"What the hell was that?" A mulleted woman asked a Richard Petty look-alike standing behind her.

"Sons of bitches." A manager cursed under his breath, darting toward the doors, surveying the ground along the way to see what Billy'd knocked onto the floor.

"On the dope." A stout woman who might have had Down's Syndrome barked at a clerk.

"We'll call police if he stole anything. We have him on camera," the clerk assured her. I threw the batteries into the shelves of candy under the counters, pushed my chin toward my chest and slinked out the door.

It went like this for weeks. Billy'd set off stink bombs in a crowded McDonalds during lunch hour. He waved down cars in Nolan's sister's ballet tutu. He chugged staggering amounts of beer and whiskey until he projectile vomited in streams like a cherub in a Vegas hotel's water sculpture. Drunk and sober, but much more effectively drunk, he acted as our own Stuttering John, saying anything to anybody. "Billy, see that pasty guy with the huge head talking to that girl? Go over and say 'Excuse me, why do they call you 'Fetus?'"

It was a painful summer for Billy, but the flip side of the abuse was he was the only kid who got laid at his age and could get as drunk as he liked because he wasn't old enough to drive. On the balance, he couldn't complain. The problem, however, with a lopsided power dynamic in any relationship - between lawyers, lovers or drunken high school kids - is the dominant eventually go too far.

Nolan's home was filled with loads of old creepy relics stuffed into odd little rooms and closets scattered about the place. The family never threw anything away. One room, which might have actually been a massive walk in closet, held racks of old clothing. There were old leisure suits, ball gowns, a tuxedo, all varieties of random pants and dresses and terrible wide collar 70s dress shirts and a fur coat, complete with a hat and hand warmer. On the floor were boxes filled with the remnants of an old office - nameplate for the door, desk calendars, appointment books, humidor and a collection of shelf ornaments recognizing professional accomplishments from the early 70s. Bored, drunk and hoping we'd stumble into a trove of yellowing disco era porn, Charles and I searched through the boxes for a couple minutes, throwing the contents onto the floor as we went. Nolan stumbled upon the mess and flipped. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"What? It's a mess anyway. We'll put it back."

"That's family heirloom shit." Nolan was angry, which was odd. I felt bad, and I didn't want to listen to him bitch. "Billy can take care of it." I snapped.

"Hey, hey, hey... Calm down. Izz nothing. Dohworry about it..." Charles slurred.

"Fuck you guys. This is bullshit." Nolan was on a whining jag, which was tanking my buzz. I snuck out the door, went into the room next door and tried to play along with the Kinks' "Destroyer" on his electric guitar.

"Billy! Billy! Get up here." I could hear Nolan bellowing. Commotion followed a few minutes later. A huge slamming sound vibrated through the wall. I put down the guitar and went next door.

"Clean it up." Nolan was barking at Billy and pointing to the rack of clothes now knocked over onto the floor. Charles was standing in the doorway, playing with a rusty old Derringer, a little purse-seized pistol which I assumed was one of the antiques Nolan kept in a cabinet in his room.

"No. I didn't do it and I'm not cleaning it up." Billy, or the whiskey in him, was taking another stand. That wouldn't last. He'd be folding those old leisure suits for the rest of the afternoon. I walked down the hall to the bathroom.

A lot can happen when you're taking a long booze piss. When I walked away, Nolan and Billy were having a stare down. When I came back, Charles had the gun pressed to Billy's head and was waving the handwarmer from the fur coat in front of his face.

"Fuck the muff."

"You can't... You can't..." Billy kept repeating himself.

"You can't what? What?" Charles rattled like a drill sergeant.

"You can't... You just can't... I can't..." He'd fallen into Tourette's.

"You're going to fuck this muff or I'm going to pull this trigger."

The scene was ugly and wrong and someone should have stopped it... Curiosity froze me. Where was Billy's Edge? For everyone's sake I prayed he had one. If the thing went as badly as it might - as it technically could - I wasn't sticking around, and I'd never be able to look the kid in the face again. Surely something would happen if it trended in that direction. Or would it? The game was finding a very strange line in the sand - a moving target of sorts... And where was Charles' Edge?

I wondered why Billy was so nervous, shaking as though he'd been tazered. Didn't he know the gun was a relic? I couldn't imagine the general initial reaction to forced garment fetishism was a Grand Mal seizure... But then I've never been faced with fucking a Tanuki handwarmer.

"I... I... I..."

