TO-WIT: A Force of None
It’s night now. I’m all alone in my office. The phone is not ringing, the machines have all been shut down for the day and my secretary had gone home to a life.
Although it is quite dark outside, I have turned off all the lights, and here I sit, in darkness and in solitude. I am enjoying these moments, self-deprived of all stimulations, the sensory equivalent of the color black, and I have no wish to leave. I have, at long last, made the decision, and having done so, I want to bask just a while longer in the tranquility.
for many years matrimonial law has constituted large part of my practice, but I have finally decided that I will not do divorces any more, a least not other people’s. I must confess that I weighed this decision carefully, because there were many credible arguments on both sides of the issue. On the pro side, divorce work makes up forty percent of my practice. On the con side, it makes up 10 percent of my income. However, I can summarize the most persuasive argument for you fairly succinctly – I hate it.
It’s not what it used to be, this business of jumping into other people’s toilet bowls. in the old days, before n-fault, divorce cases were different. Injured and innocent spouse was all the rage then and divorce work was really life in the trenches, a no-holds bared, blood and guts diet of infidelity, deviant behavior, cruelty and decay. Ah, those were the days.
Divorce work is different now. It’s all about money, pensions, IRA’s, not a single solitary thing to get the heart pumping. No, it’s not for me. I really began to lose my zest for the work when the use of a camera became obsolete.
I actually made the decision several months ago. Once having done so, I would have preferred to quit cold turkey. I would have preferred to have marked right into my office, seized every remaining divorce file and flung them, inventories and all, into the river. Wouldn’t that have been spiffy?
Unfortunately I couldn’t. In the first place, I don’t live anywhere near a river. And in the second place, I had a whole bunch of pending divorces to finish up, cases that involve real live people who file real live complaints with a Disciplinary Committee that has yet to recognize “spiffy” as a defense.
today however, while attending to one of the few divorce case I have left, I saw the correctness of my decision with such clarity, with such a perfect crystalline vision of reality, that I fully intend to sit here in the dark and savor it for as long as I can.
The lesson for today came in the form of a support hearing, you know, those long-lost poor bastard relatives of due process. I represented the self-employed divorced father of three children whose unemployed but eminently employable ex-wife, in an on-going series of never-ending skirmishes, had petitioned to increase an existing child support order.
“Perhaps we should hit her with preliminary objections,” I mused out loud to my client.
“Perhaps we should hit her with a tractor-trailer,” he mused back.
The hearing was this morning, first thing. I knew the day was going to be less than special when it started with a morning wake up call from my secretary. It was almost time for the hearing to start but I was still sound asleep.
“Are you still in conference with the Governor?” she asked first thing. Damn, the client was already there.
“Sonofabitch,” I answered.
“Yes, I will tell him,” she replied.
By the time I got to the hearing room with my client, fifteen minutes late, opposing counsel was just leaving.
“We didn’t think you were coming,” he replied, unsuccessfully trying to suppress a grin.
“We didn’t think you were coming,” the hearing officer advised after I barged in with both client and opposing counsel in tow. In the total absence of a defense he had already entered an increased order for $450.00 a month, based strictly on the support guideline charts.
“Well, now I’m here and my client is her, so let’s have the hearing, shall we?” I screamed pithily.
Petitioner, being from out of state, had not come. In lieu of her testimony, opposing counsel merely asked the hearing officer to consider an increase, “just because.”
“I do not believe an increase is warranted,” I argued, “unless my esteemed colleague is prepared to cite case law delineating ‘just because’ as sufficient grounds.”
My presentation was flawless. I had both law and fact on my side. My client testified in a reasonably straightforward manner, omitting naught save his fantasy for modification by truck, and at the conclusion of the case, the hearing officer looked at his charts, nodded as sagaciously as his third grade education would permit, and entered an order for $450.00 a month.
“Now let’s see if I have this right,” my client said as we were leaving. “First nobody shows up and he increases the child support to $450.00. then we show up to give evidence and the hearing officer still enters an order for $450.00. Are you going to charge me for this?”
Sing no sad songs for me. It could be worse. I could have to do this for a living.
As for my client, sing no sad songs for him either. as we were walking back from the courthouse, he broke our pregnant silence. “God,” he said, “just imagine how bad it would have been if I had told them how much I really make.”
© 1990, S. Sponte, Esq.