Chapter 3: Is booze God's back up plan for killing all the lawyers Jesus could not heal?

Something about writing a book without a plan is I have no clue where it is going and how it might end up. Yet, isn't that how life works? For sure, the 22-year-old who entered the University of Alabama School of Law in September 1965 would have freaked out if he knew what lay ahead of him while he was in law school, and if he had known what lay past that, well, he might have taken vows and joined a monastery. 

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I majored in Economics and minored in Business Administration at Vanderbilt, because those arenas were related to my father's line of work and I didn't have a clue what else I might want to get involved in after I graduated from college. However, I took several English courses, and by the time I reached my senior year, I had completed most of my required major courses and I filled in my first semester curriculum with a course in the English novel, and in the second semester a course in the American novel. By the time I graduated, I nearly had enough credits for a major in English, and I had a romantic notion of wanting to be a writer. Emphasis on romantic, since there was no way in heaven or hell the Golden Flake heir apparent was going to be another Ernest Hemingway, for example.

Now some students of English writing might say there is a run-on sentence in the previous paragraph, but I might ask them if they ever read William Faulkner's novels, in which some of his sentences run a page or longer? Hemingway would not have been caught dead writing like Faulkner. But then, why should they write alike, when they were two entirely different men from two entirely different backgrounds? Faulkner, from Mississippi; Hemingway, from Illinois. Between Faulkner and Hemingway, I preferred the latter's novels, because I liked reading war stories, and I loved fishing and hunting, which were Hemingway's passions.

When I was a boy, my mother gave me the serial installments of The Old Man and the Sea, which I think were published in Life Magazine? I didn't know anything about Hemingway, had never heard of him, when my mother gave me those installments to read. She didn't know why I loved to fish, but she knew that if I didn't get to fish, that would be really bad for me. I did not yet know the lakes and streams where I fished were churches, and the fish were God, and when the fish had taught me how to fish, they would send me forth to fish for souls.

I reread The Old Man and the Sea during the American novels course at Vanderbilt. I took copius notes to feed back to the professor on the final exam, but I didn't need any notes to remember he said that you know who the bad guy is in a Hemingway novel, because he does not drink. I drank a bit back then. All my friends drank a bit. Sometimes we drank too much, but it didn't take us over like it took over Hemingway. 

My senior year in law school, I volunteered to acquire the booze and ice and cups for the traditional 8 a.m. homecoming party in the law school rotunda, with a rock and roll band. All but one law student were male, and the tradition was we all wore morning suits and our wives or girlfriends wore evening gowns. 

I drank maybe a half gallon of Bloody Mary's before the party ended and we adjourned to hop onto flatbed trailers pulled by over the road trucks. At the head of the lead trailer sat the law school's sexton before his pump organ, playing what all he knew how to play, That was the law school's contribution to the homecoming parade. That, and the law school's traditional cheers.

"1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 ...10!"

And, "Hidja, hidjja! How'd ya like to bite my ... ass?!"

Hidja had gotten banned the year before by the university administration. However, being clever lawyers to be, we simply chanted "Hidja" up to the last word, which we silently mouthed. 

We Hdjaed real good Alabama's governor George Wallace that day. I was on the ground, walking with a couple of other really drunk male law students in morning suits, strutting about and leading cheers, until -

A huge paw grabbed my right shoulder and I turned around and looked up at a giant Alabama State Trooper, who said, "Son, do you want to see that  football game today?" I said, "Yes, Sir." I didn't dare not say, "Sir." He said, "Then, get on that trailer!" 

I climbed up on the trailer with the other drunk future lawyers of Alabama and their ladies, and all of a sudden the tractors revved their engines, left the parade, and led by a state trooper car with red lights flashing and siren wailing, we were escorted about 50 mph back to the law school, hanging onto each other and the floorboard of the trailer for dear life- there were no side rails, nor anything else to grab.

As if God desired more sport to banish care, the trucks stopped across from a grassy quadrangle where the visiting Mississippi State Bulldogs marching band and majorettes were warming up. Well, what a wonderful opportunity! A few of us really drunk future lawyers of Alabama wandered ourselves right into the midst of those pretty majorettes and were prancing ourselves with them to their band's music. Until -

From across the street came what looked like the entire Alabama Crimson Tide marching band, tubas and saxophones swinging back and forth, to protect the honor of the visiting band and its majorettes from the obnoxiously drunk and presumed highly dangerous future lawyers of Alabama, who immediately turned tail and fled with our ladies to the nearby football stadium. 

Now it was long the custom for the law school students to sit on the 50 yard-line in the student section, starting at ground level and going upward. Except, when we arrived at our hallowed reserved seats, there were signs saying, "Reserved for band." Our longstanding legal easement had been stolen without due process. So, what did we do? Possession being 9/10ths of the law, we sat down in our purloined seats and - fine point of law, Hidja had only been banned from the parade. We started chanting Hidja really loud, and we did not omit to say "ass" at the end, which we very definitely wanted the school administration to bite, and we were certain beyond any reasonable doubt that we were really funny and cute. 

Then, through the ground entrance of the stadium marched the Alabama band with its tubas and saxes waving back and forth. They marched right to where now about 100 drunk law students and their ladies sat, and in solidarity we law students crossed our arms and did not budge, and that went on a while, and then more drunk law students and their ladies showed up, and we took over the entire reserved band section, and the band about faced and marched toward the end zone and up into empty seats there.

By halftime, I was barely able to sit up straight and my wife drove me home. The next day was not a good day. Then followed several days of my stomach muscles cramping because of drinking way too much tomato juice. I wasn't much of a Bloody Mary fan after that.

