You spent your time just like they said you should
Now those marks on your face just don’t look any good
And all the time all that they told you to
Was get a little more for your little you.
- “A Little More for Little You,” Tyrannosaurus Hives (2004)

The next email I received from Ellis on the Statcorp settlement was three or four days after the first, and it confirmed my worst fears – he and opposing counsel were playing chicken.

From: _______@______________.com
To: ________@______________.com; ______@______________.com
RE: Statcorp Settlement
Spoke with Statcorp’s counsel again today. He said his client reiterates its refusal to indemnify for anything in re Global. We either accept the deal as is or reject it. He says they’ll pull the offer off the table.
No chance of that. He’ll come back. They’ll buckle.

It was the last correspondence I got about the case from Ellis. After that the discussions went into “standoff” mode, an agonizing limbo between “settled in principle” and “dismissed, subject to a signed agreement.” Most people need closure, a sense that something’s over, for good or ill or other. Not Ellis. He seemed to thrive in that netherworld, inches from the finish line, oblivious to the annoyance of being so close – of all but knowing the orgasmic satisfaction of putting a piece of litigation out of your head forever… of boxing all that wasted paper and shipping it to storage, to rot on a shelf in a warehouse, deservedly forgotten and properly, eventually, incinerated. Ellis could stretch out the construction of a formal agreement for months. What did it matter to him? If the settlement tanked in the interim, he didn’t have to try the case.

And tank it very well could. A handshake deal between a pair of Philadelphia lawyers isn’t worth a quart of rotten milk. And I knew every day that passed without a signed agreement – every day that passed with no follow up email from Ellis or any word about the negotiations – was one day closer to doom. The meanest sound in law isn’t a judge ruling against you or a jury finding for your opponent. It’s not the sound of a bickering asshole opponent on the phone while your morning coffee turns cold or some whining, haughty partner nitpicking your work as though he were William Fucking Safire. No, the meanest sound in litigation is silence – the email left unanswered, the phone call unreturned… the mute stare of a judge or jury or appellate panel after you’ve just finished making an argument riddled with holes and inconsistencies. Silence equals thought. You’ve said too much, shown a weakness, and the audience is angling for the best method to exploit the flaw.

In a game of chicken over the terms of a settlement agreement, silence signals the start of the “sudden death” round. All or nothing. Somebody caves or the case goes to trial. It also means failure – that somehow, some way, two groups recognizing they had enough at risk to compromise in the broader picture couldn’t meet minds on the phrasing of some minuscule concession.

Every day I heard nothing, and every day I got more and more annoyed. The job was thankless enough, but this? Working your ass off to push the other side into a pittance settlement only to have the whole thing collapse in a pissing contest between the scriveners who punched up the settlement papers? I tried not to get angry, remembering the situation was terminal – that Don Quixote wouldn’t have been fool enough to rail against the folly and sloth of the average law firm. Try as I might, though, every day I saw Ellis in the hall the same fantasy ran through my head. I saw myself racing at him as he passed an empty office, checking him into the room with my shoulder and slamming the door behind us:

Listen, you twisted fuck. Conceptually, I don’t care if you blow the whole case with this game of chicken, but I worked my ass off on this thing… And you want to know why? Because I want the fucking files out of my office, off my goddamned desk. I’m bored with it, sick of it… Sick of working on the same issues day after day – filing briefs filled with the same technical arguments and writing the same “Statcorp this…” and “Statcorp that…” entries in my time sheets over and over and over again. If you fuck up this settlement and I have to prepare all the dry as dirt shit in those files for trial I am going to strangle you with the cord to your blessed fucking speakerphone.

It drove me nuts that Ellis ignored his complete lack of leverage in the negotiation. Most of that’s studied ignorance, of course. Being an advocate is being obnoxious – offensive, pushy and coarse… absolving a client of having to act like a shit, at least directly, to get what he wants. The average business litigator is an instrument of greed, trading in manipulation – exploiting the chasm between what language allows and decency dictates. But even in that amoral/immoral universe, even when he’s asking for a hundred knowing he’s only entitled to ten, the litigator always knows what he really, truly deserves, the best he’s going to get with his limited bargaining power.

Ellis’s demands weren’t obscene on the surface. The problem was all in the context. Our leverage was paper thin. Legally, our defenses rested on a single point of contract law. We claimed a provision of the contract excusing our client’s alleged breaches was unambiguous. The other side claimed it wasn’t. Most of the previous cases on the issue went in our favor, but none dealt with the exact language in our contract. And on the “gambling” side of the equation, Statcorp had already spent enough money on its claim that any flurry of legal bills for weeks of negotiations on the language of what should have been a boilerplate, cookie cutter agreement and release could easily push the company’s general counsel to take his chances at trial.

As the days kept flying by without a resolution I started wondering if Ellis was pathologically clueless – if he really, truly had no idea of the cost/benefit ratio at hand or if he understood it from the start and just didn’t give a shit. Was he mad? Was the problem organic? He had to know… We all know what we deserve, every day, in every transaction in our lives. We know what we ought to make, the title we should have or how attractive a mate we can expect to score. We know how fast or clever we are. We all own mirrors. The only question is how much of a premium to demand. If you shoot for more than you’re worth every time, you’ll get it here and there, certainly more than you would playing it safe. Some people swear by that approach, milking pork and beans leverage for surf and turf gains their entire lives. But they’re exceptions, and more often than not, assholes. And when you lose playing that game the failure’s always spectacular, erasing all the profits the strategy banked for you along the way. It’s not a popular mantra in a country like ours, but the truth is, a lot of people would be better off knowing their limitations.¹
And observing them.

* * *

“BANG! BANG! BANG!” I heard the knuckles slamming against the door.

Ignore it. It’s just a couple looking for an empty room, a place to fuck. They’ll go away when they realize it’s taken.
Thank God it locked from the inside. Anyone bursting into the room would never understand. At first blush it looked ugly, strange — perverted and queer. I mean, there I was, sitting Indian style, fully clothed, sipping a plastic pitcher of beer with my free hand. And there she was, on the floor – nude, writhing, loaded and stinking of wine coolers, begging me to fuck her with a children’s toy I was holding with the other. What would I say if someone turned on the lights? The truth made no sense. I met her downstairs. She’s crazy and I didn’t have condoms. The room was empty and the floor was littered with children’s toys. She wanted something inside her. I figured this Tinkertoy was sterile and– Well, she seems to like it…

“Don’t stop! Please don’t stop!” I pulled my hand from the Tinkertoy for a moment, to cup it to my ear and listen to the sounds on the other side of the door. The moment I did she lost it, screaming like a junkie in withdrawal. “Oh, God, don’t stop! Please don’t stop! Fuck me!”

