Before I could stop to think, I heard the first chord crunch of the Stones' "Sway" scream from the speakers at a deafening volume. I hollered into the living room, "You think that's loud enough? I can hear Keith's pick grinding over the string before he hits the next note!"

The voices shouted back in unison, "It's never loud enough!"

Monkeys.

Lewis and Kas were already bouncing around the living room like chimpanzees, spouting gibberish back and forth over the blaring music.

"This is the best fucking subwoofer!"

"What?"

"This is the best fucking subwoofer!"

"What?"

Soon, however, the chimpanzees began to take on color trails, the music started echoing and the room got brighter. Colors erupted. Everything was eye candy, from the Kandinsky print above the fireplace to the red diode lights on the stereo. I looked into my beer, reversed in appearance. It was now a cup of white foam topped with sprinkles of yellow liquid. I knew where I was. No reason to panic, but there was reason for concern. Strong mushrooms grab you by the balls early, a sharp rocket ride straight to the sky. Forty-five minutes to an hour in, you're zooming toward the peak at 600 mph. There is no turning off strong mushrooms - no talking or thinking your way out of it. On a skull full of top-grade fungus, your synapses go off like a Roman Candle for about two to three hours. What concerned me was the speed with which these mushrooms had laid into me. They were fifteen minutes early - stronger, possibly much stronger, than average. I checked my pupils in the mirror. Wide as saucers. I could be doomed in an hour. These could render me a babbling mongoloid, ear-to-ear grin, giggling like a schoolgirl.

Fuck it. No use in worrying now.

The law students started piling in around 9:30.

"Hey, is this your place? Nice. You have wine, right?"

"You don't let people smoke inside, do you? I'm allergic."

"Hey, good to see you survived Secured Transactions. You looked pretty shocked when he called on you. How did you not know the priority liens?"

"I've been lost for a hour. Your directions sucked."

Not a hottie in the pile. Fuck this door- greeting routine.

I gave in. "Gimme some of that, Kas."

"Oh, so now you want it," she sarcastically replied.

"Just a line. I must get my brain cleared. My synapses are gummed up. I need to talk. Organize the gibberish."

"Good fucking shrooms," she elbowed me, almost knocking my drink out of my hand.

I made my way back downstairs and started meandering through the party. The blow overrode the mushrooms and gave me a game face. I was still seeing through fungus eyes, but I appeared sane, in full control of my faculties, gregarious even. I had that rosy-cheeked charisma you only get when your heart's at 120 beats a minute and your synapses are drowning in dopamine. Ladies. Must meet some ladies.

Our house was two stories, thin and long, structured like a row home. I made my way from the front to the back, stopping to chat with everyone along the way, scanning the room for available women. The process took about a half an hour. No success. Nada. Nothing I'd consider fucking and nothing that would consider fucking me. By the time I reached the kitchen at the end, the blow was wearing off along with my charisma. The mushrooms regained their unyielding grip. I scanned the kitchen for any conversation in which to inject myself. The room was filled with gunners arguing absurd tort hypotheticals - pimpled globs of pasty flesh waving thick, stubby fingers in the air as they bickered back and forth like Trekkies debating whether season one was better than season five.

"If the motorcycle were to go off the cliff because it skidded on the dead squirrel, than the driver who killed the squirrel, were he to have been driving recklessly, could be responsible. I mean, I guess it all turns on where the squirrel was located. If it's outside the yellow lines, that would indicate the driver who hit it was driving recklessly," one argued to the other.

His chum bested him. "What if the squirrel walked to where it was after it was struck? Who's responsible then?"

This was what we were paying $20,000.00 a year to learn? This wasn't brilliant critical thinking. This wasn't being forced to take biochemistry in medical school because you needed to understand the intricacies of the cell. There was no glorious reconstruction of the mind taking place here. This was a pack of 24-year-old virgins debating the inane, exhausting their grey matter arguing over unlikely or impossible fact scenarios. They may as well have been discussing computer games.

"If I get the invisibility cloak, and I'm on my last life, and I'm slain, will I become visible again before I die? I mean, if I die invisible, is it possible no one would know I'm dead?"

I hurriedly ran back to the front of the house, to the staircase. I had to get back upstairs. I had to get away. It was all too ugly. How had it come to this? Where did I make the wrong turn? Just two and a half years ago I had been in a bar full of cute girls and amusing, witty people making jokes and planning to get apartments together in the City after graduation. How did I fall into this? Was this a sentence? Were the fates punishing me for playing mailbox baseball in 9th grade, for taking Mary Katherine McCarthy's virginity sophomore year? Can I get a mulligan for the last two years? Or is this how life really is?

