I was starting my first year at Rutgers Law School in Newark, following a zigzag (should I say Zig Zag?) course that had taken me from a small hill farm in northern Vermont, to Harvard in 1967 where I declined to take a student draft deferment, federal prison for two years for refusing induction, a year working as a roofer in St. Johnsbury, and back to Harvard, graduating with a Latin major in 1974.
The summer after graduation, instead of productive activity, I wisely decided to roll west with my cousin Teddy and tour the Cascades, from Mt. Lassen to Glacier Peak. Our grueling treks including a long, unplanned night stuck on the east face of Mt. Jefferson, left us amazed, refreshed, and with barely enough gas money to get back to Vermont.
A couple of weeks before school, my cousin Mary and I dashed down to New York. With a fleeting glance, knowing and caring only that the monthly rent was a mere $175.00, and that it was convenient to Newark, I leased a tiny studio apartment on the 4th floor of 305 West 45th Street, between 8th and 9thAvenues. It was an old six-story building, across the street from the venerable Martin Beck Theater. I called my new home “my little Raskolnikov room.”
I came back to New York on a bus from St. Johnsbury, nearly broke, with my pack, sleeping bag, and a fat Black’s Law Dictionary. I bought a cheap alarm clock in a touristy gift shop in Port Authority and emerged into the evening carnival of 8th Avenue, jumping with whores, pimps, and peep shows. Hungry Hilda’s, a topless bar and restaurant between 44th and 45th streets was so prominent a landmark that I find myself missing it in the wonderful streetscapes of the HBO series, The Deuce. The sex industry co-existed with good, diner-type restaurants, regular movie theaters, and little convenience stores. Hell’s Kitchen was the perfect and proper name for the neighborhood, bordered to the west by 9th Avenue, a great, long cornucopia of food markets and restaurants, which existed somewhat apart from the prostitution, porn and peep shows. I never heard 42nd Street called The Deuce.
The entry to my building, on the north side of 45th Street, opened onto a dark, empty courtyard with elevators to the left, and a separate stairwell in back. I reached my room, made a mattress of the New York Times, unfolded my sleeping bag, set the alarm clock, and fell asleep wondering what law school was all about.
In those years Rutgers cultivated the reputation of a people’s law school, with many minority students, fabulously low tuition – after all, do you need an atom smasher to teach the Commerce Clause or the Rule Against Perpetuities? – and hosting publications like The Women’s Rights Law Reporter. Our first day keynote speaker was Professor Arthur Kinoy, a small, hunch-backed man then in his 50’s, seeming old to me at the time, with a booming voice, flashing eyes, passion, presence, humor, learning, and riveting stories from his career as a front line civil rights lawyer.
I’d usually get over to Newark on a bus that left Port Authority from up near its roof, which meant a long climb through the weird warmth of the bus station, by its snack bars and newsstands. There followed a ride through that wonderful swamp grass of New Jersey, and a walk of ten minutes or so from Newark’s Penn Station to the concrete bunker that then housed Rutgers Law School. I’d ride to Newark looking at one of those old contracts, tort, or property cases known to first year law students everywhere. If you’re in hot pursuit of a fox and someone else kills it, whose fox? If you buy an old chest and find a diamond ring in it, whose ring? My head was swimming with these new (to me) questions; fresh visions of the Cascades; tags of Latin and Greek poetry; the Celtics’ title defense – 1974 having brought the first post-Russell championship –; and I still wallowed joyfully in the dregs of Watergate. In spite of Ford’s recent pardon of Nixon, and the persistence of Kissinger, it seemed like the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was drawing to a close, and that regime change, of a sort, had happened.
