1 May 2007 |
I dream of lawyers

I dreamed last night of Thomas V Loran III. We were chatting al fresco in front of a café in Twickenham, home of English rugby, between the American nails place and the big rugby shop. In real life, there is no such café. Tom was talking about himself with considerable enthusiasm, but reacted graciously to my winking and saying, “But I imagine there’s a lot you’d like to know about me.” It’s a recurring real-life problem for me and the missus. We know a great many people who are quite happy to talk about themselves all evening, but who know nothing about us except that we’re good listeners.

Whether Tom is like this in real life I can’t say. What I can say is that, in my experience, he’s a good guy. During those hellish, hellish years when I was working as a legal word processor jockey because it seemed the responsible thing for the father of a tiny daughter to do, he was a rising star, soon to be anointed a partner at San Francisco's biggest law firm – an adrenaline junkie who would habitually wait until the last possible second to dictate a document, and then would stand in front of the printer, frantically ripping each new page from it, literally trembling with stress, sweating bullets, gasping. But he was one of the very few lawyers at the big fascist law firm who didn’t think his shit didn’t smell, and who was clearly bright. Where his colleagues, on my every semi-annual review, essentially recommended that I be set afire and hurled from a window on the 21st floor, Tom always found something good to say about me.

I think he found his way into my dreams via my having been commissioned last week to redesign a Website for a woman whose company made a film about autism. When the missus and I actually went to lunch the other day (tapas in Kingston-on-Thames), we agreed that at least a couple of her boyfriends exhibit some of the major symptoms of the disorder. It occurred to me that David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, clearly has Asperger’s syndrome, and it’s impossible for me to think of David Byrne without thinking of another of the very few lawyers I liked at the big fascist law firm. In his wild youth, Robert C Phelps had invited Byrne to autograph a Talking Heads album for him, and the great man had neatly printed his name on the top left corner of the front of the album cover, which I thought quite droll.

A few weeks after arriving in this country to live, I briefly considered moseying into the American nails place in Twickenham to say howdy, and am now glad I didn’t, as I have come to understand that there are as many Americans employed in such places as there are natives of Nantes and Marseilles working in American restaurants serving French fries.

But enough about Robert C Phelp's youth, and back to my own. When I was around 11, me and the other fellows would skip school on Wednesdays and wait for the week’s new shipment of comics at the liquor store on the corner of Pershing and Manchester. The owner liked us because we bought a lot of candy from him and shoplifted only if he was otherwise engaged. “I have no one to blame but myself,” he’d say, grinning, running his big hand through what remained of his hair. Reading Arachnidman’s and Mothboy’s new adventures, we’d start feeling like we’d eaten too much sugar. We weren’t queer, but you didn’t have to be to notice how attractive our superheroes were in their skin-tight crime fighting outfits, their tights and capes and what-have-you. We’d buy a couple of soft drinks just to keep up appearances, ride our two-wheelers down to the marsh near the helipad, and there, out of sight of the intrastate, recreate some of the scenes in the new comics. We’d fondle one another’s gentles and then gang rape the weakest among us – usually Ronald Adams, who years later became a very successful chiropodist, with commercials on late-night local television and everything.
Once having ejaculated, we’d feel embarrassed or even ashamed about what the uninitiated might have made of our shenanigans, and would have to find a queer to bash to prove we were just as studly as the next fellow, even if the next fellow was on the football team, or an Eagle Scout.

We didn’t usually have to look any farther than Mitzi’s House of Beauty over on Culver, which had come to be owned by this guy with pointy shoes and orange hair, Mr. Kenneth. As we dragged him out behind his place of business and kicked his ribs in, sometimes the old lady whose hair he’d been tinting blue would follow us, all tizzied, and say something like, “Why, Johnny Reynolds, you stop that this instant or I’ll tell your grandmother!” But we didn’t include a Johnny Reynolds, and our grandparents were pretty indulgent anyway; Ronald Adams’ granddad was said to own every edition of Arachnidman that had ever been published.

Trying to make it so that he wasn’t the one most likely to be cornholed the following week, Ronald would try to be especially vicious. But I don’t think he could have kicked in an empty grocery bag, let alone Mr. Kenneth’s head. It got so that Mr. Kenneth started taking Wednesdays off to play golf with Mayor Thompson and Ronald Adams’ granddad. If a lady in our town had something she needed to look really ooh-la-la for on a Wednesday night, tough titty. None of us could imagine living past 12. In 11 days, I will be 60.

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