giggled exactly the same way. Every time I've dealt with one of these functionaries, I've wanted say something bizarre, just to test that theory.
I don't see anything in the dress code about jodhpurs. I assume they're okay?
'Jod'-what?
I have a pony.
Oh, I uh...
I was wondering... The blinds on these windows are too white. Can I bring in my own drapes?
I don't know if the hand book allows--
You'd love Jimson Weed.
Excuse me? What did you say?
'Jimson Weed'... My horse. Everyone loves him.
Oh. I, uh... Sorry.
This office faces Mecca, right?
You can't help but wondering just how far an act like that could go. Wondering just how disparate your two realities might be. Whether those middle management types are really the simple drones they present on the surface, or if on some other level she'd be thinking to herself, Go ahead. You little shit. Fuck with me all you like. I'm leaving at five today, while you're still checking commas and case cites2.
"I'll be sure not to get attached to that chair." I smiled.
"Great. Great. And you have the pass code to get in the building on weekends and the elevator card to access the floors after hours."
"Lovely. Thank you."
"And you've seen the catering service menu, right?"
"Yes I have."
"People really enjoy that. It's so much easier to not have to leave the office to eat."
"Of course." Having walked the floors and seen the rows and rows of cubicles filled with bodies punching keys I couldn't help but fantasizing there was a Soylent Green rendering machine in the building and somewhere in a locked conference room a group of grim faced partners were staring down a quivering old secretary tied to gurney. "Gladys, you've been here thirty years, and you know that means it's time for 'retirement.' Trust us. The needle won't hurt a bit."
"Great. Then you're all set." The HR lady shook my hand and bounced off down the hall, leaving me standing outside the office, staring into my new home.
The spaces are all the same - a swivel chair and pasteboard desk surrounded by those divider walls firms build into the open floor space when they sign office leases. You learn a lot about those removable walls as an associate. Each has its own unique shade and texture of drywall and paint. Some have deep grooves, almost like stucco, and some are almost perfectly smooth. The majority, of course, are in between - not too flat and not too grainy. And they're always painted a shade between bone white and cream. That or grey. But never too grey, like you might see in a trendy restaurant. More along the lines of shale, or bleached gravel. And the finish, well, that's always matted, as mute as possible (though I have heard legends about one firm using a risky lacquer which was quite shiny when the sun came through the windows).
There's no mind built to sit in one of those boxes every day. I think it was Newton's Third Law that said for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction, and that rule applies far beyond the parameters of simple physics. Pen up a couple hundred people like veal every day, particularly the sort drawn to a profession not known for putting any premium on social skills, and two things are going to happen. They're going to start fucking each other, or at least trying to, and it's not going to be pretty.
"Romantically" speaking, a lot of lawyers seem to have been stunted, having never progressed beyond a high school student's understanding of how to interact with the opposite sex. Some are harmless - fumbling, awkward sorts all but paralyzed in the presence of anyone they find attractive. Some are pathetic - in-house "playas" who screw gold-digging associates and staff but would never get a second look from a woman outside the firm. Others are creepy, like Michael Jackson - grown adults in every other regard, but developmentally trapped just past the opening cusp of puberty, like they never had any regular sexual experience past the days of jerking off to old Penthouses in eighth grade.
Whether the law draws those emotionally demented sorts or mints them is a question for the ages. All I know is they seem to flood the profession like locusts, and at forty, a lot of them are still holding bushels of the wild oats most of us have sown by twenty five. ...And that inventory's getting more and more rancid by the day.
Anyone who's had a normal sex life can tell you, the sickest twists are always the repressed types. Remember your freshman dorm in college? The alcoholic sluts serviced the highest volume of men, but it was the mousy introverted girl with the crucifix necklace everybody heard screaming "Harder! Put your finger in my ass!" through the walls when her home town boyfriend came to visit. The problem in a law firm is, unlike a dorm, where a wallflower screaming for ass play is a funny background soundtrack for bong hits and beer pong, when stifled lawyers get randy the results are always ugly.
To Be Continued.
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1 From a pure business perspective, the only real differences between an associate and a copier or fax machine are a heartbeat, depreciation schedule and the fact that one "profit center" bills by the page while the other bills by the minute.
2 It's easy to make fun of middle management types for their lack of ambition and creativity, or the way they blindly cling to procedure out of fear. They seem worthy targets. Until you start thinking about how simple their life is compared to yours. You wonder if they really live in quiet desperation, or if they're actually smarter than the rest of us. If maybe they got past all the egotism and realized it's a whole lot easier to just follow orders and collect checks than chart the course and take the risks... That the only real currency is comfort and there's an accidental wisdom in keeping it simple. Stated otherwise, they understand, as smart as you think you are, your cat's probably having a much better life.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 8:38 AM