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Rich Boy

Page 22

by Sharon Pomerantz


  “I know,” Robert said, smiling. “I’m wanted in three states.”

  “Wanna make it four?” she asked, then offered her name and number, which he took, because why not? It had been offered.

  He smiled, watching her walk away, remembering that strange feeling of not so very long ago when people gave him things based solely on what he looked like. He was healthy again, had put on enough weight to look merely slim instead of gaunt. His face was exposed to the world, and it was a world that offered the children of Stacia and Vishniak precious few natural advantages by which to distinguish themselves—and in a city the size of New York, he had to use what he could and not think too much about it.

  HE WAS OLDER THAN many of his fellow law students, though not all, because the draft, avoiding it or going to Vietnam, had taken up at least a few years of most everyone’s time. In his section, he could spot the vets, the GI Billers, not just by the signs of neighborhood and origin, but by an aura that hung around them: of disappointment, a heaviness that they pulled behind them, despite their superior posture. There had been no need for Robert to cut his hair, though, not ideologically, at least; NYU law students wore sandals, tie-dyed T-shirts, and jean jackets, and many of the men had beards and long hair. In the fall of 1975, they talked of white-shoe firms like Sullivan and Cromwell, and Latham and Watkins, but dressed more like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

  There were courses, like Contracts and Torts and Procedure, and then there were electives. The professors taught in a combination of lecture and Socratic method, liking the occasional surprise attack, but mostly you had to have your hand up to be called on. In college, if you hadn’t done the reading but were a relatively intelligent person, you could often guess at some interesting if not perfectly correct answer, but not in law school. Stanley Dunphy, a third-year around Robert’s age, gave him some advice one afternoon as they sat in the park eating hot dogs from a nearby stand. “In the first semester, if you read the cases, you’re mostly fucked,” Stanley said, “but if you haven’t read them, well, you’re totally fucked.”

  College had not really prepared him for any of this, not even the writing, because lawyers did not write like regular people. He had to throw away everything he’d ever learned about writing, actually, and he’d considered himself a good writer, as had his teachers. His legal analysis class was for the fewest number of credits, yet it took up the most time. This was not just because of the amount of work, but because learning to write in a way that was acceptable to the powers that be was the key, along with grades, to earning a coveted spot on the Law Review, an important stop on the road to the best jobs.

  As he read the examples of actual legal analysis from his textbooks—memoranda, motions and appeals, briefs and summaries —he could see that lawyers, the ultimate advocates for their clients, never acknowledged that a client might have done something wrong or illegal. Lawyers were paid to be aggressive, but they wrote in the passive voice, the voice of the unfairly victimized. He and Barry had assumed that Nixon, in leaving office, had said “mistakes were made” and not “I made mistakes” because he was an asshole—but by the end of his first term, Robert understood that the former president chose those words because he’d gone to law school.

  NEW YORK CITY’S ECONOMY WAS still in tatters. If he wanted to gain some needed experience as a first-year, he’d have to work for free, at least during the school term. Such largesse went against his principles—he’d never worked for free in his life—but then, this was an investment in his future. A flyer had been posted outside one of his classrooms advertising for law-student volunteers who spoke Spanish. Robert’s Spanish was high school and college Spanish, but he’d gotten real practice as a cabdriver who often went into the Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx when others wouldn’t. What he spoke, or had picked up, was more a hybrid of the Spanish and English spoken on the street by those groups, more Spanglish than Spanish, but perhaps that would help him, too. He called the number and ended up spending three afternoons a week at the Patricia Friesèe Alexander Law Clinic.

  The clinic was in one large and unadorned room in a nondescript brick building off Union Square that housed, among other things, a talent agency specializing in circus performers, a design magazine, and, on the ground floor, the Clifford Odets Memorial Theater (and dry cleaner). He worked in a cubicle, surrounded by high-strung first-year law students masquerading as lawyers. There were two actual lawyers on staff: a recent Yale grad named George Raft (before Robert could ask, he was assured that this truly was the man’s name), and an NYU alum named Stella Depillis, a redhead in her late thirties, married and with a six-year-old daughter—with the appropriate desk photo of happy family to prove it—even as almost everyone in the office openly acknowledged that she was having an affair with George Raft. This resulted in a very flexible idea of time at the office—lunch was as long as you liked it, hours were set in advance but could be changed, and the two third-years who still volunteered three afternoons a week provided the most consistent, if not always the most reliable, direction and advice. The first day Robert walked in he was directed to a bridge chair and a tiny desk, then put to work doing intake. The desk, recovered from a local high school library, was covered in obscenities.

