The People on the Second Floor

Nothing to move, nothing to give

By Larry Gross

 

I met Carol and Victor one evening in late January. I was aware that new tenants were moving into my building in Covington, Ky., but I didn’t know when. It turns out their move-in date was a Saturday night. We met in the entryway.

Carol is a short, thin, white, middle-aged woman with graying black hair. She walks with a cane. Victor is a tall, thin, black, middle-aged man. He doesn’t like to make eye contact. Carol is fairly friendly. Victor isn’t.

I was going out, they were coming in. Both were carrying full plastic garbage bags. I asked them if they wanted me to prop the door open for them to move their furniture in. Carol said they had no furniture. Those bags – I’m guessing filled with clothes – were their only possessions.

For the first several days I didn’t see much of Victor, but every so often Carol would knock on my door. Once she wanted to know if I had a baking pan. Another time she wanted to borrow my mixer. I had neither.

In February, the weather warmed and I saw a thin young man with blonde hair walking a small dog in front of my building. He is one of those young people who can’t seem to pull up their pants. Turns out he is Carol’s son and was now also living in the apartment. His name is Ralph. Even when the weather was colder he spent most of his time outside sitting on the steps that lead up to the building. He smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of Coke. He left his Coke cans on the sidewalk for others to pick up.

We had very warm weather in early March. One Sunday morning I was standing outside the apartment building drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying the warm temperatures. The door opened to the apartment building, and out stepped a younger woman with brown hair. She had a nice smile and introduced herself. Her name is Melissa, Carol’s daughter. She also now was living on the second floor.

I offered her a cup of coffee and went inside my apartment to get it for her. We drank coffee outside. I found out – or she rather directly told me – she was a prostitute.

Melissa made no big deal of this. She said she had been making money doing it since the late ’80s. I asked if I could interview her about her line of work. She said yes – maybe sometime during the week.

During those warm days in March, Carol, Victor, Ralph and Melissa would spend most evenings outside, either in front of the apartment building or around the steps leading up to it. They were fairly quiet but sometimes friends would pass by that weren’t so quiet. Sometimes those friends would go up to their apartment for hours at a time. I know this because of all the noise they were making. More than once it occurred to me to knock on their door to tell them to keep it down, that I was trying to sleep. I never did, but on those loud nights, I didn’t consider them very good neighbors. I wished they would move.

Carol continued to sometimes knock on my door. Once she wanted to borrow my Kroger Plus card. I lied and said I didn’t have one. She also wanted to know if I owned a car, that she needed a ride. This time, I didn’t have to lie: I don’t own a vehicle.

Ralph was now shirtless while walking the dog. His pants were still pulled down low and he was still drinking Coke and throwing the empty cans anywhere he wanted. I noticed that Victor was outside now and drinking, too – from a brown paper bag. Once I got close enough to see a Colt 45 bottle inside it.

In late March I saw Melissa sitting on a bus bench outside the Walgreens on Madison Avenue. I sat with her and talked for a while. I asked about doing the interview and almost as soon as I did, a car slowed down in front of the bus bench. The guy inside waved at Melissa and she got in the car. I’m guessing it was one of her regular customers.

In early April I heard through the apartment building grapevine that the people on the second floor were being evicted. According to the grapevine, they hadn’t paid a dime in rent since moving in. Not putting much stock in rumors, I saw the landlord one day and asked him. He said they had to be out by Thursday.

On that Thursday I kept listening for noises on the second floor. I heard none, but that evening before the sun went down I could hear footsteps coming down the stairs. The windows in my apartment face the sidewalk, and I saw Carol and Victor.

They were by themselves. Ralph and his dog were nowhere in sight. Neither was Melissa. It was just Carol and Victor walking down the sidewalk carrying those same plastic garbage bags they moved in with. I thought to myself: They arrived with nothing and were leaving the same way.