At 7:30 one morning, two or three weeks after school started, I landed on the ground floor and two men rushed in and boxed me into a corner of the elevator. I drove a left jab into the first guy’s face and his nose spurted blood. I felt a knife biting into my leg, just below my butt, and the other guy removed my wallet, saying. “We could kill you.” They scooted away and I knocked on the superintendent’s door. He and his wife, an old, white couple – Jewish? Greek? Polish? – saw my pants soaked with blood, looking a lot worse than it really was. The super demanded, “Were they SPICS or NIGGERS?” I said, “One of each.” An ambulance took me to the old St. Clare’s Hospital on 51stStreet where they promptly stitched and bandaged me. I changed my pants, and got to school having missed only first period contracts. Later that morning the law school got a call from my Newark bank saying that two guys, who didn’t seem to fit, were trying to cash a check there. I’d left a blank check (along with about $6.00, a student ID, and a joint) in my wallet. I rushed to the bank, but they’d departed. From that day, I always had an open, locked and concealed Buck knife at the ready when I left my building.
Thank you, guys, for not killing me. You were players in the true generous spirit of The Deuce! I hope you enjoyed the $6.00, and I’m pretty sure you enjoyed the joint, which was decent. About the failed check cashing, as Curtis Mayfield said, “Don’t worry, worry, worry…” There couldn’t have been more than twenty dollars in my account.
I think I was the least favored customer of the Security National Bank, with my persistently tiny balance, and frequent, miniscule transactions. I’d gotten a job at the law school library and made enough to live hand to mouth. I’d buy a box of spaghetti and a can of clam sauce at little mini-mart on 8th Avenue. The clerk there had a number tattooed on his arm. I’d get fresh vegetables and fruit on Ninth Avenue. I cooked on a little hotplate and in a toaster oven, my campfire and farmhouse cooking skills useful. For my bigger expenses, tuition, rent, the Lyndonville, Vermont Savings Bank was nice enough to make occasional unsecured loans of $1000 or $2000.
The basic courses were organized into large lecture classes, with one class broken into small sections. My small group, with about fifteen students, was in property. The first significant graded exercise was a paper in that section, something about New Jersey zoning law, and I was the only one to get an A. I was feeling good about myself. I was hanging out with a pretty Seven Sisters girl who sat next to me in contracts. I had my Ivy League “credentials”. I was healthy and strong from backpacking in the Cascades.
I settled into my neighborhood, enjoying an occasional meal at the newly re-opened Oyster Bar beneath Grand Central, or at a second story Brazilian restaurant a bit east on 45th. One Saturday night I went to see the late screening of “Walking Tall” at a dark, crowded, cavernous old movie theater right in Times Square. A crazy old white lady in a platinum blonde wig wandered the aisles with a camera, at selected moments taking flash photographs of Joe Don Baker, an early version of screen shots, each blinding flash bringing curses on the head of the lady, who smiled sweetly and blandly.
I wondered off the tracks somewhere around Christmas, not even knowing it. Not that I didn’t work hard, but I was looking for gold in ancient tomes, and straining to be original and witty, not quite getting that I was neither called upon for – nor capable of – originality or wit in the first year law school curriculum. My grades at the end of the semester ranged from mediocre to miserable, and my social standing plunged right along with them. The Seven Sisters girl took up with a classmate in that small property section. We’d attended his New Year’s Eve party together, for God’s sake. He was a nice guy, but I wasn’t feeling it.
Frayed and flayed and trying to regroup, the city nurtured me. I’d head up to the Metropolitan on the odd, free weekday morning and gape at Chinese vases and Flemish paintings in near solitude, feeling like I owned the place. The reading room of the Public Library made you smarter just by being in it. Winter snows, briefly covering the rest of the city with clean white robes, tossed alluring negligees over the pulsating lights of Times Square.
With spring I found a nice run up 8th Avenue from 45th to Columbus Circle, where I’d then hang out in the sunny southwest corner of the park. Eighth Avenue wasn’t, and probably still isn’t, known as a classic New York running trail, but I’d get a good work-out, doing the 1000 yards as fast as I could, consistent with traffic lights. Nobody cared or stared. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1975 a young, dark-skinned black man was among the crowd enjoying the park, wearing an over-the-top, vivid green Irish outfit, complete with green Derby hat. Merriment reigned.
