I was not dying, but I was at some transformational moment, and, yes, my life flashed before my eyes, not in one lightning-fast continuous scroll, but as a handful of discrete moments reaching back to my earliest days. I can’t determine even today whether these recalled moments were significant, or related, or constituted a logical path leading me to this isolated, drab room. At the age of eight, I thought that poison ivy was a myth, a scare tactic invented by teachers to impose order on unruly children, so I rubbed a thatch of oily leaves on Steve McGreevy, and the following day, he came to school with arms filled with puss and scars. I was told by a German nanny when I was eleven that I could not watch a Star Trek rerun, which led me to brandish a butter knife, causing the nanny to laugh uncontrollably. As a teenager on a skiing road trip, we stopped at the C. B. Vaughan factory in Bennington, Vermont, found the gates unlocked, and ransacked the warehouse, stealing hundreds of dollars of high-end skiracing outfits. In my early twenties, I had a blind date with an Israeli paratrooper who commandeered me in a joyless night of sexual fulfillment.
I opened the door, because I noticed that Erica had stopped talking, which led me to believe that she had made the necessary preliminary remarks. As I pushed the door open, I saw quickly that the room was packed, although there were no spillover attendees standing in the aisle. Did this mean that many were turned away? I stared out at the crowd but established no eye contact with any one individual. I realized that I was going to make a fair amount of money that evening. And the nature of my services was so amorphous that no one could reasonably expect a refund.
My apathy then lifted, and everything that was held at bay washed over me. I was suddenly filled with gratitude and genuinely humbled. Whether foolishly or not, those souls placed their trust in me, and I felt a profound obligation to return their faith with a sincere effort to address their needs and soothe their concerns. But I had another thought as well. You fucking losers, are you for real? Does the phrase “Get a life” have any meaning for you? Why are you here? What can you reasonably expect? I have no greater claim to mystical talents than anyone else in this room. What I have, and what you lack, is the will to present myself as empowered. Chalk it all up to an incomprehensible blend of circumstance and chutzpah. You could all be doing this and making money. But here’s the thing: I got here first.
Erica walked over and grabbed my hand. I shuffled behind her as she tugged me toward our chairs. This was good, as it suggested that I was enfeebled in the three-dimensional world and therefore empowered in the four-dimensional world. That’s the way these things work, right? At that moment, I recalled that I once appeared for oral argument before an appellate court, knowing full well that my legal position was frivolous. I armed myself with a walking cane and exaggerated limp, and sure enough, the panel was gentle with me, saving its invective for its written decision, issued months later.
The placement of our chairs in front of the audience suggested that Erica had equal billing, which was fine with me. We sat down, and Erica reached over and placed our hands in an interlocking clasp. She then lay back on her chair, and that seemed as good as any a procedure to follow, so I lay back as well, my right hand remaining clasped with Erica’s left. I was tired and closed my eyes. Maybe I had heard the chant previously, its familiar, melancholy rhythm providing comfort and release, but not without an abiding sense of responsibility and connection.
Ohmm,
Krishna Varnee
Bruhar Rupee
Bruhar Gandhi
Ma ha Va Yee
Devi Devi
Ma ha Devi
Mama Shatrone
Vay na say yo
I repeated this chant sixteen times, and I felt the soothing accompaniment of many voices, although I was quite sure that no one in the room had joined me, not even Erica. One voice in particular stood out, a voice reedy and tremulous, burdened by experience yet infused with hope. In this voice, just beyond the reach of the chorus, lay all of the possibilities of redemption and despair, and in a language utterly foreign to me. I still knew that the chant was imploring those who would listen to choose, to simply choose, for that was the absurd little secret buried within us all. To simply choose, and to empty ourselves of everything we’d ever been taught that would divest our abilities to do so.
I opened my eyes and saw Erica to my right, still clasping my hand. She was asleep, or in a trance, and I quickly shut my eyes, lest the audience suspect that I was somehow uncommitted to the enterprise. But there is silence, and there is emptiness. I turned around to face the room and found no one. Erica opened her eyes and smiled at me, tightening her grip on my hand.
