Getting the Perfect Lawyer alone, part 4

The plan was for me to come by the perfect lawyer’s place at 7:30. Just as I was about to ring the buzzer, Griffothy sprang out from behind me. I yelped. Curly hair bounced all over his forehead.

“Did I scare you?” He giggled and stabbed the lock with his key.

We made small talk up the stairs. Inside the perfect lawyer greeted us cheerfully. She walked down the corridor to your bedroom, and Griffothy put some leftovers into the microwave. In a minute she was back.

“All set! Let’s go,” she said.

“But I just started cooking dinner,” Griffothy said. I feigned interest in the cover of The Economist. I’d rather he didn’t come at all.

“Catch up with us, then,” the perfect lawyer said. She told him where we were going and we left.

“I think it’ll be good for Griffothy when I start making some real money,” she said. “He’s so stressed out lately. He throws temper tantrums whenever the smallest thing goes wrong. Please don’t tell him I said that. About his temper.” Her sentences bubbled out one after another like a shoddy recitation.

For a moment we walked down the avenue in silence. Even though I suspected Griffothy was a robot, plus (and more importantly) sometimes he ignored me for weeks on end, I still felt loyalty for him.

“It’s no big deal,” I said finally. “I knew the goofiness had to be an act.”

Yet I was picturing the lanky man thrashing in the middle of their living room, his hands and feet circling like a carnival ride, hurling the perfect lawyer’s cats at her. We weren’t facing each other so I let myself shudder.

“Griffothy, goofy?” She squinted as if the twilight really frustrated her; as if the East Village weren’t the most navigable neighborhood in all of downtown. I looked away. The perfect lawyer was fierce when she wasn’t giggling.

“Sure, like around school. He always makes dumb jokes, people think he’s so laid back. Oh yeah plus he refers to himself as a ‘goofball.’”

“Huh. I just never thought of him that way. People used to say I was ‘goofy’ in law school, you know.”

“He must be copying you, then,” I said.

“Probably.” I looked at the perfect lawyer and she grinned. “He always copies me. Griffothy worships me.” Her matter of fact tone was a relief.

At the bar we sat on stools. The perfect lawyer’s was set a little back from the bar, and she leaned her right elbow on the back of mine as we talked. She asked me about my summer job and I told her I’d be working at the public defenders’.

“That’s great! I bet you’ll really enjoy being able to help people. They work reasonable hours, too, so you can have a normal life. I’m jealous. Did you have to interview for the job, or just write something?”

I don’t want a normal life any more than you do.

“My lawyering prof used to work in that office, so I just went through her, actually. She’s nice, she likes me, so I really didn’t have to do much.” I added, for style points, “she said she sees herself in me. You know how it is. When you’re good looking enough, everyone sees themselves in you.”

“Sorry, I don’t have that problem,” she said. I rolled my eyes, stung that the perfect lawyer thought I was a bimbo.

Griffothy appeared and pressed his hands down on her shoulders.

Not much happened after that. Griffothy talked at least a quarter of the time. I channeled my frustration into a series of limes, pinching them as hard as I could above my drinks. The worst was when the perfect lawyer and I talked about our hair. It was a custom of ours to ask each other if we should get a different hairstyle, then tell each other “no, you look really pretty the way you are.” She would stroke my bangs, and when I was drunk enough, I put my hand in her soft hair. She had a complicated haircut. It was shaped like fire.

That night while the perfect lawyer stroked my hair, Griffothy kept talking about abortion rights.

“Hey! It’s not cold out,” she said when we stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Because you’re wasted,” Griffothy said. We ignored him.

“The daytime was so beautiful,” I said.

“Really? I wouldn’t know. I was at the office facing my computer all day.”

Was the perfect lawyer in role as the mature workaholic, or had she actually ignored the weather? Either way I resented and admired her because I had failed at both of those projects myself.

Getting the Perfect Lawyer Alone, part 3

I waited until the following Tuesday and then I emailed the perfect lawyer about getting that drink. We decided on Sunday since the Lolita tradition had lapsed a month or so earlier.

