Worthy Of This Great City Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lawyer joke: thirty-three attorneys go into a room. Except most of them aren’t really lawyers yet, only law school graduates.

  What happens after law school is you immediately enroll in another course designed to get you through your bar exams. Eventually you spend two or three unrelievedly horrible days sitting in front of a designated identification number in a convention hall or its ilk making educated guesses on a computer form or scribbling vaguely professional-sounding issue-spotting crap, with a break for awful coffee and crock-pot hotdogs on cold buns with those packets of neon-green relish served up by kindly volunteers. None of this is even remotely fun; it leaves you with a sick sense of impending doom, and your brain by this point is barely functioning except that it knows better than to focus on all those student loans. After that you get to stew through an unpleasant three or four months’ limbo while you await the results, if you’re fortunate accomplishing this in the Caribbean or Europe, if you’re not working at some sort of interim law-related job. My particular circumstances involved rent and child support, which made immediate employment imperative. Happily, it was also available.

  In a burst of energetic panic some months earlier I’d supplemented the usual law firm applications and sporadic interviews with resumes to every legal staffing agency in town, scoring a temporary assignment after an extremely cursory interview. Me and about forty other recent graduates out of Temple and ‘Nova, Penn and Rutgers and Widener, as it turned out, and even some people from Virginia and New York. All of us gathered one morning in the expansive marbled lobby of one of those Center City office buildings, most of us naïve and perplexed. This was a job, right? Not just another interview?

  We were collected and herded into elevators and up to the offices of a major firm, then into a spacious meeting room, bland like all of them but expensively appointed and nicely supplied with refreshments, salads and sandwiches and chips, all that kind of stuff. I shared a table with three vaguely familiar faces from my own law school: Eric, a nice Korean boy from Radnor, a fatalist already determined to fail in the legal profession; Josh, romantically dark, gangly, and ethnic; and Petra, an immensely ambitious young woman already slated for a smaller firm in a better suburb. She had one of those faces I saw all through law school: saintly and long, with a thin nose, shrewd eyes, narrow lips - that dedicated type. They’re everywhere, winning approbation. We four immediately amalgamated into a sarcastic, defensive clique, thenceforth and for the next several months communicating primarily with each other in a desperate attempt to confirm our individual humanity. Even today we remain useful acquaintances on the social media level although far from friends. All three were significantly younger than me; the guys held libertarian in that superficial manner of so many struggling but basically self-confident young professionals I know. “Put in some decent safety nets and leave me the hell alone.” Petra was of course a dedicated Liberal. The presumptive elite: they practiced subtle, unconscious linguistic games, tailoring tired political and economic terms to a contemporary fit, ignorantly reconfiguring the whole wide world in the process. It’s a subtle phenomenon and I really can’t speak to it except that it skewed everything as it inexorably pushed me aside.

  That morning we viewed a power-point presentation about some ongoing litigation with additional commentary from a few partners and associates, followed by another slideshow with a different set of associates explaining the intricacies of the database we’d be working in. The more suggestible among us perked up like real lawyers.

  At which point we were abruptly brought down from those windowed, pampered heights to a career purgatory or maybe even a genuine existential hell: a dungeon, a gigantic, dedicated basement space, strangely dim despite its fluorescent office lighting, filled with row upon row of computers receding back into infinity, a hundred monitors at least, each on its bland yellow station with a keyboard, a mouse, a plastic file holder, and a web-backed office chair. Wires and cables, bundled into thick snakes, were shoved into the interstices. Other than that, the room contained a few carts of assorted office junk, a coat rack up front, and gray industrial carpet with a chemical smell.

  Thus my indoctrination into the generally disdained and discreetly closeted realm of document review, that evolving backwater of the covertly over-crowded and ultra-competitive legal profession. Edata is interesting from an abstract cutting-edge perspective if you aren’t stuck doing it yourself. It’s better known now, of course, this providential creation of the profession’s ongoing upheaval, this new universe of digitized tedium just lucrative enough to pay the rent but never stable or rewarding enough to quiet that sickening little twinge of sick failure in your stomach, the constant sense of any real professional life slipping away.

  “So what kind of law are you looking to practice?” Josh was eager like that, never still enough to be where he was, although in this situation it was a natural question.

  “That’s a benefit to working here; you buy time to find the right position.” Petra tended to peer quietly over people’s chairs issuing helpful advice, sensibly condescending. “Would you mind my showing you something?” I’ve rarely met a female lawyer who wasn’t a bitch, forever determined to top you. Maybe all the nice ones flock to public interest law; I was mildly surprised Petra wasn’t headed that way but it turned out her future firm advised non-profits. I only put up with Petra because I knew she was talking to herself, like all of us, and therefore something was pretty screwed up in her perfect world.

  “Or just some job,” Josh said. “Dude, just a real job I can land before someone else here beats me to it.”

