The six of us should have started our own firm. That did not happen. Jack and another partner joined an existing firm. A third partner went in-house at a non-profit. Glenda decided to start her own shop and asked me to join her. Glenda was an ideal person to partner with. However, the dishonesty I'd encountered during the copyright case, coupled with discovering that my own partners were screwing me, left me doubting whether I wanted to, or could, continue practicing. I declined Glenda's invitation.
Much like Gwen's departure for college a year earlier, the end of our law firm left me with a lot of spare time and no ideas how to use it. For want of anything else, I started helping April with the non-technical aspects of her business, like billing and sales tax reports.
April ran her own one-woman business doing tech consulting. Once or twice a year, she wrote custom programs for clients. She advised some medium-sized and small businesses, like Ute's doctor's group, on upgrading and new procurement of hardware and software. She also fixed those clients' computer problems. The beauty of the business was that April could do most of it remotely. It wasn't uncommon for her to earn a couple thousand dollars of a morning sitting nude at her laptop beside the pool. Her skills and reputation let her charge premium rates, netting six figures a year. It was great for her, but after a couple months, I was bored silly.
Salvation came, once again, from Ute. Ute had treated a patient, successfully, who was a photographer. During his treatment, he had talked with Ute about some ideas he wanted to pursue. Ute asked April and me to meet with him.
April and I met Chris Feldman and his wife Doreen at a coffee shop near his studio. Chris told us that, although he did any photographic work that would pay, his interest was in photographing nudes. He had a gallery in our city and one in New York that sold his work. The models he found were in their twenties. "Don't get me wrong," Chris said, "they are great people. But not everyone is a twenty-something. I'd like greater diversity in my models." Chris looked at us for a minute or more before saying, "you look very promising clothed, but I'd really like to see both of you naked."
We paid for our coffees and the four of us walked the couple of blocks to Chris's studio. April and I had become very accustomed to stripping off in front of people we had just met. We stood naked in the center of the room while Chris and Doreen walked around us slowly, looking at our nude bodies. They finished their inspection, walked several feet away from us, and had a short, whispered conversation. That ended with each of them nodding their heads.
Chris turned and took a step towards us. "You guys look great for your ages," he said. "I especially like that neither of you is pierced and you have no tattoos. I'd like to work with you." With April and me still nude, we began discussing terms. Chris offered to pay us each $ 20/hour to pose and he got all rights to the images. Chris would not ask us to pose performing any sexual acts. The issue of showing our faces came up, which Chris viewed as essential. April didn't care because her business was built on her skills, not what her clients thought about her "character" or about what she did in her spare time. I had effectively quit practicing law, so I decided that it didn't matter if my face appeared in nude photographs.
We were back a couple days later for our first session. Chris shot what he called "figure studies" of us standing individually from front and back. Chris had each of us stand with our legs spread while he lay on his back between our legs taking pictures of our pubes from below. The session ended with a few pictures of April and me standing side-by-side, and hugging.
A rare warm day was forecast for that November and Chris called to ask whether April and I were willing to do a nude shoot that day in a state park. Of course, we were willing! Chris had us climbing trees, lying together in a field, and chasing each other through the woods. It was a weekday, so the park was not crowded. A few people saw us, but nothing came of that.
Chris had hoped we could persuade Ute and Iens to pose. They were happy to go naked in situations where everyone else, or almost everyone else, was naked too. Having nude pictures circulating was another matter. Ute particularly was concerned since, as a foreign citizen, her privilege to practice medicine in our state was always somewhat tenuous. Chris then went in a different direction, posing April and me nude with clothed models. One picture I remember well was taken from above and showed April nude in the center of a group of men wearing suits.
The following spring, Chris hired about a dozen models. Just after dawn one Sunday, we all went downtown. The models were in suits carrying briefcases. Chris posed them on a sidewalk as if they were office workers going to or from work. April and I were among them, also carrying briefcases. April wore only heels, and I wore only wingtips.
We learned that Doreen was an artist, doing primarily sketches and oil paintings. Her pictures all had erotic themes. She persuaded April and me to pose for her by showing us how she could render our faces in her pictures so that they didn't look exactly like us.
The first work we did with Doreen was a series of sketches she called "discovery." The first sketch showed only my limp dick and balls. April's hand appeared in the second sketch. The third sketch showed April's hand holding my balls. The fourth showed her hand around my dick. The series continued for three more pictures, showing my dick getting harder, until the final sketch showed me very hard with April's hand around my dick and semen starting to shoot. The second part of the series focused on April's pussy with my hand coming into the series and ultimately finger-fucking her. The final sketch, which Doreen called "unity," showed April's pussy with the head of my erect dick just beginning to enter her. It took Doreen thirty to forty minutes to do one of those sketches. Holding my dick in position just entering April for that long was work, but fun work. Doreen sold the sketches to a single buyer through her New York dealer. April and I often laughed about sketches of our pubes lining a hallway of a mansion in the Hamptons.
Doreen did four more sketches in our first round of work with her. The first pair were two views of April sitting on a bench with me between her legs eating her. Doreen drew one view from behind me that showed most of April, including the expression on her face. The other view was over April's shoulder and showed most of my face pressed against April's pussy and mound. The other pair were basically the same thing except that April was sucking me. In the "over-the-shoulder" view of that pair, Doreen had April back her head away from me slightly so she could show the shaft of my dick in April's mouth. Doreen gave us prints of these sketches. We hung them in our bedroom.
Our daughter Gwen spent summer after her sophomore year in Europe again with Paul. I was glad April's business was making money. In June of that year, my friend and former law partner Glenda Porter sucked me back into practicing law.
Glenda represented doctors, before the state board, in hospital credentialling proceedings, and in disputes with other doctors. One of her recently acquired clients was a relatively young cardiac and peripheral vascular surgeon, Dr. Daniel O'Donnell, whom we called "Dr. DOD." What set Dr. DOD apart was his mastery of very new technology that reduced the need for invasive treatments and made the invasive treatments much less invasive. An out-of-state hospital chain trying to break into our market built a hospital on the east side of town equipped for Dr. DOD.
Insurers liked Dr. DOD because he shortened hospital stays. Patients liked him because he did less surgery, and his surgeries were much less uncomfortable for the patients. The established surgeons in town hated him. Typically, the established surgeons could eliminate an upstart competitor by using their control of the medical staffs at the older, established hospitals to deny the upstart surgical privileges. That did not work on Dr. DOD because he was, in effect, the medical staff at his hospital.
The established surgeons tried to get the state board to suspend or revoke Dr. DOD's license. Glenda thwarted that before any formal proceedings began. Undeterred, the other doctors began running TV, radio, and newspaper ads saying that Dr. DOD's treatment methods were dangerous. The established surgeons also began calling the primary care doctors who made the referrals and threatening them with consequences unless they stopped referring patients to Dr. DOD. That was when Glenda recruited my help.
Glenda had filed a lawsuit alleging a variety of claims, including state and federal antitrust claims, against our city's two large groups of cardiac surgeons, vascular surgeons, and cardiologists. They were the moving force behind the campaign against Dr. DOD. Glenda asked me to help her litigate the case. Our primary claim asserted that the ads were defamatory. After all, the FDA had approved Dr. DOD's methods of treatment as "safe and effective." The doctor groups defended primarily on the basis that the FDA was wrong and their ads about Dr. DOD were true.
