If you enjoy this site, if you identify with this site, you have a split personality. No, you're not mentally ill. In fact, you're very healthy - healthier than most around you. But you are two people. You must be two people in order to maintain your life. If they knew who you really were, they'd fire you. For good reason.

You probably wake up like I do every day, amazed that they haven't caught on to the fraud. When will the other shoe fall? It's only a matter of time. I don't deserve these checks. I'm not a team player. I'm not even playing the same sport. Every day that goes by is one more successful charade - another scene you've convincingly played in the longest running comedy you'll ever see. You find yourself feigning interest in all sorts of conversations within generally accepted work topics: the weather, lawn care, the satisfaction having a new roof with a five-year warranty. But you never discuss anything that might get to the meat of who you are. You never let "you" out of the box. This stifling of the self can be maddening. You might someday feel the need to be honest with those in your work or school world - to attempt to merge the two spheres of your existence. Suppress that urge. Bury it. It doesn't work.

Way back in my first semester of law school, my buddy Wallace schooled me on a fundamental truth: there exists an inescapable chasm between two types of personalities in the legal profession.

"Some dude just flamed on me for using a copy of his outline. He actually tried to take it back from me. Demanded I give him the copy in my hand. I didn't know what to do. I just cracked up laughing. What the fuck? Can you believe that?"

Wallace spoke calmly. "Yes... Cut throats. This is life and death to them. They bought into the whole charade."

I was baffled. "He can't be taking this shit that seriously. I mean, he was angry. He was barking about how the outline was his, and that it was somehow cheating for me to use it. I thought he was going to take a swing at me when I refused to turn over the copy. Nobody is that big a fucking tool."

Wallace stared up from his newspaper. "Don't try to understand. You won't 'get' those people. This is their life. They're warped, true believers. Like those people crying and screaming in front of televangelists - it's their religion. You're fucking with his world. If you screw up the grading curve by using his outline, he might not make law review, and if he doesn't make law review, he might not get the most prestigious on-campus interviews. If he doesn't get those interviews, he won't get the most prestigious summer position available. Then his life is over. This. Is. All. He. Has."

I remained unconvinced. "Nobody's that deranged." I insisted.

Wallace laughed. "You're fucking blind. You don't understand. You're a Ten Percenter."

"Ten Percenter? Like the Pixies tune or the Nation of Islam?"

"Look, ten percent of the people here are like you and me. We don't fall into a clique. There's no connection, no shared background to bond us with the rest. That's a good thing. Eventually, all the Ten Percenters find one another. They don't form a clique, but they help one another out."

"Doesn't law school followed the 'Two out of Ten Rule?'" I asked.

Wallace shook his head. "Apples and oranges. The 'Two out of Ten Rule' states that two out of ten law students are tolerable... that you can spend more than twenty minutes in close quarters with them and not want to shoot yourself. The 'Ten Percent Rule' is totally different."

I liked to think of myself as one of the most social people around. Just a year prior, I headed my fraternity's social fund. I bristled at the notion I could be an outsider. "That is the biggest pile of horseshit. I can fit in anywhere."

"Dude, you are in the bizarro universe. Black is white, up is down, all the sinners saints. Everything you've been conditioned to think is socially endearing, everything you think is funny... it's all foreign to them. I have never tried to mix my actual life with this world, with these people. That'd be a fucking disaster."

I tested Wallace's theory the week before Thanksgiving in my last year of law school. The student council rented a bar the third Thursday of every month for a free beer and wine party. Due to the Thanksgiving holiday that month, bar night was cancelled, leaving several hundred dollars in the student council account unspent. Through Wallace, I was friendly with a student council representative, Christine. During a Guinness-soaked, late-night conversation at a watering hole near campus, Christine and I decided it would be a good idea to purchase three kegs of beer and throw the party at my house the Friday before Thanksgiving.

"Absolutely! Great idea. I'll get to meet some of those people I don't know." Actually, I'd been in a horrible dry spell at that time and was desperate to meet women, any women - even law school women. Christine printed up fliers announcing the party and posted them about the school.

Wallace, who'd already graduated and moved away, didn't think highly of my decision. "I'm not flying out for that. You think I want to spend my weekend with more fucking lawyers?"

"I need to meet some chicks." I complained to him.

"Get an escort," he snapped back.

"I'm fucking destitute," I protested.

"Take out a bar review course loan," he replied, dryly.

"I think I'll try the party first. What's the worst that could happen?"

