The Patience of Mike

When Wall Street was in the shitter after 9-11, I worked at a celebrity divorce law firm for a few months.  There, I acted as an advocate, fixer and therapist for some very rich people who had made stupid mistakes from the consequences of which they wanted us to help them hide.  Our clients didn’t need access to the courts; they needed a shot of common sense and a kick in the butt.  The money that they paid us would have been better spent to help stop climate disruption, catch Bin Laden, feed Afghan refugees, or even to pay for a well-executed three-day drunk.  But I did like one client, who I will call Lemuel.  Lem was an older Jewish guy from New Jersey who had once been rich and had fallen on bad times.  I helped him draft a memorandum to the court asking it to amend his divorce settlement.

Lem and his brother had started a financial-services company during the seventies.  It had done quite well, but bad risk management and a few careless decisions had bankrupted them in the late nineties.  Lem had gotten divorced while the firm was still in the black.  His wife got the house on Sutton Place and the house in the suburbs, and also won the right to monthly maintenance payments in the tens of thousands of dollars (I do not remember specific dollar figures, but I believe that Lem was obligated to pay from $30,000 to $50,000 to her each month, independent of child support.  I do remember that my jaw dropped and I started salivating when I read the numbers.  That was before I had learned about mobile home parks, but I knew, deep down inside me, that I was born with a yearning for passive income).  After the firm went bellyup, that burden was untenable.  My job was to convey that message to the court. 

A brief in a matrimonial case is a statement of massaged facts, rather than a memorandum of law. The task is not to draw fine legal distinctions; it is tug at the judge’s heart-strings.  The brief that I wrote began with a quote from the Book of Job: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.”

When the Book of Job opens, the main character is a rich man with a happy family.  He has untold numbers of oxen and sheep, seven sons and three daughters.  Then, G-d kills his livestock and his children and afflicts him with boils that cover him from the crown of his skull to the soles of his feet, the pus from which he has to scrape off with a pot shard.  As if that is not enough, he is visited by three friends with funny-sounding names who give him bad advice.  But Job is a mensch.  He does not take the bad advice that his friends and his wife give him, stays the course, and is rewarded for it.

The strangest thing about the story is the set-up.  Job’s affliction is the result of a bet between G-d and Satan.  G-d says, “Nobody can make Job curse me”.  Satan says, “I bet I can”, and G-d says, “Have at it”.  The original says it better than me:

1:6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

1:7 And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

1:8 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

1:9 Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

1:10 Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

1:11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.

1:12 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power.

1:6 surprises me.  The verse seems to imply that (i) G-d had sons, and that (ii) Satan was one of them.  What?  Didn’t the son-of-God only surface in the New Testament?  Isn’t a son-of-God a kind of god himself, and don’t monotheists only believe in one God?  If G-d has sons, is there a Mrs. G-d?  The narrative voice assumes that the reader or listener will know the answer to these questions intuitively, but that facility has been lost along the arc of three thousand-plus years.

The second thing that surprised me about the story was the parallel to the 1983 movie Trading Places.  In the movie, two rich old white guys make a bet regarding whether business acumen is innate or whether it can be taught.  In order to do that, they manage to have the Dan Akroyd character, who is a rising star in their trading house, brought low, and they replace him with a street hustler, played by Eddy Murphy.  The scene where the two rich old white guys place their $1 dollar wager on the life of the two men is eerily similar to the scene between G-d and Satan.  “I can bring him down!”  “I can elevate him!”  “Put your money where your mouth used to be!”  “You’re on!”.

(I also noted with interest that the movie was made in the same year as that in which Richard Dennis made his famous bet with William Eckhart.  Eckhart thought that commodity traders are born, not made; Dennis believed the opposite.  To settle the bet, they recruited a group of traders who they named the “Turtles”, after a turtle farm in Singapore that Dennis had recently visited, taught them a mechanical trend-following system, and staked them.  The Turtles were quite successful, although there is some speculation that that might have been an accident of history, because trend-following systems tent to work well in trending environments, while reversion-to-the-mean systems work better in choppy markets.  Any idiot can learn a mechanical trading system – many do – but fitting the system to the current market environment is what separates the viros from the pueris. A mean-reversion system developed during the nineties was called turtle soup).

The people who wrote the Book of Job meant it as a parable of faith.  Here was a man of such strong conviction that his believe in G-d could not be shaken even by everything that Satan threw at him.  But the story is powerful for the godless, too.  The universe does not care about us.  It throws horrible things at us when we least expect them.  Even if you don’t live through a war or a refugee crisis, the house will win.  But if you want to do right, you stay honest, take care of the people who matter, use common sense, and, unlike our clients at the celebrity divorce firm, try not to whine. 

A few months ago, I told the zoning officer for my park in northern New York that Mike, the manager in that park, had the patience of Job.  Mike had been digging up some collapsed Orangeburg pipe outside of Tin Foil Hat Guy’s home.    The zoning officer called to say that Tin Foil Hat had called him to say that the sewer lines were exposed.  I said, about Tin Hat Guy, “We told that clown about the problem, and are fixing it now.  I even comped him a month’s lot rent.”  The zoning officer told me,

-I hope you pay Mike well.

-I try to take care of him.

-I was over there this afternoon, and the guy who lives next door – Eli?

-I call him Tin Hat Guy.

-was yelling at him, and Mike just stood there and took it.  I wouldn’t do that.

-He has the patience of Job.

-You couldn’t pay me enough to put up with that.

The issue of Mike’s compensation made me uncomfortable.  I said,

-I take care of him.

Then, Mike spent three days digging up a water riser sunk in runoff and old sewage underneath Eli’s home.  Then, he was punched by a tenant, ignored by the police and ridiculed by his neighbors. That was the plague and the locusts.  The main event, however, was CPS.  That was loss of the children.

A few days after Mike was assaulted by Shavers, he called me, distraught.  “I can’t see my kids!”  He is a big guy, but he sounded like he was going to cry.  I said, “What?”  He said,

-CPS called me.  They said that their mother wouldn’t let me see them, and if I tried, they would be sent to foster care.

Mike does not live with the kids’ mother, but they co-parent well.  I said,

-Huh?

-They couldn’t leave school until she signed the paperwork.  Someone said my house is a dangerous environment for the kids.

-Did you talk to her?

-She won’t return my calls.

-Did she make the initial complaint to CPS?

-No.

-Did they say who made it?

-No.

-Did they say what you are accused of?

-No.

Mike and his neighbor, Jim Funk, have been feuding for a couple of months.  I try to keep them away from each other, but when they see each other, they are like the Coyote and the Tasmanian Devil.  I said,

-I don’t think Shavers has it together enough to make that call.  I think that someone else who might have a score to settle with you –

-You mean Jim Funk?

-Eh – yeah.  But stay away from him, please. 

-It ain’t fair!

-So you can’t even learn what you’re doing wrong?

-No.

-So, even if you are doing something wrong, you can’t fix it, because you don’t know the charge?

-No.

And you can’t confront your accuser?

-No.

-It’s like communism.

-It’s not fair.

-Let me see what Saluppi can do.

Staluppi is a lawyer in town.  He is from down-state, mean and results-oriented.  The conversation finished something like this:

-I’ve had it. 

-If you want to move out, I understand.

-I’m not a quitter, but.

-I hope you stay, but do what you gotta do.

When I called Staluppi, he said that he had dealt with CPS before, that he knew the case manager assigned to Mike, and that she was crazy.  He told me to have Mike call him.  I told him to send me the bill.

Two days later, Mike called again, almost-crying.  He said,

-They’re going to search my house.

Mike’s home is a doublewide at the back of the park.  The inside is spic-and-span and finished in knotty pine.  There are three bedrooms – one for him, one for his son, and one for his daughter when the kids visit on weekends.  It is much cleaner than my house.

-Well, that way they see you have nothing to hide.

-They said I make Brayden shit in a bucket.

Brayden is his eight-year-old son.  I said, “What?”

-He’s passing all of his courses except gym.  The gym teacher said he was overweight, so he told us to use portion control.  We did what they asked us to do!

-Uh-huh.

-And now they say we are starving him!  And they say we make him shit in a bucket!

-Jesus.

-And I know it’s Funk who called them, because they immediately asked Jessica’s kids if I beat my kids with a paddle!

Jessica is Jim Funk’s daughter, who also lives in the park.  Mike spends more time with her than I would like.  That’s part of why he and Jim hate each other.

-I told you, it’s like communism.

-They want to see my guns! 

I do not like firearms, but I understand that they are a part of life in the North Country.

-When are they coming?

-Three today.

-I called your case manager and left a message.  I will tell her that I know first-hand that you are a good parent.  She hasn’t called back.

-My guns are locked up and registered.  I have nothing to hide.  This is bullshit.

-Let me know how it goes.

I was out of cell phone service at 3:00, but when I emerged around 4:30, my phone farted and a text from Mike popped up: “Call me ASAP”.  When I called, he said, “I can’t face-time with Brayden!”

–Why?

-They say that the park is a dangerous environment for them.

When Mike’s kids visit, they run around with Jim Funk’s grandchildren, Ron’s step-kids and the daughters of a woman named Mrs. Moran.  They ride bikes and hoverboards, play pickup soccer, ambush Mike, and climb over him as though he were a jungle gym or Chris Cristie.  It looks like a fun existence.

-So – are they going to put all the kids in the park in foster care?

-Ding, ding, ding.

-If the problem is the park, why the hell can’t you talk to the kids on the phone?

-They said that I could!  Then, they told their mother that I couldn’t!  I can’t get a straight answer!  They won’t do a three-way call!

-You spoke with the kids’ mother?

-She said that they called her.  They told her that someone had called them and that, if she did not start an emergency custody proceeding, the kids would be taken from school straight to foster care.

-So – this was their idea, not hers?

-That’s right.

-Any idea who narked?

-Still, no.

-If they are going to have a hearing, that might force them to show their hand.  The informant can be called as a witness.

-What if he doesn’t show up?

-It would be a subpoena.  He would have to.

-Oh.

-Call Staluppi.  He can represent you at the hearing.

-Me and the kids’ mother are meeting with him tomorrow morning.

-You are going together?

-Oh, yeah.  She doesn’t want this any more than I do.

-Well, that’s good.  If it comes from her, the judge might understand that these people are out of line. 

-It ain’t fair!

– I’m telling you, it’s like communism.  You drop a dime, call the secret police and the rule of law goes out the window.

-Huh.

-Look – I’ll spend a few days up there this week, mind the store.  You go to the camp and relax.  You have been through some shit lately.

-I don’t blame you, John.  I blame the system.  They let Shavers go, and then they take my kids from me.

-I am so sorry.

I hope that Mike does not quit, but I would understand if he did.  CPS is a nasty part of a rough universe.  Mike is a mensch, but it would be unfair to expect him to be Job.