"On the count of three you're either going to fuck the muff or--"

Nolan jumped in. "Wait. Wait. That's my mom's coat."

I felt like I had to say something. "That's not mink, is it?"

Nolan glared at me. Charles laughed and started the countdown, screaming and pressing the gun to Billy's temple. "One... Two... Threeaaarrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhh!!!!!" He might have pulled the trigger; I couldn't tell from the noise of his hollering and Billy collapsing into the pile of boxes, curled in a ball among a pile of testimonial paperweights and old framed diplomas crashing to the floor around him.

I felt terrible for the Billy, lying there, quivering. If he'd been a little older or a slightly better judge of character... Maybe had more experience with the Seagrams-soaked 18 year old mind... Or perhaps if Charles weren't as menacing and the possibility that old pistol held a slug and actually worked as remote as it would have been in any house but Nolan's, he would have been able to do what he should have - smiled and dared Charles to pull the trigger.

Torture, control, dominance... They all have Laffer Curves. The needling starts small, builds to slow-burn passive aggressive mind games, climbs to crapulent infliction of pain and reaches its height in a flurry of abuse, insult and annoyance, heaped on in unrelenting waves for no reason but the torturer's curiosity as to how far he can push the exercise. Then comes the whiplash - the "Farva Effect" - where the torment turns so ludicrous it loses all of its scare value. The person inflicting the pain has taken it that one step too far. You've probably seen it. Every fraternity has that brother no one likes who attacks the pledges and forces them through the meanest rituals. Every office has those associates who crush staff with a slew of "emergencies" at 4:50 and talk to them in a Captain Kangaroo child-speak... All are varieties of Farva from Super Troopers, the larded dimwit desperate to throw the weight of his badge around, perpetually hazing the rookie cop, Rabbit. Yet everything he does to Rabbit winds up a joke at Farva's expense.

At the top of this torture Laffer Curve is the perfect balance of fear and confusion... The victim doesn't know whether the tormentor's kidding or serious, but is frightened enough to demean himself in whatever fashion demanded. Push it one step too far, however - try the dick-tied-to-cinder-block ritual from Old School with a pledge, or mindfucking an associate or paralegal in the fantastic fashion James Spader does Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary... Show that you're not half the manipulator you seem, but just another insecure opportunist flexing his limited power and You're Done. The office Machiavellis who screw with their charges just to see them twist are respectable in one odd sense - for having the skill to know just how close to the The Edge they can drive a person without pushing the wretch stark raving mad or making a buffoon of themselves in the process. Once they've blown that balancing act, their respect and authority are lost for good. In the fraternity, these Farvas are mocked behind their back, brothers secretly telling the pledges not to listen to them. In the work world, the tortured have to continue enduring them, but where they used to quake in fear, now all they offer is a patronizing mechanical response. And they do it in a subtle way that lets the torturer know he's being placated. The power dynamic flips permanently. Once you're Farva, there's no way back.

Charles was no Farva, but he'd rolled over the line and violated the Curve. If Billy'd only known... All he had to say was "whatever, go ahead and blow my brains out."

"I think you damaged him." I quipped to Charles as we walked back to the pool.

"You didn't think I was actually going to make him fuck the thing, did you?"

"Close the door please."

Dennis obliged.

"I've been writing motions now for three years and they've been pretty serious, largely in Federal Court. You read one and hired me in part based on the skill of it. I'm learning these state rules as I go, but--"

He cut me off. "That's a potentially very expensive way to learn."

"It is. It's also the only way I learn. I don't learn anything listening to someone working me over with a cross examination. That's annoying."

"You don't understand anything about the Pennsylvania Rules. I don't understand what kind of lawyer you are." Dennis didn't back down. Most of them do - they run and hide or blame someone else when you call them on the carpet. Dennis stood his ground.

"That I can't cite a rule off the top of my head when you decide to quiz me doesn't mean I don't know how to use them. I don't know the name of ninety percent of the streets in this city but I can still drive around it."

"The rules are what we do. You need to be able to cite them off the top of your head. And to do that, you have to read them all." Dennis' delivery was turning haughtier than usual; he'd be cutting things off soon. "You do understand?"

I closed the rule book and slid it to the furthest corner of my desk. "Of course."

Dennis looked at the book, then at me. Read the rule book in my off hours? He'd gone too far and blown it, and he knew it. Still, I waited for The Phrase...

"We are lawyers, are we not?"

"Oh yes. Yes we are."

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 10:44 AM

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