Lawyer Boy: A Case Study on Growing Up - Hardcover

CHAPTER ONE

A Sleight Change of Plans

I always wanted to be a magician, but my father, a tax lawyer, never considered magic a "viable career path." My mother, on the other hand, always told me I could do whatever I wanted with my life, but as I grew older, I realized that she and my father were playing Good Cop/Bad Cop and that when she said that I could do whatever I wanted with my life, she meant I could practice whatever kind of law I wanted.

My uncle is a lawyer, and so are my Michigan cousins, my Chicago cousins, and my New York cousins. If I had any siblings, they'd be lawyers, too. My father's father, though, was not a lawyer. He slaughtered cows for a living.1 Now, I couldeasily write half a dozen lawyer jokes comparing slaughterhouses and courtrooms--they practically write themselves--but I'm not going to do that because I refuse to disrespect the meatpacking industry--see?

All of my friends and ex-girlfriends are lawyers, law students, or soon-to-be law students currently denying their inevitable legal futures. The only exceptions to this rule are (1) my childhood buddy Steve,2 who works as his dad's law clerk, and (2) my neighbor Stacy, a paralegal. I come from an affluent suburb of Detroit where the only excuse for not practicing law is practicing medicine. But even medicine, many of my dad's partners feel, is a pretty sketchy excuse.

My father and his partners saw my interest in magic the way an evangelical Christian father might view his son's homosexuality. As a phase.

"He'll grow out of it," they told my dad.

I imagine one of them took my dad aside and said, "I've never told this to anyone before, but when I was Rick's age, I went through a magic phase, too. My bunkmate showed me my first card trick at summer camp when I was fourteen ... ."

In middle school, my dad bought me 8.5" × 14" yellow legal pads on which to take notes, the way the evangelical father buys his gay son a baseball glove. But just as the gay son uses the baseball glove as a prop in his school's Damn Yankees production, I used the legal pads to sketch blueprints for grand stage illusions. Every time my birthday rolled around,I asked for marked cards and gimmicked coins and linking rings--and received dress shirts, neckties, and dictation recorders. So I sewed secret pockets into the dress shirts, used the neckties for escape demonstrations, and recorded psychic predictions on the dictation recorders (e.g., "Your card was the three of clubs").

I didn't just perform escapes and psychic demonstrations; I performed billiard ball manipulations, rope tricks, and dove illusions.3 My specialty, though, was performing elaborate, multi-phase card tricks that most professionals wouldn't dare take on, like those of British magician GuyHollingworth. Hollingworth created one of my favorite card tricks, Reformation, in which a signed playing card is torn into four and then restored, piece by piece. It sounds simple, but it isn't; the trick's explanation goes on for thirty-six pages and contains instructions like this:

As a teenager, I fantasized about creating illusions so elaborate they'd make Guy Hollingworth's Reformation look like Dan Harlan's Card-Toon(!),5 so you can imagine how betrayed I felt when, at the age of twenty-four, Hollingworth left the field of magic to study law.

Hollingworth's career change got me thinking: maybe practicing law isn't all that different from performing magic. The most powerful weapon in both lawyers' and magicians' arsenals is misdirection; just as Slydini misdirected an audience's attention away from the billiard ball's true location (Slydini's right hand) by looking at his left hand, Johnnie Cochran misdirected jurors' attention away from the DNA evidence by focusing on the pair of ill-fitting Isotoners.

The main difference between magicians and lawyers is that lawyers have no use for sleight of hand. This difference is as personally disappointing as it is obvious--for every hour my dad spent pacing around the kitchen, saying things like "bargained-for consideration" and "promissory estoppel" into his dictation recorder, I'd spent three in front of the bathroom mirror practicing rope sleights.

"Judges," my father once told me, "aren't impressed by lawyers who can tie four varieties of slipknots; the only knots judges like are the ones that go around lawyers' necks."

My father wasn't referring to a noose--my father doesn't make lawyer jokes--he was referring to neckties, and the reason he was referring to neckties was that I couldn't tie one. I'd always figured that if I never learned how to tie a necktie, nobody could rationally expect me to hold down a desk job. Unfortunately, I overestimated society's rationality, because everybody expected me to hold down a desk job. Specifically, society expected me to become a lawyer--this much was made clear to me while I was sitting shivah for my grandfather.

"Have you thought about law school? I bet that'd make your dad real happy."

"I'd love to take you out for lunch so we could talk about law school--your dad told me you're thinking of going."

"I heard your big news!"

"Law school!"

"What a smart decision."

"Your grandfather would be so proud. I didn't want to tell you this until you made a final decision, but your grandfather always wanted you to become a lawyer like your father."

Before my grandfather's funeral, my father sat me down at the kitchen table and said, "It's time for you to learn how to tie a tie." My father had offered to teach me how to tie a tie before every wedding, bar mitzvah, and funeral, and I'd always declined--that was the ritual. Only this time, my father wasn't joking around. "It's time for you to learn. Really." Maybe my grandfather's death had gotten my father thinking about how he wouldn't always be around to teach me how to do it. But when I declined again, my father did the same thing he had done my entire life: he tied my tie on himself, slipped it off his neck, and placed it around mine.

 

In terms of employability, political science degrees make English degrees look like business degrees. Politics isn't a science, and therefore there's no such thing as a political scientist, and therefore poli-sci students generally need to find other fields to actually enter upon graduation. At the University of Michigan, my poli-sci classmates swore they'd never go into teaching political science, but fraternity pledges say the same thing about abolishing hazing once they becomeupperclassmen. And yet, year after year, the ridiculous, pointless rituals continue, as does fraternity hazing.

After graduation I moved back in with my parents, where the closest thing I had to a job was watching The Price Is Right, in that I had to make it to the living room couch at the same time every day. A master of the art of reverse psychology, my mother enthused about having me back: "I feel so fortunate to spend all this time with...