New York was charmed that year. All the prettiest spring days fell on the weekend. The afternoon of our drink date was one of them. But exams were only three weeks away, so I resolved to study before meeting the perfect lawyer. Ellipses and I went to a bar on MacDougal and spilled our books and computers onto a huge dark booth in the back. The sun was out, cafe walls had dropped away, and people buzzed all over the Village. They hovered on the sidewalks, stepped through windows, and landed on exposed tables like ladybugs.

So there was commotion. But through it all I tried to look at my books a lot. I wanted to be able to tell the perfect lawyer, casually, that I’d spent the whole day reading administrative law cases. She’d see me as a mature person, not a kid who wasn’t yet used to the seasons changing.

The truth is I didn’t finish reading any cases. First Ellipses and I spent an hour wandering the Village before we chose a place. Then we discussed our con law notes. She kept track of the actual facts of cases while I talked out on tangents and whims. I offered stylistic critiques of the recent cases and she agreed. An even worse song came on so we researched who sang it. Then we researched the lyrics.

Stop wasting your study time with me, I wanted to say. Ellipses tried to act ironic but she was just ambivalent. Issue spotting lawyer? Appropriately dressed indie music fan? She couldn’t decide; she wanted to; she figure-eighted around the two in slow motion and I wanted to knock her over.

Oh well. At least it was nice to have company on the first warm Sunday. I sat with my back to the wall and my legs in front of me on the bench so I could watch the bright scene on MacDougal.

In our dark booth I felt like a fugitive ducking searchlights.

Getting the Perfect Lawyer Alone, part 2

During the second half, Ellipses and I left the auditorium to use the bathroom. I took my bottle. She said hi to some guy in the hallway and I waved the bottle around as I followed behind.

“White wine is so much better than red. I’ve spilled it a bunch of times and it’s totally invisible,” I said to her as she pushed open the bathroom door. Ellipses cracked up.

“You just said that in front of the president of NYU!”

“The guy you just said hi to? Wow I thought he was a janitor!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m glad I didn’t say that about a minority.” She went into a stall and I waited for the next one.

But the perfect lawyer stepped out of the next one.

“Jane! I thought I heard you.”

“The perfect lawyer!” I only barely restrained myself from hugging her. Instead I fell back against the paper towel dispenser.

“Who did you think was a janitor,” she asked, washing her hands now. Tipped downward, her face looked so peaceful in the bathroom mirror. She was the Madonna with sink.

“The president of NYU. I accidentally drew attention to my cupless drinking habits. Is that bad?”

“No, it was probably cute,” The perfect lawyer said to my reflection. “So what’s new! I never see you anymore.”

“I think Mr. Cat finally realized I’m a bad influence,” I said, and pouted. I pumped some paper towels out of the dispenser and handed them to her, since I was blocking it.

“Don’t worry about Mr. Cat,” she said, and then broke into a grin.

“So ditch him. Let’s go get drunk.”

“Right now?” She laughed. “I don’t know about that. I have to work in the morning.”

“You suck!”

“No I don’t. Maybe a little.” A few people came into the bathroom at once. The show had just ended. “I should go.”

“Okay. Nice seeing you.”

“Let’s get that drink another time,” she said, already pulling open the door.

Distraught at the rejection, I dropped my bottle into a trash can. It thumped down into the wet paper towels. I told Ellipses I hated law jokes, and law songs, and law students, and there was no way I could go to a bar with her and Patrick without puking. I cut through the crowd and left, throwing up a little in a plant outside Dag. Back in my locker I turned up the music and opened a window. A few hours later I woke up, shivering as usual.

Author page is up.

Getting the Perfect Lawyer Alone, part 1

New York was the first home I didn’t plot my escape from. I attributed my satisfaction to the city’s “energy.” But once some weeks passed without seeing the perfect lawyer, New York started boring me just like everywhere else had. When I wasn’t drunk or reading con law, I wondered what the point of living in the city was anymore. I might as well be in a real submarine, I thought as someone tripped over my ankles in the little café across the street from school/home; I might as well be somewhere clean. It was all because Griffothy and I had drifted apart. Was it the stuff I’d said to his wife at the French restaurant? The way I always tried to show him up in con law? It was probably my bad grades; he was afraid they’d rub off on him.

Law Revue happened just in time.