My housemates decided that my law school party was an excellent opportunity on which to piggyback their own "build the bar" party. They called a bunch of their friends in the area, which included several of my college friends, and told them to attend, with just one requirement: they each bring a bottle of liquor to "build the bar."

My buddy, Alex, however, couldn't attend. "Duuuuude, your timing sucks. I'll be returning from a hockey tournament late that night." I was secretly glad he couldn't make it. Alex was a huge, hulking lunatic who'd become one of my best friends in law school. If there was any evidence to support Wallace's contention that the Ten Percenters find one another, it was my meeting Alex. As I recall it, there was nothing to distinguish me from any of the other people in the law school library that day. I was utterly unremarkable - another average guy highlighting Emanuel's outlines. Alex just walked up and said, "Hey, what's going on?" After about five minutes of conversation, I knew Alex was a Ten Percenter. I knew that because I'd known Ten Percenters my whole life. I'd gravitated toward them and they to me. At every juncture - high school, college, now grad school, I found myself surrounded by people who thought in a fashion just a shade outside the perceived norm. I'm not talking about bizarre counterculture people here. Ten Percenters aren't stoners, geeks, goths, computer freaks or loners. They're not rebelling against anything. In fact, they look and act entirely average in every regard. They operate like highly functioning alcoholics. One may have performed surgery on you. Another might have been piloting the plane you were on yesterday. The difference between a Ten Percenter and anyone else is so subtle you could easily miss it. Ten Percenters hold a viewpoint, an attitude and a sense of humor ever so slightly tweaked from the everyman's.

I didn't seek the Ten Percenters, nor did they seek me. In fact, I tried several times to avoid Ten Percenters and engage with the other 90% at several junctures in my life. Try as I might, I never fit. I couldn't get truly interested in that world. I'd always return to the Ten Percenters. If there was one common thread among all of the Ten Percenters I've known, it's a pragmatic understanding that we're all just parts of a cosmic comedy. Ten Percenters seemed to take life a little less seriously than the 90% of law students biting their nails, tearing out their hair, scribbling notes furiously, retyping outlines, chain smoking outside the library and mainlining espresso. They live in the moment a bit more than the others. They didn't buy into the merry go round of non-stop devotion to the field on which the school tried to place us. That put them at odds with the other 90%.

Ten Percenters cannot work to their full capacity at something unless they find it engaging. It's impossible for Ten Percenters to invest themselves in anything, school or work, to the extent that it becomes their life, unless the subject absolutely fascinates them. I always thought it sounded absurd when my law professors made statements like "I never had time to read a newspaper in law school" or "Law is a jealous mistress. It becomes your life." I had no idea that, to a large chunk of the other 90% nodding their heads in agreement, the idea of letting a career comprised largely of tedious organizational tasks take over your life sounded sensible, accurate, natural. Wallace labeling me a Ten Percenter wasn't an epiphany. He'd just given a name to what people like Alex, he and I knew we'd been our whole lives.

I know what some of you are thinking. "Who is this arrogant bastard to claim that he belongs to some exclusive club?" I'm not claiming membership in an elite fraternity. We're all over the place, and law is particularly infested with us. In truth, I think we'd be better described as Twenty Percenters, but I didn't coin the term, so it's not mine to adjust. And if you think that I wanted to be a Ten Percenter, you couldn't be more wrong. I'd have loved to have been able to invest myself fully in law like so many of my classmates. I'd have given anything to have been able to say, "I find this work fascinating," without smirking. Of course, the Ten Percenter enjoys some of whatever office work he does, even law, but routine and repetitiveness ultimately drive him to despair. He's dogged day in day out by the recurrent voice, echoing through his head.

I can't do this for the next 30 years. I can't keep coming in, day after day, sitting at a fucking desk, reading cases, writing arguments, dictating letters, fighting over nothing.

Don't think for a second that I'm advocating being a Ten Percenter. I happen to like the powers of perception that seem to come with it, but given the choice, I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer to be happily ignorant, or better yet, irrelevant. You don't work or wish yourself into Ten Percentership - it just happens. It's you. You don't have a choice.

Everybody - the full 100% - knew who Alex was. He had one of those personalities that jumps off the page - equal parts menacing and absurd. He was one of the few people I'd known whom I wouldn't be surprised to learn died in a fiery crash being chased by fifteen patrol cars. Alex was at once one of the brightest and dumbest people I knew. He had a "tilt" mechanism in his brain. When he reached a certain substance ingestion level, the machine went on auto pilot, turning him into a cross between Belushi and Neal Cassady. Alex was unpredictable and usually unstoppable, with a bottomless taste for psychedelics. Unbridled by boundaries of money, time, distance or common sense, he was the sort of person who'd start the weekend at the corner pub and end it one thousand miles away, penniless, wandering about a hotel room, nothing but "How?" in his head. When Alex was dosed, which had seemed to be every other day during our third year, he could not be controlled. I had holes in the hallway walls, a shattered living room mirror and a set of blown Bose 301s to prove it.