“What happened?” I asked.
Erica continued to smile. “It was wonderful,” she said. She closed her eyes and lay back. “This could be the beginning.”
I could neither share nor reject her enthusiasm, and I lacked the energy to make further inquiries. While I shook myself from my slumber, Erica told me that, after thirty minutes, she had communicated to the audience that they could leave, while I continued in my trance, or however my altered state could be described.
Erica and I stood up to leave, and Erica supported my arm, like a caring attendant ensuring that an elderly patient stayed balanced. We exited on Thirty-Third Street, the same block where I had bolted from the hotel following the Great Harmonic Alignment. We made our way toward Fifth Avenue, intending to find a taxi to take us to Erica’s apartment. We walked perhaps twenty or thirty yards when I noticed, coming toward us, an overweight, disheveled man in his late twenties or early thirties. When he was perhaps ten feet in front of us, closing the gap quickly, he reached into his tote bag and drew out an object, which he brandished before us. Its familiar dull blue finish alarmed me, and I reflexively positioned myself between the object and Erica. I felt its papery surface tap my chest and realized that its intended target was me, not Erica.
“Mr. Alexander,” the man said. “This is for you.” He pressed the object against my chest, which I finally recognized as a clutch of papers bound by thin rubber bands, but I refused to take possession. The man closed his eyes briefly and shrugged, then dropped the papers at my feet. The pages sprang free from the rubber-band enclosure and flattened out upside down on the sidewalk. I saw the familiar words typed in an exotic font, words I had typed many times myself. “Summons and Complaint.”
“Whatever,” the man said. “You’ve been served.”
42
Grounded
The general consensus in the legal community was that Justice Carlina Ramone was cruel. I’ve known attorneys who would visit her courtroom in their spare time to watch her display of intelligence and abuse, to witness the shredding of lawyers who appeared before her unprepared or who offered questionable arguments.
Justice Ramone was funny, but she was mean. She sought to hurt, and in those moments when her destructive intentions were thwarted, an unpleasant anger swept over her countenance, and she would regroup, and almost always, her second efforts found their mark. She also conscientiously strived to reach a just result. These two tendencies did not merge in some singular purpose. They simply coexisted, separate strands that just happened to become entangled.
Oral argument in New York State courts with many judges had become an extravagant waste of time. Judges often did not read the briefs, or they relied on the shallow summaries of their law clerks. Justice Ramone, by contrast, read everything. Carefully. Few appreciated this extra effort, which is not to say that attorneys wished for lazy or unprepared judges. More often than not, lawyers longed for those few occasions when their carefully constructed and laborious arguments set forth in tedious briefs were familiar to the judge.
But this appreciation found an exception in Justice Ramone. She was intent on demonstrating to her packed courtroom that she was the smartest person in the room, and regrettably, she usually was. I say regrettably not because smart judges were liabilities, but because Justice Ramone had many questionable goals for her high-octane inte
llect. Even those who prevailed in oral argument or nonjury trials felt that they had achieved a victory at an uncomfortably high price.
Her opinions were solid and rarely reversed and free from the rhetorical flourishes that characterized her commentary during oral argument. She was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the appellate courts in New York, but many theorized that she rejected this advancement. Oral argument before an appellate panel was typically spread among multiple judges, and not even the chief judge on the panel could exercise the dictatorial control that Justice Ramone favored. Also, appellate panels almost never ruled from the bench, and it was often difficult to gauge how the collective consensus would ultimately play out in a decision. By contrast, Justice Ramone frequently ruled from the bench, probably so that she could witness the deflation of the vanquished.
I thought of Justice Ramone the moment I finished reading the summons and complaint served on me after the Hotel Pennsylvania healing session, and for one of the few times in my profession, I hoped that the case would be assigned to her, because I knew that she would be unswayed by pity and would follow the law rigorously.
