Paul Maliszewski – on suing his landlord.

Durham, North Carolina
December 19, 2000

Dear Paul,

When Monique and I showed up one fine afternoon at the Durham County Court’s Small Claims Division for our case against the landlord, my first thought was we must be in the wrong place. We went to the third floor, exactly as we were told. We read the signs on the offices, some as old as the building, some hand-written in magic marker, and when we found the only door that seemed to have anything remotely to do with us, we walked inside.

The waiting room was deserted. I had expected bustling litigation. Instead we had our pick of twenty-plus plastic chairs, all pushed against the walls and facing in, any one of which was powerful enough to evoke unwanted memories of high school. On the other side of the waiting room were two more doors, about three feet apart, each with a narrow arrowslit of a window. The choice between the identical doors felt like a test, something in support of a behavioral scientist’s experiment on litigants, stress, and bureaucracy. Not wanting to select unwisely, we put our faces to the glass and looked inside. Apparently these were the courtrooms. Both were empty. No judges, no plaintiffs, no defendants. We had arrived early expressly to catch our magistrate in action, hoping to glean valuable tips on how best to conduct our part in the matter of Monique Dufour and Paul Maliszewski v. Robert L. Schmitz Properties.

In the County Clerk’s office, where we went to check our appointment and double-check the location of the courtroom, several knots of people were preparing the two forms required to set a case in motion. The forms are fairly straightforward, the legal language kept to a comfortable minimum. You print your name, address, and phone number, you provide the same information about the person you’re suing, you explain, briefly, why you’re coming to court and how much money you’re seeking, and you pay fifty dollars to the state. A minimum of four people huddled around each set of forms. Some stood in a circle, the better to surround the forms from every possible angle. Some knelt around a table, as if praying to the forms. A clerk was trying to explain, slowly and carefully, to the woman in line in front of us that if she went ahead and submitted the forms the way she had them filled out she’d be suing herself on behalf of the person she in fact wanted to sue.

The woman nodded uncertainly and walked away, taking the forms back to her dream team for revision. The clerk turned to us, and we smiled and asked our question. The clerk referred to an appointment book, dragging her index finger down the dates and times until she found ours, and told us, yes, we had been in the right place.

Back inside the waiting room, I immediately slumped down in the chair nearest the door and started fiddling with a bunch of paper. Monique said, “Do you want to sit there, or do you want to sit where we won’t have to look at everyone who walks in?”

“Good idea,” I said, standing up.

We sat in the far corner of the room, directly in front of the door to the second courtroom, and started waiting. Though there was nobody else in the room, we whispered. At the sound of any approaching footsteps, we fell silent and listened.

In the past week we had worked hard to prepare our case. We dropped our disposable camera off at the pharmacy. A couple of days later we chose the most damning pictures. We talked about how best we might say, look, this landlord neglected his responsibilities as specified in his own lease, turned the apartment over to us not cleaned and not ready for occupancy, and misrepresented his property. We developed a strategy, which mostly involved agreeing that Monique was best suited to handle the big picture, leaving me to supply details and quotations.

Then one evening we watched the Orson Welles film of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” The movie is incredible, starring Anthony Perkins at his jittery best. He’s two sharp elbows, a couple of pointed shoulders, and lots of flabbergasted, slightly high-pitched protests for someone, anyone at all, to listen to him. He meets people who know more about his case than he does. Yet they only speak elliptically. In so many words, they offer no help. He encounters a man who has spent countless years on an appeal, who somehow remains blissfully confident of a favorable resolution. He wades into large rooms flooded with paper, up to his knees in writs, briefs, and law books. He pleads for order where there will never be any.

The movie was ideal for novice litigants such as ourselves. No, we were not, like Joseph K., arrested one fine morning. We were two people who invested in the law a great deal of our most abstract hopes about the eventual and satisfying triumph of right, reason, justice, and fairness over wrong, illogic, injustice, and iniquity. We were two people who wanted our security deposit back.

The day before our trial I put together a presentation of our argument, nearly fifty typed pages, including nineteen of the photographs and document exhibits A through L. This brief (if that’s the word for it) featured a full-page table of contents, copies of receipts, and our collection of Dear Landlord letters. I’m aware that some may consider the effort a bit overblown, given that the word “small” modifies our claim, the stakes, and the court itself, but I am one of those people who needs to write something down in order to figure out what I even begin to think. Without writing, I babble, I stammer or just don’t speak. I’m less than useless without notes, good lines, a soundly reasoned and previously constructed argument. So, like a dutiful student, I highlighted in yellow those passages of the lease that the landlord violated and entered them into the argument. I dug up some contemporaneous notes I wrote while witnessing the landlord’s hasty, after-the-fact effort to have the apartment repaired, cleaned, and painted. I assembled the case out of paper. It was a dreary hobby as they go, and I can’t recommend it, but I had the sense and satisfaction of making something, a castle out of words maybe.

Late in the afternoon I ditched an ill-considered initial draft of the argument in which I got tangled up in mimicking very unconvincingly what little I grasp of legal language. I sensed I was in trouble when I found myself referring to Monique as “plaintiff Dufour” and beginning sentences, “We plaintiffs therefore request here that the court hereby order the defendant….” It read like a Monty Python skit. All that mumbo-jumbo and mystification was gone, deleted; now I opened with a brisk single-paragraph summary of the complaint, moved onto an itemization of the money we were seeking, detailed the charges, and drew the conclusions. Simple. My prose was as clean as our point was clear. On paper it made perfect sense, and that made sense to me. Besides, it was quite a beautiful brief to handle, to inspect, to read. In triplicate – copies enough for us, the judge, and Schmitz – it inspired awe.

Schmitz walked into the waiting room a few minutes before our trial was set to begin. We assumed it was Schmitz. Until that moment, which I captured only out of the corner of my left eye, as I pretended to flip through my papers, we had never seen the man we were suing. We hadn’t even spoken with him. We’d dealt exclusively with his beleaguered second-in-command, rental agent Christina Coffey. He had dragged Coffey to the trial with him, and the two of them sat down at the opposite end of the room and commenced whispering. A minute later they stood and hurried out of the room.

I turned to Monique and said, “Is that him? Is that Schmitz?”

“I think so,” Monique said. “But I don’t know. Was that Coffey?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It sort of looked like her, but it sort of didn’t. If that’s her she looks like she’s aged several years.”

Monique nodded. They came back into the room. Monique confirmed their identities. She sounded disappointed. When I got a better look at Coffey, I started to lose my enthusiasm for going through with the trial. If in the last month Coffey had been elected President of the United States and served two consecutive terms, battled against partisans in Congress, and made several tough decisions to send troops overseas to fight, that almost would have explained how she had changed. Almost. If I say Schmitz was stooped and dumpy, with poor to no posture and pasty skin and those adult freckles that are always threatening to merge together into one big freckle mass; if I describe him as wearing the sort of cotton Dockers and sports shirt ensemble that department-store ads swear all fathers want to receive each and every Father’s Day, you may assume that I’m allowing our legal dispute to bias my physical description of him, but you would be wrong.

We sat in the silence. The air conditioner turned on. The fluorescent lights buzzed.

A small man with a neatly trimmed beard entered the room. He seemed vaguely judge-ish in a way that, say, the four of us didn’t. Schmitz said hello to him, by name. The man returned the greeting and scooted into the courtroom on the left. From his chair he called out the first case, someone versus the something credit union. No one moved. The judge announced the name of the case again. He was shouting from his chair, at the front of the courtroom, across the empty courtroom, through the closed door in front of us, and into the waiting room.

The judge paused a minute and riffled through some papers. When he shouted our names, we filed through the door past a jumbled collection of mismatched chairs (the gallery?), through a swinging gate that barely reached my kneecaps, and took our places around one low table in front of the judge’s desk. The judge sat elevated above the table a total of, I’ll estimate, six inches. With Monique and I sharing a Bible roughly the size of a game-show buzzer between us, the judge swore us to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help us god. After I distributed copies of our brief, we were off and running.

Monique told our story. I directed the judge to our photographs. Schmitz noisily flipped through the pages to the photographs and then laughed derisively, the way people do when they can’t control themselves, except he was making such a loud production out of snorting that it was clear he was pretending to appear as if he couldn’t control himself. Monique told the judge she didn’t come here to be laughed at by the defendant of all people and expected more from these proceedings. It was going to be that kind of afternoon, the sort where the judge doesn’t wear a robe, possesses no visible gavel, has no bailiff or court secretary, sits behind stacks of paperwork from cases past, and metes out justice from a makeshift office in a building that smells like old air. Everything that should have been substantial and impressive – that gate dividing the gallery from the courtroom, the Bible, the courtroom itself – was small and toy-like, a burlesque of what I pictured.

As we had worked to ready our brief, we had also prepared to be found wrong. In between moments of feeling thoroughly convinced we would prevail, we imagined ourselves first as Schmitz might describe us and then as the judge could see us. We enacted and reenacted all the permutations the trial might take and ran through all the possible ways we could win or lose. It was one of those times when I really wished I wasn’t so self-conscious and so willing to try out the other guy’s point-of-view.

Everything was going exactly how Monique and I had imagined it would, when we had permitted ourselves to imagine the worst-case of our case. Coffey denied she ever told Monique, “Unlike a lot basements in the south, this one stays dry.” She denied she ever said the road outside the apartment is only noisy from traffic at eight in the morning and five in the evening. Trying another angle, I asked the judge to consider that the landlord undertook a whole menu of repairs after we moved out, arguing, as I’d written in the brief the night before, that the apartment was either ready when we moved in or it needed repairs. It couldn’t both be ready and need so many repairs. I was very pleased with this point. The judge asked Schmitz about those repairs. Finally, progress.

Schmitz acknowledged he had a little work done, something about not being able to match precisely the type and quality of the tile on the roof of the awning and needing to research and order it special. His fixing up the apartment was sounding more like the fine art of restoring Renaissance frescoes. The landlord was actually sitting there dreamily confessing how he’s “always liked older buildings and architecture.” I said I saw someone in the apartment painting, for two days straight, this after Coffey had told Monique the apartment didn’t need painting and wouldn’t get any. Schmitz turned to me – we were shoulder to shoulder at the table – and demanded, “Let me see a picture that shows someone in that apartment painting. Do you have a picture of someone in the apartment painting? Do you?” The judge asked Schmitz if he had the apartment painted, and Schmitz replied, “Your honor, I cannot recall.”

Almost two hours passed like this. It felt like two hours exactly. At the height of the trial’s futility, Monique explained that we did not move out of the apartment because there were yellow streaks running down the walls; that was only one minor reason of several dozen. Schmitz said, “Do you have pictures of yellow streaks on the walls? Do you? Do you?” He was like a machine, a very simple machine. Look, I said, it’s difficult to take photographs of a white wall with a simple flash. Monique said, again, please understand we are not talking only about yellow streaks. At just this moment, when I wanted to float out the window behind the judge and be far away from the courtroom, back at our apartment with Monique, where we could finish unpacking and make our home, we heard clapping in the courtroom next door. A crowd of people started applauding. There were cheers. Someone started playing the wedding march over a boombox. That’s nice, I thought. Monique told me later she thought, at least something good happened.

The judge turned to Schmitz and reprimanded him for “really falling down on the job” and “dropping the ball” and “not going the extra mile” to see that we moved in okay. This is it, I thought, the decision’s going our way. I whispered as much to Monique. In the end, however, it didn’t go our way: we lost. The judge turned to us and said from what he could see the apartment didn’t rise to the level of uninhabitable. Whatever that meant. “I have to rule for the defendant,” he said. The judge informed us of our right to appeal. We had only ten days to act, he explained. Schmitz hurriedly packed up his papers and left with Coffey. They were gone before the judge was done speaking.

So that was it. I know Monique and I both thought we were right, and moreover wanted the judge to agree we were right. We had believed, most of the time, that we could and would prevail. Failing all that, we hoped maybe for a partial judgment, an acceptable Solomonic split of our vast differences. At the very least.

Instead, zero. The afternoon was gone and we had nothing to show for it. We were tired, hungry, and disappointed, but not, I think, defeated. Despite the fact that the judge had ruled for Schmitz, landlord and friend to old buildings of Durham, neither of us felt all that wrong. It’s not as if upon hearing the judge’s decision we suddenly agreed with him. We didn’t undergo a miraculous conversion. It’s not as if we turned to Schmitz and Coffey and said, “How about that, you were right all along!” We never agreed with the judge, nor will we ever, I suspect. Instead it was as if the world of the law cleaved away from our own world right then, and we realized that where we had traveled to the law to seek a decision that would hopefully right the wrong that had happened over in our world and, you know, order our security deposit returned to us, to jingle around in our pockets a bit, what we received, in fact, was a decision limited strictly to the narrow world of the law. What hopes we’d placed in the law, we still at least were able to withdraw from the law. They were, after all, our hopes to take away. We could keep the hopes somewhere else, in the care of some other institution perhaps, though that’s doubtful, for all the obvious reasons, or we could associate them with some abstract idea of our own fashioning. Right, reason, justice, fairness – we could find these elsewhere. Or as a character at the beginning of William Gaddis’s novel, “A Frolic of His Own,” says, “You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” So what do we have faith in? That seemed like a good question, and this seemed like a good time to ask it, however dicey it always is to answer. I personally think we have a few decent options: good writing, Kafka, and the comfort of friends. Though don’t get me wrong, it would have been nice to have our money back.

Outside the courthouse, the sidewalks and most of the streets were empty already. It was Friday and nearly five. Everyone who was able had cut out of work early. We took our time walking back to the car. Monique said, “I think that judge really liked your brief. Did you see how he read it? He seemed reluctant to return it.”

I said, “I thought you did a great job telling our story.”

Truly,

Paul