I was talking to a friend about this shortly after they moved out, not understanding why they would move into a building knowing they couldn’t afford it, knowing they would sooner or later be kicked out. My friend suggested they moved in to simply get out of the winter cold. With the warmer weather now here, they basically got what they wanted. It was now time to move on. I’m thinking my friend is probably right.

Sometimes when I walk up to Walgreens I still see Melissa sitting on a bus bench. She acts like she doesn’t know me now. Maybe she’s afraid I’ll ask her questions about her moving rather than questions about being a prostitute. Maybe she’s more ashamed of this than what she does for a living.

I can’t do anything to help any of them. They need to help themselves, but I feel bad for them – especially Carol. Whenever she knocked on my door, I never had anything to offer, nothing to give. I wish I could go back and change that.

 

Ask an Unemployed Lawyer

Jesus Has a Business Plan

By U.L.

Photo by REUTERS/Toby Melville.

Dear Unemployed Lawyer,

 

Something has been bugging me. It has become very common for employers to require drug testing even for jobs that involve sitting at a desk all day. Now some companies are requiring applicants to give their Facebook passwords. What happened to privacy? What happened to being presumed innocent? How did we get to this point, and how do we change it?

 

Jennifer Spangler

Dear Jennifer:

Don’t know if you’re a baseball fan, but a few weeks ago Miami Marlins Manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for five games for expressing his admiration for Fidel Castro because he survived so many assassination attempts. It was not unlike how people express their admiration for Keith Richards. It’s not, “Hey kids, you should model your life after him because of all his wise decisions.” It’s a more Lebowski-like reverence of life’s paradoxical mysteries: “The Dude abides.”

The orchestrated condemnation, led by the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, was swift and fanatical. One talking head (sorry, I didn’t catch his name, but he was a reporter for Fox Sports) angrily lectured the TV audience that this was not a First Amendment issue, because the First Amendment only protects citizens from being silenced by the government, whereas private companies, such as the Miami Marlins, are free to act in their best interest.

Which is true. Ozzie committed a Private Crime, violating the Prime Directive: Thou shall not negatively impact thy employer’s freedom to maximize profit. He deserved a public flogging, which in these more enlightened times includes groveling apologies for ever holding a thought that could be interpreted as anti-profit.

Commissioner Bud Selig explained: “Guillen’s remarks, which were offensive to an important part of the Miami community and others throughout the world, have no place in our game.”

Which is certainly not true: The history of baseball is renowned for its offensiveness, such as the death threats that Hank Aaron received in Cincinnati when he was about to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record, as enshrined in Cooperstown for all to see.

What changed is the morality of economics. As industries deregulated and cross-pollinated, new markets were born, just as promised. The fans in the seats were not nearly as economically important as the fans who watch TV, the emotionally vulnerable who buy merchandise and the media who shill shoes.

(Kids won’t believe this, but it wasn’t that long ago that some play-by-play guys refused to do commercial plugs. Of course, back then lawyers weren’t allowed to advertise, either. Funny.)

Now, I’m no economist – hell, evidentially, I’m not even a very good lawyer – so the “How did we get to this point?” question you pose, Jennifer, is best answered pretentiously: the influence of the Chicago School of Economics, converging with a corporate ethos replacing religion and civic rule as our public moral structure.

There are good things about the corporate ethos: Since one does not want to offend any segment of the market, equality of opportunity to purchase is paramount. Was it not the mighty Procter & Gamble that forced Cincinnati to rescind its ridiculous anti-gay charter amendment? They even suffered a half-assed boycott attempt from a tiny homophobic tide because of its role.

I was exposed to the Chicago School, which includes such stalwarts as Milton Friedman, via the work of Richard Posner, who concisely explains justice as “efficiency” because “in a world of scarce resources, waste should be regarded as immoral.”

Sounds pretty moral, doesn’t it? Think about it a little more, and it sounds a tad neurotic. A wee bit more, and it reeks of Howard Hughes-level bat-shit crazy. Add to it an incomprehensible belief in human rationality and neoclassical price theory (the market knows best), and you have your modern mores.

How does one define “waste” in Posner’s postulate?  We’re not talking about wasting a life or opportunity or even getting wasted. No, it must be an objective measure: And what more objective measure is there than money?

And it can lead to funny outcomes. One of my favorite class discussions in law school was about how legalizing rape could be shown to have a net positive economic impact. Therefore is it not a moral imperative that we legalize rape?

And as “efficiency” and trust in the market (until Bears Sterns is allowed to fail in the name of “moral hazard,” which threatens a financial collapse that requires government bailout) is our moral base, “freedom” is more about commercial rights and less about human rights.

And so, as you point out, who tests your pee or asks for your Facebook password: the government, or private companies exercising their “freedom”?

But it’s far more pervasive than that. Privatization of prisons – does profit derived from those who’ve lost their liberty not mean slavery? – schools and the hatred of all things “government” perpetuate this ethos.

(Kids won’t believe this, but it wasn’t that long ago that newspapers didn’t even have business sections. If anyone cared about business news, they read the Wall Street Journal, or they kept quiet. Business advice books were separate from the self-help section, and Jesus lacked a formal business plan for growth. You not only could lie to the government, but you were expected to – that’s why we had to administer oaths.)

Metrics are another corporate bastardization of our culture. Giving most managers a metric is like giving an algebra problem to your average preschooler. “Solve for X, Maven.” “Four!” “Good girl, gold star for you!”

Recent conversation from one of those private colleges:

Administrator: This new metric will show your class attendance. You will be expected to achieve a minimum of 80 percent.

Teacher: What does that measure, exactly?

Administrator: It measures your class attendance.

Teacher: No, I mean, is there some correlation between class attendance and student success? Because I sure skipped a lot of classes.

Administrator: (Says nothing, writes lengthy note on clipboard.)

And leadership! Stop it! Leadership is not a trait to admire; it’s generally a precursor to more psychotic tendencies. Your Myers-Briggs ideal managerial candidate would live by something akin to Michael Pollan’s advice for eating food: Make decisions, don’t think too much, mostly gut.

We all know someone who has been marked by an errant HR evaluation as leadership material. They think their ideas are always good ones,

Those inspirational stories of persistence, like how many rejections Steven King got, or how many times Einstein got fired? Stories of failed leadership, every damn one. Sure, persistence can pay off, but you also need a little help and a little luck, because, as all those idiots who rejected these talents demonstrate, our leadership class is moronic on a good day.

Anyway, Jennifer, that’s how I think we got to this point. We no longer believe in religion, we no longer believe in government, and so egalitarian corporatism has filled the moral base.  The left is happy that gay couples can get benefits and women are primary consumer targets, the right is happy that we keep the prisons full and the guns loaded, and the rich are just plain grateful to all.

How do we fix it? Well, this might sound like a cliché coming from an unemployed lawyer, but the truth is always ultimately subjective. That’s why we have juries. And that’s also why we admire people who beat the odds, despite making objectively bad decisions.

Never take the advice of an Unemployed Lawyer. Always consult with an attorney for any legal advice in your situation. If, however, you want to ask, write to info@article25online.org.

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Mark Painter

Judge Mark Painter. Photo by Paul Davis

Resigning from the United Nations

By David Heitfield

 

Two unemployed white male baby boomers walk into a bar, while a third unemployed white male baby boomer awaits the full report.

That’s not a joke. That’s the story.

Characteristically, Mark Painter distinguishes himself from the others in his subset. For one thing, he recently resigned his position as the first American justice on the United Nations Appeals Tribunal three months before his three-year term expired. He was protesting the decision by some bureaucratic pinheads to not nominate him for a seven-year extension of his term, and he felt a literary allusion.

“Beware the Ides of March,” Painter deadpans. (His resignation letter is dated March 16; the first session of the Tribunal was March 15, 2010.)

He also evokes a memory of a bygone era, back when William F. Buckley was the face of the Republican intelligentsia, when political wit was somewhat more substantial than the gotcha lamestream media allows today.

An always well-coiffed and youthful-looking 65, Painter looks and sounds like someone who knows what he loves, does what he likes and loves where he lives. He almost conjures up an image of a Marcus Cincinnatus, living a life of civic virtue. A little work for the tribunal here, walk over to the academy to teach some wisdom to the youth, then over to the theater to lend a hand to the latest gig from Stratford.

The real Cincinnatus is best remembered for his abrupt resignation from his term as Roman dictator in 439 BCE, as the statue says: “With one hand he returns the fasces, a symbol of power as appointed dictator of Rome. His other hand holds the plow, as he resumes the life of a citizen and farmer.”

And while he won’t be farming, he won’t be returning to the life of a judge, either. Last year, Ohio voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have rescinded the mandatory 70-year-old retirement age for judges.

“You can’t be fired for being old for any other job,” Painter says. “Except for being a judge in the state of Ohio.”

Besides, he has no interest in running for the state supreme court, as he once did early in his career.

“Bob Taft screwed that up enough,” Painter says defiantly. “I’ve told him that.”

That leaves his work for the American Arbitration Association, serving on the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s Board of Trustees and other odd jobs. He’s entertaining other offers and recently turned down a carefully considered position to be the dean of a new law school in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

“Almaty means ‘the city of apples’,” Painter points out. “I guess Johnny Appleseed got there before he got here.”

There’s always a local tie. He’s like a Gannett editor’s wet dream.

In the end it came down to $12,000 flights home, 300 days away a year and – just to remind you he’s a Republican – taxes. “UC doesn’t take two days to get there” being another reason.

Painter is doing a few things in private practice, his first opportunity for private practice in 30 years, although he has no desire to practice in Hamilton County.

“No telling who you’ll get as a judge,” he explains.

And no current desire to run for mayor, either, although he ruffles at the thought of Charlie Luken ever holding that job again.

As the first American elected by the U.N. General Assembly to serve on the new tribunal overseeing the disputes of 60,000 U.N. employees (Painter once said, “It’s basically an employment court”), Painter was one of three judges to draw the short straw to serve a three-year term instead of the typical seven-year term, in order to create staggered seven-year terms. The three judges were then congratulated by their peers because they would, in effect, be the only judges to serve 10-year terms.

Instead, the Internal Justice Council refused to re-nominate Painter and the judge from India for a seven-year term. (The French judge, the third-three year appointment, somehow escaped the purge.)

Painter is clearly proud of his work on the Appeals Tribunal – he says they produced 150 cases without a dissent, contrasting with about 15 percent of appellate cases he dissented on in his tenure on the Ohio First District Court of Appeals.

He was understandably upset when a new international position he was expected to form and shape until he was 72 was cut short by seven years. Press releases declared, “The U.N. reform initiative has lost its way. It has been subverted by the (Internal Justice Council’s) apparent desire to remove those jurists who insist on adhering to the rule of law.”

Of course, given that all their decisions were unanimous anyway, how does removing only two of the judges change anything?

Honestly, to me, it sounds like a suspicious conspiracy. As hard as it is to believe, there was a conspiracy involved when I left my job. It didn’t involve the Rule of Law so much as Office Politics and Fear, but there you go.

And, as coincidence would have it, the editor of this paper who arranged this meeting, yeah, he was the victim of a conspiracy at his last job, too. Political Correctness or some such thing.

It’s just important to remember what we’ve learned about neuroplasticity in the past 10 years, that the brain can continue to grow despite aging as long as a person stays active. When I see someone like Judge Mark Painter, I can’t help but be a little sad that Ohio makes old judges retire.

Of course, while it might be against the law to fire people for being old in other jobs, employers seem to have become quite adept at firing (or not hiring), older people for no reason at all. Or maybe just because they hate the Rule of Law.

Rock on, Marcus Cincinnatus.