My year at Torys went as expected. I performed some outstanding work—one partner said I was among the best students he had ever worked with—only to sabotage it by not even completing other work that had been assigned to me.
My inner hell was only getting worse. I was able to hide it from most people, and to most at the firm I was sociable and fun to be around. However, one assignment found me off-site and working with an associate on a project in which we were integrated into a client’s business affairs unit for due diligence. We had to work closely with each other while going through a company’s legal paperwork to ensure things were all as described by the company. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what was wrong, but I could tell that she knew that there was something not quite right with me and that I was struggling to engage properly with the outside world. Although I could put my mask on and hide my true self from so many around me, I knew she could see through the façade.
I loved so much about Torys. It was in many ways a very progressive law firm, and I especially appreciated the focus that it put on learning and research. The firm’s library was given prime real estate in the office layout, with a wall of windows overlooking Lake Ontario and a view of a construction project of some notoriety at the time—SkyDome. Law partners usually fight over corner offices with more windows and the best views, while a firm’s library is often relegated to a dark, interior space. I thought it was significant that the firm understood that the students and junior lawyers would be working so hard and so long in the library that that they, and not the partners, deserved the best view the firm had to offer.
LAW FIRMS CAN be self-important places full of self-important people, and when you get up close and see how the sausage is made, a part of you wishes you hadn’t ever seen it, for you can never look at it the same way again. In the end, though, people are just people, and most lawyers are like most people you would meet anywhere—kind, decent, and hardworking. But again, like almost anywhere else, there are those who are self-important and self-indulgent, who use their positions to try to control and bully others in the workplace. Torys had far more who were decent than not, but, like all organizations, it also had some who you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy.
What I saw at Torys instantly resonated with me because of my past. Graham James on his own was a loser. Graham James employed by a junior hockey team became somebody with power who could control the futures of young men. Graham’s position did not change who he was, it gave him cover to be more than he otherwise would have been, it gave him perceived status and qualities he himself did not possess.
I saw the same effect within the law firm. Torys is a law firm of the highest reputation. Yet despite its attempts to ensure otherwise, not all lawyers there are of the highest quality or caliber. The firm’s reputation confers the attributes of excellence on all who work there, whether or not all are deserving. I instantly recognized that those who are truly talented and deserving are secure and don’t need to rely on the institution for power—they have it independently of the institution. Those lawyers who were truly talented just were, and they were humble. They didn’t have to go on about how the firm was this or that, they were just people who did their jobs very capably and would have been successful even if they had had to start all over again at a new place the next day.
There were others, though, who needed the cover of the firm to protect them from their own insecurities. Without the firm, their shortcomings would be visible to all. That insecurity pushed these lawyers to constantly bring up the firm’s reputation and their own place in it, even with clients who questioned the wisdom of their advice. There was never a moment when these lawyers didn’t remind you of your place relative to theirs, and this type of lawyer never hesitated to bully or condescend, just as Graham had done within the hockey community.
The truly talented would listen to any idea and consider any possible alternative, irrespective of who had come up with it or where it had come from. The insecure needed to silence the voices that might challenge their place in the hierarchy for fear of being exposed, stripped of the veneer of excellence.
My experience with Graham had given me a heightened sensitivity to manipulative behavior and greater insight into how people operate. It made me acutely sensitive to people’s true motivations and the extremes they may be prepared to go to.
We victims of child sexual assault trust nobody. We trust nothing. We will be wary of what is right in front of us. The most important bonds may mean nothing to us, because we will try to look though everything, try to see through everything, so we can, while planning for the best, always be ready for the unimaginable worst, because we know that the unimaginable worst is possible.
This surprised me. Because of the abuse, I had acquired something that was helpful.
From the moment I set foot inside the firm, I could see the various power dynamics at play. I could see who was confident and who wasn’t. I could pick out those who were truly helping and willing to share credit as opposed to those who were using the work of others for their own benefit. In meetings, I could sense when somebody was giving a real opinion or when somebody seemed to be tailoring a viewpoint to please a superior. I questioned everything, not in a cynical way, but to better understand who was motivated by what and what the various end games were.
The problem is that this “gift” was coupled with my need to self-destruct.
Because I understood immediately how the office worked, it was easy for me to do things to blow myself up in a way that nobody who understood how an office worked would ever consider. I would see an insecure lawyer bullying another, so I would go out of my way to speak over the bully in meetings and point to the bullied lawyer’s work so that it was clear to people at the meeting that that other lawyer had done the work, not the bully. I had no desire to respect office hierarchy in the face of insufferable behavior by anybody, no matter how senior, for I wasn’t a career-focused young lawyer, I was a warrior fighting against injustice, damn it, and if I couldn’t confront Graham I sure could confront them.
Right.
Of course, my actions ensured that I would receive negative reviews and not be hired back at the end of articling. As always, I had cared, intensely, and had wanted to succeed. But at the same time I didn’t care because I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place and had always deserved to fail. So, certain that I was going to fail, I chose not to play along in the first place.
That approach was wrong on so many levels, particularly in as much as everybody is entitled to your respect and it is up to you to maintain character and never diminish yourself. I was so wrong. But while I was going through so much inner hell of my own, I started thinking it was only fair to dole out some of my “justice” to people I thought were deserving. That pathetic grasping at whatever power I could put my hands on did, however, allow me to believe that there was purpose to my life, and in that way the disrespectful approach saved me. It burned a bridge, but it may have saved my life. Still, I know it was wrong.
When a somewhat pompous writing instructor showed up to teach us the basics of how to write clearly and asked for a sample of our writing, I submitted not my own work but a draft client letter prepared by a partner of some repute that had been given to me to fact-check. I thought it was poorly written, and I decided to give my view of him a fact-check. I changed his name to mine and submitted it. That backfired when the instructor called me in for a special meeting to set up times for remedial teaching. I, the student who supposedly wrote the letter, needed special help. I got cold feet about calling the partner out and explaining what I had done. It was easier to just go along with it than try to explain that someone else in the firm, a very prominent professional in his field, had written the draft and needed remedial training.
I did all of this not caring about whether I would be hired back, because I didn’t deserve to live, let alone be hired back. But, of course, I had also desperately wanted to be hired back. Back and forth. The demo
n within. Over and over and over again. Once the self-sabotage is complete the young man instantly regrets what he has lost, resets himself, and moves on to fight another day against that internal demon.
But I was not the only one at the firm with demons. No matter how esteemed the company, firm, or institution may be, the city or town in which it is located has dark alleyways and doors that lead into places far removed from the magnificently appointed offices, places you couldn’t ever imagine visiting, an underside that offers anything and everything to anybody in need. I saw them. And I was not the only one in pain or leading a double life of sorts.
Standing outside a bar after a firm event, a lawyer asked which way I was going. On finding out, he suggested we share a cab, and I thought nothing of it. Ten minutes later, after having rebuffed his numerous sexual advances while thanking him for his interest, I found myself in the middle of an intersection, trying to grab him and get him back into the cab after he had jumped out at a stoplight to play matador with the cars going by, and looking as if he was about to lose.
MY CONTINUING SELF-DESTRUCTION was getting worse.
I was abusing substances. It was becoming uncontrollable. It was happening at the office. I would sit inside my office with my door closed while other lawyers were holding conversations just outside, conversations that I could hear while I was trying to numb myself. Paranoia overcame me. The lawyers were taunting me, for we had a policy that our doors should always be open except under special circumstances. I believed they knew what was going on behind my closed door and were having a loud conversation just outside my office to make it clear that they knew all about me, about my past, that I was a fraud. I believed that they were laughing at me, knowing that I didn’t belong. In my state I couldn’t move my legs to open the door, but I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. All I could do was fall back into my chair and be taken to a place far, far away, a better place, a place where I didn’t exist, where nothing that mattered existed, where everything made sense.
I didn’t want to exist. So, I didn’t. Goodbye, Torys.
I TOOK A job at an emerging firm. Actually, it was already well established in Quebec but was just emerging in Toronto at the time: Heenan Blaikie, home of former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and later Jean Chrétien. But I knew from my first day that it was going to be a complete disaster.
The senior lawyer in the corporate group was a tall man who, like Graham, always had to be the smartest in the room. He called me into his office. When I arrived he, standing, waved me in, his phone held to his ear. I assume that what he was hearing wasn’t good news, for, while I was sitting across from his desk, he turned suddenly, picked up a pen, and whipped it across the room, narrowly missing me but taking a chunk out of the wall behind me. Just what I needed: a stable, humble, and compassionate mentor.
I kind of admired him for being so patently ludicrous yet clearly transparent, me sitting there and being somebody unable to be anything remotely approaching transparent. But I also thought it was an incredibly immature act, especially as he had done it in front of somebody he was working with for the first time. Still, here I was judging him for throwing a pen while I was in the midst of destroying myself and doing far worse things in my own life.
It wasn’t a good fit, but I worked at it for the sole reason that some very good people—Allen Garson, Norm Bacal, Joe Groia, Kip Daechsel, and others—were there. They were talented lawyers who were even better people, the type of people you aspire to become yourself. They renewed my belief in the goodness of things and the possibility of a future life for me. They believed in me and showed patience with me because, I suspect, they saw that I was dealing with something they just couldn’t see. Without knowing it, their patience gave me enough of a window into what I was doing to myself—though I was far from being able to address matters head-on and get the help that I so desperately needed—that I was able to emerge from the deadly downward spiral I had been on at the time.
