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."
Striding past it all, I reach my office tower, take the elevator to the 16th floor and slide through the hall, passing co-workers with the usual auto-pilot exchanges: "Hello," "excellent," "relaxing," "too short." My secretary berates me. "Michael Carson called and I put him in your voice mail." "Did you get those papers that were faxed to you on Friday afternoon?" I throw my bag on the desk, slide into my chair and turn on the computer. The screen fills with a calendar of deadlines. A stack of angry faxes from opposing counsel wait in my in box. Two emails from opponents and two from my boss and it's barely 8:45. The phone crackles with my assistant's voice - somebody's calling to demand a pile of documents I was supposed to turn over two weeks ago.
"Take a message."
CLICK. The calendar's closed.
CLICK. The email's closed.
CLICK. The phone's on "Do Not Disturb."
After an hour or so reading news online and watching great white sharks eat seals off the California Coast on Youtube, I scan my private email and flip to a folder of shots of Lisa naked on the beach. Get the blood moving, remember those vacations, which cost money, which reminds me why I'm trading away my hours in the goddamn office. The digital photo sharing program prompts me for a password.
P-I-C-S-7-7-7-7
"The password entered is incorrect. Please try again."
Fuck. L-I-S-A-7-7-7-7
"The password entered is incorrect. Please try again."
Motherfucker. L-I-S-A-P-I-C-S
"The password entered is incorrect. Please try again."
Damnit. What are the last four digits to my social security number?
My secretary appears in the door. "I really need you to take a call. It's on an important new case."
"This is bullshit. I'm really busy here."
Trading off "The Grid"
...At least one of the people you saw in Starbucks this morning has sold illegal drugs in his or her life and two have bought them, probably in the past month. South Americans and black kids in ghettos don't control the trade. Your broker, cardiologist, lawyer, real estate agent... The bank V.P. next door, your kid's history teacher and the architect who designed the addition you're putting on the back of the house... These people make up the fat middle of the retail drug market. Hell, if you've not been in the presence of an illicit substance sale at some point you're in a very small minority. This "black market" is a hundred times wider and deeper than anyone admits, and black's a terrible adjective for it. It's flooded with Bush voters, Little League coaches and people who belong to country clubs and sit in the front pews on Sunday.
The middle and upper middle class dope market operates like those "peer to peer" computer programs people use to trade illegally downloaded music - the ones that connect users directly and keep no central repository of files. If Consumer A wants a quarter ounce of marijuana, he can call one of a half dozen connections. One's either holding enough to sell some to him or buying from someone else soon. That person, Consumer B, might get it from a delivery service or he might be meeting another friend with a better product source. And that person, Consumer C, might just happen to have a pile of extra sitting around, or be meeting someone else, Consumer D, to make a purchase. The braches on the supply chain multiply exponentially. And like I said, this is just one of Consumer A's six possible supply chains.
The individual inventories of any connection fluctuate wildly, and the chain of purchases is always changing, impossible to identify and never big enough to investigate. Nobody's in it for money. Doctors, lawyers and brokers don't need dope profits, so none of the sources have any reason to grow. The idea is just to keep as many small ones open as possible, to ensure against a lapse in the product stream. It's a friendly handshake system, and when the network's flush, a consumer can have a bag of what he wants faster than he can get a pair of driving moccasins from J. Crew.
Wrapping your head around the notion a dope runner going to jail was paying for bad business decisions was one thing. Swallowing the fiction he was evil, or that there was any battle between "Right" or "Wrong" in that realm is another. Educated consumers are utterly ambivalent to the right or wrong of the thing, which probably accrues from the dull qualities of the product. For a thinking person it's near impossible to build any moral totems out of a baggie of vegetable mass, powder or pills. And it might also be that purchasing something in a true, unfettered market, where Uncle Sam, City Hall and all the other fingers that rip off pieces of everything we buy and sell aren't getting any action feels "American" in a much more real sense than most of the things we spray with that adjective.
It's easy to see how the business could be addictive... An instant return on risk - what drives millions of day traders and real estate flippers all over the country. Only faster, cleaner and pure - just the seller and marketplace. No tax issue to vet, permits to procure or shysters and accountants to be hired to guide you through a Byzantine maze of paperwork to be notarized and filed with the proper clerks. The revenue's immediate and real, cash in hand. Hedge funds aren't opening faster than Starbucks out of the blue. The dope runner's world might just be the last outpost on a continuum of people who simply don't have any more time or patience for the Grid's reindeer games.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 7:30 PM