TO-WIT: ME, MYSELF AND I OBJEC
She was, for me, the perfect client; elderly, poor, alone, and about to lose her beloved home for unpaid taxes. I couldn’t have been happier. I in turn was for her the perfect lawyer; free, and for that she couldn’t have been happier herself.
Her children were willing to help her pay the unpaid taxes, so lack of funds wasn’t the problem. She had just misplaced the tax bill is all, and then she forgot about it. As a result the property had been purchased at the most recent tax sale for a tenth of its value by your typical cretinous bottom feeder, and after she had refused his offer to sell it back to her at full value he commenced process to heave her out into the street.
“A real Simon LeGree, huh,” I commented to her at our initial meeting. “No,” she replied, “I think his name is Howard.”
Despite the fact that her home had already been sold, there was a procedural defect in the process, and on that account I was certain the sale could be set aside. Her eyes glistened with tears when I told her, and mine were headed in that direction as well.
“God bless you, God bless you, God bless you,” she said as she departed. It was a lovely sentiment to be sure, but I’m a lawyer now for forty five years and I think that kind of salvation has long been off the table.
Ah, but still it was another crusade, another chance to don mask and cape and take vengeance on the miscreants of the world. And who says the practice of law isn’t any fun?
I immediately filed a petition to set the sale aside and the court scheduled it for oral argument. I prepared for it as I always do, by rereading my brief and complimenting myself on its acuity. Before I left for court that morning I honed my didactic mien to a razor’s edge in front of my bathroom mirror, and by the time I walked into the courtroom I was loaded for rancorous vivisection. Other than causing me to erroneously discount all the validity of an opponent’s argument from time to time, it is truly such fun to be a raging moralist.
I was alone at counsel’s table when His Honor took the bench. “I have been advised that neither opposing counsel nor his client are going to appear,” he announced, “so I’ll just sign your proposed order,” and with that he picked up the large fountain pen he keeps on his bench just for that purpose.
“No, wait,” I bellowed, “I object,” and I hastily looked around for something to throw at him.
“Object,” I thought to myself, “did I say ‘object’?” “Object,” His Honor queried, “did you say ‘object’?”
Now if this were a television show, this would be the time the camera would close in on my face, I would turn towards it and as an aside would explain to a startled but adoring television audience why I was objecting to the entry of my own order. But there is no camera, there is no television audience, there is only you, and I have to make do with it.
So listen, what fun is it to slaughter a dragon if there is no gore, what joy if there is no writhing in agony, no echoing death rattle to proclaim one’s primacy? It’s not for nothing this is called an adversarial profession, and while that may drive many genteel-minded folks away from it, it can also provide a great deal of lawful gratification for those of us for whom a violent, victorious denouement is the icing on the blood; without an opponent physically present to suffer the ignominy of defeat at the end of a crusade, what is there to savor?
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that there must be a parole officer somewhere in my background, but you’d be wrong. Yes, I take both victory and defeat with the same sense of intense personal investment one usually reserves for gladiatorial combat, and yes, I probably would have been a great Roman, but no, that’s as far as it goes. Butterflies are safe around me, as are most other living, intelligent creatures.
“Your Honor, may I have a moment,” I asked.
“I think you need a lot longer than that,” he replied, “but certainly.”
“Have you ever argued a case,” I whispered to the tipstaff seated near me at counsel’s table. When she shook her head in the negative, I made the same inquiry of the court reporter. Getting the same response I quickly calculated that there was no one else in the courtroom who could take up a spirited, doomed defense for the absent reprobates, no one who could stand in as a target for my wrath du jour.
“I withdraw my objection,” I advised the court, and with that he signed the order, stood up, shook his head at me in disbelief and left the bench. The court reporter and tipstaff quickly followed.
I sat there for a while in the otherwise empty courtroom. So there would be no slaughter, not even so much as a modicum of tussle, only the emptiness of lexis interruptus and the simmering solace that soon enough another chance would come my way. I picked up my briefcase and went to lunch. I was really hungry.
©2016, S. Sponte, Esq.