I
It had taken me two weeks to find an attorney who had earned a law degree from a university that wasn’t a Bible college, an attorney who had gone to a university I had heard of – a respected university. Such an attorney was recommended to me by a law student – a guy I had once dated – who had asked around on my behalf, and according to his contacts, Taylor Lewis was the best attorney for my needs.
“He’s the one, Karen,” the old boyfriend texted. After I thanked him, I received another text: “Do you miss me?” When I didn’t respond within the hour, he sent a sad-faced emoji. I countered with the exact same sad-faced emoji to let him know that, yes, life was indeed sad. A few minutes later, I wrote, “I’m sorry.”
My needs were, on the surface, simple. I had gotten a speeding ticket. But the case became more complicated when I wrote a letter to the District Attorney’s office disputing the ticket since I hadn’t been speeding. At all. In fact, I had just turned onto the street when a cop rounded the corner and claimed to have clocked me doing sixty-eight in a forty-five. In my letter, I asked for a list of evidence. I had found this list on a website that explained how to dispute a speeding ticket. This was not, as it turned out, a letter I should have written. I should have paid the fine. But I didn’t.
My letter was passed down to the Assistant District Attorney, who, I discovered, had made a career prosecuting murder cases, successfully securing the death penalty. He wrote back to me that the officer, according to his notes, had given me a break, knocking the amount I had been speeding down by ten miles per hour but that he was now going to bump the speed back up to what I had been originally clocked doing, the potential penalty for which was jail time, a fine, and revocation of my license.
“You’ll find attached the new court date,” he concluded.
I agreed to meet the attorney, Mr. Lewis, at the Bagel Xpress for a courtesy consultation over lunch. It wasn’t until I was in the parking lot that I Googled Mr. Lewis and saw that his specialization was representing corporations that tested their products on animals. Had the old boyfriend misread the text about the speeding ticket? Was this his revenge for my breaking up with him? He had cried when I’d delivered the news, and it was at that moment, watching his eyes water and his lip quiver, that I knew I had made the right decision. I had hoped, three years later, that he would have gotten over it.
It was too late to cancel the appointment with the lawyer. Furthermore, I still needed representation. I locked my car and headed for Bagel Xpress, where Mr. Lewis was already halfway through his blueberry bagel, his face bright and fresh from his steaming cup of coffee.
“Hello,” I said.
He set down his bagel and smiled. “Ms. Hayes,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
II
“So, what kind of bagel did you get? Looks like cinnamon sugar? Good, good. Excellent. Superb. You grow up here? No? I grew up here. Hometown boy. Went away to college. Long time ago. Went to Woodstock. That’s how long ago. Huge Jimi Hendrix fan. Huge. I had long hair back then, too. I know, I know. Hard to believe. Smoked pot. Did I say that too loud? May have done some other things, too. Things I shouldn’t say in public. We were the love generation. Free love. No inhibitions. No judgments. We were not going to be repressed like our parents. What was wrong with sex? What was wrong with making love? How’s that bagel? I like the one they call the garbage bagel, too – you know, they put a little bit of everything in it. I can’t help noticing you’re not drinking coffee. You don’t drink coffee? So, Hendrix at Woodstock. Amazing. I saw Janis Joplin at Woodstock. I mean, how lucky can a man be? Everyone’s doing acid. Everyone’s hooking up. You know the story. I met a girl there. She had four other boyfriends. I became her fifth. We all lived together in a barn for six months. This barn, it had mattresses. Some old blind fella rented the barn to her. Her name was Marie. There were other women there, too. Girlfriends of the boyfriends. Oh, man, I can’t tell you how often I think about those days. Somehow – I don’t remember how – we stole electricity from a pole outside. Ran an extension cord through knotholes in the barn. Hooked up an old record player. Remember records? Good times. Revolver was it for us. The Beatles. And then, later, The White Album. But Charlie Manson ruined The White Album with “Helter Skelter” and murders and Sharon Tate and her beautiful unborn baby. God. An unborn baby. You don’t want any butter for your bagel? Just plain? Really? Hey, whatever floats your boat. Me? I like peanut butter. Or cream cheese. Any flavor cream cheese. Doesn’t matter. Anyway. Where was I? Oh, that’s right. Horrible. Horrible. So after I leave the barn, I finish college and then go to law school. Chapel Hill. Good school. Solid school. And when I finish law school, what do I do? I start prosecuting child molesters. That becomes my life. This is the mid-seventies. I spend the next ten years putting child molesters in prison. If you knew what I knew about these guys… I mean, I don’t want to go into specifics. Not here. Not in the Bagel Xpress. Not with kids around. But it’s worse than you can imagine. And I took that home with me for ten years. About three years in, I had this epiphany. I was working on this case against this horrible man named Harold Jeffers. A monster, really. Had a dungeon in his nice suburban house. You want to hear the epiphany? Well, I had it because I saw in his bedroom a poster of Jimi Hendrix, and like that, poof, I realized that back in the sixties we were planting the seed for a culture of predators. Our permissiveness. Our lack of a moral foundation. We were sex obsessed. We thought what we were doing was okay, but it was a sin against God. And now we’re paying for it with each heinous act committed against a child. We gave sexual predators permission, see? Think about it. When there’s a Biblical flood, the rivers rise, but when the rain stops and the rivers begin to return to normal, another city a dozen miles away, a city that hadn’t flooded, will flood now because that excess water needs somewhere to go. You can’t have a generation of sexual perversion without sexual predation down the road. As an attorney, I was experiencing the overflowing river of a city a dozen miles away. And my generation – perverts and sinners that we were – were to blame. You want a different bagel? You’re only nibbling at that one. They also sell hotdogs wrapped in a kind of biscuit. Sort of like a pig in a blanket. If you’re hungry. And if you like hotdogs. I like a hotdog every now and again, but if you eat them every day, they’ll eventually kill you. Nitrates. Toenails. Pieces of bone. But you take your chances, right? The government wants to regulate everything. If they could, they’d regulate which side you sleep on. If you’re supposed to sleep on your left side and you accidentally roll over to your right side in the middle of the night, you should expect a visit from Big Government handing you a hefty fine for your infraction. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I talk a lot. But there’s a point here. You know who Roman Polanski is? Well, he’s a metaphor for what went wrong. His wife, his unborn baby – they were both slaughtered by the Manson family, right? But then, what, half-a-dozen years later? Polanski rapes a child. What I’m saying is this. It’s cause and effect. You can’t have one without the other. I don’t know if you believe in God or not. I hope you do. But this is how God speaks to us. Not in obvious ways. He speaks to us in consequences. People say, if there’s a God, why is there war? And I say, let me tell you stories about Roman orgies and the fall of the Empire. Speaking of stories… When I turned forty, I had an affair. She was an intern in my firm. Eighteen. Nineteen. Looked up to me. Now, my story isn’t unique, right? You’ve heard it before. You’re probably thinking, so what…middle-aged man has an affair with his intern. It’s the most boring and obvious story in the world, right? But here’s the thing. She was my best friend’s daughter. Hell, I remember when she was born. I used to change her diapers when I babysat her. I probably changed her diapers a hundred times. I went to her birthday parties. My wife and I vacationed with her mother and father, and she was always with them. With us. She called me Uncle Terry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this in the Bagel Xpress, of all places. Listen, this place is gonna get crowded in about five minutes. You want one of those hotdog things? No? You sure? Okay, so I thought the affair would last a summer, but it lasted five years. And no one ever found out. Three years after it ended, my wife and I divorced. Amicably, I should add. We remain friends to this day. I remain friends with the parents of this girl I had an affair with. I make obscene amounts of money representing corporations against nutjobs like PETA. And I’m good at it. I win every case. The law is on my side. Animals don’t have rights. Look, I have a dog. A pug named Cassidy. And I love that dog. But my dog isn’t a person. Can we agree on that? That a dog is not a person? I don’t buy sweaters for my dog, either, or dress him up in Halloween costumes. My point is this. There have been no consequences for my actions. If anything, I’ve been rewarded. After the affair ended, my business thrived. I’ve won awards from the bar association. I’ve been on the cover of two professional trade journals. I’ve told this story to a hundred clients, and still there have been no repercussions. And there’s only one logical conclusion. Are you ready for this? God is rewarding me for all the good work I did putting child molesters in prison. I already paid my dues. I prevented countless other molestations. So what does God do? He offers me a taste of the forbidden fruit at no charge. He offers me my best friend’s daughter. He offers me money. He, not Satan, is the snake, and the Tree of Knowledge is my law firm. What I taste in my mouth isn’t Sulphur. What I taste is flesh.”
Mr. Lewis reaches over and takes hold of my hand. His grip is firm.
He says, “You’ve eaten only half your bagel, Ms. Hayes. Didn’t you like it?” He lets go of my hand only after I try pulling it away. He’s not looking anywhere else except in my eyes. He says, “I guess this is the point where I tell you my fees, you gasp, and then I assure you I’m a bargain because I’ll wind the clock back to the moment you got your ticket. That’s the best we can hope for here. But no jail time. No points against your insurance. You keep your driver’s license, and what do I do? I wind the clock back to when the world was a sweeter, better place.”
III
As I crossed the parking lot, a young woman walked toward me, her eyes on the Bagel Xpress sign. She was eighteen or nineteen. She looked down from the sign, saw me, stopped walking, and said, “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t put in words what I was feeling, so I said, “He’s waiting for you.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Lewis.”
She furrowed her brow. I could tell I was making her nervous. When I stepped toward her, she flinched.
“Don’t go,” I said. “Hire someone else.”
“It’s too late,” she said. “My father already hired him.”
“Be careful then,” I said.
That night, unable to sleep, I got dressed and walked to my car. I’d heard stories of people who drove in their sleep, but this was not my case. I was wide awake.
I lived next to a two-lane highway, the one on which I had been accused of speeding. The highway had once cut through farmland but now sliced through housing developments where only three different styles of houses sat on small plots with newly planted trees. I had never driven to where the new houses ended and the farmland resumed, but tonight I was determined to do just that.
The speed limit was forty-five, but I drove fifty-five, sixty-five, and then seventy-five. Fifteen miles from home, a police car fired up its lights and fell in behind me. Ten miles later, two more squad cars joined the chase. I pushed on the accelerator, inching up to a hundred. I saw barns ahead, one on either side of the road. One was still sturdy, the other imploding in on itself. There was a hole in its roof, as though an asteroid had hit it. There were no other sounds in the night except for the roaring sirens. In my peripheral vision, illuminated by the high-beams, I saw squirrels and rabbits, a stray dog. A gang of deer stood off to the side of the road, all of them frozen in place. I have spoken to the devil, I thought. I imagined looking into my rearview mirror and seeing a constellation of glowing eyes, a thousand animals oblivious to the horrors that lie ahead, but when I finally glanced up, I saw only red and blue swirling lights, and the blurred faces of men hunting me down.
John McNally is author of ten books, most recently The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid and The Promise of Failure: One Writer’s Perspective on Not Succeeding, forthcoming in June from the University of Iowa Press. A native of Burbank, a southwest Chicago suburb, John divides his time between Louisiana and North Carolina.
Order a copy of John McNally’s latest collection of essays, The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid, HERE.