Holy Hullabaloos, The Blog

Memoir Monday: I Was a Bank Teller

Like everyone I know, I had a lot of ridiculous jobs when I was a kid.  I was a paper boy for years, getting up at 5:20 am to deliver papers to 24 houses on Eisenhower and Truman roads and hoping that this friend of mine who inexplicably liked to come along with me for no money wouldn't steal another bottle of my father's Wild Turkey while I wasn't looking; I worked as a stock boy in a food store where everyone called me "College Boy" in really bad Boston accents; I inputted periodicals into a computer system at a library with a lady named Birdie. 

One of my early jobs, which I did the summer between high school and college, was working as a bank teller.  My mother worked in banks, and she knew lots of people who worked in banks, and so I got a job in a bank.  I hated working in the bank. For one thing, I sucked at working at the bank.  The whole goal of being a teller is to finish the day with the right amount of money in your drawer.  If you were supposed to give out three thousand four hundred and fifty two dollars and eighteen cents, according to the computer based on what you inputted throughout the day, then when you count up the money at the end of the shift, you have to show that you in fact gave out three thousand four hundred and fifty two dollars and eighteen cents, so as to prove that you didn't pocket a twenty or stick a hundred dollar bill up your ass or something.  Well, I never stuck a hundred dollar bill up my ass, but I also never ended up with the right amount of money in my drawer.  I don't know why.  It was always embarrassing though.

Once, a guy I knew from school came in to cash a check.  He gave me both the check and the check stub.  I gave him back the check and cashed the check stub.  The next day my boss came up to me, slammed the check stub down on the counter, and said, loudly: "Jay, where am I going to get the money for this?"  Oops.  Wexler=Doofus.  Luckily, since I knew the guy, I called him up and asked him if he could bring in the actual check.  Most people would have probably said they had thrown it away and then gone and cashed the check at some other bank, so as to receive twice the amount that they deserved.  This guy, however, was the most upstanding citizen of our school, the winner of some sort of "most upstanding guy in the school award" at graduation.  And, it turns out, he's done pretty well for himself, now being the Attorney General of New Hampshire and all.  Thanks for bringing back that check for me, Mike Delaney!

This was the first job where I had to dress up.  When I think about the clown-like outfits I wore that summer, it makes me want to cry.  I had one outfit that consisted of yellow pants (that's right: YELLOW PANTS), a blue and white striped shirt, and a blue square knit tie.  I had another outfit which involved a pair of pinstripe pants (black on white) with a pink shirt and a black knit tie.  Put this together with the butthead mullet hairdo I was sporting, and all I can say is OhdearsweetmotherofgodIhatemyself.

Next Memoir Monday installment: How I almost became a door to door meat salesman.

RBG Grants a Stay: A Recollection

So yesterday, Justice Ginsburg issued a stay of a lower court's approval of the whole bankruptcy deal involving Chrysler and the sale of a bunch of its assets to Fiat and whatnot.  Though it doesn't happen often, individual justices of the Supreme Court have the authority to grant stays of lower court decisions when they believe that the stay is necessary for the Supreme Court to decide whether to decide the case on the merits.  In other words, if a lower court decision would result in some irreversible action (like the whole Chrysler deal), and if there's a plausible argument that the lower court decision involves some legal issue that might be worthy of Supreme Court review, the adversely affected party might ask a justice to issue an emergency stay of the lower court decision so the whole Court will have some time to decide whether in fact the case is worthy of review.  The request goes to the justice who has authority over the geographical area where the case comes from; Justice Ginsburg is the justice in charge of the second circuit area, which includes New York, and so the request went to her.  The justice has the option of either just deciding whether to grant the stay him or herself, or alternatively to bring it to the whole Court to decide whether to grant the stay.  A decision to grant a stay doesn't mean that the Court will actually go ahead and decide the case on the merits; it just means that the Court thinks the issue is important enough that it needs some time to consider whether to decide the case on the merits. 

