THE TORT
THE TORT (excerpt from Chapter 14 of BLESSED with BIPOLAR) When I arrived The Tort was already pacing, almost prowling. He did not look like he had ever played the game, but he reminded me of a football coach all jacked-up just before kickoff, cracking with snarl and spit. That put him and me already off to a bad start without either of us having uttered a sound. (I firmly believe – from hot experience and cold-critical observation – that all football coaches at every level are a bit insane, a little too self- important, and not to be entirely trusted, Tony Dungy excluded. Considering those traits, I might have made a good one.) As The Tort twitched, tapped, and eagerly bounded around the room, he kept quickly snatching glances at the clock on the classroom wall. The Tort was up to something. Students rushed in seconds before 9:00 and the suddenly grinning Tort fiendishly shut the door. Immediately, before The Tort could turn, the door shot open with a breathlessly hurried student. She did not get far. “I’ll see ya Wednesday!” the Tort smartly snapped. His whole being was written with glee. Zip. The door opened again. “I’ll se ya Wednesday!” And a cringing, sighing young lady disappeared behind the door now closed in her face. Glee. Pure glee for The Tort. He had been living for this since the previous year’s first day of class. The Tort was halfway to the podium when the door opened again. “Wednesday. 9 o’clock. Don’t be late.” He could not contain himself. The door opened and closed a couple more times before all the students on the wrong side got the message. The Tort finally reached the podium and needlessly proclaimed, “If you want to attend class get here on time. Class starts at 9. After that, nobody gets in and nobody gets out until we’re done. In six years of teaching nobody has ever entered my class late and nobody has ever left early. If I’ve got to be here for fifty minutes, so do you!” Believe it or not, I had no problem with that. It was law school. If we ever became lawyers and had to appear in court, the judge would demand that we be on time – even if he wasn’t. Once we knew the rules and the consequences it was odd how easy it became to get to class on time. I even came to appreciate The Tort’s “closed door” terrorism when students started to make a habit of walking five minutes late into the lectures of the less jihadi Sweetie-Pies. The Torts hard-nosed tactics did not end with closing the door in the faces of latecomers. And, believe it or not again, I came to appreciate a fair portion of that. The Tort was demanding, but, again, it was law school. It needed to be demanding. The Tort forced us to be prepared by putting people on the spot with rigorous, rapid-fire questioning about the cases we should have read, studied, analyzed, and re-read with the help of any study guide the school had subtly declared out-of-bounds. (If they did not want us to use them, they should not have let them be sold in the campus bookstore. But a buck is a buck. And, as we all know, tuition hardly covers the cost of lighting our institutions of higher legal learning, let alone paying the Sweetie-Pies.) The Tort called on students hoping to find somebody who didn’t have a clue. Most times, it was none too difficult. And nobody got off with answering just one question. Whether you answered correctly, incorrectly, or incoherently, there was sure to follow an abrupt “Why?,” “What if?,” or “So what?” And then a hypothetical shift in the facts of the case to force you to apply the law rather than simply memorize a stock answer to a predictable question. And responding to The Tort with a sad-eyed and pathetic, “I don’t know,” simply let The Tort know that it was time to swoop in on the road- kill. When anyone pleaded one of those pitiable “I don’t knows,” The Tort chomped, “Yes, but if you did know, what would you say?” I have to admit – that’s pretty good. We were law students. Why should he let us off the hook? What good would it do us if The Tort let us get away with an “I don’t know?” He forced us to prepare and once we got to class – no matter how prepared we were – he forced us to think. It was fifty minutes in the cross-fire of rapid, vigorous, non-stop question and answer on matters that we scarcely could read, let alone understand. And you never knew when your turn alone on the battle front might come up and your dearest classmates would be relieved to see you taking the beating they had coming. I appreciated it. I hated it. I was exhilarated and cranked-up by it. And I couldn’t wait for it to be over. But it served me well and I had no problem with The Tort forcing us to work hard. My problem was with The Tort’s daily practice of humiliating people. He laughed at people’s accents, ridiculed their former professions, insulted their previous education, and demeaned everything from their names to their haircuts, their clothes, their politics, and any other degradable attribute that popped into The Tort’s mind. It took no special talent for a law professor to be able to belittle a class of first semester students (1L’s). There was no reason to suspect that any of us had any idea of what we were doing. 1L’s don’t know the law. In fact, when it comes to law, they don’t even know how to read. And we were trying to decipher the ancient secret code of laws, facts, issues, reasoning, and decisions as they had been written by appellate judges. The Tort’s success at humiliating us was about as grand an accomplishment as it would have been for a life-long Iranian to prove that we shamefully did not know Farsi. It was law school. I expected to have to work hard. But it was not the marines. I quietly put up with The Tort’s ‘shame and destroy’ style of teaching through August, September, and October. But as the Miami heat subsided, bipolar began to simmer. When I was 16 I tolerated my football coaches and their ranting insults about a game that has no real consequences. I said nothing when a coach grabbed my facemask, shook my head, and screamed curses into my face from three inches away – all for the crime against humanity of blocking the wrong body across the line from me. I was a kid and he was my coach. At 16, that put him once step below god in my eyes. I kept my mouth shut and my fists on my hips. (At 26, I would have driven that coach into the dirt. Today, at 46, this Christian man would turn the other cheek – once.) But I was not 16 in law school. I was 38, just like The Tort – and he was starting to look more and more like a soft-around-the-gut football coach who maybe talked