The Book of Air and Shadows

copyright, which covers all the arts of humanity-music, writing, films, images of all kinds, Mickey Mouse, etc., and I will record here the instinctive punch of the special key on my machine that adds the sacred © to the little rodent’s name, and which I have just gone back and removed, because this is a new me writing this whatever it is. My firm, Geller Linz Grossbart & Mishkin, is a copyright house, and although each of the partners handles the full spectrum of copyright work, you could make a case that each of us has a different specialty. Marty Linz does TV and movies, Shelly Grossbart does music, Ed Geller is, as I said, our litigation chief. And I handle the literary business, which means I spend a good deal of time with writers, enough to realize that I am not and will never be one of their number. Quite a few of my clients have told me, often with a patronizing tone, that within every lawyer is a strangled poet, attributing the quotation to a variety of different authors. I don’t really mind this sort of thing, since all these people are as helpless as kittens in the real, as opposed to the imaginary, universe. I can do cutting irony too, when I choose, which is not that often because, in all honesty, I admire the hell out of them. I mean, just making up a story out of your head and writing it so that someone else, a complete stranger, can read it and understand it and have real feelings about fictitious persons! Were you ever so unfortunate as to have a seat on a packed-tight plane or train where you were stuck in front of a couple of jerks exchanging anecdotes? You want to cut your throat out of sheer boredom, right? Or kill them. My point is, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s damn hard to tell a coherent story. One client of mine told me that in order to write a story you start with everything that ever happened to anyone and carve away the parts that don’t fit. This was a joke, however. Although I seem to be doing something like it now.
    Perhaps, though, I am being too diffident. The legal profession is not without its creative side. We do a lot of writing, nearly all of it of interest only to other lawyers, but still there is the business of telling a story, setting a scene, laying out the facts and assumptions behind one’s case. Young Charles Dickens started out as a court reporter, and scholars believe that this experience formed the sense of the human drama evident in his novels. Besides which, those novels are nearly all about crimes, mainly of the white-collar type. Mickey Haas is my source for that factoid, and he should know, as he is a professor of English literature at Columbia. And he is also the beginning of this story.
    How much do you need to know about Mickey? Well, first of all you know something, because only a certain type of mature man allows himself to be called by a schoolboy diminutive nickname. I don’t believe that “Jake” is a nickname of the same type at all. He is certainly my oldest friend, but he is not entirely a serious person. Perhaps if he were a more serious person he would have shined the little professor on, and this business would not have occurred. Fittingly, therefore, I have ended up at Mickey’s house, a cabin on Lake Henry deep in Adirondack State Park, where I am currently in…I suppose I am hiding out, but I can hardly bring myself to use such a dramatic term. In seclusion, let us say. Armed seclusion, let us say.
    I have known Mickey (or Melville C. Haas, as it appears on the spines of his many books) since my youth, starting from our sophomore year at Columbia, when I answered an ad asking for a roommate to share a fourth-floor walk-up on 113th Street off Amsterdam Avenue. It is typical of Mickey that the ad was posted in the window of a Chinese laundry on Amsterdam rather than at the student union or with the university housing office. When I asked him later why he’d done that, he replied that he wished to solicit roommates from the subpopulation that wore professionally cleaned and ironed shirts. Oddly enough I was not really of that population; I owned a single dress shirt, a white-on-white De Pinna discarded by my father, and had gone into the little shop to have it pressed for a job interview.
    At the time I was living in a greasy single-room-occupancy building, having recently run away from home. I was eighteen and grindingly poor, and the SRO was charging me fifteen bucks a day, kitchen and bath down the hall. Both of these rooms