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?