Law Revue is the annual musical that spoofs NYU Law. Its title is a pun on “law review,” the journal that the smartest people in the class edit after 1L.

I went with Ellipses and Patrick and, at Ellipses’s request, sat between them. They drank Sparks (I don’t know if you remember, but Sparks were cool a few years ago at least in an ironic way) and I slagged from a six dollar bottle of chardonnay (timeless). I had planned to use it mainly as a prop—something to swing around—but I ended up downing at least two-thirds of it. The show really depressed me.

It wasn’t just the audio-visual experience of law students dancing and, at points, stripping down to their underwear. It wasn’t that the script contained all these sly references to US News because they had just ranked us number four, and the audience went “oooooh” every time. It wasn’t even that it contained fewer jokes about the outside world than my high school’s parody show had. I sucked on my bottle because there were only three punchlines in law school, and they were all lies.

The first law school punchline was that NYU Law is very liberal. Often it took the form of someone making a joke about gay people, and the entire rest of the school rising up against them in ire. First of all, why would anyone want to make jokes about gay people? Jokes that straight people tell about gay people tend to seem uninspired. Gay guys are feminine, gay girls are masculine, ad nauseum. Second of all, law students did not rise up. That was simply a lie. Just wait until I tell you about the protest against military recruiting.

The second punchline was about how grades don’t matter. On its face, this joke was pretty honest. Law firms cared about grades, but you could still work at a bad one if you had bad grades, and it’d pay you the same as a good firm. Public interest places cared about stuff besides grades. All mediocre grades barred you from were really good firms, good clerkships, academia, and federal government stuff.

Patrick doubled over in laughter. I thought:

But everyone wants one of those things! In theory we barely have to do any work, but in reality everyone’s either a workaholic or wishes they were. The implication of the joke, then—that law students are all slackers—is a lie.

(Two of the songs about how we are all slackers, however, were quite catchy.)

The final punchline was that law firms sucked. Again, on its face that was accurate Obviously law firms sucked. The clients ranged from unsympathetic to satanic, the buildings were over-air conditiond sweatshops, everyone who worked at them was clinically depressed or sociopathic, etc. In fact, they were all identical except their ranking.

And there was the contradiction. It was a logical impossibility for any set of things to suck, as long as a magazine or website ranked it. Because then one member of the set was the best. Best could not equal suck.

An actor representing a Columbia student called NYU “overrated.” Patrick chanted along with the crowd, “unattractive,” just like we all had at the NYU-Columbia law school basketball game.

I took a little gulp and thought:

No law student truly feels that law firms suck.

And I thought, I wish I were more liberal just to spite these assholes, but the most impassioned thing I’ve ever done is threaten to assassinate Sandra Day O’Connor during office hours. I drank.

Funeral, part 2

First time here? Start at the beginning.

To prove that my uncle had died of a sudden heart attack, and that he had not shot himself in the head, his wife had arranged for the service to be open casket.

You might be thinking that’s a violation of Jewish custom. But my uncle converted to Greek Orthodoxy in a fraudulent ceremony before his wedding. And actually, the service was being performed in a Roman Catholic church. That weekend was a Greek Orthodox holiday, so those churches couldn’t perform funerals. But Jewish law says you have to be buried right away (like I said, the conversion was a fraud).

We were among the first to arrive at the funeral. In the lobby area of the church, my mother talked to me.

“Your brother already saw the body last night at the wake, but you still need to,” she said. I didn’t move my face. “Don’t worry. His head looks very realistic. I’ll go with you.”

She walked me down the aisle, dutifully taking the side that would be closer to the reconstructed head. My body tipped away from her as we approached the coffin. I didn’t devote all of my energy to correcting the imbalance.

My mother parked herself square in front of the head. Kneeling alongside her I mimicked her gestures and thought about praying. Better not, I thought. Fraudulent Catholic prayer for a Greek Orthodox Jew with a fake head was probably some kind of jinx, and I had exams coming up.

In order to keep myself upright, I brainstormed reasons why the moment was actually not that creepy.

I thought,

It’s not like I knew the guy really well. When we were in the same room, I was always in a room with a remote person. Him lying there with a fake head is just a more extreme type of remoteness.

