Beware of Dog...and Lawyer...

As a kid growing up, I knew, of course, that my dad was a lawyer. To me, that meant he went to work five days a week, dressed in a dark suit. Gone by 8am when mom drove him to the train station and back by 5:30 after she picked him up again. Dinner was always at 6PM sharp, no exceptions.

Other than wearing a suit and riding the train into NYC, I really had no idea what a lawyer actually did. Along the way I picked up that it was something boring, in an office full of books, talking to a bunch of other lawyers in dark suits, about stuff that would put an insomniac into a coma. In my mind’s eye, everyone would be very serious and smoke lots of cigarettes.

Then one memorable Saturday afternoon when I was 16, Dad gave me a real life lesson in lawyering.

As the youngest among my siblings, when I was in my High School years, it was just Dad, Mom, and me. The house was way too quiet; at night, Lawrence Welk set the tone. I tried my best to grow up quickly so I could get my own place, boredom and I have always had an adversarial relationship. So when the doorbell rang, I perked up at the possibility of something, anything, that could spice things up a bit.

And whenever the doorbell rang, Lucy went crazy. So there was that too.

Lucy was a black dachshund with a severe bipolar disorder, part snuggly bunny, part Wolverine. If our doorbell rang when Lucy was sleeping soundly in the big chair at the far end of the living room, it was as if someone pressed an electric stun gun gently up onto her anus and then fired off a few million volts. Zero to 100 in under a second.

She flew from the chair, gaining speed on the carpet like an arrow from a compound bow, shooting straight at the front door, with only one objective in mind, to kill the doorbell ringer with extreme prejudice. Near the front door, where the carpet ended, was a three-foot path of tile that lead from the front door to the kitchen. That was flanked on the other side by floor to ceiling windows, 25 individually framed, single pane. Five across, five up.

When Lucy got to the tile, she was just a blur, putting on the breaks too late and smashing into the window. We normally kept the shades partly drawn to act as a goalie for a totally out-of-control dachshund. The one time we forgot to draw the blinds that normally prevented Lucy from seeing the front door, she was awake in her chair, watching as the mailman came up the three steps to our mailbox by the door. Lucy did her “shot from a cannon” act, put on the skids at the tile, smashed through the bottom window, and attached herself to the leather clad left foot of the mailman like a shark to a surfboard.

Mr. Postman danced the shark off of his foot while I got her back inside. Mom called a window repair service and the mailman was extra quiet, tiptoeing whenever he came up the stairs after that.

Anyway, you get the picture. Cuddle-bunny wasn’t to be trusted around mailmen, garbage men, or… men. She came by her bad behavior honestly; her mother had been crushed to the thickness of a Pop Tart, running backward while attacking the rear wheels of a slow moving garbage truck that was moving forward. Not a good plan.

Lucy was cool with women, children and other dogs though. I remember one winter morning, when everything was covered with a pristine layer of new snow. Mom let her out to pee, as Lucy ran around to the side of our house, under my bedroom window. I had been practicing my Saturday night, high-school routine of drinking sloe gin fizz in a Staten Island bar that welcomed underage kids with cartoonish fake ID’s. After a blurry ride back home in David Mom’s station wagon, I would stumble to my bedroom and vomit out my window. Blowing chunks in the bathroom made the hallway smell too much and I needed the fresh air anyway. Lucy liked to run around to the side on Sunday mornings to look for frozen vomit Frisbees she could retrieve and offer to neighbors out walking their own dogs. Usually they were charmed by the little black girl, squirming and wagging up to offer them a sloe gin fizz Frisbee, until she got close enough for them to realize it wasn’t a Frisbee at all. I doubt anyone actually figured out what it was, they just knew it was something very terrible that shouldn’t be handled and needed to be buried immediately.

But my point is that Lucy could be very unselfish and giving. She could have kept the vomit Frisbee all to herself, maybe saved it for a light lunch, but she openly offered it to anyone who was blind enough to take it. She tried to be a good girl.

That particular afternoon, Dad was expecting a salesman. He had made an appointment with a guy who wanted to sell us basement paneling, a dreamy sea of walls in intermittently striped brown. Over these last thirty years, people have come to their senses and replaced all that paneling, but back then, it was a must-have for homeowners who felt a need to stay ahead of the curve. It was unusual for dad to actually invite a salesman to the house, but mom wanted paneling and dad, being the practical guy that he was, had lined up the first of three or four estimates.

The doorbell rang, Lucy went ballistic, dad ran to the door, I scooped up Lucy, and Mom waited pleasantly inside.

Mr. Salesman came in, carrying a black leather case, like doctors used to take on house calls a thousand years ago. After placing his case carefully on the living room rug next to mom’s desk, he was invited to a chair and mom gave him an iced tea. All went well for ten minutes as he told dad about his company, prices, warranty stuff, etc.

Knowing that ultimately he needed to please the lady of the house, he got up and headed toward his black case for samples.

By that time, after sitting through a nice chit chat among the humans, Lucy had smelled Mr. Salesman’s feet and settled down. I thought she had exited the stage and was probably in her bed in the kitchen, but no such luck. Lucy had bonded with Mr. Salesman’s black case, thinking it could just be her long departed mother who had been flattened by that nasty trash truck. As our hero reached down for his sample bag, Lucy jumped up from her crouching position next to it and latched onto the right hand of Mr. Salesman as she had done with the mailman’s shoe. With all the teeth and violence of a breaching barracuda, chaos returned to the house like ten doorbells all ringing at the same time.

As soon as Lucy struck, she quit, somehow understanding that she had gone too far. I grabbed her and hustled her off to my bedroom. Lucy was proud to have taken decisive action against an obvious murderer and I was pleased to have some excitement in that morgue of a house.

Mom got a clean kitchen towel to wrap that bleeding hand while the sales guy turned white, telling us that he faints at the sight of blood, especially his own. Mom hustled him to a “more comfortable” chair in the kitchen so he would stop bleeding on her new wall to wall carpet. Not wanting to miss any part of the show, I followed. The wound was clearly minor but the song dad’s salesman was singing was in a major key. I was thoroughly enjoying the whimpering and crying coming from a grown man who acted as if he had just lost his whole hand. It looked like Band-Aid stuff to me at best; but he knew how to milk it.

Mom was doing a great job being motherly about his bad boo boo, when I realized that dad was nowhere around. Usually he was the rock, stable and decisive in all emergencies. It surprised me that he wasn’t there.

Fifteen minutes passed in which Mr. Salesman held center stage, acting out his histrionics, and needing more tissues for his nose than bandages for his hand, as dad walked back into the room, a long sheet of legal paper in his hand.

He had been at his desk, writing a document in longhand.

It was simple, really. Dad agreed to buy the basement paneling if the salesman signed the document absolving dad of any potential legal action against him for Lucy’s bad behavior.

“I’ll sign yours if you sign mine.” was the deal.

Sweet! Mom got her new basement paneling, Dad was safe from liability, Lucy would be kept away from all strangers in the future, and I had witnessed a brief but exciting storm on what was normally a mind-numbingly tranquil sea.

Happy with the outcome after the salesman left, Mom asked me: “Aren’t you pleased to have such a smart lawyer for a Daddy?”

I wasn’t really sure about that, but I did have a slightly better idea of just what it was that lawyers did. I knew that among other things, they specialize in legal agreements involving nasty little black dogs that attack wimpy grown men and make them cry and that the dog owner’s wife gets a new paneled basement out of the deal.