Watching Billy scowling, silent, scrubbing the residue from his face, armpits and hair, I knew things were going to be different going forward. The social dynamic had turned, as mayonnaise would in the sun. Treating Billy like a pet monkey was too funny, too easy and too addictive... Once you're high on controlling people, every other way of relating to them flies out the window. It only makes sense for a couple of high school seniors to abuse this sort of power. At 17 or 18, you've never been in charge of anything. Abusing a weaker peer for amusement is constructive - a cautionary lesson of sorts... something you can look back on in guilt a decade later when it's happening to you.1
* * *
Every morning Dennis came into my office my throat would tighten. He'd start off friendly enough, a little chit chat about something in the news. Slowly he'd segue into a case I'd been assigned. If we were talking the economy, he'd slide into a cross examination about my preparation for the deposition of some stockbroker. If we were talking literature, he'd mention how writing a brief was similar to creative writing and ask whether I'd begun one I was supposed to be working on but he knew I hadn't started. Sometimes he wouldn't even bother bridging the subjects. He'd just walk in with a brief he received from an opponent - something I hadn't even seen yet - and start quizzing me about its contents, as though I should have been prepared to address the arguments.
"I didn't know the thing had been filed until you brought it in here." I'd protest.
"It's not raising issues you didn't already know about. The question is 'How are you going to address them?' We're going to need affidavits from the client, aren't we? How much time do we have to respond under the rules?"
I knew after working under Dennis for three months that I was his monkey. There are two types of people in the work world: Those Who Just Want the Money and Those Who Want Power. The former can be a serious pain in the ass and usually make sullen, angry, moody bosses. But they're often decent people at heart who made the mistake you did - thinking they could extract the filthy lucre without marrying themselves to the field. And most of their annoyance accrues from their having to share space with the latter. People who are in it for power want Control. Money's secondary. The fundamental difference in the two schools of living is a simple matter of self-actualization. One group punches a clock in the Matrix, the other never leaves.
Dennis didn't want power. He was too low key, quirky and intellectual for that coarse a venture. But he was a student of the law firm hierarchy, crafted by its cruelties - weekends at the office as an associate, writing memos on esoteric issues partners would never read and only forced him to write because they could. Dennis knew no other way to relate to an associate than needling and antagonizing. As smart as he was, he was a traditionalist, and rejecting the system that had created him begged a question Dennis didn't want to ask. He did as he'd been done, and though we liked each other, he drove the thumbnails into me, day after day.
I'd complain about his outrageous nitpicking - the pathological way he'd tear the slightest grammatical gaffes to shreds. "Oh, come on. That's a computer error. The spell checking mechanism did it."
"I don't care. It's wrong."
"I understand that. And I'd have fixed it. And it's so minor no one would have seen it anyway."
He'd flip the papers at me and say the same thing every time - "The Phrase"... "We are lawyers, are we not?"
Sitting there, listening his criticisms, all I could think was "You're not working me over with the Socratic Method again, are you? You tool. Don't you have other material?" Yet all I could say was "I see," "Understood," "I'll fix that" and "Got it." I understood how Billy'd felt using the garden hose to strain that Jif out of his hair. You can't wash enough when you're playing the submissive. And there was no mistaking the dynamic between Dennis and me. I was his gimp, and when Dennis felt bad about his life and his choices, was cranky or just felt like being superior, he'd talk down to me and I'd take it. Maybe taking Dennis' daily abuse was punishment - my sentence for all the rotten shit we'd done to Billy. I could do the time, and I had some leverage. Dennis had blown through too many associates in the past; he couldn't afford to lose another. The only thing that scared me was, I knew from those days with Billy, once a person gets a taste for torture, things go downhill in a hurry...
* * *
"Now? Right here? But it's too crowded. It's broad daylight." Billy whined from the back seat of the car.
"Yes, now." Nolan deadpanned.
"I usually do it at night."
"Now you do it in the day. We'll park close." Nolan wheeled his car to the curb. I got out, moved the passenger seat up and waited for Billy to exit.
The Rite Aid was of the typical "big box" drug store, a 15,000 square foot warehouse of processed snack foods, vitamins, suntan lotion, tampons and shampoo arranged on eight foot high shelves separating long aisles running the distance from the front to the back. Perpendicular to the aisles across the front of the store were a row of check out counters staffed with dumpy middle aged women and the occasional 20ish clerk with British teeth, a heavy metal groupie haircut (3 inch walls of spray-hardened hair protruding from the sides and top of the head, with the hair behind it feathered down to the middle of the back)2 and Alice Cooper eyeliner.
