Prior Bad Acts

CHAPTER ONE

Pat

The snake in my belly winds tighter as I clip on my dealer’s I.D. It is so horrible to have a tight gut all the time, as if the center of you is curled up like a frightened baby. That’s where the pain always lands, straight in the belly, when he comes on the floor, looks my way, sneaks up near me in the pit. Now it crawls up each morning when I’m laying next to John as he snores like a freight train. The alarm creeps near 5:30 a.m. and though I haven’t slept anyway, I’m all the way awake with my belly roaring. Soon, I know it will never leave. My stomach will ache and turn all the time, a constant reminder of him.

The babies came running into my bedroom, galloping really, like little ponies set free in the meadow. It’s for them that I straighten my shirt every day, pull on the black vest and breathe deeply, preparing for the very worst in another day at the Dome. This morning I shushed and hugged them—John needed sleep—and we hurried to the kitchen for our ritual of breakfast, backpacks and lunch boxes. Late last night I looked long and hard in the cabinets for some kind of good food for their lunches. It’s getting to be a struggle, feeding these three since John has been so long out of work. Like a magician I pulled some healthy things out of a hat, praying as I wrapped and bagged that my little girls would never have to do this, never have to lay down for a man with needs and power. Jesus, I prayed, let me feed them good things and keep my pain from them. My girls will never be sick with fear about going to work, never.

John’s medical bills are pushing us off a cliff. He’s a strong proud man who did good work. When the drinking stopped and he learned to finally find his way home at night I was so happy but when a roofing panel blew him off a ladder I know his life ended. He tried to stay with us., but he’s just so damn angry all the time now, furious at the back that gave out on him, furious at me for having a decent job, raging at the man who was making me sick but helpless to do anything. Let the system work, I told him. But John paced the floors most days in agony, fantasizing about taking a baseball bat to the Dome and crushing Toland to a pulp. And he didn’t even know half of it. I have been sketchy with the details. If he knew what really happened I would be unable to contain him, because I have seen the animal he can be when he’s angry. Can’t let that loose.

Flooded with medical bills from the surgery, me and John spend nights at the kitchen table sorting through forms. Though insurance paid eighty percent, you know that twenty percent of $300,000 would send most people like us straight to the poorhouse. My salary’s good, $38,000 a year but I know that will not cover this nut. John bangs his fist at night and cries, alone in the kitchen with me and I try to give comfort, come over and rub his shoulders, kiss his neck softly and tell him to have faith. But I may be losing it too, my faith that is.

Faith will have to feed these kids soon. I choked back a sob as I thought about it, knowing that I had to go to work there, in a place where my skin crawls with fright. Toland will be waiting for me again today, waiting for what I will give him this time, again, and I will, make no mistake, because three sweet kids need shoes and warm clothes and Toland would remind me of that when he strokes my hair and pulls me into his office. As the kids got their coats on this morning, just before the bus, I ran to the sink, nearly sick with the thought of his awful hands, his gray skin. The snake coiled tighter, around my heart this time it seemed.

I can’t do it, I wept softly, turning the spigot on so the kids wouldn’t notice, I can’t do it anymore.

Mommy! it was Sarah, we’re gonna miss the bus!

Let’s go, baby, I wiped my face and grabbed my purse; I’m going to be late for work.

CHAPTER TWO

Maria

All my life I’ve wanted to be one of the boys.

Boys are strong and fearless. They draw sustenance from the physical part of life; they grab the world that is right there in front of them - the ball, the tree, the money - unlike girls who live life so often in our own heads, fantasizing about marriage, babies, and knights in shining armor. Growing up in a raucous Italian family with my three brothers surrounding me always like moss in a forest I just came to love the physical presence of men, to want to be around them. I could work the girl thing as needed, almost with the best of them and I never wanted to be a guy mind you I just wanted to have their recklessness, their strength, and ultimately their paychecks.

The legal world is sodden with men so it was a perfect fit. I could be contentious, aggressive, wear a suit like guys and hang around them. Battling was as natural as drawing breath for me, ever since those long autumn days I spent in the driveway playing basketball with my brothers and their friends. I can still hear that beautiful soft pounding, rhythmic and light as the chilly air while we laughed, elbowed each other under the boards and played as if something really was at stake other than some measly neighbor-hood pride. Even as a little girl I fought like hell for my place at the guy table. Every spring I had to beg my father to take me to the Phillies games with the boys, but for baseball, I’d degrade myself. Reluctantly, the men would agree to let me tag along, and there I’d sit for nine innings, glove on my sweaty left hand, eating hot dogs in Connie Mack Stadium and praying to God for a foul ball. I still live and breathe to play ball, to watch 300 pound men in pads crash into a scrawny quarterback, or to ski with intensity down an icy mountain.

Sports taught me more about life and loss than any textbook I’ve ever touched. The strength born of athleticism supported me always, most clearly through the dark years of litigation where stronger, faster, better was everything. Playing basketball or hockey I also learned of the option to cheat—an elbow jab under the boards, a stick to the shins. I did this when I had to, when the other guy was too powerful or we were losing badly. No schoolyard antics prepared me, though, for the professional version of a cheap stick to the shins, when lawyers lie to each other, their clients, themselves, every day. It becomes less an option than a necessity, in law, to blind side an opponent with something less than integrity. Some people will see this as justification for a bad and gruesome act but it’s all I know.

Spread out before me on my desk this day are piles of documents relating to a sexual harassment claim brought against one of our firm’s clients, the Langdone City Police Department. Some woman is alleging that her male counterparts and supervisors harassed her by making sexual jokes, hanging graphic pictures of nude women in their workspaces, and occasionally smacking her on the butt. Oh please, I’m thinking, just handle it. How can a woman let things get to that point? It’s all that pathetic cowering and fear that women have—oh he won’t like me if I’m not demure, I’ll lose my job if I make a stink and so on. What did she expect when she became a cop, that roll call would be a church picnic?

My aggravation mounts as I read the litany of whiny complaints in her answers to interrogatories. You forayed into the man’s shop, darling, and now you’re yiping that the toilet seat is up. I feel generalized aggravation creeping up my spine, the kind of impatience bordering on hatred that I used to feel in high school when I biked and played ball and sledded my way through life with my crazy brother Nick and his friends, while the Great Divide grew between me and the smooth and pretty girls who dared not challenge the boys at ice hockey on the pond behind the seminary or baseball in our summer pick up games on perfect fields of green. The sweet and pretty girls preferred to stand just so on the sidelines or sit with legs carefully crossed in the bleachers, thinking me and my athletic friends butchy and crazy to be fighting with the boys. Of course, the boys played fiercely against us, never letting our budding breasts get in the way of a steal or cheap shot but it was the pretty sideline girls who got the attention, the fawning, and the dates. Oh well, I consoled myself as I’d wipe the sweat from my forehead and plan my next play or pass, my time will come.

Interrogatory #65: Describe each and every act of sexual harassment you allege caused or contributed to a hostile work environment at the Langdone Police Department. For each and every act alleged set forth in complete factual detail the date, time, and place of any remark or conduct as well as the names and addresses of all witnesses thereto. Defendants Carlucci, Brandon and Cole routinely engaged in sexual banter, openly discussing their sexual escapades and subjecting me to a hostile work environment.

I threw the rogs on the desk and rubbed my eyes. Why would any woman bring a lawsuit about this stuff? How very embarrassing, to admit to the whole world that I am a helpless female, I can’t stop or control these bad men. Their dirty talking offends me. They have touched me on the buttocks. I get up and pace the room. Years ago, as a 17 year old waitress at the Porthall Restaurant some puny chef decided he wanted a piece of me and one day came around the stainless steel tables and hanging pots in the kitchen and hung his arm long and loose around my shoulder, just whisping across my left breast with his greasy fingers. I grabbed his wrist and twisted it, like my sweet brother Nick had taught me and I looked this guy right in his eyeballs.

Do that again, I spoke slowly, and I’ll knock some fucking teeth out.

I was calm, let the words sit for a few minutes in the hot kitchen air and then threw his hand down in disgust. He left me alone of course after that, although every order I brought out to my customers for the remainder of the summer was cold or undercooked, resulting in their demanding that I bring it back right. The lucrative tips I’d been using for beer money dwindled quickly and I quit the Porthall Restaurant long before Labor Day.

It was the same melody, different words when I exchanged the apron and serving tray for high heels and a briefcase. I was a junior associate at Green Robinson & Shere for exactly three and a half weeks. Terrified at how stupid and inept I was, I couldn’t believe these guys were paying me $50,000 a year, which I considered extraordinary money. I had just finished my first witness deposition, a standard red light-green light auto case. Good Lord it took me three days of terror to prepare, and to add to my high anxiety, Mark Robinson Senior Partner sat in to watch my performance. Today I could do a dep like that with my eyes closed, no preparation, no hesitation but then I was one huge nerve ending. Afterwards, Robinson followed me out of the conference room and to my office. He came in behind me and shut the door. Odd.