When I was clerking for Justice Ginsburg in the 1998-1999 term, I had occasion to work on one of these stay requests.  It was late in the term--maybe June or something--and as usual I went on a long lunch break.  I can't remember whether it was one of those days when I went back to my rat-infested apartment to eat and watch a rerun of Good Times or whether I went to the Au Bon Cafe with friends or what, but I remember coming back after lunch to find this big file on my desk involving a request for an emergency stay in a really famous religion case--one in which I discuss in Holy Hullabaloos (available now from amazon).  Now, I'm good at certain things, but one thing I'm not good at is dealing with emergencies.  Luckily, there generally aren't any emergencies at the Court.  Clerks do a lot of work, but you always know what's coming and you generally have a good amount of time to do it.  This allows you to plan your work in a rational fashion and not have to worry that something unexpected is going to come up and bite you in the ass.  Well, this file bit me on the ass, and I freaked out.  I said something like: "Ahhhh" and wet myself.  OK, I didn't wet myself, but I got very nervous and worried and also a little irritated because now I was going to have to do all this work to figure out what the stay application was all about, which meant that I wasn't going to have time to watch more television or work on my unbelieveably horrible novel about a blueberry muffin called "Arrivederci, Loser," the title of which was based on a piece of hate mail that my wife once received from a former nutso friend who thought that my wife had abandoned her for me (she had). 

The case in which the stay was requested is too confusing to describe fully here.  It basically involved a first amendment Establishment Clause (church/state separation) challenge to the state of New York's decision to grant a community of Satmar Hasidic Jews its own school district so it could administer publicly funded assistance to disabled children in the community.  Back in 1994 the Court had invalidated the first version of this arrrangement in the Kiryas Joel v. Grumet case that I discuss in the book.  In subsequent years, the state made several attempts to comply with the Court's decision in that case while still giving the Satmars the authority they wanted.  The thing I worked on was a request to stay a lower court decision holding the most recent attempt unconstitutional.  Luckily for me, Justice Ginsburg, as usual, knew exactly what to do and didn't really much need my help and so it all turned out fine (the Court in fact granted the stay but didn't end up hearing the case, though a few justices thought they should have), but I still sharply remember the feeling of YIKES I had coming back to lunch to find the latest iteration of a famous case in my field of interest sitting on my desk.

A Collection of Thoughts on Recent Reading and the Budapest Metro

I've been reading some good books lately.  Now I will tell you what those books are.  First I read Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a first edition of which my wife gave to me for my 40th birthday.  For those who don't know, the famous movie was in fact based on a non-fiction book that Crowe researched by going undercover as a high school student in San Diego as a 22-year old.  The book is very different from the movie in all sorts of ways, and although the movie is far more memorable, the book was pretty enjoyable too, though perhaps not worth the $250 that it sells for (my plan is, over the course of my lifetime, to get Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forrest Whittaker, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the four cast members of FTRH who subsequently went on to get nominations for best actor/actress (the three men won the award) to sign the book, thus increasing its value to something approaching a Warhol Marilyn painting or so, and thereby justifying the ridiculous expense of getting the book in the first place). 

I continued my reading with another volume set in a high school, though this one wasn't quite as wacky: the new book about Columbine by Dave Cullen entitled, well, umm, "Columbine."  The whole Columbine event is so incredibly fascinating, and the book is riveting.  I think it took me an hour to read it or something (not really).  It turns out that if you're like me, and the information you recall about Columbine was gathered just from your run of the mill news reports, then almost everything you think you know about it is wrong.  For example, while there was a trench coat mafia at the school, Harris and Klebold weren't part of it.  And while you might tend to think of the two killers as a piece, they were in fact incredibly different kids.  If I gave stars to books whereby the stars represented how much I liked the book, then this book would get lots and lots of stars.

So would "Into the Wild," my next book.  Though I read "Into Thin Air" when that was out and hot, I somehow never read this one--nor saw the movie--and it was another riveting book, which I had to read in tandem with my wife because she picked it up and started looking at it and also couldn't put it down and was ahead of me the whole time and would do that thing of looking over your shoulder and seeing where you were in the book and saying, "oooooh, this is a good part, want me to tell you what happens?  oooooh."  Although of course the wilderness guy who died by himself in Alaska at 22 or whatever was totally different from Klebold and Harris in a million different ways, there were some similarities--young kids who thought they were totally unique and superior than almost everyone else and wrote and wrote and wrote about their uniqueness in journals they left for people to read after they were dead--and so reading this book after reading the Columbine one was particularly interesting.

Now I'm reading the novel "Lowboy" by John Wray about a schizophrenic kid who spends all his time in the NY subway.  It's fine, though I'm not really that into it yet.  Mostly, though, what it reminds me of, because it's set largely underground, is the great Hungarian movie "Kontroll" about the Budapest Metro, which takes place entirely and completely underground.  I learned about this movie because of what happened to me in Budapest.  My wife and son and in-laws and I were on a weekend trip in Budapest from Krakow where we were living.  Budapest is a splendid city, but its subway has this rule--unlike any other subway in the world I've ever been on, and I've been on a lot--that you have to pay for a separate ticket if you change lines.  We all changed lines, and in fact when we were going to the second line a subway worker looked at the ticket we had validated to get on the first line and waved us on, but when we went to exit, some not-officially-dressed guy and his sidekick asked to see our tickets and informed us in broken English that we were in violation of the rules for not getting a second ticket validated when we changed lines.  He said we owed him something like seventeen million dollars.

Okay, not seventeen million dollars. But maybe forty dollars each, so like 200 dollars.

If I had been traveling with my family, we are all scaredy cats and would have just given him the money or maybe even offered to give him more money than he asked for and also perhaps our shoes just to get out of there, but the thing about my wife and her family is that they do not like to give money to people when they feel they are being screwed.  And so I knew that we were going to argue with these guys until either they let us go or brought us to the firing squad.  We argued with them for probably forty minutes about how the guy in the station had waved us on after looking at our ticket, etc. etc., and I even called the US embassy for help, which was useless because I got some 26 year old on the line who couldn't have gotten himself out of a paper bag much less us out of a conflict with the fake Hungarian metro security guards.  We kept insisting that the guys call the police, and they kept saying they were going to, but they never did, which made us pretty confident that they were just screwing with us.  We became sure of this when they offered to let us go for half the money they had originally asked for.  Come on, who are you kidding?  Finally, after forty minutes the guy crumpled up our tickets, threw them on the ground, said "Go!" and then also yelled "US people not right!" 

I have to give my then-four-year old son credit for his patience.  He likes playing and stuff, but he doesn't generally like arguing with Hungarian pseudo-police for forty minutes.

Anyway, when we got back to Krakow, we told some European friends about the incident, and they told us that the Budapest Metro is notorious for this kind of thing, and that there are these semi-official guys who wander the stations and look at peoples' tickets and try to give them huge fines.  The only people who pay them are the scaredy-cat tourists like me when I'm not accompanied by my wife.  The movie "Kontroll" is about one of these guys, and so we watched it as soon as we could.  Again: lots of stars.

Childhood TV Crushes, Addendum

In light of the previous post regarding my childhood crush on Hong Kong Phooey's Rosemary, I should probably mention that not all of my childhood TV crushes were on cartoon characters.  Most were on more typical TV knockouts, like all of Charlie's Angels, Loni Anderson, and Lydia Cornell from Too Close for Comfort.  By far my biggest TV crush of all time, however, was Sue Ellen Ewing (or Linda Gray, who played Sue Ellen Ewing, but I'm not sure how relevant this distinction really ever was).  This clearly had to do with the fact that Dallas was and really remains my favorite television show of all time, in the sense that at the time it was on, the show was more important to me than any other show has ever been at the time that that show was on, if you catch my drift.  Also, J.R. Ewing was my childhood hero for many years, so it stands to reason that his wife would be my biggest crush, right?  Here's a picture of her going to jail.

Memoir Monday: Childhood TV Crushes

My earliest memories of thinking about girls date back to my nursery school days.  Like most little boys, I had massive crushes on both Wilma and Betty, though whether most boys also fantasized about keeping the little cuties locked in a small cage like gerbils to be taken out periodically for my enjoyment I couldn't say (note to self: perhaps bring this up with therapist).  Somewhat more idiosyncratic, perhaps, was my childhood crush on Rosemary, the bespectacled blonde police station phone operator from the Hong Kong Phooey show who had her own crush on the canine superhero and was therefore forever beyond my reach.  What's particularly interesting about Rosemary, thinking back on it now, is that unlike, say, Sweet Polly Purebread from the Underdog show, who also had a bit of a thing for a canine superhero, Rosemary herself was not a dog. This makes me feel slightly better about my own sexual instincts, and it also provides some much-needed insight into why this sick, twisted cesspool of a show was cancelled after only sixteen episodes.

Clerkin' for RBG, Part I

As everyone who follows the news knows by now, Justice Ginsburg recently had surgery for pancreatic cancer.  This has sparked speculation about whether she might retire soon.  I don't know anything about the details of her illness; although I clerked for her during the 1998-1999 term, and although we got along very well, we do not keep in touch.  I do know that she is about the toughest person you will ever meet, and if anyone can beat pancreatic cancer, it's her.  I definitely wish her and her family all the best.

 

The news reminded me of a piece I wrote a couple of years back called "Clerkin' for RBG," which related some of my memories from my clerkship.  I thought it was a good piece, but nobody seemed interested in publishing it.  I thought this would be a good time to put it on the blog.  It's long, though, so I'll have to post it in installments.  Here's installment #1:

   

     When former Supreme Court law clerk Edward Lazarus published Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court in May of 1998, curious readers bought the book in droves to find out what really happens behind the scenes at the nation’s highest court.  The law clerk community, however, flipped out.  Claiming that Lazarus had breached his confidentiality obligations to the Court, critics called his actions  “wrong,” “offensive,” and a “betrayal.”  One prominent sitting judge who previously clerked at the Court argued that Lazarus had violated several canons of the Supreme Court Clerk Code of Conduct as well as “the bond of loyalty to his Justice, the other Justices, and his fellow clerks.”  Charges like this are enough to make any former law clerk hesitate to say just about anything about his or her time working at the marble palace.

 

            On the other hand, the temptation to talk is strong.  Whenever anyone finds out that I clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the 1998-1999 term—whether it be a student, a newly made friend, or just some random stranger that I’ve accosted on the street or in the men’s room—they inevitably want to hear about my experiences.  What was it like working there?  Was Justice Ginsburg nice?  Is it true that Justice O’Connor made her clerks do aerobics?   Does Felix Frankfurter’s ghost really haunt the Great Hall?  What does it feel like to sit shirtless in the Chief Justice’s chair screeching “Order in the Court” after four margaritas?   Because I get tired of talking about the only other interesting experience I’ve ever had (side note: do not plan vacations on the web while drunk, or you too might decide that spending a frozen night in a Quebec Ice Hotel sounds like a good idea), I often feel the urge to mention a few tidbits from that year.  And although I always refrain from divulging any confidential secrets, I generally say something, usually before the guy even comes out of the stall.

 

            In this Essay, I will try to walk the same precarious line that I tiptoe whenever I talk about the twelve months that I worked for Justice Ginsburg.  I will reveal nothing that would shed light upon the inner workings of the Court, at least nothing that has not already been prominently divulged (the fact that clerks take part in a “cert pool,” for example, to help the Justices decide which cases to hear, is an example of a piece of purportedly inside information that is already widely known).  I will discuss no specifics about the particular cases decided when I was there, and I will not talk about any substantive conversation that Justice Ginsburg had with me, or with anyone else, in the event that I happened to overhear such a conversation through the plastic cup I regularly held between my ear and the door to her office.

 

            Lazarus published his controversial book right before I was about to start clerking, so coming in I had visions of a year filled with ideological tension, backbiting intrigue, and wild shootouts on the Court’s spiral staircase.  As it turned out, though, nothing of the sort ever took place.  Perhaps it was because our term was conspicuously devoid of any cases involving hot button issues like abortion or affirmative action (the two cases I worked hardest on dealt with insurance fraud and the statute governing removal of cases from state to federal court), or maybe it was because the thirty-six of us who clerked that year were a friendly bunch, but the term was exceedingly quiet from an ideological perspective.  One liberal colleague observed toward the beginning of our tenure that he thought one of our conservative colleagues wanted to start a right-wing cabal among the clerks but that the guy simply lacked the charisma to pull it off.  Other than that, though, there was very little of the conservative-liberal infighting that Lazarus claims took place when he worked at the Court.

Next Installment: How many steps are there leading up to the front doors of the Marble Palace?