I backed up the stairs slowly, surveying the scene. Voices attacked me from every direction, deafening waves of grating non-sequitur commentary delivered in whiny, nasal tones... fifty-cent words and arcane concepts ricocheting around the room.

"The Featherman decision posited the notion that parole evidence should only apply where..."

"Actually, the proper citation since the 1977 Commentary has been a semicolon, and no italics..."

"Carson and its progeny stood for the proposition that whether a deliberate act could qualify as a superceding cause is determined by..."

"Well, the 'Wherefore' clause at the end of the count would never request the relief. It must refer to the end of the Complaint, wherein..."

As I backed up the stairs toward the second floor, I looked across the collected bodies chattering away and realized just how right Wallace had been. The mushrooms hadn't helped me deal - they'd only clarified the malignancy of the situation. I saw a cavalcade of chromosomally malevolent people barking and sniping at one another, posturing to prove their worth, which seemed to be measured in amount of dicta and procedural buzzwords memorized. Too dumb for medical school, too ugly and mean for sales. This was higher education's junkyard - the last stand of the book-learned, but common sense impaired - a collection of paranoid strivers gunning for a few top slots, taking notes and organizing outlines for six figures a year. Watching the crowd as I walked up the stairs, I felt like I was in that famous long fadeaway shot from Gone with the Wind, where the camera slowly pans back from thousands of dead and injured bodies on the battlefield.

Gangly men with bad posture and huge Adam's apples bleated about tax code to one another. I watched the shrill, rapid-fire banter between the short, fat feminists who'd become the next generation of employment discrimination lawyers. My eyes followed the gesticulations of the gunners - the true bottom of the barrel - as they perverted Palsgraf and Erie to absurd conclusions, in the futile hope the exercise would train them for a future on the bench. Tomorrow's commercial litigators were there, arguing back and forth about whose first draft law review article had the most incorrect cites.

"What are you looking at?" Lewis stood at the top of the stairs. "Lotsa hotties, huh? Great party, douchebag."

"It's a goddamned cockfight... it looks like the killing floor of a chicken farm... a pack of frenzied birds, reeling back on their haunches, puffing out their chests, then slamming their beaks forward, pecking flesh from each other. They even look like birds - reptilian overbites, massive noses, sunken chins, beady eyes, spindly appendages, waddling gaits, jerky movements, piercing caws. Banging against one another, banging into walls..."

Lewis laughed. "That shit's really got you by the short hairs. You need to drink more, a lot more."

"Actually, I'm quite lucid."

"Exactly," he laughed back.

"Well, I seem to have the right mix. I can deal."

Lewis surveyed the room. "You can't get the right mix here. They're all freaks, but most of them aren't the good kind."

He was right. We had front row seats to the ugliest battle royale imaginable - the innately insignificant fighting one another for respect. There is a myth that all lawyers are merely greedy bastards; that we do what we do out of cash lust and nothing more. This is true for some. It is certainly true for most Ten Percenters. But for a large sector of the other 90%, the law is a calling, or more accurately, a lifeline. It's the only chance to define themselves, to escape an otherwise pathetically generic existence. For these desperate seekers, "lawyer" is an identity. It's not what they do. It's not a mere license or an instrument with which to collect a paycheck. It's them. The firms they scratch and claw to join are their sanctuaries - constructed realities where the hopeless nebbish can be an enforcer, if not king. These awkward fumblers could never hold the rapt attention of a small conversation circle, let alone command the attention of a boardroom or a crowd like the bombastic politicians and captains of industry they idolize. These people claw and bite to join the only hierarchy that would recognize and reward their kind. Big commercial litigation is a dumping ground for thousands of doomed souls who never understood the fallacy of the "law as life" mentality - the hopeless belief that collecting the cheapest and easiest of all professional degrees would grant noble definition to an utterly unremarkable life.

But where did that leave me, the man on the stairs? Was I also trapped in their warped reality? Would I become a prisoner of these mean geeks and doomed fundamentalists? Where is the alternative track for people like me, just looking to make a buck? I had the skill set for litigation, but I had no intention or desire to compete on the level of one who'd made it his life. It seemed folly, insanity, illness, to trade away almost all of my time on any one endeavor, particularly one composed largely, if not exclusively, of ministerial tedium. There were so many things to see and so little time. How could I piss it away? How could I limit myself so severely? Law could never be more than just a job to me.

