Somewhere around the last years of my drinking I decided to go to law school. It was not a very well thought-out plan. One night I was holding court in my usual loud-mouthed fashion on my barstool at Boston’s Beacon Hill Pub when someone remarked, "You ought to be a lawyer." At the time, I was so bereft of my own ideas, so starved for direction, that I took the chance comment of a virtual stranger and determined forthwith to build my life around it. Yes, I thought to myself, I should be a lawyer! I conveniently set aside the small facts that, in spite of a social service degree, I had never done any kind of work other than waitressing, that I was incapable of going without a drink for the eight or nine hours a regular job required, that I was not even sure what lawyers did.
Since my hangovers ruled out all possibility of commuting, I focused instead on the fortuitous circumstance that a law school was handily located just two blocks from my apartment. Once I was accepted—I applied to just that one place—I figured that, somewhere along the line, I’d have to study so hard I would naturally cut down on my drinking. Somewhere along the line I would be transformed from a person with a nervous system so sensitive that, when sober, merely being addressed by a fellow human being almost caused me to hyperventilate, into a bold, assertive, self-confident advocate for victims of racial oppression and gender discrimination. Somewhere along the line, I would stop being disenfranchised and clueless and start being privy to the inner workings of The Law. Not the law of right-wing, terrorist Amerika, of course—for even in the early eighties, I was nothing if not a good child of the sixties—but the Thurgood Marshall, Brown v. The Board of Education, ACLU-type of law, the sacred kind of law that dug right down into the essence of how we live, in order to effect change, help people, make the world a better place.
I had always secretly suspected that everyone but me had been handed a rule book at birth. This sense of alienation and deficiency, this intuition that I had missed some kind of essential truth available to everyone else was, in fact, the very reason I so ceaselessly craved the oblivion of alcohol. Now, for the first time in my life, I told myself, I would be at the very heart of how things worked.
People sometimes ask me, "How could you have gotten through law school drunk?" My answer is that there is no way I could have gotten through law school if I hadn’t been drunk. One of the first things we were plunged into, for example, was the moot court competition, a nerve-racking, nail-biting event that entailed researching and writing a brief on an assigned topic, presenting it to a panel of black-robed alumni, and, while an assembled throng of professors and classmates watched you squirm, attempting to respond to a barrage of supercilious, hypothetical, unanswerable questions such as, "How do you propose to reconcile the Rule against Perpetuities with the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur?" or "What is the proximate cause of a counter-offer?"
We prepared for months, researching esoteric points of law, polishing our papers, and listening to endless tips from our earnest legal-skills professor, who was fresh out of law school herself. She could not impress upon us firmly enough the solemnity of the occasion, the august company, the credentials of the corporate lawyers, appeals court judges, and Harvard professors who had deigned to rearrange their busy schedules and grace us lowly students with their presence. We women were not to wear our skirts too short or our heels too high or our earrings too dangly. We were all to dress in conservative colors, speak in a modulated, pleasant voice, and say "thank you" at the end.
"Now, are there any last questions about how to conduct yourselves from the podium?" she asked.
I raised my hand from the back of the room.
"Yes?" she nodded.
"Can we smoke?" I asked.
I’d wanted to lighten things up a little bit but instead, chalk in hand, the professor literally froze in horror. She didn’t even get that it was a joke—hardly anybody did—and that was when I saw that the worst thing about The Law was going to be that it lacked all sense of humor.
Time bore me out: as the months passed, I searched in vain for a subject that wasn’t deadly boring, dry as dust, and leached of every detail of the kind that makes things interesting in real life. The contracts questions featured companies that manufactured widgets: I wondered what the secretaries ate for lunch. The real property examples had a hypothetical estate called Blackacre: I pictured what kinds of trees might grow on it. I did manage to work up some affection for a few first-year tort cases. There was the aunt who sued her five-year-old nephew for battery. When she had gone to sit down in a lawn chair, he had snatched it out from beneath her and she had fallen, fracturing her hip. There was the woman who sued a stock boy in a grocery store for intentional infliction of emotional distress because she had asked him the price of an item he was marking and he had replied, "If you want to know the price, you’ll have to find out the best way you can. You stink to me." There was the jilted lover who had thrown lye in his girlfriend’s face, completely disfiguring her, and to which the legal textbook writers, in an unprecedented show of human interest, had thoughtfully added a footnote saying that when the guy had finally gotten out of jail, she married him. Opening yet another bottle of rotgut wine I knew would lead to yet another blackout, yet another savage hangover, yet another attack of excoriating guilt, I particularly identified with that gal’s gluttony for punishment.
