one_raven
03-18-2006, 06:32 AM
This is not a short story, it is the chapter (Angel) of a book (Adam) I am working on.
I think it can stand alone as a short story, however.
I would love some feedback.
It is broken into three posts due to the 10K character limit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I was sitting in on criminal court proceedings, as I often did. Sheriff's officers spend their days parading the most despicable, opportunistic parasites and predators that society has to offer and the pariahs they make their living defending. JoAnn was the worst of her ilk. Someone should round up all the lawyers in the world and throw them into the ocean with accountants chained to their necks to weigh them down.
JoAnn stood before the court wearing an ill-fitting, forty-dollar JC Penny suit over a bright blue shirt that had an elaborately tied, six-loop bow sewed permanently in place just below her chin. Her azure eye shadow and indigo, leather stilettos rounded out the ensemble. She didn't look like a lawyer. She looked like a run down bar fly there to face charges for her third DUI in an attempt to throw herself on the mercy of the court because she needed her license to drive back and forth to work or she couldn't afford to feed her daughter. The whiskey made her look twenty years older than her thirty-five. A steady diet of Whiskey, coffee and not much more will wear a person down. She was soft and flabby all over -a nicotine-stained bag of soggy dough. There isn't much that is less appealing than a thin woman with a double chin and tits down to her knees. When she turned just so, a cigarette hole burned into her shirt just above the left breast would peer out from behind her thin twill jacket and draw attention to her tired old bra. Her thinning hair was held in place by a generous application of Aqua Net. Her hairstyle hadn't changed since her senior year high school picture -it was outdated even then.
Every day after work she would go to the usual lawyer's bar to rub elbows and hope to find a rich lawyer to rub other body parts with. Her favorite drink when people were around was a White Russian. If she was with a man when she ordered her drink she would make a crass, woefully unfunny comment about it to the waitress while glaring at him, "I like my drinks like my men. White, strong, straight up and coming all night!" When she laughed it sounded like the wet, phlegmy cough of an old wino. If she were with a black man, she'd order a Black Russian. When she wanted to appear cultured, she would drink White Zinfandel. She stank of cigarettes, liquor and cheap perfume. One of her clients sold bottles of knock-off perfume on the street corner with labels that said things such as, "If you like Eternity, you'll LOVE Infiniti." She was a "Coco by Chanel" woman, herself. She bathed in that crap.
I followed her home a couple of times to see where she lived. It was a fairly typical eight-family apartment building off Tremont Ave in the Bronx. Her building was on the corner, so I could see when the lights in her apartment on the top floor went on and off.
Sirens going off night and day, bums sleeping in alleys, clutching their bottles in place of the woman that left so many years ago, young punks standing on street corners selling drugs... It was a real sh*t-hole neighborhood, but the rent was cheap. More importantly it was where most of her clientele lived. She practiced law in the neighborhoods occupied by the dregs of society, and had good reason for doing so. She knew the dealers, whores and their pimps. She had a direct line to all the neighborhood dirt. If Mr. Johnson hit his wife, she was the first to know.
She knew all the cops too. She knew what their weaknesses were, which of them were cheating on their wives and with whom. She knew which cops were drunks and which ones were on the take, and took full advantage of the information. If you were a cop in JoAnn's jurisdiction you were either a rookie trying to earn your stripes, a crappy cop that was shelved there by the brass to rot away slowly or a dirty cop that chose to be there because that's where all the opportunity was. Whichever you were, you were bound to fu*k up often -misfiled search warrants, improperly handled evidence, protocol failures... the list goes on and on- and JoAnn was bound to spot it. That was her magic. That was why, aside from all her faults, JoAnn was actually a damned successful lawyer. She measured her success by how many scumbags she kept on the street, not how much money she had. After all, most of her clients were ghetto poor.
So I watched her again, as I had quite a few times before, practicing her craft. The piece of filth she was defending this time was Jerry Spolinsky. Jerry was a tall stocky Pole who made his living repossessing cars for a shady car dealer on Tremont. He purposely made a lot of noise when repossessing a car in hopes that the owner would come out and confront him. He always carried a switchblade, a .32 semi-automatic and assorted other weapons -most of them illegal. His weapon of choice, however, was his Blackjack. A Blackjack is basically a series of three or four nested heavy springs that collapse into each other like the antenna on the back of a portable radio, with a heavy weight at the end. When closed, it's about eight inches long and fits into a pocket. With a flip of the wrist it extends to almost thirty inches long. The springs on a good Blackjack are firm enough to cause some serious damage if wielded by the right arm, but they are pliable enough to not break any bones. Jerry lovingly referred to his Blackjack as his Nigger-Be-Good.