Jesus, what is it about this thing? The toy was nothing more than a thin wooden tube, barely as wide as a pencil, with a round wheel-like appendage fastened onto the end. But the way she moaned and panted and screamed… You’d have sworn it was something fashioned from a plaster caste of John Holmes’ member.

“Don’t jerk around so much.” I cautioned as she twisted on the floor in a spastic limbo, all but doing a reverse version of “The Worm.” If that wheel came loose inside her things would go from a strange to ruin in an instant. We’d only met an hour before, a random introduction from a friend of a friend. One thing led to another and we wound up groping each other in a mud room off the grand hall. I didn’t know a thing about her, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. There was no way in hell I was spending my night in an emergency room with the girl, watching her come down from a Bartles & James stupor, explaining myself to some stern-faced ER nurse. “I think she fell on the thing. That’s how it got inside her. My name? St–uh… Stan. Stanley, actually. Stanley Jurrrrgelson… With a ‘Sen’ at the end. Everybody gets that wrong.”

“BANG! BANG! BANG!-BANG!-BANG!” The knocks came louder, faster, and I could hear someone yelling in the background. The words were garbled, lost in the mix of screams and hoots and hollering coming up from the downstairs. Still, it was clear – this wasn’t a couple looking for an empty room. Somebody wanted me. Or the girl on the floor.

“Put on your clothes.” I leaned in and eased the toy out of her.

“I’m not going anywhere.” She bit my ear, leaving a cloud of wine breath around my head.

“BANG!-BANG!-BANG!”

“Fine, then. Pass out here.” I threw a comforter from the bed on top of her and slid out the door.

“I have to get these people out of my house!” Leo was standing in the hallway, fidgeting with a drink his hand.

“So throw them out.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?” I noticed he was distracted, grinning and watching the patterns of light from a crystal fixture reflecting on the walls down the hall. His girlfriend, this skinny Goth chick with Robert Smith hair and black lipstick, stood mute, staring through me, straight into the wall at my back.

“I can’t handle this.” I could see his hands trembling as he struggled to find his cigarettes. “I took a tab of acid.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t smoke in here.” His girlfriend ran her hand across her face, stopping to squeeze her lips and make sure her jaw was still in place. “It could set some stuff off. Like alarms, or… alarms.”

“So.” Leo flicked his lighter. “Everything else is ruined.”

“You took acid at your own party?” What the fuck is the matter with you? Every high school in the area knew about this thing. You don’t drop a hit of LSD with two hundred drunken lunatics in your house. I didn’t say that, of course. No use in putting it in his face, bringing the poor bastard to tears. He probably read it my eyes anyway.

“I didn’t think it would get this big. It’s out of control. People are breaking everything.” Famous last words from every high school keg party in history. And what did he expect from me? He asked for a keg of beer and I got him one. I didn’t hire on for crowd control. I was just a skinny white kid with a booze connection. No bouncer here.

“Let me go see what it looks like.” There was nothing I could do for Leo, no way for anyone to stop what he’d started. He was a fool, in Darwin’s hands now. I just wanted to get away from the guy, get downstairs and see how ugly it really was.

Sixteen Candles. As I made my way to the kitchen, those were the first words that came into my head. The place was something out of that awful high school movie – the ending where Molly Ringwald’s boyfriend throws a blowout, destroying his home. Only worse… The wreckage was mean and ruthless, the product of a crowd that didn’t know the value of what was destroyed or just didn’t care.

“Hey, d’ja fuck that chick?” My buddy Charles grabbed me in the entryway, a dusty bottle of wine in his hand.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Too hard to get a fucking beer, but there’s a wine cellar. Don’t tell anyone.”

“I’ll keep it a secret.” Over his shoulder I saw a kid in a football jacket from a rival high school doling out identical bottles to friends.

“Nolan’s still looking for the liquor cabinet…” Charles trailed off, watching a pair of girls in stretch pants and Like a Virgin haircuts saunter into the kitchen. “There’s got to be a fucking huge one here.”

The kitchen was a full on disaster. It was huge, like the rest of the house, built more for staff than residents, with more stoves, counters and refrigerators than any one family could use. All of it covered in trash. The sinks below the front window were filled with piles of used plastic cups, napkins, cigarette butts, crushed beer cans and empty bottles of whiskey and wine people had brought along or stolen. The island in the middle was coated in various items people had dragged from the refrigerator and pantry – a rancid smorgasbord of cold cuts, leftover spaghetti, opened bottles of juice used as mixers and boxes of crackers and cereal half poured across the counter top. A couple of drunk girls were racing around it, one trying to grab the other’s bottle of Absolut, knocking into people and sliding in a slop of spilled condiments and beer as they turned the corners.

On the other side of the kitchen, on an outdoor patio, was the keg. That space was crowded like a nightclub. People were shoving one another and handing cups back and forth above other people’s heads, spilling on each other, starting minor skirmishes. Judging from the size of the crowd, the keg had to be on its last legs. The only reason it lasted as long as it had was because of the chicks. The girls never drank beer, at least at the beginning of the night. They always started out with wine, or liquor – usually vodka or schnapps, sometimes rum. They’d mix it with Crystal Lite or Diet Coke and sip it from soda bottles. This left the guys to work on the kegs, and though every one of them would bitterly argue the point, the average high school male can’t drink for shit. A keg goes a long way with those “rock stars.” By the time it kicked, however, everyone in the party would be good and fucking loaded… thirsty and furious. Leo would have a serious problem on his hands, and barely a quarter of the mind to deal with it.

To Be Continued…
———-
¹ Is it me or are the people who ought to try always overestimating their limitations while the ones who shouldn’t be are perpetually swinging for the fences?

I went inside and told Chelsea I was leaving. Predictably, she didn’t take it well. “What do I do?” She paced back and forth in the kitchen, stopping every now and again to bark “Get the fuck out of here” at some drunk scavenging through the cupboards for a beer glass. “I’m fucked! They shattered the fucking door! My parents are going to kill me!”

“When do they get back?”

“Monday.”

“Call a glass store tomorrow. They have emergency services.” Getting a plate glass door repaired in seventy-two hours was a tough order, but it could be done. I wasn’t sure of that, of course, but I had faith. My folks had gone away a few months before and I’d invited friends over. One of them had sex with a virgin on a white couch in our living room. The aftermath was a red-and-white couch, smeared with Jackson Pollack patterns of blood splatters. When I saw the thing, I was certain I was doomed. How does anyone explain that to his mother? “I had a nosebleed” would never suffice. The stain was too wide, blotchy and smudged, like a small child had gone mad with finger paints or red Magic Markers.

My immediate thought was to scream. Christ, did you fucking stab the girl? Am I going to find ‘Helter Skelter’ smeared in blood on the dining room mirror?! Then I looked at girl, straining to avoid pouting, watching a pair of drunks arguing over how to wipe the remnants of her innocence out of furniture cushions. I figured it’d be crass to throw a tantrum, and that was probably a blessing. The cooler side of my head guided me to the kitchen, to the phone book in the drawer next to the refrigerator. Is it listed under ‘laundromats,’ ‘laundrymats’ or just ‘cleaners’? The next morning I peeled off the upholstery covers and ran to the closest dry cleaner. Forty-eight hours and a hundred dollar cleaning bill later the stains were gone, like magic, the couch’s dignity restored.

“What about the fight?” Chelsea was running every rotten contingency through her head. “What if those assholes wind up in the hospital? They’re going to call my parents!”

I didn’t have an answer for her on that. “Look, I’m sorry, but I have to leave. I still have to drop Nolan off at his place before I go home.” I felt guilty walking away, leaving her there shell-shocked, with all the drunks running amuck in her place, spilling beer everywhere and screaming back and forth about the lynching that was still taking place outside. But I knew we were already pushing our luck. The noise level emanating from the property was growing. People were hollering, blaring music from their cars and roaming the woods, yelling to one another as they tracked the kid who’d gotten away. It was only a matter of time until the police were at the door.

Nolan caught me in the front yard, dangling a set of car keys wrapped in some sort of toilet paper or tissues. “Look what I found.”

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s a set of one of those college kids’ car keys. They were on the deck. He must have dropped them.”

The plan hit us immediately, one of those imbecile plots hatched in slurry of adrenaline and alcohol. We’d help Chelsea the only way we could – getting rid of the evidence of the crime (or at least one of the crimes). If the college kids called the cops and claimed they were beaten at her house, their best proof would be the car they came in, parked in her driveway. For one reason or another, mostly beer-logic, Nolan and I figured removing the vehicle from the scene would provide Chelsea with an ironclad alibi. “What people assaulted at my house, officer? I don’t recall any college kids coming here and getting into a fight.”

The car was an old Pontiac, a rickety bag of bolts, and we were careful never to touch it or the keys with our bare hands. I figured I’d drive it with my jacket over the steering wheel but when we opened the door I noticed a pair of what looked like golf gloves on the dashboard.

“Who uses driving gloves with a car like this?” Nolan laughed.

“The kind of college student who crashes high school parties?” I slipped on the gloves and handed my car keys to Nolan. “Follow me, but don’t stay on my ass. And don’t run any signs or anything.”

I didn’t realize I had a problem until I closed the door. Shit. This is a fucking stick. Nolan knew how to drive stick, but it was too late. He’d already run off toward my car, all the way back near the house. Screw it… How hard could it be? I pressed the clutch and slammed the shifter back and forth until the car started to move. The gears locked together and the car bucked, slamming me forward and backward every time I struggled to shift. Luckily, once we got a hundred yards away from the entrance to the house the road pitched downhill and momentum did the rest.

It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the hill, near a stop sign a quarter mile away, that things went out of control. The car was rolling at nice clip and I was totally in control, steering it and letting gravity do the work like we were in a soapbox derby. But as I saw the stop sign coming, a set of high beams turned in my direction at the intersection, blinding me. My first instinct was to tap the brakes, but when I hit the pedal nothing happened. I panicked. For an instant I thought I was going to roll through the sign, into crossing traffic. I swerved quickly toward a rut on the side of the road, thinking it was the fastest way to slow down. That was overkill. The brakes were fine. I’d been confused and hit the wrong pedal, and now I was hung up in a foot deep rivet along the side of the road. We’d aimed to hide evidence of a battery and all we’d done was create a different kind – of car theft. And there I was, sitting in it. If the cops came up the road to bust the party at that moment, Nolan and I would be making some very strange calls to our parents.

“Son of a bitch.” I pounded my fist on the dash. We had minutes to get away and I was hoist on a pile of dirt. Watching Nolan park and walk toward me in the rear view mirror I envisioned the police coming around the corner, stopping, offering us help. They’d smell the Milwaukee’s Best on us, ask for licenses and registrations and that would be the end. Is grand theft auto a felony or a misdemeanor?

“What the hell happened?”

“The high beams… I don’t know. I just– lost it.”

We didn’t argue long. The moment Nolan refused to take the wheel I did the only thing I could – slam the car into gear, turn the wheel toward the road and stand on the gas.

Jesus, that can’t be good. I heard all sorts of rattling in the drive train once I got the car back on the road. Things were ruptured, cracked, no doubt of that. All the more reason to get out of the thing, away from it as soon as possible. A mile or so down the road we finally spotted salvation – a parking lot for a deli next door to a highway entrance ramp. I rolled the vehicle into the lot, threw the keys on the seat and closed the door.

“Here. Hold these.” I handed the driving gloves to Nolan as I jumped in the truck.

“Did you grab that tape?”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s a great fucking record.”

“You don’t have a copy of Listen Like Thieves? Who the fuck doesn’t own that?”

“I want to listen to it on the ride home.” He started slipping on the driving gloves. “You know how you hear a little bit of a song somewhere and you immediately have to listen to it?”

“Yeah, but–”

“You didn’t lock the keys inside the guy’s car, did you?”

“Do I look like an asshole?”

“Do you want me to answer that?”

“That would be a huge dick move.”

“Right…” He opened the door and jumped out. “We wouldn’t want to be dicks.”

The last I remember of the scene was pulling out of the parking lot and turning onto the highway, Nolan cranking

“What You Need” on the car stereo.

“Wait.” I turned down the volume knob.

“What?”

“You hear that? You hear those sirens in the distance?”

“That’s the saxophone.”

“That’s no saxophone. Those are sirens. The cops are busting Chelsea’s place.”

“You’re fucking paranoid.” He turned the music back up and started playing drums on the dashboard as I stepped on the gas. “Everybody thinks this is dance music, but these guys play some heavy shit.”
The next morning I ran into my father in the garage, on his way out. “So I got a call from Bill Reynolds, the local magistrate. He says Chelsea Norris’s house was raided last night. The police cited a bunch of your classmates for underage drinking.”

“I’m glad I left early.”

“I hear there was a fight, and two people were hospitalized.”

“God, that’s awful.”

“You weren’t there for that?” He threw a golf bag in the trunk and slammed it shut. “I thought you were dating thatgirl.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘dating.’”

“Well, whatever you call her, her party got out of hand. One kid wound up with a skull fracture… A skull fracture.”

“Damn.”

“And they’re looking to charge somebody with auto theft.”

“Auto theft… really?”

“You kids get drunk, break someone’s skull and steal their car?” He shook his head. “Who does things like that?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I left early.”

To Be Continued…

Sheep get sheared; pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.
- Theodor Geisel (1904-1991)

The minute I opened the email I got a sick feeling in my stomach – an immediate recognition this was just the beginning… The first little move that would set a chain reaction in motion, destroying everything I’d worked on for the last few months.

From: _______@______________.com
To: ________@______________.com; ______@______________.com
RE: Statcorp Settlement
Statcorp is refusing to assume the liability on any future claims arising from the Global Processing venture. Their counsel simply refuses.

No shit he refuses. I’d refuse as well, on principle – on the basis I wasn’t about to go back and run through days of due diligence for a pointless, gratuitous demand.

Our client didn’t have any risk of litigation accruing from the Global Processing venture. It was barely involved, and the project barely got off the ground. Hell, it was our client’s refusal to go forward with its duties under a broad agreement with Statcorp – including the Global Processing venture – that caused Statcorp to sue it in the first place. Statcorp’s complaint was an ironclad defense to any future claim. If anyone was wronged as a result of something Global Processing did, all we had to do was hold up Statcorp’s own allegations, stating our client had refused to put a drop of sweat equity, let alone a single red cent, into the thing.

Still, Ellis, the partner assigned to finalize the settlement with Statcorp, pushed forward with the demand, putting the whole thing at risk, for no good reason. They’d sued our client for millions and we were getting rid of the case for nickels – barely nuisance value – and here he was, laying the proverbial straw on the camel’s back, seeing if there wasn’t some way he could muster defeat from the jaws of victory.

A few years before, when I still thought law was a rational trade, I’d have lost my mind – flipped out and gone running down to Ellis’ office, begging him to lay off, capitulate… think of the minimal upside and the enormity of the potential loss. “Damnit, Ellis, if you keep pushing these people they’re going to call the whole settlement off and roll the dice in court.” Not now. Now I just smiled, laughed to myself and ran the odds in my head. Sixty/forty the settlement implodes. If Ellis and opposing counsel get bitchy with one another, trying to prove who’s smarter, seventy/thirty.

Ellis was brilliant – a master of the mechanics, the law, and the art of structuring agreements. The problem was all that focus on the technical details blinded him to the practical realities of the negotiation. He didn’t seem to understand, no matter how much leverage you think you have, there’s always a point of no return – that one step too many, straight off a cliff. Some people get it. They understand that whether it’s haggling over the price of landscaping services, a new set of tires or a multimillion dollar corporate dispute, if you get ninety five percent of what you want, but your opponent refuses to buckle on that last little bit of your demand, you take the deal and run. Some people don’t. They only know what they want – all of what they want – even if they don’t really need it, and they’ll put their ninety five percent gain at risk just to push for that last little bit of gravy.

This allergic reaction to compromise is common in litigation, or any business involving zero sum games and rampant neuroses. People get locked into the idea of beating the other side so badly they forget that any resolution where you’re doing better than the opponent, even by the smallest increment, is a “win.” Once things are moving in your favor in settlement negotiations, the battle isn’t between you and your adversary anymore. It’s between you and your ego, greed or insecurity – finding that line where you’ve clawed all you can from an opponent without frustrating him to the point that he says, “Fuck it. You’re an asshole. Let’s just try the goddamn case.”

Most of the lawyers who know how to find that line would credit the ability to mentoring or experience. But that’s not all of it. Most of it comes from a sixth sense, knowing when you’re pushing things too far, when you’re on the edge of collapse. It’s like that rapid drop in air pressure you feel in the moments just before an initial burst of lightning kicking off a sudden thunderstorm. Remember when you were a kid playing baseball and a voice came out of nowhere saying “Put down the aluminum baseball bat” seconds before a bolt crashed into center field? Sort of like that. Sure, some of it’s acquired. A partner can school you on the nuanced ways to “find the line” in the world of litigation, but chances are you already had most of the basic skill set before you were eighteen. The only trick was having the good sense to listen to your instinct. Maybe you learned to follow that the way I did – at high school keg parties.

* * *

“Shit!” I felt the car’s undercarriage grinding against the rocks as the nose dropped into the ditch.

“What are you doing?” My friend Nolan appeared at the window a minute later.

“I can’t drive stick.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He had a point, I guess. If you’re going to steal a car with a manual transmission, it’s probably a good idea to know how to drive one.

“I didn’t know it was a fucking stick until I got in it.”

“That doesn’t explain why you drove it into a drainage rut.”

“I pushed the wrong pedal. It got away from me.”

“You thought the fucking clutch was the brake?”

“I don’t know. The lights were in my eyes.”

“When that pedal didn’t stop the car, you didn’t think ‘Hmmm, maybe I should hit a different one?’”

“Here, you drive it. Wear these.” I started peeling off the driving gloves on my hands and getting out of the car. “No fingerprints.”

“No way. You’ve probably ground up all the fucking gears in the thing. It won’t even move.”

“Fuck it. Get out of the way.” I slammed the gas and threw the car into the first gear that grabbed and gunned it out of the ditch. The combination of gears crunching together and the underside shredding along the ridge of the gulley made a horrible sound, but the wreck eventually leapt forward, bucking its nose into the street, back onto the blacktop. “Meet me in the next parking lot, wherever it is.” I screamed out the window.

“Grab that tape!” Nolan yelled back.

“What?”

“The INXS tape that was playing in the car. I love that record.”