What a strange feeling, being sued. As an attorney, I had been involved in scores of lawsuits and often found my ego exposed as I harnessed my abilities in the pursuit of achieving victory or avoiding humiliation. But litigation for lawyers was still one step removed from the raw emotion experienced by the parties themselves.
Now, I was able to fully experience the gut punch when someone takes the time and trouble to utilize the formalities of a pleading to label you a coward and con artist. I was being sued by Roger Whitfield, Josh’s father, for intentional infliction of emotional distress, wrongful death, impersonating a psychologist, fraud, and various other causes of action. Within minutes of reading the complaint, I knew to a certainty that the lawsuit would be dismissed summarily. It came as no surprise that Whitfield had prepared the complaint pro se, probably because no attorney would agree to represent him in such a meritless endeavor, even at the extravagant rates that Whitfield was undoubtedly willing to pay. Undeterred, Whitfield probably took to Google, found a few sample New York complaints, and contorted the templates so that the outer edges of the pleadings took on the look and feel of a genuine lawsuit.
But while the lawsuit was frivolous from a legal standpoint, the allegations wildly yet methodically pieced together a humiliating narrative, some based on conjecture, some based on nonsense, and some based on facts that I was surprised Whitfield knew about. Had he been in touch with Jessica? And his rage and pain spilled over the confines of the pages, making the entire complaint a weird mixture of stilted language and florid prose. “Defendant did knowingly and intentionally prevent crucial medical care from being provided to the deceased Josh Whitfield, resulting in an agonizing, premature, and horrific death.” “Defendant extracted substantial funds from the parents of the deceased by promising miraculous cures for a helpless, cancer-stricken child.” “Defendant leveraged his status and standing as an attorney licensed to practice law in the courts of the state of New York to further deceive and defraud the parents of the deceased into believing that there could be some legitimacy to the errant nonsense said Defendant peddled shamelessly.”
I trembled as I read through the complaint, alternately breathing sighs of relief as I came to recognize, with growing conviction, that the lawsuit could not withstand dismissal, and shaking in humiliating recognition that many of the wild shots flew uncomfortably close to what others might perceive as the truth.
Erica was anxious to compile a point-by-point rebuttal to the allegations. She was unhappy with my explanation of the proper strategy, which was to prepare a motion to dismiss. Such a document would concede the truth of all of the allegations solely for the purposes of the motion but then would seek to dismiss the entire lawsuit on the grounds that the allegations, even if true, failed to state any cognizable cause of action.
“You cannot concede anything,” Erica said. “You have to expose the falsity of the allegations.” But allowing this matter to drift into the murky process of separating truth from fiction was precisely the wrong legal strategy, as it would prolong the duration of the lawsuit. Instead, I prepared motion papers, systematically going through each section of the complaint to demonstrate the lack of legal substance, regardless of the truth of the allegations. And when the case was in fact assigned to Justice Ramone, I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that she would lace into Whitfield at oral argument, exposing the complaint as a compendium of frivolous contentions attached to a legal caption. For unlike most judges, Justice Ramone insisted that each and every motion be argued before her, and she issued rulings on the vast majority of them from the bench.
On the day of oral argument of my motion to dismiss, I walked up the concrete steps to the circular courthouse at 60 Centre Street in lower Manhattan, a path I had walked hundreds of times before but never as a named defendant in a lawsuit. I had always accepted the quirks of the building before without much contemplation, but now I saw the structure in a different light. Round, dusty, yet also intimidating, an old-school throwback somehow architecturally linked to an era when justice was harsh and swift. Resistant to Internet connectivity, plagued with atrocious acoustics, the building still emanated a sense of propriety and foreboding.
And Justice Ramone played to the structure. For all of her theatrics while on the bench, she insisted on strict adherence to etiquette. The attorneys were required to congregate in the hallway outside the courtroom, and only when all counsel were present for a given case would the attorneys be allowed inside, where they would inform the clerk that they were ready for argument. Posted prominently through the courtroom was a set of Ramone’s rules for oral argument, dubbed the “Podium Protocol” among the New York bar.