The only other time I got that drunk in law school was after a last final exam. I prepared for finals by reading my class notes through three times. The night before a final exam, my wife and I went out for dinner and a couple of beers. I got up the next morning and went to the law school and took that day's exam and came home and started studying again.

There was a bar in Tuscaloosa called The Tide. Some of the Alabama football team star players liked to hang out there, drink beer, play the pinball machines. Such as, Kenny Stabler, who would go on to become a star professional football quarterback After the last final exam, me and a law school buddy, who was an Auburn graduate, liked to sit in the Tide and drink beer and talk with the star football players. Until we were smozzeled. Then, our wives came and got us and took us home.

Perhaps if I had drunk more beer and whiskey at Vanderbilt and in law school at Alabama, I would have been a lot more successful lawyer, and later as a writer? I wonder, because later in my lawyer life, I attended a few Birmingham Bar Association parties and saw some of that city's finest lawyers drinking as if there was no tomorrow, and I went on some so-called continuing legal education ski junkets out west, and I saw plenty of booze flowing, but by then my gut was ailing so bad, I was only a shadow of my former law school booze guzzling self.

While in law school, I read Carlos Baker's book about Ernest Hemingway. That's how I learned Hemingway had ended up blowing out his brains with his favorite double-barreled shotgun, to save himself from being locked up on a psych ward and dying of brain cancer there. All things considered, I thought Hemingway took the noble way out.

Baker came out with a second book, which contained a collection of Hemingway's handwritten letters. One letter to Hemingway's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner & Sons, remains with me to this day. Hemingway was not happy that William Faulkner was getting so much attention. Another letter that remains with me to this day, was Hemingway was adamant that his latest manuscript was perfect. Every word, every comma, every period, was perfect. It should ot be changed in anyway. Several other letters caused me to tell my Vanderbilt sweetheart that Hemingway was an asshole. I lost interest in him. It never occurred to me that he and I might be somewhat alike.

During the latter stages of writing THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems, I hired a book editor in Birmingham, who also was a published author. She helped me organize the book somewhat better and also write better. She told me about an upcoming writer's conference at Birmingham Southern College, which had a stellar arts and sciences reputation. She asked if I would like to be one of the presenters, since I already had three books published? HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?; SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME; and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers?.  Editors certainly had helped me improve those books. I said, yes, even though I didn't have a clue what I might present at the conference. I had attended a short story fiction writing course in Birmingham before writing the three books, which some people tried to pretend were fiction.

I was living in Boulder, Colorado then. In my living room one day, I wondered out loud to myself what I had signed myself up for? What would I talk about at the writers conference? Out of the blue, Writing as a mystical experience came into my thoughts. Neat, I thought. That's right up the new book's alley. The new book still being written and refined with the editor's help. But, I wondered out loud, what would I actually talk about? Then, as if a light switch was thrown, I was looking at The Old Man and the Sea in a very different way. 

The old man was Hemingway far along in years. The boy was the young Hemingway, who had not spent much time with his father, and did not get invited to go out fishing with the old man that day in Cuba. The great blue marlin the old man hooked into with a dead fish for bait using a handline supported by a windlass mounted in the boat was the manhood Hemingway still was trying to prove to himself, thus to his father. The sharks that came to the old man's boat and started chomping away at the great fish lashed to the side of the old man's boat were his rejected feminine, his yin, getting her revenge by leaving uneaten only the head and the tail of the fish, and its skeleton. The last novel Hemingway completed, The Old Man and the Sea was his unconscious suicide note.

The first day of the writer's conference I was assigned a classroom and about 10 people showed up. They seemed to have no interest in my presentation outlined above. Nor in my suggesting that what an author writes about, first is about the author, whether the author believes it or not. The next day, I was assigned the main auditorium and had all the participants in the workshop in front of me. Again, there seemed to be no interest in my topic and The Old Man and the Sea analogy. I was stumped. Then, someone in the audience asked me what I did about writer's block? I said I didn't get writer's block. When I had something to write, I had to write it. When I didn't have something to write, I did something else. Maybe I could have heard a pin drop. I asked if they had read books about writing, in which they were told to sit in front of their typewriter so many hours a day, no matter if they wrote nothing? Some nodded, yes. 

A fellow up in the back of the auditorium, with whom I had gone to high school, who did well in an English literature course and was a Golden Gloves champion and later became a lawyer, gave me a thumbs up. When I moved back to Birmingham in 1995, after the Boulder adventure played out and left me a bit disheveled, I reconnected with that fellow. We had a few visits. He had remarried and was still pushing himself hard. I gave him a copy of THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD, which led to some discussions. I finally suggested he try to go more with the flow and less with trying to make things happen. I didn't see or hear of him for a long while. 

My life changed dramatically, because I ran out of money, which might, or might not, be another story to tell in this book. The novel, HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale fell out of me in about six weeks' time, after I had a dream in Key West of a street performer I had met there, which suggested I was going to be doing some kind of street performance. A few days later, I met that street performer again, in Helen, Georgia, where he lived and worked during the warm months. Upon learning I had written books, he asked if I had ever written a novel? I said I had written three novels. He said he had long had a great idea for a novel, did I want to hear it? I said, yes. He told me his idea and asked if I could write that novel? I said, sure, I had lived half of the story the year before. But I had no computer. He said the Helen Library had computers. 

We went to the library and I was given permission to write the novel on one of their computers. A story about a very good Birmingham trial lawyer fate dealt a really bad hand, and he got so drunk on tequila that he became catatonic and ended up on a psych ward, and then God, or Something, came along and turned that lawyer (and some other people) upside down and inside out and every which a way but loose in ways I doubt Mississippi lawyer/novelist John Grisham could ever imagine before or after he was born again.

