Corporate Tools: The Lawyer

I started thinking about TheLawyer when I was sitting in judge Razzo’s criminal court voire dire, when the ADA and the defense attorneys asked each one of us in the jury:

“Are you a lawyer, do you have any lawyers in your family, or do you know any lawyers?”

Judge Razzo himself (the judge presiding over the trial) was a bit of a character. Older man, with silver hair, his skin had a bit of redness to it, either from being Irish (I assumed) or maybe stemming from a possible love of the booze (likely).

What killed me about him is that once in a while, the judge would roll his eyes at one of the attorney’s statements or requests, and for me, this automatically meant perhaps the trial wouldn’t be so tedious after all.

At the end of the first day, I got home and Googled Judge Razzo’s name, and I guess I wasn’t too surprised to see that the NY Post had featured him a few times, usually having to do with some controversial ruling (he was considered have some diva-like tendencies), but the last time, about his outburst to a potential juror who made some rude remarks during the voire dire. In true Post fashion, the headlines were deliciously cheesy and somewhat funny at the same time, and they wasted no time calling him “Wacko Razzo”!

So back to the lawyer at hand:

At first look, TheLaywer did everything possible to project a certain type of calculated image. That image was to translate: conservative, serious, elegant, and successful.

He wore glasses instead of contacts, for I believe, a desire to appear older. And he succeeded. TheLawyer was about 5 years younger than me, but certainly looked somewhere in his 40s.

His hair was always severely side-parted, and remained extremely moist throughout the day. Not one strand would ever move.

The severe side part reminded me of the way my aunt used to part my two cousins’ hair when they were little boys. They’d get out of the shower, she’d run after them with the comb, and in tears, they’d stand in front of her, facing her, as she ran the fine tooth comb on a geometrically precise straight line from the back of the head to the front.
The excess hair that now found itself piled up on their little foreheads was combed over to the opposite side of the part, and remained there, so proper, until all the water evaporated, and slowly their little childhood cowlicks began to show.

TheLawyer was a compliance attorney at F-ME Corporation nestled in one of those charming towns in upstate New York along the Hudson. His function was to basically be the hall monitor of the company. To comb through every minute detail of crap, instill fear in those who just wanted to do their jobs and go home, and self-hype his level of importance at F-ME.

I think the ultimate level of doucheness that I ever witnessed TheLawyer commit was when our colleague Luke introduced him to a client:

Luke: “Dr. SoandSo, this is TheLawyer, Compliance Counsel at F-ME Corporation.”

At which point TheLawyer interjects and corrects Luke in front of the client, no less:

TheLawyer: “AAhhmm, Luke, I am actually the Senior Compliance Counsel.”

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With his tendency towards self-importance (you think?), he must have really recently gotten into money, as his behavior reeked of nouveau-riche tackiness. You’d think he’d know better, living in NYC, where so many TRULY wealthy people reside, any bipedal inhabitant of the island would have at least learned that it is oh, so gauche to brag about money in such an 80’s, “greed is good”, Gordon Gecko kinda way.

The most delicious and at the same time atrocious example of this came when he told me the story of a recent date he had:

“Soooo, I went out to dinner the other night with this investment banker who does really well, definitely makes way over 6-figures, and between the two of us, the dinner came to over $800 dollars.”

Me: “What did you have, super expensive wine?” (By the way, who the fuck gives a date’s pedigree like that? Makes well into the 6-figures??? Whaaaaaatt?)

He responds with one word, but the one word that says it all:

“Caviar”.

His eyes squinted a little when he said it, and his lips glistened and opened up into a knowing smile, that knowing smile that savored every millisecond of the word, and knew that the word in and of itself was supposed to stand for something:

Yes, that’s right, I’m Senior Compliance Counsel at a major corporation, I moved to NY all the way from Iowa or Ohio, or some other Midwestern state. I went to a 3rd tier law school, but that’s still good enough to get me some prime NYC ass, an investment banker, no less. Yeah, that’s right. And when I go out, I go big, and I spend $800 bucks on

CAAA-VVVVIIIIIIIIII-AAAAARRRRR!

It all played itself in slo-mo in front of me, CAVIAR!

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The whole caviar ordeal reminded me of Cynthia, another new-riche repeat offender. I worked briefly with Cynthia when I lived in Miami. She was recently married and moved to Florida with her husband, who evidently had an MBA from a great school in the Midwest. Mind you, this was the mid 90’s, the Clinton years, the dot com years, the years when all MBAs were being given multiple insane offers, with crazy stock options, out of this world benefits and incentives, it was a free for all. (God I wish I had gotten mine back then, and not later, when every other schmo seems to have an MBA.)
Well, Cynthia liked to remind people all the time that as soon as hubby graduated from B-school he got a job “with a really high salary”. You could see that she was just counting the days until she got the “go ahead and quit your job” sign from her husband, and she’d turn into the Midwestern hausfrau she’d always wanted to be. Hopefully by then, she thought, they’d move out of Miami. You see, she didn’t feel comfortable in Miami. By comfortable, she meant comfortable in a way that one may feel if you live in Dallas, and the local fashion dictates big hair, spatula-applied make-up and faux nails, usually in a ridiculous shade of mauve coral.

