How It All Began, Part 2 - The Oakland Office

Meanwhile, back in the “no there there” of Oakland, California, the real interest at work was the office dramas of which there was no shortage. Of the three partners who gave the firm its name, the Bezerkle Brothers and Dumb occupied the Oakland office. However, between the Bezerkle Brothers and Mr. Dumb, Esq., a split had already occurred before I arrived. Although they remained within the same small office, Mr. Dumb and secretary had split off, isolated themselves from the rest of the office members, and operated as an independent unit.

They refused to speak or interact with anyone (including me, the new temp in the office) in the Bezerkle faction unless they had to. Mr. Dumb’s disgust for the Bezerkle brothers was apparent, undisguised, and readily made known to anyone, even an outsider like me. At least I was in the office gossip loop and in this line of work, anything and everything helped to make the day pass with more interest- music, food, gossip, drama.

Within the Bezerkle faction, the harried Elder Bezerkle was attempting to manage the Oakland office. How could I tell? His graying hair, his look of constant anxiety and hurried air, his being harassed from all directions at once. I felt sorry for him sometimes, but really, who held a gun to his head and made him go to law school? I would have somewhat more compassion for him now as an older adult than I did back then. In 1986 I was still strongly under the musical and political sway of the Clash and generally hated corporate entities on the general belief that they were all inherently evil. “Career opportunities, the ones that never knock…” was my theme song. That and “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” At that time, I still believed I was going to go much further in life than any mere lawyer, Mr. John Grisham, The Hack, Esq. included. But really, poor Bezerkle the Elder, who had much to contend with just from his brother, Bezerkle the Younger.

Bezerkle the Younger was having a torrid affair with a young beauty, Esmeralda, who was short, petite, feminine, lovely and extremely sharp of tongue. She often treated Bezerkle the Younger with unrestrained contempt, like dogshit lying on the sidewalk of her workday even though she was his secretary and he was her boss. Bezerkle the Younger had fallen hard for Esmeralda, and the impact seemed to have knocked all reason out his head: he had separated from his wife and was in the process of divorcing her along with his children, home, cars and all despite the abusive disdain Esmeralda showered on Younger. Clearly, he had his dick slammed hard in the trapdoor of Esmeralda’s body and writhed in his joyful pain with what appeared to be the pure, suffering pleasures of love. You could see it in his puppy dog eyes begging for some sweet petting from Esmeralda whenever he was around her. It was sickening.

However, I soon learned that Ms. Esmeralda was also bonking the much younger office “go-fer” boy, Justin, a strikingly cute, crew-cut blond, complete with starry blue eyes. Justin’s angelic golden boy looks contrasted nicely with Esmeralda’s darker, sultry looks. Clearly, from Justin’s excited puppy dog behavior whenever he was near Esmeralda, he was having the best sex he had ever had in his twenty-two years of life. Neither Justin nor Esmeralda attempted to conceal their affair from anyone in the office, least of all to Bezerkle the Younger, and treated him like an extraneous piece of fluff whenever all three of them happened to be in the same part of the office.

Every day I came to work expecting one of these three to pull out a pearl-handled revolver and shoot the other two. I was only worried about getting hit in the crossfire, hardly worth it for twelve dollars an hour. Although I thought I didn’t care what anyone was doing with anybody my real opinion about how these heterosexuals carried on - see how they were - came out one evening during a conversation with my friend, Harry. I regaled him with all the details of the torrid office affair and wasn’t it awful? Harry fixed me with one of his, “I thought you knew better looks!” and said, “Oh yes, simply appalling behavior, unlike us homosexuals, we never do things like that do we!” Ohhh….

I promptly stopped judging them and decided to mind my own business because really, if given the chance to bonk-di-bink-bonk with Justin I would have done so and added myself to that threesome to make a foursome. Although being a perfect Kinsey 6.0 homo, I would have been only able to lend Esmeralda my comforting shoulder to cry on since there was no chemistry between us ‑ that man-woman thing ‑ I just didn’t get it. I could see though that she was having a great time with both men, and why not? Wouldn’t I love to have had a couple of boyfriends myself? Besides, if I kept an open mind and ear, who knew what kind of juicy material might surface that could one day be turned a book about law office life?

How It All Began, Part 1

In 1986, I was a rarity ‑ someone who actually know how to operate the already obsolete Xerox 860 word processor, a stand-alone behemoth that could only do word processing. I had learned the 860 system in 1982 in preparation for re-entering the workplace. To my horror, the one place in town that owned hundreds of them was Standard Toil.