Around the time I finished writing HEAVY WAIT, I met a man living in Helen, who turned out to be an old friend of my brother Major, who also went to law school and later tried his hand at practicing law. I told my new acquaintance about the novel, which I felt God wrote and I went along for the ride. My new acquaintance said he wanted to read the manuscript. I gave him a disk holding the manuscript and he copied the disk and printed out the manuscript and read it and said he really liked the story. 

He made more copies and sent one to a Jewish fellow in Birmingham, with whom I went to grammar school. He and other boys in my class had teased and sometimes hazed me. Much later, he became an evangelical Christian. He told Major's old friend to tell me that he really regretted being so mean to me, and I told Major's old friend to tell him that I said he would have to apologize to Jesus about that, after he died and went to heaven😎.

Major's old friend found me one day and said the Jewish evangelical couldn't relate to the novel and gave the manuscript to a lawyer friend, who happened to be my old high school friend, who became a lawyer and gave me a thumbs up at the Birmingham Southern writers conference. Major's old friend said my old high school friend was boxing at a gym in Birmingham and his much younger sparring partner hit him hard in his heart. His doctor told him to take it easy and let his heart heal, but he went to the YMCA and got on the running track and had a heart attack and died and left his new wife and their new baby behind. I asked Major's old friend if maybe I should not share HEAVY WAIT with anyone else? He seemed a bit spooked. Hell, I was spooked.

What was it Jesus said in the Gospels about lawyers? 

Luke 11:52

“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.

I wonder right now if booze was God's back up plan for killing all the lawyers Jesus could not heal?

As for the writer's haven Key West, when I lived there, I wrote a lot on blogs and had some truly exciting poetry fall out of me, but I never wrote a book there. I grew totally intolerant to booze there. One glass of red wine over dinner made my liver howl the next day and my gut behaved like it hated me. So, my drinking days ended in a city where boozing is the national pastime.

An annual celebration in Key West, called Hemingway Days, consists of lots of old white men with white Hemingway-ish beards, wearing fancy fishing outfits, drinking a whole lot of booze, hoping to win the Hemingway look-alike contest. Sometimes people told me I should enter the contest, I might win. I said that wasn't going to happen. Because, I did not drink, and I knew how to fish and write, and the Hemingway wannabes did not.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Chapter 2: We plan, God laughs!

After writing the previous chapter, "The Law Is a Jealous Mistress", I thought perhaps I might go back to the end of the Introduction, “My Mamma Knew I Would be a Lawyer”, and tell a bit about what happened after my artist wife and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where there was lots of interest in other world phenomenon, in which I was very interested. However, that doesn't seem to be in the cards for this chapter, which kept growing as I kept dreaming about it.

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For about two weeks, I found myself thinking about when I drove my car in the fall of 1987 into the Arkansas River Valley in Colorado, and when Mts. Harvard, Yale and Princeton came into view, I had a vision that I would write a book about practicing law in a new way. I started writing right away, and turned out reams of garbage. Finally, I stopped trying. 

Some time passed. 

A woman called me from a small town in Maine. She said she had found KILL ALL THE LAYWERS? in her local library, and I was the only lawyer who could help her! I asked how she had found my phone number? She said she had gotten it from the Alabama Bar. I said I didn't practice law that way any more. She said she didn't know what she would do. Perhaps she would see a spiritual adviser. I said I sometimes did spiritual counseling, did she want to try that approach with her legal problem? She said, yes. I asked her to tell me about her legal problem.

It was a scrape with her ex-husband. 

As if a light switch was thrown, I suddenly saw her situation differently. I told her that, and asked who her ex reminded her of, and who another person involved reminded her of, and who the judge reminded her of? It was other people very important to her, with whom she had deep unresolved issues. She was blown away. I was blown away. I suggested she get to work in her relationships with the other people and try to cool down about what was going on with her ex.

That was how the writing of the new book began. 

More people showed up looking for legal help they did not yet know they were seeking. They became part of the new book. 

A fellow at least a generation above me called from the American midwest and said he had read KILL ALL THE LAWYERS?, and I was the only lawyer who could help him. He proceeded to tell a long tale of lawyers and judges not treating him right. I saidI didn't practice law the regular way anymore and now I approached legal problems as spiritual issues. He asked me how old I was and said he was an elder in his church. My age had not been relevant when he told me I was the only lawyer who could help him.

A fellow where I was living had heard about me and called all upset about a defective part in Volkswagen Beetles. I asked if he had a Beatle himself? No, he said. He kept ranting about the defect. He dropped that he was a recovering alcoholic and had been sober many years and went to lots of meetings. I asked him if he'd ever heard of "the rescue syndrome?" He said he had. I suggested he talk with his AA friends about his beef about the defect part in Volkswagen Beetles. He grumbled that he would never have imagined calling a spiritual lawyer, who would talk to him about the rescue syndrome.

For two years, the evolving manuscript and my ego suffered heavy editing by angels and people angels put in my path. I was stood before many mirrors. My perspectives of myself and my ways of thinking and behaving changed dramatically. 

I was taken back into some of my own brushes with the law, including getting my senior law partner to sue the 90-year-old woman driving a Volkswagen Beetle in front of which my older daughter darted her bicycle. What was I thinking, suing that elderly woman and causing her even more distress over something she could not have prevented?

Even more troubling, after I started clerking for the federal judge, I spent a lot of time in the downtown YMCA playing 4-wall handball, which I had picked up after moving back to Birmingham from Tuscaloosa. I was spending so much time in the Y playing handball that this happened in my front yard when my older daughter was about 2 years old.

