Defending

He was tired of arguing. He was tired of defending. He was tired of losing.

It seemed that he had been arguing all his life. Among his earliest memories were the arguments at the supper table which he had been encouraged to join. His father, grandfathers, brother, mother, all had reveled in lusty dispute. The subject matter hadn’t seemed to matter to any of them. They argued about the food, the weather, the Friday night fights, McCarthy, unions, anti-Semitism, Eisenhower. The feel and smell of the oil cloth on the kitchen table was still fresh in his memory, as vivid as the recall of the feeling of those arguments. He seemed to have lost most of his arguments even then. The feeling of losing an argument — the tightness in his throat, the tears that welled, the heavy chest that hurt so much — those feelings never left him.

He remembered little of his boyhood friends. Their faces, their voices, were lost to him. But he did remember the fights — which were just aggravated arguments — in which he always ended up with a humiliating nose bleed. He would wind up in a head lock. He would be fighting to hide blinding tears, but couldn’t stop the nose bleed. That had always stopped the fight, scared his enemies. They didn’t know that his nose bled easily. Sometimes it bled when he sneezed violently, or when he blew his nose with too much force during an allergy attack or one of his frequent colds. It was something he had gotten used to. It didn’t hurt. It was just something to be a little ashamed of. Eventually, he learned to use it to his advantage. When an argument escalated to pushing, then swinging and wrestling, he stood with blood dripping from his nose, his fists balled and cursed a dare to keep fighting. He spat blood and wiped it with his sleeve and tried to look crazy. That usually scared his enemy enough to back off, and others to respect and fear him a little bit. It even gained him the sympathy of a girl who wanted to nurse him with tissue plugs and ice wrapped in her hankie.

He liked to watch black and white movies, romantic ones about idealistic, naive losers. He believed the lines in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” about “lost causes” being the only ones worth fighting for. He liked “Twelve Angry Men” in which Henry Fonda stands alone against the ridicule of eleven jurors, and turns them around, to justice. Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird” inspired him. He liked Garfield and Bogart, read Hammett and Chandler and thought a lot about codes of honor and irony.

He remembered little of his classes in high school except the arguments with his teachers. He argued with passion about things he thought he knew more about than his teachers. He argued about “Hamlet” after he had read it for the fifth time, memorized the lines, watched Olivier’s film, and then seen Richard Burton on Broadway. He felt he was Hamlet, morose and defensive about his father. He saw himself as a tragic figure, alone and righteous, misunderstood and fighting for justice alone among people who thought him mad. He liked that idea back then. He thought it would make him attractive to girls, at least a certain type of girl, who would recognize his special sort of quality.

Later, he argued with college friends about ideas. Truffault vs Godard, Goldwater, The Beatles vs. The Stones, JFK, Civil Rights, Viet-Nam, Nixon, were all subjects of passionate arguments.

When he became a public defender, he though he had found a calling and a family. The other public defenders seemed to revel in argument as much as he did. Like habitual gamblers who would bet on rain dripping down a window pane, he found others who would argue about the merits of white vs. wheat bread with vicious abandon. For a long time he loved it. He would go to court, argue with judges and prosecutors and bailiffs for his clients. The more hopeless the cause the more ardently he fought. He lost often of course, but it wasn’t so bad then. Back in the office, he would tell his story and they all seemed to understand, to sympathize, to value the fight.

He even developed a philosophy about losing. Baseball was his metaphor for defending criminals. In baseball, a batter who hits .300 for a lifetime goes to the Hall of Fame. Batting .300 means failing in seven of every ten at bats. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in ten thousand at bats,struck out many more times than he homered.

He had been raised in Brooklyn in the 1950's and rooting for the noble losers against the pinstriped rich was inbred. And he was Jewish. That added to his sense of separateness, and of righteousness against the majority.

That became a metaphor for his love life. He lost most of those arguments too, struck out looking most of the time. When he finally found a girl who laughed at his sad jokes, smiled at his sadness and kissed the hurt away, he fell so deeply in love and need for her that he waited a long time for her to come to him. When she did, he wondered why. Every time he caressed her, he felt surprise, at sensations he felt, and those he saw she was feeling. He kept waiting for her desire for him to drain away. He tested her with periods of feigned indifference. When time passed without love-making, he suspected every moment that she was lost. Then would come the inevitable argument. He would talk, she would cry and rant. She would angrily complain about his skillful use of words to win. Then they would clutch each other and he would feel the same amazement at how much he still wanted her and the same disbelief that she still wanted him. When she died, he felt as if he had known it would happen, had deserved to be left alone. He realized that he had lost all of the important arguments.

He couldn’t remember when the fatigue became overwhelming. He had been arguing now for clients for more than thirty years. His batting average was probably not Hall of Fame stature, but he had won his share. Yet, now it seemed that the highs of the wins were far less convincing than the lows of the losses.