All counsel recognize the importance of civility, decorum, and protocol in judicial proceedings before this Court. Therefore, all attorneys arguing motions before this Court shall adhere to the following rules:
a)Each attorney will stand at the podium when it is his or her time to speak.
b)No attorney shall speak unless
(i)The attorney is at the podium; and/or
(ii)the Court grants permission to do so.
c)Any attorney not at the podium shall remain seated behind the counsel’s desk and not speak, unless permitted to do so.
Note: Only in rare circumstances will the Court allow any attorney not at the podium to speak. Unless otherwise expressly indicated by the Court, attorneys shall assume that they are not allowed to speak unless and until they are at the podium.
I spotted Roger Whitfield in the hallway. He was seated on a bench, hunched over a legal pad filled with scrawled notes and penciled lines jutting out to the margins. He was well dressed in a crisp pinstripe suit, although the jacket seemed shrink-wrapped onto his overly developed torso. I found comfort in the image of this hulking, menacing presence being chopped down to size by Justice Ramone. Everything that worked for him in his business world—the brute force of personality, the risktaking, the commercial instinct, the timing of decision-making—all of this would prove unhelpful in this forum, where the elements of each cause of action were either met or not met. And I knew Ramone. She would be merciless, perhaps giving lip service to the tragedy suffered by Whitfield but then returning to the task at hand, which was disposing of this contamination to the rule of law.
I approached Whitfield. “We should report to the clerk that we’re both here,” I said. Whitfield nodded his head, stood up, and walked into the courtroom. I followed him, and we both made our way to the desk of the law secretary, an amiable gentlemen in his forties who had been with Justice Ramone for years. He registered our appearance and instructed us to find a seat. I walked to the other side of the room, away from Whitfield, and sat near the jury box. Like most of the other attorneys in the room, I reviewed my outline for oral argument, trying to commit as much of it as I could to memory. With Justice Ramone, however, it hardly matter
ed. Usually within a few seconds of an attorney’s presentation, she would interrupt with a series of pointed questions, and the remainder of the attorney’s allotted time was spent fending off hostile questions. Better to know the law than the outline.
The courtroom began to fill up with the attorneys, and at 10:15 a.m., Justice Ramone stepped out of her adjoining office and walked swiftly to the bench, her haste possibly owing to a desire to conceal her diminutive stature. As she neared her seat, a burly guard with an oversized gun hanging conspicuously from his belt banged the desk hard with the flat of his hand. “All rise,” he commanded. “The Honorable Carlina Ramone presiding at the motion calendar, IAS Part 53.”
Justice Ramone flipped open a small laptop, grabbed the first of many large folders stacked on her desk, quickly emptied the folder of its contents and, without looking up, stated, “Call the first case.”
With most other judges on motion calendars, I took the opportunity to study my notes when other attorneys were arguing their cases. Not so with Justice Ramone. Concentration was difficult, as the attorneys waiting their turn knew that some small explosion of anger was never too far away, and these eruptions were entertaining. Also, the attorneys were eager to grab on to some scrap of advance knowledge or insight, anything that might provide a hint as to Justice Ramone’s mood or, more concretely, her views on a given subject that might be relevant to the case soon to be argued.
Uncharacteristically, the first few cases were mundane and handled in muted fashion. No repartee, just crisp rulings that the nonprevailing attorneys accepted with equanimity. I found myself lulled into a slumber of inattentiveness, until the clerk called out sharply: “Whitfield v. Alexander.”
From opposite sides of the courtroom, Whitfield and I walked toward each other until we reached the narrow wooden gate through which the attorneys had to pass to take their seats at the counsel’s table. Whitfield stopped and allowed me to pass through first. He followed close behind, maybe too close. We both sat down.
The Reluctant Healer Page 27