I thought,

He owned all that furniture with decals of naked Asian women woven into it. That was creepy. The world is actually less creepy now that he’s gone.

I thought, that’s too far.

My mother crossed herself and so did I. We rose. When I was a kid, at church, I took care never to cross myself at the same time as she did. I wanted to look like I was praying my own prayers at my own pace, not just copying my mother. Now mimicry was the maximum form of assertiveness the occasion allowed me, and I took it. Anybody who cared to notice would see I just went through the motions.

In the car after the service my mother said, “good thing you guys had me around to sign for the church.” The parish had required a practicing Roman Catholic to vouch for the family.

*

The day passed smoothly. My cousin who modelled in Playboy derided the cousin who modelled in Hustler. My mother derided the day’s “esperanto religion.” Both conversations were interested me, since I rarely compared porn magazines or religions.

In the car I came up with a new theory of why society pressured me to keep in touch with my family. It wasn’t because blood relatives thought like each other, or because we looked up to our ancestors. Friends more logically filled those roles, since we chose them. As a social institution, the point of family was it forced you to spend time with people different from yourself.

Funeral, part 1

I got an email from my father during crim class. His older brother, my uncle, had killed himself. So I took a train to New England for the funeral.

The town was near the coast. It was cold in April and humid eternally. For the first few minutes of my trips to New England I always imagined that as I walked across the parking lot, I was pushing aside salt water particles like feathers. The airborne part of the ocean.

My parents and brother were all in the car at the train station. Inside the car I told them law school was going fine and that I enjoyed my constitutional law class. My mother told me who had gotten fat and whose kids had gotten arrested for pot. The road was dark and irregular; I should’ve known how long it would last, but I didn’t.

At home my mother followed me down the corridor into my old bedroom. I stepped cautiously toward the lamp and ticked it on. A pile of wrapped and ribboned boxes sparkled and cascaded under the vanity table.

“I like your hair,” my mother said.

“Thanks.” The remark was a surprise; my hair was in a ponytail. I’d been cutting the bangs myself, and the rest of it hadn’t been cut since the previous May.

“Your Aunt Nancy has been spreading rumors,” she said. “One of your cousins saw a picture of you on a website called… My Webpage? Anyway, she said it looked like you had short hair. But I knew you would never do that.”

“Must have been the angle of the picture,” I said.

My father stepped into my room from the corridor. The floor creaked. He was a skinny man, but he seemed to take up the doorway. The house was small and responsive. It turned everyone in it into a cow. From my bed I could sense where every other cow was. (My brother was in the basement lifting weights, clank.)

It was time for me to open my Christmas presents. I sat on the rug that my mother’s favorite aunt had crocheted for me twenty years earlier. There was a big smiling moon on it and some stars. My parents sat on the twin bed.

The presents included jewelry, scarves and gloves. The pile was endless. I said thank you for each one and they said you’re welcome.

The next morning my father woke me up after my brother but before my mother. That was the old sequence from high school. He triaged us so that there wouldn’t be competition for the bathroom. My brother didn’t hate dawn (the sun kicking through all the front windows) so he went first. I went before my mother because it took me longer to dry my hair.

Once I was dressed I checked my email on the computer between the kitchen and the dining room. Then I stood up and looked in all the kitchen cabinets.

“You didn’t buy that outfit for the funeral, did you,” my mother asked. I was wearing a new black sweater and an old black skirt.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t do that again. It’s corny to wear all black to a funeral. Did you see someone do that on TV or something?”

“Yeah.”

My father rushed into the kitchen, holding his left arm out plaintively.

“I cut my wrist on the… stupid nail in the back of the closet,” he said to my mother. She told him how to minimize the appearance of the gash. He shuttled back down the corridor. “This does not look good!”

Office Hours, part 2

The next Wednesday an extra large crowd showed for office hours. Feldstein took us into a nearby lounge where we sat in a long oval. I took a seat on the opposite end of the room from Feldstein, and for most of the hour and a half I just watched people lose arguments to him. But then he praised Justice O’Connor for the tenth time, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. When I’d read her opinions on affirmative action and abortion, all that jumped out at me were her lies. Like, in Casey she kept saying she was upholding abortion rights, but she was actually gutting the doctrine. She knew newspapers would just report that she was upholding abortion rights because she said so a hundred times. Only lawyers really got what’s going on in Casey.

“Sure,” Feldstein said. “That’s ‘esotericism.’ The real meaning of the text can only be understood by professionals.”

“That’s evil! Like in Grutter, she says that the pathways to leadership must be visibly open to all segments of society. Visibly. Not actually. She’s flat-out saying that she only cares about affirmative action programs insofar as they create the appearance of fairness. So minorities don’t realize that America treats them like shit and they should revolt. But anyway, she knows the newspaper will only report on the nice ‘diversity’ rationale. She’s all about the social control!”

Feldstein scoffed.

“Affirmative action is all about social control! Let me put it this way: we live in a meritocracy. That’s because in our era, intelligence is what makes people powerful, dangerous. We—white people, privileged people, the ruling class—have to buy off the smartest members of every community so that they won’t overthrow us. That’s what affirmative action does. We lure smart minorities into fancy universities. Law schools that we call—what’s NYU these days? Number five in the whole country. We give them jobs, jobs that come with salaries, but even better, titles. We co-opt them.

“You’re all being bought off too. You think the most important thing you can do with your life is practice law? Do you have any idea how interchangeable lawyers are? Even if you take a public interest job—if you choose a nice sounding title instead of cold hard cash—you’re going to be a foot soldier.

“When you work within the legal system, whether you’re defending corporations or defending the idea that five black people should attend UMich Law every year, you’re doing it in a courtroom. In front of a judge who, if he is rational, and of course he is rational, he’s a judge, will be asking himself who’s more dangerous: the corporation or the consumer. The black people or the racists. And that’s who’s going to win.

“When you’re a lawyer, the game you play isn’t change the world, it’s called scare the judge. No, scratch that, it’s called appease your client. The ruling class is paying you not to change the world. To leave the world alone.

“But you are going to be lawyers. And you should be lawyers. It’s the rational thing to do. It would be highly irrational not to take the deal you’re being offered. Law firms are paying you more than four times what the average American earns to start. When you’re twenty-five. Of course it’s blood money. Blood prestige. And of course you’re going to take it.

“What are you going to do with that money? Well, you’re going to buy sushi, of course, and a house in the Hamptons. But you’re also going to tithe to NYU School of Law, because you want your degree to be from a number four school. Then you’ll pay hundreds of thousands of dollars so that your kids can come here—or, if their nanny raises them really well, Yale.”

Most of the people in the room laughed because that was a rude thing for Feldstein to say, as a Yale graduate.

“And if you’re really rational, you’ll set up a scholarship fund for terrorists so they’ll stop flying airplanes into our office buildings.

“So, Jane—” Feldstein addressed us by our first names in office hours because that was a different game from class—“back to your issue. Are all these cases we read really about social control? Yes. The legal system is about preserving the meritocracy and you’re going to be one of its soldiers. That’s a good thing. For me, for you, and for every single party that loses its case. The alternative to protecting the current order is starting riots in the streets.”

I believed every word he’d said except that I was going to be a lawyer. I gaped and leaned forward, elbows on my knees, to see his face around all the guys sitting between us along the wall.

“So it would only take one irrational person from a number five law school to tell people what’s going on and start riots in the street,” I asked.

“Sure. But Justice O’Connor’s betting that you won’t do that,” he said down the oval.

“O’Connor’d better watch her back.”

Everyone in the room gasped except Feldstein. He said, “good luck with that,” and in the same instant pointed his finger, zap, at someone who’d had his hand raised for a while.

The guy cleared his throat and said, “yes.” Then in a measured bass, “many of us have been wondering: how many questions will there be on the final exam?”

Feldstein promised to tell us on May 5 (the day of the exam).

What, exactly, would I tell my rioters?

Office Hours, part 1

Now that I was raising my hand in con law, strangers started talking to me.

“Done the con law reading for tomorrow,” they would ask, in the laundry room of Dag or in line for falafel on MacDougal.

“Great job in class today,” said one of the guys who gropes people. “You’re really coming out of your shell.”

Most strangely, I started talking to a professor. I went to Feldstein’s office hours every Wednesday.