a tougher game than he had ever played. On a Friday in early November 2000, The Tort got a little surprise. He and one of my fellow students, Mr. Finnegan, went a few rounds over the facts, issues, and rulings of a case that we were studying. Finnegan stuck to his guns. I don’t remember whether Finnegan was right and it doesn’t matter. He believed that he was right and The Tort could not convince him otherwise. Finnegan was wise to stand his ground. It would not have been beyond The Tort to knowingly and adamantly take up the wrong position just to get Finnegan to cave and then laugh in his face. I had seen it before. It didn’t bother me much. The Tort was forcing Finnegan to defend his position. Nothing that Finnegan would not have to do daily if he ever became a lawyer. The Tort moved on. There were other pigeons to b.b. gun off of the church roof. But as The Tort took shots at another student, he suddenly roared, “Mr. Finnegan, what do you think you’re doing?!” My head popped up out of its case-law cramming trance and I heard Finnegan moan, “I gotta yak.” I looked to my left and saw him staggering down the ramp, looking like a gut-rotting ghost. The Tort roared on. “Mr. Finnegan you are not going to leave this room!” Finnegan kept walking. “Nobody leaves my class. Mr. Finnegan, go back to your seat.” Finnegan said nothing and, just like any man who had to puke, he completely ignored The Tort. I smirked in The Tort’s direction, laughing my butt off on the inside. His ridiculous bluff had been called and his pride exposed as insecurity. For a split-second, he stood there naked with the whole class staring in wonder at what he might do next. The Tort forced an anxious smile that said, “Man, I can’t let them think that I’ve lost command.” It didn’t work. I wondered how well The Tort could take a punch. “Mr. Finnegan is going to regret this,” he protested, “He should not have left this class. I expect all of you to stay here until I say that class is over. If you’re sick, don’t come. Use one of your absences. Don’t come in here if you’re sick,” he said, the anger mounting. “Stay home. I don’t want you coming in here and having to interrupt class because you’re not smart enough to stay home when you’re sick.” The Tort was now ranting. And I was getting a little revved up myself. “Mr. Rivas,” The Tort demanded, “Take Mr. Finnegan’s books and put them outside the door. I’m not letting him back in here. You leave, you don’t get back in.” Rivas grinned and timidly carried Mr. Finnegan’s books to the door. He did not look good. The Tort had now lost control and I wasn’t real happy with being yelled at like a child by a man my own age. “If you have to vomit,” The Tort raved, “Do it in your hands.” Suddenly, my face mask was being shaken and there was a lunatic football coach screaming curses three inches from my nose. But I wasn’t 16 anymore. I pushed my chair back hard and stood up in the middle of my row, halfway back in the room, smack in front of The Tort. I glared at him for an instant, turned, and took a step to my left. “Mr. Ya’Zhynka,” The Tort roared, “What are you doing!?” “I’m taking one of my absences,” I growled and headed for the door. . . The Tort screamed as I reached the end of the row, “Don’t do this!” I kept moving and started down the ramp. “Mr. Ya’Zhynka, stop! This isn’t going to be good for you.” I hit the bottom of the ramp, turned to leave, and heard The Tort say, “You don’t want to go out that door.” It was half demand and half plea. I paused, turned around, and started walking across the front of the room without saying a word. I looked The Tort in the eye, sneered and nodded as I passed him, and kept walking toward the door on the other side of the room as if to say, “You don’t want me to go out that door . . . I’ll go out this one.” The Tort warned, his tone moderating, “This isn’t going to do you any good.” I kept striding angrily for the door. “Why are you doing this?” The Tort pleaded. I stopped, incredulous at the possibility that anybody would not understand why I was refusing to put up with this garbage. I turned around and jabbed my fist toward Mr. Finnegan’s seat. “Because that man was sick and you tried to humiliate him!” I barked. “So, why do you have to leave the class?” “There was no need for you to treat him like that and I’m not going to put up with it. Who do you think you are?” “He shouldn’t have come . . . if he was going to have to leave,” The Tort contended weakly. “Yeah, but he did and then he got sick. So what?” “Do you want to go back and get your books,” The Tort offered, trying to keep me in the room. “I’ll get’em after class,” I said with disgust. “You’re going to have to see me in my office right after class,” The Tort directed. “And if I don’t-- ?” I smarted off. The Tort’s tone suddenly went soft. “Just make sure you come,” he said. And I turned and went out the door. Instead of going back to my room in the campus motel, I decided to sit in the breezeway between the law school and the law library and wait there until the end of The Tort’s class to go back and get my books. My sitting and waiting, however, was interrupted by a lithium side effect – frequent urination. I went to the men’s room and as I finished obliging the demands of my medication, I turned away from the urinal and was stunned. The Tort was leaning against the sink, arms folded across his chest, and staring at me. “You can’t challenge me in my class,” he scolded. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing, but I didn’t stay stunned long. As I zipped up, I stared back and smirked, “So, you come in here and confront a man when he’s got his (penis) in his hands.” The Tort and I barked backed and forth. The words were similar to what was said in class, but I was angrier and louder. Being challenged and scolded while urinating seems to do that to me . A second year law student, who had the misfortune of needing to urinate shortly after I did, tried to rescue me. “C’mon, man,” he urged, “you don’t need this.” The Tort cracked, “No, no, leave him alone. Let him hit me.” I cocked my head at an angle, raised my eyebrows, and twanged-and-sang sarcastically, “I-I-I’m not going to hit you . . .professor . . . That would be insane.” And as we barked at each other, The Tort and I heard the unmistakable growling moans of Mr. Feingold puking into a men’s room commode. “Listen to that!” I yelled at The Tort as we stared each other down at close range, “Did you want him to do that in class?!” Blessed with Bipolar |
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