Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  “Can I have him fax one? I could call him right now. If I reach him, I imagine he could shoot one over right away.”

  “Sorry, you can’t be in the building.”

  “Okay, no problem.”

  “It’s just a procedural thing.”

  “Them’s the rules,” I said, trying to show that I knew they weren’t his rules.

  Relief and dejection washed over me as I bundled up: I was able to leave, but I was also not allowed to stay. For all the lip service people in my office pay to the notion that mental illness is no different than cancer or diabetes, I couldn’t help but think that Teresa from the immigration unit wouldn’t have been sent packing after returning from chemo if she’d forgotten her note. Would they even have asked her for a note or would her new short hair and the fact that she was standing upright be proof enough that she was fit for duty? The note rule didn’t feel like the fulfillment of a bureaucratic requirement; it felt like a request for proof of sanity. We’re thrilled to have you. Now we’ll be needing certification that you’re no longer certifiable.

  By now the entire office was trickling in and milling about in the halls. Obvious double takes were quickly followed by polite smiles and trailing “Welcome backs.” I was on display, and I could tell that some of them hadn’t expected me to return. As I made my way toward the exit, I quit making eye contact with people. Pretend you’re just leaving to grab lunch, like it’s any other day. Who was I kidding? I was just going to waltz in here in a cardigan and suddenly everyone was going to forget that I’m crazy? PDs are, for the most part, a nonjudgmental bunch, but we ain’t above some good ol’ fashioned office gossip, and I figured I knew what today’s topic would be: Did you hear he’s back? I wonder if they’ll let him go to court. Is he stable? They sent him home.

  Toward the end of my first week back, Barry came ’round to fetch me for the come-to-Jesus talk I knew was coming. He was borderline sheepish as he informed me that I’d been “away” when they’d done performance evaluations. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to my geographic location, my state of mind, or both. From there, we proceeded to a completely nonconfrontational stare down. I assumed he was thinking Come on—do I really have to say anything? That’s pretty much where I was at too: sympathetic that he actually had to address my indiscretions in measured, middle-management speak. I thought about his possible lead-ins: So, uh, don’t strip at happy hour, please—we all got wind of that one. Show up to work, please, preferably not two hours late every day. Please consider how you’d feel if you were a seventy-one-year-old first-time criminal defendant and your twenty-six-year-old attorney came to court in a fucking Mohawk. Oh, and don’t email me to ask if you can use my Yankees tickets after you’ve been AWOL for two weeks.

  Barry’s approach was soberer. Like any good dressing down, he started with some compliments. “You have the potential to be a great trial lawyer. You’re good on your feet. You read people well, you have good instincts on cross, and you’re charismatic. But—and this is one of those scenarios in which everything before the ‘but’ doesn’t carry much weight—you are underprepared, you mail it in, your files are a mess, your voicemail box was full and had been for months. You’re late every day. You wrote one motion all year. It was good, but it was one motion. It’s great that you tried a case and it’s great that you won. But, honestly, it was an easy case. You had no idea what you were doing, you had a great judge, and you nailed the guy once when it mattered. This is not a knockout punch business, though. We win by working the body. Look through the transcript. You probably missed ten objections that would have been a big deal in an important case.”

  All true.

  I had a solid insanity defense and a sympathetic jury, but I wasn’t going to try to defend “my” conduct. Barry knew what happened. He’s a Legal Aid lifer. For more than thirty-five years, he’d made his butter begging for mercy for tens of thousands of people who’d done bad things they wouldn’t have otherwise done but for drugs, poverty, and mental illness. Barry understood that sometimes there’s a Bellevue pit stop on life’s itinerary.

  I pled to the docket—guilty on all counts—and tried to own it. I told Barry that I knew I’d let everyone down. That I was embarrassed. That I knew I was lucky to have a job and to work with folks who understand a DSM-IV code. That I’d been sick. Really sick. And that I was better now.

  “Listen,” he said, “this isn’t Skadden, Arps, LLP, or some other white-shoe fart factory. This is Legal Aid. We’re all a little bit nuts. If we’re not when we get here, we are by the time we leave. Nearly everyone here has some big trauma in their past life. We’re underdogs. That’s why we do it.”

  “True.”

  “Welcome back. I’m done playing supervisor now. They make me do it a few times a year.”