"Dude, that really sucks. I just got a quarter sheet," Alex lamented when I told him about the party.

"A quarter sheet of acid? How in the hell did you get that?"

"It came with my car."

"What?"

"I bought this Olds '98 off this stripper a guy on my team introduced me to. She couldn't get the title squared away, so I did it. She gave me a quarter sheet of acid for my troubles," he matter-of-factly noted, in the same voice he might use to ask if I had change for a dollar.

Sure enough, in front of my house was parked a massive yellow 1986 Olds 98.

"That has to bee the ugliest..."

He cut me off, "Yeh, ain't it great?"

For just about everybody, such a transaction would be quite unusual. For Alex, it was par for the course. If we were both Ten Percenters, he belonged to a subgenus of One Percenters who lived in a world too strange and ugly for the other nine percent of us. To Alex, getting acid from a stripper as a vehicle purchase incentive was as regular as receiving free snow tires. When I learned that he had that much acid, I was thrilled he couldn't make it. I'd already lost my share of the security deposit to the holes in the walls. The last thing I needed was to be in hock to my housemates for another set of speakers because Alex decided again - in the midst of three-dose, paranoid mania - that he needed to hear Black Sabbath's "Supernaut" at top volume.

"The team is renting a UHaul and driving back from tournament with a keg. If we get back in time and I'm still walking, I'll have them drop me off."

"Sure, great," I responded. He'll never make it.

I didn't think much about the party until the morning of the day it was to take place. As I was leaving class, people started coming up to me asking for directions. I soon felt dejected. I gave directions to a pack of doughy library jockeys who resembled Botero caricatures. I was accosted by two middle aged "gunners" who demanded to know not only when the party started, but what food I'd be serving. I saw piles of pimpled faces, fat asses, round heads, bad skin, big hair, high pitched nasal voices and enough bad breath to fill a dirigible. I handed out the address and telephone number to every group imaginable - Federalist wannabes, the Moot Court Board, the Sports & Law Review, the Environmental Law Review and the Civil Rights Law Review. I handed them out to a loner in a raincoat smoking a butt outside the school who addressed me with, "You! Where do you live?" Even the creepy librarian who wore bolo ties and smoked hand rolled cigarettes got my address. But not a single hot woman inquired the entire day.

To make matters worse, my roommate, Lewis told me that afternoon that "Malibu Kas" and some of her friends would be attending. Not a good thing. Kas was a seventh-year UCLA undergrad majoring in black-market pharmacy studies - a trollish girl who never stopped talking or smoking. She was one of those women who knew she'd never get a man, so she made herself a drug monkey. That way, men would have a reason to hang out with her. She could be their drug-buddy confidante, a "cool chick" everyone wished were better looking. You know the type: looks like Janeane Garofalo and curses like a man. And since most of her clientele was wasted, some would even fuck her every now and again.

Kas wasn't a nervous insecure wreck like the average drug monkey; she was just overstimulated. Her ADD and amphetamine crippled brain pinballed between a seemingly endless variety of inane topics: discussions of jam bands she'd toured with, celebrities she'd run into in LA and gobs of pop culture trivia. She was half granola chick, half starfucker. Kas was the only person I'd ever seen compare Bob Weir to Madonna. "Bobby was always reinventing himself on stage. Madonna went through her Marilyn stage; Bobby went through his short shorts stage." Listening to her was like slowly turning the dial on a radio playing at full blast. Kas never made a stitch of sense. She'd gulp massive hits from her cigarettes between exhortations and just keep going, like some wired beatnik poet riffing stream of consciousness gibberish. Kas didn't speak to or with you. She spoke at you, oblivious to the fact that no one but her was talking. Kas couldn't leave empty air in a conversation. She needed the white noise of her own grating hoarse baritone to fill every possible moment. I wasn't surprised she avoided leaving any contemplative moments in a conversation. If she stopped to think for a second, she'd be forced to confront the fact that people were only smiling and listening because she had a bag of white powder they wanted.