Our next door neighbors asked my daughter what her name was, and she said it and they said that was so good! They asked her what her daddy's name was, and she said, "Daddy named handball." They gave me the look.

The day after my daughter was run over by the Volkswagen, instead of going to the hospital at lunch time to be with her, I went to the Y and got into a 4-man handball game, 2 against 2, which I seldom did. Mostly, I played singles games. 

I was playing very well, and when I backed up and set to take a right-handed shot out of the air as the ball came off a side wall (I was ambidextrous in handball), it felt like someone stepped on the back of my right ankle and I went down in horrible pain. I turned around and no one was behind me.

I limped back to my law office and the next morning was in the office of the same orthopedic surgeon who had sewed my daughter's leg back together the day before. He's said I had ruptured my right Achilles tendon and it would have been better for me if it had snapped in two, which he could have sewed back together. He said my daughter would walk before I would. He proved right.

My older daughter had serious difficulties in her teens and twenties, and I felt a great deal of that was rooted in my being off in my own world when he was young. She fought her way through it, but it was not easy and I still feel responsible for most of it.

There was something else in my fathering past.

After several weeks in1988 of going to my son's unmarked grave at the foot of my mothers grave stone and bawling my heart and guts out until I had run out of tears and snot, I had a marker put on his unmarked grave, on which was engraved, "Infant son: He opened our hearts and set us on our journey."

It took me longer to come around to being able to think the terrible argument my 1st wife and I had about her taking our infant son out of town was so traumatic for his soul that he decided to leave. It took me even longer to understand that his death had messed me up so bad that it became impossible for me to fit into my father and his father's plans for me.

Toward the end of writing the book about practicing law in a new way, I was told in my sleep, "This book is your son." There was a sense in the dream that I would not get too attached to how he (the book) did and I would let it find its own way.

THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems (1990), was dedicated "To my son, who died for me." I still see the book offered at online book stores.

After the book was published and had gotten some publicity, a woman called me from Southern California. She said she had lived with a man for quite a while and had decided she needed to leave him, but she was afraid he might hurt her if she tried to leave. As we talked further, she said her brother was a local police officer. 

The light switch was thrown. I told her this is how she should proceed. 

Tell her brother her concern and ask him to have two of his fellow officers come to her home on the day she wants to move and they hang out inside with her while the moving occurs and they escort her to her new home. Her brother should not be there, because he is too close to it. 

She seemed hesitant. I said this will really help you, if you do it. She said okay, and thanked me.

She called perhaps three months later and thanked me. It had worked. The boyfriend was upended and docile. The move out to a new apartment was seamless. She was changed. A new person.

Some years later, I came across The Christian Legal Society chapter in Birmingham and attended a workshop they hosted, where I posed the question from the audience: How do Christians square turning the other cheek with plaintiff lawsuits? Thereafter, I had some visits with some of the members, who agreed that was a tough issue, but there had to be some circumstance when Jesus would approve of plaintiff litigation. I suggested they get out their Bibles and read up on Jesus in the Gospels.

Meanwhile, I last was licensed to practice law in Alabama in 2000. Because of recent dreams and waking life signals, I called the Alabama Bar last week and learned all I need to reactivate my law license is update my personal information with the Bar and send the Bar a check for one year’s membership, $325, and catch up the annual dues for the Client Security Fund, which was created in 2012 - $25 per year, $225. The fund protects clients from their lawyer’s stealing their money.

Imagine a lawyer retiring for over twenty years and then being able to pick up where he left off by paying $550. No catching up on Continuing Legal Education. No proof the lawyer remembers anything he used to know about practicing law.

I mailed two checks to the Alabama Bar, to become an active lawyer in Sweet Home Alabama again. 

I don’t charge for spiritual counseling, but I might charge for human legal advice, if a client can afford it.

At this stage, I don't know if I will open a law office. 

In the computer and internet age, with an iPhone and Apple laptop, I can meet clients face to face remotely. I can work out of my home and car, in coffee shops, libraries, public parks, etc..

I once trained in and did mediation and can do that.

After I stopped practicing law, I sometimes was asked what kind of law I had practiced in Birmingham? I stole a line I had heard somewhere and said, "Threshold law." When asked what that meant?, I said, "Whatever walked over the threshold into my law office."

Although I do not know if I will do litigation, a few years ago I qualified to e-file court pleadings in Alabama and Florida. How that came about doesn't seem on my Mamma and Jealous Mistress agenda today.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Chapter 1: The Law Is a Jealous Mistress

 

A dream around dawn today left me thinking my Senior Law Partners, whom I sometimes call angels, want me to fill in some blanks today about my legal training at the University of Alabama School of Law, which I entered in the fall of 1965. 

The dream included an Alabama Crimson Tide star running back, Major Olgovie. My younger brother was named Major, which was my mother’s maiden name. Major was an Alabama undergraduate when I was in law school, and we attended some Crimson Tide fall football practices together, using passes Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant gave our father to give to us. As I wrote in the Introduction, Coach Bryant’s Sunday show after each Saturday game was sponsored by Golden Flake and Coca Cola - “Great pair, says the Bear.” 

Anyway, I woke up from the dream around dawn thinking I was supposed to play a little football in today’s writing, and the way to do that was to go back in time and fetch something I wrote in 2019 about a southern lawyer who became a mystic.

…………………….

A few nights ago, I was told in a dream. “Life began on Hackberry Lane.” The University of Alabama School of Law was on Hackberry Lane in Tuscaloosa, when I attended that law school.

I well recall my first day in class. The professor told us to look to our left, then to our right. Two of us would not be around by graduation time. That would prove out. My recollection is that professor was Clinton McGee.

