Legally Wasted

by Tommy Strelka

  “It’s something to think about, isn’t it?” asked the Judge.

  Larkin nodded. “I think, Judge, that if the President doesn’t appoint you to be on the district court level, you can have an excellent career in sales.”

  The Judge smiled. “So that’s a yes?”

  Larkin smiled a true smile, but he shook his head slightly from side to side. “I . . . let me think about it.”

  Madeline’s car battery died at the courthouse, but luckily, her would-be fiancé had been forced to drive separately that day. All of Larkin’s many words had left him as he drove silently. He thought about the Judge’s offer juxtaposed against ivy coated brick walls and a world at which he could only guess. Secret Knowledge. Privilege. Madeline rested one hand upon the dashboard to steady herself. Larkin’s car needed new shocks forty thousand miles ago. Her other hand rested on his, and that slight touch made it nearly impossible to gauge his commitment to either Cornell or Wexler & Monroe, Attorneys at Law.

  “Thank the Lord the courthouse is right near work,” said Madeline as she stared at the grand Tudor mansion looming at the edge of downtown. The Hotel Big Lick, like much of the city, could have used a good spit-polish and a coat of paint, but that did not take away from its grandeur.

  “You’ve never been late once,” said Larkin. “Or even called in sick. Besides, who is going to check in on a Tuesday morning?”

  “You’re thinking about something,” said Madeline.

  “I’m thinking about how much I hope you didn’t flush my ring down the toilet.”

  “It’s safe. What else did the Judge tell you?”

  Larkin smirked as he turned onto the hotel’s driveway. “Are you psychic?”

  “Yes. What else did she say?”

  Larkin cleared his throat. He parked his pickup at the service entrance. Two outdoor ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts. A huge air conditioning unit, spotted with rust, whirred and shook next to the truck. Larkin rolled up the windows and sighed.

  “I’m about to make you really late for work,” he said as he softly bit his lower lip.

  “What did she say?” asked Madeline as she quickly unbuckled her belt and sat up in her chair.

  “She . . . well,” said Larkin as he cleared his throat again, “She offered me a job.”

  “Who? The Judge? She offered you a job?”

  Larkin nodded.

  “A job? What kind of job?”

  “To be a lawyer.”

  “What?” Madeline bounced as if the car still wobbled down the road on its worn shocks.

  Larkin again nodded. “Apparently Virginia has this apprentice program. The Judge’s son works as a lawyer in town. I would work for him and then, eventually, I would be able to take the bar exam.”

  “Oh my God!” shouted Madeline as her hands cupped over her mouth. “That’s . . . that’s . . .”

  “I know,” said Larkin. “It came out of left field.”

  “That’s wonderful!” A tear fell from her eye.

  Larkin bit his lip even harder. Her joyous smile stabbed at his heart. The quickness with which she had summoned such a tear gave him surprising worry.

  “Oh, I can’t believe it,” she said as she dried her cheeks. “It’s just a miracle, right? I mean, you wouldn’t have to pay any tuition. You can’t afford any of the schools you applied to anyway, right? He would have to pay you for working there. You won’t have to worry about paying for some big private law school you could never afford.”

  “That’s true,” said Larkin. Now it was the letter’s turn to play the demon in his pocket. He could feel the edges of the paper begin to smolder. Soon they would alight and all the ivy would burn. Madeline turned and looked at the horizon as if the future had just crystallized for her twenty feet left of the giant Dr. Pepper bottle cap towering above the Williamson Road overpass. Larkin’s shoulders dropped.

  “Wow,” she said. “You never even heard back from those real snooty schools that you applied to. Well, to hell with them. You don’t even need them.”

  “Right,” said Larkin. Sweat covered his face. His heart pounded.

  She leaped from her seat onto his lap. Before he knew it, they were kissing. He knew she could taste the rest of the bourbon he had swigged in the courthouse bathroom after meeting with the Judge, but she apparently didn’t care. Her arms pawed at his back a moment before finally just digging in for a tight hug. Larkin closed his eyes and smelled her sweet skin. He pulled her even closer to him. His heart thundered in his chest.