The thing about law school that is ideal for an alcoholic is that there is only one exam and it is at the end of the course. The first year all the courses lasted both semesters, which meant we didn’t have any exams until May. Then we had five, each of which required reviewing an entire year’s worth of notes and material. I faced this ordeal by going on the wagon, forcibly tearing myself away from the dreamy part of my brain and switching over to the military part that dealt with useless detail and rote memorization, and burying myself in the basement of the library from seven in the morning until ten at night for fourteen solid days. Actually, this was right up my alley: anything that reeks of the hair shirt, torture, and self-mortification, I’m an expert at. When the marks came out, I was seventh in my class of over three hundred.
This induced in me a brief surge of hope, but getting good marks and functioning in the world are two entirely different things. I did not, for instance, work a single day the whole time I was in law school; by going without new clothing, food, and all entertainment besides a weekly stack of library books, I was able to survive on student loans and the hundred dollars my loving, oblivious, poverty-stricken parents sent me every other week. While the other students were currying favor with professors and cultivating mentors, I was picking up strangers at the Beacon Hill Pub. While the other students were taking summer internships, I was taking the Blue Line to Revere Beach, lying hung-over in the sun for a few hours, then repairing to the Hi-Lo lounge to swill $1.25 vodka gimlets for the rest of the afternoon. I somehow managed to graduate with honors and pass the bar exam but, by that time, I had taken to starting the day with seven or eight Sea Breezes with the cirrhotic drunks at Sullivan’s Tap and was more unemployable than ever.
After going back to waitressing for a year or so, I finally stopped drinking, worked as a real estate title examiner for a few years, got married, and moved to Los Angeles. For me, these were all huge accomplishments for which I was deeply, uncomprehendingly grateful. Nevertheless, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that practicing law was still the most terrifying thing I could imagine, I was consumed by the conviction that only by working as a lawyer could I prove I was not the loser and weakling I had always feared myself to be.
After getting sober, I had embarked on a vaguely defined spiritual journey. I had gone through a long stage when I thought everything about the world was wrong, but now, having dimly grasped the concept of humility—like everything else, taking it to its furthest extreme—I was at a point where I thought everything about me was wrong. If law school had seemed irrelevant and boring, I told myself, it was a defect in me, not law school; it was my fear, my reluctance to become a full-fledged dues-paying citizen, my arrogance that made me feel different and alone. Then, too, there was still that concept of The Law, shimmering in my imagination like some Holy Grail. Now that I was sober, I thought, perhaps The Law would give shape to those ideals I was seriously starting to think about: Truth. Justice. Right.
After the extra year or so it took me to work up the courage to draft a résumé and go to an interview, I was hired by a downtown firm whose office was in such stupendous disarray that I didn’t take a lunch break in the first six months. I’d entertained visions of matte black accessories, cherrywood paneling, and recessed lighting. Instead, the lobby carpet was a liverish mauve, the walls were hung with Monet lily-pad prints in cheap gilt frames, and the coffee table, a white plastic cube, was covered with year-old copies of Fortune and Sports Illustrated. Down a hallway piled with boxes of Xerox paper, I had my own room. The floor was heaped with medical records and rolled-up exhibits, the waferboard walls were marred with Scotch tape and nail holes, and the windows faced south, affording, on rare smog-free days, a glimpse of the ocean and, during the 1992 Rodney King riots, a panoramic view of the city going up in smoke.
