Diamonds & Blue

Before tonight, I had never held a handful of loose diamonds or tasted Johnnie Walker Blue. And if I'd had to guess where such things would eventually occur, I certainly wouldn't have said, "Out in the countryside, in a ranch house owned by a retiree from the state's department of transportation, in the company of a quantity of Irish musicians and a very friendly sheltie." But that's where it happened, at a party held to wish my friend Alison bon voyage for her move to Ireland. The host is taking advantage of his post-retirement free time to pursue his hobby, jewelry design. He pulled a crumpled envelope out from behind the small bar in his small living room and shook the contents out amongst the beer bottles and the tray of cheese cubes: easily a hundred little red stones. "They're rubies," he said. "From Burma!"

I was going to post a photo of my hand full of diamonds here on this blog, but the photo wasn't taken. It wasn't taken because, while my friend Jeff was fiddling with my new Lomography Colorsplash camera, I dropped (!) a quarter-carat round-cut diamond onto my host's slightly glossy, champagne-colored carpet, which turns out to be perhaps the worst possible surface on which to drop a diamond. I cannot blame the Johnnie Walker for my dropping and losing a flawless quarter-carat diamond, because first off I'm on the clumsy side even before you add alcohol, and second, I was deprived of the opportunity to become pleasantly toasted on sixty-year-old scotch when I offered Alison a taste and she, thanking me profusely, grabbed my shot glass and necked it all. I forgive her: she was too bevvied to know what she was doing and in any case, since the whole party was for her, my excellent scotch might as well be for her too.

I spent several minutes on hands and knees patting the carpet in search of the diamond, without success. Our host, very merry and magnanimous: "Oh, get up off the floor. We'll find it later. Check out this one, it's harder to lose." I stood up, checked out the two-carat marquis-cut diamond he placed in the palm of my hand, then got back down for more futile patting of the carpet. I hesitate to imagine how many thousands of bucks I would now owe our host if Jeff had not used the Force to locate the lost diamond in a glossy, champagne-colored tuft partway under a leatherette footstool. Maybe the diamond jumped from my hand because it sensed that I don't particularly like diamonds. It felt rejected, and flounced away in a huff. Sorry! Sorry! Oh dear.

Bus Portraits #4: Ghetto Accountants

This happened a while ago, but it deserves to be immortalized (?) here because it's so much fun to have your expectations turned on their head. So, I'm on the bus going home when two gangsta-looking baggy-pantsed black guys, age 19 or 20, get on, do that urban swagger down the aisle and sprawl in seats nearby. Their conversation, infused with ghetto rhythm and phraseology, is just a pleasant background noise until one of them catches my attention by saying, "Yo, man, cuz ideally you want to get your PERSONAL funds taxed at the CORPORATE rate, cuz the individual tax rate is, DAMN, I mean WAY high." He explains: "Cuz, as a corporation, yo, if you can get your personal funds passed through a corporation, you get taxed like in a whole other bracket than a individual, or even a partnership for that matter." Then he fielded tax-related questions from his friend, who I'll refer to as Gangsta 1:

Gangsta 1: "Well cuz I heard Reverend Charles, he don't pay NO tax at ALL."
Gangsta 2: "What, on his personal money?"
Gangsta 1: "Naw, man, church money."
Gangsta 2: "Aw, yeah, dawg, cuz that's nonPROFit."

They also shared tips, apparently from Reverend Charles, on how to select an accountant: "Yeah an' he tole me, you wanna check out by askin'--you know, in church, people be comin' up to a little money an' all, so they contribute. An' if you ask an accountant to contribute, if he don't come up with at LEAST ten grand, he ain't--you know. He ain't the one you want. Cuz if he can't make hisSELF ten grand, how he gonna make YOU ANYthing?!? You know?!?"

My hat is off to people who surprise me...

Courthouse Portraits #1

We summer associates get paid to go on field trips. We get paid to meet people who are interesting and/or scary and/or bizarre and/or... (insert panoply of human behavior here). For example, yesterday... (all names changed to protect my anonymity)...

"Judge Grandpa": white-haired, round-faced, with a hardcore local accent. He came in to provide insight and guidance for the future to us fresh-faced, suit-wearing, overpaid summer associates. His guidance was to get out of the big firm and work in public service, a.k.a. follow his example: before being a judge he was the DA; before that, he was Chief of Police; before that, he was a beat cop. Given that resume, he probably knows the underbelly of this city almost as well as he knows himself, if not better. I wish this guy would write a novel, what stories he must have. He rambled pleasantly and dispensed pearls of wisdom like, "Before I was a judge, I thought judges were the dumbest things God ever gave breath to. Now I'm a judge, I know they are! Heh heh. Don't you go thinking that just because I put on this robe, I acquired wisdom and understanding of everything. I'm just up there fakin' it like everybody else."

