[Enter Trooper Farva, carrying a tray of coffees for his fellow troopers, Rookie Trooper "Rabbit's" containing a large, visible bar of soap]
Rabbit: [dryly] Oh, look, a bar of soap.
Farva: Oh, shit, I got you good, you fucker!
Trooper Mac: *Awesome* prank, Farva.
- Super Troopers (2001)
"I want you to read the Rules in your off time." Dennis dropped the Civil Procedure book on my desk... Hundreds of pages of endless descriptions of when certain legal papers may be filed, the form in which they should be filed, where they should be filed and how much it costs to file them. Below each is two or three pages of commentary on when the particular rule was first written, each time it was amended, how it was amended and why it was amended.
"What?" I liked Dennis. He was erudite and darkly sarcastic. We'd talk pop culture, political candidates, traffic records and college basketball. He was interesting and engaging, and such a perfectionist (the man would take a week to draft the simplest papers, and agonize over every line of text, knowing full well a clerk would never read it) that it was clear law, or any field demanding churning of hours on commoditized tasks, wasn't his chosen field. There were a million better things for a mind like his to do.
I couldn't help thinking as I listened to him speak, with his Plimpton-like delivery, affected as it was, "What a shame - this mothefucker'd be a solid Classics professor, or Ambassador to a minor protectorate." Dennis had too many interests and curiosities to be a lawyer, even if most were repressed, and I think he knew it.
But he was stuck - 55 and a partner, his dreams buried before Reagan left office. Or maybe they never existed. Maybe he was a zero who was only amusing because I was sitting in a grey box, reading printouts of cases about contracts between corporations and insurance companies and banks. The only context I knew him in was one where watching a fly circle an overhead lamp qualified as a five minute distraction. Fuck it.... How Dennis came to where he was isn't important. What's important was how he handled it. Though he seemed to loathe what he did and only work when forced by a deadline, Dennis was intent on excelling at it. What he did he did perfectly, no matter how painful the act of getting there. Dennis never submitted anything to the Court that wasn't grammatically and stylistically perfect, yet constructed simply enough not to overwhelm a clerk. From a logical standpoint, his pleadings were as waterproof as arguments got in business litigation. He could have half-assed it and gotten exactly the same results, but he had a sad pride in what he did. Dennis knew it was just paper, and in the larger picture, it held no significance save the invoiced payable it justified. But it was what he did, and if he wasn't recalled for anything else he'd done in this life - if the talents that might have made him memorable had been wasted - he'd at least be thought a fine Philadelphia Lawyer.
Still, I respected Dennis and his work, and I think respected me. I also think he knew I wasn't really interested in the job, and it drove him a little nuts to have someone whose attitude tested and reminded him of his own forced commitment to the field roaming the floor every day. The less I seemed to care, as manifested in my mistakes - little typos I'd shrug off here and there; a response to a motion submitted a day late; forgetting to put a document's page numbers in the same font as the text - the more he had to wonder why he did. "Law is a jealous mistress" many like to say. If Dennis believed that, then what did my blowing her off say about the last 30 years of his existence?
There was a terminal tension between Dennis and me, boiling beneath the surface. He seemed to live for it, stopping by my office every morning and peppering me with the Socratic Method. "What have you learned about this-and-that rule? Do we need to file a such-and-such motion to preserve our rights? Have you looked into the time limit for filing one of those? Why not?" It got so I'd say nothing and just take notes, groaning under my breath... "OK. I'll be back to you in a few minutes."
But ordering me to read the rule book in my off hours... That was the last straw. I knew Dennis had economic reasons for wanting me to be a better lawyer, and I knew he wanted to work less and couldn't unless I were honed to the point that he could trust me doing his work. But I also knew hazing, and I understood the process of breaking a person down. I'd spent the last decade in a world run on the concept of psychological torture as personnel management....
* * *
Billy was a stocky kid with a big round head and a sullen demeanor. He was 15, fairly intelligent, quiet and sheltered. His mother worked and left him in the charge of his older cousin and my friend, Nolan. Nolan's parents were never home, and he had a great big old house to himself, with a pool in the backyard. During the summers when I was in high school, my buddy Charles and I would drive down to Nolan's every day and waste the time kids today would spend pretending to volunteer at food banks, learning Bach's Violin Concerto No. 2, taking a junior year Kaplan's course on how to ace the senior year Kaplan's SAT Course in the hopes of landing in an Ivy League school sitting by the pool, or getting ripped on Southern Comfort, Bartles & James wine coolers and cheap shwag weed when it was available.
