Eric Dinnocenzo - The Tenant Lawyer (4 page)

I believed the cause of this transformation was that he had simply burned out. I thought I could see it in the way he slowly lumbered up to the bench, his shoulders hunched over a little and his head angled slightly downward. For years, he had seen thousands of landlords and tenants come through his courtroom with the same issues: non-payment of rent, tenant misconduct, and sanitary code violations. It was like an assembly line of legal claims, all of them pretty similar in nature, and it had probably worn on him over time. And over the years he had signed off on the evictions of thousands of people.

The work of a housing court judge was often not intellectually challenging. The vast majority of tenants were unrepresented and thus did not raise and argue points of law. On the comparatively rare occasions when interesting legal issues did appear and lawyers were present on both sides, the judge had such a large number of cases to deal with that he often had neither the time nor the resources to really engage with the issue. It was difficult to spend half an hour, or even fifteen minutes, presiding over an oral argument when fifty other cases were waiting to be heard in a single morning.

After only two years as a legal services attorney, I was beginning to feel a little burned out
myself
. Most of the tenants who sought my help were a number of months behind in rent due to some calamity like a serious illness or job loss, or just a terrible life decision. One tenant was famous in my office for paying her cable bill instead of her rent, even though it was explained to her that having cable TV would mean very little if she had no home to watch it in.

Since they had little or no income, these people’s tenancies couldn’t be salvaged. There was little I could do for them, except to try to puff and negotiate for more time, since I had almost no bargaining power on my side. It was a dispiriting role to play, making me feel kind of like a doctor who only tends to dying patients and, unable to cure them, on his best day makes the end of their lives only slightly more bearable.

Judge McCarthy often gave me a hard time when I appeared before him, something I attributed to my being a young lawyer, since he didn’t act that way to more seasoned lawyers. It started with my first trial in front of him. I was cross-examining a landlord and asked for permission to approach the witness, which he granted. When I requested permission to make a second approach, he said tiresomely, “Mr. Langley, you don’t have to ask permission every time you approach a witness.”

“Yes,
Your
Honor,” I replied. “Sorry.”

When it came time for me to approach the witness again, I did so without requesting permission. Judge McCarthy snapped, “Mr. Langley, what are you doing?”

I looked up at him with a startled expression.
“Approaching the witness, Your Honor.”

“You ask permission before you approach a witness in my courtroom!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,
Your
Honor,” I stammered. “May I approach the witness?”

“Well, what’s the point now?” he bellowed. “You already
did it!”

Worcester. At certain moments like this one, waiting for Kendra’s motion to be called, or while driving my car to and from work, it would dawn on me that I was working in my hometown. Worcester was a place I had longed to escape during my adolescence and had, in fact, managed to successfully stay away from after going away to college—up until the last two years, that is. In my view, Worcester was a place where you were born and raised, not a place where you remained as an adult, especially when Boston was only fifty miles to the east. The sour taste that Worcester left in my mouth, I knew, was largely the result of getting picked on as a kid in school and feeling like a social outcast. I had always reassured myself back then that one day I’d leave Worcester and prove that I was meant for bigger and better things. Returning to Worcester, even just to work
there,
was a persistent reminder that I had failed in that endeavor.

My parents had lived in Worcester all of their lives, as had their parents, and it was hard to picture them living anywhere else. In fact, they hardly traveled outside of the area except for a week’s vacation in Florida in the winter and a week in Cape Cod in the summer. Even visiting me in Boston was a big trip for them, and I could only recall them bringing me there a handful of times when I was a kid. They had come of age in Worcester when it was a solid middle-class city with manufacturing jobs and a vibrant downtown. But as had occurred in many mid-sized New England cities, the manufacturers had closed down or moved away in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and for years Worcester had been on the decline. In conversation I would sometimes make jokes at its expense, like that the downtown was so desolate after six o’clock that you could see tumbleweeds rolling down Main Street. I once heard a comedian at a comedy club in Cambridge, riffing in a derogatory way about his hometown of Buffalo, say, “Buffalo is pretty much like Worcester, but with a football team.” To my mind, that pretty much said it all about Worcester.

I was well aware that my return to Worcester was of my own doing. After law school I worked as an associate at a prestigious Boston law firm and subsequently got fired. The only job I was able to get was as a legal services lawyer in Worcester, where I made only a fraction of my former salary. At the law firm I practiced in the Labor and Employment department, and because I had an interest in litigation, I was staffed mainly on employment discrimination cases in which the firm represented management. In my heart I wanted to represent the plaintiffs, but I figured that I could suck it up for a few years, make some money and get good experience, then leave the firm and switch to the other side.

One case I worked on was brought by an attractive single mother of about forty who worked in sales at a Fortune 500 company. She alleged that her manager, a portly and extremely arrogant guy in his fifties, had subjected her to unwelcome sexual advances and comments. At her deposition she testified that he had cornered her next to the coffee machine late one evening and groped her ass. Another time he told her that if she made a certain sale, he would give her a bonus, that bonus being what he called a “naked workout” in a hotel room. She said that he would regularly leer at her body and a few times had stared directly at her ass and said, “Man, I’d like a piece of that.”

It was during the manager’s deposition that I realized that I couldn’t do what I was doing any longer. At a break he and I were both in the bathroom washing our hands at the sink and, while looking down, he said, “You have to K.O. this bitch.” My resolve as an advocate for his company broke at that moment, like a shelf that collapses under too much weight.

