INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice Read Online Free PDF Page B

I had a lotta gall comin’ in to their office on Park Row in New York City and asking them for a job. Who the hell was I ?   each one of them wanted to know.
     
           It was, in short, my kind of interview. And sitting there in the cramped room stuffed with too many chairs and a table two sizes too big, staring out a window that looked out into a sooty airshaft, I understood, implicitly, that this was my home and these were my people.
     
           “Here,” said one of my interlocutors, pushing a set of stapled papers across the table at me like a detective presenting a prepared confession. “We’d like to have you back for a second interview. You’ll need to deliver a summation. This is the fact pattern.”
     
           “Work out your summation during Thanksgiving,” said another, “and we’ll see you back here at ten thirty Friday morning.” Her tone left no doubt that I’d be there at 10:30 and be prepared.
     
           And so while grandma was basting the turkey and my mother and sisters squabbled over mundane Thanksgiving-related matters, I was given the gift of homework. More than content to skip everything about Thanksgiving other than the meal, I holed up in a small bedroom poring over the facts of a faux robbery case, preparing my very first faux summation.
     
           I was back at the offices first thing Friday morning, my heart pounding, certain I was actually going to die as I stood to face my four-person jury. But despite my nerves, my voice was strong and clear as I explained with a few rhetorical flourishes and dramatic gestures why my imaginary client was innocent. The summation lasted about twelve minutes, each one of them floating by me like an iceberg off the bow of a lumbering ship, each moment crystalline, weighty, and portentous. It was the first time, but by no means the last, that I heard myself sum up without understanding a word that I said, some deep part of my limbic system taking over the words while the conscious part of me was left abstractly appreciating the rhythms and sounds, completely divorced from the meaning of any of it. I supposed this was what it was like when an athlete spoke of being in the zone, of doing without thinking, of a deep and golden attention to one’s heartbeat, the smell of the arena, the chill of the late fall, the ball slowing as if thrown through honey.
     
           Once done, I was led around to an office on the other side of the building and ceremoniously introduced to Ivar Goldart. Ivar wasn’t actually the big boss --that was a guy named Bob Baum. But Bob was out of the office, as was one of his deputies, and so, for my third interview, I got Ivar. Ivar was a lanky man who walked with a pronounced limp --the uneven lope gave him a weird gravitas, as if somehow no guy with such an affliction would ever say anything frivolous or stupid.
     
           “What can we do,” Ivar asked me, “to get you to come work for us?” There was a long pause. In truth, it had never occurred to me that I’d get to ask for anything, and I was utterly unprepared for the question. But as I sat there in Ivar’s office, with its partially obstructed views and proximity to city hall, it was instantly clear to me that there was really only one thing I wanted. “Being from Wisconsin,” I explained, “I always kind of envisioned New York as being bound by the East River and the Hudson, and I’d really like to stay in the city I imagined.” In other words: Manhattan. Ivar fixed me with an ingratiating smile: “Oh, no problem,” he said. “That’s where we send most of our out-of-state people.”
     
           And with that, then and there, in the narrow Park Row building across from city hall in downtown New York City, on the Friday after Thanksgiving 1990, I made up my mind: I’d turn my back on the filthy lucre of Wall Street and spend my life being down, dirty, and righteous with the Legal Aid Society of New