Intake in the S. Bronx Today was intake day for me. Everyone who has any type of problem, imaginable or otherwise, wash upon the shores of our office, desperate to speak to a lawyer. And we try our best to help, though the problems are often pretty far afield.
A representative sample:
9:00 a.m. -- Mr. D, Viet Nam veteran, comes in to talk about his drug treatment program. He's dressed in a nice suit, carries himself with dignity, gives me a firm hand shake and tells me that "his ass is raw" and he needs to buy "diapers" because of his bladder problem, but he doesn't have any diapers because his drug treatment program won't give him his money. He wants a new drug treatment program, he wants his money, he needs some new diapers (he insists on calling them diapers), but there is nothing I can do about that - it was court-mandated. He left in a rage.
10:00 a.m. -- Ms. TU came in with a grocery bag full of papers and her boyfriend. She had bought a car from a S. Bronx dealership for $30k (!!!!). Problem is the dealer did not own it. Second problem is that she returned the car to him, in exchange for what amounted to a thank you note. Third problem is that her bank is still forcing her to pay back the loan, for a car she never owned. Ms. TU is pulling out scraps of paper from the bank, the dealer, the DMV, etc. and piling them on the table in front of me. She wants me to fix the problem (I'm a lawyer, aren't I?). The best I could do was give her some sympathy and the number to the Attorney General's consumer fraud hotline. She gathered up her pile of papers and her boyfriend and left unhappy.
11:00 a.m. -- A 20-year-old kid came in. He told me he and his father had been busted "trucking" several hundred kilos of cocaine. They both ended up being used by the DEA, trucking large shipments of drugs around the country trying "work off" their case. He had been responsible for several large-scale cocaine busts across the country. But they haunted him. One guy, the kid was sure, had seen him when the DEA made the arrest and knew where he lived with his mother. The pressure began to get to him. He became paranoid in the extreme; his hands started to twitch uncontrollably; he developed a rash and then began hearing voices. He called his DEA "handler", who told him he was "hot" and to "lay low".
Then he cut him off, just never returned his calls.
A year went by. The kid waits to hear about his case, about the guys he helped get busted, he can't sleep...he's literally losing his mind. A social worker in my office spoke with him for over an hour, trying to get him into a counseling program. He left with, hopefully, some direction, which is more than DEA would give him.
2:00 p.m. -- Mr. C, a recent widow, came in. He had been living with his wife in the same two-bedroom apartment for 29 years before she died. Within a week of her death, the Housing Authority filed papers to force him to move to a studio in a different building, although his grandchildren often stay with him and, after nearly three decades, his building was his world. We have housing attorneys in my office, so to Mr. C I was able to offer more than my sympathy. I'm not sure how he left.
I left the office newly amazed at the shit the people in the S. Bronx deal with, even those not caught up in the criminal justice system. |
