Rancid, "Olympia WA"
This post is about trial and error—but maybe not in the way you might think.
In I think 1996, when I was living in New York, I worked as a paralegal at a law firm that defended products liability lawsuits. The caseload consisted for the most part of diethylstilbestrol cases and claims brought against a now-defunct computer company, Digital Electronics Corporation, by users who attributed carpal tunnel syndrome and related hand injuries to design defects in Digital’s keyboards. But we also had a one-off case, Tyree v. Eli Lilly & Co., brought by a plaintiff who claimed that the life-saving drug his doctor prescribed to him for his lymphoma had also caused debilitating neuropathy in his legs and feet.
Our drug company client suspected Mr. Tyree’s injuries weren’t all they were cracked up to be, so they sprung for a private investigator to follow him around. The PI came back with photos of Mr. Tyree playing a round of golf on a public course in Long Island: walking the full nine, without use of a cart. I was sent to the golf course for further research. Turns out they had stacks and stacks (and stacks and stacks and stacks) of tee-time sheets in their clubhouse basement. My job was to read through them, page by page, and log additional instances of Mr. Tyree signing in to play golf during the period of his claimed injury.
There were a great many additional instances of Mr. Tyree signing in to play golf at this course—so many, in fact, that Eli Lilly approved our firm’s purchase of a modestly portable copy machine to take to the golf course, to run off copies of the tee-time sheets. (Cell phones in those days didn’t have cameras.) Off I went to Nobody Beats the Wiz to buy the copier, which I hauled down into the basement, unpacked, set up, and used to photocopy the many documents we would later introduce into evidence to show that Mr. Tyree wasn’t quite so debilitated as his lawyer claimed. I spent maybe a week in this basement in Long Island, turning pages, making copies. I had my trusty Discman with me (see “Columbia,” January 23), along with a copy of Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight … Yeah! on CD. I played the crap out of that record while I did that work. Now, whenever I hear certain songs from that album—Tramazi Party (Apple Music, Spotify), Shake Your Money (Apple Music, Spotify)—I’m placed right back in that clubhouse basement. Seated on the stairs, hunched over, rubbing knots in my neck, brushing dust off the pages in front of me with the sleeve of my dress shirt.
A year, maybe eighteen months after a Queens County jury entered the expected verdict against “Nine Holes” Tyree, I was back on the job, working another long-hours trial. By this time, the small firm that had employed me for the Tyree case had broken up, and I’d gone with several of the attorneys to another firm, Brobeck Phleger & Harrison LLP. This was a big law firm, based in San Francisco, but with additional offices sprouting up like mushrooms all over the country, including one that took up the entire 47th floor of the building at 1633 Broadway. You’d have thought we were trading up, and that might have been the case for the lawyers. For my part, I had to give up my office overlooking Lexington Avenue for a windowless interior room, and for word processing Brobeck provided an MS-DOS-based version of Word Perfect that I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens used to write Bleak House.
This new trial I was working was a monster. Judge Weinstein in Brooklyn had consolidated nine different cases together into one and set them all down to be tried together over a period of six to eight weeks. There were two of us paralegals staffed to assist the half-dozen attorneys. This ratio sounds out of whack but in reality wasn’t that bad, except for the fact that the lawyers expected one of us to deliver them sandwiches from Manhattan every day at the lunch break. Off you would hike six blocks to the deli, where you would wait twenty minutes just to reach the counter. Then you would place an order for not one but six custom-built sandwiches, prompting everyone behind you in the line to call for your summary execution. Sandwiches paid out of pocket—hopefully you remembered to keep the receipt for reimbursement—you jumped the D train, then the F train, then made a dead sprint to the courthouse. Invariably one of these attorneys would unwrap his or her lunch and say something like, “I asked for light mayo,” and you’d try not to bite off your own tongue.
About a week into all this, the trial team came up with a work plan whereby one of the legal assistants would work 9 AM to 9 PM, and the other would work 5 PM to 5 AM. The idea was to have somebody on call while court was in session, then two of us together working prime time, then one of us pulling together all the Last Bits of Necessary during the wee hours, so it would all be packed and ready to go when the attorneys dropped in on the office in the morning. As the senior paralegal on the case, I claimed the late shift, because while I loved these attorneys to death, I was done bringing them their fucking sandwiches.
These late shifts were amazing. Don’t get me wrong: it was a slog—a smear of photocopying, outlining of direct and cross examination, transcript annotation, binder-building, with no beginning or end. Wake up, eat a late lunch, train to work, work, work, eat, work, work, walk home, sleep. For a period of at least a week during the trial, the City sent men with jackhammers to batter the sidewalk outside my building between 8 AM and 3 PM: i.e., while they didn’t expect anyone in the nearby buildings would be trying to sleep. Which of course I was. But there came a point every night when everyone else had left the office, and I had the 47th floor all to myself. Shoes came off, sometimes socks, too. And I could play music. I did have the aforementioned Discman, which I played during the commutes to and from the office, but firm protocol and general decorum mandated headphone-free living so long as anyone else with the trial team was in the office with me. Only after that last attorney packed up and left could I load up and rock out.
