"This is my tape. I made it."
- Sherman McCoy, Bonfire of the Vanities
I had the opportunity to watch a sentencing last week. They brought the prisoner in, went over the usual procedural matters and then the Judge read his sentence, "120 months."
"Ouch." I cringed.
"Bad liar," a bailiff laughed nearby.
I chuckled to myself. Then, as the officers escorted the prisoner from the courtroom, it struck me. Did the bailiff mean the prisoner or his lawyer? Did I just snicker at joke where I was the punchline?
When I finished arguing my motion and returned to the office, a copy of the local trade paper was open on the mantle surrounding the receptionists' desk. Half of the front page was an obituary for an aged pillar of the local legal community.
A man of unimpeachable credibility and character, devoted family man and possessing one of the finest legal minds.
A lawyer dies every few hours somewhere in this country, and many get a eulogy stating some variation of the above. It's a canned remembrance, delivering the standard three accolades:
Good for him.
I always found it odd that honesty would be celebrated in anyone's, let alone an esteemed professional's, lengthy obituary, assuming a dead man worth half a page of print necessarily possessed such a hardly exotic quality. I haven't seen obituaries for mailmen, doctors, bartenders, plumbers, stuntmen, boxers, singers, astronauts, lumberjacks, chefs or ballroom dance instructors lauding their honesty. The focus is on how loving, decent, caring or "wonderful" the person was. Law is the only field where the professional community makes a conscious effort to rehabilitate the deceased, as though his title soiled him with Original Sin, or compliments would pay his fare across Styx like the coins Greeks used to put over the dead's eyes. "Alfred was a great lawyer, but he also told the truth." Call him honest three times and maybe Phlegyas'll put the old coot in business class - the only way Al traveled.
Most people dismiss these queer obituaries as pap coughed up by PR pros. There's a perception lawyers rip and smear their competitors' reputations. Some do, but they're generally fools. Most lawyers wax melodramatic ad nauseum about how upright and honest their colleagues are. The primary Pavlovian basis for this effusive gushing is simple economics - every other lawyer is a potential source of referral business. Best not to shit where you eat. But there's a little more to it than that. The honor among thieves allows lawyers to feel human, to pretend they're not angling, scheming, and backstabbing in every aspect of their lives... that they can be decent, complimentary, docile people. They want to believe they can pervert procedure, twist facts, file frivolous actions and lie to clients and the court for money, yet remain morally beyond reproach.
A lot of lawyers think life works like one of the contracts they parse - that as provisions in an agreement dictate how the parties are expected to behave, saying or writing something enough will make it reality. They crown each other with awards for their pro bono programs and talk up meager strides made on politically fashionable issues like diversity; as if this somehow undoes the rancid reality everyone knows lies at the heart of their cash flow - fraud and theft.1
The obituary writers can't tell the truth. They can't say that, among the many things Al might have been, he was undoubtedly a conniving, manipulative liar. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have been successful enough to warrant all that ink. "Lawyer" and "liar" aren't mere sound-alikes - lying's what we do. We just don't call it that. We offer platitudes like "there are three sides to any story - plaintiff's, defendant's, and the facts... by fighting, we ferret out the truth." That's true, but it also means one side is lying all the time. But our lies aren't direct. Nobody counsels his client to bald-faced bullshit - that could cost you your license. We lie by omission, hide facts or hijack the focus, making the other side's credibility the issue, obscuring the claims against our clients. We warp the language of an agreement into something its simple verbiage could never have intended. Most of us rationalize this by lying to ourselves - suspending disbelief and supporting our client's most obscene prevarications. I've been dressed down several times by partners for merely joking in private that our client was lying.
"The Judge will decide what's true. You aren't the Judge. You have a duty to your client. You're an advocate, and that is all."
Translation: "I know our client is lying. You know he's lying. But we want his money."
But these rationalizations are for the service partner shlubs. The big fish know that the trick to lying effectively is complete self-delusion. First, you have to make the facts your client gives you real in your mind, as though they actually happened exactly the way you're going to tell them to the jury. Give them a history, some context, a back story. This sounds easy, but as the WMD debacle in Iraq eloquently illustrates, it's actually hard as hell. The real facts have a pesky habit of surfacing at the worst times, and this causes serious problems. You might mix up your client's story with the true facts during a hearing or trial. If one real fact sneaks in, the rest have a tendency to flood in through that hole in the dike. If you start thinking about the truth, your conscience might kick in subconsciously, leaving you a less than zealous advocate. But how do you bridge the holes in your client's fantastic story, and bury the guilt of abetting his lies? With the second half of the self-delusion - a victim complex. You're client's gotten screwed by his opponent before, so even if he's wrong on this claim, he deserves to hit the bastard for some money. Your client did something wrong, but something we all do from time to time - why should he lose a fortune due to some bad timing? You're not lying; you're righting a wrong... getting even for the aggrieved. There is no justice if you lose. Once you've made the quantum leap to this pedestal, the actual bullshitting's easy.
