Brain Storm (5 page)

And what sort of career had Whitlow chosen?
he wondered, just before slumber took hold of him.

He drifted off into a dreamscape populated by phantoms born of his apprehensions about what would happen at informal matters before Judge Stang. The only historical detail about Ivan the Terrible he could recall from his undergraduate studies suddenly played itself out in the nether courtrooms of his nightmares. Ivan the Terrible, robed in black after the fashion of Judge Stang, had just seen St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow—that Disney-looking conglomeration of multicolored turrets and onion domes always prominently featured in news photos of the Moscow skyline. The story goes that Ivan had commissioned the best architect in town to build it for him. And when it was done, and Ivan saw how beautiful it was, he promptly feared that the architect would go on to build an even more beautiful building for someone else. So he had ordered the poor man’s eyes to be put out.

Watson, prostrate on the cold flagstones of some multimedia castle of nightmares, unable to breathe, covered his eyes and screamed in anguish, while Judge Ivan Stang pronounced judgment from above.

Arthur stood in the galley, solemnly shaking his head in disapproval.

And Sandra leaned out of the jury box and said, “I warned you, didn’t I?”

T
he court reporter slipped into her booth, switched on her computer, and began clattering on her keyboard. The courtroom deputy tapped the microphone and announced: “Informal Matters, Courtroom Twenty-seven, Federal District Court, Eastern District of Missouri, St. Louis. Twenty-four June 2002. Time and date stamp entered.”

The court deputy clicked the gavel icon on his computer screen and a computer-generated sound clip of a gavel banging issued from the courtroom’s sound system. “All rise!” he cried.

Young Joseph Watson, Esq., and twenty or thirty other lawyers of all ages, sexes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and legal persuasions abruptly ceased their subdued wrangling, broke up earnest conferences with opposing counsel, stood up from cushioned benches, and faced front.

Watson had been in the old federal courthouse once before, when he was sworn in during a dimly remembered ceremony—at the time he had just finished back-to-back all-nighters doing document productions in two different securities fraud cases and was barely able to find the courtroom. (He went first to the St. Louis city court by mistake.) His
next contact with the federal court had been the clerk’s phone call announcing his appointed case.

He had no trouble finding the new courthouse: It was the third-tallest building in town. The Thomas F. Eagleton United States Federal Courthouse. Thirty floors, over a million square feet, the largest courthouse in the country, a hub of federal justice for seven states. At a cost of almost $200 million, it was a monument to the explosion of federal laws and federal rights. Twenty-nine courtrooms were arranged in four towers around elevators, lobbies, holding cells, and offices filled with lawyers, litigants, judges, clerks, deputies, court reporters, jurors, prisoners, federal marshals, and expert witnesses—all participants in the booming twenty-first-century industry called litigation.

Watson carried a folder with his motion to withdraw, memorandum in support, and proposed order neatly printed on 100 percent bond, proofread, spell-checked, and signed with his Mont Blanc fountain pen, a graduation gift. According to Arthur, Judge Stang was an old colleague who might read between the lines of the memorandum in support and maybe make an exception to the rule that nobody was allowed to withdraw from an appointed case.

A twenty-foot ceiling vault soared overhead and echoed with the sounds of clearing throats and soft coughing. The benches, the dais, the witness stand and jury box, were all paneled in cherry wood and capped with slabs of marble. Computer monitors were mounted around the jury box, on all four counsel tables, on the dais, in the court reporter’s booth. Running transcripts of all proceedings scrolled by on the screens, which could also be used to display everything from police reports and deposition transcripts to MRI films.

Federal District Judge Whittaker J. Stang walked in from his chambers and gasped with exertion (he was an Eisenhower appointee and a heavy cigar smoker) or despair (he nourished a notorious hatred for the legal profession) as he climbed two steps, turned left at the entrance to the witness box, and took two more steps up behind the bench, where he enjoyed the highest vantage point and suffered the eye of every lawyer in the courtroom.

He tugged at the collar of his pleated black robe, muttering under his breath and over his shoulder at his clerks—two petite recent law school graduates, a blonde and a brunette—who tiptoed in behind him and took seats in the empty, sweeping curve of the jury box. Along with the
usual battered leather portfolio, Judge Stang carried something pale and rectangular, which looked like a long white book until he brandished it. It was a length of two-by-four about a foot long—a piece of lumber. He set it on end and drew everyone’s attention to it by carefully adjusting it so that the breadth of it faced out. Watson assumed it was an exhibit or a piece of evidence—a bone of contention in a motion to be argued later on.