I work best with music on. At this very minute I’ve got Funkadelic playing on the turntable beside me. It fills the empty space around me and settles my mind. It’s helpful, too, at times, to have a rhythm track to drive me forward through whatever task I’m completing. A handful of times during my workday lately I’ve had the side of a record run out, and I’ve looked up from my computer screen and thought, I should flip this over and play the other side, only to check the label on the LP and see that I had already done it, twenty minutes earlier. Resetting music is something that happens at such an autonomic level when I’m working that most of the time I don’t remember doing it.
Having the entire floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan to myself, while I played music, was an ideal work condition. Even better, when I’d finished for the night and stepped out onto Broadway at 5 AM, I had—so it felt—the entire City for my own. Except for the McDonald’s up the road a block, all the storefronts were closed, but as this was Broadway verging on Times Square, the whole neighborhood was lit up. The streets were empty, because 5 AM was when the cabbies all drove back to Queens to swap shifts. For lack of a cab to drive me, and with no interest in braving the subway at that hour, I got in the habit of walking the thirty blocks home, right down Broadway—more than once right down the middle of the road, for four or five blocks, just because I could. (Eventually I’d happen upon an NYPD squad car and I’d scuttle back over to the sidewalk.) And of course I played the hell out of whatever CDs I was carrying at the time: Spiritualized, R.E.M., the Verve, the Beatles, Blur. The music—that rhythm track I was talking about—lightened my step as I trod home under the pinkening sky. I would spend thirty to forty minutes walking down Broadway, then 23rd Street to my apartment at 23rd and Park, and I’d encounter maybe five people on the way.
You work the late shift enough, and there comes a point where you just assume you’re by yourself. At this point, you are Tom Cruise in his dress shirt and underwear: you are at your most vulnerable and most at risk of really stepping into some shit. You may find yourself (to borrow a phrase from David Byrne) holed up in the copy center, for example, Xeroxing hundreds of pages of trial exhibits and collating them into folders. In that moment your eyes may pass over the telephone on the counter next to you, and you may be prompted to think back on the several times earlier that day when one of the assistants used her office line to page an attorney over the floorwide PA system. Then, looking down at the Discman hanging against your hip, you may say to yourself:
I can rock this place.
A minute later you have the Discman on the counter, the phone receiver off the hook, your headphones balanced over the mouthpiece of the phone, and you’re looking for a rubber band you can use to strap them together. Once that’s done, you hit the phone’s pager button, then the Discman’s play button, and just like that you have Rancid blasting into the open air, all across the 47th floor.
You chose Rancid here for a reason. First of all, it’s the middle of the night, you need a burst of energy, and it’s punk rock. Second, the chorus of the particular song you chose, “Olympia WA” (Apple Music, Spotify), starts with the line Hangin’ on the corner of 52nd and Broadway,” which is exactly where you’re standing: 1633 Broadway occupies the block between 51st and 52nd Street. Third, Rancid is pretty terrific. You’re generally not a fan of U.S. second- or third-generation punk bands (you’re all about the U.K. new wave), and for a long while you held off buying their record notwithstanding the outstanding first single, “Roots Radicals” (Apple Music, Spotify), because starting with its name, Rancid carried all the markers of vacuous fake-confrontational ’90s skate-punk of the worst kind. But a lawyer at your last firm—shout-out to you, Ramsay Lewis—insisted that you listen to the full LP, and it turns out this band has the chops, the riffs, the references, and exactly the right sensibility to go into heavy rotation on the Discman. You hear the Clash in them, and Stiff Little Fingers, too, but they write terrific, tuneful songs in their own right and the production is beefy and authentic. You even saw them play at the Roseland two years earlier.
So it’s “Olympia WA” rocking the shit out of Brobeck Phleger & Harrison NYC at 3:30 AM on a Wednesday morning, and you’re loving every minute of it. You’re pogoing in the copy room, punching the air, singing—very loudly:
—NEW YORK CITYYYYY AND I WISH I WAS ON THE HIGHWAY, BA-AACK TO OLYMPIA—
But you weren’t alone. There was one attorney left in the office. One of the transactional lawyers was working on a closing, or a merger, or whatever those people did with the big metal accordion rack of papers they were continually setting up in their little war rooms. This attorney is standing in front of you now, in the copy room, seething. She is not someone who can see the humor in this situation, not in this moment nor possibly ever. She hauls off and screams at you. While she does that, you run over to the Discman and yank the headphone cord out of it. You hang up the phone and you apologize over and over and over until she finally relents and stalks off down the hall.
You won’t be fired for this, as it turns out, because you’ve made yourself indispensable to six other lawyers. But for the rest of your tenure at Brobeck, you will drop your eyes to the floor whenever you walk past this attorney in the hallway. And for the rest of your life, whenever you hear “Olympia WA”—wherever you are, whatever you’re doing—you will be triggered, recalling again that moment when you were caught in flagrante delicto, living your best life, when you absolutely were not supposed to.
Which was definitely punk rock. Kinda sorta. Right?