Stephen Cannell: Runaway Heart

Herman Strockmire Jr., attorney at law, got his

fourth severe ventricular arrhythmia at 7:45 Tuesday morning while riding up to his borrowed office on the thirtieth floor of the Century City high-rise. It was the day before he was scheduled to appear in federal court to argue his case to protect the monarch butterfly. He was in the plush-pile elevator, rocketing upwards at blast-off speeds, his ears popping every ten floors, his short, bulging body feeling as if it were pulling at least two Gs. His heart arrhythmias always started with the same curious sensation: first a mild loss of energy, followed by a sinking feeling as if a hundred extra pounds had just been strapped onto his five-foot-eight-inch, lunchbox-shaped frame. This heavy sluggishness was immediately accompanied by a sensation of light-headedness that quickly left him-short of breath, dizzy, and slightly woozy. Fifty-five-year-old Herman didn't have to take his pulse to know that the old ticker had just gone into severe arterial flutter. He didn't have to, but he did anyway force of habit.

He set his faded briefcase down, grabbed his fat, furry left wrist, and wrapped his stubby fingers around it, finding his pulse.

"Jesus," he muttered into the elevator Muzak. "It's doing a damn fandango." He didn't want to count beats; didn't have to, really. He knew from past episodes that it was up over 150, maybe as high as 185.

I don't need this now, he thought.

On the thirtieth floor the elevator doors hissed open revealing the art deco foyer of Lipman, Castle amp;c Stein, Entertainment Law. They had thoughtfully placed a marbleized mirror on the opposing wall (actors love mirrors) and Herman Strockmire Jr. was forced to take a depressing personal inventory as he stepped off the elevator into his own sagging, bulging reflection. He looked like shit.

In the last ten years his Bavarian gene map had veered. The decade had turned him into a stocky carbon copy of his dead father.

Herman Strockmire Sr. had been a foundry worker a metal press operator banging out steel sheets in the humid heat of a Pittsburgh mill, each thudding, hammering stroke of the metal press pounding the poor, elder Herman shorter and lower, until the old German immigrant seemed like a fun-house distortion of a human being.

Now, as Herman Jr. studied himself in the law firm's marbleized mirror, he saw his dead father: short, Teutonic, absurd. The hand of gravity was reaching out with gnarled fingers and pulling him down toward the grave, while his runaway heart spun wildly out of control.

Herman's borrowed office at Lipman, Castle amp; Stein was an accommodation that his dear friend, Barbra Streisand, had arranged for him. These power brokers were her show business lawyers and they constantly reminded him of their huge respect for her star power. Star was spelled with a dollar sign at Lipman, Castle amp;c Stein. The partners, two Jerrys and a Marty, had acceded to Barbra's "request" and loaned him a small, one-window office that overlooked Century City and the Fox movie studios across the street. For some reason that defied natural selection, Herman had learned that most agents and entertainment lawyers were named Jerry or Marty, with a liberal sprinkling of Sids. Herman had spent the last two weeks in this slick retreat, doing pretrial deps and federal court writs.

Because the trial started tomorrow, Herman had driven in from Barbra and Jim's beach house early that morning, via Malibu Canyon Drive, just before sun-up.

Dear, sweet, politically conscious Barbra had not only prevailed upon her show biz attorneys to loan Herman the office while he was in L.A., but she had lent him the use of the ocean-front pool house at her Malibu estate while she and her husband James Brolin were on vacation in Corsica.

Herman and his thirty-year-old daughter, Susan, had been residing there, using the cars and eating the food, and had permission to do so until Herman's current federal case was adjudicated which, he figured, would be in about two weeks if he didn't die of a coronary first.

He shuffled down the hall to the men's room thinking it looked more like a sultan's harem than a shitter. Black marble floors, brown Doric columns, and decorator washbasins with arched dolphin faucets profiled under directional pin lights. The little, gilded, flippered critters spit water delicately into hammered artificial gold sinks. Herman hefted his briefcase full of writs, pretrial motions, and law books onto the marble counter and popped the latch. It wheezed open like a broken accordion. He rummaged around inside for his pill bottles and, finding the Warfarin first, shook two of the little capsules into his palm. They were blood thinners to prevent strokes during an arrhythmia. He dug out the

bottle of Digoxin that was supposed to control his heart rate, then grabbed a paper cup from the built-in dispenser. He had never before been in a corporate men's room that supplied Dixie cups. Herman tossed the pills into his mouth and washed them down. That was when he got a second look at himself in the well-lit bathroom mirror. He was used up and tired. He'd seen raccoons with subtler eye markings.

But he had no choice; he had to go on. He was on a mission, maybe the most important of his life. An entire species of butterfly was about to be wiped out by biologically enhanced foods. It wasn't just any butterfly he was fighting for, but the heart-stoppingly-beautiful monarch, the majestic creature that had introduced Herman to the wonders of nature as a child. He had studied the beautiful orange-and-black-winged treasures for hours as a boy, lying on his stomach in the grass behind his parents' tiny row house, marveling at their delicate markings, seeing in them God's divine artistry.

The monarch butterfly, once the most common in North America, was now in danger of going onto the endangered species list. Unless Herman blocked the FDA, EPA, USDA, and all the other federal letter agencies that controlled bio-enhanced foods, these priceless treasures of nature might disappear forever, unintended victims of the new gene-spliced Frankenfoods. Specifically corn.

His federal lawsuit was for injunctive relief and damages on behalf of two organizations chartered to protect the monarch. It had been filed and fast-tracked to beat the spring planting season. If successful, it would stop this year's trans-genetic corn crop from going into the ground in May and would pay out damages to his two client organizations. However, the real reason for the suit was to force the government to reexamine the long-term, downstream effects of bio-enhanced food.

Herman felt a surge of anger as he had these thoughts, and with it adrenaline coursed through his tired, sluggish body, doing

god-knows-what to his already jackhammering heart. He fumed about his lawsuit and the arrogant disinterest of the government watchdog agencies and private labs he was suing. The biologically enhanced corn was engineered to kill off mites and pests that ate the cornstalks, but because of inadequate or sloppy testing, it was killing the monarch butterfly as well, and no one else seemed to give a damn.

Herman stood in front of the men's room mirror and glowered at his sagging jowls and shaggy, curly hair that always seemed unkempt. It was then, he noted with mild consternation, that he had "mixed his numbers" again. Herman was colorblind and used a number scheme to stay in one color zone or another. He had the clothing taste of a mill worker, which, like his poor dead father, he'd once been. He never paid attention to trends, always bought cheap, and wore it until the stitches broke. After all, he reasoned, it was hard to dress for success when you were built like a steamer trunk.