“Right! First thing on my list!” You fucking idiot. We’ll be lucky if the cops don’t come around the corner and pull us over on principle, just for driving away from that fiasco up the road. I turned up the tape deck in the car. Sure enough, “Kiss the Dirt” came out of the stereo. He’s got sharp ears. I wonder if he already hears the sirens.
We were running from a keg party up the street, at the house of a girl I’d been seeing at the time named Chelsea. Her parents had gone away and left her home alone, assuming a seventeen year old was adequately responsible. They were wrong. She promptly threw a keg party. Half my high school showed up and as they always tended to, a huge brawl erupted.

I remember standing in the kitchen, sipping a beer and bullshitting with a buddy when I heard this amazing crash and suddenly all the glass in one of the sliding doors off the family room was falling to the floor. Apparently some students from a local community college had crashed the party, and one of them grabbed some munghead’s girlfriend’s ass. The munghead, one of those goons who went to parties looking for fights, threw a bottle at the college student, missed him and took out the plate glass door. Realizing they were grossly outnumbered by the munghead and his friends, the college student and his buddies jumped through the shattered glass and ran for their car outside.The goons chased them across the huge rolling yard, catching up with them just outside a garage fifty yards down the driveway. Then the beating ensued.

Normally a fight wasn’t a big deal. Every high school had a couple big, angry assholes who’d get loaded and pummel a dork or two at every party for some trumped up reason (“disrespecting” somebody’s girlfriend; cutting in line at the keg or “cracking wise” when the mook accused the geek of giving him a dirty look). It was a ritual – a form of expected entertainment. No matter how dull the party was, you’d always get to see at least one good beating before the end of the night. Looking back, it was probably a Pennsylvania thing – desperate, drunk douchebags in a hick state with no other avenue for anger expulsion.

But this fight — this was different. Nobody knew these college kids, so nobody felt sorry for them and stepped in to get their back, to break the melee up after a few black eyes and some battered self-esteem. I remember watching the group of meatheads knock two of the college students to the ground, then form a ring around the poor bastards, stomping and kicking them as they shielded their faces. No, this wasn’t a standard high school fist fight. This was a Rodney King battery, with all the broken jaws, shattered eye sockets and broken noses that go along with a crazed mob attack. The breaking point for me was hearing two of the goons pass by, talking about chasing one of the college students who’d escaped into the woods around the property. “I have a flashlight in my car, and a baseball bat. Let’s get the fucker.”

“We have to get out here.” I turned to Nolan.

“But the keg’s not done.”

“This thing’s going to get busted.” At the time, probably because they nothing better to do, local police had a habit of breaking up high school beer parties. Their standard procedure was to block the entrance to the property with one patrol car and post another just up the street, to arrest anybody driving away. No matter the town you were in, the rule was always the same – if you heard the sirens and saw the lights, you were done.

“No it’s not. We’re in fucking the middle of nowhere.” Geographically, Nolan was right. On its face, based on the surroundings, there wasn’t a chance in hell of the party getting busted. The house was set back in the woods, at the end of a long winding driveway, and the property was ringed with huge trees, blocking any view of the dozens of cars and trucks parked inside. But that was just the obvious empirical evidence. Nolan was missing the elephant in the corner… Somewhere in the woods a college student was sprinting for his life — scared insane, wired on adrenaline and racing from a certain, horrible beating. The mungheads chasing him were loaded. They’d tire and he’d get away, and once he got loose we were cooked. He’d run into the nearest house or business in town, panting, babbling to the first people he saw about maniacs chasing him through the woods and pummeling his friends in a drunken frenzy. They’d immediately call the police. The sirens would come; it was only a matter of time.

“Doesn’t matter. One of those kids escaped, and he’s going to get to a phone sooner or later.”

“It’s a long walk to town. I’m getting another beer.”

“He’s running. Make it fast.”

To Be Continued…

Look, maybe we could do something else together, Mrs. Robinson. Would you like to go to a movie?
- The Graduate (1967)

My first experience with the female lawyer libido in the law firm atmosphere was, not surprisingly, the office Christmas Party. We were at a ballroom in a hotel and I was standing near the bar, picking up a Dewars and water when Peter appeared to my left. “Don’t move.” He pushed my shoulder outward so my torso would better eclipse the line of sight between him and the dance floor behind me. “You’re the only thing blocking her from seeing me.”

“Who am I blocking?” I’d never seen Peter flustered like that. We’d been friends since shortly after he arrived at __________________ a few months after me. We went out drinking all the time and I’d never known him to be anything but the picture of control, the sort of permanently calm fellow who never got rattled by anything.

“Veronica… Veronica Kelly.”

“Who’s that?”

“She’s one of the partners from my floor. Reddish hair, graying, tall? You know.”

“I’m not sure.” I turned to get a look at the woman.

“Don’t look over there.” He stopped me. “She’s looking in this direction.”

“What about her?”

“She wants me to go to the parking lot with her so she can suck my dick.”

“What?”

“She asked if she could suck my dick.”

“Why in the parking lot?”

“How should I know? I was just dancing with her and she leaned in and whispered in my ear, ‘Let’s go to the parking lot. I want to suck your cock.’”

“It’s just strange. Why not suck your dick in the building?”

“I think she has a minivan.”

“Some of those are pretty comfortable.”

“This whole night’s been fucked up. I told you about the ride over, right?”

“Possibly. I’ve had a few drinks.”

“I was giving the money to the cab driver and when he turned around I realized it was one of my law school classmates. This dude from Vietnam. Real nice guy. Can you imagine that? Couldn’t get a job and now he’s driving a cab.”

“I hope you tipped him well.”

“And now this.”

“I don’t know… I think you should take Veronica up on the offer.”

“She’s twice my age. I wished her fucking kids a Merry Christmas when they visited the firm a week ago.”

“You’ve never done the Mrs. Robinson thing?”

“There isn’t enough vodka in this bar for that.”

“I’ll bet she gives a hell of a blow job.”

“You want to pinch hit for me and find out?”

“Older chicks are amazing in the sack, particularly the lawyer types. They’re all fucked up in the head. They think like guys.”

“Exactly what I want – a middle aged woman who sucks dick like a man.”

“I’m serious. They’re crazy, but they know what they’re doing in bed.” It was hard to explain in the moment, on short notice, but there’s something amazing about fucking a woman with years on you. Some of the best sex I’d had was with a crazy female law student many years my senior, and it happened every bit as randomly as Peter’s situation had arisen.