I was instantly disabused of any notion that workplace camaraderie might ease my transition into the legal world. Frank, my supervising partner, was a cigar-smoking bachelor eight years my junior who specialized in personal-injury and employment-discrimination cases and, as I knelt by the supply cabinet for a box of paper clips, considered it the height of wit to inquire, "On your knees again?" Eric, the paralegal, had a bald spot and clammy hands, twiddled a knockoff Mont Blanc pen, and wore a blazer with a gold insignia over the breast pocket. With two years of experience, he considered himself an expert on the American legal system and everything connected with it. He belittled judges, second-guessed lawyers, and aired long-winded opinions on the ways in which the law should be rewritten and administered. He critiqued the intelligence and experience of various justices of the United States Supreme Court, held forth for hours on the science of jury selection, and rated the performance of the city’s top trial lawyers.
Luckily, since I would have been entirely incapable of doing any such thing, I was not hired to try cases—that was Frank’s forte—but to clean up the trail of destruction that he, with Eric’s help, had left behind. I wrote appeals for cases that had been dismissed because the statute of limitations had run, motions for relief from defaults that had been entered because nobody had sorted the mail, oppositions to summary-judgment motions which were unwinnable because no one had ever gotten around to conducting the appropriate discovery. Having been lulled by law school into thinking that lawyers pondered interesting questions about chains of causation and the formation of contracts, I kept thinking, "When am I going to get to do some real legal work?"
After a while I realized this was what real lawyers did their whole lives.
Frank’s m.o. was to sit around shooting the breeze for a couple of weeks, get four or five extensions of time for filing a major motion, wait till the last possible minute, and then announce at 6:30 Friday night that I had to work all weekend. Once I cleared away the wreckage of the past, I saw that we could reduce workplace stress, increase the chance of winning cases, and promote cooperation with clients, court clerks, and other attorneys by simply adopting a rudimentary form of organization. Envisioning proudly the way my contribution would make things easier for everyone, I devoted all my energy to not missing deadlines, not asking for extensions, not making the secretary stay late.
Unfortunately, nothing could have impressed Frank less, and I never quite recovered from the shock of discovering that he found my best, most sacrificial efforts barely worthy of notice. Instead, he viewed me as a pitiful crackpot and I got stuck doing not only my own work, but Eric’s as well. To make matters worse, it became immediately apparent that I was not cut out for the confrontational world of trial law: even agreeing with people made me nervous. My heart sank just approaching the courthouse. Although I neurotically overprepared for even the simplest status conference, in my mind it was always a crapshoot as to whether I’d make it to the counsel table or, halfway there, descend into catatonia and have to be led gently away to the county mental health center. Those hours in court, waiting to argue motions, were the times when I felt most keenly the absurdity of my position. I was often overcome by a loneliness so acute I had to restrain myself from turning to touch the face of the person beside me.
Eric had some complicated system of lists and little index cards bordered in blue that he was constantly rearranging in various slits on the inside cover of a leatherette portfolio he carried around at all times, but his true "specialty" was taking referral calls from potential clients. Simpering, he came into my office one morning, held his arm extended straight out for a moment, and let a fax drop into my box.
"It’s from your good friend, Betsy Gould," he said archly. "Looks like they aren’t going to cough up those documents, after all. Still playing games. I told Frank not to take that case."
In fact, Betsy was my bitterest enemy, and the case—a medical malpractice, my least favorite kind—was hopeless. Eric was vocal in his opinion that "we’d" never make any money on it, so Frank had simply excused him from participating and, as usual, was making me do all the work. I glanced at the fax and saw that it meant drafting a motion to compel the production of evidence, a time-consuming, tediously grinding exercise in futility.
"Number one," Eric was saying, rapping his knuckles against the wall like some self-important professor, "even downtown you’re not going to get a jury that will find against a hospital in favor of a fat, black, convicted felon with cocaine on his tox report. Number two..."
"Eric, we’ve only been over this about a million times," I interrupted, in a voice that could have cut through steel. "Have you got those expert-witness subpoenas for Robinson yet?"
He ignored this completely. "I’ve told him I don’t know how many times, this case is a big"—he hung his hands limply like paws—"bow-wow!"
I closed my eyes, counted to ten, and said evenly, "Eric. Where are the Robinson subpoenas?"
"I mean I’ve been telling him since Day One," he continued, clamping his nostrils together with thumb and forefinger—"this case STINKS."
