by John Decure
Two of my hired guns appear ready to go off half-cocked, so overheated with envy are they when the pretty young thing hands me a business card with her e-mail address and phone number handwritten on the back. I turn the card over once more. Kathy Jones. Kathy? About as utterly bland a name as there is!
I liked KC better. God, I hope the fooling around is a whole lot more exciting than her name. Better throw in a fetish or two to spice things up.…
Even Vance Mooney, the walking cadaver that Heidegger insisted I bring on as Lawyer Number Three because Mooney had prosecuted a few sex cases ages ago for the state and therefore supposedly knew the ropes? Even old Vance Mooney himself, his veins rounded like speedbumps—even he extracted his face from his file long enough to crack a grin. I’d like to think all three of my lawyers, including Mr. Walking Dead, were hoping I’d kiss and tell, say, a week or so down the line, maybe the next time we met in court for this silly case, tell them about Kathy Jones and what they could only dream about, those healthy calves spiked in the air until her ankles were pinned behind those wet, wet ears, as she gasped and panted, a new wave of passion washing over her at the sound of her pure words of praise: Oh, Dr. Don, Dr. Don! Cure me again!
Mastery is what I’m used to, the personal standard by which I live, and I was glad to feel it, that familiar sense of complete control, that certain “it factor” the TV people all say I’ve got—by the square foot, Donnie baby, what they want, you could sell by the square foot—the charisma I’d grown used to trading on, my own special currency. But then…
The courtroom door opens and this Latino Joe Schmo in a bulky suit slides in with a woman in black, she who looks askance at the out-of-place court reporter, hears the laughter among my trio of overpaid defenders, punctures my who-are-you stare and pierces my façade with a high-powered, frigging nail-gun stare-down of her own—a steely sureness, a focus, a hint of… fury that, holy shit, made me completely leave my body, pushed me right outside my zone until I forgot myself and was instantly stripped naked of my stature.
The court reporter, Kathy, said nothing, but her face was a shade whiter and those dazzling thighs were clammed up tight, like a chilling wind had blown the door shut. I was transfixed.
Judas Priest! Who is that?
Tall and lean, with a model’s insouciance, standoffish toward the subservient stutter-stepping congeniality of every man in the room now taken hostage by her mere presence; and that face, a face carved by God’s hand in his image of feminine power, a face that made me forget all about the court reporter’s business card that fluttered now from my fingers to the floor.
Jesus F. Christ…
They take their seats opposite our table, all business, no greetings, the Latino, who looks like a dishwasher in a department store suit, opening a file and sliding it in front of the woman in black. Ho—wait! The dishwasher and Heidegger exchange a furtive glance, stand, and shake hands. The dark one’s none too pleased, but she follows suit—and I thrust my palm forth for just a touch, surprising her. Hoo!
Jesus F. Christ, the dominatrix is a lawyer! The dark vixen shall be my adversary!
Now, as the array of legal talent surrounding me attests, I am not a man to be trifled with, and though this entire court matter resulted from a colossal misunderstanding, I assure you—a mere miscalculation of personal aims between myself and a former patient—well, for a man like me to stand accused in a place like this simply… it simply will not do. Cancelled appointments, a slow drive downtown, parking in a public lot that stank of urine, this charade of servitude to the medical board when it is they who owe me no end of gratitude for what I’ve done for them. And thus, in the event of such a baseless, misdirected legal challenge, a man of means and friends in high places must press both to advantage, if necessary, to extricate himself from circumstances not befitting his professional stature, his station in life. To that end, not only had I bankrolled Team Heidegger, but I’d reached out to a professional colleague affiliated with the board who might ensure that I received the fairest treatment possible. Indeed, that colleague, whose name I am not at liberty to mention here, assured me that the most equitable due process of law available to me would be forthcoming. In particular, a certain quid pro quo was in the offer, one which would swiftly deliver me from further public displays of servitude such as today’s “Hearing on motion,” whatever that meant.
