TO-WIT: SHUT MY MOUTH
It was a raucous peal of laughter that first caught my attention. It came from the file room, first as a little snorty chuckle, then as a few guffaws, then as a torrent of hilarity from deep in the belly.
Since there is nothing more corrosively disruptive to the practicing of law than unbridled merriment, I immediately made haste to the file room to discover its source and quell it aborning. There I found my long time and until then beloved secretary seated on the floor, an empty accordion folder beside her, papers strewn all around, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks.
I could not immediately call to mind any old cases that warranted such mirth, save perhaps two or three imprudent appeals I had long ago filed which, judging by the opinions they had engendered, appeared to have provided the appellate courts with much jollity.
“Okay,” I queried at the top of my lungs, “what’s so funny?” Wiping away the tears, she stuffed all the papers willy-nilly back into the file folder, handed it to me, and walked back to her desk with that insouciant stroll she long ago effected as a result of my many years of complete dependency on her.
I took the file into my office and started through it. Unlabeled, it contained only an assortment of letters I had written on many different cases over many years, seemingly connected only by the extraordinarily opulent and highly prolific incivility running throughout; I knew at once what she had done.
You see, I am quite besotted with both a spleen easily exasperated by the adversarial rigors of lawyering and a vocabulary blissfully rooted in expletives; and whenever provoked by an opposing pleading, brief, letter, opinion, memory, fantasy or dream, I immediately dictate to my secretary responsive letters engorged with wonderful insults and astonishingly original vituperations which serve to vent my ire. She then routinely sanitizes them and presents for signature something far more civilized and appropriate.
Its an unspoken ritual we’ve been doing now for forty years. I’ve always been silently grateful to her for that overlay of professionalism and I know that, although similarly taciturn, she is thankful for my teaching her how all those hard consonant expletives can be configured to apply to almost any situation. It now appears she has been clandestinely keeping the originals, and that was the file I now held in my hands.
“Dear Mr. ______,” I had dictated to a particularly illegitimate from birth landlord, “If you persist, I will seek a writ of fiere facis, which means I will set fire to your face.”
“Dear Attorney ______, It is not true, as you have complained, that I take issue with the grammar in your pleadings. To the contrary, I take issue with its absence.”
“Dear Judge ______, Congratulations on your masterful proof of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. When you handed out your written opinion immediately after our oral argument, I knew at once you had written it at the speed of light, for in it all real matter has simply ceased to exist.”
There’s more, much more, but perhaps this sampling, with the best words expunged, gives you a hint. Oh what do you do with a secretary like that, one who persistently and without explicit invitation intrudes into the workings of a luridly creative and unfettered mind? Well, you do what I do, keep her around and pay her well. The cost of doing otherwise is simply prohibitive.
©2016, S. Sponte, Esq.