“So we’ll get our hair cut, Nino, and then we’ll have lunch. If you need anything for the trip, we can pick it up. Then, in the afternoon, we’ll work on Reading Law.”
“Oh, great.”
“I have a few difficult problems for us to work through.”
“I need a nap.”
“Sure. You’re in the pink bedroom, as usual. Let me take that.” I reached for his garment bag.
“I can carry that!”
“Well, then, let me put your suitcase and briefcase on the elevator. And your garment bag, too. It’ll all go up together, just outside your room.”
“Thank you, men,” Justice Scalia said to the marshals.
I led him up to his room. “I have to say it again, Bryan: this is a beautiful house.”
“Thank you.”
He paused on the top landing to see the Supreme Court bobbleheads. “I have those, you know. I keep them all together on a windowsill in my office.”
“I’ve seen them.”
“I keep your bobblehead behind my computer,” he said. “You’re not a Justice, so you’re not on the windowsill. But I see you more frequently there by my computer screen.”
“That’s touching. Here’s the picture where you married us. Remember that great day?”
“I do indeed! What’s this over here?” He was looking at a framed note on the wall. “Is that my handwriting?”
“That’s a note you sent down from the bench—a note to Karolyne to come back and see you in chambers at an oral argument. It was shortly after you married us. She was so proud to get that note that she framed it.”
“She’s really sweet. Now let me get some sleep. Oh, when will I see her?”
“About 5:30.”
He gave a single nod and said, “When I get up I’ll need to call Maureen. I want to make sure the fire is doing well.”
Frozen Shoulder
With Justice Scalia ensconced in his room and marshals out front, all was quiet. I went to the library to figure out precisely which statutory-interpretation problems we most urgently needed to work through for Reading Law. There was no doubt: the series-qualifier canon (for example, in unreasonable searches and seizures, the adjective unreasonable modifies both nouns—seizures as well as searches) and the so-called rule of the last antecedent (if the phrase were searches and seizures that are unreasonable, would that are unreasonable modify only seizures, or would it also modify searches?). We had encountered some scholarly criticism for aspects of our treatment of these issues in the first edition, and we intended to improve our analysis in the second edition. We had our work cut out for us. I put four articles in order for him.
At 3:30 he was stirring. I knocked on his door. “Nino, you need anything?”
“No, I’ll call Maureen and be out in about 15 minutes.”
“Sure thing.”
Rarely do I find myself just doing busywork, tidying up the library and so on, but at moments like this, with Justice Scalia in the house, I felt as if I was in a holding pattern. He emerged just before 4 p.m. saying that he’d hurt his shoulder.
“I have frozen shoulder. I’ve been diagnosed. I don’t have much range of motion. Look at this: I can’t serve a tennis ball.” He pantomimed a tennis serve and then grimaced in pain.
“I know all about frozen shoulder,” I said. “My dad had it. He cured it through simple exercises. I do them every day. Did your doctor show you how?”
“Yes, progressively up the wall?”
“Right. Would you like a little workout?”
“I think I need one.”
“I’ll be your trainer.”
We walked downstairs to the workout room. “This is a great gym,” he said.
“Thanks. We’ve gotten some new equipment since you were here last. But this exercise requires no equipment—just a door opening. Did your doctor show you how to start with your hand here and go up a little at a time?”
“Yes.” He tried the exercise, but he was rushing it.
“Slow down. Put slow but constant pressure as you lean forward, like this.” I showed him, and he tried but was obviously in pain.
“Don’t rush it, Nino. You know, my father is a band and orchestra conductor. In the early 1990s, he developed frozen shoulder. There are little adhesions, bony adhesions in the shoulder, that have to be broken a little at a time. With the exercises, it might take over a year for them to break. With my father, it took 15 months. If that doesn’t work, they’ll put you under and violently break the adhesions. But exercise is better.”
“Put me under and break them! I want it fixed now.”
“Believe me, the exercises are better. It may be a bit painful, but slow and steady every day will get the job done.”