Hey Maria, you’re quite the little pit bull, he smiled at me, standing in front of my desk as I hustled about, stepping over files and moving papers around the cluttered desk. All I wanted to do was call my baby-sitter to make sure little Jake was okay, but my boss needed attention. He stepped around the desk, and sat on the corner right next to me. Bells, alarms and whistles went off in my head and I felt a chill.

Ah, yeah, thanks for the compliment, Mark. I guess being kind of relentless in this profession is the highest praise. What do you think, did I rattle that woman enough?

I was rambling on, pushing my chair back to the windowsill until it wouldn’t move. There were files all over the floor around me and there he sat, swinging his leg so his $200 Italian shoe touched my leg each time, in rhythm with my pounding heart.

Hey, all that talk about her injured body parts kind of got me going.

He leaned forward, put a hand on my knee. He even pushed a bit, just a small force, pushing my legs open. I sat there like an idiot, frozen solid and staring.

"You were great, Maria. I was thinking maybe tonight we could hit Beaches after the dep, get a few drinks to celebrate you know?"

The hand.

I needed this job. We had two babies under the age of three and Sal’s accounting firm was struggling. This was not some greasy chef and surely not a job I could just blow off after three weeks. Here was the firm’s premier litigator, the Big Man on Campus, and he was coming on to me. Most of my life, guys just stared right through me. My prowess in field hockey, my straight A’s meant nothing. Why would this one choose to stop and look? Explanations, scenarios for getting out of this were roaring through my head like white water. I was scared, repulsed, and furious in one half second.

No thank you, I pushed his hand off my leg, struggled up out of the chair and past him, uncomfortably close as he leered. Why would I say thank you? He laughed at me and I felt stupid, pathetic even.

No, Mark. I’ve got kids, I have another dep tomorrow. No drinks.

Well, you think about it, honey. He stood up and walked behind me and I felt his eyes on my butt, up and down, up and down.

You appear to have a future here. I’d say partnership was around the corner for you. Part of that is socializing with the big boys, honey. Get used to it.

I did. That’s all, you just get used to it.

So I could take on this sexual harassment thing with my bare hands and I had little time for women who couldn’t. My steely defense increased with each employment case I touched. I worked endlessly on these kinds of claims, as they had become the slip and fall cases of the new decade, the bread and butter of plaintiffs’ attorneys and a wellspring of money for the defense bar. The truth is, up until about my sixth year of practicing defense litigation, I’d chew these gals up and spit them out in little pieces, savoring their misery all the way. Fighting was fun. It was so energizing to be just like a guy, to be stronger and smarter. Knowledge of the law and its archaic and unworkable rules of procedure and evidence gave us the supreme caveman’s club. Once I got the hang of it, I wielded it with joy bordering on abandon. Lately, though, like a massive melting of snow around me I had begun to see glimpses of the rock and scruffy grass of real life. I was finding that when fighting, even fighting with cocky men, the thrill was gone. It happens in ice hockey all the time—two combatants circle dance slowly then pummel furiously, pull clothing around, get tired and pray secretly that somebody will come and make it stop.

After a few years of litigating I began to understand why lawyers blossomed in doing their awful tasks with such menacing glee: there’s great money to be found, and in getting there you leave a battlefield littered with bodies of the unsuspecting litigant or adversary. It’s some powerful stuff, these victories. Like steroids building a weak and skinny body into a force to be reckoned with, the lawyer-power makes folks feel hot and brawny. Take a good long look at most lawyers. You won’t see a lot of chiseled pectoral muscles or tight rippling abs. By and large, they can be a scrawny lot—social and physical misfits of sorts—not smart enough to be doctors and not brave enough to build skyscrapers. So the suits and briefcases, secret handshakes and hidden twists in the legal morass bestow the power, fear, and stature we small humans seek.

For me there was even greater pleasure in blind-siding my male colleagues. I’d sashay into an oral argument in my little lawyer suit with my heels and well-shaped legs, kind of wink across counsel table and shake the hair out of my eyes. He smiles a little, looks at my legs and his mind starts wandering off the legal principal of respondeat superior as it relates to the operation of an automobile during company time and by the end of our session with the judge I have pulled his ankles out from under him, pinned him to the mat and moved on to the next victim.

When you’ve spent most of your life as a nameless, faceless nothing-special kid these moments sustain you, I promise, and keep you coming back for more. After the terror of law school and those first six months of practicing, where the secretaries know more about law than any associate ever will, it feels good to gain some balance by learning how to fight. It’s pure football wisdom: the best offense truly is a good defense and a lost and clueless girl lawyer had better find those sea legs fast, had better get defensive early and often. Most often, my brethren treated me with disdain and this was just fine. Their dismissal of me made me put up my dukes. You will not take me down.

