The women in these buildings are young enough to be my daughters.
Out of the corner of my eye I notice a grizzled old black lady with a chinful of hair wistfully studying the phone in my hand and give her a thumbs-up sign that I’m almost through. In my new office we have to be generous about sharing the phone. I flip through the Yellow Pages, looking in the realty section, and remember an old friend in solo practice in the Layman Building almost directly across the street.
I give the old-goat lady a wink as I hand her the phone.
She responds to my rudeness with a “don’t-you-be-botherin’-me-white-man” stare, and I fairly prance out of Beaumont’s, relieved to have somewhere to go. As I find Clan Bailey’s name on the board in the Layman Building lobby, I begin to feel depressed again. I could write a book about what I still don’t know about general practice. I am going to have to find a floor full of lawyers who will take turns holding my hand and lending me their forms. I can handle a criminal case and have learned more than I want to know from the plaintiff’s side about personal injury litigation, but I can’t draw up a simple deed without wanting to check my malpractice coverage.
I realize suddenly that I am no longer covered by the firm. I’ll just have to fly without it for a while. One crash though, and I’ll be doing a forced feeding on bankruptcy law, another area I managed to avoid in school. What the hell did I learn? Confidence I do not have in abundance at the moment. As I head up to the sixteenth floor, I wonder how Clan is doing. Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that he must be eating steroids for breakfast. Each time I’ve seen him lately, he looks as if he’s gained another fifty pounds.