By the Time I Get to Arizona

By the time I get to Arizona, it will be time to come home again.

I am sitting in Tucson International Airport typing this entry in Microsoft Word because I can’t get an Internet connection here. I spent most of last week and this weekend attending a meeting of the plaintiffs' bar at a nice resort in Tucson, Arizizzle. The plaintiffs' attorneys in my primary area of practice meet at a fancy hotel every year to discuss creative ways to bring (mostly) frivolous lawsuits and extort more settlement money from my clients. The meeting is open to the public, although certain sessions are closed for members only. It’s in those private sessions that they discuss strategies to attack specific defendant firms and for obvious reasons, they don’t want the world to know about their plans. Still, the open sessions are a treasure trove of information and it dawned on someone at my firm that it might be a good idea to send someone to have a little gander at what the piranha are talking about this year.

I don’t completely know why, but I was approached to take on this “special assignment” and I readily agreed. Right up my alley and a break from the monotony of everyday work. Who wouldn’t like a pre-winter trip to a nice resort in Arizona? Besides, spying is wholesome fun.

I registered as an attendee of the conference at the last minute so that my name wouldn’t be included on the attendee list. I also left my firm name off the application, though I later found out that omitting the name of your firm is a dead giveaway that you are on the "dark side" and trying to hide it. If someone asked me who I was, I told them, but I was definitely using the don't ask/don't tell policy. On the whole, I had an interesting time, though I did not exactly feel welcome. Most of the attorneys failed to notice my presence and paid no mind as I listened to their low-voiced conversations at the bar, by the pool, and in the restroom between speaker sessions. I think spying may have been my true calling.

The funniest incident happened during one of the seminars on the last day. I was taking copious notes of speaker remarks, as I had been doing for the entire conference, when one of the more vocal lawyers from the plaintiffs' bar sat right next to me. He didn’t recognize me, so when one of the speakers said something he didn’t completely agree with, he would whisper an occasional critical comment to me under his breath, like “Yeah, but sometimes X happens and you have to do Y.” In response, I nodded appreciatively, as if to say “You’re totally right, man.”

After an hour or so, he asked me what I was going to do with all the notes I was furiously jotting down. The true answer to his question was that upon my return to New York, I am going to type them up in as much detail as possible and circulate them to all the interested attorneys at my firm, as well as my clients, i.e., the very same companies he and his buddies had spent the better part of the conference ripping a new one. If I wanted to be even more honest, I could have told him that I was hoping that all of the helpful tidbits I had been gathering from all of his friends would help us make their lives miserable in future cases. But no, I didn’t say any of this. Instead, I simply extended my two hands and made a little typing motion with my fingers. That was NOT a lie.

“Ah… going to have your secretary type them up,” he said. “Yes,” I replied. Okay, maybe that was misleading – my secretary isn’t going to understand what I wrote or how it should be organized, so I’ll probably type them up myself. The identity of the actual transcriber of my notes isn’t material though, so I didn’t feel bad.

Then he goes, “You know, once they're done being typed up, you should post them on the [PLAINTIFFS' BAR] website.” I almost laughed out loud. How fucking funny. I felt like saying “Sure, I would love to but I can’t log onto your website because I’m defendants’ counsel and not a member – care to make me one?” Instead, I just nodded again.

At the next break, one of the moderators from the previous day suddenly walked up to him and began talking to him very quietly. Both of them had their backs to me. Something was up. After about 30 seconds, I saw out of the corner of my eye that my new friend had turned around and was trying to steal a look at the laminated i.d. card I had around my neck, which had my name on it. (We had to wear these i.d.’s all weekend for security purposes.) He had a surprised look on his face. Then the conversation ended and my friend sat down next to me again. He uttered nary a word to me for the rest of the session. At one point though, he got up to pose a question to the Panel about how to deal with an abusive objection practice that he kept encountering from opposing attorneys in his cases, and he specifically mentioned my law firm by name. I guess this was the little bitch’s way of getting back at me for making a fool of himself earlier. I thought his mention of my firm’s name was hilarious though – a badge of honor. If he wanted to know who I was, all he had to do was ask and I would have told him. Pity the fool who takes my identity for granted!

Apart from all of the strategic things I learned at the conference, my general impression is that my colleagues on the other side have a colossal chip on their shoulder and are completely deluded about their role in the world. From their self-masturbatory grandstanding and relentless whining to the few regulators who were in attendance, you would think that these money grubbers were doing God’s work on behalf of innocent lambs who were slaughtered by my satanic clients. No, no, no, they’re NOT doing this work to make a buck. They’re fighting a legal jihad to help the poor huddled masses recover just compensation for their pain and suffering. For a sizeable retainer. And 40% of the winnings. Please. It makes me want to puke. Most of the people these a-holes represent make more money than I do. After listening to this horseshit for three days, it was all I could do not to walk up to the microphone and give these tools a reality check.

But enough talking shop. Unfortunately, ethical obligations preclude me from being too specific about these things and the self-censorship really castrates the fun of writing what I want to write. So I will leave it there.

What I really want to talk about is Arizona and how great it was to be out here in the desert. I think I may have been destined to live out west. Or maybe I did in a past life. Every time I come out to the Southwest, whether it’s Arizona, New Mexico, or Utah, I just feel this sense of peace and relaxation that is nowhere to be found in New York. Or even New England. There is just something about the beauty and vastness of the open desert and the clear sky, particularly at night, that I find incredibly compelling. I don’t know what it is. I remember having this same feeling when I visited the Grand Canyon and Utah fifteen years ago. (Shit, has it been that long?) It’s like a giant exhale for me. A powerful sigh, where all my stress just dissipates and floats away. Seriously, the second I got my rental car on the highway and started driving, I could feel my blood pressure go down. The Southwest is the only place that really tempts me to leave New York one day. Maybe I will retire there.

Speaking of rental cars, it’s funny to me how strange it is to drive a rental car in a place I have never been when I don’t know where the hell I’m going. I get this adrenalized feeling of adventure every time I rent a car in a new place and hit the highway. I get in the car, pull out of the airport parking lot and start driving with this little shit Avis map that I’m hoping is going to get me almost close to where I think I need to be going. And all of a sudden, there I am, on the road with all of these other drivers from Arizona or Florida or Texas, all of whom, unlike me, know the roads and where they need to go.

I look around and note to myself how strange it is to be in this new place, a place I had never seen until yesterday and would never see unless someone sent me there. I look around and suddenly I realize that all of these people in the cars I see on the road or walking on the sidewalks, or working in the restaurants and hotels, all of these people LIVE here. They have lives here. Their lives existed before I came, and they will exist after I leave. People are born in Tucson, or Flagstaff, or Santa Fe. They grow up there. Go to school there. Raise families there. Work there. Die there. And the entire time, as I am immersed in my own life in New York, I have no clue at all about the lives these people are leading. In fact, their lives were vague and meaningless to me until I landed in this far-flung place and saw them for myself. I have this sensation every time I travel to a new place.

As I was driving around downtown Tucson tonight, before I came to the airport where I now sit waiting for my red-eye flight to New York, I thought to myself that it’s places like the Southwest that are uniquely American and which really capture the real history and beauty of this country. I feel happy that I got to see it again, and I can’t wait to go back.