The fear of losing had always been there, from the first. There had been retching, cramps, smoking, sleeplessness, the mental constipation that kept him rigid for long stretches. He had overcome the sweats and plowed through with gritted teeth. He had suffered embarrassment, survived terrors of incompetence. His inherent sense of his inadequacy was suppressed long enough for him to function on an acceptable level for periods of time, but over the long haul, he had not been able to conquer his suspicion of his worthlessness. Even when he won, deep down he knew that he had performed a mere trick. He had fooled some into believing he was confident and correct.

Now, the prospect of a loss had become almost unbearable. With each new case, he foresaw the inevitable. He pre-experienced all the arguments he could make, imagined the counter arguments which would be made by his opponents, the prosecutor and the judge who would deny most of his pitiful arguments. He could see the faces of jurors, see their eyes looking away in embarrassed pity as he argued, as he spent his remaining energy on another futile plea.

It was his special gift and curse as a lawyer to be able to see both sides of any issue with clarity. He could envision both his arguments and the best answers to them. Sometimes his opponents failed to make the best arguments. At such times, he smiled inwardly, knowing that his chances to win had increased. But the gift took its toll. It meant that he could never be completely committed to the righteousness of any argument he made. He had already weighed it with the opposing view and often had lost to himself already.

Now he was tired of arguing with himself. He lost most of those arguments and was depressed most of the time.

After his wife died, he argued with his son, who had inherited his passion for contrariness. He lost most of those arguments too, but with a sense of pride now mixed with the frustration of losing. Losing to his son, he knew, was healthy in a way. Every son, he had read or been told, goes through a period of challenge to his father. He flexes his manhood by knocking over the old man at his own game. But he felt a profound sense of sadness about the arguments. When they argued about “trivial” things, he took them as exercises, with little at stake but the competition of debate. He was often surprised and frightened by the passion his son brought to the arguments. There was rage in his conviction, viciousness in his assaults. There was pain and anger that he recognized as expressions of resentment and deep hurt. It depressed him even more and he conceded arguments, felt more fatigued and fearful that his arguments would at last force the only person whose understanding and respect he craved to hate him.

So he avoided arguing with his son as much as possible. His nature was such that it left him with little to say to his son. It was as if his only means of expression was stripped, and he felt a deep sadness. He now treated his son with detached superficial politeness. He felt utterly alone.

It was not only arguing that tired him. It was the fact that he was a defender. Although he had always been a vigorous and aggressive arguer, he had always felt more comfortable defending. When young, he could not have been a prosecutor. That was partly because he was Jewish. He identified with the minority view, distrusted the righteousness of the powerful State over the individual. He had even argued with friends that they were not true “conservatives” if they favored the State over the accused. He alienated his friends who had claimed to be “liberals,” claiming himself to be a “conservative.” He argued that a true “conservative” opposed the police power of the State over the individual. He playfully argued that he was the true “conservative” in defending accused criminals. He had won many of these tricky debates over his lesser acquaintances, reveling in these minor social victories.

In the 60's, he had been a hero to his friends and acquaintances as a defender of civil liberties. But as time passed, his social relations became murky. He found that people began to ask: “How can you defend such people?” They meant accused rapists, child molesters, street gang drive-by killers. His wife was a feminist and she had begun to apologize for him, to “explain” him to her friends: “Oh, he’s not like those lawyers who destroy women and children on the witness stand. He’s ethical. He defends the Constitution, not criminals.” The social arguments eventually became tedious to him, too, and he avoided explanations and temptations to defend himself, resorted usually to lame wit or off-putting gallows irony. By the 90's, he felt as if he were a member of an extinct quaint religion, the last New Dealer, the last pre-Israeli Jew. He avoided his old acquaintances and had few friends except those contemporaries who, like him were relics of the past public defender days. They were old men who had shared war experiences which could not be understood by anyone but the few who had survived them.

The Law changed too over the thirty plus years that he had spent defending. The pendulum had swung so violently that it now was all but futile to argue. The arguments had been whittled away over the years, so that little was left to say, little hope for the defense. Frightened voters and liberal governors and presidents and legislatures had eliminated the “technicalities” of civil liberties, streamlined procedures, increased sentences, to insure the prisons were filled with
his clients and their brothers and cousins.

He was now over sixty. In his youth he had seen such men as he was now, bent and shuffling the corridors, vowed he would never be one of them. He was one of those old sad men. He had no energy, no enthusiasm, no faith, no patience.

He felt that his professional life was a metaphor for his personal life. He was tired of defending himself to himself, and of losing the arguments. He saw the faces of the jurors as they filed into the courtroom and avoided his glance. He steeled himself for the verdict, clenched his teeth. His back and neck were sore. He had not slept for a long time. His mouth was dry. He thought about staring defiantly at the jury, but the anger passed. He sat passively as the judge asked if they had selected a foreperson and reached a verdict.

Despite his resignation at defeat, his heart thumped and he rocked in his chair.