Category Archives: lawyer

I had a client once who was being evicted from pub­lic hous­ing. He’d had a rough hand dealt to him— men­tally retarded, emo­tion­ally impaired, with para­noia, anx­i­ety, depres­sion, prob­a­bly bor­der­line per­son­al­ity. He was a mess, and his parents—get this—MOVED AWAY one day while he was at work at a local retailer like K-Mart, round­ing up carts in the park­ing lot. So, he became home­less, because when he came home, his home was empty. For seven years. When he finally got beck into the social ser­vices sys­tem, they got him on the short list for dis­abled hous­ing. The only prob­lem? He was 27, decid­edly, flam­ingly gay, and didn’t know how to behave him­self. Which wouldn’t have been a prob­lem if some­one had met with him and seen that plac­ing him on the same floor as elderly peo­ple in a mixed, elderly-handicapped apart­ment build­ing just wasn’t going to work.

Pre­dictably, evic­tion pro­ceed­ings ensued. We begged and pleaded with him to go along with our rea­son­able accom­mo­da­tion plan—the one where he took his med­ica­tion, saw his men­tal health coun­selors, stopped hav­ing par­ties after 11 pm on week­days, and didn’t let his home­less boyfriend crash at his place every sin­gle night. He was the worst com­bi­na­tion of impairments—not retarded enough to be docile, too para­noid and anx­ious to trust that we wouldn’t betray him, like his par­ents did. Under­stand­able, but still—he was too smart, and too crazy in the wrong way, for his own good.

Long story short, after threat­en­ing to dis­charge him as a client to his own devices (and boy, did the car­rot and stick approach nau­se­ate me given his expe­ri­ence at his par­ents’ hands, but it was the only thing that worked…), he went along with the plan, and clearly, started get­ting bet­ter. We tried to pos­i­tively rein­force how he was improv­ing with the meds. We took the boyfriend aside, pri­vately, and advised him that he’d lose the only warm place to crash besides shel­ters if he stayed more than two nights a week, and trust us, the man­ager of the build­ing was watch­ing, and we got the client ready for the pre-trial con­fer­ence, where he needed to appear in order to con­vince the judge to con­tinue the trial date so he could show the court what a good boy he was being.

We warned our client that he needed to not inter­rupt the judge, to be quiet and respect­ful, and to wear some­thing nice to court, like a suit. When he said he didn’t have a suit, we told him to wear a nice col­lared shirt, and dress pants with shoes. He thought for a moment, then said, brightly, “OK!”

The next day, he was a lit­tle late meet­ing my clinic advi­sor and me at court, hav­ing got­ten flus­tered by the whole thing. He made it in to the court­room just as our case was being called. Wear­ing a but­ton down, gold lame shirt, pur­ple pants with bright blue stripes, and pur­ple suede ankle boots. He was meek, he was sorry he was late, he sat qui­etly while I argued that the trial be con­tin­ued, he told the judge about his life in his own words, and when he was done, the judge said “thank you. And sir, what nice col­ors to see on such a grey day.” You should have seen the client’s face light up. My embar­rass­ment at his appear­ance melted as embar­rass­ment at my elit­ism washed over me instead. But the client didn’t notice. He was glow­ing from the compliment.

After the client was allowed to go back behind the bar, we approached the side­bar the judge had called. As soon as the hous­ing authority’s attor­ney arrived, along with the stenog­ra­pher, the judge leaned over the bench, right in oppos­ing counsel’s face, and said, very qui­etly, “It’s like you were try­ing to let him fail. Did any­one even read the appli­ca­tion his social worker filled out, say­ing he’d ben­e­fit from a fam­ily hous­ing place­ment? Or a veteran’s place­ment?” He then con­tin­ued the trial with no firm date, and a sta­tus con­fer­ence in six months to report on the progress of our rea­son­able accom­mo­da­tion proposal.

Out­side, in the hall­way, we con­grat­u­lated him on doing such a good job, and for being so brave to be able to get to court. He was happy, but more impor­tantly to him, the hand­some judge (“though I usu­ally like younger men”) had com­pli­mented him on his “best out­fit. It’s the one I was wear­ing the day we filled out my apart­ment appli­ca­tion.  And when I met [Boyfriend].”

Best out­fit, indeed.