“Yessir! Hotty Toddy!”
I forced a smile. “How’d you all do this year?”
“Not so good,” he said. “Five and seven.”
“That’s rough,” I said.
“Hey. It happens,” he said with an affable shrug.
Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all, I told myself. But over the course of the day, as Grady sucked down beer after beer, it became harder to maintain this position. He was everything I couldn’t stand to be around. His stories were too long; he laughed too loudly; and he was the expert on everything. No matter the topic, he’d jump right in without the slightest hesitation.
At dinner that night, things went downhill even further when Serena Williams’s recent U.S. Open match against Naomi Osaka came up. I braced myself as Grady launched into a tirade about her “poor sportsmanship.”
I looked at Hannah, knowing she was a huge Serena fan. “I don’t blame her for being upset,” she said. “She was accused of cheating!”
“She was cheating. She was getting hand signals from her coach,” Grady said.
“I don’t believe that. She said she wasn’t,” Hannah replied. “Even the commentators were saying that Serena makes her own decisions on the court.”
“Well, who the hell’s gonna admit to cheating?” Grady said.
The comment was a huge red flag.
“Besides,” Grady continued, “you can’t throw a hissy fit just because things don’t go your way.”
“Why not? Men do it all the time,” Lainey chimed in.
“And they get penalized when they do,” Grady said. He looked at me. “Tyson, man, where do you come out on this?” he asked, clearly mistaking my silence for being on his side.
“Serena’s the GOAT,” I said.
“Okay. But do you think the ump was being sexist?” Grady pressed me.
Sexist and racist, I thought. At the very least, there was unconscious bias at play. But I’d made it a long-standing policy to only debate worthy adversaries, so I simply shrugged and said, “Hard to tell.”
“Well, I still say she’s a poor sport,” Grady said. “And tacky.”
“Tacky?” Lainey fired back.
“Yeah. Remember the ridiculous spandex suit she sported at the French Open?”
“What was so ridiculous about it?” Lainey asked. Shaming a woman for her clothing was a big no for her.
“She’d just given birth,” Hannah said. “She wore it to combat blood clots.”
“Still. You shouldn’t be allowed to wear shit like that in tennis. It’s a matter of decorum,” Grady said, then doubled down on his racially coded language. “Tennis is a genteel sport. Nobody should behave that way. Black, white, or purple.”
I stared at him, marveling at both his cluelessness and his brazenness. Here he sat, critiquing a Black female—two things he’s not and never will be—with two women and a Black man. We were all more qualified to speak to Serena’s experience, yet he was so convinced that he had all the answers.
I finally broke.
“You’re right, Grady,” I said. “She can’t act that way. She’s held to a different standard and has to be completely beyond reproach. She’s gotta be twice as good and half as reactive knowing that she’s going to get double the scrutiny. And on that day, she wasn’t. When that ump accused her of cheating, she reacted like a normal, frustrated human being who’d just been accused of doing something she hadn’t done. She lost her cool. So yeah. You’re right. She can’t act that way.”
Grady nodded, then drained his pint of beer, obtusely triumphant. Meanwhile, Lainey squeezed my leg under the table, as if to tell me to calm down, he wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t going to change his mind, nor was I going to change Hannah’s mind about him. I bit my tongue for the rest of the night, and during the few times I’d seen him since.
One thing life had taught me was how to keep my mouth shut. I was good at that.
But now, as I hang up the phone with Lainey, I realize that I’m off the hook: I can finally tell Hannah what I think of her asshole fiancé. Ex-fiancé.
Bottom line, I know Lainey is right. I know I have to fly down there and be with Hannah. We made a promise, and I don’t break promises.
—
A few minutes later, I’m standing in Martin Strout’s office doorway. Martin is the head of our firm’s white-collar defense practice group and a D.C. legend. There’s no one who understands the False Claims or Foreign Corrupt Practices Act better than he does. I’ve watched up close and in awe as he navigates complex issues of fraud, money laundering, and trade sanctions violations, defending heavy hitters in pharmaceuticals, financial services, retail, and energy.
He also happens to be a world-class asshole who believes that things must be done the way he did them back in the eighties. In other words, we all must be sitting together in a conference room, day and night, sometimes just watching him think. Even during the height of the pandemic, he expected us all to come in, and he made it clear that masking up annoyed him.
“Can I help you, Mr. Bishop?” he asks now, looking up at me with a scowl.
“Hi, Martin,” I say. “Do you have a minute?”
“I have thirty seconds.”
I nod, take a deep breath, and tell him that I need to go out of town this weekend.
“Come again?” Martin says, whipping off his wire-rim glasses with one hand. He flings them onto his desk, continuing to stare at me. It’s one of his go-to intimidation tactics that I’ve witnessed in many depositions and trials.
I repeat my statement verbatim.