"The SUBPOENAS!" I hissed, springing to my feet like a rottweiler ready to jump across the desk. "Did you get them or not?"
Eric looked up in surprise and asked, "What subpoenas?"
"Oh, forget it," I muttered, picturing for a moment how lovely his head would look if I delivered it to Frank on a plate. "I’ll do it myself."
Underlying every other loathsome aspect of my job was the fact that I hated Eric with a festering hatred. I burned with it, writhed with it, fanned the flames of it morning, noon, and night by pinpointing, categorizing, and analyzing his infinite character defects: his stupidity, his cunning sloth, his soft, sluglike hands. My resentment was a creation I worked on behind my closed office door: a sculpture, carved from a mass of indignities and slights, whose contours I endlessly, obsessively reshaped. I could even have tolerated Eric if I’d felt that I was getting a grip on the essential truth I longed for, but the actual practice of law, as opposed to the abstractions of law school, only plunged me deeper into confusion.
The adversarial system of civil law is based on the curious notion that the surest way to reveal the truth is to place people in an artificial stance of polar opposition and give them advocates who are ethically obliged by the concept of client confidentiality to conceal the truth. "Discovery" is the process whereby each side is permitted to request, and the other is bound to produce, all relevant information, and, while this was supposed to level the playing field and yield a measure of justice, the idea that lawyers were actually going to sift through the evidence and, guided by the honor system, deliver into the hands of the opponents the rope with which to hang their own client was ludicrous beyond all imagining. In practice, I learned, for instance, that you "prepare" a personal-injury plaintiff for deposition by asking: "The light was red? Are you sure the light was RED? Unless that light was really RED, it might look better for us if you don’t say so tomorrow...."
The knowledge that I had ever believed The Law to be the heart of how things worked now filled me with the same anguish I’d experienced in the worst days of my drinking. On my lunch hour, I escaped the office and wandered to the residential streets west of Beaudry, desperate for a glimpse of something human: a plant on a balcony, a cat sitting in a window. Even my clothing felt oppressive: boa constrictor pantyhose and high heels, unfit for walking, that cruelly pinched after the first few steps. In a deserted park, I sat staring numbly at a patch of yellow lilies, as if trying to infuse myself with strength from their sunny petals and green leaves.
I carried with me always the secret of my alcoholism and the fear that it had rendered me permanently unfit for normal life. Why can’t you be more grateful? I berated myself. Why can’t you fit in like everyone else? Why are you always so depressed and drained and tormented? I had started to think of God almost constantly—I had even started praying—but there was still a gnawing void at the center of my life that I was ravenous to fill.
I would like to say my conversion began by reading the Summa Theologiae or Jacques Maritain or Etienne Gilson. Instead, one afternoon my secretary and ally Rose, a skinny Southern Baptist who lived on Mr. Goodbars and Fanta Orange, lent me a book by a man who had found religion after undergoing a terrible skiing accident. "In the midst of life’s hurts you can choose joy!" one of the blurbs read. Luckily, I will read just about anything that is printed, especially if I can read it on company time. I was sitting in my office snorting at the Reader’s-Digesty style when a quote in bold capitals from the book of Isaiah jumped out at me: I HAVE CALLED YOU BY NAME, YOU ARE MINE.
I can’t describe the effect this sentence had on me. It was the kind of shock you might feel if you stepped out of the shower and looked into the face of a Peeping Tom, except it was not just my body laid bare, but my soul, too, my entire existence, including parts that were probably hidden even from me. I started at the beginning of the book and read straight through. It was still a little "inspirational" for my taste, but there were passages from Auden and William Blake and the Psalms, and what I liked was that the author talked about the ambiguity and contradictions of life, the mystery of suffering. He did not talk about those things in the context of an amorphous cosmic spirituality, either. I had read plenty of books about spirituality; this guy was talking about Christ.
Next thing I knew I had started reading Thomas Merton, whose conversion actually did begin by reading Etienne Gilson. I read the Confessions of Saint Augustine, which I hadn’t read since college twenty years earlier. I even, bit by bit, read the Gospels. This was a major capitulation. As far back as I could remember, I had—on sheer principle—thought and believed and done the opposite of anything my mother had thought or believed or done.