  “I’ll call back the Judge and tell her yes this afternoon,” he said, eyes squeezed shut and lost in her hair.

  Madeline tightened her hug for a moment before relaxing and pushing herself back a bit. “You told her you would think about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is what you want, isn’t it? I mean, am I crazy, or is this just the best thing for us?”

  Larkin’s left hand gripped his leg. The stars - - or it might be better to say, some stars - - had so quickly aligned. God he loved her. “It is. I’ve thought about it.” He kissed her cheek. They embraced and while tightly snuggled, he cheated and stared at the rusted air conditioner rumbling next to the overfilled ashtray. “This is what I want,” he said. He closed his eyes and smelled that wondrous cinnamon smell. “Yes,” he said. “This is what I want.”

  20 Proof

  Larkin Monroe opened his eyes as the constant thump of jazzercising people in the dance studio above his law office forced him back into the waking world. As he flipped his wrist over to glance at his watch, he suddenly realized that the fingers of his left hand clutched something heavy and hard. His gun.

  “Jesus,” he said with shock as the cheap pistol he took as payment in a divorce case slipped from his hand and landed on the floor with a clatter. Had he been dozing with the firearm the entire time? “How dramatic of my subconscious,” he said aloud.

  He did not remember opening the left drawer of his desk where he kept the weapon. He only remembered leaning back in his desk chair and shutting his eyes for a catnap. What the hell had he been doing in his sleep?

  For a minute he considered whether he truly had some sort of death wish that his unconscious self sought to realize.

  Thump Thump Thump went the jazzercisers.

  Larkin knew that he did not want to end his life, but an article he read years ago in a magazine about deep subconscious desires gave him a moment’s pause.

  His mind wandered and he forgot the gun beneath his desk and instead remembered the curvy form of some redhead pinup in the same magazine. His eyes fluttered and began to shut when the pounding above hit a sudden peak and he snapped back to attention. He leaned forward and looked at his watch. 1:30 in the afternoon. He had only twenty or so minutes to do what he had to before heading out the door and back to court.

  With a kick of a scuffed loafer, he sent his chair rolling away from the paperclip and legal pad chaos on his desk. Rainbow colored carbon paper copies of court-appointed payment vouchers at least made it a jolly mess. Larkin steered himself toward the small refrigerator humming quietly beneath his printer. His kick only sent him about halfway forcing him to paw at the door before it swung open. As his fingers grabbed the bottle of gin, he sighed.

  “Shit,” he whispered as he opened the plastic bottle for the first time. His voice was mostly drowned out by the people smashing syncro-jazzing cardio with what sounded like a hyper up-tempo remix of Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl. He looked up to the ceiling. The song had always saddened Larkin.

  Though the floors of the old brick building were thick, he was certain that in the six or so months since Margie altered her business model from a quiet ballet studio to free-spirited human cardiovascular downsizing that the plaster and floorboards above his head had been pounded thin. He took a sip.

  “Good god,” he stammered as a stream of gin slid down his stubble. He held the bottle away from his face to examine his poison. “Damn you, Bowland’s gin,” he said as th
e little liquid that had made it down his throat ravaged his gullet. He winced when it reached the stomach. “I’m counting that as one,” he said as his left hand reached for his calendar. He flipped through the summer months and landed on mid-September. As he gazed down at the 2:00 slot for that day, his heart sank. No less than six poorly scrawled names of defendants filled up the afternoon block below the heading “DCSE.”

  DCSE stood for the Department of Child Support Enforcement, a state agency. As a private attorney on the Big Lick City Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court’s court appointed list, Larkin had agreed to represent deadbeat parents who had fallen in serious arrears on their child support payments. The hearings themselves were rather simple. Aside from trying to paint the deadbeat as a simple down-on-his luck father unable to find steady work, Larkin had little to do but sit next to his client and listen to the other court appointed attorney in the room present the parent’s payment history, or lack thereof. Like Larkin, the DCSE attorney was a court appointed attorney who had worked some special deal out with the Department to represent the state agency in court. Larkin made a lowly one hundred and twenty bucks per deadbeat, but he was convinced that the Department attorney made more.