He was impatient. “I’ve had enough,” he said after about 60 seconds. “What else do you have?”
“Here’s a medicine ball. Try this.” I handed it over. “Can you go from side to side?”
“Sure. No problem.” He moved it back and forth just above waist level. “Can you raise it beside your head? Do it slowly.” On the left side he could do it, but not on the right. He was exasperated, and he tended to try to jerk the ball up.
“Slow and steady, Nino.”
“I can’t lift it on the right! I just can’t do it. What else do you have?”
“This is an elliptical machine. Why don’t you try it?” I figured he’d seen one before, but they’re not all the same. He tried it for 30 seconds but was soon off.
“I don’t like that.”
“Good thing I didn’t buy you one of those. Do you remember I was going to get you one?”
“You were?”
“Yes. But we agreed it might be embarrassing to disclose that as a gift—and you said you might not use it anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“There’s a recumbent bicycle you could try, and a treadmill, but why don’t we try some weights?”
On the weight machine, he had no trouble pulling weights from side to side or even pulling them down, as long as he didn’t have to reach as high as his head. I put it on the lightest weight possible.
“This is really good! This is what I need.” He did five reps.
“I need more of it myself. I wish I spent more time in here.”
“Enough of this. What’s next?”
“I have three friends coming over for wine and cheese. They’re partners at a major firm here in town. They’re literary guys, and we get together every so often just to talk about literary things. I hope you’ll join us. They proved very useful when you and I were working on Reading Law. I ran lots of ideas past them. I think you’ll like them.”
“Good. I’ll do that. But the fundraiser I can’t do, so I’ll be in my room for that.”
We went down to the wine cellar to pick a bottle of wine—an Italian red—then back up to the kitchen. I had bought some artisanal cheeses. As I prepped the cheese and uncorked the wine bottle, Justice Scalia sat at the bar sipping club soda. I told him about our guests—Steve Fink, Herb Hammond, and Bruce Sostek—and explained that we’d spend an hour or so talking in the library. I left Justice Scalia to sample the cheeses while I went outside to tell the marshals the identities of our three guests. Not that our guests would be stopped as they approached, but I figured the marshals would prefer to know who would be coming in. I also took a roster of the Trinity University alumni who would be attending that evening and told them the name of the valet company that would be parking cars.
Steve and Herb arrived promptly at 5:00, and soon after came Bruce—on crutches. He was still recovering from hip-replacement surgery, and sadly, he wouldn’t be able to take up running again. As we stood in the kitchen sampling cheeses, Bruce regaled us with a story about the surgery and the pain meds that kept him delirious for several days afterward. Bruce’s wife, also a lawyer, had to keep him from trying to work while he was more or less hallucinatory. As we walked into the library, Justice Scalia asked Bruce several questions ab
out the surgery. Then he talked about his shoulder problem, saying he might not be able to continue playing tennis if it didn’t get fixed.
We also spoke of law, law practice, legal interpretation, the marshals parked out front, and the upcoming trip to Asia. Soon Karolyne arrived home and got hugs from everyone. Justice Scalia told her, “I’ve been wondering when I’d see you!”
Toward the end of our visit, I mentioned Justice Scalia’s experience as a teenage etiquette maven on New York City television during the 1950s. “Yeah,” he said, “they’d put up four of us teenagers at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street. We were local celebrities. They’d give us a situation involving teenage behavior and ask our opinions about it. Who knows, if I’d stuck with television, I might have amounted to something!” Everyone laughed.
By 6:30, the valets had arrived, our servers were bustling in the kitchen, and an early contingent from Trinity had arrived. “We’d better get you up to your hideout,” I said to Justice Scalia. On the way out of the library, he briefly greeted President Danny Anderson of Trinity, said goodbye to our three guests, and then ascended to his room. Soon the house was filled with 35 or so guests, and Karolyne and I had assumed our hosting duties.
