My Iron Maiden

The year 1987 was a difficult one for many people, no doubt, but for me it was particularly challenging. We moved out of student housing into a little house on the corner of Sixteenth and Bay Streets in Santa Monica, right across from the parking garage, which made it quite a noisy location due to the prevalence of car alarms going off every time of day and night. During the weekdays, I was trapped in what was then called the AT&T tower, working in the LA office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, an old Philadelphia firm. I spent every day with rich straight guys, and their sons and daughters, working to pay off my great big fat student loans. How I had gotten in there was a mystery to some.

The truth was, I was hired by the litigators, a crew of very cool lawyers, Vickie Bonnebaker, Steve Lowry, Gary Russo, Jim Wawro, and Gayle Crosby, some of whom are still working together. They were the core of the original LA litigation office, and they understood me, but in the larger firm, I did I not fit in. One day my friend, senior associate Robert Maas, told me that he had been walking with two partners, Loyd Derby and Chuck Cale, when they walked past the place where my red Honda Ascot was parked, and Chuck said to Loyd, “Do you know, Loyd, that one of our associates rides a motorcycle to work?” That was Charles Carreon, Robert had volunteered. Once, when Mike Klowden, the LA managing partner, took all the new associates to lunch at the Athletic Club, I wore what I thought was a snazzy contrasting combo, a dark blazer with beige pants. I realized I had missed the mark when one of the new corporate guys did a sort of black act, like I was dressed like a jazz musician in flashy attire, to the quiet amusement of a couple of the corporate female attorneys.

Although I had no money in the stock market, the crash of October 19th, when the New York stock exchange lost over 22 percent of its value in one day, set downtown LA reeling. Later, when the Boesky prosecution made famous in Den of Thieves took off, the firm I worked for represented Boyd Jeffries, LA financial magnate and owner of Jeffries Banknote Company, who ratted out Ivan Boesky and his pet Michael Levine. I killed time in the library trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing. One day Loyd Derby gave me a complaint and told me to draft an answer. I had no idea what the hell a complaint was, and read the thing. It said that a Mexican couple had taken their baby to LA County Hospital because it was sick, and then they never got the baby back. The baby just disappeared, and County told them that the baby had died, but they’d lost the body, and yet there was no proof of that. Horror of horrors. I couldn’t believe we represented the County. I had not thought to receive this kind of work at ML&B. I had a bad dream that there was a pile of dead babies in my back yard. The next day Loyd came and told me to stop work on the project. It had been a mistake. We didn’t do that sort of thing for that client. I felt like a death sentence had been commuted.

I had passed the bar exam with relative ease, but with that de riguer achievement safely secured, I realized that I had been cast out of the heaven of academia for a long, long time to come. I found myself confused and anxious about the future of my life. Riding my motorcycle or the bus fifteen miles from Santa Monica to LA and back every day was a bit of a grind, especially wearing a business suit. The whole thing was really so crazy I was in a constant state of amazement and anxiety. What the hell was I doing here? There was a JESUS SAVES sign on top of the building right next door to our office building, and a televangelist held church every Sunday in the building. His trashy flock would park their rattletraps in the building lot, to be ridiculed by the young lawyers in our firm. It was pitiless company, a humorless grind, although it was also very collegial, whatever that means. I was a prisoner, a brain slave of the corporate hegemony, just another salaryman, and not a very clever one at that.


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