  His first real assignment involved a group of mostly Puerto Rican tenants in low-income housing in the South Bronx. The tenants, now part of a tenants association, had filed endless complaints about the conditions in their apartments and hallways. They knew, vaguely, what a class-action suit was, and they were not dissuaded when Robert pointed out that no one had ever successfully sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and that the best they might get, if they all filed complaints, was some fresh paint, a few repaired steps, maybe a maintenance man who wasn’t high all the time. As instructed by George Raft, Robert interviewed them and wrote down summaries of the complaints: children damaged by eating peeling paint; old ladies with broken bones from tripping on upended floor tiles, or pneumonia blamed on the lack of heat and a roof that leaked all winter. If there were doctors involved, Robert contacted them when he needed more specific details, and made endless calls, with little success, to the building superintendent and various bureaucrats who were supposed to have inspected the place.

  Clients came for more mundane reasons, too. Their food stamps had been mysteriously cut off, or a relative working under their Social Security number had used it to get a credit card and then left the country without paying the bills, leaving them to deal with furious creditors.

  Robert had expected all of these people to be beaten down, tired, hopeless—their lives were an endless series of small hurdles that they could not clear; a circumscribed life was how Robert thought of it. Yet most of the poor people he saw each week were, if not cheerful, then certainly more optimistic than he’d have been, more patient. They waited in endless lines, laughed at each other’s jokes, told their stories with surprising humor. And then one day he realized: they were being listened to. In each and every cubicle, the law students listened with rapt attention, and wrote down their stories carefully. How often did a person, any person, get another human being to really listen to them? It seemed that in New York, in late 1975, even the poorest people wanted, and were beginning to expect, that it was their right to be heard. If he could do nothing else, he could listen. And if they were hungry, and some were, he gave them a few cereal bars from his desk and emergency food stamps. He was authorized to do that, and when he did they looked at him with an expression of such awe and relief that for a little while afterward the city was beautiful to Robert, strangely bright.

  He also saw a lot of artists that year. Artists had been living illegally in SoHo for decades, taking over the lofts that had been used for industry but were then abandoned as blue-collar jobs fled Manhattan. The zoning changes of 1971 had made it possible for these artists to form co-ops and buy their places, or rent legally, so long as the loft was under 3,600 square feet, but the
y had to prove that they both lived and worked in the space, and also that the building had become obsolete for manufacturing purposes. All this took paperwork; they were supposed to register with the Department of Buildings, and become certified. This could take years, and they often needed help. So they showed up at the law center.

  Weren’t people who lived outside mainstream culture supposed to be nicer, if not to others then to each other? Wasn’t that what the 1960s had been about, or claimed to be? But these musicians and painters, playwrights and sculptors, were often the most difficult of the people he met with. Though generally better off financially than the genuine poor—some were buying their own lofts for five thousand dollars or more, and many had college or even graduate arts degrees and had clearly chosen the lives they lived—they liked to whine. About the speculators making enormous profits selling unregistered properties, about the other artists who’d gotten better deals, about the developers trolling the neighborhood for properties that could become discos or department stores. He heard over and over the same mantra from these people—that artists made a place nice, put their sweat and blood into fixing it up, just so the bankers and lawyers and developers could come in, hike the prices, and sell to the bourgeoisie. And it occurred to him, as person after person made this pronouncement, that they assumed he, Robert Vishniak of the 2100 block of Disston Street—driver of a taxicab and packer, daily, of a bag lunch, with five thousand dollars still to be paid on his undergraduate student loans and thousands more he would incur in law school—was that bourgeoisie.

  “Hey, it’s not your job to like your clients,” Barry often reminded him. But somehow, in the face of their righteous anger, the loud speeches as they shook their paint-stained fists in his face, he often became tongue-tied. There was power in being so sure of who you were and what you wanted, and these artists had that power, even as they insisted on their powerlessness. He began to do more research on the loft laws, and to think about what they meant to New York, so that at least he could look his most annoying clients in the eye and know more than they did.

  One twilight afternoon in December, with a silent, chilly feeling in the air that portended snow, Robert took the number 1 train all the way to Houston Street and walked south down Broadway, looking at the dirty windows of the enormous half-abandoned factories and tiny coffee bars, a bookstore, and the occasional gallery existing here and there on a ground floor, behind barred windows. On Prince Street, two men played the guitar—the sign said “playing to put ourselves through school”—and almost every passerby tossed in some change. A woman in a lime green dress with a bull’s-eye over the stomach tossed in a five. Two guys stood on the corner smoking a joint, with no fear of the cops. It’s still 1967 here, Robert thought, as a pack of kids brushed past him, their black clothing smelling of cloves. They all filed into a record store, or at least he assumed that was what it was from the album cover in the window.