Professor McGee taught criminal law. It was said, after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law, Professor McGee had entered the U.S. Military and was sent overseas to defend accused Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It was said he was getting them off, so he was made a prosecutor, and the ones he prosecuted did not get off. Professor McGhee didn’t deal out a lot of As and Bs. He gave me a C. I deserved it.

Some years later, a law student name Roy Moore got nicknamed “Fruit Cake” by Professor McGee. Many years later, Moore got elected to the Alabama Supreme Court and then got removed because he put the Ten Commandments in the Supreme Court building and would not take them down. Moore got elected again to the Supreme Court and got removed again because of his religious fervor.

We had a law professor affectionately called “Hatchet Harry Cohen”, because he gave lots of low grades on final exams. He taught a real property course, based on a textbook he had written. I was assigned to a different section under a different law professor. I thought I was not learning anything, so I sat in on Professor Cohen’s classes in the other section. I memorized his textbook and made an A on the final exam. I had Professor Cohen for negligence torts the next semester. I fed back on the final exam what he had said in class. I made an A. Professor Cohen often talked in class of the difference between being a “legal monk” (law professor), and being a real lawyer.

We had a law professor affectionately called “Black Jack Payne”, because he was a legal scholar and wore a green visor when he researched ancient legal history in the law library, and he dealt out final exam scores of 21 to graduating seniors. He taught negligence torts, and arcane real estate law, and I was darn glad I didn’t get assigned to his negligence torts section, but was assigned to Professor Cohen’s section. (Many years later, my oldest daughter married Professor Cohen’s son. I told my son-in-law a few law school stories about his father.)

We had a law professor named “Bad Sam Beatty,” who had a PhD in law, and would drill into us that the Law is a Jealous Mistress. The first day of class, Doctor Beatty looked down at his roll sheet and said, “Bashinnnsky! I like that name, Bashinnnsky. Is Mr. Bashinsky here today?” I stood up, as required when a law professor called on us.

Doctor Beatty said, “Mr. Bashinsky, what’s the first thing you do when a client comes into your office?” There was nothing about that in the reading assignment for the first class. I said, “I suppose you ask him why he came to see you.” Doctor Beatty said, “Sit down, Mr. Bashinsky, you will never make it as a lawyer?”

Doctor Beatty asked if anyone knew what is the first thing you do when a client comes into your office? A fellow somewhat older than the rest of us, Billy Church, who had been a Baptist preacher, raised his hand and rubbed his first two fingers against his thumb. “Correct, Mr. Church”, Doctor Beatty said. “You get paid.”

Up the road in Birmingham, was Samford University, a private Baptist school, to which my Baptist Grandfather Bashinsky had given a great deal of money. Attached to Samford was Cumberland School of Law. The tuition there was much higher than at Alabama. Most of the Cumberland students  graduated. 50-percent of them flunked the state bar exam. 95-percent of my graduating class passed it. Before the bar exam, I spent several months studying my law school class notes. I think that’s why I passed.

But I skipped over a few other interesting things about Doctor Beatty.

It was said that when he was a new lawyer, Sam Beatty had represented a black man accused of a crime against a white person. Beatty was convinced his client was framed. The white jury decided otherwise. The white Alabama appellate courts agreed with the white jury. Beatty told the appellate justices that he would never practice law before them again. He quit. He got his advanced law degrees and became a law professor.

Doctor Beatty had a good friend named Ryan deGraffenried, who was a rising political star in Alabama, a good and decent man, who could have changed the course of history in Alabama, if he had been elected governor. If, the small airplane in which he was traveling had not crashed and killed him. Doctor Beatty told us a little about his departed friend, what a great loss for the State of Alabama! Doctor Beatty said he was too upset to continue. Class dismissed.

The current law school dean, also a law professor, resigned being dean, he just wanted to teach. Doctor Beatty wanted to be dean. He was not selected. A law professor from up north was brought in to be dean. He instituted mandatory class attendance, which was really dumb, I thought. Alabama did not want lawyers, who had to be made to attend class. It wanted lawyers who were dedicated to the law. I said as much during a feedback meeting the new dean held.

Doctor Beatty announced he had taken a job teaching at the Cincinnati School of Law. He his last class would be Uniform Commercial Code that summer. He was teaching Judicial Remedies. About ancient legal remedies, still part of Alabama law. Instead of his usual mostly low grades, he gave out only As, Bs and Cs. I got a C, and I was grateful.

Thinking Doctor Beatty was making a statement to the law school bosses, and he would do it again in his summer Uniform Commercial Code class, a lot of graduating seniors signed up for that class. I signed up for the class. I studied my ass off. The final grade sheet had 3 As, 5Bs, perhaps 10 Cs, and about as many Ds and Fs. I got one of the Bs. By then, Doctor Beatty had moved to Cincinnati.

We started hearing rumors of how it was going in Cincinnati. Doctor Beatty was making his students stand up when he called on them. They were not used to that. He was disturbing their comfort zones in other ways. He was teaching Uniform Commercial Code. We liked hearing that. 

A letter came from Doctor Beatty’s students, asking for a copy of his final exam in Uniform Commercial Code. A genius among us, not I, sent them a copy of Dr. Beatty's UCC final exam grade sheet, on which was scrawled, “Suck wind, Yankee Bastards!” We heard Bad Sam really liked that letter.

Later, I heard Doctor Beatty left Cincinnati to teach at Mercer Law School in Macon Georgia. Then, I heard he was working in a Macon bank’s trust department. I worried he was in a soul crisis.

Then, I heard Doctor Beatty was back in Tuscaloosa, practicing law.