"McGuire, the Aggressive DA": that's my nickname for the polar opposite of Judge Grandpa's affable, rough-hewn humility. This guy is six-four and completely bald; I assume he shaves his head not just to hide the fact he's losing his hair, which is evident from the outline of five o'clock shadow on his pale scalp, but also because it makes him look mean. He has big blue kewpie-doll eyes beneath eyebrows knotted in permanent anger. He swaggers around the courtroom chewing gum with his mouth open, even in front of the bench. The way he walks makes you wonder if he's having a contest with himself that involves trying to get his shoulders to go as far left and then as far right as possible with each step. He glares at everyone and threatens to slam the law down like a hammer on the head of the least little jaywalker. He treats pathetic ghetto kids dragged in for simple possession of narcotics like they're Slobodan Milosevic. On his lapel is an American flag pin nearly an inch and a half wide. To entertain myself the next day, I casually say, "Oh, hi, McGuire" when I happen to see him on my way out of Starbucks. This is entertaining because he has no idea who the hell I am, so my greeting alarms him: his eyebrows squinch up in wary confusion, he looks slightly destabilized. He doesn't ask who I am, presumably both because that's impolite and because he's too control-hungry to admit when he's confused. So I'm going to make a point of saying hi as I walk past any time I see him from now on.

"Guido Sarducci, Esq.": he's with the DA's office too. He looks like Father Guido Sarducci in a cheap, shiny grey suit. During our field trip to watch hearings and an attempted homicide trial, the judge's clerk put us in the jury box so we could better see the goings-on, and Mr. Sarducci came over, leaned against the box, and started telling jokes in a slightly anxious voice as if he secretly really, really wanted us to like him. When he found out what firm we're from, he said, "I tell ya something: I've been with the DA 22 years, and as summer associates -- summer associates! -- you guys are getting paid more than me. Never work for the government. Never."

Hockey Ass

Outtakes from my summer job will be few and far between, because blogging about your employer is unwise. But here's a bit.

My office mate: Republican, but embarrassed by Bush. College hockey player, total jock; his nickname is "Knuckles" from the number of fights he got in during college--but he has a frequently deployed sense of irony. He refers to a certain part of his anatomy as his "hockey ass," and this topic is not uncommon in conversation because another summer associate--also male--is for some reason obsessed with it ("Your ass looks like a shelf"). My office mate has been known to stay out drinking until 5AM and yet arrive at work on time, and approximately functional, the next day.

Today he taped a photo of Reagan to the wall facing my desk just to razz me, so I've started greeting him with a fist-pumping "Keep hope alive!" in my feeble attempt at a Jesse Jackson voice. I say this, complete with rousing fist-pump, every time one of us enters the office, every time we pass each other in the hall. He joke-mocks me for eating sakura mochi for breakfast at my desk ("What is that? A rice ball wrapped in a leaf?! This is AMERICA! Can't you eat a goddamn Egg McMuffin?!"). Lately we've started ambushing each other with our camera phones, trying to get absurdly unflattering photos. This habit of harassing each other in a friendly way occupies enough of our time that we wonder aloud what billing code we should use to account for that time: probably "Attorney Personal." (The firm bills out our time at more than $100/hour... given our utter lack of experience, surely that is some kind of sin.)

This office mate of mine was an anthropology major as an undergraduate. (As that song goes: How bizarre, how bizarre). The least anthropologist-like anthropology major I've ever met.

Haplotype V

So, in April, in a bid to simultaneously help out National Geographic's latest research efforts and explore my genealogical heritage in more depth, I forked over $107.50 and sent them a cheek swab with which to analyze my mitochondrial DNA. And the results are now in! Using the latest gene-sequencing techniques, National Geographic has cleverly deduced that I am of... wait for it... Western European heritage! They're thinking kinda more to the northern side of Western Europe.

Amazing! At last I understand why I'm white, why I have a bunch of Irish cousins, and what's up with all these Irish, Scottish and Welsh surnames on my mom's side of the family tree! Oh, the marvels of modern science. Thanks to National Geographic, I now have a printed certificate that says I'm white, or, to use the fancy, DNA-related term, I'm "haplotype V." There's also a tricolor map showing that my ancestors started out, like everyone's ancestors, around the middle of East Africa; then they cruised north for about 4000 miles, took a sharp left just after the Black Sea, and headed west-northwest into Europe. (Just like the ancestors of every Caucasian on earth.) Wow! Who knew!

*Ahem*. Excuse the sarcasm, but I thought for $107.50 modern genetic analysis could go into a little more detail...