  It didn’t soon get easier to walk through the Legal Aid lobby every day. In order to reestablish myself, I was playing a character every bit as much as in the Myles days. Zachary Myles McDermott, Esq., said things like “Boy, I feel like it’s just about latte time. Am I wrong? Did you catch Breaking Bad last night?” He laughed when people answered the latte proposition with something like “More like beer o’clock,” even though he knew Debbie wasn’t really up for grabbing a beer at 3 p.m. He listened when people told their stories about rote interactions with judges and DAs; he clucked at their generic tales of injustice and laughed at oft-recited lawyer jokes. He did favors for people when asked and he told people in kind “You’re a lifesaver. You’re the best!” He even once said “Cold enough out there for you?”

  That was my next six months. Since my caseload had dropped from eighty-five to zero, I was mostly pulling “catch” duty, covering cases for colleagues who couldn’t make it to court—a shit system for everyone involved. It was par for the course not to say a word to a client before we were standing next to each other at the podium. Within sixty seconds, I was handing the thoroughly confused defendant a yellow slip of paper with his next court date scribbled on it while he was told, at a volume well beyond reasonable, to “Step out of the well!” by the court officer. I wanted to do more: go into the hall and explain to every client the ins and outs of Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure jurisprudence and its implications on the constitutionality of modern stop-and-frisk. But, fuck, I had eighty of my colleagues’ files to get through and people mostly just wanted to know if their case was going to get called or if they should just plan to die in the courtroom. So it was easier to keep the international One minute index finger up at all times and look through people like they were wind as they stared directly at me and shouted “Lawyer! Mr. Lawyer. Mr. Lawyer!”

  That or sit in my office waiting for the world to make more internet. I had to laugh at myself, thinking I was going to come back with piss and vinegar and start shoveling sea stars back into the ocean. Excessive enthusiasm was about as useful as adrenaline coursing through a DMV clerk’s veins.

  After a day’s work, I’d go home and fall asleep almost as soon as I stepped through the door. It helped that it was February and the sun started setting not too long after lunch, but 5:30 p.m. is still a bit early to shut it down for the day. When I’d wake up every few hours, I’d squeeze my eyes closed until I fell asleep again. Life couldn’t touch me when I was unconscious.

  I tried to tell myself that the Lamictal would kick in and boost my serotonin levels in due time, that it would change things, just as Zoloft had in high school, when I shifted from depressed Zack who would sit in his car and cry to Grammy Award–winning Christian rock band Creed to the Zack who did his homework and ran wind sprints on his own after practice. Where was that dude? He had to be in there somewhere, but he felt like a distant friend from childhood whose last name I couldn’t remember.

  As people sometimes do in lonely times, I began to think I needed a girlfriend. I came to believe that my German ex-roommate and I had been in love. I also came to believe that if I could just get her in a room, I’d be able to talk her into being in love with
me. I texted her and kept texting her: Just a breakfast? Nothing. I just want to talk. Nothing. I won’t try anything. Nothing. Such a cold German heart. Nothing. You don’t miss me a little bit? Nothing.

  Then, sitting in my apartment, seven beers deep, it came to me: Must talk to you now. Emergency. Herpes.

  And I got a reply: That’s fucked-up. What the fuck are you even hoping to accomplish?

  I thought I’d been clear on that point: Just a breakfast?

  We never got breakfast.

  I was fucking bored. And I knew if my Bobby Prince–generated potential energy didn’t swing toward kinetic soon I’d end up like the crusty old drunkard PDs—coat on at 4:58, eyeing the clock until 4:59, out the door at 5:00 with a fifth of vodka in my briefcase, ripping Newports until my teeth turned into popcorn kernels. It’s a job where you can coast, and this shit is dull as church if you don’t apply yourself.

