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: Counseling Kevin

Pressure

By Kevin Funnell

A "friend of mine," also a lawyer, has a niece who just finished her first year of law school. She called him last week, stressed out over the "pressure" she was facing. Law school appeared to her to be much harder than undergraduate school, and she didn't know how she was going to keep up with her classmates.

"How do I cope with this pressure? How did you do it when you were in law school? Any advice for me?"

It had been 38 years since he first walked through the front door of his law school. That's a long time for someone who's destroyed a lot of grey matter with alcohol. Nevertheless, because he loved her and wanted to help her if he could, he tried to remember what it was like for him his first year in law school. As he did so, it opened up the floodgate and what came pouring through was more than he had bargained for.

I'll take some license and tell his story in the first person.

How do I relate? She's a lovely petite blond, and smart as a whip. Yet, she breezed through undergraduate school on a full athletic scholarship. It's been a straight sail for her; an upward-and-onward, unbroken progression from high school, to undergraduate school and now to law school. To her, this is real pressure; probably the most she's yet faced in her young life.

She's a young 22. I was only a year older, chronologically, at the same point in my life. But I took over a year's detour after undergraduate school, thanks to Uncle Samuel, the Draft, and the Flying Circus sometimes fondly referred to as the "Intelligence Community."

I was still healing, still rehabilitating, from being shot down in a helicopter on my second "mission" during my short stint making the Free World safe from evil "Commie Bastards" and their zipper-head running dogs. I was working my way out of my military service, via an eventual medical discharge, and would serve about half of the three-year commitment I made when I enlisted. The particular "agency" I worked for was then part of the US Army, and the Army had pretty much decided that I was going to be worthless to them going forward, being busted up and not breathing so well, and they didn't need more assholes on the full-time payroll in any event, seeing as how they were in the process of implementing the oh-so-successful "Vietnamization" of the war. So, I got to start law school in the same metropolitan area in which the Army Hospital where I was "assigned" was located.

I was regaining lung function (with what was less than a full pair of lungs), and was living with my respiratory therapist, who was giving me "extra therapy" by working my lungs out on her bed, her couch, her living room rug, wherever we could find. I was madly in love with that red-headed Hispanic beauty and maybe even more so (though chastely) with her 5 year-old daughter, she of the big brown eyes, the mocha skin, and the sweet disposition. The daughter grew up to get a PhD in Microbiology from Stanford. As for "J" ... that story has a bittersweet ending, not relevant here.

"J" had divorced a "big dog" in the state chapter of La Raza Unida, the Chicano radical political organization, and he wasn't taking either the divorce or my arrival on the scene with good grace. There were late night drunken telephoned threats to remove my reproductive organs with various sharp instruments, followed by weeping (his), followed by my beloved "J" grabbing the phone and spewing into the mouthpiece the most amazingly elliptical strings of Spanish obscenities (laced with an indispensable cluster of Anglo-Saxon F-Bombs). The threats never worried me to an extreme, although I did check under the hood (actually, the hood was in the back) of my VW "Super Beetle" whenever I left "J's" apartment. They did worry "J", though, because she and he were products of the barrio, and she understood violence. She told me she was actually afraid I would kill him and ruin my life. She may have been watching out for MY machismo with that particular line, but regardless, the threats were real.

With that "white noise" playing in the background, I loped along with the pain, the pain-killers, the lust, the love, and my plan to "catch up" with the class I left behind me (I would never take less than 17 credit hours per quarter, which was the system at that particular law school, and I'd go "full bore" every quarter for eight straight quarters, graduating in two years instead of a normal three), and, for the final eighteen months, with a nearly full-time job on the side. Therefore, I didn't really have a chance to give in to the "pressure" of law school. It simply never entered my otherwise-occupied and driven mind that there was any "pressure" associated with going to class, reading case books, writing papers, and taking exams, that I couldn't handle. I was merely punching my ticket in order to make it through the turnstile to the next station on the journey of life. Seeing what I'd seen over the previous 16 months, law school "pressure" was a piece of cake; a pleasure actually. There were so many other places that a person could be where the "pressure" burned with a blue-white heat.

Ong has the pistol in the man's mouth, now. The man's in pain. Blood trickles out around his lower lip. Ong cut the inside of his mouth, I assume, shoving the barrel in that roughly. The man is in pain, obviously. But he won't talk. Maybe the woman will. I hope so.

Minh is speaking softly but harshly to the woman, as he holds his pistol to the girl's head. The lamp light is piss poor, but I can see that the girl and the woman are both crying. I hear the girl whimpering. I thought I understood Vietnamese pretty well. Turns out, only a round eye could be that vain.

Minh's speaking so fast, and in dialect, and I catch maybe twenty percent of what he's asking. It's like some Vietnamese spent weeks learning American standard English and someone sent him to Texas and told him to chat it up with the natives.

I'm supposed to be along to "see how it's done" and to provide cover, if needed. There are two other PRUs outside, so I'm as useless as tits on a boar. They don't need me here. I'm just one more American asshole along for the ride. They've been pissing on one another for centuries, and we're amateurs compared to them. Plus, I don't trust these brutal "allies" anymore than I do the people we're "interrogating."

There's a loud "bang" outside, like a grenade. It must be a grenade. I turn sharply toward the door as Minh barks an order to Ong, and behind me I hear the first of the shots explode in my ears.

I tell her: compartmentalize your day. Break it down into hours and plan what you will do with each hour. During that hour, you do only the planned thing and you think only of that thing. You banish all other thoughts from your mind for that hour. Each hour is a separate room. You walk into that room and close the doors to the other rooms. You live only in that room for that hour, then open the door and walk into another room. You close the door behind you and for the next hour you live only in that new room. If you exercise this act of will, you will manage. You will not be overwhelmed. You will learn to concentrate only on the task at hand. Visualize this. Live it.

Of course, don't let the unexpected strong wind (say, an innocent question from an unknowing relative) blow a door wide open that you long ago slammed shut, padlocked and abandoned. There's no telling what might crawl out.

The Huey's engine sputters, smokes. A rancid, oily smell fills the cabin. The bullets have done serious damage. The zips couldn't hit any of us, but they have seriously f***ed up that engine. It's that half-light before dawn, but we're starting to yaw and pitch and I can't see well. I can see Ong's face, though. He's sitting right across from me. He's not scared; he looks pissed; disgusted, maybe. Me, I'm scared. Maybe he's disgusted with me because I'm showing my fear. Well, f*** him and all of his f***ed-up countrymen. I wanted the Berlin Watch, not this s**t hole. Sometimes you don't get what you want, do you Ong? Instead, you get what you deserve. Satan works in mysterious ways. He lets his henchmen have their fun doing his work, then brings them to him in fear and in pain.

We start to rotate and dip. I say the Lord's Prayer -- Baltimore Catechism Roman Catholic version -- all the way down.

I doubt my friend was of much use to his niece. No matter how much you try, sometimes there is simply no way to make a useful connection when the differences in experience are so great. Each of us has to learn to cope with "pressure" in a way that works for us, and, I think, only for us.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on August 07, 2010 (boomark / email).