Ever since my forced childhood stint in Sunday school, I had associated the Gospels with stories about ancient men in dusty tunics. What struck me now, though, was how precisely they spoke to my situation, how precisely they explained, or at least began to explain, why I, and from what I could see, everyone else in the legal profession, was so deeply miserable. The Gospels talked about giving while the basic premise of the law was hoarding. They talked about letting go while the law advocated hanging on for all you were worth. They said to lay down your arms and I was in a world where all we ever did was gird ourselves for battle.
The world in which I worked was all about technical compliance with the law and stretching it as far as you possibly could, while Christ made clear that legal codes were only beginnings, not ends. The idea was to refrain not just from lying and stealing and killing, but from the hateful thoughts that are at the root of those actions: "You have heard the commandment imposed on your forefathers, `You shall not commit murder; every murderer will be liable to judgment.’ What I say to you is: everyone who grows angry with his brother will be liable to judgment."
Even in my untutored state, I sensed it was no accident that almost immediately following this passage about anger was a caveat about the dangers of lawsuits: "Lose no time; settle with your opponent while on your way to court with him. Otherwise your opponent may hand you over to the judge, who will hand you over to the guard, who will throw you into prison. I warn you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny." Given the toll litigation took on plaintiffs, defendants, attorneys, and everyone else involved, it seemed to me that people were paying down to the last penny—even when they won.
Shortly after I’d started reading the Bible, we took on Mrs. Prietto as a client. Mrs. Prietto was a recently bereaved widow whose husband had died during outpatient podiatric surgery while she sat in the waiting room. She was bringing a wrongful death action against the hospital and several of its doctors. Frank dispatched me to "defend" her deposition against seven jackal-like insurance-company lawyers.
The "host," in whose twelfth-floor conference room we were gathered, was a paunchy man with a greasy red face who, without even bothering to introduce himself, sat down, loudly snapped what sounded like the pack of gum he was chewing, and started firing a volley of questions: Did your husband have any hobbies? He played the guitar? What songs did he play? Where did he buy his strings? What was the name of the street the store was on? Were they plastic strings or steel? You don’t know? How often did he practice? Less than three times a week, more than five? Which days? You don’t know! How can we give you money for the death of a man you hardly knew?
Just being present made me incandescent with shame and, in addition, I was so completely intimidated by the whole scenario—the overbearing interrogating attorney and the other silently smirking six—that I almost had a coronary every time I squeaked out a tentative objection. "Tell him to take the gum out of his mouth!" I instructed myself in panic. "Tell him to stop badgering the witness!" but my heart was knocking against my ribs so hard I could hardly breathe, much less speak.
As it turned out, Mrs. Prietto was almost a caricature of the perfect client, which only spurred on the opposing attorney. Her husband had been choir director at the Church of the Precious Blood; the lawyer rolled his eyes. She attended Mass every day; he heaved an exasperated sigh. She and her daughters went to the cemetery with flowers every weekend; the lawyer sneered and asked, "What did you do on your time off?"
"We were not extraordinary people, able to take expensive vacations," Mrs. Prietto replied in her lilting Spanish accent. "We usually went on retreats with different members of our congregation and..."
"Have you had any physical complaints since your husband died?" the lawyer interrupted.
"Physical complaints?" she replied, bewildered. "No, it is the little things I miss. Raking leaves together, painting the house, doing errands. He used to put gas in my car for me..."
"I’m asking you if you have any physical complaints," the attorney snarled. "Insomnia, stomach pain, backaches? Have you seen a doctor? Have you started taking any prescription medicines since your husband died?"
"I don’t think you understand," Mrs. Prietto said softly, leaning in toward his tense, sweaty face. "When my husband died, it was like I had been sitting in a bright room and someone, without any warning, snapped the lights off. And they were never going to come on again."
In the world of litigation almost everything you do or say or hear is calculated, but this was so real you could smell it: real sorrow, real grief, real love forever lost. You could have heard a pin drop; the interrogating lawyer even stopped snapping his gum. Simple, sincere, soft-spoken, Mrs. Prietto had managed to bring eight attorneys to their knees, had rendered us, finally, mute. In the silence, a phrase floated up from nowhere to the forefront of my mind: "But many who are first shall be last, and the last first." That was when I saw that Mrs. Prietto didn’t need me. In some strange, reverse way, she had already won.