Then, he ran for the Alabama Supreme Court, and got elected. I went before him on an appeal from a case I had lost on the pleadings in the Birmingham courts. He and the other justices ruled against me.

I dedicated KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? : “To my Law Professor Sam Beatty, who taught me how to think.”

Many years later, as I was emerging from the black night (1999), Doctor Beatty called me from Tuscaloosa, said he was coming to Birmingham to have lunch with a friend at The Club, he’d like for me to join them. I was, well, flabbergasted, but there was no way I would not be there.

It was a fairly low-key lunch and discussion, but some deep currents were touched. Three men, who had seen plenty, who recognized we were a bit different.

I told Doctor Beatty that I had long wondered something. He asked me what it was? “You sometimes gave me a really hard time in law school.” He smiled, said, “Because I really liked you, Sloan!”

I don’t know if Doctor Beatty read any of my books. I don’t know why he called and invited me to join him and his friend that day. I had no further contact with him in this life. But then, maybe he was who told me in my sleep recently, “Life began on Hackberry Lane”?

  

There was yet another The Club event when I was coming out of the black night. A law school reunion, during which I learned a classmate named Billy Scruggs had become the president of the Alabama Bar Association.

In law school, Billy had teamed up with Billy Church during the moot court competition, and they gave me and my moot court partners fits.

Billy was a great banjo picker. He worked at fishing and hunting shop in Tuscaloosa. He and Billy Church did pro bono apprentice legal work in the local courts, and gave local lawyers fits.

After law school, Billy Scruggs went back Fort Payne, his hometown in north Alabama, to be a country lawyer, fish and hunt, and keep playing his banjo. He jammed with a group of musicians he had grown up with. In time they became known as the band, Alabama. Billy became their lawyer. He helped them and himself make a whole lot of money, in Sweet Home Alabama, which was not one of their songs, but maybe it should have been.

About a year ago, I traveled through Fort Payne and stopped for lunch at a diner and struck up a conversation with a local at the counter bar. I asked him if he had known Billy Scruggs? Yes, he had known MR. SCRUGGS. Then came stories that left me thinking Billy was a giant among men in his hometown.

Billy Church practiced law in Birmingham, and eventually ended up in a small town east of Birmingham, where he was a country lawyer of some renown, and took up and played a lot of golf, I heard.

I never became a country lawyer, and I didn’t do all that great as a city lawyer, but I did write some interesting books based on my time as a city lawyer. And the four novels were a trip. Two were self-published: KUNDALINA, ALABAMA and HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale. 

KUNDALINA, by "Jake Carruthers", is a romp about a young man whose Pleiadean human father wanted him to be a lawyer, but his lady love, who turned out to be a shaman is disguise, and the Cosmos had other notions. It can still be found at online used book stores. 

HEAVY WAIT is a romp about a very good Birmingham trial lawyer whose lady love Fate dealt a really bad hand, and then he was given a new lady love, and they and a lot of other people were turned upside down and inside out and every which away but loose. HEAVY WAIT died and went to heaven, or somewhere.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Introduction: My Mamma Figured I Would Be a Lawyer

When I started my freshman year in public high school, my father said I should take a typing class. He knew how to touch type and said it would be a valuable skill.

The typing class was me and another guy and about 30 girls. I got up to about 40 not entirely accurate words a minute by the end of the first semester, and made a B. I did not improve the second semester and made a D. 

I can imagine there were people over the years who would have been much happier if I had not learned touch typing 😎.

*************************

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1942. I grew up in the upscale white over the mountain community Mountain Brook, sometimes called The Tiny Kingdom. 

During my childhood, I mostly felt I didn't belong on this planet. My favorite novels were science fiction. I was convinced people lived on other planets and some of them traveled in space. 

I viewed grammar school as being sent to jail. I liked play period and weekends, holidays and summer vacation. I viewed church services as being sent to jail. I liked Sunday school. I hated yard work.

I loved to fish and came to love to hunt. I was pretty good at football, basketball and baseball, and became pretty good at golf, which was my father's sport. He was very good when he was young, a scratch player - at or below par. He could have turned pro, but he went into business after navigating B-29 bombers from Guam to Japan in World War II. He told me golf is really important, because all business deals are made on the golf course.

I made fair grades in grammar school, and usually got C in conduct. For talking too much. The first report card in 7th grade was all Cs and a D in conduct. My father blamed the Cs on the D. Said I would be sent to a local private boys school if I made another D in conduct. The next 6 weeks report card was all As and Bs and a D in conduct.

One day my mother accused me of doing something I said I had not done. We went back and forth a while. Yes, you did do it, she said. No, I didn't do it, I said. Finally, she said she had the memory of a camel - she never forgot. I said camels go for a long time without water, elephants never forget. End of argument. She retold that story many times. 

I didn't reach puberty when I was supposed to. I quit all sports that involved locker rooms. I was doing poorly in public high school. I felt like I was the only person ever who never reached puberty. I was in a living hell. My father enrolled me in the private high school he had attended in another state. I went into puberty soon after that, the middle of my 16th year. Whew!

The private school was run by Presbyterians who were convinced Nikita Kruschev was the AntiChrist, they were the Elect, Christ would return in their lifetimes. The 80-year-old founder told us in New Testament class that he and his wife had only had sex three times, twice to have children, once for pleasure, and he regretted the third time ever since.

I got born again, briefly. Then, I quit standing up or raising my hand in daily convocations when we were asked if we were saved, or wanted to be saved. I had no problem with God and Jesus, who intimidated me. I had a problem with the people running the school. But they helped me get into Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

I joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which still lived in the Confederate uniform and flag era, even though it had maybe a dozen brothers from way north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Interestingly, the "mystic goodies", revealed during the secret initiation, were based on the Holy Grail. The fraternity's creed was Dieu et les dames. God and the women. I met my future wife on a blind date at a KA party. We were married on July 4, 1964, before my senior year. I graduated the next year. Thus ended the happiest years of my life, and since.