  You could still see plenty of the ugly bits, reminders of how industrial and bleak the area had been before the artists came in. Some of his clients at the law center had scars and poorly healed fractures from the work they’d done erecting walls, installing plumbing and wiring. To live illegally in a large work space was to do everything for yourself, including toting your own garbage to the dump. In these buildings, tenants made collages all day long that few people bought, or created a giant swimming pool in the living room where they could float wax carvings. What an odd, self-absorbed existence, Robert thought; they lived like children. Yet he understood now what he hated about the artists who came to his office to champion their cause —their insistence that this place belonged to them. They had made a home, surrounded by other people who cared about the same activities and shared their fury at anyone who threatened their way of life. He envied them this sense of community. In a city so huge and demanding, he knew, when you found a place to make your own, you held on for dear life.

  From there, he walked over to the wasteland of long, half-empty streets, boarded-up buildings, and broken glass that City Hall referred to as Washington Market but the artists called TriBeCa, the triangle below Canal Street. The Office of Lower Manhattan Development was studying this area—City Hall would have a hearing in a month. Hundreds were living here illegally as they had once lived in SoHo, and for once developers and artists were on the same side, though neither would admit it—both wanted to ease restrictions so that TriBeCa could be zoned residential.

  Off Canal, on Walker Street, he saw a fat little man leaving a graffiti-covered door. Looking up into a lighted window next door, he could see several women still at their sewing machines. There was writing on the doorway the man had left, but Robert couldn’t read it—the street was too dark, illuminated only by a single lamp and the light from the women working in that window. He imagined the man to be a machinist or warehouse worker. He walked slowly, the way a man walks after a too-long day at a physical job. As he passed by, Robert could hear the squeaking of his shoes, a familiar sound, momentarily touching, for it reminded him of his father and uncle, who wore a certain work shoe with a thick rubber sole shaped like jagged spikes, a sole designed to absorb shock and last for years, bought by men who stood up all day.

  Manufacturing was disappearing from New York. Why had the owners and workers been so quiet about the taking over of their business district? In 1971, when SoHo was rezoned, there were twenty thousand blue-collar workers employed there, yet even the unions had hardly made a peep, seeming to accept the inevitable. His properties professor had once remarked that no place abhorred a vacuum like Manhattan. Nowhere did New York’s identity seem more in flux, more confused, than in its building codes, its attitudes toward preservation and destruction. A student of history, Robert thought about neighborhoods, about their rules and regulations, and how a place to live could shelter and nurture you like a lover’s arms, then turn on you one day and leave you out in the cold for reasons you barely understood.

  Those were the very words he’d use when he wrote the essay that was part of his application for the Law Review, which he applied for even though his grades were not as high as they should have been, in the hopes that admission would help get him a job after graduation.

  Even if he failed, he knew that it was time to compete again, to put himself on the line. And in the end, he was lucky—the fictionalized court case that he was to write on called into question the Landmark Preservation Act, the 1965 law that forbade the destruction of buildings that for reasons of history and/or aesthetics contributed to the character and economy of the city. Robert had become fascinated by landmark preservation law—what else could salvage the past, the most beautiful and valuable buildings so often destroyed by the wrecking ball?

  People, he insisted, had a right to live with beauty, to touch their own history. He had grown up in a place that smelled bad, where everyone lived in a carbon copy of the house on either side of it and no one had a yard big enough to throw a football in. What relief he’d gotten had been in the form of public works—the two public pools where he swam for free; the Max Myers Playground, where he learned to play baseball; the Cobbs Creek Park, where, rarely, his father took him to commune with nature (even if nature was sometimes mixed with snack-food wrappers and empty beer cans), and the magnet high school, with its superior facilities and sense of mission, built to attract the city’s brightest regardless of income.

  Those who believed in preservation often cited economics to justify New York’s landmark law—beautiful buildings attracted tourism and business. But the law needed to be about neighborhoods and the people who lived in them. Landmarking was concerned with a specific building, but zoning was about entire districts conforming to a plan that, ideally, benefited the public. The two kinds of laws needed to work together better. He advocated the rewriting of the 1965 law with stricter adherence to the demands of neighborhoods. And when he’d finished his brief and wrote the five-hundred-word personal statement to which he gave scant attention, he suddenly felt that with
out realizing it he had learned something from his first year of school. And he knew something else, as well —he wanted to be a real estate lawyer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Barry to the rescue

  That summer, he continued to work mornings in the law center—they paid a small wage to students who worked over the vacation, but it was more of a stipend than anything like real money. He drove his cab from 4:00 p.m. to midnight and on weekends, though business was slow, even with the Bicentennial. On his lunch break he combed through ads at the career center, hoping for a job, any job, that might help his legal résumé or give him an idea of what his future held, but there were few such jobs to be had—and what positions there were went to students entering their third year.

 

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