This female cop let the guys get the better of her. They were just being guys. I could have handled it; she should have. My eyes wander out the window now, to the beautiful white-hot summer sky and I wonder where the fire in my belly has gone. I am trying to rouse the beast again, but it’s sleeping or dead. Lately I seem to be losing my grip and I’m watching my life sort of circle the drain. I am so tired of fighting. Maybe—I can’t even entertain a level of empathy—but maybe this female cop just got tired of fighting too.

Maria, the intercom barked at me.

It was Mary, Richard Green’s secretary, in her whiny nasal tone, telling me to come to Richard’s office.

Maria, she snapped again, can you get in here.

It wasn’t a question. Some of the secretaries at Green Robinson & Schere treated female litigators with contempt. Their glory days were over and growing up to a real job 9 to 5, was none too enjoyable for them. On top of the fact that they had to work twice as hard to manipulate their husbands now that the bloom was off the rose, having to take direction from another woman was so distasteful, repulsive even. If Sandy Resetan, the only other female junior associate, or I dared to asked a secretary to do something she’d often roll her eyes, shake her head—body language all over screaming Jesus, I’m busy woman, do it yourself. The same request from a person with external genitalia, however, brought perky attention and submission. Despite what men think, and as all women know, we are toughest on each other.

When this particular summons came my buddy Jack Cander had just opened my office door without knocking, plopping down in my office like a black lab. There were five other first year associates who started at Green Robinson & Schere with me, one other woman and four guys and like terrified recruits sent to a foreign land to kill people, we sort of faux-bonded. There was a friendship to be found in shared misery but the partnership track would derail any loyalty. It was like being dumped head first and naked into a raging river. We flailed about, flapping arms at each other—help!— but in the end it was each man for himself.

In the crazy landscape of bullies and intellects which informed my lawyer-world, people I would never choose to spend ten minutes with became my dear buddies, tied together closely by the drowning web of law. With Jack, Brian, Tim and Sandy I could say or do anything. They really were—at least initially—earnest and sweet and we’d hold each other up during 16-hour days and the screaming pressures of a partner in trial. It was all so very much what none of us wanted, each of us too afraid to ask the real question, what the hell is this? God, all the work, all the yakking about justice and the Constitution and here we were, inflating our time sheets, screaming at secretaries and making the world safe for major insurance companies.

Mark Robinson remained my supervising partner from the outset. I suspect he was allowed his pick of the litter. Robinson was classically handsome, with fine soft brown hair and striking blue eyes. Women jurors loved him and he knew it. Still, except when he was pacing thoughtfully before a jury, his shoulders seemed to ache from the fury he always carried on his back like stone. Mark never wore his wedding ring in trial, preferring to flash the unadorned left hand to any woman he had in that almighty jury box. And they responded, he won some big cases. I was learning at his knee and was more than once oddly thrilled at watching him bring a deponent to tears or leave a witness shattered. This was beginning to scare me.

Twenty of the state’s largest insurance companies used Green Robinson as outside litigation counsel and the influx of injuries and misery never ended. Files were opened in a partner’s name, with a form letter fawning all over the insurance company. The case was then unceremoniously shipped to a low level associate who would do everything in the partner’s name, at a partner’s billing rate. The non-insurance company clients, the big corporate mahoffs and the personal injury plaintiffs were treated differently. Though the partners rarely touched those files either, these clients got special audiences with the big boys, being led to believe that this well heeled lawyer really had a clue as to what was going on. In truth, before any meeting with a client, the partner would call in the associate-drone and demand an accounting, what is going on in this file? And then he’d send the little lawyer back to his cell and wax brilliant before the client. Like many businesses, a law office works like a tube of toothpaste. You’ve got to squeeze the

bottom to ensure abundance at the top. My career so far being spent on the bottom, along with twenty-seven other non-partners, I was used to being squeezed.