  Now me, I liked doc review from the beginning, probably because I’d already had a real job and could appreciate the difference. Contract work, document review, is a necessary consequence of the computerized office; it involves the identification and categorization of electronic records, generally from some humongous corporate client and in response to a discovery order. Data that, collected in hardcopy, would fill the Comcast Building several times over with email and contracts and spreadsheets and miscellaneous effluvia ranging from the legally privileged to the merely confidential to the excruciatingly personal. The private chatter of obnoxious senior executives with their proud Americanism and misogynistic jokes and family photos from some church event along with inspirational words of pseudo-wisdom to be sent to twelve of your closest friends.

  “Imagine when it all coalesces into the electronic noosphere, one omnipresent mind,” Ruth says of the Internet. “I mean, when it becomes conscious. At least now God has the decency to stay quiet.” Freely altering the definition of God, which is the history of God.

  So the job was kind of cool and totally stupid at the same time. I could pretty much choose my own hours and basically I didn’t do shit; it was free money. Sometimes I extended myself too much due to this problem I have with ambition and ego, but then I inevitably screwed up because my thoughts were profoundly elsewhere. I just couldn’t take it seriously or convince myself it mattered. So I absently clicked the weeks away, happily overpaid for bracketing documents, complacently performing essentially mindless manual labor down in that lawyer’s sweatshop while my younger colleagues grew increasingly nervous and restive.

  I even enjoyed the forcibly companionable atmosphere, how when you talked to one person you were basically sharing with the room. I got drawn into these unlikely discussions about wedding plans and restaurant critiques, uncensored political opinions and the latest from the tabloids, all that trivial shit. Which at least helped keep me reasonably alert.

  But I can’t deny there was something ugly down there, too: competitive and slightly desperate personality-driven infighting.

  But that’s true everywhere.

  But not with the same utterly helpless desperation. Those stares when the fully employed started to filter out and we rejects understood the familiar rules weren’t working for us. Then when we realized it wasn’t just us, it was Armageddon. Plus I was
that tiny bit older so courteously included in every discernable way but in a subtle yet absolute sense automatically discounted. All in all an extremely superficial camaraderie, no missing you when you’re gone, which only added to the overall impression of living in some kind of karmic waiting room.

  Our location emphasized this sense of transience. Our quarters were on Market Street about two blocks from Septa’s Suburban Station; you could access the building from one of those endless station tunnels if you weren’t alone or given to nerves. Have the right swipe card, slip through an unmarked entrance below the unaware pavement life and there you were at the office, directly below all the marbled lobbies and security desks and well-appointed conference rooms of all those legal and financial firms. On crappy weather days you never had to risk exposure to the drenched streets of Lawyerland, out there where good old Billy Penn was hovering directly above you leaning at his tipsy angle, his back to you but still dominating that blank sky.

  Of course that’s myopic nomenclature; there are obviously as many financial and commercial institutions along those particular city blocks as law firms, and conversely numerous law firms outside the immediate precinct, including some famous ones. But I experienced a particular sense of ownership in that limited area where colleagues not infrequently met by cordial accident at food carts or on train platforms, and I started to make the attorney assumption unless I actually knew different, especially with those certain types, the one with that particular avidity about them.

  And there were disadvantages beyond the temporary nature of the job. There were startling, mysterious clanks and groans and random heavy thunks and metallic shrieks. There was a total absence of job security, a daily awareness that frayed the nerves: your case could settle overnight and leave you laid off without warning for days or weeks or forever. As a result you felt grateful to be assigned a project, then immediately resented your own immense relief, but you had no recourse because you didn’t work for the firm, you worked for a slimeball legal staffing agency that had no clout but shared your paycheck on the basis of, they cut your paycheck. And the same or nearly at every major firm up and down the street, it was almost always about working down in some basement.

  But it was a job, and jobs were scare in the law biz to pretty much everyone’s surprise, even mine. God knows why, when there was plentiful literature available on that unsettling subject. Maybe the whole descent into dystopia was too much to absorb outright; somehow we’d all envisioned ourselves graduating into an earlier era, possibly the crass, lucrative eighties, inheriting those extinguished opportunities, well-prepared to meet already obsolete goals and expectations.

  The insinuating chill of reality hurried Eric into his characteristic rancor; he started half-humorously threatening to sue our law school. “Dude, they pay students to do volunteer work and then count that as a job for their employment numbers? They count non-attorney jobs, too.”

  Petra was invariably reserved but sympathetic and prepared to minimize our qualms, more certain than we of our futures. I remember late one evening, her tote bag on her shoulder, she turned to capture the size of the room, empty except for the few guys doing seventy or eighty hour weeks, living at their computers. She was just standing there taking it in. “I’m so glad I had this experience.” And you could tell she meant it.

  There were vermin everywhere. I enjoyed watching Petra’s morning routine: gathering up a tidy mound of mouse droppings despite the traps along the walls and under our tables, then running a disinfectant wipe over her station, under her keyboard, over her seat, always smiling at herself like a good little soldier. Once, and this is for real, one guy gave a yelp and stood up, and then the girl next to him yelped and stood, and delightfully it continued along the row with each person jumping up in sequence exactly like a cartoon until finally there was the tiny furry creature - smaller than you’d think, hardly bigger than a quarter - disappearing into the wall. Those fuzzy little rodents didn’t upset me; I figured infestations were unavoidable since the basement of a posh building in the city is a basement in the city and there’s not much you can do about it. It wasn’t like we had the kind of large, impudent rats they had back on campus. And I appreciated the complex Rube Goldberg machinations our interlopers employed to navigate over our cabinets and wire bundles to reach our microwave popcorn packs.

  But the bugs got to me a little. That first day I was standing in a bathroom when I noticed the pattern of the mottled institutional linoleum shifting, rearranging itself courtesy of tiny individual elements like miniscule silverfish, neutral in tint and almost translucent. Those were the small ones; later on I met some of the fucking gigantic brown cockroaches casually loitering around. Occasionally you came upon a half-dead specimen, ineptly whacked, its little brown legs and antennae waving pathetically. The girls covered the dying ones with toilet paper and fetched some amenable guy to do the final stomp and disposal.

  One afternoon Petra came rushing back white and sweating because she was just sitting on a toilet when she noticed the roach climbing out.

  That same week, a roach fell from a ventilator fan onto her shoulder. She screamed really sharp and angry.

  But word was we had it good, in fact the best: we were treated with absolute respect whereas at some other firms they stipulated work hours and you had no Internet access. And maybe they paid better in New York but you worked out of an actual closet with water pipes. Anyway what could you expect with firms needing so many people on an uncertain basis?

  Along with pretty much everyone else there I persisted in my job search, and I had no difficulty whatsoever getting interviews: I got dozens and went to all of them, suitable or not, only nothing worked out. It’s possible I’m just making excuses here, but the truth is I don’t make a pleasing appearance; given a choice, I wouldn’t hire me either. I’m used to seeing people scramble around for some rationale for their instinctive dislike. Plus maybe I already knew better and deliberately undermined myself; God knows I flagrantly eschewed the conventional job-hunting advice. I never assumed the proper attitude of eager gratitude. I literally never sent one thank you letter or even email. I exuded disinterest if not scorn, lied outrageously and obviously, argued for the hell of it, and once almost snarled. All these offices at the smaller firms where they had metal security doors so the lawyers worked locked inside bank vaults.

  What I was doing was writing and taking it seriously, one of the stupidest things you can do in this world and worrying to everyone who cared about me or had any interest in my future. I wasn’t yet thinking in terms of journalism, though, not only because I had no background in it but because the inflated self-importance and paltry ethics of the news business repelled me. Plus I figured it was beneath my literary talents. They say law school changes you; what it did for me was to restore what academia and corporate finance had leached away: confidence in my own opinions, the desire to explore new ideas, and delight in my own obnoxious, insistent, attention-seeking voice even when it inspired general avoidance if not outright dislike.

  I was back. I didn’t give a shit. Or if I did it was still better.

  There was a lot of cynicism involved. I was definitely on the attack. I was suffering a resurgence of an old complaint: a sense of being used. Everyone wanted my input, but instead of acknowledging me they read my own words back to me, right to my face, obliviously taking credit for my anecdote, my explanation. So many people simply didn’t realize I existed except to serve them, kind of like a dictionary. I mean, this has historically happened to me, but in that particular basement situation, where I was already an anomaly and frankly much more dour and repellent than anyone else so hardly a typical candidate for success, any slight seemed egregious, intolerable. I wanted to sue the whole world, so instead I wrote.

  One initial idea was a scathing bit of satire about City Council; I came up with it watching a clip of them on television. It was weirdly entrancing, all these self-important, posturing lawmakers pushing their little pieces of pos
sibility here and there, viciously undermining each other with silly stratagems or unconvincing bombast, practically operatic in their gravity, all furrowed brows and integrity and dedication. Who was all this melodrama for? What kind of ignorant, credulous audience did they imagine? Broad farce, and mine to harvest, and such is the human ego that even at that stage I fantasized myself a famous comedic force: an acerbic Voltaire, Philadelphia’s professional gadfly.

  So I set about familiarizing myself with the players, their individual idiosyncrasies and ambitions, their interactions with each other, all their usual tics and lies. An obsession I thought temporary, and I indulged myself, which was easy enough with City Hall right there down the street. Otherwise I really might have let the whole thing slide; stuff happens that way, your fate gets decided because of what you had for breakfast.

  I attended my first Thursday session disguised by this scheme, peering out from behind its protection to scrutinize the chamber, members, spectators, and assorted supernumeraries. Head down over my legal pad, scribbling down every color and curve of architecture or profile. I experienced an absolutely compelling sense of coming home there in that shabby official chamber where government so blatantly diverged from the mere common good to go its own unconscionable way.

  Thom noticed me that first day, my air of fresh purpose and compulsively busy pen, and came over to find out who I was and make meaningless helpful noises. Of course I immediately, pathetically confided in him, eager for interest and support, and he thought over my idea a long minute, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Email it to me when it’s finished. I’d be fascinated to see what you make of us.” And then that ugly, deliberate grin. “You strike me as someone with a happily skewed point of view.” I have absolutely no idea why he got that impression, but I hoped it meant I’d aroused some genuine interest. So I sent him a careful draft and received liberal praise in return, much too florid but immensely reassuring.