Happy Hour Is for Amateurs

Work Sucks. Life Doesn't Have To.

Philadelphia Lawyer

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780061845062
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061981685
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Law

For some people, happy hour is never enough

This is a book about escape. It's also about laughing gas. And bourbon and dope and sex and mushrooms and every other vice millions of us indulge in to forget our jobs, the office, and the stifling, corporate caricatures we're forced to become for paychecks. This is a book about a decade lost in a senseless career no one likes and all the ridiculous things I did to run from it. In the end, it's probably your story as much as mine. We're everywhere. We just can't say it out loud.

3-to-1

THE ART OF BALANCE
(LESSONS FROM THE FLASHLIGHT ROOM)

Somebody, please, kill me. I sat at my desk sweating, the pulse in my temples pounding, staring at the crumpled receipts from the weekend spread across my desk, struggling to read the numbers and the names of the places I’d been. Three hundred dollars in cash withdrawal slips? Three hundred dollars in cab invoices, liquor store receipts and bar bills? The balance in my account showed I’d spent a thousand dollars on Saturday night, but how? I hadn’t gone to dinner or hit any expensive clubs, at least that I knew of. What the hell had happened?

I chugged coffee and tried to jog my memory, but concentrating on any one thought was impossible. My brain was jelly, every part of me hurt, and being in an office only put a serrated edge on the pain. Straining the mind even slightly gave me this intense headache, like someone was jabbing an ice pick into my sinuses.

Nothing’s worse than a Monday morning hangover, that tail end of an extended sickness starting Sunday afternoon, caused by what you did over the previous thirty-six hours. You sleep away most of Sunday, figuring the worst of it’s gone, but then that wretched alarm goes off on Monday at seven-thirty and it all kicks in again. Anyone who gets his money’s worth out of a weekend knows: The real pain comes the morning after the morning after. You sit at the desk cursing yourself, swearing you’ll never do it again, knowing that’s the biggest lie in the world.

As I pored over the receipts, memories of the weekend came back, but it was all garbled, playing like a bad acid trip—blurs of color, figures and sounds impossible to put in any narrative except to know that it all had been wrong, in every carnal sense. The only way to piece it together was to start at the end and work backward, like a crime investigation.

The first thing I recalled was the phone ringing early Sunday morning, at one of those obscene hours when you’re sure the voice on the other end is going to tell you a relative died or they found your car burning in a west side ghetto. “Hello? This is Tom Roth from the Courtyard Suites Hotel.”

“Who?”

“Tom Roth, Courtyard Suites Hotel, Philadelphia. We have a room in your name. Can you please come over?”

“Now? I’m in bed.” It hurt just to speak, and all I could taste were acrid whiskey fumes pouring out of my mouth. “Just put it on my bill.”

“That’s the thing. We’ve had an incident in the room. We’d like to see you as soon as possible, please.”

“An incident? What happened?”

“Can you please come over?”

I threw on some clothes, stumbled to the living room couch and shook Les awake. “Get your stuff together. We have to go to the hotel.”

I called Bennett from the cab. “What the hell is going on?”

“The people across the hall stole a half ounce of weed.”

“And a cell phone! They stole my fucking cell phone!” I could hear Jerry, some work friend of Harris’s, screaming in the background.

“Yeah, yeah. Got it.” CLICK. The conversation was giving me a migraine.

“I knew this was a terrible idea. We should have just gotten a car service and gone to Atlantic City.”

“I had a good time.” Les snickered.

“Good. You want to field this meeting with the manager for me?”

“I would, but I have, uh, jai alai practice in an hour.”

“Of course.”

“My serve’s been shit lately.”

We got to the hotel, slipped through the lobby and walked upstairs to survey the room. Drapes were pulled from a window and the carpet and sofa were soaked in whiskey and Coca-Cola. Cigarette butts and crushed beer cans littered the floor and random articles of clothing were strewn about. Nothing amazing, but a little angrier than usual. Furniture and the carpeting are assumed casualties, but I couldn’t help wondering, What kind of sick mind attacks drapery?

“Dude!” Jerry grabbed me in the hall. “I need my fucking phone. These cocksuckers across the hall stole it.”

“Can’t you buy another one?”

“That’s not the fucking point.” His voice was nails on a blackboard. “It’s got chicks’ numbers in it and shit like that.”