On this summer day it didn’t bother me so, that Robinson was signing his name to my work, which I was billing out at fake hours for work done in a fraction of the time. We had to perform 2000 billable hours a year, that is, hours that could be passed onto the client for payment. Given the intensity of the work, unless you stayed chained to your desk it was damn near impossible, so lawyers always faked it. If a task took three minutes we billed a half hour. Each casual participant, at an hour’s worth of time, billed a five-minute inter-office discussion about a case. So three lawyers talking in the hallway for five minutes could cost a client $800.00. I hated this at first, and fought like hell to be honest on my time sheets but the system was too huge and I couldn’t do it. I buckled, like everyone else. Sometimes that old Catholic school guilt crept into my soul, and I’d anguish over the many little lies I told as a lawyer each day of my sorry lawyer life. But there were so many bills to pay, and I had three kids and a crumbling marriage. I’d stroke those clients, pad that timesheet, tote that barge. I really did not anticipate that I’d be spending my career twisting words, searching out loopholes for corporate clients with big money, deliberately delaying litigation to wear down an adversary. When I applied to law school I was drunk with my own self-righteousness, high on the power of the JD, what it would bring me in status and money. Eventually, I trained myself to look past the morally challenging aspect of the job and just revel in how cool it was to call someone, identify myself as an attorney and listen to the voice clutch and change.

Jack Cander, now arranged casually with his left leg draped across my office chair, was my greatest foxhole friend. He was a funny and good guy who was also uncomfortably com-promising small measures of integrity each day but Jack did a much better job of dealing with the tough part of law, that is, the addictive enjoyment of semi-slaughter. We shared an insane passion for sports and more than once we sat in the firm’s video room under the guise of reviewing a surveillance tape when actually we were watching ESPN. Jack was a brother-friend, smart and humble and so charming it was like opening the window wide when he came near. Some days, our office building fairly stank with arrogance and Jack was pollution control.

Oh boy, he smiled widely after hearing the intercom’s command, Principal’s office. I’m outta here Testa. If you’re lucky you’re being fired.

You’re hilarious Cander. I’ve got kids to support. As much as I’ve grown to hate this, I can’t do anything else and unemployment is a pretty dismal prospect.

Hey, he said, holding his hands up in a gesture of great defense, don’t yell at me sweetheart. You’re the one that procreated thrice. I’m still saving myself for the right woman.

Get out of here, I pushed him out the door as we walked into the hall, there is no right woman.

Being summoned by the Big Guy was rarely a good sign and it always made my head ache. I sank into the lush dark carpeting as I snaked through the back hallways and cubbyholes where the underlings toiled, moving quickly towards the vast open space of Partner Land. It was quieter there, by the huge corner offices with bay and ocean views, classical music playing softly, strong and reassuring artwork on the walls and sturdy, uncomfortable wing chairs in the reception area. Why do people with money feel like they have to sit in bad chairs? Everything about Partner Land spoke money and trust. It was indeed a place where the uninformed (and corporate VPs were always among this sad group, though they fancied themselves silent members of Partner Land) would gladly dump buckets of money at the feet of a lawyer. Help me, make the system work for me. And, inevitably, the more money dumped, the better the system worked.

I smiled at Richard’s stony secretary because it gave me great joy to do so. She nodded her nose in the direction of The Big House, as the associates liked to call the huge office expanse occupied by Sir Richard. We called him Dick actually, all the time, in our mutinous groups, gleeful at how great the universe can be, bestowing a name like Dick on such an arrogant snipe. Dick hated that name, of course, and no one ever addressed him as genitalia in his presence.

Tall, very white and skinny, Dick had that familiar lawyer-look of generalized irritability, always rolling his shoulders around like he had bad gas and running the palm of his right hand flat over his balding pate. Like many people who make too much money for doing marginal or unimportant work, Dick had a way of making anyone near him feel small. It might just be the way he’d extravagantly pull his left arm out from his expensive suit sleeve to stare at his Rolex while you were trying to talk. Maybe he’d look past you often to someone more exciting or important down the hall. I really hated Dick, but who knows, he could have been a nice guy in college, played the guitar, had good friends. Dick probably went to law school with some guarded notion of doing Justice, but was overcome by the smell of money wafting from Partner Land.

I rounded Mary’s desk and noted an office full of suits, different suits than my buddies Jack and Tim. My breathing changed immediately, and I tugged indiscreetly at my skirt, to make sure everything was straight, to make sure I was ready. Since this room was filled with Important Men and I was just a seven year associate female, I knew I was there because of biology. There was some menial task that needed to be done, something distasteful to the male partners, and I was going to do it. Sometimes, in order to hang with the boys you just had to be a girl. Today, I knew that as always, no matter what the task, I wouldn’t say no or I can’t or I’m busy. In fact, I would act pleased and humbled, I’m sure. I was such a good indentured servant. Married to the salary I needed to get free of my suffocating husband and totally without the ability to do anything but play with words and argue, I’d do anything. Or just about.

Although having to go