Judge Stang groaned as he pushed aside two three-foot stacks of bound pleadings and pretrial papers.

“It’s Monday,” he announced, looking up suddenly. “And despite the fond hopes of some of you, I am not dead.”

He produced a white handkerchief from a slit in his robe and blew his nose, as one furious eye peered over his hand and probed the congregation.

“I thought I hated Mondays,” he said, deftly returning the handkerchief to its place under the robe. He stopped and looked down again. “Look at them out there!” he cried, pointing at the lawyers while addressing his clerks, both of whom smiled and obediently looked out over the heads of the lawyers. “It’s not Mondays. It’s the goddamn lawyers who show up on Monday mornings seeking continuances for the trial dates I set for them four years ago! That’s what I hate!”

About half the audience stopped breathing.

“Is this informal matters?” he hollered, glancing at his clerks. The heads of the two young women nodded in unison.

“I like my clerks smart, young, and pretty,” he said to the lawyers. “And if anybody doesn’t like it, they can sue me for sexual harassment, age discrimination, and—I don’t know—
brains
discrimination, how’s that? Can they sue me for intelligence discrimination yet? Never mind. I’ll send the government lawyers over to explain a little concept called absolute judicial immunity to them. Take note! I’ve hired black ones five or ten times at least. They were also smart, young, and pretty.”

He paused. “Is this informal matters?” he hollered, glancing again at his clerks. The heads of the two young women nodded in unison again. “See? Attentive, responsive, and they’re both great writers who’ve decided for some reason to defile themselves by placing the English language in the service of a lower human urge called litigation.

“Well, if it’s informal matters, let’s be informal, shall we? Informal it shall be then.” He looked down onto the lawyers thronged before him. “Look at my face!” he shouted, placing a rigid index finger just under
his chin. “See what it’s done to me? Sitting here watching you mountebanks and carnival barkers wag your forked tongues at me for forty years? Forty years of mummery and flimflam, travesty and sham!”

Several lawyers coughed, a few others politely covered their mouths and quietly cleared their throats again. Watson wondered if he could get away with leaving. Not a single eye strayed from Judge Stang’s face.

“I detest lawyers,” hissed the judge. His arm shot out in the palm-out gesture he used to stop his court reporter. Her fingers instantly rose from the keys, and the transcript of the proceedings froze on the computer monitors. “And I am a goddamn lawyer,” he said, his false teeth clacking. “A federal judgeship doesn’t change that. Nothing changes that, once the brain has been reformatted by the case study method, but I hear they are having some success using frontal lobectomies in lawyer retraining programs out on the West Coast.”

Twenty or thirty lawyers shifted their collective weight from one leg to the other and looked askance at one another, thinking that this was going on just a tad longer than usual. They sighed and carefully kept their impatience invisible. They were plaintiffs’ lawyers, corporate lawyers, U.S. Attorneys, federal public defenders, members of the criminal defense bar, big-firm lawyers, solo practitioners, feminist lawyers, AARP lawyers, NAACP lawyers, ADA lawyers, LAMBDA lawyers, NRA lawyers, Lawyers for the Homeless, Lawyers Owned by Large Corporations, Lawyers 4 Christ, Lawyers for the AIDS Coalition, Lawyers Protecting the Rights of Fatal Viruses, Greenpeace Lawyers Against the Dioxin Incinerator at Times Beach, Lawyers for Drunk Drivers, Lawyers for Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, Lawyers for Specially-Abled Children Abused by White Male Republicans, Lawyers for Battered Male Spouses, Lawyers for Affirmative Action, Lawyers for Negative Action and Reverse Discrimination, Lawyers of Color, Lawyers for Promise Keepers, Lawyers Against the Stigmatization of Deadbeat Dads Who Can’t Help It, Right-to-Life Lawyers, Abortion Lawyers, Lawyers for a Bar That Looks Like America, Lawyers for an America That Looks Like a Bar, Lawyers for the Beautification of St. Louis, Lawyers Against Lawyers, Lawyers Against Judges—all of whom found a way to keep silent and respectfully listen to an outraged old man pour bilious lava on their heads. It was informal matters, held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10:00
A
.
M
.—excluding federal holidays—but Watson had been told to call ahead, because sometimes Judge Stang was constitutionally unable to bear the sound of a lawyer’s
voice, and on other occasions he was under strict medical orders from his cardiologist not to expose the cochlear nerves of his inner ear to sound waves from the vibrations of an attorney’s vocal cords.

He bowed, then looked up suddenly.