Jerry was a regular client of JoAnn's.
This day, Jerry was standing trial for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, Jenny Carter, on the subway. As Jenny sat on the witness stand recalling what happened that night, I watched Jerry. I had a clear view of him from the first row behind the Prosecutor's table. He was slung low in the defendant's chair with his right arm hanging over the backrest, bent at the elbow as if it was keeping his greasy body from sliding down to the floor. JoAnn dressed him up in a cheap dark blue suit with no tie. He looked like that slick appliance salesman whose store keeps changing names following going out of business sales and bankruptcy proceedings.
"People want to know that you are the type of man who would wear a suit," she would explain, "but you don't want them to think you are rich, or some Mafia greaseball. You want them to relate to you. Most of them are regular working stiffs. Rich people never get stuck serving jury duty. Rich people are the bosses that are refusing to pay these poor saps for the day."
Some old wives tales are bullsh*t, pure and simple, but some speak to the collective wisdom of generations of mothers. "If you make that face long enough, it will stick." Jerry's face was permanently plastered with an expression that told the world that he knows he is a real piece of sh*t, but there's nothing you can do about it, a**hole.
It was JoAnn's turn up to bat, and boy did she shine that day! She called her first witness -a respectable decorated police detective from a neighboring precinct. Lieutenant Forrest testified that Jerry couldn't have been on that train that night because he was at a bar in Brooklyn with him at the time. Their night out was padded by at least three hours on each end of the incident. "It was simply impossible for Jerry to have been on the train with that girl!" What the jury was not aware of, is that Lieutenant Forrest was having an affair with JoAnn at the time. I know this because, by stroke of sheer luck, I followed JoAnn home the night that Jenny was accosted. More accurately, I followed JoAnn and Lieutenant Forrest to her house.
JoAnn proceeded to pull one magic rabbit out of her a** after another. By the end of the testimony she had the jury questioning Jenny's honesty, chastity and intentions. Was she just covering herself after a lewd tryst on the subway? Was she ashamed of her actions and wanted someone to point her finger at to her disappointed parents? Was she a predatory lolita in schoolgirl's clothing? Was it a case of misdirected anger at her uncle who used to touch her when she was five? Of course none of this was her fault - the Freudian quack who JoAnn once defended in a malpractice suit involving a suicidal teen-aged patient he had an affair with testified to that effect. She had Jenny asking the same questions of herself.
I think it can stand alone as a short story, however.
I would love some feedback.
It is broken into three posts due to the 10K character limit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I was sitting in on criminal court proceedings, as I often did. Sheriff's officers spend their days parading the most despicable, opportunistic parasites and predators that society has to offer and the pariahs they make their living defending. JoAnn was the worst of her ilk. Someone should round up all the lawyers in the world and throw them into the ocean with accountants chained to their necks to weigh them down.
JoAnn stood before the court wearing an ill-fitting, forty-dollar JC Penny suit over a bright blue shirt that had an elaborately tied, six-loop bow sewed permanently in place just below her chin. Her azure eye shadow and indigo, leather stilettos rounded out the ensemble. She didn't look like a lawyer. She looked like a run down bar fly there to face charges for her third DUI in an attempt to throw herself on the mercy of the court because she needed her license to drive back and forth to work or she couldn't afford to feed her daughter. The whiskey made her look twenty years older than her thirty-five. A steady diet of Whiskey, coffee and not much more will wear a person down. She was soft and flabby all over -a nicotine-stained bag of soggy dough. There isn't much that is less appealing than a thin woman with a double chin and tits down to her knees. When she turned just so, a cigarette hole burned into her shirt just above the left breast would peer out from behind her thin twill jacket and draw attention to her tired old bra. Her thinning hair was held in place by a generous application of Aqua Net. Her hairstyle hadn't changed since her senior year high school picture -it was outdated even then.
Every day after work she would go to the usual lawyer's bar to rub elbows and hope to find a rich lawyer to rub other body parts with. Her favorite drink when people were around was a White Russian. If she was with a man when she ordered her drink she would make a crass, woefully unfunny comment about it to the waitress while glaring at him, "I like my drinks like my men. White, strong, straight up and coming all night!" When she laughed it sounded like the wet, phlegmy cough of an old wino. If she were with a black man, she'd order a Black Russian. When she wanted to appear cultured, she would drink White Zinfandel. She stank of cigarettes, liquor and cheap perfume. One of her clients sold bottles of knock-off perfume on the street corner with labels that said things such as, "If you like Eternity, you'll LOVE Infiniti." She was a "Coco by Chanel" woman, herself. She bathed in that crap.
I followed her home a couple of times to see where she lived. It was a fairly typical eight-family apartment building off Tremont Ave in the Bronx. Her building was on the corner, so I could see when the lights in her apartment on the top floor went on and off.
Sirens going off night and day, bums sleeping in alleys, clutching their bottles in place of the woman that left so many years ago, young punks standing on street corners selling drugs... It was a real sh*t-hole neighborhood, but the rent was cheap. More importantly it was where most of her clientele lived. She practiced law in the neighborhoods occupied by the dregs of society, and had good reason for doing so. She knew the dealers, whores and their pimps. She had a direct line to all the neighborhood dirt. If Mr. Johnson hit his wife, she was the first to know.
She knew all the cops too. She knew what their weaknesses were, which of them were cheating on their wives and with whom. She knew which cops were drunks and which ones were on the take, and took full advantage of the information. If you were a cop in JoAnn's jurisdiction you were either a rookie trying to earn your stripes, a crappy cop that was shelved there by the brass to rot away slowly or a dirty cop that chose to be there because that's where all the opportunity was. Whichever you were, you were bound to fu*k up often -misfiled search warrants, improperly handled evidence, protocol failures... the list goes on and on- and JoAnn was bound to spot it. That was her magic. That was why, aside from all her faults, JoAnn was actually a damned successful lawyer. She measured her success by how many scumbags she kept on the street, not how much money she had. After all, most of her clients were ghetto poor.
So I watched her again, as I had quite a few times before, practicing her craft. The piece of filth she was defending this time was Jerry Spolinsky. Jerry was a tall stocky Pole who made his living repossessing cars for a shady car dealer on Tremont. He purposely made a lot of noise when repossessing a car in hopes that the owner would come out and confront him. He always carried a switchblade, a .32 semi-automatic and assorted other weapons -most of them illegal. His weapon of choice, however, was his Blackjack. A Blackjack is basically a series of three or four nested heavy springs that collapse into each other like the antenna on the back of a portable radio, with a heavy weight at the end. When closed, it's about eight inches long and fits into a pocket. With a flip of the wrist it extends to almost thirty inches long. The springs on a good Blackjack are firm enough to cause some serious damage if wielded by the right arm, but they are pliable enough to not break any bones. Jerry lovingly referred to his Blackjack as his Nigger-Be-Good.
Jerry was a regular client of JoAnn's.
This day, Jerry was standing trial for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, Jenny Carter, on the subway. As Jenny sat on the witness stand recalling what happened that night, I watched Jerry. I had a clear view of him from the first row behind the Prosecutor's table. He was slung low in the defendant's chair with his right arm hanging over the backrest, bent at the elbow as if it was keeping his greasy body from sliding down to the floor. JoAnn dressed him up in a cheap dark blue suit with no tie. He looked like that slick appliance salesman whose store keeps changing names following going out of business sales and bankruptcy proceedings.
"People want to know that you are the type of man who would wear a suit," she would explain, "but you don't want them to think you are rich, or some Mafia greaseball. You want them to relate to you. Most of them are regular working stiffs. Rich people never get stuck serving jury duty. Rich people are the bosses that are refusing to pay these poor saps for the day."
Some old wives tales are bullsh*t, pure and simple, but some speak to the collective wisdom of generations of mothers. "If you make that face long enough, it will stick." Jerry's face was permanently plastered with an expression that told the world that he knows he is a real piece of sh*t, but there's nothing you can do about it, a**hole.
It was JoAnn's turn up to bat, and boy did she shine that day! She called her first witness -a respectable decorated police detective from a neighboring precinct. Lieutenant Forrest testified that Jerry couldn't have been on that train that night because he was at a bar in Brooklyn with him at the time. Their night out was padded by at least three hours on each end of the incident. "It was simply impossible for Jerry to have been on the train with that girl!" What the jury was not aware of, is that Lieutenant Forrest was having an affair with JoAnn at the time. I know this because, by stroke of sheer luck, I followed JoAnn home the night that Jenny was accosted. More accurately, I followed JoAnn and Lieutenant Forrest to her house.
JoAnn proceeded to pull one magic rabbit out of her a** after another. By the end of the testimony she had the jury questioning Jenny's honesty, chastity and intentions. Was she just covering herself after a lewd tryst on the subway? Was she ashamed of her actions and wanted someone to point her finger at to her disappointed parents? Was she a predatory lolita in schoolgirl's clothing? Was it a case of misdirected anger at her uncle who used to touch her when she was five? Of course none of this was her fault - the Freudian quack who JoAnn once defended in a malpractice suit involving a suicidal teen-aged patient he had an affair with testified to that effect. She had Jenny asking the same questions of herself.