TO WIT:
My office workday, like that of my colleagues, consists of innumerable interruptions compressed like a crime against nature into a limited span of time. As with any rare commodity, I guard what time I have against any would-be usurpers, and I have come to regard any unscheduled derailment of my train of thought, unladen though it may well be, with the same disdain otherwise reserved exclusively for real estate brokers nee housewives.
I trust you can appreciate my displeasure when some months ago a law book salesman, one Liberman by name, outflanked my secretary, rushed into my office unannounced and presented me with volume 1-A of the proposed 150 volume set on Admiralty Law in the State of Kansas. With a face as straight as I have ever seen on his genre, he assured me that this set would catapult me from the melancholy mediocrity of a small town practice directly into a performance before the U.S. supreme Court of such scintillating brilliance that at its conclusion, the Chief Justice would proclaim me competent and insist that I autograph his copy of my brief. In anticipation of the future worth of my signature, he requested a sample, affixed to a check as a deposit. He promised me instant exaltation if I acted at once, and I promised him instant exaltation if he didn’t vanish. In the next instant, I was alone again on the track.
Such devastating directness has not come easily to me, for early on in my career, I was very law book salesperson’s Valhalla. It has taken me years to dislodge the trappings of civility in these matters, a period which has, for the lack of that ability, cost me dearly and annually. In those formative years, I adhered out of sheer terror to the notion of literary osmosis, the belief that acquisition of the books was somehow akin to the acquisition of the knowledge contained therein. I was sole, young, unlearned and inexperienced, and above all else, I feared mortification, the root word of which means death, at the hands and minds of more learned adversaries. It was, to my mind, a clear case of purchase or perish.
Oh, and it was so analgesic, no money down, no interest, only $37.50 per set per month per infinitum, and a tacit promise never to sue for failure to pay. All those lovely books surrounded me with the cherished aura of competence, and as long as I didn’t actually say or do anything, I appeared to all the world, if not the bar, as a LAWYER. My library grew by leaps and bound volumes, but to my dismay, all I acquired was an avid following of law book salespeople, who congratulated me on my practice, obviously booming to require such a vast library. They treated me with great respect and some of them even stopped spitting on my carpet. Even after I bought all they had to sell, still they came, making sure I was not some legal fiction by keeping their fingers firmly in my pocket parts.
No longer a pauper in forms, I drew writs of quo warranto, trover and coram nobis, storing them as against some gloriously litigious day of reckoning. I Shepardized every decision on the Rule in Shelly’s Case, awaiting that frantic call from the heirs of A. I prayed for a fertile octogenarian like a Bedouin prays for rain, and I knew exactly how to empower an entire posse comitatus if need be. That no one really wanted a posse comitatus was of no moment. I would nonetheless be ready. I took to quoting chapter and verse on the law at every chance. Before long however, even my professional friends stopped discussing their cases with me, and unless a book salesman was in town, I ate lunch alone.
It did not take me very long to realize that something was amiss. All the law book salespeople I knew drove Lincolns and Cadillacs while I rode the bus. I gained that first painful thrust of insight the day a client called to ask me how his case was coming. I answered him by citing from memory every case on point from the Pennsylvania Reporter, including, of all things, those from the Superior Court. “That’s real nice,” he said when I was finished, “but what’s my case worth and when do I get the money? I’m looking at a new car.” I told him I didn’t know and shortly thereafter he got another lawyer. His case was settled in three months, just the length of time it would have taken me to research and draft a masterful brief in support of the preliminary objections to my opponent’s new matter.
In due time, I really did become a lawyer, and eventually I learned how to make my living at it. Many of the books I still have, and some I even use from time to time. The rest are packed away somewhere, mildewed and dusty, gathering apt tribute to a freshman’s folly. The salesmen no longer flit around like drones to a queen, and while I may not be as learned as some, I do all right. And it’s only occasionally any more that I wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what to do if a client’s boat runs aground and goes belly up in Kansas.
© 1980 – S. Sponte, Esq.