  I went home at the end of every day with tight shoulders, in a shit mood but unable to attribute it to one thing in particular. It was always a variation of the same fight with the same opponent; the blows were familiar, hard and steady from all angles. Was it the mass incarceration that had me down? Was it the judge who told an intellectually disabled grown man with forty-three misdemeanor convictions that since he didn’t learn the last time with a thirty-day sentence, let’s see if sixty would teach him a lesson? Was it the private lawyer in orthopedic shoes, half-untucked shirt, chili-stained tie, and pit-stained suit jacket who told his client in the pen, “I’m not Legal Aid, okay? I’m private,” like he was Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. himself, raised from the dead. The same guy who then, for reasons unknown, yelled at his client, “That’s why white women won’t sleep with you. Because you’re an asshole thug.” The misery just bleeds together. You feel sorry for your clients, but pity is adjacent to contempt. Constant conflict and suffering rests in the back of your psyche, even if you had a good day at work.

  But occasionally there’s a client you remember and feel you can do something for—something beyond the mere call of professional duty. I pulled up Case Tracking—our janky 1987 MS-DOS database, and typed “Miller Jr., Earl” in the client field. I expected his case to be closed—dismissed and sealed 730. Actually, I wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d picked up a few new cases in the four months since I’d last seen him, corrections officers dragging him by his ankles back into the pen. Fuck outta here! But his case was still open. New attorney of record: Alinari, K. How could his case still be open? The mentally incompetent standard is tough to establish, but Earl thought threatening to burn his building down was nothing more than a landlord–tenant issue.

  I knocked on Alinari’s door. “You get a case of mine?”

  “I got twenty cases of yours, McD.”

  “Did you get a crazy guy, charged w—”

  “I got nineteen crazy guys charged with something. Go on.”

  “Earl,” I said.

  “Miller Jr.,” she said.

  “Yeah, what’s up with that case? I thought I 730’d him,” I said.

  “You did.”

  “Fit? He’s fit?”

  “Found fit. But he’s definitely not fit,” she said, and I knew what she meant.

  “Is he still on Rikers?”

  “Yup.”

  “Fucking serious?”

  “Fucking serious,” she said. “He came back fit. Earl Jr. has been trying to cop a plea for several months, but Judge Arriaga wouldn’t even allow him inside the courtroom on his last appearance. I get him all set to take the plea—he’s got the time in by the way, just needs to plead guilty and then he can leave—and we’ve tried four separate times to allocute. He’s fine in the cell one minute, then he’s screaming at me calling me a stupid bitch and talking about burning the place down.”

  “Can we do anything? Can you re-730? Advance his case?” I liked the way the words sounded in my mouth—it felt good to get the lawyer slang back.

  “I don’t know if you can re-730—never tried that before. That’s a question for Special Litigation if you feel like walking upstairs,” she said. “He’s on again in three days, though, so probably no faster way of getting him out than trying to get him to stay calm for five minutes and plead guilty.”

  I asked Alinari if she wanted me to come to court with her, though I wasn’t sure it was the best idea in the world for Earl to see a “familiar” face. I doubted he’d recognize me, but if he did, it might get the persecution wheels spinning in his head.

  “I’m taking Drinkwater. He’s the plea whisperer,” Alinari said. “If he can’t get him out, we’ll figure out what Special Lit can do. Don’t sweat it. It’s not a big deal. Let’s get lunch this week. I have a Rikers call in ten with my twenty-seven-year-old mandatory persistent felon. Two-victim shooting with witnesses and a confession. They’re offering him twenty to life.”

  “Good luck.”

  Twenty to life. That’s the shit that really terrified me about being a public defender: quarter-century stakes. I didn’t want to be the goalie in front of that net. I almost threw up the first time I saw a young man get cuffed in the courtroom. He came into court as an “INVOL”—involuntary return on a warrant—meaning he’d missed his court date and the warrant squad picked him up and hauled him in front of the judge. He’d been arrested for jumping over the turnstile. Usually, the judge will just give the INVOL a new court date or another chance to do community service. But on that day, maybe because there were new attorneys watching from the front row of his courtroom, Judge Wilson threw him in. Fifteen days in jail for failure to complete a few days of community service—scrubbing subway cars that had been filthy beyond redemption for decades. No one was in the audience for the boy as the court officers slapped the cuffs on him and led him to the cell. The DA called him a “transit recidivist,” said he’d done it three times before, meaning the city of New York was out $2.00 x 4 turnstile hops = $8.00. That’s how it came to pass that an old white judge with an old white beard ordered a young black man to be led away in chains, crying and begging for mercy as two thick-necked officers smiled and dragged him away. I was certain it wouldn’t be the last time he saw the inside of a Brooklyn jail cell. I doubted he’d ever graduate from high school or eat an organic chicken breast with roasted chickpeas and kale. Eight bucks: Get in the cage, boy.

