Drive, He Said
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I was born without a lick of ambition. I never wanted to be anyone. Never wished I were somebody else. Never envied another’s accomplishments. Admired them, but never envied them.
Twice in grade school I was given the chance to skip up a year; both times I chose to stay with my friends, and I was particularly glad the second time, because that year, the year my mother died, was the best I’d ever had, and then she was gone that summer after. Ambition would have made that year different: she would have missed the eighth-grade graduation she told me she hoped to live to see.
In my senior year of high school, when my father’s employer was moving him out of state yet again, one of my teachers implored me to stay that last semester with her family. She was certain if I did I would get the scholarship to Columbia she had worked to secure for me, but I needed to be there for the interviews she had brokered. I chose my own family. Ambition might have made me think my little sister, and my little brother, didn’t really need me just those last few months.
Months after moving to Boston, where I had dreamed for years of living, I was offered a job writing advertising — in New York. I came for Boston, I told a friend. It’s the best agency in the country, she said. I shrugged. Have you no ambition, she asked in frustration. No, I said, I don’t think I do.
Even my three recalled past lives lack a certain largeness of vision. I was a man who murdered my sister and hid her body in my basement. I was a calvary soldier shot in the back with an arrow as I fled from battle. My best past life? I was a junkyard dog. It was my best because I was the leader of the pack. That’s as grandiose as my recovered memories get.
As a criminal defense lawyer, I never met a client whom I didn’t first consider whether they even needed to be anyone’s client. Whether they needed a lawyer at all. I don’t really get paid when I tell someone: look, this is what’s going to happen to you in court, and it’s going to happen whether you show up with a lawyer or not.
I have testimonials from people who glowingly describe how I helped them get through a criminal crisis without actually being there at all. I have none of their money.
Another good way to get no money, I’ve discovered, is through pro bono work. Every year of my career the Colorado Supreme Court has sent me a very nice certificate commemorating the fact that I haven’t the faintest idea how to make a buck.
My favorite image of what I feel it means to be a man, is of a drunken Taoist poet, lying on his back atop a lovely green hill, literally watching the clouds roll by.
The price of this black hole of ambition?
My wife works harder than she should have to. My children, consciously or not, saw their father’s lack of drive and decided to up their own games. My son works hours I didn’t even know they made that long. My daughter is the hardest working young woman in show business.
Still, if you call me I’ll tell you, without a second’s hesitation, if I don’t think you need a lawyer, and you won’t have to warm up your wallet one bit.