by Auld, Alexei
She did too.
I still didn't know anything about her fine ass. I was itching to know. I'd have to ask her.
But I fell asleep.
When I woke up, she wasn't there.
***
It was casual Friday, so I stumbled into work wearing sunglasses, a short-sleeved designer shirt with the collar up, and custom jeans. I felt like a king. I’d reinvented myself. Punk-free. If I showed any signs of weakness, they'd take advantage of it. This was like a prison, according to Enos. And everyone knows when you're in prison, you don't act soft. This was a jungle that I would rule. My kingdom. Say it, live it, do it, and it will come. Just like the honeys. And if that was working for me, why would this nerd kingdom be any different? I'd be the king of the nerds. A fair, honest, and wise king. With plenty of concubines.
As soon as I left the room, someone grabbed me. It was a gaggle of dorks. One patted me on the back. “You have lunch plans?”
“I do?”
“We made reservations at Balthazar and can't go.”
See? They knew I was hungry. The universe heard my vision and put everything in place.
63
I ENDED UP at a chichi restaurant in SoHo. Late.
I staggered to the hostess and asked for a Krueller lunch party. She pointed at Taylor, who happened to wear a passionfruit-colored suit, and a key-lime tie with a matching splint and bandage. My eyes burned just looking at him. “Damn. I was sleeping until this motherfucker had to be here with his Technicolor Pimp Suit and wake my ass up.”
Taylor blushed and covered his hands with his mouth.
I patted him on the back. “This man here interviewed me wearing a pomegranate suit and kiwi tie. Made me feel all hungry and shit. Back then, I thought I’d seen it all, until today. Look at that suit. Rocking the sorbet. Although I can’t pull off dressing like a dessert, I have to give it up to a brotha that can.” I gave Taylor a pound.
Jack, who’d also interviewed me with Taylor, was beet red. “I'm glad you were able to leave your desk and partake in lunch, Rufus.”
This was a challenge. Jack, who seemed cool when he interviewed me, was now trying to bust my balls. The lawyers at the table were looking at me to see how I was going to react. And if I didn't show and prove, I'd be done. The first time I met Jack, I didn't go strong, so I'd have to teach him a lesson of who exactly not to fuck with.
I said, “I never went to work. I just woke up for lunch at this fine establishment, thanks to Uncle Krueller.”
“You've been at the firm for how long? Two months? And they're already putting you on all-nighters?”
“The only all-nighters I've been pulling have been in the Meat Packing District. Right, Taylor?”
Taylor looked at his crab hammer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I harrumphed. “Of course you do. The Meat Packing District? Filled with honeys. Drunk, trashy honeys. You walked into a club and got felt up by fine-ass women. That's what I was talking about. And what you so conveniently forgot.” My head throbbed, so I clutched it. “Man, I should've stayed in bed.”
Jack said, “You're joking, right, Rufus? I mean, you didn’t just get out of bed before coming here?”
“No. I went to the gym before coming here.”
Jack almost choked on his foie gras. “Son, I know we try to show you a good time, but you have to do some work to keep your job.”
“That's assuming I want to keep my job.”
“Why else would you be here?”
“I love New York.”
“You have a great opportunity here, why not take advantage?”
I patted Jack's back while gesturing to the waiter. “Get this man a drink.”
Jack said, “It's too early.”
I said, “Not for me.” I ordered a glass of Shiraz, since the best thing to cure a hangover was more liquor.
Jack said, “I can get you on a corporate case.”
“I thought this was a litigation lunch?”
“It is.”
I was wounded. “You don't want to work with me, Jack?”
“Rufus, have you ever been on a corporate case?”
“No, but I heard trained monkeys can do the work.”
Everyone at the table laughed.
Everyone but Jack.
I said, “I didn't come here for that shit. Fuck that.”
Jack said, “What if I put you on one?”
I buzzed my lips.
“I'm serious. If I put you on a case. what are you going to do about it?”
“The first day I'm on the case will be the last day I'm on the case.”
“After one day?”
“Done. Don't call me about the case. Don't CC me on emails about the case. And if you set foot in my fucking office to talk about the case, I can't be held responsible for my reaction, because I gave fair warning.”
The lawyers hooted and hollered.
I was their king.
King of the nerds.
Jack ripped into a dish of coconut mustard seed sustainable Chilean sea bass, showing no mercy for the crab and corn flan, or the cilantro chimichurri.
I had to hold my ground. It was bad enough they’d lied to me about Goldberg. And now they were gonna threaten me with corporate work?
Wasn't gonna happen.
I went back to work and had none.
***
That night, the firm had a party at Nobu. I ordered drinks for some random skanks at a separate section of the restaurant who weren't part of the gathering.
I borrowed a corporate credit card from Jack, flashed it at them while covering Jack’s name, and bragged, “It's on me.”
The girls hooted and whooped while jingling and jangling. I approached a waiter and whispered, “Make sure their drinks are on the firm.” The waiter nodded, then proceeded to rat him out to a partner. It didn’t matter that night, because my strumpets never found out and I still got laid.
