Single Jeopardy Read Free Page B

law school, the education he gets doesn’t remove the schmuck part of his personality - all it does is add the knowledge of the law, and you wind up with a schmuck attorney . If you look up that phrase in the dictionary, you should see pictures of Gary Koontz and Melvin Braunstein, along with numerous other members of the bench and bar.
    But Melvin is no longer Melvin: he has now become Marcel Bradley, a very nice gentile-sounding name that he thinks killed two birds with one stone: it changed his religion and still allowed him to use his embroidered shirts and hankies... which doesn’t really help much, because no-one with an ounce of class would ever be seen with him. Melvin only developed one people-skill: he had the unique ability to make everyone he met detest him because of his rude sense of non-deserved superiority and antagonistic views about society – and women, in particular. You can tell how out of touch with people Melvin was when you realize he thought that making people think he was French would mean they’d like him more.
    I went to law school with Melvin in the Los Angeles San Fernando Valley, at a non-accredited 4-year evening school we affectionately nicknamed Betty Crocker College of Law, on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys. During those four years of evening classes I learned to tolerate him because twice a year he ran the school’s bookstore, and by working for him a week each semester I received my casebooks and textbooks free of charge, saving me hundreds of dollars. I was working my way through school by being a process server during the day and playing piano in saloons at night, so the free books were a great help and I felt I owed him something for that.
    During our second year of law school Melvin thought it would be cute to have a bumper sticker that said, “Let’s give Apartheid a chance!” The sticker only had a bumper-life of about three minutes after his car was parked. That evening after class, Mel saw the remains of the sticker, still pasted onto the bumper. Unfortunately, what he didn’t see was the rest of the car. It was gone. Melvin called the police to report the theft and then smugly smiled, claiming that he was right: “if there were Apartheid, no one ‘of them’ would have stolen my car.”
    Melvin was never wrong. He was right and the rest of the world was wrong. The only clients he seemed to be able to attract were chauvinistic men hiding their assets while going through nasty divorces. Maybe it’s because they appreciated Melvin’s philosophy that the Saudis got at least some things right: their women aren’t allowed to vote or drive.
    As a result of his sterling personality, his law practice spiraled downward to the level of doing collection work and serving papers on deadbeats. He hired lawyers to appear on his behalf, because no judge in the district liked Melvin’s obnoxious personality.
    And now almost twenty years later, I find myself once again about to go into Melvin’s debt. The word among the alumni is that Melvin finally snagged a steady client, one for which he could utilize the attributes of his personality: he’s doing all of the tenant eviction and collection work for our large local Marina. They wouldn’t pay him the exorbitant amount he thought he was worth, but they do allow him to live rent-free on one of the square box houseboats that the Marina owns and rents out… sort of a floating trailer. It wouldn’t look so bad if it wasn’t parked in a slip that faces directly into the fifty-foot slips, where right in front of Melvin’s box-boat is an almost new fifty-foot fiberglass Grand Banks trawler-yacht – one of the most beautiful luxurious cruisers in the world, and the exact same model I’ve always dreamed of having, complete with the four-person Asian crew that’s always cleaning it and touching up the varnished teak rails.
    Melvin hands me a drink as we sit on the front deck (porch) of his houseboat, which is a strange thing to see: