Criminal That I Am (24 page)

“The two shared clandestine kisses behind bars,” the article says. I am stated to have “repeatedly used a balloon to sneak dozens of Xanax anti-anxiety pills into the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan at his request.

“‘From what I remember, I saw her take it out of her bra,'” the article quotes Cameron as saying.

“Douglas, 32, said the relationship continued even after he was shipped off to prison in Pennsylvania, where he told her to lie on an official form so she could continue to visit him.”

The article lists my name; my age; my employment history, including the name of the law school at which I teach. I am described as having confessed to my crimes, as having been arrested, as having had my charges dropped.

The article does not make mention of Cameron's medical condition, choosing instead to heavily imply that the Xanax was provided for his recreational use. The incident is described as one of many “drug-fueled transgressions” by someone with a “drug-addled memory” who “started smoking pot at age 15, and moved on to harder drugs within a year or two.”

My attorney issued a statement stating that I am “an outstanding young attorney.” When I read this, I laugh out loud.

According to the article, I declined to respond to the tabloid's request for comment.

I
read the article only once. I carefully close my laptop and place it on the nightstand.

I get back into bed. I pull the covers over my head.

Sleep arrives quickly. It turns out that when the moment you dread arrives, there is nothing more to dread. There is nothing left to do at all.

T
he phone starts ringing at some point in the middle of the morning.

I pick it up only to make it stop ringing. I know that there is nothing on the other end that can portend good things.

The first wave of calls are from concerned friends. They say all the
things that a good friend is supposed to say, that is, everything that minimizes the damage at hand and nothing that actually reflects reality. I later learn that while they are making these assurances, they are privately acknowledging to one another that this is a complete disaster.

The role of a friend is to make you feel good about yourself. The role of a brother is to give you the harsh truth. “This is terrible,” he says when he reads the article. “You'd better call Mom and make sure she doesn't read it.”

Have you ever had to call your mother to tell her that your underwear is in the newspaper? If so, you know that this is not an easy task. This is especially true of my mother, whose modest sensibilities are easily ignited. I dread this conversation.

It's clear she's been waiting for my call. “How bad is it?” she asks.

“Mom, it's bad.”

“What does it say?”

“I don't want to tell you.”

“But I need to know,” she insists.

“Why?” I ask. “They totally twisted everything in the worst way possible.”

She assumes her interrogator voice. “Jennifer, read it to me.”

I take a deep breath. Then, for the second time that day, I start reading.

There is a sound unique to Iraqi women that I call the Iraqi gasp. It consists of an intake of air so intense and sudden that it results in a noise like that of a whooping crane. It is prominently featured in my mother's response to the article.

She does not focus on the fact that the article makes me out to be a drug smuggler or even that it mentions my underthings.

She fixates on the kissing.

Here is where my mother's traditionalism really shines. While I presume as a general matter Iraqis kiss no more or less than any other people, kissing is something that is confined to intimate spaces. Kisses between men and women otherwise cannot be found, not at weddings, not in suggestive music videos, not anywhere. Unmarried people are to remain unkissed until further notice.

My mother understands that she has raised her children in a society
that embraces kissing of all kinds. But even with this being the case, I have always suspected that she has assured herself that this still does not occur with her children. Now that it is in print, there is no opportunity for denial.

“It talks about kisses????!!!”

“Um, yes.”

“Did you kiss him?”

I don't have the energy for this. “Well, yes.”

“With tongue????!!!”

She is giving me an out, and I can sink no lower than I already have on this day, and so I lie. “No. Not with tongue, Mom.”

She is silent for a moment. “What does ‘clandestine' mean?”

“It means hidden.”

“Oh.” She thinks about this. “But why are they saying the kisses are hidden?”

I close my eyes and rest my head on the wall. I supposed I've earned this exchange, but it is not making things easier.

“They're not saying the kisses were hidden on me,” I say. “They're saying we kissed when no one was looking.”

“What! Why would anyone be looking?”

I don't point out to her that now that this article has been published, everyone is looking. Instead, I say, “I don't know, Mom. I honestly don't know.”

O
ther calls and e-mails flood in, but after a while I tire of telling everyone I am fine. From my location in the bedroom, I sporadically hear the buzzer ring, and then a few minutes later, my doorbell. I answer neither, but make a mental note that attention from the press may not be completely over.

My lawyer calls at some point in the day. His words are supportive, but I don't have a specific recollection of them. He will later tell me that a complaint has been filed against me with the New York Bar, the proceedings of which will determine whether I will continue to be licensed to practice law. I will simply nod and say, “Okay.”

Later in the day, I get a call from a number I don't recognize. When I
answer, I discover that it's the dean of my law school. Before he speaks, he clears his throat. He is choosing the appropriate words, a thoughtful thing for him to do, consistent with the person I know him to be. But it is also entirely unnecessary. I already know what he is going to say. I know. I will never have to worry about giving a disastrous academic presentation ever again.

W
hen everything is over, everything is gone, there isn't much else left to do. Without a career to worry about, I throw my shoddy article and research notes into the trash. I call off my eleven job interviews—“I am no longer interviewing,” I write without saying any more—delete my electronic plane ticket and my hotel room confirmation. I complete these tasks with stoicism, as though I am canceling my dry cleaning, not my future.

