TO-WIT: HARD DRIVE, PART II
As if it wasn’t bad enough that my brain capacity had become saturated with far too much accumulated information, I soon came to realize that most of it was useless at that. I mean, who really needs to know the name of the tipstaff in orphan’s court or the name of the recorder of deeds or the names of all the judges on the Superior court, for heaven’s sake.
Oh, I still had plenty of room for the client of 12 years ago whose business I could not save. I still had plenty of room for the client of seven years ago whose house I could not save. And I still had plenty of room for countless other clients with countless other causes whose lives I could not better, whose dismal slide along life’s razor blade was slowed nary a skootch by my efforts. Those pains, those failures, oh, I remembered them all right. Bust just once I try to recall from my youth that gorgeous blonde with salacious energy sufficient to light Seattle for a month and no more room at the inn. That cinched it.
The next morning found me in the waiting room of Dr. Wilhelm DeFrag. He had been recommended to me by Howard (or was it Fred?), my personal physician, as a therapist trained to deal with such matters.
I was so grateful that, after hearing my tale of woe, he did not suggest the acquisition of an inflatable companion. Instead, he spoke to me in reassuring terms.
“I have treated many patients with the same problem,” he said. He wrote on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Meet met at this address tonight at midnight,” he said, “and we shall begin.” He added as I headed for the door. “Prepare yourself. It’s not going to be pretty.”
Midnight found me at the address. I was mildly surprised to be standing in the alley behind the courthouse, but inasmuch as Dr. DeFrag showed up promptly at the appointed hour, I did not have much time to ponder the matter.
“Follow me,” the good doctor said, and he opened an unlocked rear door to the courthouse and entered.
“How did you arrange that,” I asked.
“You mean the unlocked door? There’s nothing to arrange. They’re never locked from the inside, only the outside. The only security problem courthouses really have is from people trying to escape.”
In a matter of minutes, we found ourselves standing outside Courtroom No. 1. “Does this look familiar to you?” he asked.
Before I could respond, he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me inside.
He switched on the lights, placed the palms of his hands on the cheeks of my face and directed my head, much against my will, toward the bench. “What do you see there?” he screamed. “Look, look, what do you see?”
“It’s 1971,” I said. “My first big jury trial. Arghh, it’s awful. My client was the defendant; it was a foreclosure of a purchase money mortgage; there was clearly fraud by plaintiffs in the inducement; there were four days of trial.”
“And …?” the doctor demanded.
“I can’t, I can’t, it’s too painful.”
“You must,” he replied.
“Criminy, the judge directed a verdict against my client even though the jury found he had been defrauded in the purchase. The judge said even if you get cheated, you still gotta pay the mortgage. No supporting law, just his personal philosophy. My client won on appeal, but the costs of litigation pretty much wiped him out.
In the next instant, we were in Courtroom No. 2. Forced to stare at the bench again, I remembered another old case, from 1979. I hadn’t thought of it in years.
“Tell it,” Dr. DeFrag screamed in my ear. “Tell it.”
“It was a contact case; my client should have won it easily. We lost because was going though a divorce myself and couldn’t concentrate. I felt horrible.”
“How horrible?” the doctor asked.
“Not horrible enough to fess up,” I said. “I told the client that he had done a bad job of testifying and the jury didn’t like him.”
“Was that the truth?”
“No.”
Then it was Courtroom No. 3, then No. 4, then No. 5. It went on like that all night. In each courtroom, I relived failures, some of which I thought I had forgotten years before. It was astonishing to me how powerful some of those memories were.
After what seemed like an eternity, we were both standing in the alley again. It was dark and cold and I felt like hell.
“This is your therapy?” I bellowed. “This is what you do to your patients? It’s bad enough I had to suffer through those humiliations the first time. God knows, I didn’t want to relive them.”
“You’ll feel better in the morning,” he said. “Give me a call when you do.”
Well, the next morning I felt great. “That’s some technique you got there,” I told Dr. DeFrag on the phone.
“For most lawyers,” he said in response, “success is hard to conceptualize. Because everything you do is so adversarial, even the victories can often feel like defeats. Soon, everything feels like a defeat, and after many years, all these defeats take up valuable memory space. The secret is to face your failures, perceived or otherwise, bring them to the forefront of your consciousness, realize they aren’t that bad and let them go.”
Well, it all sounds like a lot of psychobabble, I know, but I sure feel better, and my memory is significantly improved to boot.
Last week I ran into the good doctor at a cocktail party. “I was wondering,” I said, “how would you treat a lawyer who doesn’t feel like a failure?”
For a second, he looked at me as if hit right between the eyes with a baseball bat. Then he started to snicker. The snicker soon became a chortle, then a guffaw and then a convulsive stream of belly laughs. Within minutes he was rolling on the floor, paralyzed with laughter, and that’s where I left him. Some questions, I guess, should never be asked.
© 2000, S. Sponte, Esq.