The sex trade on 8th Avenue went at least into the high 40’s, maybe the lower 50’s. One lovely spring afternoon a bar up there had a door propped open and a nude dancer performed on a little stage, monetary and security considerations giving way to the sunshine and light breezes coming in off the Hudson.
I’d take a paperback copy of Middlemarch on my runs up to the park –- Yes, scholarly Abby! Yes, bookish Darlene! Middle – effing – march by George – effing – Eliot! Middlemarch soothed my soul. I loved Dorothea and Mary Garth, while creepy Casaubon and the Dead Hand’s malign influence helped me get my head around the Rule Against Perpetuities. Having found a cozy perch on one of the ledges in the park, I’d read until twilight and then dash back down to darkening, thumping Midtown and a long night with the books.
I decided to enter the moot court competition. This required the production of a proper, conforming, appellate brief and oral argument before a panel of upperclassmen judges in a hypothetical defamation case – a ton of extra work. I got the brief done nicely and when the day for oral argument came, I crushed a notorious, class-wrecking windbag, breaking a long, academic losing streak. In Barry Reed’s The Verdict, about the down and out Boston lawyer who scores big in a tort case, the hero’s wise old mentor says, “The very best are the lawyers who do their homework.”
Professor Kinoy worked us hard in Constitutional Law, breaking down the landmark cases; making us absorb majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions; always pounding away at the history; carrying it all off with classroom pyrotechnics. He insisted, for example, that we understood the Dred Scott case inside out, and on May 11, 1975 I took my photocopy of Dred Scott v. Sandford to the Sheep Meadow, arriving early for a celebration of the end of the Vietnam War. I tried to dissect Justice Taney’s murky prose as 75,000 others settled around me. Soon Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Patti Smith, and many others, sang joyfully. I put away Dred Scott v. Sandfordfor a while.
New York friends gave me love: from Jody, encouragement, dinners at her Upper East Side apartment, and once, with a sweetly apologetic smile, an all too welcome coupon for a free meal at Burger King; from Bob, welcome and work at a bustling cabinetry business in a loft on Wooster Street; from Dan, my old prison bridge partner, now living in the Bronx, the hope of an Upper West Side apartment we could share the following year when he’d be finishing his pre-med course at Columbia.
Brent and Debra, college friends from Boston, were visiting on Palm Sunday. We went to services at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 46th Street, which we re-named and forever after knew as the Church of St. Mary the [Only] Virgin of Times Square. Dissipated looking acolytes strode the aisles, swinging huge, smoke billowing incense canisters. After church we cut over to 8thAvenue where young prostitutes, clumsy, bedraggled free lancers, paraded in their short shorts, halter tops, and platforms, their outfits not really working. We walked by one “rap parlor” after another – by 1975 rap parlors were everywhere, sex talk on offer for short money in tiny little booths. We pictured the conversationalists as women invisible behind screens, like priests in confessionals. The very idea of rap parlors seemed like a wry goof on the signature psychobabble mindset of the 70s.
Late one warm night, as finals loomed, I was beating the familiar pavement between 42nd and 45th when I saw a hideously disgusting, frighteningly large creature crawl out of the gutter on 8th Avenue and lumber down the street. A water bug! Not water bug in the sense of the benign little surface scooters on a Vermont brook, but a horrible overgrown cockroach on steroids. I started to think I wasn’t having fun anymore. I ground through the finals and mended my grades somewhat, even getting an A in Constitutional Law, though, truth be told, Professor Kinoy wasn’t that hard a grader.
It was time to leave Midtown for summer in the good green woods of Vermont. In One L, the story of his first year at Harvard Law School, Scott Turow reflects on what had happened to him and his classmates that year: “Something exalted. Something fearful.” Whatevs, we’ll agree it’s intense.
My friend Dan did get that apartment on the Upper West Side, seven rooms (we called them the “Seven Rooms of Gloom”) on the seventh and top floor of 2647 Broadway, between 100th and 101st. After a year, my 2nd at law school, Dan finished at Columbia and went off to medical school. A new roommate replaced him, and she and I have been married for 40 years.
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