Kas was the "friend/dealer" who is invited to parties because she has the drugs. She's a lot like the clients you see at the firm Christmas party. Most of them are there because a partner wants to make sure some other lawyer across town isn't filling his cash cow with Dewars and buttering him up for business. He wants to protect his investment. He's got a lot of sweat equity in that round little GC shoveling shrimp and crab cakes into his pie hole. Just like you can't tell that GC, "We just need you for the money," when he asks where the firm will be holding the Christmas party this year, we couldn't tell Kas, "We just want the drugs," when she called to find out what we were doing on Friday night. We had to pretend that there was some sort of personal connection, that we wanted to hear about her meeting Marky Mark in Fred Segal and catching four Aquarium Rescue Unit shows in a row. We had to say "fucking awesome" in response to her stories the same way I now say "fucking awesome" when I watch a client hit a 180-yard, limp-wristed slice. Kas wasn't stupid enough to think we'd have her over if she didn't bring the drugs, and the client at your Xmas party isn't dumb enough to think you'd invite him if he weren't pumping retainers into you three or four times a year. But if we were to admit the true nature of the relationship, if we were to say that it was really just commerce, we'd never get the product we wanted. I always laugh when I read advertisements for CLE courses on substance abuse in the legal field. Every one of them takes the position that the field pushes lawyers to drugs. They never consider how many people who already used drugs, who learned how to use people like Kas, just figured law was the next natural rung on the career ladder. If you know how to use people and you're good at it... if you get what you want from people... if you can get people to go as far as risking jail for you... why not get paid for it? Law is just the next logical step for the aimless college-educated dopehead.

To her credit, Kas delivered fantastic product. Most of the blow my roommate Lewis got was cut with baby laxative, ephedrine and speed. It was a jittery, nasty high. Finding yourself sweating on a toilet while straining a bowel movement in the midst of blow neuroses is as close to Hell on Earth as it gets. You could go at any moment. The heart races, the intestines cramp, you strain and stare at the door, praying none of the other fiends slam it open looking for a place to cut some bumps. Don't let me die here, not like this, not lying in piss in Down Dog position with my unwiped ass in the air. Quality coke takes you up sharply and drops you like a rock. It doesn't burn your nose and keep you flying for three hours like the cheap shit. That doesn't mean it's weaker or less dangerous. You cannot play with strong blow the way you might with shoddy dust. Cheap Face Draino might make you stay up all night and want to kill yourself, but strong coke, the kind Malibu Kas always brought, might actually kill you.

"Kas has some Mexican connection who gave her a huge block of this crazy strong Peruvian shit. Like three eight-balls' worth. This is going to be a balls-out weekend," Lewis bleated into the telephone.

This concerned me. I had a houseful of people I didn't really know visiting. My aim was to meet women. I'd dodged Alex and his sheet of acid, which would have turned the affair into a full on freak festival. But now I had to contend with a house full of blow fiends marching around, wiping their noses, clogging the bathrooms and making everyone uneasy with non-stop high speed idiotic conversations. And I had to contend with probably being one myself. I did not want to find myself spending the night in the blow room at my own party, but I knew it was inevitable. There is no better place to be. Whatever you've ever done in your life - scaling Everest, winning the lottery, a three way with Norwegian swimsuit models - none of it felt as good as the first ten minutes after sucking a line into your head. I didn't need that sort of distraction. I had to meet a woman. It was desperate. The escort ads in the Yellow Pages were beginning to look attractive.

I realized there was a strong chance this party was going to run off the tracks. I could smell it. I had a sense for these things. Some people can't wait for the weekend. Some claim to live for the weekend. I actually only live during the weekend. The person you meet during the work week isn't me at all. It's a low rent, half assed version of me, running on four, sometimes six of eight cylinders. I'm friendly, cordial and polite. I'll make pleasant small talk. I might laugh a few times and even say something that sounds inspired, possibly really funny. But I'm phoning it in. To see me operate on a full capacity, you'd have to run into me on a day off, outside of the office, when my personality returns.

After my honeymoon people asked what was the best part of getting married. They smiled and said things like, "Young love, I remember that," or, "Bet you were so relieved to be done with that wedding preparation stuff." I nodded and smiled. How could I say, "I was thrilled because that was probably the only time in the next decade, barring a massive heart attack, I would get three straight weeks away from the goddamned prison you and I toil in?" How could I politely say, "My joy at not having to be in the office actually eclipsed the joy of getting married?" They'd report me to associate development. Some androgynous ex-lawyer counselor would show up at my door with a notepad. "I've heard some troubling things about your attitude. I'm concerned you may be depressed." Actually, I think the word you're searching for is 'human'.

Because I live exclusively on the weekend, I know it far better than most. I know every minute of those 60 hours. I know the elation of leaving on Friday at 6:00, if I'm lucky, and the immediate serotonin burst from that first happy hour drink. I know the pain of watching the clock tick away on Sunday night, as you move to the small hours - 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. - when the 60 hours are up, when the ulcer kicks back in, when you realize you're eight short hours from another five days chained behind that fucking desk.

Yes, I know the weekend. I understand it, and I respect its unpredictable nature. You can have the most detailed plans for the best weekend of the summer, and two cancellations from friends on a Friday at 2:00 p.m. turn your weekend into 60 hours of dead air. You can have no plans at all, and just stop off for one quick drink with a friend, which turns into four, which turns into travel, which turns into a quest, which can take you somewhere you'd never even known existed 9 hours ago while you were packing your briefcase to catch the 6:17 home. You can suddenly find yourself sitting in a BYOB strip joint, throwing crumbled $1 bills at a 19-year-old blonde with a fresh caesarian scar. You can find yourself in an emergency room, nursing a black eye and a broken nose. Or you might get lucky. You might find yourself sharing a nightcap with a cute blonde, sitting in a clean loft, with clean furniture, a clean bathroom and clean sheets. You could meet your true love, or you could find yourself calling for strippers at 4:00 a.m. from the kitchen of home you don't recognize. All of these very different endings have one common thread: you did not expect them when you walked out of work at 6:00. The weekend is like a bottle rocket. The only thing you know is it starts with the bottle. From there, its direction, its trajectory, its destination, that's anybody's guess.

I had to get a handle on Lewis and the coke whores before the party, to assert some semblance of control. "Look," I told him, "don't freak these chicks out with that shit."

"It's my fucking house," he groused.

"Do you have to be constantly selfish? Just keep that shit quiet. I don't know these fucking people."

As usual, Kas arrived early. A thin, white kid with dreadlocks who introduced himself as Reggie, and a couple of mute stumpy brunettes in tie-dyed shirts followed in her wake. I said hello and shook their hands, but none of them said anything. Not a hello, not a pleasantry, not a grunt. They just looked at me then stared at the floor. Just what we need - a couple of dead bodies and a white rastafarian. The classic "dead body" is a young, perpetually baked introvert. They tag along with drug monkeys like Kas, sucking scraps like cuttlefish trailing a shark. Dead bodies just sit on the couch, sucking on joints and sipping beers, offering nothing to the conversation, afraid to engage in any interaction - terrified of being asked any question they'd have to think about, or being dragged into an aggressive debate. Hiding in their heads would be fine if they were doing it in their own homes, but they don't stay home. They show up at your house, take up your couch space, flip through your Dylan and Traffic discs and mutter to one another. The only time I ever heard one speak was to ask me for some obscure microbrew I obviously did not have.

"Well, it's the greatest beer. I had at it Red Rocks."

I glared at the kid. "I saw the Allmans at Red Rocks. Do you see them here?"

Kas and Lewis promptly got to work hoovering themselves into red-eyed, babbling frenzies.

"Need one?" Lewis asked.

"Jesus, no. It's fucking seven."

"I have some mushrooms. You should take those," Kas offered.

This was beginning to sound like a "too much" weekend. I knew that there was no stopping or controlling the evening, which would undoubtedly spin out of control. Once we'd sent out the invite, we'd signed on for the full tour.

"Yeh, gimme 'em. These'll keep me away from that white stuff." It seemed an entirely logical decision - the right thing to do. I can't expect to control freaks unless I'm on the same page.

The phone rang about a half hour later. It was Alex. "Hey, guess what? The last team didn't have enough guys. Forfeit. I should be there around ten. Do you have any Jack? I'll need some Jack to calm me down. This beer isn't going to work. I'll be tattooed to the ceiling soon."

"Great," I said aloud, as convincingly as I could. Shit, now I have to deal with that monkey.

Alex's call brought dread. I was in the trough of a huge wave which would be peaking in less than two hours, in my house... and there was nothing I could do about it. Wallace's speech came to me again. "You can't mix both of your worlds."

"Hey, hey, are you listening?" Alex bellowed over the voices of drunken hockey players screaming around him.

"Yes."

"Do you mind if the team comes? We'll bring another keg," he blustered through the receiver.

"Sure, why not?" This is no wave. I'm facing a perfect storm.

To Be Continued

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:58 AM

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