I am utterly heartbroken at the destruction of my professional path. I allow myself to remember a ten-year-old me, who decided that she was interested in a career in law. A twelve-year-old me, who spent her free time obsessing over
L.A. Law
and began following criminal cases. An eighteen-year-old me, who carefully plotted a rigorous college trajectory that would allow her to get to law school in three years rather than four. A twenty-one-year-old me, who moved from the Midwest to New York City to begin study at said law school, touted as one of the best in the country. A twenty-four-year-old me, who studied and sat for the Bar Exam. A twenty-six-year-old me, who completed a federal appellate clerkship and began to practice law in New York. A thirty-two-year-old me, who began teaching as a law professor. Now, as thirty-five-year-old me, having thrown all of this away, I feel as though someone has repeatedly punched me in the head.

But my devastation is perhaps not what it could be. I know this because in the phone calls I make to report that my career has imploded, everyone seems to be more upset than me. My mother bursts into tears, pleads with me to find a job, any job as soon as I can. My brother implores me to beg for my old job back. My lawyer urgently offers to find me work as a contract attorney, suggests that this will allow me to cling to a spot still within the legal community. Friends provide desper
ate ideas for legal-based businesses, for jobs that will not require me to show my face too much.

Although these conversations occur separately, in my memory they happen all at once, an anxious cyclone of well-intentioned advice and expectation, a distraught deluge of urgency and instruction. As I quietly listen to everyone panic, it occurs to me that maybe the reason they are this distressed is because the things that have been lost are more important to them than they are to me. That it's entirely possible that I've spent a lifetime following a path dictated by other people's objectives. That what's gone was perhaps not really mine to begin with.

I don't mention this to any of my concerned callers, because at this point I am essentially dead inside. But the thought does cross my mind—naturally when it is far too late—that my defiance at MCC was possibly misplaced. It was in simply living my own life where I maybe should have been breaking the rules all along.

W
ith nothing good to think about, I try to distract myself with other news. I head over to a UK-based gossip site, a guilty pleasure in which I regularly indulge. I scan the stories on the right-hand side of the page in order to pick one that will make me feel good by comparison.

I see a headline about an attorney. Perfect. Surely this person has done something worse than me. I click on it, and I realize that it
is
me. I close my web browser.

I consider an e-mail sent to me by a friend, which curiously contains the full text of a commencement address delivered by David Foster Wallace three years before he committed suicide.

It seems an odd selection, given that I have just humiliated myself in front of the whole world, not completed the requirements of an undergraduate degree. But my friend has underlined this particular passage:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

I suspect that my friend is referring to the care I showed Cameron, the sacrifice I decided to make on his behalf. But this hardly feels like
freedom. And so, because I use humor as a defense mechanism, I write her in response, “I wouldn't exactly say
un
sexy.”

Only when I get into bed do I take a real accounting of everything that's happened. Here is where I curl my knees up to my chest and start to sob uncontrollably. Where I want to push out everything I have inside so that I can be someone or something else.

I stop when I am no longer capable of continuing. As I fall asleep, my final thoughts of the day rest on David Foster Wallace's word “freedom.” I strain to understand how it could possibly apply, how anyone who has failed so calamitously could ever feel free.

AFTER

Rejected by society, I embark upon a quest for complete numbness. The events of the last few days have left me emotionally gutted. I am in pain and would like not to be.

My pursuit of nonfeeling is made possible with an entity I call The Couch.

The Couch is more than just my couch, although that's where it begins. The morning after the article is printed, not having the wherewithal to do much more, I decide to spend the day sprawled out on it, a pile of magazines at my side, a remote control in my hand. I haven't eaten anything of note in two days and am starving. I decide that there is no purpose in being a disciplined eater today. I should order
exactly
what I want to eat. And so I do. I choose a grilled cheese sandwich, no, wait,
two
grilled cheese sandwiches. Oh, and a soda. And a bag of kettle-cooked potato chips, of course. And a slice of chocolate cake. That's plenty. Hold on, they have milkshakes?

I use a food-delivery website to order my food. I prepay the tip. Then, under “Special Delivery Instructions,” I type: “Please leave it at the door.” And because I can no longer stand the sound of it, I add, “Please do not ring doorbell.”

When the buzzer announces the arrival of the delivery person, I remind him to “please remember to just leave it at the door.” I wait. I hear the ring of the elevator, the heavy plod of his shoes against the hall
way carpeting, the soft rustle of the plastic bag that is gently set in front of my door, I hear him wait for a moment, then his fading footsteps, and then the elevator taking him away.

I count to twenty. I open my door for the first time in days, snatch the bag, close the door, and lock it.

I place the bag on the coffee table, unwrap each item, and then proceed to eat the entire lunch in a matter of minutes.

While consuming this amount of food in such a short period of time would normally make me nauseous, this time I feel nothing of the sort. In fact, I feel nothing at all. I want for nothing, other than a nap, which I take right there on the couch.

When I wake, I still feel nothing.

Although I'm not hungry, I want to keep it going. I repeat the motions of my lunchtime order, only this time selecting cheeseburgers instead of grilled cheese—cheese features prominently in this period of my life—and gummy bears instead of cake.

“Please remember to just leave it at the door,” I announce into the intercom when this meal arrives. When I feel my stomach fill, I push down the food anyway.

I'm once again in a carbohydrate coma. It isn't long before I am asleep again. I don't even bother getting up to go to my bedroom, but simply remain in the same supine position I've assumed all day.

The next day, I repeat the same sequence of events, except with Chinese food for lunch and Italian for dinner. The following day, I return to grilled cheese but have Tex-Mex in the evening.

And so on. And so forth. I continue in this manner for an untold number of days and weeks, mostly because I lose track.

At some point, I wonder to myself if I should do something other than sit in a sea of takeout containers. But I find that I can't, that whenever I try to get up from The Couch, I begin to remember why I am there and only want its comfort again.