Bad Lawyer Read Free Page B

substance.
    It was in the middle of this orgy of self-pity that Julia Gill and Caleb Talbot showed up. I remember they were carrying green visitor’s cards and that Julia held hers against her breasts while Caleb let his dangle from his clubby fingers. At another time—and I realized this as they approached my bed, each flashing a thin, unsure smile—I might have been angry at their presumption, but at that moment I would have welcomed my executioner.
    “You hit bottom yet?” Caleb asked without preamble. “You ready, boss?”
    I remember nodding quickly, then wishing I could take it back, that there was something still within me able to summon a hint of defiance.
    On the following day I went, by cab, from Bellevue Hospital to the Rushmore Institute on East 83rd Street and spent the next year in one of two modes. Either I endured the vicious attacks of eight group members or I joined eight group members in attacking some other unfortunate. The experience was hellish by design. You had to be open, to reveal some new awful truth at every turn, a sore wound on which your brothers and sisters would feast. Nor could you back off when it came time to score the others. Pain was to be given, as well as received; one was expected to do one’s bit, to make the sadomasochistic sacrifice.
    At the end of each session we joined hands to form a ring and begged some obscure, beneficent (and almost certainly Christian) deity for the strength to get through the night.
    The question that leaps out is simple enough: Why didn’t I just leave, especially during those first few months when the urge for cocaine had me terrified by my own dreams? The simplest answer is that I was afraid of the world, that within the Institute (we referred to it, one and all, as the Institution) I felt safe. At least I knew from which direction the blows would come. But beyond that, as I recovered my physical strength and my bad attitude, I realized that the pure will to survive (which precluded the use of any mind-altering substance) was reasserting itself. If I remained in the Institution, it would grow; if I left, it would shrink, perhaps die.
    Eventually, when the staff pronounced me fit to entertain, Julie and Caleb came to see me. I had no other visitors. My son phoned from time to time, but I had little to say to him. David was a good boy, a graduate student in archeology at UCLA who neither smoked nor drank. His calls reeked of perfunctory obligation, as if he, too, realized that we had no common ground, not even that of his childhood.
    It was Julie who provided me with the last piece of the addiction puzzle. We were in the dayroom, the two of us, and I was sitting by the window in a deep funk. After eight months of voluntary incarceration I’d come to the point where I didn’t give a damn about sobriety or drugs. My general mood flicked, almost from moment to moment, between unfocused rage and profound despair.
    “Sid, you look like shit.” Julie was quite slender, with prominent bones that remained somehow delicate, as if the contours of her brow, cheeks and jaw had been shaded in by an artist.
    I remember shrugging my shoulders, unable to summon the energy for actual speech.
    “What it is,” she said after a minute, “is grief. You’re in mourning.” She lit two cigarettes, put one in my hand. “And it’ll never go away. That’s the important part, Sid. The grieving will never end because your lover isn’t dead and buried. She’s right across the street, in the parks, the bars, even the supermarkets.”
    I turned to face her. “You’re talking resurrection here? Reanimation?”
    “No, Sid, not resurrection. Possession. Possession and death.”
    I came out of the Institution in 1995, older, wiser, and destitute. Caleb and Julie, both working for other lawyers, met me at the door and took me into the apartment they shared on East 25th Street. I believe, at the time, I was bewildered by the arrangement; there was no physical