About 8:00 p.m., I went to Justice Scalia’s room with a plate of barbecue, but he was on the phone. I decided to wait. Soon most guests had left, and I returned to his room with food. All was silent. I knocked but heard nothing. I knocked again and said, “Nino?”
He growled a little: “What is it?”
“I have food for you.”
“I’m not hungry anymore. I’m sleeping.”
“Sorry. See you in the morning.”
I learned later that he had received some sad personal news. He needed time alone to think and to pray.
Ivan the Barber
The next morning at 7:30, Karolyne and I were downstairs making coffee. Justice Scalia came down dressed in a golf shirt and khakis. As we sipped coffee, I asked whether he’d rather ride with the marshals to the restaurant down the street, or walk. He decided to walk the 300 or so yards to the restaurant. I went out front to tell Ralph Tenorio (who had two cars ready) that we’d be walking through the back gate and down the back street—not really an alley, but a small side street. I opened the gates so the marshals could pull through the drive.
Justice Scalia walked between me and Karolyne, with a sprightly step. “The morning air is so good!” he exclaimed. “Just what I need.” The marshals drove slowly behind us, at perhaps one mile an hour.
A lot of neighbors walk their dogs on this street, and one couple pointed, seemingly worried, and said to us, “Do you realize there’s a car following you?”
“Yes,” I said, “they’re with us. No worries.” They seemed perplexed. We walked on as they stared.
When we were finished with breakfast, Ralph reminded me that I still hadn’t given him the barber’s information, and I realized that I hadn’t gotten around to calling Ivan. I looked it up on my phone under Ivan. Nothing. So I told him, “It’s Lovers Lane Barber Shop. The guy closest to the window is Ivan. I think he’ll remember me. It’s on Lovers just past Douglas.” Ralph said he had enough information to go on.
We paraded back home, two slow-motion vehicles behind us. The joggers and walkers we passed seemed bemused, but no one said anything.
As we went into the house to freshen up, Ralph said we should leave at 9:55. When the time came, we drove over with two cars—ours and a chaser car. As usual, I sat behind the driver and Justice Scalia sat behind the front passenger seat. We talked about our planned work that afternoon: the series-qualifier canon and the last-antecedent canon.
When we got to the barber shop, I hopped out briskly to alert Ivan to what was happening. The moment he saw me, he exclaimed that he couldn’t cut my hair. “Can’t do it. The place is surrounded by federal marshals.” He was frazzled.
“I know, Ivan, I’ve brought Justice Scalia here for a haircut.”
“You brought him here?”
“Yes, he needs a haircut, and you’re the best around.”
“What will I say to him?”
“Don’t worry. Just be yourself.”
Knowing all the barbers at this shop to be reliable, I took an available chair two down from Ivan’s so we’d be finished about the same time. A thin man perhaps in his mid-50s, with gray hair flowing over the back of his collar and a close-cropped beard, Ivan was noticeably nervous through the beginning of the haircut, and other than asking how Justice Scalia wanted his hair, he remained reticent through most of the cut. I made some small talk, telling Justice Scalia that this barbershop was among the oldest in Dallas. On the television above the mirrors, at low volume, reruns of the 1960s Western series The Rifleman seemed fitting. Two other customers who were waiting in line joined in the conversation. The shop has a small-town feel—about as close as you can get to TV’s Mayberry within a major American city.
As we finished, Ivan overcame his unwonted taciturnity and asked for a photograph with Justice Scalia, who patiently obliged as I snapped one. A fourth-grader accompanying her father asked for a photo as well. Justice Scalia said he’d agree on one condition: “Can you name the three branches of American government?”
“Yes,” she said confidently. She had just been studying them. “The president, Congress, and . . .” It was a long pause, and she seemed stumped. “Judges?”
“Excellent!” exclaimed Justice Scalia. “Of course I’ll take a picture with you.”
“Where are you going next?” asked Ivan.
“We’ll have lunch,” Justice Scalia responded. By then it would be about midday.
“Where?”
“I don’t think Bryan’s decided where yet.”
“Why don’t you go to Kuby’s?” Ivan suggested to me.53
“Great idea,” I said. It’s an old-time German restaurant in Snider Plaza, about a block from the SMU Law School. I knew Justice Scalia had never been there, and I thought he’d like it: it has a traditional butcher shop, and the food is first-rate. But first we needed to stop by the pharmacy to get him some compression socks for the long plane trip we’d be making the next day.
The Drugstore
The marshals drove us to my neighborhood CVS. As we walked in, we were flanked by two marshals. I asked Justice Scalia whether he needed anything other than the socks, and he said: “I need deodorant. Not antiperspirant. It can’t be antiperspirant. It has to be deodorant.”
We went for the socks first. A CVS employee directed us to one section and then another, and it took several minutes to find compression socks. Meanwhile, I had grabbed the roll-on deodorant as we passed down one of the aisles.
As we were heading to the checkout counter, I noticed an African-American man walking erratically and excitedly down the aisle next to ours. He had spotted Justice Scalia. As we approached the counter, the man started saying to me, “Is that Scalia? Is that Scalia?!” in a high, excited voice.
I nodded.
“Well, I just want to shake his hand! I just want to shake his hand!”
Justice Scalia heard this and walked toward the man, who now had a marshal beside him. “He wants to shake your hand,” I said.
“I just want to shake the hand [Justice Scalia took his hand] of the biggest bigot on the U.S. Supreme Court!” he shouted in a crackly, high-pitched voice.
Justice Scalia just smiled and walked back to the cash register. “Please get away,” I told the man. A marshal stood between the man and me, and without touching him, essentially escorted him to the back of the store—using nothing but body language.
As we were leaving, I said, “I’m sorry that happened, Nino.”
“I didn’t even understand what the guy said. Are you ready for lunch? Is Lyne joining us?”
“No, she’s seeing her grandmother and putting flowers at her father’s grave. He died when she was ten, and he’s buried here in Dallas. She visits the grave periodically.”
“That’s touching. Filial
piety is so important in Asian cultures.”
“Yes. It has its advantages. The downside, though, is that obligations to one’s elders can sometimes become stifling coercion. Lyne has friends whose parents demand payments from their adult children as soon as they start working. ‘I want $5,000 now: I’ve raised you, and you’re working.’ Some parents use filial piety almost to extort money from their children.”
“At this stage in my life,” Justice Scalia responded with a smile, “that doesn’t sound bad at all. I think I’d like that system.”
Wurst and Kraut
We got out of the car at Kuby’s and were briskly escorted by the marshals to a back seat—a communal bench, really. Justice Scalia and I sat across from each other; each of us had about three seats open to the side of us. The marshals sat at the next bench. We had seating for six, but no one else was at our table. Almost instantly, a friendly waitress came by and began explaining the menu. I suggested the sausage sampler to start, and Justice Scalia said he’d like a beer. We asked her to bring us two glasses of a German pilsner. Soon she arrived not just with the beer but also with slices of bratwurst, knackwurst, wienerwurst, and Polish sausage, together with red cabbage and sauerkraut. Justice Scalia chose the Polish sausage and the sauerkraut; I went for the red cabbage.
An odd-looking couple, in their mid-60s, came in, looked around, headed back toward us—passing several empty tables on their way—and sat down at our table, he beside me and she beside Justice Scalia, who of course was facing me. The husband was a huge disheveled man with a ponytail, dressed in overalls. She was a frumpy blonde with a strange knitted cap made of orange yarn: cat ears on the top and long earflaps that extended down to her shoulders, with pompoms on the end. It seemed almost as if someone had tipped off this bizarre pair that Justice Scalia would be going to Kuby’s. Both were stealing glances at Justice Scalia, who seemed oblivious of it. The marshals looked at me and raised their eyebrows. Perhaps the CVS experience had made me extra alert.
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