I'm sure several of the lawyers I've worked for would like to believe that they taught me how to lie like a lawyer. But I learned how to do it long before I got into this industry...
* * *
"Crash!" I lurched awake to the sound of shattering glass all around me.
Shit... who is this blonde girl next to me? Where am I? What time is it?
Waking up blazing drunk is a scary scene. Waking up blazing drunk in a jacket, tie and Bermuda shorts, on the floor in a room you don't recognize at first, your cheek drool-glued to a filthy carpet, clutching a strange girl, is even scarier. The immediate stabbing paranoia that comes with the first glimpse of daylight after a crushing bender seizes your organs. The heart races, the hands get clammy, the stomach starts churning, kicking up the remnants of last night's debauchery - an acrid mix of cheap hors d'oerves and gin and tonic sludge searing your already cigarette corroded esophagus. You stammer to concentrate, to recall how you landed in this ditch, but the mind is still drowning in drink. The senses are dull, the body feels numb... everything is wrong. You're where you're supposed to be at midnight, but your watch; the sun; the joggers outside, tell you it's early morning. You'll be a babbling idiot by lunch, sick by dinner, a mongoloid mumbling through delirium tremors by cocktail hours. You can't even fight fire with fire - the mere smell of a Bloody Mary would only trigger a violent fit a dry heaves. These are the wages of fixing yourself doubles at 4:00 a.m. The next day's over before it begins.
It took me a minute to recall that I'd been at fraternity formals the night before, and that the blonde next to me, Anne, was a friend whom I'd taken as a date. It took me one more minute to realize that I was in my friend Les's room.
Les and his date were sitting on the couch, rubbing their eyes. I decided to forgo the usual questions (How did we get here? When did we go to sleep?). I had other concerns on my mind.
"What the fuck was that?"
"Someone threw a bottle through the window," Les half yawned, pointing to the bookshelf on the other side of the room.
On the bookshelf was the evidence of the crime - a pile of glass shards held together by a tattered Dewars label.
"Who did it?"
"Fuckers next door," Les answered, fumbling with his cigarette lighter.
For a time during that year, my fraternity house was at war with the house next door. It was an odd dispute, since nobody in either house knew each other or crossed in any social circles. Mine was a strange fraternity - a senseless, ramshackle collection of disparate personalities held together by tenuous thread of gluttony and sloth. It operated more like a dining club than a fraternity. We observed no rituals and only had a brotherhood in the sense that we all shared the same common goals of getting laid, getting twisted and getting laid. The house was more a loose collection of like minds celebrating their ids in a common area than anything else. We had swimmers, lacrosse players, musicians, dope dealers, dorks, pretty boys, academics, peaceniks and college Republicans. This was the patchwork you got when you ordered a case of bourbon before voting on whom to admit... The school had wanted us shut down for years, but due to laziness, or perhaps because to some of the faculty we represented the last fumes of the fading 60s/70s loose morality they pined for under the recent Reaganization of campus, we somehow stayed afloat. Perpetually on double secret probation, but alive.
The house next door was, to the best of my knowledge, a harmless, friendly group of engineers and chemistry majors. They kept to themselves, had their own parties and never bothered us... Until my Junior Year, when a few of us decided to fire 40 pounds of roman candles and bottle rockets into their windows for no reason. There was no reason for the attack except flat out boredom. It was a Thursday night, a few of us were drunk, and it just seemed The Right Thing to Do. We were just "Breaking Shit," an incredibly cathartic form of performance art that's gotten an undeserved shitty reputation since a pack of overpierced dentists' kids went on a gang raping rampage to that shitty Limp Bizkit single about it at Woodstock 99. Immature, juvenile, senseless? Yes. But done right, throwing a television off a roof, creating a 30 foot high bonfire with an old couch and gasoline, throwing a hundred or so plates across a parking lot like great ceramic frisbees can be spectacularly beautiful. Who's to say there's no skill in skulling nine irons into 3' by 3' windows from 100 yards with only a streetlight as a yard marker? Who can dismiss the graceful pirouettes of a man carving abstract lawn poodles of the hedges at 4:00 a.m., turning every few seconds to avoid slicing into the electric cord and cooking his hands to charred meat? The fact is, watching things explode, crash, burn or be sawed to bits is every bit as interesting as watching them get built. If we don't cull the home appliance and furniture population, who will?
The only problem is, sometimes, you'd run out of your own things to break, and have to break someone else's. Hence the bottle rocket and Roman candle assault on the neighbors. From that day forward, the houses fought sporadically, unpredictably, attacking one another without warning. You'd be sitting in the living room, watching television, and all of the sudden a 1.75 liter tequila bottle would crash through the huge bay window and smash onto the brick fireplace. Sometimes it'd be eggs; sometimes bottles of paint. Sometimes it was near fisticuffs. It wasn't unusual to see someone dash from the living room with a hockey stick, golf club or, on one occasion, an ornamental, but quite functional machete, to stop a group of brothers from the other house from stealing a keg or a mountain bike. But this attack, this morning... this was different.
Well, actually, it wasn't different. It just happened that Les and I were morning drunk - confused and disoriented, not just open to the notion of violence, but embracing it - hair triggered and operating on instinct. The still drunk morning mind doesn't consider options, particularly at 9 AM, torn awake, irritated from its coma. Adrenaline floods the limbs and all goes numb in a bloodlusting revenge frenzy. You react.
I darted to the window. "I see the fucker. It's that fat little guy hiding behind a bush on the side of their house. He's one of them."
"You mean that fat little Indian guy with the notebook?"
"Exactly. Stay low. He'll see you."
"What do we do?"
"Teach the round little bastard a lesson."
Les looked out the window again. "You sure it's that guy? I mean, he doesn't look..."
I ignored Les's skepticism. We had to strike fast. The immediacy of the retaliation was paramount, hitting the right target was secondary - anyone in their house would do. They'd just tagged us in the chin with a sharp right cross. We needed to lean in and shock them with a Tyson uppercut to the jaw - send a shockwave through the head.
"Do you still have that pellet rifle?"
"You can't be serious."
"What? It's not a real gun."
I sat back on Les's couch and pumped the weapon a dozen or so times. It was a rickety old pellet rifle that could barely break skin, but it worked. I fired it empty once and felt the blast of the pressurized air releasing through the barrel. "Pop," it exploded with a sound like a small balloon bursting. "Outstanding."
I scanned the room for a test target to shore up my aim. On Les's wall was a tattered black and white poster of the Grateful Dead standing on a San Francisco street, each of them dressed totally in black, wearing black wraparound sunglasses, arms crossed, all staring straight ahead, like a menacing biker gang. I leveled the rifled at the poster and tried to draw a bead on Jerry's head, but the barrel kept shaking in my trembling hands.
"Gimme a piece of gum. This Tanqueray taste in my mouth is making me sick... It's fucking with my concentration."
Nothing is worse than a gin drunk. Gin is the bottom barrel of clear liquors. It stays with you for days, leaving a gag-reflex inducing cloud of distilled juniper berry essence all around your head. After a nasty gin drunk, the inside of your sinuses and throat feel like they've been painted with juniper juice. As I sat there trying to aim the gun, the awful taste in my mouth made me think about the gin, which made me think about the previous night, and how I'd feel when I was sober in a few hours...which made me shake.
"This gum isn't doing shit. I need a cigarette."
The Camel Light did the trick. After a few nicotine jolts, my concentration returned. The smoke also masked the gin cloud around my head. I was suddenly aiming straight, my hand steadier than a surgeon's. I not only had Jerry's head in my sight, I was able to focus on one side of his sunglasses without even a hint of a tremor.
"You're not going to shoot the guy, are you?"
"Do I look insane?" I picked my head up from the barrel. "I'm just going to give him a little scare."
I pushed aside the shards of glass with the barrel and aimed the rifle out the window, aiming dead between the fat man's eyes.
"Get his attention," I barked at Les.
"How?"
"I don't know. Yell at him. I can't do it. I'm holding this fucking gun!"
"Hey, fattie! Yeh, you fat fuck!" Les screamed over my head.
As Les started screaming, Anne turned on the stereo. The ominous opening of Zeppelin's "How Many More Times" poured out the speakers, its thick bass line shaking the bookshelves, punctuated by screeching reverb drenched guitar interludes.
"How many more times babe... treat me the way you wanna do... I said how many more times..."
Les kept screaming out the window in a ragged, hoarse voice, like some homeless junkie in the midst of a terrible hallucination, howling at passers by. "You little shit! Yeh, you! Look at me, cocksucker!"
The fat little man stared up at the window, placing the notebook he'd been reading on a wall next to him. Les continued screaming. "Did you throw that fucking bottle through my window?"
"I don't understand you. What.. are... you... saying?" The fat man cupped his ear with his right hand, as if he couldn't hear Les, and yelled in a thick Middle Eastern accent.
Les turned to me. "Are you certain about this? If he threw the bottle, wouldn't he have run inside?"
"No, he's playing us for dopes... Hiding in plain sight... He's fucking with us."
It was too late to switch targets now. We were committed. We'd picked a weapon and we were going to see the project through. I hadn't considered where it ended, but that didn't matter. The escalation, the tension, the unknown of where we'd ride this moment - where it'd crash, burn or explode - was the juice here. If we stopped to think, to reason it through, the momentum would unravel. Where would that get us?
"We'll know how to unscrew this thing when the time is right."
To Be Continued...
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1 http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06242/717520-28.stm
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/08/30/images/farmer.pdf
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:53 AM