That's the handle with litigation. It isn't the job that makes it intolerable so much as the cancerous personalities who've taken over the field. Law could, theoretically, be a very rewarding, possibly entertaining way to make a living. What could be more stimulating than a job where each case provides the chance to learn about a different industry or culture? But it had been long ago poisoned by malignant attitudes and behaviors of those who made it a religion, a substitute for a life, and therefore, an all or nothing proposition. Complete submission is the only option, and easy for them, since they have nothing to sacrifice. I couldn't escape their reality. They'd taken over the industry and made all the rules. If I wanted to eke out a living, I had to play their game. I had to be two people, but that could only last for so long. I couldn't feign respect and loyalty to their creed forever. There would be a witching hour when one side took over the other. But which one would it be? Would I wake up at 55 and realize I'd drunk the Kool Aid?

Jesus, these things really do have me by the eyelids... I need a huge glass of something. I threw my beer down the steps and started for the second floor. There must be a bottle of Beam upstairs. No decent person does coke without a bottle of whiskey.

As I reached the top of the stairs, Spalding, my other housemate, came barreling over the top step, almost toppling me in his wake. Spalding was a 6' 5", 200-lb ex-basketball player with a severe drinking problem. His wasn't a classic alcohol abuse issue. Spalding did not shake or sweat when he was without drink. I never found him guzzling Scope at 3:00 a.m. in a blackout stupor. Spalding didn't even drink during the week. He was what health professionals would call a "binge drinker," a "weekend alcoholic," and a violent one at that. This night, he had been steadily attacking a bottle of 1957 Old Fitzgerald somebody had pilfered from their grandparents' liquor cabinet.

"Lewis, what the hell is he into?"

"Well, he nailed about half the bottle already, and that stuff's got to be at least 120 proof."

"He's wearing the Kiss wig again. Is he going to go nuts on the stereo?"

"He was screaming about hearing 'Love Gun' just before he took off," Lewis laughed.

I started back down the stairs. "I'd better deal with him." Spalding was prone to great physical feats in the midst of a strong drunk. He had no concept of his own strength, which was close to that of an ox. Our first week in the house, he'd gotten a head full of Glenlivet and kicked his own bedroom door off the hinges believing that he had somehow locked himself in his room and had no other way out.

As I headed down the stairs I ran into a gaggle of the short aggressive girls who never shut up during my employment law seminar. "Where is your upstairs bathroom? Someone's been in the down stairs bathroom for a half hour."

"First door on the right," I pointed them to the bathroom.

As I bounded into the living room I was accosted by numerous guests.

A drunken blonde girl with ratty hair screamed in my face. "Your friend just knocked a beer all over me!"

"I think I speak for everyone when I say nobody wants to hear Ozzy Osbourne," a thin man in a sweater vest with a huge wart on his forehead barked into my face. I pushed the man against the wall and stared him in the eye. "Does he look like Ozzy? That's a Kiss wig he's wearing."

Spalding was flailing, his arms flapping seizure-like, his head jerking up and down to Foghat's "Slowride." He was screaming and playing air guitar, "Slowwwww ride! Take it easss-saaaay, slowwww ride, motherfucker!" As I tried to reach Spalding, I spied out of the corner of my eye one of Katie's mute friends moving toward him, holding out a compact disc. Spalding was a Music Nazi. The mere suggestion that he endure music he didn't like could provoke him to an outlandish response. He was in a 70s stoner rock/heavy metal phase as of late. If that kid demanded Spalding play some jam band bootleg, things would get ugly.

"Godstreet Wine? Fuck that shit!" Spalding screamed loud enough to silence all conversation in the room. The mute kid knew he was in trouble. He scanned the room for a second, looking for an escape route. It was no use. Spalding grabbed him by the pants and threw him over the side of a couch, square into a pile of doughy second year students.

"What the fuck? What the fuck is the matter with you?" the doughboys on the couch barked.

The mute kid was horrified. This was foreign to him. It was not in the script. He was supposed to listen to Dead bootlegs on the couch, not be attacked by a crazed Kiss impersonator. He did not expect to find himself being fondled in the laps of fat white men like some hooker at a bachelor party. The kid furiously scrambled to remove himself from the couch and scurried upstairs without saying a word.

I offered an apology to the people on the couch, now doused in beer and red wine. "My friend is unaware of his strength."

"I don't care. That was an assault," one of the doughboys quipped.

"Whoa, there Francis, lets not start dropping legalese," I laughed.

"Don't you fucking brush me off, I'll..."

I patted him on the shoulder. "I really must go. Somebody needs me upstairs."

There was no point in remaining in that scene. It would only degrade, quickly. By the time I left, Spalding was forcing the party to listen to "Frampton Comes Alive." It was only a matter of time until he severely injured somebody for demanding to hear Dave Matthews. As I turned to run up the stairs I saw him pinning some poor girl against the wall, screaming, "Do you, YOU, feeeeeel like I do!" I couldn't control him. No use in trying. My job there was done. We'd find Spalding in the morning, the same as so many times before, curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor, dried vomit caked in his hair.

As I turned to run up the steps a round little woman who was coming down poked her finger in my chest and berated me. "There are people upstairs using cocaine!" She was bent. Lewis had clearly forgotten to close the door to the blow room. "You realize that we could all be held if this place were raided, don't you?" Oh God, not now, not in the peak. She appeared to me as a little dog - a pug - crinkled fat face, spitting slobber and barking, jowls flapping up and down. She even had a thin layer of whiskers on her upper lip. "I'm not going to lose my degree because... yarf yarf yarf yarf... and I'm no prude, but... yarf yarf yarf yarf!" She should be on all fours, collared, shitting in the yard. I was suppressing laughter so badly my intestines were beginning to cramp. Stop with the dog thing. Respond to the girl. Say something. Anything.

She kept sticking me with her stubby little finger. "Why are you smiling? This is not funny. You took crim law. Are you listening at all?"

I grabbed her hand and smiled, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do. I told Christine that we should not have any sort of school function at your house. You look like a fucking junkie."

The response tumbled from my lips as though I'd been rehearsing it for months. "I look like a junkie? That's rich. You're a junkie. This place is littered with junkies. You're all on the same continuum, searching for something that makes you feel like you're in control, like you're on top of your world. You're all grasping for self esteem. I hear you running your mouth off in class. You're a powermad lunatic. You want exactly what the junkie upstairs wants - to feel important, bigger than you are. Who's more pathetic? You've blown 100K on your eightball."

Christ, where did that come from?

She recoiled in horror, but never had a chance to respond. At that moment, Alex kicked the front door open and two members of his hockey team dragged in a keg.

"Hey fuckhead, where's that Jack?" The round little girl bolted down the stairs and scampered out the front door, her saddlebags flapping back and forth in her khaki stretch pants.

He gave me a surprised look. "What the hell was that?"

"We're in love. You just fucked it up."

Alex, about a dozen collected hockey players, and their assorted friends and girlfriends poured into the house. The noise level piqued the interest of the upstairs crowd, which slowly began working its way downstairs. Mingling began, changing the face of the party entirely. It jumped from folk to electric.

Within minutes, all the various bottles of liquor given to us that night were being passed around the kitchen. Rendered alcohol-immune from the acid, the hockey crowd swigged Glenfiddich, Knob Creek, Grand Marnier, Bacardi, Stoli and Jack from the bottle. It was a terrible waste of good liquor, but there was nothing to stop it. Spalding was grabbing everyone who walked in the kitchen a demanding they do shots of Bacardi 151.

"But I don't want..."

"Do the shot! Do the shot or I'm going to fuck you prison style!"

Spalding was blacked out and legally insane. His pupils didn't move when I talked to him. "Get a grip. I'm not going to smash the bathroom door down to make sure you're breathing later," I warned him.

Just as I finished with Spalding, Reggie ran by with a green complected girl, throwing up into her hands. The force of the vomit causing it to shoot through the spaces between her cupped fingers like little fountains. She left a huge reddish yellow clump of half digested salsa, chip and red wine slurry on my shirt as she passed.

I glared at Reggie. "What the fuck is this?"

"She didn't handle it well."

"Handle what well?"

"151 Cannonball," he answered.

"Stop that shit. You don't understand these people. I'll be sued, arrested," I protested.

"Hey, when she gets cleaned up, can I use your room?" I didn't answer his last question. It didn't matter what I said. He'd use it either way.

Kas was pinballing around the room searching for any pliable male. Her rap was awful. "So, do you want to be, like, a judge someday? That seems pretty cool. You get to tell everyone when to shut up and stuff." Can I be sued when she gives him herpes?