“Look, I’ll see what I can do.” I headed downstairs to the lobby.

“Have a seat over here.” The manager ushered me to a couch. “I want you to know that we take these matters very seriously, particularly racial incidents like this.”

“Racial incident?” I felt the enamel on my molars cracking as I clenched my jaw. “What are you talking about?”

Nothing good can ever come out of a “racial incident.” The words are repellent on the surface, like “date rape” or “sexual abuse,” conjuring up all sorts of rotten images. We’d violated a pile of laws over the last twenty-four hours, but the Civil Rights Act? What the hell had happened here?

“There was an altercation between the people in your room and some people across the hall. One of your guests claims they stole something, but he didn’t tell us what.”

“How’s that a ‘racial incident’?”

“The people in the other room were black.”

“That’s ‘racial’? Do you know what ‘racial incident’ sounds like? It’s eight-thirty. I don’t need that.”

“Nine-thirty. It’s nine-thirty.”

“My watch is slow. It never runs right in daylight saving time.”

“I see…Well, uh, look. We know people get out of hand with strippers in the room, and—”

“Not the people in my room. They’re gentlemen.”

“The concierge noted several liberally attired women heading to your floor. But that’s no matter. What I’m looking for here is just a statement from you of what was allegedly stolen.”

“Yes, well, I won’t be doing that right now. First I’d like to go up and talk to the people across the hall.”

“I can’t let you go up there. Security reasons, you understand.”

“I was just up there.”

“We didn’t know who you were.”

“If I can’t talk to those people, how am I supposed to know what was stolen?”

“You want to find out what was stolen by asking the people who stole it?”

“Trust me on this. I’m a lawyer.”

“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t do that.”

“I’ll just take the check. That’ll be fine.”

I understood the repair costs and taxes on the bill, but the slew of identical duplicate charges—“$10.99,” “$10.99,” “$10.99”—made no sense. Bartering it down was the proper course, but I didn’t have the stomach for the discussion.

“Did you get my phone?” Jerry caught up with me as I tried to sneak out of the hotel. “I’m not letting those assholes get away with my phone.”

“They’re looking into it for me. I dropped a few legal threats on them. But now I really have to get back.” I patted him on the shoulder and staggered out of the hotel, feeling like I’d just been had. Was it possibly all a scam? I remembered the kids from across the hall the night before. They looked a little young, high schoolish sorts in “gangsta” do rags and baggy pants. And the manager was wrong—there were white kids in the room, with spiky hair and chains. Were the hoods in some conspiracy with him? He’d give them skeleton keys, they’d steal from drunks and then he’d scare off the victims with some horror tale about a “racial incident”? So much ugliness and paranoia spinning through my head, but why? The night had begun so innocently…

“I can pucker it in time with the music.” The skinny girl’s sphincter was keeping perfect rhythm with a Madonna mash-up playing from a portable stereo.

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“I trained with a mirror on the floor. It’s tricky.”

“I can imagine.”

“Does anybody want anything else?” she whispered in my ear.

“I’m all right, but he really likes golden showers.” I pointed across the room to Bennett.

“I can’t do that.” She gauged my eyes to see if I was kidding.

“Performance anxiety, I understand. Have some more liquor.” I’d have said anything to cause amusement at that point. The group of us were supposed to be in Atlantic City, for a “guys’ night,” but for one reason or another, mostly poor planning, things never gelled. So there we were, stuck in Philadelphia, in a hotel, ordering strippers from the phone book.

“I’m not peeing on him, but I’ll do something else.” The short one fellated her finger. “Fifty dollars.”

“Why are you asking me? Ask him.”

“You ordered us, didn’t you?” I had. You always have to do the ordering when you’re the lawyer. Everybody assumes you can negotiate. They give you the phone, then bitch about the goods when they arrive.

“I didn’t ask for a fat Rosie Lopez!”

“This girl has tracks on her arm and tits like an Aborigine.”

“My wife’s hotter!”

You never get what you want with strippers. Unless you’re in Vegas and rolling in cash you barely get what you need. It was my policy to ask for the impossible—“Skinny. Blond. No cottage cheese. We’ll pay.” That’d get you a pair of chain-smoking coke monkeys, which was as good as it got in the world of “delivery dancers.”

All things considered, these two weren’t bad. One was short and a little plump, the other tall and skinny and strung out.