Until this moment, all was well, and according to the Heidegger Trio, the secretly bartered quid pro quo was smoothly taking shape. But, although I may be many things, as God as my witness, I am nobody’s fool; and, as a licensed psychiatrist, I like to think that I possess a uniquely keen insight into the human character. What unnerved me now, made my palms sweat and the hair on my neck tingle with electricity, was the sight of this woman in black and the way she so plainly, blatantly stood outside and beyond the reach of my considerable means, personal magnetism, and professional stature. Her eyes? Curious, somehow. Oddly off-balance, but hard and resolute, and when, from across the courtroom, I show her the results of a revolutionary new teeth-bleaching process my publicist swore was the best in the world, she… looks right past the Dr. Don surface and taps into a vein of fear I didn’t even know I had, her unspoken disdain scuttling the offering, leaving it for dead before it even reaches the table.
Much as my care and treatment of the patient in question in this case had suddenly gone awry, distorted in a funhouse mirror of unmitigated impulses and desires, I can feel in my bones this medical board case also taking a sharp detour into the unknown and unexpected. The experience is scary, yet exhilarating, as if in confirmation that this life, my life, is indeed worth living. I am, after all, Dr. Don.
A judge walks in and the lawyers’ spines stiffen. He’s in a black robe, a tall man of over six feet, but the face is twinkly and impish like a gnome’s. A gentle giant who tilts his frame to regard us politely with a nearly blank expression, but those blue eyes fix on me and tighten, as if I’m the butt of a joke he hasn’t yet told. Court reporter Kathy’s legs are still slammed shut as she gushes a good morning to the judge—Your Honor—her display of deference like a kick to my crotch.
Then the woman in black takes command. Standing twenty feet from the bench, Mrs. Mojo rises, going toe-to-toe with the judge. Toe-to-toe, baby.
“Good morning, Your Honor.” That voice hums like a Ferrari in low gear feeling out the roadway. Ready, steady—go, go, go. “Bradlee Aames, Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General. Representing the Complainant, Medical Board of California.”
My default home base is domination. Well, conquest ain’t all bad, but ultimately, the conquest leads to domination and control. Dominion. It is an irrefutable, irresistible force within, and I’m not always proud of the things it makes me do—hey, hey, let’s not forget, I’m still Dr. Don, beloved by the vast, anonymous masses. But I own the driver’s seat, I thrive when I’m in complete command. Yet, this Bradlee-side-winding-bullwhip-beauty-Aames-I’ll-cause-you-pain-just-to-look-at-me, God! It is as if she materialized from another dimension with a cosmic two-by-four on her shoulder, with which she has just rather righteously smacked Dr. Donnie right upside the head. She da boss, the commandant, and I, the submissive accused doc-on-the-run-from-the-Law-and-Judgment-Day, I am upside-down! Hoo-wee, baby, I can hardly breathe…
The judge’s slow but smart and seeing eyes, they take their sweet, sweet time with the Dark Angel. Oh, those eyes, I can see they grieve the near-forgotten but unmistakably sorrowful loss of young, pure love.
“Morning, Counsel,” the judge says, the court reporter tapping his anguish into her little black keys.
Upside-down, I fight for balance, secretly reveling in the challenge this grievously alluring opponent represents. Oh, this will not be the “cakewalk” as previously advertised by my crack team of overpaid yes-men. So what? Nothing worthwhile is easy. In time I will best her, and then—and only then—I will possess her, swallowing whole her vengeful pride, reclaiming the mine-is-bigger-
than-yours swagger she has already stolen from every man in this room. Even the sad-eyed judge.
I am scared and exhilarated and more alive times ten and it’s a new day, indeed, Donnie boy! Beneath the table my manhood stands at glorious attention…
4
BRADLEE AAMES
Times when my head is jingle-jangled but I can’t muffle the noise with a shot of JD or haven’t concocted the right pharmaceutical boost to hold steady, I’ll simply bear down hard as I can, hard as humanly possible, like my eyes will break a sweat and my ears will spurt blood if I push myself any harder, you know. I overcompensate with sheer willpower, purse my lips, and quell the brassy clatter until I am safe from the enemy inside me, but awfully, terribly alone. Then, the quiet I’ve willed into being rounds into a monster all its own, a stifling, smiting, suffocating fog, dissolving my very being, as if I, too, along with the world surrounding me, am lost, disappeared, erased. So, why battle to overcome the noise with quiet when the quiet merely isolates and erases? Why bother?
This is only an approach, a tactic borne of an awareness that not a single better option exists. But it’s not all futile. For a spell, a peculiar thing can happen: perhaps as a product of these monumental mental exertions, the will to slow down, brake, and freeze the kaleidoscopic mind’s-eye view to a single manageable frame I stagger through, blinded—my little world of the silent scream—the fragmented view will indeed hold still, snapping more sharply into focus. Only for a moment, that’s all I can hope to achieve, but it’s as if my eyes had been straining so hard to make something out in the haze, that now, when a shape emerges from a thousand flickering shadows, it clicks into place with such true clarity, I have to look away or risk burning the image into my brain permanently. In that moment I tend to forget myself and my self-conscious doubts, and despite the hum inside my head, the tremor of carotid arteries and manic brain stem howl, yes, yes—a higher level of thought process follows.
All of which sounds like batshit crazy-woman talk, unless a picture of something worth looking at, worth studying, comes into view.
That higher plane was within my reach as I sailed up the elevator shaft upstairs to court with Mendibles, my ball-of-mush supervisor. He was mumbling something about liking my shoes, which—Jesus Christ, Mendibles—are boots, by the way. We arrived on the sixth floor and those boots just kept on walking, depositing me at the end of the hall. Department 8, to be precise, where I would find not one, but three overly solicitous attorneys for the defense awaiting our arrival like long-lost, wish-they’d-stayed-lost, gap-toothed hillbilly relatives camped on the front porch without a hotel booking. Leering at me with beady eyes and slimy mouths. I wanted to be ill. Those boots Mendibles admired were asking me, now, for permission to kick the shit out of someone, a damned fine suggestion that was nonetheless out of the question.
I enjoy myself so much more when opposing lawyers are jonesing for a street fight. A head-on, killed-on-impact collision outcome clarifies my mind that much more. Winning is a pure drug with very few side effects, a natural high I cannot get enough of.
Of course, this was my first appearance in the matter of the Medical Board of California, Department of Consumer Affairs, versus Donald Fallon, MD, but that wasn’t how lead counsel, a gray-haired, sweaty-handed tool with a military crew cut named Heidegger, was playing this meeting, his two co-counsels bowing and nodding behind him like marionettes. I ignored the three Fallon apologists as best I could, but Mendibles caved quickly, shaking hands like a practiced politician as he made proper introductions all around. Then, a nod toward their oily-haired, oily-brained client, the great Donald Fallon, MD, who rushed in and gobbled up my hand with his greasy touch before I could recoil. I was glad I’d skipped breakfast, because the touch of that squinty reptile made me sick. We went inside.
My hand, still traumatized, tried to lodge a complaint, but I blocked that bitter dialogue before it could begin, wiped my palm on my skirt back and forth to muffle any sound. With a handshake, a touch, Mr. Innocence had sought to claim me as his own. Bastard—the picture of complacent, transparent innocence was he, settled in at the far end of the defense counsel table, the skilled, hollow-hearted exploiter who couldn’t find it to keep his pecker in his pants when his job was to provide psychological care and treatment to a woman tormented by multiple demons. I looked at the tip of my boots and they right back at me, beseeching me to give the order. Oh, if only…
Enough with the pleasantries. Like his client, this head lawyer, this Clarence Heidegger, he was an emboldened one, already pushing in on Mendibles as to whether we had a copy of the proposed stipulated settlement, and whether he could read it. Mendibles looked like his head was ready to cave in. He wanted a nod of agreement from me, but I wasn’t in a giving mood.
“Not now,” I whispered to Mendibles. “Let me argue this motion first. It’ll give us more leverage.”
My boss was about to object for the third time this morning, so I put a hand on his shoulder and whispered for him to trust me. He responded to my gesture the way I expected: with silly, secret gratitude. Sometimes he is such a child.
