by John Decure
“Go ahead, try and sue me on the terms and conditions of a contract you can’t produce.”
“Terms and conditions?” He seemed surprised. Still staring at my chest, he asked what I did for a living.
“I sell seashells,” I said, gently cupping my boobs as if they were conches.
“I take two.”
“Not for sale. How about putting your eyes back in their sockets.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He studied a passing truck and the miniature dust storm it kicked up. “What you really do, seashell lady?”
“In my spare time, I practice law. Please think about that before you threaten me again with legal action.”
“Woman lawyer. Huh.”
I counted out a hundred bucks in twenties, held them out for him to see, but didn’t hand them over just yet.
“One condition.”
“You say terms and conditions. What happened to ‘terms?’”
“Never mind. Just cut the lawsuit business. I don’t like being threatened.”
He folded his meaty arms, sizing me up all over again. “You don’t like threats. I think to be lady lawyer, you must be tough.” He leaned forward a few inches, peering into my aviators. “Right?”
I leaned in the same distance and tipped up my shades. “Better than that. I’m tough and crazy.”
Studying my eyes, he reached the same conclusion.
“This is in full and final settlement.”
“Yeah, yeah, forget lawsuit. I take money.”
He growled a little for show as he took the bills. After that I followed him on a long walk to a distant row of bunkers. Farhad found my mother’s unit and crouched, grumbling as he wrestled with a ring full of keys, the sweaty crack of his ass winking back at me.
“Lawyer—hah! My country, lawyer is lower than dog, we tell lawyer what to do!”
“Not in America the beautiful.”
“Woman lawyer? Even lower than snake. My country—”
His whining was tired, but he’d lost a tussle with a lady lawyer in black aviators and a white Harley Davidson tank top, so I let him vent. At last he clicked the right key into the base of a rolled metal door that hissed like a dragon as it unfurled, and I was left alone to sift through a stack of useless old junk, most of which I would later gladly pay Farhad twenty more to toss.
But one box with a lid bearing the letters JMA—my dad’s initials—got my attention. Heavy and stuffed full of old documents. Leafing through a loose stack of papers, I glimpsed several pieces of my father’s history: a set of college transcripts from USC, the owner’s manual for the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe hardtop he’d driven for twenty years; an US Army notice to report for duty at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro on June 12, 1942, at 0700 hours; a Chase Manhattan life insurance policy—the payout of which had funded my mother’s final years at Blessed Mary. There was more: a deed to a house my parents had owned in West Hollywood before I was born; a book of pristine, vastly dated Disneyland tickets, marked A through E—probably from a family outing cancelled by an emergency legal deadline; a pile of furniture and household appliance receipts from big department stores no longer in business today. A lot more random yellow paper that I wouldn’t begin to categorize as useful.
Last, I came upon a thick brown file resting at the bottom of the box. Inside was a thick stack of papers secured by fat rubber bands that disintegrated the instant I dug my fingernails under them: a police report and medical chart—the officially recorded data from the hit-and-run accident that had killed my father—and a detailed coroner’s report, with complete lab results. Each set of documents neatly hole-punched, tabbed, and bound.
Someone had taken care to put this file together, as if to form a complete picture of what had become of Jack Aames on the last night of his life. My mother? Doubtful—she’d always seemed so flighty and out of it. I couldn’t think who else would compile such a detailed record, but that didn’t matter. Finding it was what counted.
Farhad was pacing around in the inland heat when I emerged. The sun beat rudely, invading my thoughts.
“Lady lawyer, not look so happy.”
I regretted having taken off my shades. My inner life is best maintained by walling off outsiders. I’m like those tribes that won’t let you photograph them because they believe a photo can steal a part of their souls. I get that thinking completely. The less of my real self I put out there, the less I give away my power. Whatever that’s worth, at least. Telling this dude I was crazy sounded cool in the moment, but I’d paid the price of giving him an insight.
“I read your ad. Climate and humidity controls.”
“Yeah, sure, motors running now. Very quiet.”
“Right. Smells like you’re storing dead rodents. I ought to call the Better Business Bureau.”
His palms shot up. “Hey, hey! We keep friendly!”
I offered him the tiniest of nods. He knew, now, to keep away.
“Okay, okay.” Farhad sighed and pointed to the box I was juggling on my hip. “You take away?”
I nodded, handing him the cargo before he could speak again.
“Thanks. It’s heavy.”
Walking back beside me, he’d dropped back into studying my chest, but at least he was working for me.
“Hunh. Women lawyers.”
His stubbornness amused me. “Jesus, get over it already.”
“My country, woman knows her place—”
I knew mine. So I retreated to Venice Beach, where I spent the rest of the weekend on the floor of my bedroom, reading.
The accident that killed my father had happened on a Holy Thursday in late March, at 10:14 p.m., in the eastbound far right lane on Temple Avenue just short of the intersection with Main Street, a few blocks south of the federal courthouse. The officer on the scene had drawn a simple overhead diagram that reduced Jack Aames to a crumpled stick figure in the roadway, felled at a spot marked by an X. The culprit—nothing but a long-necked arrow running out to the edge of the drawing—seemed to stop a block away, where the paper ran out, and for a heartbeat I felt an urge to drive down there myself for a look. I pictured those east–west blocks of civic buildings downtown. Parker Center and LAPD headquarters were a scant few blocks away, so plenty of cops were in the vicinity, but no one saw a thing. No suspicious tire marks on the road, either, which meant the driver never braked. Broken headlight glass from a car made by General Motors—a detail that served only to narrow the field to about a million or so cars on the streets of LA.
In his line of work, my father had some fairly heavy-duty enemies, which is why, I supposed, an autopsy was done: in anticipation of future criminal charges against a perpetrator. But no witnesses or evidence emerged, and no murder angle was worked up beyond the stage of speculative discussion. Every lead was exhausted. His accident, or killing, was forgotten long ago.
Next, I studied the medical chart. Massive head injuries. Hematomas behind both ears. His skull had struck the pavement, partially caving in a four-inch panel along the base, just above the neck, and probably killing him on impact. The femur, the largest bone in his left leg, had been crushed beneath the wheels of the car that had just nailed him.
Last, I came to the coroner’s report, which read much like the medical chart, but with greater scope and depth. Vital organs were extracted and weighed. Contusions were noted and measured. Thorough blood and chemical testing was performed. One test result, and one positive drug finding, got my full attention.
Lithium carbonate.
My father had lithium carbonate, the drug most commonly used to treat schizophrenia, in his system when he died.
Schizophrenia—a condition known to be hereditary.
I sat there for a time, eyes shut. I was at the bottom of a well, dry and caked with dirt. Dying of thirst with nothing to drink. Blinked when I felt the bedroom walls beginning to vibrate—they’d closed in tighter while I was down that well. Without thinking, I pulled a well-placed quart bottle of Jack Daniels from benea
th the bedsprings, twisted it open, smelled the euphoric burn before it lined my throat with cleansing flame. One, or three, more times. The walls around me stopped shaking, at least for now. Not a single car alarm had beeped down in the street, so I knew there’d been no earthquake. I studied the black JD label—good to see you, my friend from Tennessee, Old No. 7—and was slapped in the forehead by a single, persistent thought.
My old friend the bottle was equally perceptive, and with an obliging Southerner’s warmth that soothed my soul, it duly attested to my very thoughts: Yes, of course, my dear. You’ve been self-medicating all these years and—goodness gracious, sakes alive—you hadn’t even known it! Now, kiss me again, dear, one more time, lay those thirsty-girl lips right on me.
After this belated epiphany, I resolved to delve into a course of treatment for my condition. If my father had the resolve to face it, then so would I. Anxious to embrace whatever curatives modern medicine might have in store to fix my head, I got tested, evaluated, therapeutically counseled, and so on, the sum of which disappointingly resulted in the accumulation of more unanswered questions than I’d had when I started. No formal differential diagnosis was reached, but God, the slew of equivocations and five-dollar psychological terms that were bandied about in the process? Impressive.
Possible borderline personality.
Rule out bipolar disorder.
Rule out schizophrenia.
Thank you for the referral. Subject presents as a high-functioning individual who describes a history of intermittent anxiety and even psychotic episodes, yet has excelled in school and met demands of professional life. She is also guarded, sarcastic, and exhibits a generally negative predisposition suggestive of low-level depression with concurrent lack of initiative. Personal defense mechanisms are well-developed and reportedly effective in most social situations. Subject markedly denies the effects of psychosis on her cognitive functioning. High-level coping skills are also in evidence. Subject reports no prior history of hospitalization or medical intervention.
I did, however, emerge from this thicket of nonfindings with a fistful of prescriptions, ostensibly written to aid me in contending with the diagnosis of Onset: Whatever. I’m talking heavy-duty controlled substances, the kind that, under the right conditions, will knock you flat on your ass, and if ingested under the wrong conditions, might leave you down for the count, down and out for the rest of time.
Clozapine.
Olanzapine.
Quetiapine.
Risperidone.
Flight conditions for this ever-changing space shot? Variable! That means, I strapped in for takeoff under every possible combination—or “titration,” which is the five-dollar word favored in modern pharmaceutical practice—you could imagine. It was a white-knuckle, front seat, hands-in-the-air ride, and much of the time I was either sick or disoriented, or both. Some combinations stole my appetite, while others had me lusting after anything deep fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. For weeks I felt nothing below the waist, forgetting sex even existed. Retaining water, I blew up like a puffer fish. One night I awoke gagging and cotton-mouthed, reached for the bottle of JD under my bed and—holy shit—barely caught myself before downing in what could have been the last thirst-quenching shots of my life. Some days I was fogged in and bone-dragging tired for hours, only to lie awake half the night, studying the speech patterns of neighborhood crickets. My moods came and went, surging and receding like the winter shore pounds at the jetties. One week, I had all the emotion of a can opener, but a few titrations and a new dopamine blocker later and I was weeping over the truth about Santa Claus.
In fairness to the American pharmaceutical industry—a business built on caring, if you believe the TV ads full of pretty actors who are anything but high on meds—the chemicals were not all bad. The drugs did slow the visions. When I was legally stoned, the corner mailbox didn’t duck when I thrust forth a pile of letters; the palm trees lining my block in Venice stopped snickering at my black summer outfits; and if I gazed up to study a downpour, the raindrops didn’t spiral gyroscopically to earth the way they do in Van Gogh paintings, they just fell like… rain. My portrait of the world through a convex mirror was gone—I was seeing life closer to the way it apparently existed. But the trade-off was a bitch, and slowly, I came to realize that my ability to engage in critical thinking had been blunted. Flattened. Hard, without mercy or subtlety. In the practice of law, keeping that mental edge sharp is often the difference between winning and losing, but the meds I was prescribed whittled my mental edge all the way down into a pile of sawdust.
One bad case nearly got me fired. Still prisoner to the pharmaceuticals that were meant to liberate me, I was unaware of the calamity awaiting me the minute I couldn’t be at full capacity. Even seriously stoned, I still knew right from wrong, but when all the details were dialed out of focus, I got lost.
It was a simple investigation against, ironically enough, a physician alleged to be mentally unstable. Philip Burgess was a general practitioner with a good heart. He had a small clinic on a busy stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita, and specialized in servicing low-income families reliant upon government assistance for their health care. Burgess maintained his hospital privileges a few miles away at Torrance Memorial hospital, where he was well-liked. He’d never generated a single patient complaint with the medical board in over twenty years.
But Philip Burgess had a sickness. Back when he was still a resident and working killer hours, he’d suffered an attack of mania and was diagnosed as bipolar. For years he took all the antianxiety meds and mood stabilizers his doctors prescribed for him to function normally again, but eventually he wearied of the drugs’ harsh side effects. So he weaned himself off the pills, carefully monitoring his own condition.
Slowly his health improved; his sex drive, energy level, and appetite also revived. Life returned to normal—until changes in state medical insurance allowances for the poor doubled his patient base overnight. At the same time his practice ballooned, a New York publisher purchased his manuscript for a book, requiring him to make significant edits on a tight timeline. Burgess began pulling eighteen-hour workdays, seven days a week. He also stopped eating and sleeping regularly, lost twenty pounds, and became manic again. When his wife found him crouched near the toilet with a kitchen knife, waiting to slay the anaconda only he could hear slithering up the sewer to get him, she called the police.
Burgess fled before the cops arrived, checking into a Hilton hotel a few miles from home. He stayed in his room for a few hours, until the time came, he said, to return to his caveman roots and embark on a quest for fire. When hotel security found him hunched beneath the leaves of a large decorative fern in the lobby, holding match after match to the base of a giant green leaf, the police were called in again. This time Burgess was put on an involuntary seventy-two-hour hold for a psych evaluation—which, in California, is called a 5150, for the Welfare and Institutions Code statute authorizing the hold. By the next day, he’d stabilized, been treated, and was released. He retained a good criminal defense attorney, who directed him to cut a thousand-dollar check to the Hilton for groundskeeping restitution and promise never to return to the hotel. Those measures, and a copy of the psych eval, persuaded the deputy district attorney assigned to Burgess’s indecent exposure case to drop the charges.
In the interest of public protection, the deputy DA tipped off the medical board that one of its licensed doctors may be seriously mentally ill. The board was compelled to look into the case, using statutes that allow for medical and psychological evaluation of any doctors that may be a danger to themselves or others. If you survive the process, the board will leave you alone, but if you don’t, they can use the results to suspend or revoke your license. Failing to comply when the board orders you into an eval is the same as failing the testing outright.
When the board opened a case on Dr. Burgess, he quickly took the position that he had nothing to hide. He agreed to be evaluated and signed
a consent form, which was obtained by the board’s assigned investigator, Jerry Roggin.
The eval was set to take place a week later. In the meantime, I all but forgot about the case, slept late all weekend, had some good Thai food at a new bistro around the corner Sunday night—or was it Monday? Malibu also got a decent head-high swell, and I took my longboard out there twice in the dead of night, which is what I do when I can’t sleep. Or just when I feel like getting wet. No one surfs Malibu on moonless nights. The depth of solitude I take away from those solo sessions is very calming.
But the point is: the whole time I dealt with Burgess, I was whacked out, in contemplation of Life, the Universe, and the Great Nugatory Yawn. No visions to contend with, just a punchy numbness, my work a robotic exercise, like breast-stroking through molasses. When Jerry Roggin called me and said you won’t believe what “the crazy one” did last weekend, I almost snapped that he had no right to follow me around.
Jerry told me the Philip Burgess evaluation was off for the time being because the doctor had just been 5150’d again. A Hermosa Beach lifeguard had fished him out of the surf just south of the pier in an attempted suicide. Dr. Burgess, however, claimed he’d merely been walking along the sand and was overcome by the urge to play in the waves. Can you believe this guy? Jerry had asked. Well… yes, I can, I’d said without irony.
Jerry had already gotten the police report and the 5150 records. His supervisor had talked with the board’s enforcement director, and based on the two psych holds, they wanted me to prepare an emergency petition, ASAP, asking the court for an order suspending Dr. Burgess.
Petitions for interim suspension orders—ISOs—are done on paper, with witness declarations and other attachments, to support the request to suspend. The state’s primary argument is that the doctor presents such a threat to himself, the public, or both, that he must be suspended right now pending the outcome of a trial to come later.