Broke, desperate, and close to the end of the unemployment I had lived on from October 1981 through July 1983 (thanks to the 1981 recession; I received six month unemployment extensions for over a year and a half and thought of it as my Reaganomics NEA grant), I took the job only job I was offered – at Standard Toil. I lasted just over a year before I quit and went to work as a temp for several downtown temp agencies.

A year and a half into my temp career, my agency called one day and asked if I’d like to work in a law office for a change? “It will pay more!" said Julie. But I had never worked in a law office before I told her. No problem! My Xerox 860 skills – the fact that I could actually make the dinosaur spit out an actual document– outweighed my lack of legal experience. Twelve dollars an hour instead of nine? I’d be rich! I said yes. Under the tyranny of capitalism, it’s easy to be a dupe when you’re desperately broke. None of us should blame ourselves.

This particular firm had two offices, one in San Francisco, one in Oakland. Being lucky in all matters work-related, I was needed in the unlovely Oakland office and would have to commute on BART from San Francisco. Would the law office cover my extra commuting costs? Well, said my agency, you will be getting that extra three dollars an hour! And that legal experience!

After working only a short time at this particular firm, I concluded it would have been better named Dumb, Splayed and Bezerkle than its actual name. In the Oakland office I was lucky enough to work for a young attorney, Jack, most of whose documents involved setting up partnership agreements. For him and me this meant a lot of red marks all over lengthy legal documents for budding capitalist ventures, mergers, acquisitions, whatever. Later I would learn this kind of legal work was called “fill-in-the-blanks” law by the more contemptuous litigation crowd who preferred the gladiator-style high dramas of summons and complaint ad nauseum, dragged out for years on end.

In time I would learn the only real winners in a lawsuit are the lawyers who charge their outrageous fees even for taking a piss on your time. In the end it all comes down to billable hours and pity the poor client who has to trust that their fees are based on actual hours worked; as opposed to the actual dilemma of some young, frantic associate attorney trying to meet the crushing demands of producing enough billable hours to keep her or his job.

Jack was actually decent, for a lawyer, and he gladly showed me the ropes. He also took all my errors with humor, such as the draft letter I brought him which I had addressed to “Mr. John Doe, Esq.” I thought he had forgotten the “Mr.” added it for him ‑ wasn’t I a sharp secretary? When Jack saw my change he burst out laughing and explained that an attorney is addressed as either Mr. or Esq. but not both. Ah, the education of the high-tech fool in legal land.

Though I have often asked what the “Esq.” or “Esquire” stands for, few in the law offices I have worked in have ever known. My guess is that it was some vestigial tail left over from Merry Olde England, from the days when a lawyer (or solicitor in British English) was some kind of a squire of the shire perhaps?

Better yet, let me quote one of my current, cynical co-workers about the meaning of esquire: “Oh it’s probably just some kind of title that means nothing! It’s just to make them seem more important than they already think they are!” Obviously a descendent of the same people who participated in the Peasants’ Revolt in Olde England in the late 14th Century, one of whose main wrathful targets were solicitors, lawyers, attorneys-in short, scumbags by any other name.

PROLOGUE

“And you may ask yourself,
‘Well, how did I get here?’”[1]

How did I get here? Yes, that’s the question.

Others have been here before me: “Bartelby the Scrivner.” I, too, know that brick wall outside the window.

Dickens wrote eight hundred pages in Bleak House about a lawsuit that never ends, that goes on and on, like a workday in a law office, proofreading trivia that will matter to no one the next morning.

Kafka took a degree in law, worked briefly as a lawyer before going onto the equally arcane world of insurance, all of it an experience of the absurd that informed his blessed writing.

Marcel Proust said, “In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office.” [2] It’s good he didn’t have to support himself – he would have quickly choked to death on the atmosphere.

I’ve worked in a law office far longer than I ever hoped I would – have you, too? What have I really wanted to do with my life? Become a famous writer and free myself from the monotonous, 9-5 tyranny of office work. That hasn’t happened.

I currently work in a large anonymous office in an anonymous city in an anonymous country. Yes, I’m protecting myself. I know how sharp a shark’s tooth is. All names have been changed to protect the guilty and thereby protect me from lawsuits, from which only lawyers almost ever benefit.

Yes, how did I get myself into all this for over eighteen years?

“My god, what have I done?”

_____________________

[1] “Once In A Lifetime”, Track 4, Remain In Light by Talking Heads, Sire Records, 1980.

[2] Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International: New York,
1997), 12.

[3] Op. Cit., "Once In A Lifetime".