“How high are you guys?” the skinny one asked as she spread her legs in my face. “X is as good as money.”

“Yeah, well, there’s none of that.” The only substances moving around the room were joints, bottles of Maker’s Mark and what seemed like hundreds of cigarettes, filling the space with thick gray clouds of smoke.

“When’s the girl-on-girl action?” Bennett yelled.

“Excuse us for a second.” The skinny one dragged the short one into the bedroom and closed the door. The short one popped back out a second later.

“Can you get this guy out of here?” She pointed to a body lying sideways across the bed, mouth open, snoring.

“The Corpse,” as we referred to him that night, was a high school friend of Les’s. All I knew of the guy was he walked into the hotel, downed ten bourbon shots, smoked a joint, and passed out before the sun had even set.

“He’s out cold. Don’t worry,” I assured the girl, wondering why a woman who’d just lip-synched with her anus suddenly needed privacy.

I heard Harris arriving a minute later. “Hey guys! I couldn’t find butcher’s smocks. But I got some carving knives and a tarp. Where are the girls?”

“What did he just say?” The skinny girl glared at me.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“The butcher knife shit.” She darted out of the room. “You think that’s fucking funny?”

“He’s harmless—just a joke.” I pulled her back into the bedroom. “The important issue is the girl-on-girl thing.”

“She won’t do it.” The skinny one pointed at the short one.

“I’ll give blow jobs.” The short one sniffed. “Isn’t that better?”

“You’d think, but no.”

“What’s going on in here?” Martin came into the bedroom, poking his finger through the aluminum foil on the top of a red and white pill bottle. “You want a Mini-Thin? You’ll dance better.” He held out a handful of round white tablets.

“What is that?” The short one grimaced.

“You’ve never had ephedrine? It’s good. Helps you lose weight. Not that you need to lose weight or anything.” The girl stared at him, not saying a word. “Fine, more for me.” He threw the tablets in his mouth and chased them with his drink.

Things would only go downhill from there. Ephedrine’s a brutal, unforgiving high—a bronchodilator that floods the body with adrenaline, causing your scalp to tingle like your hair’s on fire, your hands to go numb, and your penis to shrink back into your bladder. “Mini-Thins,” “White Crosses” or “Two-Ways,” whatever the brand name, every one’s a vicious, shitty buzz. Three to five hours of nail biting, nervous chatter and an unnerving desire to take huge, deep breaths. I’d once seen Harris eat thirty Mini-Thins. He lost his mind for the better part of a day, stumbling around, saucer-eyed with crusted drool forming at the corners of his mouth, asking people to light his cigarette over and over. “I can’t feel my legs. You think that’s a bad sign?” Ephedrine is no one’s friend. In half an hour, Martin would be impossible to control, and short of using a tranquilizer gun on him, there wasn’t much we could do about it.

“Come on. I have three hundred dollars here.” I pulled out a stack of bills. “Just licking.”

“No lesbian stuff.” The little one wouldn’t budge.

“But you’ll give hummers?” Strippers are native pragmatists. It’s kind of a job qualification. We’d somehow stumbled into the one-in-a-thousand irrational idealist.

“How much to watch?” Bennett appeared to my right.

“You want to watch a blow job?” the short one barked.

“I’m a fan of technique.”

“I have the best.” She smiled.

“Can you blow him back from the dead?” Bennett pointed to the Corpse.

“Two hundred dollars.”

I counted off the bills and handed them to her. “Let me get a hit off the joint first.” She darted to the living room with the skinny one in tow. Bennett promptly ran to the closet, opened one of the double doors, and got inside. “Quick. Get in.” He pushed op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• 1998
• Chap Stick
• Breaking and Entering
• Hat Trick
• Ten Percenter
• How to Not Get a Job Offer
• Twenty-six
• Squirrelfucker
• Thirty Years
• Lisa
• The Crab Orgy
• Marshal?
• The Train Wreck Defense
• 3-to-1
• Meet the New Boss
• The Costanza Method: Part I
• The Costanza Method: Part II
• Sudden Asshole Syndrome
• Everything Went Pink
• Newspaper Guys
• Getting Your Money’s Worth
• My Fifteen Minutes of Fame (Well, More Like Ten)
• Last Roulette Wheel on the Way Out of the Casino
• “Justice” Junkies
• Plan B
• Everything Went Wrong
• Gone
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher