Charlie-In-The-Box: I am the official sentry of the Isle of Misfit toys.
Hermey: A jack-in-the-box for a sentry?
Charlie-In-The-Box: Yes. My name is...
Rudolph: Don't tell me, Jack.
Charlie-In-The-Box: No, Charlie. That's why I'm a misfit toy. My name is all wrong. No child wants to play with a Charlie-In-The-Box so I had to come here.

- Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1964)

Kendall, the partner in charge of my department, is a sadist. He lives to inflict pain, dragging everyone to his level. Kendall never leaves the building. His second wife left him for a woman and his children speak to him only through counsel. His wife wasn't gay; he just turned her off to the point that switching teams seemed entirely reasonable, sensible - the only proportional response. We can all sympathize with the woman.

Kendall's one of those rare people without any redeeming quality. If he were one of the children in "Sophie's Choice," it would have been a ten minute short. I've searched for some nugget of humanity in him and found nothing - an iceberg, a man whose sole social interaction is stomping around the office like a prison guard, dispensing disparaging comments and grumbling "shit" as he stares at some doomed associate's paperwork. He never smiles and never acknowledges anyone. You can almost run smack into Kendall before he'll make eye contact.

To be fair, the latter etiquette slip is hardly unique to Kendall. Most of the lawyers around me don't know how to say or even nod hello. I used to think it was because they were all incredibly busy, engrossed in some heavy analysis of "complex" issues. Then I thought it was arrogance. I've since realized most of them simply have no manners or social skills, and are basically functionally autistic. They've been trained about which forks to use, what wine to order with dinner and how to give off an air of what the marketing consultants describe as "professionalism" or "prestige." But they lack the rudimentary people skills that come so easily to those who socialize regularly as part of their business - the humanity that comes innately from respecting, liking or caring what the person you're speaking to thinks - the humanity even a used car salesman offers.

These misfit toys spend too much time in offices, overthinking and maneuvering. They can't converse in the easygoing fashion of laymen because they're constantly on edge, having to be right, correct, smarter, quicker - brainwashed terminally toward endless adversarial procedure, life a series of zero sum games culminating in that one unavoidable loss. They cross examine everybody they speak to and always get the last word. That, or, in a awkward stab at personality, they make bizarre comments or attempt jokes nobody understands. Machines, operating in the spirit world.

"I'm sorry ma'am, I lied to you. I'm very sorry about that. That man right there is my brother and if he doesn't get to watch 'People's Court' in about 30 seconds, he's gonna throw a fit right here on your porch. Now you can help me or you can stand there and watch it happen."

- Charlie, "Rain Man" (1988)

The best example of the lack of social ability and manners is Peter, a tax lawyer on the other side of the building. Peter's Phi Beta Kappa, Order of the Coif, Law Review, Summa Cum Laude, Eagle Scout, best diorama in History class four years running and head of the Geophysics and Economics clubs. But while Peter's overinvolved parents were frantically dragging his carcass from violin lessons to pre-PSAT classes to a battery of private tutors in an effort to build a perfect Hitler Youth superchild, they forgot to give him a filter. Whatever comes into Peter's immense skull comes right out of his mouth. It's equally sad and amazing to watch a person with his cranial horsepower, with a library of treatises of detailed knowledge between his ears, fumble through the simplest of human interactions like some fifteen year going for second base with his girlfriend. This could be endearing. Peter could play the hopeless, harmless introvert - the law office version of a meek, stuttering research scientist... Except that he's not. He can't tolerate that many of his clients either aren't able to, or have no interest in, grasping the arcane concepts he rattles off his tongue like baseball scores, and he lets it be known.

"So let me try to understand. The idea is that Dynacorp should assign its right to collect under the contract to Dyna Holdings III in exchange for... uh, wait, I mean..." The client scratches his chin.

"No, no, no. Again, Dyna Holdings III is purchasing the right to collect certain receivables of Dynacorp. We're transferring the..." Peter's thinnest condescension is as veiled as tear gas.

"Wait, I lost you..."

"Look, its simple. I don't know how else to explain this." Peter fiddles with his Blackberry and leaves the room.

When the door slams, everyone looks at one another. Were we anything but lawyers, we'd cave to the urge to apologize. That's been trained out of us. Somebody steps into the void. "How about we step out for coffee?" At the coffee shop, somebody else suggests lunch, sans Peter. At lunch, the client gets one of the many "Peter's savant-like" speeches. "He's very intense, you understand... Try the spicy peanut shrimp skewers - excellent."

After lunch, somebody speaks to Peter about getting the deal completed. I've been that somebody. "You didn't get me for lunch." "Uh... Well, they had to hammer out some business unconnected to your part of the project." "You're not connected to any part of the deal other than the one I'm working on." "True... true. That is a fact, uh..." Peter punishes me for using a weak excuse. "Well, you understand that the wah wah wah waaah waah wah wahhhh, right?" He runs on about his part of the deal and how simple it is for him to understand. I'm staring past his head, out his window, watching a plane streaking past in the distance. I should see Seattle. Why haven't I? His lips stop. I nod as though I get it. "So then you see that Dyna III gets a great benefit under that structure, right?" "Yes, of course." Peter leans over his desk. "You don't understand anything. Dyna III doesn't get a benefit at all." I don't mind falling into the trap. In fact, the sooner, the better. Once Peter belittles me, I can leave his office.

"Those fucking 'salesmen' don't understand shit. They're going to get fucked with the setup they want," Peter barks as I cross the threshold out of his office. A lot of lawyers call clients who don't pay attention to them "salesmen." I guess it's an insult. Thankfully, the "salesmen" never stay past 5:00 at most meetings. Peter's insults bounce off the drywall and fade out somewhere near the men's room two offices down the hall.

Cougar (n) - "Has been" party girl/s who are now angry they are not married and prey on younger men; common traits include leathery skin from frequent tanning sessions, smoking, anti-depressant use, and a large collection of "massagers."
"I'm dating a nice guy; unfortunately he's surrounded by cougars older than my mom...."

- Urban Dictionary (2006)

Then there's Karyn, an of-counsel across the hall. Unbeknownst to Karyn, her voice carries around the office like a gong in a canyon. I know Karyn's teenage daughter has an ecstasy habit and sleeps around. I know Karyn has gynecological problems and a foot fungus issue, none of which I can pronounce. I know Karyn got really horrible rashes from a bikini and moustache wax last month, and that her new boyfriend wants her to get her nipples pierced. And I know that when Karyn says she "did the sheets," she had sex that morning.

Normally, this kind of dirt wouldn't be a bad thing to know. But Karyn had seen hundreds of miles of hard road, driven like a rented mule. I didn't want to run into her in the hallway and picture her tending to a fresh nipple piercing or carving a gangrenous growth from between her toes. I didn't want to think about her cigarette and tanning booth shriveled face wincing when she came home and found her daughter 69ing with a KFed-like creature on the media room floor. Karyn hadn't done a client lunch in a long time. At her last one, on a headful of white wine she cracked off about how she was "really married to her vibrator"... to an engineering expert from the Midwest she'd known for about three hours, wearing a crucifix pendant on his lapel.

"How did you know I went to Harvard?"
"I noticed your class ring when you picked your nose."

- Unknown

Oh, and I can't forget Tim, the appellate lawyer from the other side of the floor who constantly picks his nose. Tim doesn't glance across the nostrils with the side of his finger - he digs for gold. His technique is the Rapid Fire Pick. Tim looks up for a second, scans the room with his beady eyes until he thinks no one's looking, then stuffs his pinky in, up to the first knuckle. Scrape. Remove. Inspect treasure. Look around. Repeat. The process takes less than two seconds. Tim's endlessly rubbing his fingers together. If he's in his office, he's wiping his hand under his chair. When I run into Tim in tight corners in crowded walkways between filing cabinets, those situations where it's acceptable to put a hand on another's shoulder for balance as you pass, I recoil to a vertical limbo position to avoid being touched. He probably thinks I hate him. I know he's seen me flush the urinal with my elbow after he uses it.

"What are you going to say?" 'Mayday. Mayday. I'm being held by a pig lady'?"

- Montgomery, "Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996)

Though she's not a lawyer, I have to mention Denise, Kendall's secretary. Denise is easily 55, but dresses like she's a 22 year old gold digger - mini-skirts, low cut tops and push up bras, presenting her pruny cleavage and legs argyled in a collection of varicose veins reminiscent of a purple and peach Pollock. She's been at the firm forever - unfireable, and she knows it. Denise doesn't say hello to anyone. She looks you up and down and comments.

"You can't wear burgundy loafers with blue pants."

"She needs a stronger bra."

"The goatee only works if you're thin."

"A tab collar? Are you in the old folks home?"

It's odd that a woman with a face stuccoed in cheap makeup and enough eyeliner to shame the average Goth has the balls to hand out fashion critiques. Denise looks like an Atlantic City hooker, yet she's judging my choice of shoe? You have to ignore Denise, which isn't easy. She doesn't move around the office like the rest of the secretaries - she ricochets off the walls, wired to near meth psychosis on a bottomless iv of stale break room coffee. I've never seen the woman without a Styrofoam cup in her hand, no matter the time of day. Every two weeks, like clockwork, she gets strung out and starts a catfight with one of the other assistants. Once I heard her rip into a sweet old temp down the hall, calling the grandmotherly woman a "fucking cunt," from fifty feet away. The old lady nearly blew a ventricle. A management lackey appeared outside my office. "Do you notice Denise engaging in anti-social behavior?" "No, never seen that." Selling Denise out was suicide.