“As you know, I cannot be fired. I am an Article III federal district court judge. President Eisenhower appointed me for life. And unless I commit a felony, or a high crime or misdemeanor, nobody can touch my paychecks. They can discipline me. They can reverse me on appeal, they can whine about me in the newspapers. If they get two thirds of the U.S. Congress to go along with them, they can impeach me. They can complain to the bar committees and the rules committees. But the practical truth of the matter is I can’t be fired unless I commit a felony, and guess what? Over the last forty years, I’ve become intimately acquainted with exactly what constitutes a felony, and I am not going to commit one. You’re all stuck until somebody sends me a mail bomb.

“As you also know, I’m somewhat reticent when it comes to expressing my feelings.”

The courtroom erupted in nervous laughter.

“Hah! Hah! Hah!” he shouted, anfractuous veins flickering and standing out in blue relief between his skin and his skull. “Stop laughing,” commanded the judge. “I’ll be on my deathbed soon. My whole life will be flashing before my eyes, and I don’t want to see myself giving the likes of you any pleasure.

“See this?” he shouted and pointed again at the stacks of bound pleadings from dozens of different cases. “Papers filed by all of you. Do you want me to read them? I’m calling every one of your clients so I can personally tell them how much it costs them per word for these learned treatises which I do not read. I cannot read them. I cannot begin to wade through the high tides of bilge that flood this place every day. Do you think I need another fifteen-page regurgitation of the Eighth Circuit’s current standard for reviewing an order granting a motion for summary judgment? I can admit to you and to your clients that I do not read any of these papers. Do you know why I can admit it? Not reading them is not a felony. Admitting that I do not read them is not a high crime or misdemeanor.

“There you are. And here I am.

“Don’t misunderstand, I’m an avid reader, that’s why I can’t bear this tripe. Lavater said, ‘God protects those He loves from worthless reading’—a sentiment that has me very worried about meeting my Maker.”

The lawyers inhaled, prepared polite laughs, then recalled that Judge Stang had ordered them not to laugh.

“Maybe some of you are familiar with a very famous lawyer turned author. He wrote one of these blockbuster legal thrillers. Probably the first blockbuster legal thriller. It’s called
The Trial.
It even sounds like a blockbuster legal thriller. That’s right,
The Trial
, by old Franz Kafka. A real finger-burning page-turner. Can’t put it down! Hold on to your ottomans! Clear out the weekend, unplug the phone. I’m sure you’ve all heard of old Franz, his novels have been published in five hundred and seventy-two different languages, and if he was still alive he’d be getting advances of several thousand dollars at least. Anyway, he was a lawyer, too. I’m told he never practiced, couldn’t quite go that low, but he went to law school and passed the bar. And he had the perfect description of what it’s like to read this stuff.

“Old Franz said that reading legal briefs was like being ‘intellectually fed on sawdust which had already been chewed by thousands of other mouths.’ I don’t think he could bring himself to contemplate what it would be like to
write
the stuff, but you all know, don’t you? You know what it’s like to sit there with your Dictaphone on, droning forth polysyllabic Latin derivatives carefully arranged in the passive voice, with nine dependent clauses and a few semicolonic afterthoughts tacked on for good measure. Every once in a while you get up and go into the john and retch a few times, and then you come back and settle in for some more yammering. Your secretaries put it in their computers, push a button on the printer, and then you send it over here.

“Well, I’ve been reading that stuff for decades. And guess what? It’s all the same! Over and over again! It’s eternal damnation! You’ve all heard about the Eternal Recurrence of the Same? How about the eternal recurrence of the same IRS regulations, of EEOC regulations, of OSHA advisories, and EPA wetlands restrictions, and of lawyers by the dozen explaining them over and over in prose that’s even more obtuse than the statutory language. I remember when the Tax Code was twenty-five pages long! Now it’s housed next door in several rooms. Nobody’s read the whole thing. It takes too many lifetimes! But a tax case would be stimulating compared to the reams of papers I receive about drugs, guns, and civil rights! The Republicans keep passing laws telling me to put everybody who smokes pot in jail. Guess what? Everybody the marshals drag in here smokes pot, and probably half the marshals do too! But that’s not enough. Vote the Republicans out, and here come the
Democrats passing laws telling me I have to hold a three-week jury trial every time a woman, a black person, a Jewish person, an old person, or a crippled person gets harassed in the workplace. Guess what? Ninety percent of the population is old, female, Jewish, or black, and one hundred percent of the workforce is harassed every day, which means nine out of ten employees are entitled to three-week federal jury trials. And you want to know why we are backlogged for five years in civil cases!