Not caring to watch more Vanderbilt football, and not knowing what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and since my father had often told me that he wished he had gone to law school, because knowledge of the law was really important in business, I enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, about 60 miles southwest of Birmingham. My bride and I moved to Tuscaloosa. We were financially supported by inheritances from my father and his uncle-in-law.

I watched Alabama Crimson Tide football games, and thanks to my father's business relationship with Paul "Bear" Bryant", I was at a lot afternoon fall football practices near the law school. 

My father owned Golden Flake, which he had bought from his father and his father's brother-in-law. They had bought the company from its founders to lure my father back to Birmingham after World War II, in which he was an Army Air Corps Pacific Theater combat aviator. 

My father learned the business from the ground up. Golden Flake competed head-on with Frito-Lay. Coach Bryant promoted Golden Flake potato chips and Coca-Cola on his Sunday afternoon TV show after each Saturday football game. "Great pair, says the Bear," meant Golden Flake and Coca-Cola throughout Alabama.

I attended summer law school to graduate early.

My mother, who had more friends than anyone I knew, died of cancer during my second year in law school. My friends and my brother and sister's friends were in shock. I was numb, never grieved. She was miserable a long time. Was going to file for a divorce from my father until her mother said, if she divorced my father, it would kill her. Years later, I would think my mother died and divorced my father and her mother.

My Vanderbilt sweetheart became pregnant and bore a beautiful baby boy in July 1967. She was worn out. I got up in the wee hours and brought our baby to her, to nurse. I then changed this diapers and put him back in his crib and my wife went back to sleep. I washed out his diapers in the toilet and went back to sleep.

I felt like I was in paradise, literally. 

For seven weeks.

My Vanderbilt sweetheart and I had a terrible argument about whether she would take our baby to her hometown to see her brother off to Thailand with the U.S. Air Force, where he would service American bombers during the Vietnam war.

The argument really scared me. I agreed to to the trip, drove them to the Tuscaloosa airport and watched her board a Southern Airways DC-3 and went home. Two days later, a fellow law student who lived nearby came to my home to tell me my wife and called and asked him to come to tell me our baby had died in his sleep. She wanted someone to be there with me, when I Iearned of it. 

I was devastated. And, I was wrecked by recurring thoughts that my won would still be alive if his mother had not make that trip to her home town. I wept a lot. I was furious a lot.

The Vietnam war was revving up. Two of my law school classmates were in the military and they were called up. Students with deferments were drafted when they graduated. Married men were being drafted. Fathers were not being drafted. I had lost my father deferment. 

I roiled for a few weeks between enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps.and fighting in Vietnam, and enlisting in the U.S. Army and hoping to get into the Judge Advocate General Corps and being a military lawyer and avoiding combat. If I elected for a student deferment, I was assured of completing law school.

I drove to the Draft Board in Birmingham and filled out an application for that deferment and drove back to Tuscaloosa. About a week later, my wife learned she was pregnant again. I drove back to the Draft Board and told the same lady clerk who had taken my deferment application what had happened. She said she was sorry, the deferment I had applied for was irrevocable. She said she would show me the application.

She walked to a green filing cabinet and pulled out a file and looked in it and said there had been some mistake. I asked what mistake? She said I filled out the wrong form and would have to do it again I said, no thanks, I'll go with a father deferment. I left feeling as if the weight of the world had been lifted off me, and God had done it.

In January 1968, I left law school with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree and would spend the next three months studying for the Alabama Bar exam.

 

My beloved black nanny died.

A law school buddy a year ahead of me had moved back to his small south Alabama hometown and was practicing law with his father and his father's law partner. An esteemed lawyer in my father and his father's hometown, Troy, Alabama, offered me the spare office in his law firm and the use of his secretary. He had lost his own son many years before.

My father and his father were against it, and I chickened out  after being offered a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham. His law clerk had quit in the middle of his clerkship to practice law with his father in Birmingham.

About a year into my clerkship with Judge Allgood, I woke up one morning and my bowel was jammed. There were no prior symptoms. My internist couldn't figure it out. It scared the shit out of me. I lost confidence. Judge Algood advised me against going to work for Golden Flake, which seemed safer to me. Judge Allgood offered me another year working for him. I felt I needed to move on and went work for Golden Flake. 

Judge Allgood is the first person portrayed in a little book that fell out of me in the fall of 2004, which can be read for free by clicking on this link.

https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/

Then come five other exceptional Alabama people, who greatly influenced me in my youth, but it took a bit longer for me to realize how much they truly had influenced me. The 2nd of those five was the daughter of African slaves, who came to my parents' home looking for work around the day I was born. She loved and raised me as one of her own.

I had worked at Golden Flake during summer vacations before I attended law school. 

Throughout my youth my father had said of Golden Flake, "Son I built this business for you!" I felt awful every time he said that. 

Perhaps working for my father full time might have gone differently, if first I had gone into the practice of law and tried that for a while.

After four years, hoping to save my life and my soul, I left Golden Flake to go into the practice of law in Birmingham with a small law firm that had nothing to do with my upbringing in Mountain Brook. 

My physical health had been horrible since I was with Judge Allgood. It was amazing that I gutted out practicing law, feeling every day like I was dying from cancer in my gut. 

