The Nine [57]
Although Thomas asked almost no questions of the lawyers at oral argument, he wasn’t silent on the bench. Thomas sat to Breyer’s right, and the two of them often whispered and joked to each other, barely muffling their frequent laughter. Things sometimes got so raucous between them that Kennedy, who sat on the other side of Thomas, would lean forward, trying to get away from the noise. Breyer and Thomas passed notes, too, often mocking each other’s positions in good-natured ways. “States’ rights über alles,” Breyer might write, and Thomas, in another case, would jot, “Always for the criminal, eh?” This wasn’t feigned fellowship. It was a portrait of colleagues who genuinely cared for each other.
There was a new measure of joy in Thomas’s personal life as well in this period. In the midnineties, his son from his first marriage, Jamal, went off to college at the Virginia Military Institute. (For this reason, Thomas recused himself in 1996 when, in an especially satisfying moment for Ginsburg, she wrote the opinion holding that the state-funded school could no longer refuse to admit women.) The following year, Thomas’s six-year-old grandnephew, Mark Martin Jr., came to live with him. Mark’s father was in prison on cocaine trafficking charges, and his mother was struggling to raise four children on her own. Thomas was roughly the same age when his grandfather adopted him, saving him from similarly chaotic circumstances. New fatherhood, when he was close to fifty, invigorated Thomas and filled his home life with happiness.
It also changed Thomas’s approach to transportation. The justice had a long-standing obsession with Corvettes, the great American sports cars, and he often drove one on the twenty-four-mile trip to the Court from his home in remote Fairfax Station, Virginia. But shortly after Mark Junior’s arrival, Thomas purchased a custom-made forty-foot Prevost motor coach, with leather furniture, satellite television, and onboard galley—a “condo on wheels,” as he once called it. Thomas adored the vehicle, which he called “the bus,” and kept a photograph of it by his desk, near the portraits of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Winston Churchill. For vacations, even on many weekends, Thomas would pack up his wife and young Mark and simply take off. They would stay at campgrounds or parking lots near NASCAR races. Often, the justice would take advantage of Wal-Mart’s policy (well known in the RV world) of allowing such vehicles to remain overnight in their parking lots. In all these places, Thomas mixed easily with other “RVers,” some of whom would recognize him, many of whom would not. In 2004, Thomas received the “Spirit of America” award from the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association. “Being an RVer helps me do my job better,” he said in his speech to the group. “The world I live in is very cloistered. The bulk of my adult life has been spent in Washington, D.C. RVing allows me to get out and see the real America. In RV campgrounds, you wave at everybody and they wave back.”
Yet even in the friendly confines of his chambers, Thomas carefully tended the grudges held since his confirmation hearings. For years, he kept a list in his desk of the roll-call vote in his 52–48 confirmation. But his targets weren’t only the senators who voted against him. “When I left Georgia over twenty-five years ago, a familiar source of the unkind treatment and incivility were just bigots,” he said at a speech in Macon in 1993. “Today, ironically, a new brand of stereotypes and ad hominem assaults are surfacing across the nation’s college campuses, in the national media, in Hollywood, and among the involuntarily ordained ‘cultural