A Recollection: Legal Specialties

Legal Specialties

          We were having dinner at the small table off to the side of the kitchen rather than at the big, semi-expensive-looking table in the over-furnished dining room.

          I’d spent the afternoon in a nearby motel room with the family’s daughter and only child breaking I don’t know how many of the laws in Leviticus concerning what twenty or so year old couples do in cheap motels. I can’t be specific because I’m not a biblical scholar and it was about a half a century ago.

          The proximity of the cheap motel was due to my girlfriend’s family living in a beach resort town. Its population went from about 1500 in the off-season to something like a half a million in the summer. My girlfriend’s father, a short, wiry fellow with a sonorous voice and a pompous attitude, had given me this information when I’d arrived that morning, with the editorial addendum that, ‘A lot of trash shows up in this town in the summer, Richard.’

          In the off-season motel room that afternoon, my girlfriend, mocking him, had pointed to her delightfully naked tits with her thumb and said, ‘Me trash!’ She’d also noted that her father’s jewellery store on the town’s beachfront boardwalk made heaps more money off the summer-season trash than from his respectable fellow burghers.

          He did not, however, own a jewellery store, or so he’d told me. To the contrary, he’d insisted, ‘I am a jeweller!’

          So there we were, tucking into some forgettable food, and the topic of conversation inevitably came around to my prospects. I was then just a a year or so away from getting my bachelor’s degree in political science.

          ‘So, Richard,’ her father intoned, ‘after you finish law school …’

          ‘Uh, Mr Berman …’ I interrupted. He wasn’t the sort of person someone in my position could comfortably address as “Nate”. ‘I’m not going to law school.’

          This was a sore point in my own family as well. One of the main reasons that I hadn’t applied to any law schools was that my inhumanly abusive mother desperately wanted me to become a lawyer and I’d be fucked in the ass before I’d let her force me to.

          The head of the table dismissed this with a wave of his hand. ‘Of course you are. You’ll change your mind. What else can you do with a degree in political science?’

          The answer to that question, as it turned out, was fuckall – at least for the next quarter of a century.

          Ploughing right on, he continued, barely taking a breath, ‘So after you finish law school my advice to you is to avoid going into criminal law. There’s more to law than going down into the gutter defending trash. That way you won’t have to deal with trash, see?’

          ‘I’m not going to law school.’

          Ignoring me, he concluded, ‘What you need to do, Richard, is to go into tax law.’

          Many years later, when I was chatting with my then ex-girlfriend – I think she was still on her first marriage at the time – she informed me in passing that her father had been done for taxes; indicted. He was likely to stay out of prison, but his legal fees were eating him alive.