Billy acted as our servant, getting us drinks and food from the house, and bringing us the cordless phone so Charles or I could call our girlfriends and beg them to come down with some friends. They never did. It was a terrible scene for women. The house was old and musty and dark as a tomb. It was littered with newspapers and magazines opened and discarded, half drunk liters of soda and pizza boxes Nolan would leave about the coffee tables. Nolan's suite upstairs was a war zone - the floors were covered in album sleeves, girlie magazines, cassettes, an occasional crumpled fast food bag and all sorts of ties, buttoned down shirts, khaki pants and blue or tweed blazers Nolan would tear off and throw on the floor when he got home from school.
The girls would visit at night, for booze. Every four or five days, Charles and I would drive over to a dingy row home in walking distance from a beer distributor and liquor store (in Pennsylvania, you couldn't buy hard alcohol and beer in the same location). I'd wave from the truck to a bloated, near toothless middle aged cirrhotic name "Kenny." If he waved back, Charles and I would walk into Kenny's sun porch, through piles of fishing tackle, yellowed newspapers, buckets of greenish black residue I hoped was bait but just as easily could have been vomit, or worse. We'd visit with the old man, perched on a lawn chair in front of a black and white television. Like so many other dealers in illegal substances, Kenny'd force you to talk to him for a while before conducting business.
"I was up Canada, fishin.'" He'd sip from a coffee cup. The plastic bottle of clear liquor would be open on a card table next to him.
"Really?"
"The fuckin' people up there are nuts. My pal Donald, he's a big fucker. He got in a fight. We were drinkin' a little and these fuckers came over and we had some beers with them. We were campin,' you know? And the fuckers started arguing with Donald and shit. Donald was kicking one of them before you know it!" Kenny'd lean forward on the chair and stare at you. We'd take it as a pause for our reaction, but looking back, it was probably a mini-stroke or cerebral exhaustion - his brain crashing under the effort of sustaining the narrative after already stringing together more than 30 words in one coherent exclamation.
"That's fuckin' nuts. Terrible." Charles had a good way with The Crazy. He knew just what pitch to use in his response to avoid sounding like he was patronizing the old man, who'd let it be know in the past that he had several guns. He knew pronouncing the 'g' on the end of 'fuckin' could be construed as insult.
"Yeh, Donald kicked their fuckin' asses. I ain't goin' up Canada for a while. I'm going to go and see my girlfriend down near the beach I think." He'd wink. Picturing his bloated gut riding a ragged hag in a doublewide trailer somewhere inland from Wildwood drove me to shudders.
Charles would arrange himself on his chair in such a way that Kenny would see the wad of $20 bills in his hand.
"So what do you kids want?"
"Two cases of Budweiser, two cases of Busch pounders and, if you can go to the liquor store too, a bottle of SoCo, bottle of peach schnapps, one Absolut and a bottle of grain."
"Grain? That's the moonshine. Whaddya gonna do with that? Get some girls drunk?" Kenny looked up from a 4 by 6 in ringed tablet where he wrote his orders.
"Yep. Get some girls real drunk." Charles would laugh and put the money in Kenny's hand.
Kenny'd walk outside, grab a shopping cart he'd stolen from the local ACME and push it across the street to the beer distributor, then to the liquor store. We'd deliver the goods to Nolan's that night. He'd put them in a basement refrigerator. We'd throw a party with the stuff the next night his folks weren't around. Sometimes we'd throw one when they were around; they didn't know what we had in the plastic cups. I'd get loaded and try to nail my girlfriend, who'd refuse on the grounds that other girls were around. It made no sense. They knew we were fucking. And everyone knew those girls were fucking their boyfriends. Half the girls' boyfriends were usually at Nolan's house. My suspicion was she just didn't want to sleep with anyone under those circumstances, in that house. I can't imagine a dark, creepy old home, crawling with drunks and littered with violent comic books, nunchuks, samurai swords, Mexican gynecological textbooks (Nolan's family had been in the medical field) and occasionally, handguns, with a constant soundtrack of Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast," Black Flag's "Damaged" and Schooly D's "Smoke Some Kill" blaring in the background was much of a turn on for a 17 year old girl. Even a very goddamn drunk one. But like I said, visits from females were rare moments. Most of the time, during the weekdays, we'd just sit around killing our inventory, bored out of our minds.
To Be Continued...
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 3:04 PM