The only other time I’d ever sought out a professor in law school was when I asked Miller to hold class off campus, in support of the striking NYU grad students. (He refused.) I didn’t trust professors. They were intelligent yet they wrote journal articles all the time, which were boring. They didn’t help indigent people—the key to being a happy lawyer, as everybody knew—or make incredible salaries. What motivated them? I figured it was sadism. Law professors got to act like jerks under the pretext of preparing us for the legal profession, where we’d have to deal with jerks. As far as I could tell, professors were completely disengaged from the world except insofar as they abused it.

Griffothy and I used to argue about this all time, since he wanted to be a professor and his dad was one.

“Take it easy on Miller,” he’d say. “Can’t you tell he’s just a goofball?”

“That’s what he wants us to think!”

But I started noticing that Feldstein was different. Unlike every other law professor and student I’d ever met, he never pretended to hate his role in life. Just the opposite. To erase any doubt that he was—in Men’s Vogue’s words—The Professor, he told the class one time that he modeled his teaching style after the contracts professor from The Paper Chase.

Feldstein wasn’t so creepy. If it got me into Vogue, I realized, I’d be a professor too. After class on Wednesdays I hustled over to his office with the rest of the groupies.

One Wednesday in late March, I stepped into Feldstein’s office and he was the only one in it. A mandatory presentation for people who wanted to work at a law firm in the summer after 2L was going on downstairs. Almost the entire 1L class was there (“just in case I need the financial security a year from now”) and apparently, every single student who talked to Feldstein.

Before I could make a run for it he said to have a seat. I sat down on his couch. He stepped out from behind his desk and sat in the chair in the middle of the room. I said “hi” and asked him a question about the day’s reading. He answered it and then asked me whether that Tom Wolfe book about college life was accurate. I told him it wasn’t.

“So I heard about how back in January you gave a speech to the class kind of apologizing for being this stereotypical bullying law professor type—”

“Right, like in the Paper Chase.”

“Right, and you said that it was an act, a game, and we should all just play along.”

“You didn’t hear it?”

“No, that was before I started coming to class regularly. But listen. That’s partly because I found your class so unpleasant to sit through. Because of all the stuff you acknowledged, like calling us by our last names, and asking questions that are impossible to answer, or like cold calling with questions that only a history PhD would know the answer to…”

“I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable. But you should see it as a game. It’s not personal. You’re in role as a student, and I’m in role as a professor. Professors call you by your last name to help you not take it all personally.”

“But that’s gross!”

“Games aren’t gross, games are fun!”

“But it’s not… life. It’s artificial and… gross.” I clawed through my mind for a theoretical argument about why games weren’t fun. All I could think of was how much I hated playing Trivial Pursuit.

“I don’t think role-playing is artificial at all. Life is a series of games. We’re playing games all the time, not just in law school.”

“But … why? Is there a prize?”

“Of course there is!” He tossed his hands into the air. “Financial security, food, clothes, shelter.”

“So if you play the game the best, you get…?”

“The best food. You know what I mean. Wasn’t one of the firm recruiting events at Nobu this semester?”

I told him I didn’t know, and felt relieved that he hadn’t used an example involving clothes. His $900 loafers from the The Professor photo shoot were already tapping around the corner of my imagination, trying to make me laugh.

By the end of the conversation I realized that most of my complaints about class, like how loud the professor’s voice was, or how he used students mostly as props and might as well have used a handpuppet to illustrate his points—actually pertained more to Miller than to Feldstein. I probably conflated the two in my head because they were my only straight white male professors during 1L.

Nonconformists, part 3

Nicko smiled, blushing a little from the New Yorker’s compliment, and we kept walking. “It’s nice to be reminded that I like the human race, you know? Sometimes around law school I feel like nobody listens to me. Like whenever I point out how the educational system is racist they just laugh, even Goldfarb.” Goldfarb was the black guy in our section. “Law students act like it’s a faux pas to criticize the Man because he’s been so kind to us. Fucking conformists, all of them.”

“You can’t call them all conformists,” I said after a minute, stepping onto the Bowery as the cars’ stoplight finally turned red. “Yeah, they all dress alike and they’re all taking identical jobs right out of law school. But clothes and jobs aren’t all there is. If you spent more time hanging around people, you’d realize how weird and interesting they are.”