Why the rush? I thought. This Dr. Don might be known to viewers who frequent the late-night TV world of mattress hawkers and home-gym sweet-talkers and purveyors of ninja warrior potato-peelers, but so what? He had a private practice just like other shrinks, and I was not persuaded that any sexual misconduct case should move so fast to settlement. Every sex case I’ve ever tried ended in revocation, or jail, or both for the offending cretin. Yet, too expectant by half were Dr. Donnie’s three hired suits, and what was it about Mendibles—this fetid, overripe people-pleasing mode that extended beyond his usual spineless demeanor—that had my radar alarming?
Just why did he have to be here, anyway, at a routine settlement conference, parked at my elbow and pinching my space? If I was not to be trusted alone just yet, couldn’t he do his meltdown watch from the gallery? I reviewed the surprise, herky-jerky exchange of handshakes, the way I’d seen Heidegger receive and regard Mendibles, how he’d hung on Mendibles’s every word as if awaiting a cue, that scuzz-bucket Dr. Don hanging back too casually, too confidently for a man on the verge of losing his livelihood. I felt like the only player who didn’t know the rules, or even the game. This settlement process reeked.
Numbed up on Oxy, I’d have missed all the little signs. Talking boots and protesting palms aside, once again I had to admit that the prescription parade had done nothing to help me practice law competently.
In terms of deception, Dr. Don was not so skilled at the game. He’d been memorizing my physical details, probably casting me now in the new X-rated movie playing in his head. I stared back, wondering how any self-respecting woman could pay a loser like him a few hundred bucks an hour to listen to her problems. Of course, all he did was keep enjoying the movie, not even bothering to hide his fangs.
We were early for the hearing, so I decided to test Mendibles, see if the fix was in. I led him back outside and down the hallway, tucked my arms closer to my sides to let him confront my cleavage, and quietly asked him why he’d just offered a deal prior to the motion even being heard. He stuttered out a denial, but my harsh appraisal convinced him that I’d heard something whispered that I hadn’t heard at all.
“Bradlee, listen. The motion is irrelevant if we settle.”
I told him that wasn’t true, that I may not have written the opposition but I did read it.
He seemed ready to soak in a compliment. “What did you think?”
“Even with the bare-bones job you did, Mendibles, it’s obvious they can’t get hold of the victim’s new shrink’s records. What she talks about with a subsequent doctor is her own damn business. It’s a fishing expedition, designed to harass the victim. The judge will know it.”
Mendibles diverted his eyes as if to break the Bradlee spell. (God, why can’t I be myself and still have men take me seriously?) Then he demanded to know what arguing the motion would prove, other than how tough and s
mart I was. I was thrown by how quickly he’d gone personal, and had to remind him that this was my job.
“Our client is the Medical Board,” he said. “We don’t go out of our way to defy the client’s wishes. You know that.”
“How could they possibly want such a shitty deal?”
“It’s not… that bad.”
“Right, it’s worse. So who did this Doctor Don know—or blow?”
Mendibles’s neck puffed up as he swayed back in his wingtips. He leaned in closer to deliver a stern, whispered directive.
“Kindly get off your high horse, Bradlee.”
“I’ll gladly execute a dismount as soon as you explain why I’m wrong. Preferably not while you’re staring at my boobs.”
That one backed him up again, pink-faced. I could hear him switch to breathing through his nose in an attempt to settle down.
“You want to be relegated forever to doing dinky-ass hearing-aid-dispenser and respiratory-care-board cases? You want more midwife and acupuncture cases? Say the word.”
“I’d rather slit my wrists.”
“Open your eyes and stop fighting this. I am trying to help you here.”
The words clattered at my feet and sank into the dull brown carpet. My supervisor was a prosecutor for the Department of Justice, like me, but that face! He had that same weepy, pretty-please face the homeless panhandlers put on down on the sidewalks. Shit—at least the damn panhandlers could claim a noble purpose: they were trying to survive. Mendibles had no such excuse, which made him pathetic. I felt my stomach roll and turned away when he asked me what was the matter.