  At four months and counting, Earl was serving the longest sentence of anyone I’d represented up to that point. I wondered if his fate would have been different if someone other than me had picked up his case at arraignments. Maybe some other newbie would have written a brilliant motion to get him out. But I had peaced out to the hospital where Earl belonged. Now he was stuck in New York’s largest mental health facility: Rikers Island. He thought he was going home when he met me. Fuck outta here, he was sure of it. Men in riot gear now patrolled his housing unit with mini fire extinguishers of pepper spray attached at the hip. Rats crawled on him while he slept. Other inmates probably took advantage of him; aside from being crazy, Earl also seemed to have an intellectual disability. Did the guards take him out of view of the cameras and beat him when he flew off the handle? I’ve had more than a handful of clients tell me that it’s the corrections officers everyone is really scared of on Rikers, and mentally ill inmates are frequent targets.

  I was pretty sure I’d done everything by the book on Earl’s case and that it wasn’t my fault he’d been on Rikers for four months. Alinari is a great attorney and she hadn’t been able to get him out either. But if I was going to eventually move into the big leagues and start handling heavy felonies—the cases where we argue about decades, not days—I would have to put my incompetence on display and ask the questions I didn’t want to have to ask but damn well should. Or I could stay in my lane in misdemeanor court—no balls required.

  I’d had about enough of my sad, boring job, my sadder boring life, and my 5:30 bedtime. I missed Zack. I missed his life pre-Myles. I missed Myles’s crazy ass too. Pre-Bellevue I was big-wave surfing in Maui; now I wa
s doggy paddling in septic lake water. I took a survey of my situation and decided I had to start reconstructing some sort of human connection to supplement my late-night phone calls with the Bird.

  The one piece of my pre-Bellevue life that remained was Jonas Jacobson. I first met Jonas when he gave a lecture at UVA Law—his alma mater—about pursuing a career in public defending. He started his speech by writing $145,000 on the blackboard. Everyone knew what that meant: the average starting salary for our peers in the private sector at the time. Then he erased the 1, leaving $45,000 on the board. “That’s being a public defender right there,” he said. “The first thing you need to ask yourself before you get into this work is ‘How much of a consumer am I? How much stuff do I need?’ One hundred forty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. Think before you turn it down.” Jonas did ten minutes on the three not-guilty verdicts he’d recorded in his short career—“Three-oh, undefeated. You get to hand someone their freedom! You say ‘Here you go,’ and they go home to their family.” Of course he had long hair and a Peruvian bead bracelet on his wrist. He pinned his hair behind his ears every few seconds and he said “zealous advocacy” four times. I couldn’t decide if he was exceptionally cool or a huge douche, but I heard enough to know I was a PD. When I asked him if it was possible to live in New York on $50,000, he told me, “I’m alive.” We stayed in touch through the Legal Aid application process and he shepherded me into the Brooklyn office. Without question, I was a Brooklyn PD because of Jonas Jacobson.

  Jonas, age thirty-one when I started at Legal Aid, slept on a twin-size mattress on the kitchen floor of an East Village apartment he shared with two of his brothers and Dr. Al. His little brother had taken over his room when he briefly moved in with his now ex-fiancée. Little bro sold pot. Big bro was an unemployed Harvard Law graduate. Dr. Al, big bro’s college roommate, age thirty-six, an actual doctor and father to a sixteen-year-old, had bunk beds in his room for when his daughter stayed over. It all made very little sense, but I liked it. Jonas would often extol the virtues of the “K-room” (aka the kitchen) to anyone who would listen: “I pay no rent. If I need to piss in the middle of the night, I just stand up and pee in the sink. I have my reading lamp. I lay in there and read the New York Times on Sunday mornings. I own nothing. Nothing. You can fuck in the K-room. I fuck in there all the time.” He sold it with such enthusiasm and sincerity that occasionally I’d find myself wondering what was so wrong with me that I hadn’t yet found a K-room of my own. But then I’d remember we were talking about sleeping on a dirty three-foot-by-six-foot kitchen floor. At $0, he was paying just above fair market value.