Memoir Monday: Nursery School

It's been a while since the last Memoir Monday, but as I always tell my cat, better late than never.  I have to admit that there isn't much to this MM either, except that it includes this picture of my nursery school class when I was 3-4 years old, which I obtained through a fortunate facebook connection that is too complicated to spell out here.  In any event, thanks TD!  I'm the little guy in the middle holding the sign.  All I remember really from this nursery school year is the time when I wet my pants and the teacher yelled, "I thought you were a good boy, Jay!" but let me assure you, that is enough memory of this class to last a lifetime.

 

Memoir Monday: The Ice Hotel, February 2003

Here's an idea for a new invention: a breathalyzer contraption that you hook up to your computer and that stops you from making a purchase over some amount if your blood alcohol level is too high.  If such a thing had been on my computer in the fall of 2002, it would have prevented me from drunkenly spending some ridiculous amount of money to book one night for two in the Hotel de Glace--i.e., the Ice Hotel--in Quebec for February the following year.  In my defense, I had seen a photo spread of the thing in Conde Nast or something, and it looked great, and I knew it would be a trip of a lifetime.  My wife--bless her--went along without beating the crap out of me first.

Here's what I learned about the Ice Hotel from our night staying in the Ice Hotel: The Ice Hotel is very cold.  The night we were there, some insane record was set--something like negative 47 degrees Farenheit.  We did all the things you're supposed to do if you spend a night in the Ice Hotel: we went dancing to some weird band playing French rock music and Bryan Adams in the hotel's "Club Nice"; drank straight vodka out of glasses made out of ice; took lots of pictures of ourselves in giant coats with expressions on our faces that basically said: "boy are we idiots for spending a night in the ice hotel"; slept on a bed of ice covered with deer pelts in special sleeping bags; dreamt that we were stranded on Pluto; and got up in the middle of the night to use the bathrooms, which meant getting out of the special sleeping bags practically naked (you're not supposed to wear anything in the sleeping bags--somehow this makes you warmer) and getting dressed and leaving the Suite de Boise and going to the thank god heated bathrooms.  You might think that sleeping in the special sleeping bag would keep you pretty warm, but in fact it doesn't.  The sleeping bag keeps you from dying, yes, but let's face it, if you sleep in a hotel made out of ice on a bed made out of ice, you are going to be really, really, really cold no matter what.

The promotional materials promised that we would be given coffee in bed the next morning, but in fact this did not happen.  Instead we were told to get dressed and go up to the non-ice hotel lobby to get it, but when we got there they were already out of coffee.  So, in other words, we got totally screwed on the coffee.  Did I mention we were cold?  While we were sitting around trying to warm up a little, we talked to a couple who had spent not one but two nights in the ice hotel, I guess because they couldn't find anywhere else to stay for the second night.  That sounded worse than death. 

But one night?  Do I recommend it?  I don't know.  How many beers have you had?

Memoir Monday: Humiliation in Tokyo, Circa 1985

The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I lived with my father in Tokyo, where he had taken a lucrative job so I could someday “attend college.”  On a typical day there, while my dad was at work, I would dress up in my typical Boston North Shore In The Eighties uniform and take a walk around town to see the sights.  This meant that I put on a nice little pair of nylon shorts to show off my chickeny legs, a sleeveless top with an idiotic slogan on it to highlight my wispy armpit hair and bony shoulders, a pair of striped tube socks pulled up really high so the cotton stretched taut upon my hairless calves, a couple of terry cloth sweatbands wrapped around each wrist to, well, I don’t know, keep the sweat off my thumbs I guess, and a set of awkward oversized headphones clamped to my ears, connected to a clunky Walkman clipped to the nylon shorts, so that on my walk I could listen to such classics as Slade’s Greatest Hits and the Scorpions’ World Wide Live.  I’m not sure, but I have often feared that this getup of mine might have been at least partly responsible for Japan's economic dominance over the United States during this brief historical period. 

 

During several of these walks, I came across a beautiful, tall, young American girl who was invariably dressed in sexy and modern fashions quite unlike my own.  Every time we passed each other on one of Tokyo's busy streets, this girl would look me right in the eyes and smile.  With the benefit of hindsight, I have come to realize that she was actually just politely trying to keep herself from laughing out loud in my face because of how ridiculous I looked and how much national embarrassment I was bringing upon the Stars and Stripes, but back then I imagined that she was enthralled by my greasy butthead hairdo and wanted to go on a date with me. 