  Once the judge had heard the evidence, he or she would either give the parent three or so months to cough up some dough or send them directly to jail for thirty days to think about their life and needy children. Despite any sentence the judge might impose, the custodial parent sat fuming with tightly crossed arms in the back of the courtroom. She, for it was typically a mother, could never be satisfied when the system had already spent years trying to pump an ounce of water out of what everyone already knew was a bone dry well.

  Larkin laughed to himself. “Maybe no one in that court room gets what they want.” He considered the judges who grew weary of endless child support cases.

  “Six defendants,” Larkin mutters. “Seven hundred and twenty dollars.” He stared at the bottle. Six defendants meant six shots. “Fucking Deveraux better match this,” he said as he brought the plastic bottle to his lips, held his breath, and took another fiery swig.

  A year ago, Larkin had entered into a competition of sorts with Charlie Deveraux, one of the Department attorneys. The rules were simple. For each defendant that Larkin was assigned that day, both attorneys had sworn an oath to drink that number of shots in the hour immediately preceding the hearings. Larkin trusted Deveraux to follow through with his end of the deal. Once, when Deveraux was six sheets to the wind out by the lake, he had made his oath after an over-the-top clapping and whistling demonstration that Larkin took for some fraternity thing from Hampden Sydney or Washington and Lee or wherever the hell Deveraux had gone to school. The oath had been just too damn elaborate to indicate any fissure in Deveraux’s credibility. He half-remembered some sort of animal call in the middle of it.

  Larkin trusted himself to stand by his own word because he was a locked and loaded fully enabled alcoholic. He didn’t really care if Deveraux trusted him or not.

  Both men seemed to get a good deal of pleasure watching the other go through the motions while hiding their eighty-proof breath from the court. Usually, Larkin only had around three or four clients on his DCSE days. He furrowed his brow and weighed the hazards. Six clients coupled with the cheapest gin available at the state-run liquor store might prove deadly on a steamy dog day afternoon.

  “Three!” spit Larkin as he glanced at his watch. He would have to drink faster. A year ago, when he and Deveraux began the DCSE drinking club, he had sipped on Gordon’s gin. Essentially a mid-list London dry gin, Gordon’s was still certainly palatable and Larkin had reconciled the booze’s less than smooth finish with the knowledge that it was James Bond’s gin of choice. That thought used to give him a bit of swagger as he ambled down to the courthouse in his worn shoes. But the recent decline in his bottom line had forced austerity. Cuts were made so the law office could continue its march both toward and away from a hangover, a destination that could never fully be reached or avoided.

  After Larkin’s kindly and passably organized secretary had passed away two years earlier, she was eventually replaced with an answering service that he seldom checked. Meanwhile, the office booze budget had dwindled to the bottom shelf.

  Surprisingly, after an “eureka” moment and ninety seconds of groping under a desk, Larkin actually found an airplane bottle of whiskey in Sam Wexler’s old office. Larkin had never known the man to drink, but he half-remembered kicking it under there a month or two ago. Or was it last week? Larkin half-remembered a lot of things.

  Drugs were Sam Wexler’s poison of choice, not booze. If only Judge Wexler had known that her son’s would-be apprentice was palming a Jim Beam when they first met. Larkin likely would never have been offered the position with Sam. Shortly after beginning his apprenticeship with Sam, Larkin became accustomed to Sam’s frequent “trips” to Richmond. He’d disappear for a day here or there early on. A few years later, that became weeks at a time. One time, Sam left and he never came back. The local paper wrote a story about his disappearance. A special lawyer was appointed by the courts to handle Sam’s leftover cases left to scatter without a shepherd. Larkin, though a fully licensed lawyer at the time, was seemingly not trusted to handle the task by the powers-that-be-robed. He had, after all, not even attended law school. Another law firm received Sam’s entire book of business.

  A year later, Larkin drank a large bottle of Kettle One vodka, slowly, next to a river, in honor of Sam when police found his body in a Norfolk alley. As the story went, Sam got to owing some bad people a lot of money. Another version added that Sam had engaged in selling things aside from legal advice. He shed some tears when he thought of poor Judge Wexler. If only her son had possessed one-tenth of her pluck.

  Out of respect for Sam’s mother, Larkin had left the original sign hanging above the sidewalk, despite the fact that no one named Wexler worked at the Wexler Law Firm. Larkin had even paid to replace the sign with an exact copy when a windstorm sent it into Luck Avenue.

  “Four,” said Larkin, like a golfer, as a drop of gin launched from his mouth and landed on his business card holder at the edge of his desk. He remembered that he was running dangerously low on cards after having entered into that new marketing strategy with one of his former clients.

  “Keep it up ladies!” Margie audibly shouted from the dance studio.

  “Lose those love handles!” answered Larkin, truly meaning the encouragement, as he stooped to retrieve his gun. He leaned back in the chair and took aim at the office door leading to the hallway where the vacant secretary’s desk sat collecting dust.

  “I don’t think so, asshole,” he said. He erased his Southwest Virginia accent and tried to echo a poor Clint Eastwood. He pulled the trigger and the hammer snapped back. His lips pursed and he made a fairly decent imitation of a gunshot. “I told you, we’d fuck you in this divorce,” he said to no one.

  Larkin pulled the trigger again. “Defendant to decedent.” He said. “One shot.” What he would not give to blow away an angered divorcee. He imagined his picture on the front page of the Big Lick Times. Larkin Monroe: Deadeye Badass, Esquire.

  He reached for the gin. “Five,” he squeaked as he felt the accumulated booze beginning to swirl uncomfortably in his stomach. He placed the gun back in his desk drawer and attempted to forget that, while sleeping, his groping fingers may have attempted to end his life. Standing, he quickly felt the Bowland’s simmering in his bloodstream.

  “Probably pickling my liver,” he muttered as he approached the small mirror that hung over one of his black aluminum file cabinets. His reflection, a once nearly-handsome early middle-aged man stared back with vivid green eyes that shone despite being mostly bloodshot to hell. With his fingers, he delicately sculpted his dark hair which was in dire need of a haircut.

  “One more time!” wailed Margie. In response, someone dropped all of her considerable weight on the dance floor above and Larkin’s reflection
shook as the mirror rattled against the wall.

  A nearby frame leaped from the wall and smacked the edge of the metal file cabinet before falling to the floor. Larkin looked down to see that a spider web of cracked glass now obscured his ethics award. Careful not to slice his finger, he retrieved the framed certificate and scanned the text. The broken glass completely obscured the language regarding Larkin’s consummate professionalism and the words “role model.” The text beneath the signature line remained visible. “Hugo P. Winthorpe,” the line read, “Chairman of the East Coast Trail Attorneys Association.”

  “Fucking ‘trail’ association,” Larkin grumbled as he considered tossing the award from the fictitious “trial” organization that he had misspelled late one night at a Lynchburg copy center into the trash. “That gal should have caught that,” he said as he remembered the judging glare from the girl behind the print shop’s counter. Who was she to judge a man drafting his own ethics award?

  “Almost there!” Margie bellowed.

  Larkin looked at his watch. He had only minutes. “Shix!” he spat as he combined an obscenity with the number of shots he was required to take. With a final swig, he grabbed his brief case and wallet, straightened his tie in the mirror, and raced past the secretary’s desk and out the door.

  Although autumn had begun creeping through the trees in the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains, the outside air near the law office still felt saturated with the heat and humidity of a persistent summer. The standing water left over from the morning’s rain had nearly evaporated but filled the air to the brim with hot moisture. As he double-timed it over the uneven sidewalks, he scowled at the very stickiness of the air. It was as if someone had created a bonfire of post-it notes and vaporized adhesive still hovered above the sidewalk.

  Nestled in a muggy valley surrounded by ancient mountains, Big Lick was the largest city in the Western half of Virginia. Although surrounded by largely rural areas, quite a handful of glass and steel buildings had sprung up within the shadows of the gently sloping mountains. Originally a bustling railroad town, the city had stagnated some since its industrial heyday. Rusted tracks crisscrossed the neighborhoods stereotypically separating the relatively affluent from the impoverished.