A couple of months later, the partner I was working under told me that I would be responsible for briefing and arguing a summary judgment motion in the case in federal court, which was a lot of responsibility for someone only
two years out of law school. I told myself that I’d be able to do it, that I could do it in a clinical way and get it over with. I was ambitious, and I wanted to take on that responsibility and add it as a notch on my belt. Even if I had been determined not to work on the case, there would have been no way to get out of it with my career at the firm still intact. I couldn’t tell my superiors that I had a moral conflict. It just wouldn’t fly. They would have scoffed at me and said that a lawyer is an advocate for a client, not a moral compass. I also couldn’t make up the excuse that I had too much other work to do, because they would’ve told me to work nights and weekends. Quite simply, any attempt to get out of arguing the motion would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness or an effort to avoid work. I might as well have just written my resignation letter as made an excuse to avoid involvement in the case.

When the day for oral argument arrived, I went through the doors of the courtroom and saw the woman there, which surprised me because usually just the lawyers were in attendance. She was standing demurely with her hands clasped in front of her, wearing a dark blue business suit and white shirt. Her dark brown hair was tied back and she wore pearl earrings. She looked at me and then quickly turned away, which made me feel wicked and impure, as if I were in league with all of these men conspiring against her. Her eyes had unwillingly betrayed vulnerability, but after she looked away from me they had a determined focus.

I intentionally lost the motion. I didn’t make solid arguments, and I let the woman’s attorney get the better of me. Everyone in the courtroom knew that I was taking a dive; the judge looked at me curiously a couple of times when I spoke, as if he couldn’t figure out exactly what I was saying and why I was saying it. And, at one point, the woman’s attorney turned towards me after making an argument, as if expecting me to respond, and when I didn’t
he
just steamrolled ahead. The partner I worked underneath was seated next to me, and I could feel his eyes burning through me, but I didn’t dare look at him. When I returned to the firm he gave me a good dressing down behind the closed door of his office,
then
met with the other partners. I was gone by the end of the week.

My job search was fruitless for the next few months. Boston is a small legal community and word of what had happened traveled fast. No law firm wanted to hire a lawyer who scuttled his client’s case because of his own moral qualms about it; hell, doing so was a breach of legal ethics. Plus my firm was not exactly willing to give me a good reference.

I received unemployment insurance and Sara paid the lion’s share of the rent, since I had virtually no savings. She wasn’t at all upset about what had happened. She thought I had done the right thing and was proud of me. She told me, “I don’t know how you represented that guy in the first place.” She had a very carefree, romantic attitude towards life, so whether or not we would be able to survive financially wasn’t something that she particularly dwelled on. But the situation certainly worried me, since her earnings at the real estate agency were inconsistent and not very substantial. On top of that, maybe due to machismo, but more likely due to always being a self-sufficient person, I didn’t like being supported by her. Eventually I landed the job at legal services in
Worcester,
far enough removed from Boston so that the people there were unaware of what had happened to me at the firm. I never asked, but I assumed they never called my old firm for a reference.

So I knew that there was only one person responsible for my ending up working in Worcester, and that was me. I missed being able to get up in the morning and walk through the Boston Common to my office. And I was certainly no fan of driving one hundred miles round trip each day to Worcester. Though money wasn’t very important to me, I missed not having to worry about it, which was the case when I worked at the firm. Rent, student loan payments, gas,
car
insurance—they all added up, so that I had very little spending money. I often wondered where I would go for the next step of my career, or really, for that matter, if there would be a next step.

Judge McCarthy heard about ten motions before Kendra’s case was called. Most involved tenants who violated agreements to pay off rental arrearages that had been entered into weeks earlier in mediation. There was one tenant who claimed not to have had heat for the past two days, and Judge McCarthy sternly ordered the landlord to restore it. Another case involved a noble-looking Greek landlord of about sixty with a thick white moustache who brought a
temporary restraining order against his tenant, a hefty Latina who wore her hair in a tight bun and donned large gold circle earrings, because she had refused to allow him into the apartment to perform repair work in the bathroom. That was something you didn’t see every day in housing court—a landlord asking the court to force a tenant to allow him to make repairs. Usually it was the other way around, the tenant asking the judge to order the landlord to make repairs after many ignored requests. According to the landlord, on two prior occasions he had given the tenant advance notice before going there with workers, and each time she had refused to allow him access. He had lost money paying the workers to show up at the building, he said, and couldn’t keep dealing with this.

When it was the tenant’s turn to speak, she only got a few words out. You could tell she wanted to explain that the landlord didn’t respect her privacy or property rights, but Judge McCarthy stopped her right in her tracks with an outstretched hand.

“Ma’am, are you free tomorrow?” he inquired.

“Yeah, but you see—”

“How about three o’clock?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

Judge McCarthy put up his hand again and turned to the landlord. “You’ll be there at three o’clock to make repairs?”

“Well, I have to get my men and—”

“Sir, three o’clock?”
Judge McCarthy said in a way that communicated, I’m giving you what you want, so it’s in your best interests to go along with me here.

Instantly catching on, the landlord said, “Yes, I will be there.”

“Good. You’ll be there at three,” Judge McCarthy said, and then he turned to the tenant. “And you’ll let him in. Thank you, people.” He handed the file to the clerk.
“Another one down.
What’s next?”

When the clerk called Kendra’s motion, I was cleaning my eyeglasses with a chamois cloth. I quickly put the cloth in my pocket while rising from my seat, and then I walked over to the counsel table. I noticed Judge McCarthy looking at me with displeasure, and though in a way it seemed that he was putting on an act, I wasn’t entirely sure. Kendra had her one-year-old in her arms, and her two children followed her as she slowly made her way past the legs of people seated in the gallery. In order to reach our counsel table, she had to pass through a narrow opening behind the landlord and his attorney who were already in position. A chair had been moved in her way, and she had difficulty trying to move it while balancing her baby in her free arm. I took a step in her direction to assist her, but Frank Green, the landlord’s attorney, got there first and moved it for her.