When I got home in the morning, there was a remote control on the bed.
I pressed it and the bookshelf opened and the elevator awaited.
It was programmed for the fifteenth floor.
The doors opened and there was Rita. Sprawled on the bed.
“Wash yourself.” She pointed at a shower in the corner of the room. Clear glass. No curtain. She watched every drop. Every stroke of the towel.
“Come.”
I joined her on the bed, broke a sweat, and felt heart palpitations that made me worry I'd end up dying like my grandfather—inside a woman.
Only this time, I came alive.
Rita did too.
“Good.” She stared at my face and kissed my forehead and each cheek.
I fell asleep.
And forced myself to wake up.
She was staring at me with a wide-eyed glare.
A smile broke out from her mouth.
“You ready for more?”
“Yes. I mean, I just wanted to know more about you.”
Her eyebrows scrunched together. “You do?”
I popped up in the bed. “I do. Unless, you know.”
“Know what?”
“You want to be all secretive, which I would totally respect.”
She sat up in her two-thousand-thread-count sheets, leaned back, and spread her legs.
“I'll tell you while you're eating.”
I started toward her and stuck out my tongue.
“The fuck you doing, Rufus?”
My tongue was still extended. “Me? Eathing?”
She closed her eyes. “I mean at breakfast tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.”
“And that look with your tongue stuck out? Not sexy.”
D'oh. I stuck my tongue back in.
She stroked my head very gingerly. I felt like a puppy. She put my head in her lap.
***
Rita graduated from Cardozo Law School with one hundred sixty-six thousand dollars in debt. That didn’t include the one hundred and fifty-thre
e thousand dollars she borrowed to attend Columbia undergrad. She had a background as an actor, but went to law school because she was tired of playing weak female characters and feeding into horrid stereotypes. Actually, she didn’t get the roles she auditioned for, but that’s not the point. It was the principle that mattered.
She wasn’t in the top fifteen percentile of her class at Cardozo, so she didn’t have any job opportunities to work at firms while in law school. Free internships and one paying job with a solo practitioner who represented slumlords meant she had no job after graduating. Her mother believed in her. And came from that generation of women whose only hope for employment as a college-educated woman was as a school teacher. She lived vicariously through Rita, who had options she’d never dreamed of. So she set up a private Swiss bank account for Rita based on some documentary she saw about the ways of the rich and famous. She put her savings into it before she died.
About five hundred dollars.
Rita refused to touch the money or close out the account, on account that she held on to her mother’s hope that she would need it one day.
Rita had to foot the two-thousand-dollar bill for a bar prep class. Legal temporary contract work was not an option until receiving admission to the bar, so she worked at Starbucks—that was what most actors did to get health insurance. She passed the first time she took it. A few months later, after being sworn in to the bar, she was eligible for temporary contract work.
The legal market changed in the five years since she’d started her career. Law schools experienced record numbers of applicants, but there wasn’t an explosion of job opportunities. Graduates of top-ten programs were pretty much guaranteed at least three offers of employment from different law firms. Those that didn’t go to firms worked in the government or did public interest work, with salaries offering less money than one year’s worth of law school tuition. Still, they were competitive to obtain. Remaining law school graduates who didn’t have these options could only hope to do contract work, since their law schools weren’t going to forgive the six-figure debt each unemployable graduate incurred.
The temporary contract attorney market surged with the expansion of first-year firm salaries rising from eighty-five thousand per year to one hundred and sixty-five thousand a year. Some firm clients refused to pay two hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour to train junior associates, so firms looked to hire temporary contract attorneys to do the dirty work.
Temporary contract attorneys were the untouchable caste of law firms. Instead of receiving one-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar-a-year jobs, they were paid thirty-five dollars an hour. A joke, since firms billed them out to clients for one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Contract attorneys were employed only for as long as they were needed, as opposed to regular firm associates, who still received paychecks even if they hadn't worked for weeks or months. Contract attorneys weren’t able to climb up the ladder at the firm or get better work. They were banned from attending firm trainings, happy hours, outings, and holiday parties, since law partners didn’t want to be bothered with creating expectations of partnership or career advancement at the firm.
The typical task for contract attorneys was electronic discovery. Firms sent documents to companies that scanned them into hard drives for attorney review. Firms placed contract attorneys at a computer with orders to label the document with codes such as “Attorney-Client Privilege,” “Hot Doc,” the time period, etc. Some electronic discovery took place in individual offices, granting contract attorneys some semblance of tranquility.
But that wasn’t what Rita experienced. She repeatedly worked in large, windowless rooms with poor ventilation, rows of computers with no internet access, and one phone. If she was lucky, there’d be one computer with internet access, but it had to be shared with the other twenty contract attorneys engaged in the same task. Yes, Virginia, law firms had sweatshops, too. The work was so brain-numbingly dull, she wanted to slit her wrists. Trained monkeys could have done it, or, to be fair, a high school kid with a greater attention span than a binge-drinking, drug-addled college graduate.
This was entry-level work. When the firms were running slow, they’d fire Rita and her fellow contract attorneys and give the first-years the work, as if the first-year associates needed the money. She was bitter that she didn’t have the opportunity to do that shit work and make the $160k a year guaranteed to Ivy League Law grads. Not that they were any smarter. Especially the legacy kids.
Rita witnessed this firsthand, when she received a call from Jacob, a classmate who had a choice associate gig at a top-ten law firm.
“Hey, my officemate Brad is working on a case where our client needs permission to use songs for his indie film. I remembered you did some film work before law school, so I was wondering if you could help Brad out.”
Rita thought it would be a good opportunity to show her worth and maybe transition her advice into a sweet full-time firm job, so she agreed. Brad called her an hour later.
“My client is doing a film and needs to use the music, but I told him it should be fair use, right?”
“No, it isn’t. He needs to get sync licenses from the songwriters and the record companies who released the recording.”
“How is he going to find out who wrote the songs?”
“Does he have CDs or digital versions?”
“Both.”
“In the CD there should be a music publishing company and performing rights society listed for each song. You should contact them and figure out what they want for using the song.”
“What’s the industry standard rate?”
“There is none. Harry Fox tried getting into the business years ago, but it was a pain in the ass, since you can’t predict what the songwriters’ or record companies’ preferences.”
“Okay, but what are some industry standards for how much they should be paid?”
“There are none. They aren’t even obligated to give anyone permission. It happened with Cameron Crowe several times. He couldn’t get Led Zeppelin to give him rights for Fast Times At Ridgemont High or Almost Famous, but they gave a license for ‘Immigration Song’ in School of Rock because of Jack Black’s concert appeal.”
“What if the record label won’t give permission?”
“You could pay someone to record the song and just deal with sync licenses from the songwriters. That’s why back in the day, you’d hear strange versions of popular songs in Skinemax.”
“What if we don’t have the money they want for the license?”
“The client could commission original music or look for unsigned groups.”
“So, there aren’t any industry standards for payment?”
“No.”
A few weeks later, she received a call from Brad.
“I submitted a request for a sync license, but before I get on the phone I wanted to get a sense, if you have one, of what kinds of royalties they may be looking for, what is customary in the industry, and what may be reasonable for such a small-budget project that will likely have pretty limited distribution. And I just wanted to check in with you about industry standards.”
Rita couldn’t believe she was asking the same question. But she tried to be nice.
“Like I told you earlier, there are no industry standards and the client knows what he can afford to pay. If you can’t get a license for an amount the client can pay, he’ll have to commission original music or get a license from an unsigned band.”
“You’re telling me there are no industry standards?”
“Right. They’re not obligated to give you permission.”
Later that day, Rita received a call from Jacob.
“I got a call from Brad, and he said you didn’t help him. What’s up with that?”
“I spoke to him twice and at length about his question. He keeps on asking me if there is an industry standard for his client’s sync license. I told him there wasn’t one, but gave some options. His reply? ‘What are the industry stand
ards?’”
“But you said there aren’t any.”
“I’m glad you get it, because he sure as hell doesn’t.”
“Fuck.”
“Tell me something, they let people that dumb into your firm?”
“He’s a double Harvard.”
“And I can’t get a job because I went to Cardozo?”
“Tell me about it. I barely got the job here and I was in the top five of our class. Some partners still won’t work with me because they can’t believe I’m smart enough for the work.”
“And yet they need me, a Carbozo, to help with shit they can’t do.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, lady. Look, I gotta go.”
“Thanks for the help.”
Rita was incensed, because it wasn’t just the big firms that were snotty.
She heard about Mindy, a classmate from Cardozo, from another classmate, Josh.
“She had an interview at a patent boutique you probably never heard of, and they passed her over for a girl from Stanford who, get this, never did any patent work before.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“What can you do?”
Rita also discovered that firms only gave full-time first-year associate jobs to people before they graduated from law school. Since it had been almost a year, she was out of the equation. Her friends from other non-top-ten schools suffered the same fate. It was even worse for folks who were out for over a year.
One friend from Fordham had an in-house gig for a year and a half. Until the company went under. He tried getting a firm job, but no one respected his in-house work. Although the work he did in-house was more complex than the standard first-year experience, he couldn’t even get an interview for an associate position. So he ended up doing contract work with Rita.
“If you can’t make it, what chance do I have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell us this before we accepted the offers to go to schools that can’t get us jobs to justify the massive debt we’ve taken? I mean, some of the shit I could do for a living is shit I didn’t have to go to law school to do.”
“You couldn’t do temporary contract work without a law degree.”
“I’m not talking about that. I mean acting or directing. Fuck, I could’ve worked for an I-Bank straight out of school, made more money, and not be one hundred sixty-six grand in debt.”