My parents saw the world as pretty much black or white.   “Love me, love my dog,” their favorite cousin used to bark, when complaining about assholes who wouldn’t let his Boxer, or later his Husky, come into their houses.  He’d have nothing more to do with people like that. My parents were the same way, dividing the world into kindred souls and people to avoid.  My mother was a bit more flexible, my father quite a bit less, but both drew a strong line.

And so I was left to slowly, haphazardly, learn about nuance, and things besides loyalty and reflex.  I had a lot to learn, and, truthfully, didn’t learn much in my first five decades.  Here’s one just occurred to me, something I wish I’d have learned in time to help me make a living.

When I practiced law I participated in a program that provided paid legal counsel to clients of the NYC Department of Aging.  I represented a few senior citizens in various cases, for a flat fee of maybe $1,000 a case.  The seniors didn’t have to pay, several were very nice, and grateful, a few others were demanding and nuts.  Then there was the octogenarian interior designer who lived on MacDougal Street.

He’d been there for about fifty years, on the top two floors of a now very desirable building in Greenwich Village.   You entered his apartment on the fourth floor and to get to his bedroom, as one imagines others sometimes did back in the day, you climbed a steep flight of dark wooden steps through a door-sized opening cut in the floor of the apartment above.  It was a very nice pad, and rent controlled.  He paid a few hundred dollars for the two apartments.  Each one was now worth at least $2,000 a month to the landlord, if they could get the old interior designer out, close up the floor, put in new fixtures.

His mother had died and, as the only child, he inherited her house in Pennsylvania.  The landlord learned of this and decided to try to evict him on non-primary residence grounds.   They served the eviction papers on him and he freaked out.  I was appointed his lawyer.  It became clear that his landlord was taking a shot in the dark, hoping to scare the skittish old man and buy him off cheaply.  The landlord had no case.   The indicia of primary residence are things like: address for all correspondence, where you vote, the address on your drivers license and passport, ties to the community, the fact that the apartment you rent is your main home and that you are there for the majority of the year.  Every factor was in the old interior decorator’s favor.  The apartment was his primary residence.   The attempt to evict him was a cruel thing to do and he was anxious, angry and beside himself to be hauled into court by his long time landlord.

Once he calmed down, it emerged that for the right price he was prepared to retire to his ancestral home.  The ordinary buy-out is calculated on the difference in rent over five years.  If he paid $400 a month and the landlord would be able to get, say, $4,000 a month, you’d get the difference and multiply it by 60 months, in this case $3,600 X 60 or $216,000.  Every month after that, in perpetuity, the landlord would be collecting gravy.

The landlord’s attorney was a vicious scumbag, the kind of lawyer that gives the profession such a bad smell.   He puffed that the era of six digit buy-outs was long in the past (it was not) and that $50,000 was a fair offer (it was not).   He conducted interrogatories and a deposition, which took me and my client many, many hours to comply with.  I should have put my foot up this lawyer’s ass– beaten him at trial and then told him to pay up if his client wanted the apartment so badly.   I was thinking that way, too.

One evening I sat in the bank with my client waiting for the bank to produce some records we needed to give the landlord’s attorney.   “Can you believe we are sitting here on a Friday night waiting for papers to give to that fucking Jew bastard K___?” he asked me.   I gave a blank look and shook my head.  I am Jewish and don’t like to hear that kind of talk,  In fact, I have so rarely heard it that I am unprepared to respond each time I do.  I tried to let it pass, agreeing that the lawyer was a bad man, but he was determined.

“That fucking filthy, Eastern European kyke…” he hissed, and this time I didn’t look at him at all.

We settled the case for $50,000 and I took a third, my biggest payday as a lawyer, but a fraction of what I should have made.

Rewind in light of nuance and perspective:  I could have said “Jimmy, I share your distaste for K____, he’s an anti-Semite’s caricature of a Jewish lawyer, no question.  But I’m Jewish and that ‘filthy Eastern European kyke’ business doesn’t sit well with me, old boy.   I’d expect a bit more sensitivity from someone who, walking lightly in his loafers in a day when one could be beaten or killed for it, should know what it’s like to be a member of a despised minority.”

I have no doubt he would have taken pains to apologize.  He would have put on a great show of being mortified.  Then I’d shake his clammy hand and we’d vow to take the piece of garbage to the cleaners if he wanted his damned apartment back.

Instead, I said nothing, thought “fuck him” and spited myself by taking a fraction of what we both should have been paid– and letting that filthy Eastern European kyke have his way with us both.   Another proof that I was never cut out to be in business for myself as a lawyer.