Sharpening Axes

You betcha I was a-okay. Okey dokey, I was fine and dandy. Me? I’d never been better. In fact, I would venture to say that I was every bland assurance that I’ve ever given to a passing acquaintance when they’ve asked me how I am in that “don’t-actually-tell-me-how-you-are” kind of way.

And Sorcha, my brand-spanking new assistant? She was doing just groovy.

My office? Improving by the second. Moreover, while I was cleaning up after Hurricane Adri, I found my favorite pen, missing for weeks.

Yessiree, things were definitely looking up and thanks for asking. How’s the mum, wife and kids?

And not long after that – after things began to go so gee-willikers vacuously swell in my life – my firm hired Greg. Now, Greg is younger than me, attended a far better law school than I did, worked briefly on “The Daily Show” after undergrad, taught himself to play several obscure instruments and speak several less obscure languages in his spare time, and…

So on and so forth. You get the idea.

Incidentally, Greg is not conventionally handsome yet still manages to somehow evoke gorgeousness in a profound and incomprehensible way that makes me involuntarily a’tremble and a’quiver all over.

It was on his third day at the firm that he approached me to ask about my soon-to-be newest client.

“Adri,” he said, in a not conventionally friendly yet still profoundly and incomprehensibly sexy sort of way. “Isn’t A of E, Inc. your client?”

Before I go any further, before I get on with the getting on of my tale, I should explain A of E, Inc. A of E, Inc., which is actually Axes of Evil, Inc., which of course isn’t Axes of Evil, Inc. at all but rather an imaginary client that I just now created for the purposes of storytelling so that I don’t get disbarred and have to resort to prostitution for violating attorney-client privilege.

But you’ve seen their commercials. I haven’t seen their commercials, but I’ve been told on very good authority that if you ever watch television, you’ve seen the commercials of Axes of Evil Tools and Yard Equipment, Axes and More.

I’m told that in their commercials, which arrive at unpredictable intervals on grainy, low-quality film, in these commercials they shout, “You can keep your freedom; we just hate you for your high prices on lawn furniture!”

I’m told they announce, “During our Fourth of July sale, our salesmen will bomb the hell out of expensive, low quality piston pump paint sprayers all week long!”

I’m told that their newest catchphrase goes something like, “This weekend, we will join forces to repel the infidel American invasion of high prices on the latest lawn maintenance equipment!”

Plus, as you might have already guessed, Axes of Evil, Inc. sells a lot of axes.

Despite all that – or perhaps because of it – they were ambiguously foreign-sounding on the telephone, they had one hell of a case, they’d been truly wronged, and I was [this] close to some serious rainmaking for my firm.

And eventually, although I’d become largely a-lingual and therefore unable to communicate effectively in Greg’s presence, I gathered my wits enough to comprehend that Greg was telling me a senior attorney had asked him – Greg, that is – to meet with said senior attorney and the top head honchos of Axes of Evil Tools and Yard Equipment on Friday evening, after normal business hours. Yes, fresh inside the country from wherever the hell they came from, the top head honchos of Axes of Evil Tools and Yard Equipment wanted the same thing anyone newly arrived in the U.S. wants: to be wined and dined at an all-American A-list strip club.

I was not amused. I did not understand. I asked Greg, “What in the hell does that have to do with me not being invited along?”

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Two days later, and oh how far must a little girl go to achieve her dream? All I ever wanted was to make piles and piles of cash by rescuing fabulously wealthy evildoers from the claws of justice, and yet here I was, sitting at a strip club on a Friday night. A Friday night when I could have been safe at home, writing new and exciting entries for my blog.

The three Axes of Evil honchos, I suspect they might have been familiar with Baghdad during its heyday as a world-renown center of learning, during our own Dark Ages. Based on their decrepit postures, creakity voices, and glacial speeds, I placed their average age at around 150 years, minimum.

It was hard to tell for sure, however, because they all wore goggles and endless wrappings of stretch bandages completely swaddled their oddly-shaped heads, causing them to resemble nothing so much as Tusken Raiders or Sand People from the original Star Wars film. (Again I hasten to add that this last strange fact is completely untrue but still interesting, and serves to protect me from malpractice.)

As I lit a skinny cigar and took a swig from my ten dollar bottle of Miller Lite, Greg turned to me and said, “Frankly, I think they are uncomfortable having a girl give them a lap dance while you are here.”

A series of particularly wretched Madonna remixes blared, and we three lawyers and they three salesmen, we sat beneath red pulsating lights that doubled as a means of making the dancers’ stretch marks and scars less visible. We sat at a round table that resembled some sort of Mayan compass, and every five minutes or so, at some unheard signal, everyone would get up and move one seat to his left. I have no idea why.

And to make them feel more at ease, I paid for their damn lap dances, and I learned that the really knockout dancers don’t show up until after 10 P.M., and when I had two of the three Axes of Evil suitably occupied, I pulled the third one over to the bar and convinced him to sign the contract I had conveniently brought with me.

For you, I could concoct a good argument that the dancers looked exploited and scared and at the end of the line of sad, hard lives. I could concoct an equally good argument that they appeared to be self-actualized feminists in control of their budding sexuality. But in the end, they basically just came across like any other young workers in any other field who find themselves having to work on tips and commission.

So as I moved one more seat to my left and swallowed the last of another ten dollar beer, I watched the three shadowy Sand People confer about what to do next. And Greg leaned over to me and mumbled, “I think you just became the legal representative of the world’s only lawn equipment cult.”

I shrugged. “Lawn tool manufacturing is the oldest of the dark arts. It’s a lot like alchemy, only more sinister and with a bloodier history. In 15^th Century Italy, a lawn tool group calling itself Gardenus Magnus actually seized control of the Papacy for more than a decade. So it’s a strange and noble tradition we’re coming into here.”

Greg rolled his eyes and tried to pretend he wasn’t staring at bare breasts. “Yep, whatever,” he proclaimed derisively. “Good luck with that.”

But all things considered, I was still okay.