 

After a number of fleeting, wordless encounters, I finally got up the nerve to speak to this mysterious beauty.  I turned and walked in her direction, asked her where she was going, followed her to what turned out to be the modeling studio where she was working for the summer.  I tried to engage her in a little small banter about her work, which she politely and to her credit played along with, but when I asked her whether she might want to hang out with me some time, she indicated that she worked all the time, every single solitary second, even nights and weekends, and would not have a free moment the entire summer, so sorry.  I shrugged, asked her if she was sure, and shrugged again when she said she was sure, much to the amusement of the two other models who were standing nearby smirking at my pathetic attempts at landing somebody so incredibly and unbelievably out of my league.  After our brief conversation, I remember standing around idiotically, unsure what to do next, while the three models waited impatiently for me to leave.  This must have lasted no more than twenty seconds (I hope to God), but in my memory I was standing there for half an hour.  Anyway, I finally left, but not before I took one of her headshots from a pile near the door.  You’d think that maybe I would have tore that picture up in seething retribution for her rebuke, but I didn’t.  Instead I held onto it, kept it near my bed, thought of the model who was almost my girlfriend, mourned the tragic loss of opportunity that this girl’s unfortunate devotion to her craft had caused me to suffer.

 

That encounter is one of the half dozen or so episodes in my life which still nearly brings me to tears over myself.

Memoir Monday: The Whittler, part 2

Read Part 1 Here

 

The third summer I went to an overnight camp.  I hated this even more than I hated the day camp.  I got homesick and cried.  Every day I cried.  You can imagine how much everybody liked me at this camp.

 

The first night at this camp we played a game called kick the can or hide the bacon or something like that.  Everybody was having a real fun time playing this game.  I got stung by a hornet though.  I had to go to the infirmary and get a Benadryl injection.  That wasn’t too fun.  Later that week, I was standing next to a garbage can and I saw a bee buzzing around the garbage can.  I had always heard that you are supposed to be very still when you are around a bee, and then the bee will not bother you.  I did not want to get stung for the second time that week, so I stood very still.  The bee landed on my arm and stung me.  I went back to the infirmary.  “Oh, you again!” said the nurse.

 

This was one of those camps without any set schedule for the kids to follow.  You could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to do it.  There was swimming, boating, and all sorts of games and sports to do.  I tried to not do anything.  I couldn’t really swim, and of course I had to stay out of the sun as much as possible.  Mostly I slept and waited for my time at camp to be over.  Once, though, I decided to go to the whittling shack.  I thought it might help pass the time to whittle a block of wood into the shape of a giraffe or a duck or something.  I don’t think anyone had been up to that whittling shack all summer.  There was a gnarled old man there who seemed surprised to see me.  “What, you want to whittle?” he said, putting his beer down on the ground.  When I said “yes,” he gave me a block of wood and a whittling knife.  I tried to whittle an animal, but I didn’t know how.  After a little while, I gave up and cried and then went back to sleep.

 

I was too scared to take a shower while I was at this camp, so after a week-and-a-half I smelled like a horse.  One day, I was sitting next to the strongest and most popular kid at the camp.  He gave me a sniff and said that I smelled like a horse.  He said that if I didn’t take a shower he was going to kick the living shit out of me.  After that, I took a shower.

 

I was supposed to stay at this camp for four weeks.  After two weeks, it was visiting day, and my parents came to visit me.  They knew I was having a bad time because I had sent them letters daily begging them to take me home or at least send me some Lipton powdered iced tea mix.  When they came for visiting day, however, they did not have any intention of bringing me home.  Instead, they brought me some iced tea mix, because they knew I liked that mix and thought that maybe the mix would shut me up.  They had no idea what they were in for that day.  When they told me they weren’t going to take me home with them, I cried and wailed.  Also I threw things and spat a little.  Finally they gave in and let me come home.  I was so happy.  I spent the rest of the summer waking up late and drinking fake iced tea and watching the Price is Right.

 

It was only much later—nearly thirty years later—when I started seeing a psychologist who helped me explore my early childhood, that I realized my parents, who had separated when I was eight and gotten back together in one last desperate hope of working out their differences, really needed some time alone that summer to save their marriage.