It was my first year in law school and her name was Sharon. She was just a friend of a friend, a second year student I’d say hello to in passing and nothing more. We didn’t have anything in common, at least on the surface. She was in her later thirties and I was twenty-three. I figured she was hitched, living with a husband and kids in the suburbs. There was never even the slightest sexual tension between us. Until one random Saturday in the spring, a week before exams. I was just walking through the lobby of the law school when she stopped me out of the blue.

“Hey, __________.”

“Hi, Sharon.” I smiled and kept moving.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“Inside.”

“‘Inside.’ Great answer. How come you never talk?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘Why don’t you ever talk?’”

I’d never paid much attention before, but standing eye to eye with her without any distractions around us I realized, Sharon was pretty hot. Thin, athletic, with high cheekbones and this silky, black hair. And you could see it in her eyes, from the way she stared right through me, never blinking, never blushing or turning away – the chick was nuts… Fearless, probably unstable, but in a good way. In all the right ways.

“I never hear you say anything. You’re so quiet. Why?”

“I talk. I’m just usually trying to get out of this place, so I’m in a hurry.”

“We should talk.”

“Sure. What would you like to talk about?”

“Fucking. I think it’d be fun to fuck you.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Do you want to fuck me?”

“Uh, yeh. I mean, of course I’d–” Every guy dreams of situations like this, but when you actually face one, you don’t know what to say. Suddenly I was a sixteen year old virgin, fumbling with my prom date’s bra strap, pretending to know what I was doing, pretending to be in control. Sharon knew that, and she got off on it – on watching me squirm and try to look composed, like this sort of thing happened all the time.

“Sure, uh… when?”

“Six.”

“Today?”

“Is today bad?”

“No. No. Today’s good.”

“Great. I have to take care of a few things. I’ll pick you up out front.” Just like that, my night had taken a radical detour.

Sharon picked me up in front of the school at six sharp. “You want to get a drink?” I figured small talk was in order.

“Not really.” She stood on the gas and drove up a long winding road through the woods to a condominium on a bluff overlooking the city. I remember everything in the place was white and minimalist, like the futurist set in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Along the wall inside the door were stacks of perfectly folded towels in clear plastic bags and where the living room furniture would normally be was a bed, tightly made, Marine-style. And every line in the place was smooth and long, giving the appearance it had no crevices or spaces for anything to fall into, as though it were built to be hosed down after each use. Obviously, this wasn’t anyone’s home. This was a “fuck pad.” I don’t think it even had a television set.

The minute we got inside Sharon peeled her clothes off and put her hands on her hips. “Where do you want me?” were the only words she spoke. Other than doling out directives. “Bite my nipples.” “Slap my ass.” “Pull my hair.” No games, no subtext… no hidden agendas. She told me exactly what she wanted and exactly how she wanted it. And damn could she fuck. It was the kind of sex where you forget everything in the world but the space between the blades of your pelvis. As I stood there in the middle of that awful law firm party listening to Peter I replayed the scene in my head, remembering laying in Sharon’s bed, fucked senseless, watching the ceiling fan spin overhead, wondering how soon I could be hard enough to get inside her again.

“Yo, dude. Earth calling.” Peter barked in my ear, dragging me out of the daydream and back into that terrible Christmas party.

“Sorry. Scotch does that to me.”

“Look left, just with your head. Don’t turn your body. See her? The tall woman?”

“The Derek Coleman sized chick?”

“Yep. That’s Veronica.”

“Oh, shit.” I winced. “My Mrs. Robinson was a little different.” Veronica was an Amazon, 6’0, with shoulders like a linebacker – technically feminine, but matronly, wearing one of those boxy business suits middle aged women favor with shocking white nylons. There was a deep seeded androgyny about the woman, a sort of “Janet Reno masculinity.” From ten yards you could tell she was a deep baritone and could definitely palm a basketball. I suddenly went from visualizing Sharon lying naked on a bed to images of Peter peeling a huge pair of granny panties and support hose off Veronica in a van in the parking lot and her moaning in a Bea Arthur voice, “You’ve never seen a grey bush before, have you?”

“What did I tell you?” Peter whispered as she passed, moving around me to avoid being seen.

“You’re right. That’s not good.” The more I looked at the woman, the more I had to wonder what the hell she was thinking. Did she really think Peter would say yes? That any man his age could ever be that hard up? Was this the only time she got drunk all year? How could she think that offer was anything but a recipe for extreme embarrassment?¹

I didn’t ponder the question for too long. A person could go mad trying to find the “why?” behind these people and the things they did. I guess you could chalk it up to inexperience or native mental defect. Maybe a snap from reality, caused by too much time immersed in a law firm hierarchy, dealing in the abstract, forgetting the boundaries of normal human interaction. Perhaps they knew they could get away with it, that the people in management had been “institutionalized” in firm life for so long they’d never see any reason to bring the blade down on a fellow freak. Hell, Bill Morris hadn’t suffered any fallout from grabbing an associate’s breasts. He walked back into work the next day like nothing at all had happened. Using that as a benchmark, management would probably commend a partner for offering an associate a blow job – view it as a morale booster.²

Maybe, probably, it was just desperation, a futile need to try for what these hopeless sorts knew they’d never have… Or a deep seeded urge to be caught, “outed” for what they really were – forced from the field, absolved of its terminal anxieties and vacant pretensions. Why else would a grown man flip out and grab a woman’s breasts or a soccer mom offer a hummer to a random associate? There’s no understanding those people or those scenarios, no answering those questions… I knew that, and it didn’t bother me. The better takeaway was just to know that you weren’t one of them – that feeling alienated from most of everything and everyone you worked around in a law firm wasn’t unhealthy in the least.

“I wasn’t kidding.” Peter slugged back his drink. “She’s a big chick.”

“You’ve got to get out of here. That’s not a woman to be spurned – not a head full of liquor. She could overpower you.”

“Unless you’ve got a teleporter, I can’t move without being seen right now.”

“My advice? Make a mad dash for the lobby. Just tear out of here, in a full on sprint. Do those shoes have rubber soles?”

“Wingtips?”

“They’re shit for cornering, but you don’t need that. Run straight ahead and never look back. Never stop moving until you’re through the front doors.”

“Right. It’s the only way.” Peter slugged back the last of his drink, put the glass on the bar and turned to make a run for the door.

“Wait.” I grabbed his arm at the last second. “Do you have your friend’s card?”

“My friend?” His eyes were darting around the room, obviously agitated I was holding him back. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The Vietnamese guy, with the cab. You’ll need a getaway car waiting at the door.”³

* * *

“Come on.” Lisa popped the last button on her shirt. “This doesn’t change your mind?” No matter how I put her off, she just seemed to get more determined.

“Do I owe this to Pinot Grigo or Chardonnay?”

“I’d do this sober. I wanted to see where you spend your day. You never invite me here and you never talk about it.”

“There’s a message in that.” I turned off my computer and started putting on my jacket.

“Think of me like a cute associate.” She sat on the edge of my desk. “We’re working on a case together late at night and then suddenly we get swept up in the moment and start kissing and…” She leaned in and pulled on my tie.

“How about not.” I smiled and clicked off my monitor.

“Why?”

“Because I want to stay attracted to you.”

“You sure I can’t change your mind?” She pulled the shirt back off her shoulders. “Nothing underneath.”
I had a response on my tongue, but the words were far too harsh, coming far too quickly:

Christ, Lisa, I’m not going to fuck you here. This is where all the people who can’t hope to screw anything outside this office fuck each other. It’s their world. I’m just visiting, using the place for a paycheck, and I intend to keep that distance. The last thing I want to do is mix any image of you, in any way, with anything here.

The problem was, if I ranted like that I’d never stop. I’d ruin her mood and that would be a tragedy because yes, as soon as I got away from that office, as soon as we got home and I forgot the pointless slop of my day, I was going to fuck Lisa raw.

“You better put those away. People attack them around here.”

“What?” She put her hands over her breasts.

“Please, just button them up.” I turned out the light in my office and opened the door. The hallway was empty and the usual blue lights from the computer screens in the cubicles were off.

“I don’t understand.”

“Just assume I’m impotent here.”

“What a turn on.”

“Trust me. It’s a good thing.”
———-
¹ Or that someone might write a story about the situation like this one years later.
² Or a novel way to save cash on bonuses. “Hello, Johnson? Stanley Molbus here, from the Compensation Committee. I was thinking, what if we paid some of the bonuses in sexual favors? At 2000 hours you get a happy ending. At 2100 you get a hummer. Anything over 2200 is a rusty trombone.”
³ He made it out, of course, or this would have been a much more sordid story.

A cute brunette who’d been putting on makeup in the kitchen laughed after Stacy left.
“That was harsh. I guess you sleep on the couch tonight.”
“Just a friend.”
“Excuse me. Could you move? You’re blocking my light.” She fumbled with a lipstick tube and mirror.
“Sorry. What shade is that?”
“Red.”
“Could I have some?”
“Sure.” She handed it to me, laughing.
“Red’s my color.” I smeared it around my lips and grinned across the room at Phil, lighting a cigarette in the corner of the kitchen.
“Please, please…” A man in a striped shirt, I assumed one of Stacy’s housemates, darted across the room. “You can’t smoke in here. Please put that out or take it outside.”
“But the door’s locked.” Phil dragged the smoke. The housemate fumbled with the deadbolt to no avail.
“Please go out to the front porch.”
“Sure.” Phil headed for the front of the house.
“Put it out first.” The housemate chased him.
“I’ve only got five left.” Phil held open a pack of Camel filters.
“I’m sorry but some people in the living room are allergic.”
“No one’s allergic. They just don’t like it. Let me finish it here.”
The housemate sighed. “It really annoys some people.”
“So does terrible music. What is this, the Gin Blossoms?”
“I’ll change it if you put that out.”
Phil stubbed out the smoke in the sink. “What do you have?”
“I’ll find something. You’ll like it.” The housemate bolted. Phil’s smoke was out. His mission was complete.
I grabbed Phil’s sleeve. “You won’t like it.”
Bennett cornered me just outside the kitchen door, with a shotglass and the bottle. “Nice makeup. Here. You’re up.” He filled the glass and held it out.
“Give it to Les. Where is he?”
“He doesn’t need any more.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Take the fucking shot.” Bennett barked.
“Fine… Chaser?”
“You have a beer.”
“This is a vodka and tonic.”
“Same difference.”
“Oh, shit. I’m so sorry.” A red-haired girl bumped into Bennett, spilling the shot on the floor. “I’m so sorry, uh… I don’t think we’ve met.”
“I’m Bennett. A friend of Stacy’s.”
“I’m Susan. I work with the Frontier Group. We do a lot of PR for Stacy’s group. Shouldn’t we get a towel or something to clean that up?”
“It’s already in the carpet.” Bennett started pouring another.
“You have some smudging going on.” Susan pointed to my cheek.
“I put it on in the cab.” I wiped the side of my lip. “Is that better?’
“Not really…”
“What kind of PR do you do?” Bennett quizzed the girl.
“I’m in the internet group now.”
“Really? I was just looking at the internet earlier.”
“Scat.” Phil half coughed back through his hand.
“What’s that?” Susan looked at Phil.
“A type of jazz. I’m a big jazz fan. So where is, uh, your office, Susan?”
…Dwarf porn, anorexic beauty pageants and 80-year-old women wearing ball gags and nipple clamps… Japanese school girls fucking cattle prods and crackheads expelling grapefruit, mangos and those tiny plastic footballs you get on fan appreciation day… “Sparky the Wonderdog” scrambling around on the linoleum flooring of his owner’s trailer, looking for traction to mount a 60ish toothless hooker… The home videos of Paris, Rob Lowe, Pam and Tommy, Pam and Bret Michaels and something purported to be the R. Kelly tape… Fistfucks, bukkake, triple entry, she male double penetration, conga lines held together with double sided dildos, the “gyno exam hidden cam” and the “he sticks his whole head inside” video… These days, most of us have seen it all by 25. Nothing’s shocking anymore. Nothing.
Except “scat.” Look it up on Google and you’ll quickly find yourself in a very ugly universe. Scat’s what separates those with iron stomachs from the rest of the amateur sex voyeurs. It’s The Line… Bennett, of course, had folders of it on his laptop, sorted by subgenre. The last movie he’d sent me, “Dinner,” was enough to trip the gag reflex.

(more…)

Monty: She says I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble. I mean she’s right, but what can I do? I got no… what’s the word…
Nicky: Class.
- Easy Money (1983)
Litigation’s as much about not losing as it is winning. If you’ve pled anything before a Court, you know sometimes you have to argue junk. The papers, the law, the rules – it all says your client’s doomed. But you’re paid to reply – to advocate something in opposition… Suspend disbelief and bark out the absurd with conviction, as forcefully as possible, as though it were credible, accurate and correct on every point… The sheer force of your argument compelling the opponent to engage you. Once you’re engaged, you are credible. And once you’re credible, you’re past offensive or sanctionable – skirting legitimate – an advocate pleading an argument that just might win. You won’t ultimately, but you’ve dodged sanctions, embarrassment and probably a few of the bigger claims against your client. A win of sorts, or at least a non-loss – all for acting impassioned and repeating yourself a lot.
It’s a great all purpose strategy; works as well in or out of a courtroom…
It was Washington D.C. 1995. Stacy, a good friend from college was throwing a party the same weekend I happened to be in town visiting other mutual school friends.
“We’ll stop by at 8:00 then.” My buddy Les announced this to her over sandwiches outside Dean & DeLuca in Georgetown.
“Why don’t you come at 11:00.”
“11:00? The party will be half over!”
“Well I just don’t think it’d be a good idea before 11:00.”
“We have a handle of bourbon on ice. You don’t need any extra booze! It’ll just be Phil, ________, Bennett and me. You have some food there, right?”
“Really, I don’t want you coming by until 11:00. I don’t think it’s the sort of crowd that… Well… I don’t know if you should show up with a handle of bourbon.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Stacy excused herself.
“Good job. Now what are we going to do?” Bennett snickered.
“We’re going to fucking go.” Les was on a mission. “Who the fuck is she to tell me who I can and can’t hang out with?”
Stacy had moved to DC after college, to save the world. She worked for a think tank, advocating some platform of amorphous progressive policies, regulations and initiatives. She’d told me about the work she was doing, but I can’t recall any of it. I was a law student wasting three, sometimes four days a week wading in the residue of mental masturbation. I had no intention of paying attention to hers. I stared, smiled and said “Interesting” a lot (cue picture of monkey eating banana and scratching it’s ass above my head).
DC’s a terrible place for the apathetic… A lonely town for pragmatists, which is odd, since it only operates as it should when mired in absolute paralytic gridlock. Washington seems to be filled with “soft protestors” – people whose personalities’ only weight is their current zeal for some position or issue that dominates everything they say. That’s hardly surprising. DC’s a stop-off city, a fifth year in college with a paycheck and a McJob. People work for nickels on the Hill or in some quasi-governmental organization for a time and, when their friends start moving and they decide they need to get paid for real, leave. Which kind of explains why the people you talk to at parties there know so much.
I’ve never known how to handle protesting or zealous types. They seem to get a lot more out of whatever “movement” they’re flogging than the movement gets from them. The ones I met in DC are perfect Left Wing bookends to the warped fundamentalists they rip as troglodytes over crab-stuffed lettuce leaves and brie. Maybe even less credible. The soft protestors are incapable of uttering anything outside the parameters of what their college ethics professor preached. It’s hard as hell to get a good drunk going in the company of people talking “rights” and “inequity” and “policy change.” Being forced to drink somewhere else and show up late for a party full of them was probably a gift.
Les didn’t see it that way. We showed up at 9:00, carrying cheese, red wine and the frozen handle of Jim Beam. Bennett, Les and Phil staked out seats in a sitting room at the front of the house. I snuck back to the kitchen and grabbed a shot glass, to start a proper “bourbon club.” Stacy and I made brief eye contact as I was pushing through the crush of bodies in the middle room. Neither of us acknowledged the other. I brought the shot glass back to the front room. We started into the bottle.

(more…)

“What the hell was that?” A mulleted woman asked a Richard Petty look-alike standing behind her.
“Sons of bitches.” A manager cursed under his breath, darting toward the doors, surveying the ground along the way to see what Billy’d knocked onto the floor.
“On the dope.” A stout woman who might have had Down’s Syndrome barked at a clerk.
“We’ll call police if he stole anything. We have him on camera,” the clerk assured her. I threw the batteries into the shelves of candy under the counters, pushed my chin toward my chest and slinked out the door.
It went like this for weeks. Billy’d set off stink bombs in a crowded McDonalds during lunch hour. He waved down cars in Nolan’s sister’s ballet tutu. He chugged staggering amounts of beer and whiskey until he projectile vomited in streams like a cherub in a Vegas hotel’s water sculpture. Drunk and sober, but much more effectively drunk, he acted as our own Stuttering John, saying anything to anybody. “Billy, see that pasty guy with the huge head talking to that girl? Go over and say ‘Excuse me, why do they call you ‘Fetus?’”
It was a painful summer for Billy, but the flip side of the abuse was he was the only kid who got laid at his age and could get as drunk as he liked because he wasn’t old enough to drive. On the balance, he couldn’t complain. The problem, however, with a lopsided power dynamic in any relationship – between lawyers, lovers or drunken high school kids – is the dominant eventually go too far.
Nolan’s home was filled with loads of old creepy relics stuffed into odd little rooms and closets scattered about the place. The family never threw anything away. One room, which might have actually been a massive walk in closet, held racks of old clothing. There were old leisure suits, ball gowns, a tuxedo, all varieties of random pants and dresses and terrible wide collar 70s dress shirts and a fur coat, complete with a hat and hand warmer. On the floor were boxes filled with the remnants of an old office – nameplate for the door, desk calendars, appointment books, humidor and a collection of shelf ornaments recognizing professional accomplishments from the early 70s. Bored, drunk and hoping we’d stumble into a trove of yellowing disco era porn, Charles and I searched through the boxes for a couple minutes, throwing the contents onto the floor as we went. Nolan stumbled upon the mess and flipped. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“What? It’s a mess anyway. We’ll put it back.”
“That’s family heirloom shit.” Nolan was angry, which was odd. I felt bad, and I didn’t want to listen to him bitch. “Billy can take care of it.” I snapped.
“Hey, hey, hey… Calm down. Izz nothing. Dohworry about it…” Charles slurred.
“Fuck you guys. This is bullshit.” Nolan was on a whining jag, which was tanking my buzz. I snuck out the door, went into the room next door and tried to play along with the Kinks’ “Destroyer” on his electric guitar.
“Billy! Billy! Get up here.” I could hear Nolan bellowing. Commotion followed a few minutes later. A huge slamming sound vibrated through the wall. I put down the guitar and went next door.

(more…)