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."
"That makes no sense. Why would he just do that out of the blue?" I closed the door to my office so no one could listen. The floor had been deadly quiet all morning and everyone seemed to be walking on eggshells. The eerie silence clearly accrued from the sordid tale I was hearing, but I didn't know how far the story had spread, and I didn't want to be the fool who got reprimanded for accidentally passing sensitive gossip to the staff. "There's got to be some back story here." I whispered into the phone. "Where were they?"
"In Bill's office." I could hear Ian typing as he talked, probably pumping his source for details by email as we spoke. Ian was on the main floor of the firm, where the managing partners kept their offices, which provided him with the best gossip. "Leslie came walking in with some draft papers for him to look over."
"Where was she?"
"I don't know. Standing, talking to him."
"Near the door? Near his desk?" I needed as much description as possible.
"Let him finish." Peter snapped.
"Sorry."
"So, they were just talking," Ian continued. "And she was saying something and he just leaned in and checked them out."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that."
"Squeezed?" I questioned him further. There was no way to probe far enough into a story this strange. "Pinched? Grabbed?"
"A titty twister." Ian snapped back. "That's Bill's defense. That he was just joking around. He also gave her an Indian Burn and a Wedgie."
"Then he took her lunch money." Peter chimed in.
"He didn't say anything? No advance warning?" Try as I might, I couldn't wrap my head around the scene Ian was describing. It was a total breakdown of all social conditioning - the wages of a mind gone wrong on every level. Or a mind that never had any safety mechanisms - so desperate and out of its element the basal urge to grope an attractive fellow biped overrode its every power of rational thought and self control. "Nobody just grabs somebody's tits. It's fucking insane."
"All I heard was, they were reading papers one second and he was squeezing them the next. I guess he just had to know what they were like."
"I want to know what a lot of women's tits are like," Peter sounded as confused as I was. "But I'm not testing them like melons at the market."
"That's the mystery of tits, isn't it?" Ian laughed. "Forbidden fruit, right in your face at all times."
Like any decent joke, there was more than half-truth to Ian's observation. Breasts are a frustrating quirk of nature - a pair of female sexual organs (at least to males) constantly on display... Nature's way of permanently sexually objectifying women. As much I want to consider of a female co-worker in the driest professional manner, if she's got a great rack, on some level, until I'm desensitized from seeing her on a regular basis, I'm thinking about what her breasts look like out of the cruel confines of those support bras women wear with business suits. I'm also thinking about what it would be like to fuck her. Like all normal men, however, an evolutionary circuit in my brain keeps that internal porn flick totally severed from the reality of the moment. It's all in my head, and it never makes it to my hands - a power of segregation I'm pretty sure is most of what separates me from your average baboon.
"What did she do?" I expected Ian to tell me she hit him over the head with a paperweight.
"What can you do? What would you do if you were talking to your secretary and she just bent down and scooped your junk?"
"Ask for a happy ending."
"Your secretary's like, sixty five." Peter laughed.
"I'd take a hand job from Katherine Hepburn."
"She's what, a hundred?"
"A hand's a hand."
"Ok, how about, uh, Nancy Reagan-- No, wait... Julia Child." Peter upped the ante. "You'd let Julia Child jerk you off?"
"You'd have to prove she's a woman."
"She'd be naked."
"Enough." Ian cut us off. "I have to take another call in a minute. But to answer your question, I heard Leslie called one of the managing partners after the incident and now they're having some meeting about the whole thing."
I'd have given a toe to be a fly on the wall in that partners' meeting. How did an organization respond to something like this? How could they explain it? What tortured effort could anyone make to square Bill's behavior with any semblance of a normal mind? It was warped and perverted on one level, yet at the same time so infantile and idiotic... So helpless and pathetic. As I talked to Peter and Ian that morning the only analogous situation I could come up with in my head was a disgusting anecdote my old friend Harris had been telling for years about the sex drives of the mentally retarded:
...They're really, really horny all the time. It's a scientific fact that they have sex drives three or four times that of a normal person. I worked in this department store in high school and a retarded man named Amos worked on the dock. I was shelving clothes one day and I heard this screaming from the Ladies' Department and I ran over to see what was going on and Amos was standing in the lingerie section with a bra and panties in his hand, jacking off in front of these old women. It was gross. He was just kept going at it and no one wanted to get near him. We had to let him finish. I think some woman fainted and had to go to the hospital.
Maybe that was the answer. Bill was "challenged." Not in the conventional tongue-biting, drooling sense, but in some subtle fashion that scrambled his synapses just enough to render him a slave to his basest impulses. Perhaps Bill was the real victim here, some sort of undiagnosed idiot savant, a child in a man's body, able to process complex legal arguments but driven stark, raving mad by the sight of breasts, devolving to a lust-addled imbecile like the public masturbator in Harris' ugly story.
"Maybe he's like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man."
"Huh?" Ian sounded confused by my comment.
"Nothing." If Bill had the intelligence of a savant he'd have been a specialist at one of the really huge national firms. "Just thinking out loud about something."
"What?"
"...Is Julia Child still alive?"
To be continued.
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1 I'm all but positive Harris never worked in a department store in high school.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 9:04 AM