It's no coincidence Denise is Kendall's secretary. They're soulmates. Denise has a warped allegiance to Kendall far deeper than the usual saccharine fawning secretaries put on to maximize Xmas bonuses. She actually respects and likes him. And looking at them talking to one another, you realize - they deserve each other. Kendall's every bit as repellent as Denise. He resembles Lon Chaney cross-bred with an ape, his head topped with a heaping pile of grey and black cotton candy, tufts of thick midnight curlies spouting out of every orifice in it. The man has enough nose hair to support a small Hobbit village in his nostrils (Tim was undoubtedly jealous - the trove in Kendall's nose yielded nuggets he could only dream about). Kendall had no doubt seen a picture of William Kunstler years ago and figured that if he wore the same undone, hirsute look, people would think him absent-mindedly brilliant. He's been stuck with it ever since. Or maybe none of his wives scheduled him for a haircut because they didn't care. I can't imagine Kendall having a healthy love life. Ipecac's got nothing on the mental picture of Kendall fucking anything, or worse, Denise, which he all but certainly did.

Kendall speaks in a slow drawl, dragging his every word out, as though he's imparting divine wisdom to you, a lowly mortal. He never looks you in the eye, always staring around the room or looking up at the ceiling. Normally, this is a sign of insecurity, but in Kendall's case, he truly believes you aren't worthy to get a peek into his soul. Or maybe he's just afraid you'll find out he didn't have one.

"The healthy man does not torture others -- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers."

- Carl Jung

Kendall's favorite form of torture is doling out work to associates late on Friday afternoons. He prowls the corridors with a handful of notes on a legal pad, stepping in and out of offices and grabbing any unlucky associate who happens past him. If he catches your eye, you receive an assignment, which is always due Monday. Kendall pulls memos one by one from his in box every Monday morning, reading each only far enough to locate a typo and circle it in red dozens of times. Each circle's bigger, more jagged and oblong than the last, until the lines pour over the four corners of the paper, giving the impression the entire document was a disaster. At their best, the "corrections" resemble bad pop art; at their worst, the demented scribblings you'd expect to find littering the blank end pages of Mark David Chapman's copy of "Catcher in the Rye." Chapman's not an unfair comparison; Kendall fit the warped outsider stereotype. His every interaction is a control game, feeding an obsession not to make money, but to dominate people - an institutional addiction unique to law firms, Christian fundamentalist groups and militant Islamic sects.

My pet theory is that Kendall is acting out an Evil Wizard fantasy he developed during a lengthy Dungeons and Dragons phase in his late teens. Late at night, after everyone leaves, Kendall sits in his office listening to Blue Oyster Cult, staring out over the city, thinking to himself, "You're a player. A fucking player." I can picture him humming along to "Don't Fear the Reaper," fantasizing about the horror he strikes in associates. Like so many in the firm, Kendall gave up on being liked so early in life that the only satisfaction he gets from people is the fear they feign in his presence. Kendall's one of the many studies walking around the firm exhibiting how badly the psychic wounds of childhood envy rot personalities past repair. There's a reason those who leave firms are always referred to as "wonderful" people, and those who remain and continue clawing their way toward the top of the pyramid aren't. People at the firm send mass emails discussing happenings in the lives of ex-firm members whom they admired on a personal level. Most of the top brass and middle management wouldn't get 15% firm turnout at their funerals if they were chainsawed to ribbons by a PCP addled mutant at lunch hour in the lobby. People refer to the Kendalls who flood the halls as "lifers." "Shrewd" and "dedicated" are the stock accolades employees and associates cough when asked, but they never comment on what they think of Kendalls as people. "Personally? Oh... he's... uh... I don't dislike him."

Chickenhawk (also chicken hawk and chicken-hawk) (n.) - A political epithet used in the United States to criticize a politician, bureaucrat, or commentator who strongly supports a war or other military action, but has never personally been in a war, especially if that person is perceived to have actively avoided military service when of draft age.
-Wikipedia

Kendall's assignments are wholly unnecessary. Almost all of what we do is wholly unnecessary, inefficient and unjustified. But Kendall's stuff is really ludicrous - far beyond the standard superfluous busywork firms do to pad the bills. Kendall asks for memos regarding esoteric issues which might be argued in motions before trials that'll never happen. Pretrial motions are for trial attorneys, not office jockeys like Kendall. Kendall's never been anywhere near trial. Like most of the litigators in the firm, Kendall is bed-wetting terrified of actually trying a case. He can barely argue a motion. In the few instances where he's been forced to argue a simple procedural motion - when he couldn't claim he had a conflicting telephone conference and force an associate to argue it - he paced the halls frantically beforehand, like a prisoner awaiting execution. When he finally went to court, he took a paralegal for support.

But if you talked to Kendall in the office, he'd blather ad nauseum about hearings and trials he's aced, and give you a hard drive's worth of tips on how to succeed at both. I wanted to stare over his desk, look him in the eye and slowly, in a "Dirty Harry" affectation, sneer "Bullshit, Kendall, you couldn't find the courthouse if I dropped you off on its steps." What would he do? Would he fire me? Would he turn and pitch himself through his window into traffic below? Would one torpedo sink the man, like Joseph Welch standing up to McCarthy at those famous Senate hearings? "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" What a queer question to ask around here.

To be continued...

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 6:55 PM

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