News, No Snooze, Lose

Rory, in the late eighties, early nineties your wife's boss was probably going to L.A. to pick up cocaine. At that point all of the L.A. firms were swimming in it. After a big deal they'd break up into two groups: old school with the scotch and new school with the coke. Check it out. There was coke in New York, but like Randy Newman said: I'm gonna get 'em some of real cocaine, they can't get that where they come from. Easier to keep in a secret too if you don't buy it from someone around the corner.

Re: lawyering. It would have been fun except for the opposing counsel and the judges. Opposing counsel is almost always a pain in the ass. Big firm opposing counsel try to bury you with meaningless-but-must-be-responded-to paperwork, what we call "beating you to death with the (Civil Procedure) code." Lot's of guys send you confirming letters to telephone calls that never happened, or file responses with faked Proof-of-Service dates. Stuff like that, I don't know, I just didn't like it.

My last two years I was in a courtroom at the Children's Court with a judge who was just, just, what shall I say, Satan? He was pathetic and frightening all at once. He had a very poor vocabulary, he was always asking like "what's a Cuckhold?" as though no one in the world knew what it was. Mostly, he was an expert at college basketball and alienating his own family. Plus, he'd do stuff like fine us if a cell phone went off but answer his own cell phone at trial in the middle of a cross-examination, hold up his hand like, stop, look at the ceiling and talk for ten minutes about something very important, like getting one of his apartment buildings painted.

I like the law well enough, and the law/fact-pattern intersection is almost always interesting, but the job itself is a lot like plumbing: the money is ok but you spend your life hip deep in people's shit.