And then there was the bit about the ranch:
“Yeeeeaaaaah (think the boss in “Office Space”), my husband’s parents live on a Ranch in Tennessee, THEY OWN 350 ACRES THERE….”

She said this every-single-time the in-laws came up, without fail. We had a running tally of the times she said it, and by the end of the year, the tally had reached into the 200s easy.

Once at a work party, after already mentioning once that the husband “makes a very good salary”, the in-laws “own 350 acres”, and that the husband drove a Mercedes in high school, she also let us all know that “Hubby’s going to retire by 40”…. Nobody said anything. We all just looked at each other as if searching for the correct response.

Florida is a weird place, and people who live there and have a bit of world awareness realize it. Miami was great, sunshine all the time, going to the beach in January, the ability to go to Calle Ocho and get a true cafecito for $50 cents, that gave you a jolt harder than any grande starbucks coffee around, tres-leches at Publix, pastelitos, the relaxed feel the Cubans brought to Miami. But the further north you drove in Florida, the more like the old south it felt.

I remember one time driving from Miami to Savannah, GA to visit a friend. The drive was about 8 hours up I-95, so I had to make several snack and pee stops. One of my last stops, I think it was just north of Jacksonville, was at a Circle-K or one of those totally Florida places.

A conversation was taking place between a customer (little old lady) and the cashier. And this is what I hear as I walk in:

LittleOldLady: Miami and Fort Lauderdale were very nice, but there are just soooo many minorities everywhere! Everyone’s a minority there!

She quickly tried to suck the words back into her mouth as she saw me walk in, since she noticed the very, very olive skin , the angular, very un-anglo-looking features, the eyes that have been called marbles or kalamatas, and yet, all of this with stick-straight dark brown hair.

I said nothing and reveled in her feeling a bit ashamed and uncomfortable. I came to use this same silence technique many more times in the future, as sometimes it drives home the point so much better than words.

Savannah itself is a town that is very old school, very traditional, and full of history, but at the same time, nicely balanced by the presence of the art school. After a few days there, you get to know the bums by name (when they ask you for money, it’s “Can you spare $7 dollars?”, and not 50 cents as you would hear in other cities) and the locals warm up to you very quickly.

My friend’s charming apartment was at least 1500 square feet of antique fixtures, a gorgeous fireplace, uber high ceilings and what seemed to be miles of long-board wood floor.

In NY the place would have been at least about $6000 a month. The whole 3-floor building was owned by a couple of southern-style queens that also managed the jewelry shop on the first floor.

One day as my friend’s quasi-boyfriend was leaving in the morning, face puffy, and bed hair, one of the jewelry shop yentas had been quietly observing….

Yenta: “I saw someone leaving your apartment this morning…”

My friend, a bit incredulous by the snooping and without much time to think of a witty reply: “Ah, oh well, he’s just a friend, we ended up watching a late movie, and he just stayed over.”

Yenta, in that delicious southern gayish manner: “It’s naaaahhhhhce to have frieeeennds laaahhke thaiiiit”…..

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Besides caviar, star/CEO-effing and being uptight beyond belief, TheLawyer also had a weird love towards all things Washington, DC.

At pretty much all his speeches, trainings and talks throughout the company, TheLawyer would conveniently “drop” something about Washington. Of course with the intent to be used as his closeness to importance, closeness to the “lawmakers” who regulate our industry, you get the picture.

It became so comical, that people started noticing and started jotting down the number of times he said Washington in any conversation. Funny that it became all about the funny, and lost all the real effect he wanted it to have.

But the best Washington move he ever had was when either his cell phone or office phone rang, and god forbid, if the caller id started with area coded 202, you’d inevitable get the:

“I gotta take this. It’s Washington.”

“I gotta take this, it’s Washington”, came not only with the verbal positioning, he also held both palms straight up and pushing forward, almost channeling Diana Ross in the choreography for “Stop, in the Name of Love”.

It could have easily been a college roommate, old girlfriend, wrong number, no matter. You would think Condi Rice was getting a call from GW Bush himself, and national security depended on the outcome of this call.

The same side-smile overtook his face with "I gotta take this; it’s Washington", as when he told me the Caviar date story for the second time, two weeks later.