I was being chased around the pool table by Spalding, trying to force a 151 shot down my throat, when a large classmate named Harris grabbed me by the arm and yanked me sideways. "Hey, your fucking friend up front better cool his shit out or I'm going to kick his ass."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"The asshole in the front room whipped his cock out at my girlfriend."

I ran to the front room. There, in the corner, was "Fetus," one of Alex's roommates, half naked, wearing Spalding's Kiss wig. He had tucked his penis between his testicles and pulled it back between his legs so he appeared to be a woman. He was screaming at two of the hockey players' girlfriends, "Look at my vagina! Look at my vagina!"

"He's fucking lost it, huh?" Alex laughed to me, barely able to hold his beer down.

"Dude, put your fucking pants on," Harris started barked at him, but Fetus only yelled louder. "Look at my vagina!"

"Tell your friend to cut the shit. It's fucked up. It's upsetting," Harris barked at me.

"Look, Harris, if you want to stop him, he's all yours. He looks easy. I think he wants you."

I looked at Lewis, who suddenly appeared to be very ill, an ashen white pallor on his face. "Cops. Look out the window."

Sure enough, two patrol cars were parked in front of our house, lights blazing. I turned to the party, "It's probably nothing...a noise violation."

I scanned around the room to get a view of what the cops would see were they to come inside. A half naked man in the corner, Spalding using the banister to hold himself up, slurring, "the man, the man... the fucking man is here..." No, I could not let them in, and I had no one to help me in the negotiations. The room was littered with paranoid law students, hallucinating hockey players and wired hippies.

It's always like this. I'm always designated driver.

"I'm not going to jail because of the marijuana," some paranoid first year girl started whimpering. Some gunner answered her back, "They can't search us! Under the Fourth Amendment..." I had to stop that talk immediately. "Enough with that shit. Not a word. You talk like that and they'll put you in jail for the weekend. You'll both get fucked," I growled at them.

I looked in the mirror. Well, at least your pupils are back to normal. You recall the lines for this part? "Cops at the Door," Scene One. I fixed my hair, cleared my throat and stepped outside.

"Hello, officers."

"We have numerous complaints of noise and people urinating in the street. We found one person vomiting in your yard."

I knew in an instant that I was not talking myself out of a ticket. Cops are not abstract legal concepts. They aren't characters in debates regarding recent Miranda or 4th Amendment rulings. They are the living, breathing enforcement arm of the law. Not words, not theories - the real article. They decide whether you'll be getting a ticket before they even address you. Unless you have incredible tits, the decision is never open for appeal. I knew from their eyes that I was not weaseling out with a warning.

The best hope you have with a cop, a judge, or any civil servant who happens to have your balls in a vice, is to appeal to his natural aversion to deskwork - what the sniveling curs you work amongst would haughtily deride as "contemptible laziness." Cops are just doing a job. They don't want to write up paper or make arrests. They'd prefer to sit in their patrol cars, reading magazines and bullshitting with one another.

"What's going on in there?" one of the officers craned his neck to peek into the front room. "Nothing too crazy, just some beer and pool," I offered casually, my heart pounding as I watched his foot moving up the porch stairs. I knew that if he got a peek inside, and he saw Fetus standing half naked, we were cooked.

I had to say something to let him know that looking inside would only cause him work. "Bunch of law students partying after an exam." He immediately moved his foot back and retreated his gaze to his ticket pad. "I'm giving you a summons for a noise violation and a nuisance. Clear this place out."

Just saying "law student" alone told the cop that, if he peeked inside, and if he felt compelled to take any action, what he found would spur miles of paper and endless annoyance. He was just phoning in a job. He had no interest in staying up all night writing out reports he didn't have to. He had something to go home to. He wanted to kiss his kids goodnight, get out of uniform, maybe fuck his wife.

I walked back inside with the ticket. "Everybody out. Party's over!"

Alex, Lewis and I sat in front of the television for an hour or so, polishing off the end of a bottle of Baker's.

"This was a huge failure," I laughed to Lewis and Alex.

Lewis strained to read the ticket in my hand. "What's the fine?"

"$450.00 or something like that," I threw the ticket to him.

"Can we challenge it?" Alex asked.

Lewis began reading. "To challenge this fine, you must check the box 'Challenge' on this form and file it with the City Magistrate for your district along with a deposit for costs..."

"Yeh, yeh... How much?" I asked.

Lewis fumbled with the ticket. "Uh, let me see... where was that listed..."

I knew the answer before he read it. "Ten percent of the total fine."

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:12 AM

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