“Clothes and job are pretty good indicators. If you were cool, wouldn’t you get sick of wearing boring shit and thinking boring shit all the time?”

“Maybe they are all sick,” I said, thinking about the perfect lawyer and her impending firm job.

“I hope so.”

“Ouch, why?”

“Societal approval should come at a price. You know, since being a nonconformist does. Life shouldn’t be so fucking easy.”

I thought about whether I envied people with easy lives. Wasn’t my life kind of easy? I didn’t know. I operated it with very little training, so probably.

“How about this,” I said. “Societal approval is an addictive drug. I know you’re not against drug addicts.”

“Because they don’t get societal approval!”

We philosophized for hours in the new weather. No matter how far east we walked, none of the bars looked cool to us that night. Not the one with the telephone booth out front; not the one with the alligator. So we headed down. Waiting to cross Houston, we both gazed at a billboard for our favorite clothing store. It only showed the model’s face. A male thumb tugged her lower lip down.

“That’s so disturbing,” he said.

“For real. It’s like she’s a banana and he’s beginning to peel her.”

We were crossing the thick street, lane after lane through the headlights. No buildings shaded us and no homeless people lined my peripheral vision. I felt like birdseed.

“I think,” Nicko said, “he’s checking her gums to decide whether to buy her. Like to be his slave.”

Once we crossed Houston into the Lower East Side, Nicko saw a girl wearing zebra leggings and told me they would look good on me. We turned the corner onto Rivington and saw two more girls in zebra leggings. He retracted the opinion. Bars continued to resemble each other. Around 1 the humid breeze turned into rain. We shouted our goodnights as I hurried down into a subway station.

Nonconformists, part 2

No more studying was going to happen after all that. We decided to go for a drink, but first I wanted to stop at Dag and change into something light. The temperature had been rising all day, even as the sun dropped. Winter was finally giving up.

On the way inside we ran into Carmen and her Lesbians of Color friends.

“NICKO,” they all shrieked as we approached. Many of them gave up their spots leaning against the brick wall of Dag to get closer because Nicko was their Andrea Mitchell.

“Nicko, I love your sunglasses,” Carmen said. Although/because it was dark out, he wore pink Prada sunglasses that he’d stolen from a girl he hooked up with in some other city over spring break. Instead of replying to Carmen he answered his cell phone.

Carmen rotated toward me and said hey. I told her I had to go upstairs. When I returned, wearing a short floral dress over jeans, silver ballet slippers, and a cropped suede jacket, the girls had left.

“Bad scene, man,” Nicko said. “But here, I got you this.” He handed me a pin that said DYKE.

“Thanks!” I stuck it to my dress. “I knew they were holding out on me this morning.”

For admitted students day, all non-straight students were supposed to wear pins that announced their sexual identity. The options were “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer,” “bi,” “fag,” “dyke,” and a rainbow, perhaps for people who wanted to maintain plausible deniability about the subject. In the interests of precision I asked for “heteroflexible.” The lesbian of color in charge told me that wasn’t an option. Next I asked for “carpet muncher,” in the interests of reclaiming a vulgar term. The lesbian of color said actually, the only pin she had left was… the rainbow. So I had to wear that around all day and look like some kind of jerk.

We walked east. Nicko lived on the Lower East Side, 10 blocks below the perfect lawyer. Like Griffothy he was a boomerang. He came west for school every day, then went straight home. He never drank outside the East Village/Lower East Side. I, on the other hand, was planted on West Third Street. I lived on it, went to school across it, and when I wasn’t with the perfect lawyer/Griffothy or Nicko I drank near it too. I hated West Third, and the guys who stood on it yelling, “comedy show tonight,” followed by a joke, and the short haired guys, and the irritated looking girls with incongruously shiny  makeup, and everyone who stood in the middle of the sidewalk because they couldn’t decide between the bar with the cowboy hat on its awning and the one with the musical note.

Griffothy and Nicko were my escorts out.

As we progressed the street quieted down and each one we crossed was wider than the last.

“Nice owl,” a delivery guy said to Nicko.

“Ye-ah, that’s right,” Nicko said to me. “Real New Yorkers dig the owl.”