Grif Stockley: Blind Judgement

He was almost broke before he left and wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been a free trip.

Feeling sorry for him and guilty at the same time, I say, “I’ll buy you lunch. I’ve got a case to run by you.”

As I knew he would, Dan perks up at the mention of food. Gripping the armrests of the chair, he pushes himself up like an old man and looks around my office.

“Where did you get those prints?” he asks respectfully.

“They don’t look too bad.”

“Amy thought,” I say, standing up, too, “my office needed sprucing up.

I gave up on the plants since they insist on being watered.” “You gonna marry Gilchrist?” Dan asks as he follows me out.

“You could do a lot worse.”

“I have done a lot worse,” I remind him, but not responding to his question. Amy, Dan, and I were classmates and friends together in night law school, and he knows about some of the women I dated after my wife Rosa’s death. Actually, Amy and I are considering living together if I

ever get heat in my shiny new house from hell.

At the front desk, Julia grins at Dan.

“You couldn’t look any stiffer if you were mounted on the wall.”

It has taken me years to get used to Julia, a niece of the owner, and I have needed every one of them. She has lifetime security in a job she despises. If that isn’t a prescription for hell on earth, I don’t know what is. As usual, Dan regresses in her presence.

“Actually, my body is one long, stiff, hot poker,” he says, leering at her.

Julia lets the skirt that Dan calls imitation cracked leather when she’s not around ride up to within an inch of her panties.

“If I had a dollar for every guy who believed that,” she says, stretching her breast implants against today’s tight wool sweater, “I could buy this dump from my Uncle Roy and turn it officially into the nursing home it’s becoming. When are you guys gonna get some clients in here? It’s like living in a morgue, it’s so quiet.”

“It’s the cold,” I say, knowing she is talking about Dan and some other lawyers on our floor.

Dan is floundering, but then it seems he always is.

“If it was the summer,” Julia challenges me, “you’d be saying it was the heat. Face it, you solo practitioners are dinosaurs. You don’t know how

to market yourselves. You charge too little or too much, and then don’t collect half of what you bill. Half you guys on this floor are dead and don’t even know it.”

Dan grins.

“Thanks for the pep talk, sweetie,” he says, staring admiringly at Julia’s chest.

“You want me to bring you some pie from downstairs?”

“It wouldn’t make it to the elevator.” She smirks, staring back at Dan’s stomach. Though she would sooner die than admit it, Julia has become quite protective of Dan. While he was going through his recent craziness, she worried about him like a mother hen. While Julia likes to pick on Dan, she becomes enraged when other people follow suit. Or putting Dan’s own spin on it, to be such a competitive society, there is nothing we hate worse than competition.

Downstairs in the cafeteria, Dan blows through a plate of spaghetti in five minutes flat.

“Have you ever noticed that the real pleasures in life,” he says, wiping his mouth with a napkin at our table in the non-smoking section, “last no more than a few minutes tops-fucking, eating, shitting, the few seconds right before you know you’re finally going to sleep? All this civilized behavior just fills out the day. We’re just animals, ole buddy. I’d just as soon drop over on all fours right now and quit kidding myself.”

Poor Dan. He’s never had a kid. Childish and silly, he would make a great father. The children of his divorce clients hang all over him.

He plays with them as if he is their long-lost brother.

“What’s stopping you?” I egg him on.

“Just get neck id and plop on down there. The country’s looking for some honest-to-God leadership. If poor Bill tried to do it, half the country would say it was just a way to try to get a woman to go to bed with him.”

Dan loosens his tie as he gazes out over the crowded tables of mostly office workers from inside the Layman Building, who, like us, are beginning to show symptoms of cabin fever after a long cold snap. How do people stand the north in the winter? Three weeks in a row of frigid air is all it takes for us to start talking crazy. Dan sips greasy coffee and then nags at me, “Have you thought any more about joining One-on-One?

They’ve got a list of boys a mile long.”

I roll my eyes and pretend to sigh. Dan has been bugging me to get involved in a buddy program for ghetto kids for the last month.

“I know,” I say, thinking of the fact sheet he left in my chair last week.

“Let’s make a deal. If you can keep quiet about it until after this case is over, I’ll sign up, okay?” Despite Dan’s cynicism, he has a bowl of

mush where his heart ought to be. Actually, I’ve been feeling guilty for deciding to desert my old neighborhood. Rosa and I lived in a mixed area for years. Since her death I’ve felt increasingly detached from my black neighbors. At Dan’s urging, I have thought of taking on a kid from one of the projects as a way of keeping a pledge to Rosa that I wouldn’t try to become a Yuppie after her death. Fat chance with my income, but my new neighborhood will be lily-white, and maybe joining One-on-One will keep the guilt at a manageable level.

Rosa would have been angry with me for leaving our neighborhood without a good reason.

Dan pretends to zip his mouth.

“So go ahead and brag about your new case. I don’t mind. I think I took a vow of poverty somewhere along the way and nobody told me about it.”

I smile at the thought of Dan as St. Francis of Assisi. A monk he is not, even if he might be happier if he accepted his new solo status as permanent.

Over a piece of pecan pie and a cup of coffee I don’t need, I run through Lattice Bledsoe’s visit and admit, “I had forgotten how much anger I’ve carried all those years at the Taylors. I thought I had gotten over it.”

Dan burps into the fist of his right hand.

“We never get over anything,” he gasps, ever the philosopher.

I wonder if that is true. If I take this case because I think I can get back at the Taylors somehow, I will screw it up. Surely, I’ve got more sense than to pull a stunt like that. Though I have made more mistakes in the last five years than I care to remember, I have never betrayed a client or sacrificed his interest. Now is not the time to start. I look down at my watch. It’s time to get on the road.

I begin the dreary trek east on 1-40 toward Bear Creek thinking how monotonous it would be to make this drive every day. The cold gray winter afternoon and unrelieved flatness of the Delta soil give me plenty of time to think. I know I am having a severe case of buyer’s remorse, but it is hard not to second-guess my abrupt decision to move from a neighborhood I’ve lived in for the past twenty-five years. Yet, maybe I should have sold the house after Rosa’s death seven years ago.

It is only in the last few months that I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that my image of myself as an ex-sixties liberal no longer fits the facts. It was Rosa who had bonded with our neighbors, a mixture of mostly middle-class blacks and elderly whites who, for one reason or another, had decided they couldn’t afford to sell when blacks had begun to be steered into the neighborhood.

The sixties (despite the excesses) had been such a hopeful time for me.

I was helping to implement the legacy of Kennedy’s Camelot and Johnson’s “Great Society.” Driven by the legislation of the period (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaid, Medicate, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Housing Act of 1968, etc.), America would wipe out its twin evils of racial discrimination and poverty, and I was doing my part.