I WAS A Bay Street corporate lawyer making inroads into the broader business community. I had become a member of the Board of Directors of the Toronto International Film Festival. From Heenan Blaikie I moved on to a larger, more establishment law firm, Blakes, one of the so-called Seven Sisters of Canadian law, and my career was once again on the rise. This new opportunity was presented to me by a man who would become my mentor, close friend, and personal savior. David McCarthy, like me, had attended Princeton as an undergraduate, then the University of Toronto for law school, and he had played hockey at both. David is five years older than I am, so we’d never crossed paths until I was in law school, where he was helping with alumni affairs. David is now a senior partner at Stikeman Elliott, and to this day he remains a very close personal friend.
Things clicked at Blakes because of David’s personal support and interest in me. Although the same issues plagued me behind the scenes, I was more successful there at compartmentalizing things and was becoming far more efficient at moving away from the past. It was so valuable having a personal connection with somebody who believed in me, somebody I didn’t want to let down, somebody who supported me and took time to see the best in me, who helped me. I performed very well at Blakes, where my biggest misstep, to my eternal horror and shame, was that I once used the non-word irregardless in an internal meeting with another partner. It’s a very big deal to certain people.
I never should have moved away from there, from the guidance and support David offered me. But me being me, no success should ever go unpunished. And because of his help, I was enjoying success that set up a move in 1994 to CanWest Global Communications Corporation, based back where it all started, in Winnipeg.
Only in my story could my biggest success involve moving back to the place from which I had run.
SEVEN
CORPORATE LIFE
CANWEST NO LONGER exists, a victim of changing dynamics within global media industries and its own over-reaching at the absolute wrong time. The company’s demise came after I left. All I experienced while at CanWest’s head office was success after success after success. It all went downhill for them after I left.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
At that time, CanWest was Canada’s leading media company, with additional international interests in Australia, New Zealand, and Chile. A Canadian publicly traded company, it was controlled, in terms of both equity and votes, by the Asper family. Israel Asper, known to one and all as “Izzy” (except to me, as I could never call him anything but Mr. Asper), was a larger-than-life figure. A lawyer by training, he was a former politician and an entrepreneur who had previously built and lost a corporate empire before making CanWest into the force that it was when I was there.
I had gone to law school with Leonard, the younger of his two sons and the friend who had dragged me along to try out for the Varsity Blues. He had applied to Princeton the same year that I was accepted, and he had also interviewed to work at Torys when I was hired there. We had become close over the years, and I think that he, having grown up with so much, saw something in me with my dramatically different background that he admired and respected. For my part, I saw much good in him. Leonard was an heir who still worked hard, he was kind and gentle, and he treated everyone, absolutely everyone, with good humor and respect. As his family’s corporate empire grew, and as he was being groomed to take control of the business, he asked me to come out to meet his father to see if I wanted to join the company.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime. CanWest was a fascinating company with assets and opportunities spread across a global playing field in a rapidly changing industry. The leadership group at CanWest was small and driven, and Mr. Asper was a dynamic and almost mythic business icon. It was a chance to do so much so early in my career, an opportunity to learn so much at the foot of one of Canada’s leading business visionaries. How could I say no?
Yet, taking a job with CanWest would mean leaving David and Blakes, leaving Toronto and the practice of big firm corpora
te law, and taking a leap of faith with Leonard while having to return to Winnipeg, the scene of the crime. So many crimes.
It was very difficult to return to Winnipeg. No, that’s an understatement. It was terrifying to have to return to Winnipeg. My immediate family had all moved away, my parents back to Regina, my brother and sister to Toronto and Hamilton, respectively. I thought I would never again have to go back there, no matter how much I loved it.
I worked hard to try to forget. I consciously avoided places from my past. I avoided people from my past, neighbors, old friends, in ways that must have seemed rude or arrogant or dismissive. But I just couldn’t go back to anything to do with my past, and it hurt to shut out my past connections.
It was also too good an opportunity to pass up. Plus, if it blew up for the very reason that it wasn’t the smart move, that the smart move would have been to stay with my mentor, well, that had the benefit of being entirely consistent with my need to self-destruct.
My time at CanWest turned out to be the most amazing ride of my life. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and from the moment I got there, I did not have a dull day.
My office was situated between Leonard’s office and his father’s office. Leonard was being groomed to take over the company, something that had been evident from the moment I met him in law school. Mr. Asper was hard on his children, all of whom worked in the company, and he pushed them relentlessly. Growing up an Asper would have been difficult. That’s not to say that there weren’t benefits to growing up the way the Asper offspring did, and they certainly had advantages in life the rest of us can only dream of. But none of them were spoiled in the traditional sense of the word, for irrespective of whatever they may have received as a result of who their father was, there definitely was some bad that went along with all of that good.
I Am Nobody Page 14