Just before I left my job, I apologized to Eric. It seemed to me that if blame were to be apportioned it would be along the lines of 99 percent his and 1 percent mine, but I had to admit that if he had been the world’s biggest blowhard, backstabbing jackass, I had not always been a model of sisterly love. I thought for days about what I was going to say, reworking thousands of scenarios, saying to myself, "Okay, if he says this, I’m going to say that," and "If he refuses to talk to me, I’ll just...."
In the end, I walked into his office, forced myself to meet his eyes, and said, "I know I haven’t always been easy to get along with. I’m sorry for the times I was rude or uncommunicative." It just about killed me. I could scarcely believe, after the hideous wrongs he had perpetrated on me, that the words were coming from my mouth. But they were and, at that moment, they were as genuine as I could make them. True to form, he took it entirely as his due, puffing and preening in his usual way, and made not even the merest apology himself.
But when I walked back out his door, something had changed: some granite ledge inside me had been dynamited to smithereens. For three years, I had let him hold me in bondage and I wasn’t in bondage anymore. It was like an exorcism: the most cataclysmic grant of inner freedom (apart from having been relieved of the compulsion to drink) that I have ever experienced.
I still support myself with occasional legal research and writing. There’s something about law libraries that attracts misfits: grubby types with smudged-up notebooks. One unkempt guy with a yellowing beard sits all day at the library where I work, with his head bowed over a book whose pages he never turns. Another man with filthy clothes and wild hair spends hours filling legal pads with unintelligible squiggles. If only they turn enough tissue-thin pages, they must think, write down enough section and chapter and volume numbers, stare long enough at some fiendishly unintelligible index, some day they will finally stumble across it: the Rule Book, the code of behavior, how to be accepted and a part of the world instead of cast aside and lonely.
I know exactly how they feel: I am still trying to figure all that out, too. I am deeply grateful for the paradox that my law school education—conceived in ignorance, executed in darkness—now supports me while I "store up my treasure" and try to make my way as a writer. But I still wonder whether or not I have used my time on earth wisely. I will always instinctively side with almost any plaintiff over any corporate defendant, any employee over any employer, any member of a minority over any alleged bigot, but I do not delude myself these days that my legal work even remotely promotes the causes of racial harmony or sexual tolerance. I know too much about my own capacity for hatred, my own propensity to hold on to the compulsions and resentments that are killing me, to think that a lawsuit could heal such wounds—whether they are plaintiffs’ wounds or defendants’ wounds—in anyone else. Litigation does not seem to be working, has not managed to advance or increase our civil rights in any meaningful way, has not made us happier or more at peace with ourselves and our fellow man.
It sounds crazy, but could it be, I sometimes wonder, that given the parameters of the adversarial system, lawsuits never work, that force never sets the universe right in the long run, that each courtroom victory only inflates the winner with a subtle sense of the wrong kind of entitlement and fuels the loser with more hatred and rage? Could it be, as the novelist Amos Oz has theorized, that a sense of humor is the last bulwark against fanaticism, and that therefore the worst thing about the law really is that it has no sense of humor? Does William Rehnquist know any more about how the world really works than the wild-haired man writing squiggles on his legal pad all day?
Sitting in the library surrounded by my highlighters and Post-it notes and Federal Reporters, I don’t have many answers. In the end, we are all like those people in my old torts textbook: the aunt who had the chair pulled out from beneath her without warning, the fat lady in the grocery store insulted for no good reason, the beautiful girl maimed by a faceful of lye. In the end, we go through life assaulted at random, blindsided by tragedy, stumbling through the dark nights and occasional lights of a mysterious world. We are good at finding people to blame, but the flashes of light, the rare moments of illuminating grace in which we are given to see that—losers, misfits, drunkards, weaklings—we are loved beyond all imagining anyway....Who, I keep wondering, is responsible for those moments?
"The light shines in darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." I know a little bit more now than I used to, but none of it has come from a law book.