My 1st marriage had somehow survived losing our infant son, who was named after me, who was named after my father. The just as sudden illness that came after I chickened out about being a country lawyer in my father's hometown, Troy, Alabama, was almost more than I could bear. 

The illness laughed at doctors and natural cures and healers. If I found something that seemed to be helping me feel a little better, suddenly everything got a lot worse, until I quit using what had made me feel a little better. I came to think the illness was intelligent and wanted me to leave it alone.

My Vanderbilt sweetheart and I now had two beautiful daughters, whom she mostly raised with the help of a wonderful black woman who worked for us several days a week. As I struggled  to work for my father, and then to be a lawyer. I did a lot of practicing on clients, and some clients I actually helped. 

I think the straw that.broke this camel's back was our older daughter was hit on her bicycle by a slow moving Volkswagen in front of our home and she nearly lost a lower leg and foot. It was not the 90-year-old driver's fault. Our daughter had darted out in front of the Volkswagen. 

I had my senior law partner sue the driver anyway. It was a weak case, the settlement was small. By then, my wife and I were separated. I gave her the settlement. After a while, she moved back to Tuscaloosa with our daughters. 

I remarried. She was an artist, no longer painting after she borrowed $3,000 from a son of another boss in the Tiny Kingdom, in exchange for him getting her next two paintings. 

Upon learning of that, I went to my bank and got a cashier's check for $3,000 made out to the other son of the boss and gave it to her and told her to take it to him and get herself out of jail, which she did. Yet, she did not want to paint, even though she had more talent in her right hand that I had ever seen.

Finally, she decided she would like to teach young children how to draw and paint, and she found a place to rent in English Village, adjacent to Mountain Brook, and I gave her the money to open her school, which she seemed to enjoy, and her students seemed to like being there.

Perhaps part of that was compensation for my not wanting to have any more children, and birth control methods were not working for either of us and she got pregnant twice and had two abortions that really traumatized her, and so I got a vasectomy, which really traumatized her, and it traumatized me.

By and by, I met a fellow teaching a survivalist adult education class at UAB (University of Alabama, in Birmingham). By then, I had become an avid vegetable gardener in my back yard. He lived out in the country west of Birmingham. He had a bunch of rare breed chickens that laid different colored eggs, and a large vegetable garden.

He was the Executive Director of the local Planned Parenthood, which was receiving death threats from right wing Christians. He asked me to provide legal advice, which I did pro bono. I was not a strong abortion rights person. I knew a bit about abortion by then. I knew the damage my wife suffered. However, I didn't see any pro-lifers offering to adopt unwanted babies, or paying mothers of unwanted babies to raise their unwanted babies. 

By then, I had persuaded my artist wife to start painting again, if I wouldn't push her to try to sell her paintings. That went okay for about a year, when I persuaded her to put her paintings in a gallery owned by a woman whose husband was a lawyer I knew. Among artists, the gallery owner was not popular. She and my wife came at odds over a gallery showing. I told my wife, if I got into it, all hell might break loose. I got into it and all hell broke loose. The owner kicked my wife out of the gallery.

The angel of starving artists must have been on the job. The gallery owner had advertised a show in the Birmingham Post-Herald, and the showing artists were named. The owner invited my wife to bring her paintings back to the gallery. 

The other artists' paintings were hung and there was no wall space, so the owner stood my wife's paintings on the floor, leaning against the baseboard. A Birmingham newspaper's review of the show praised my wife's paintings, but said they were hard to find on the floor.

Heh.

I obtained a Masters in Tax Law from the University of Alabama School of Law. I hoped that would energize my law practice, but it didn't. I then went out on my own for a few years.

My wife drove down to Pensacola for its annual public art show in a city park. She won first prize in water color. A couple of years later, she drove down to Orlando and won first prize  for water color in the Disney World art show and was given the blue ribbon by Mickey Mouse. 

My law practice had dwindled down to a leaky faucet in output. 

I wrote three books, which did not make the residential real estate and legal industries particularly happy with me. My artist wife was my Muse. 

The books received good reviews and got me lots of media interviews but did not make me much money, because I was impatient and paid a publicist to promote the books before they were in bookstores. 

HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?

SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME

KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers

The Prentice-Hall Division of Simon & Shuster ended up with all three books. 

Jane Pauley interviewed me on The Today Show about the homebuyers book. Also there was the General Counsel of the National Association of Realtors. We discussed real estate brokers and agents trying to represent both sides - conflict of interest. The General Counsel didn’t think it was a conflict of interest.

I hardly killed all the lawyers in the 3rd book, but I heard some Birmingham lawyers were upset- perhaps they thought they saw themselves in the book? 

One chapter, "Don't Kill Your Lawyer!", was about clients no lawyer ever wanted to have as a client. 

I had not yet arrived at the notion that the only way to kill all the lawyers was people stop using lawyers, which would result in pandemonium given how deeply imbedded lawyers are in American society, and elsewhere.

An artist son of another boss, who was a good friend of my 2nd wife, had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, where he was doing well as an artist, subsidized by his father. They invited us out to stay in their guest cottage. We stayed two months in the summer of 1985. 

By then, I was interested in what looked to me like not of this world phenomenon. It was not a religious interest. I had grown up in Christendom, attended its churches. What I was interested in was something else altogether - or so I thought at that time.

I saw a lot of interest in that something else in Santa Fe. Decided I wanted to move there. Invited my 2nd wife to move there with me. It was an artist's heaven. 

I had a pretty good amount of money from various inheritances. That’s how we got by.

She still lives in Santa Fe. 

I live in the Birmingham Southside apartment building, in which I lived two other times after I quit running away from home. 

I can't imagine much interest in what all happened to me when I was a runaway, but some of it might bear telling again.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com