The store we'd chosen was busy, and it was the middle of the afternoon, prime hours for geriatrics to reload on stool softener and Dr. Sholes' inserts and the perpetually-unemployed-milking-a-case-of-sciatica-for-long-term-workers-compensation-benefits crowd to pick up the bi-weekly supply of Cheetos, ice cream and Percocet.
Billy went in first, followed by Nolan a minute later, then me. Nolan stayed near the door, milling about a newspaper rack. I walked past the checkout lines to the far side of the front of the store, near the photo processing desk, eyeing the usual Bird Women and Botero caricatures standing before the registers. Many of the women you'd see on a Wednesday afternoon in a drug store in Suburban/Semi-rural Pennsylvania fit into one of those two categories. The Bird Women are drawn, sallow and gaunt, with sunken cheeks from the cartons of menthol cigarettes they're waiting to buy. Variations of Don Imus, Patti Smith or Joey Ramone, with wiry hair hanging over their face, obscuring all but the pointy end of a long thin nose knifing crow-like through their split ends - what the marketers behind acid washed Jorts3 and black sneakers would refer to as the "Salem 100s Demographic." They could be 28 or they could be 60; it's impossible to tell whether the complexion accrues from age or ambitious carcinogen intake. The age of the Boteros is equally difficult to pinpoint. One bag of miniature Snickers bars or package of vanilla custard Snack Packs from Type 2 diabetes, their skin is often stretched taut as a baby's from layers of adipose underneath. They look inflated well beyond their PSI, barely twice as tall as they are wide. The Boteros are the only customers with shopping carts, who appear to do their grocery shopping at a drug store that doesn't carry anything but Kraft, Hostess and Heinz products.
Nolan and I pretended to be looking for something, waiting for Billy to emerge from the middle aisle. Of all the things we'd forced him to do, this was the only one that made me nervous. It wasn't a laugh merely at Billy's expense. The thing had broader implications, and the old and the drug addled roaming about us weren't predictable. You never knew who might be an under cover cop, security guard, or some crazed unemployed Vietnam vet, out of work, teetering on bankruptcy and just rejected by the pharmacist trying to use a laughable fake prescription for muscle relaxants. He could be a second from snapping, and Billy's act the last straw in decades of indignities he'd been burying just below a throbbing peptic ulcer. Billy was our guinea pig, but none of us wanted to see him arrested or his face beaten to hamburger by a closet Rambo in Vicodin withdrawal.
I was feigning interest in a Super-Saver package of nine volt batteries when Billy roared out of the middle aisle. He was screaming at the top of his lungs - a flurry of howls and high pitched screeching mixed with random profanity. "Jesus-aahhhhh-hel me---arrghh--motherf---ahhhhh--ahhhh--no--fuck---fuck---ohhhh---shit---Christ---arrrghhh." His act was something akin to the bleatings of prey in a chase scene from a terrible B-Grade horror movie, but so badly done it actually sounded like a true lunatic run amok. Every person in the four or five lines at the front of the place, each at least four people deep, darted their gazes around at one another to look for the source of the melee. Billy blasted out of the middle aisle and into the back of the lines, barely avoiding a head on collision with a lumpy red haired woman angling a shopping cart into the back of one. He twisted sideways to avoid her, threading the needle between a rack of tchotchkies and a pot-bellied woman in a baseball jersey and Bermuda shorts, all the while barreling forward, legs in perpetual motion, driven by the fear of being dragged down and swarmed by some unseen security force or incensed patrons if he stopped moving for an instant. A cut and slash run through the holes, knocking beach toys and suntan lotion off the corners of discount racks as he charged into the last open space before the electric doors to the street.
I slid out in his wake, holding a pack of batteries in my hand as though I were going to buy them until the last five feet before the doors, to avoid looking like an accomplice, listening to the crowd as I went...
"Goddamn fool" some old woman remarked.
To Be Continued...
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1 And be glad you got it out of your system when you were young and had shit for brains.
2 See Videos for Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" and Motley Crue's "Looks that Kill."
3 Jorts (n) - Pre-cut jeans shorts.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 5:18 PM