And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?

- Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"

The distant streetlights faded as the woods closed in. I smashed into the brush at full speed, darting between the crush of thin trees sprouting out of the snow in every direction like a massive bamboo patch. I fell sideways, forward, backward - slipping on icy leaves under the snow, tripping over dead branches, stumbling on the uneven terrain meeting my feet at odd angles. The hood of the ski parka was tight over my face, barely allowing me any peripheral vision. My head was down as I barreled through the trees, half sideways, as if I were a running back guarding the ball from being stripped, using the jacket as a shield for the jagged branches whipping me as I passed. Two, three, five... maybe a dozen times I found myself hoist on a branch jousting into me. Pain didn't register; forward was the only thought in my head.

About a hundred yards into the woods I ran headlong into the barbed wire. It wasn't a prison barbed wire fence; not a wall of mesh topped by a line of barbs arranged on an overhang. There were no posts holding it in place. Just a handful of rusty jagged wires, layered about four or five inches apart, starting a couple feet off the ground, running to near chest height, tacked from one large tree to another. Whose it was, why it was there, what it was meant to fence in, are mysteries. I can only conclude it was some sort of crude border, from a time when stepping on another man's useless watershed land meant something. I never saw it until I was doubled over, caught on its thorns. "Motherfucker." I tore the North Face jacket off, bunched it atop the wires and leaned over it until my weight pulled the top wire down and I tipped over to the other side. Once on the ground, I laid there in the snow, exhausted, certain I was done. The cop would be on me in seconds. Still, I didn't look back. All I saw were tree trunks pointing north into the moonlit sky.

After about 30 seconds, I realized I was freezing, shaking from a combination of low blood sugar, dehydration and what I figured were the first twinges of hypothermia. I sat up, looked back and saw nothing but branches and snow. No flashlights, no figures crunching through the forest toward me. Nothing. I'd escaped. Now where the hell was I? I knew which way the open field was, but I couldn't go that way. The cops could have been waiting for me to come back out. I had to keep plowing ahead.

Ten years old and lost in the woods is scary. You're going to get the Riot Act for being home three hours late. But still it's an adventure. There's a thrill and independence in being lost. Twenty four, cursing to yourself and stumbling around the woods in the freezing cold like an escapee from a psych ward is a different experience. The first ten minutes you find yourself crashing through the dark aimlessly, waiting to run into the street or a yard. Neither comes. Flashes of "Deliverance" pass through your head. Paranoia creeps in... People die in the woods. You're weak, delirious and you need a bed. How did you get lost so close to campus? What were your steps? You look back in the snow to gauge direction. The prints wind through the brush like spaghetti, twirling around trees, weaving back and forth. They might be straight. They might also loop around in one big circle. It feels like you're in one of those videos re-enacting the final moments of a plane crash. You know up from down, the horizon from empty sky, but any semblance of where you are or where you're headed is lost. Plunge ahead and hope. This isn't the Siberian wilderness. Statistics are on your side. There's got to be a house ahead somewhere.

I didn't find a house, but I eventually popped out of the woods onto a busy road about a mile from campus. I walked it back a mile and half, until I came to an intersection I recognized near Nemish's place. I stumbled into his living room and passed out on a couch. The place was a refrigerator; a cracked picture window in the front of the house leeched frigid air all over the first floor. I nestled into a fetal position on the filthy couch and pulled the ski parka over me. My adrenaline stores were dead and every joint in my body starting to ache. I felt the lacerations on my hands and face from the braches tearing at me as I ran. My feet were numb and my jeans soaked in ice water to the knees. I laid there shivering for hours, unable to sleep, too drunk to drive to a hotel, too beaten to walk across town to Spalding's to see if they had an empty bed for me.

Any hope of sleep I'd had ended with the sunrise. I stumbled to the kitchen, guzzled a 16 ounce Keystone Light to stave off any hangover, marched outside, hopped in the car and headed back to law school. I reached _________ around noon, went to bed and slept through to the next day. The phone woke me at 10:00 a.m.

"Yeh, hello."

"Mr. ___________?"

"Yes."

"This is Chuck DeNardo, head of campus security at _____________." Shit. Spalding had caved... He'd given me away. "We have reason to believe you were involved in a breaking and entering on campus two nights ago."

I didn't respond. I didn't know how. Embarrassment? Mea culpa? Feigned ignorance? Chuck had me by the balls. He knew me. I'd bought him drinks. Chuck was a closet boozer who hung around a campus bar I'd frequented. Everyone bought him drinks. Everyone liked Chuck. Campus security could've been major hard-ons. They'd had a mandate from the school to bust our house when we threw midweek keg parties. Instead they'd give us a warning. Chuck was a pragmatist, and a lazy one at that. He understood; no zero tolerance horseshit. He knew my name and probably my history... Of course I'd broken into the place. Lying was futile.

"Look, Chuck. I don't know what happened. It was just one of those things. We didn't intend to do it. It just kind of erupted, you know, and..." He cut me off. "Yeh, I understand, but you're a graduate now and it's a crime. It's out of my hands. They report it to the local police." I'd confessed before I knew the procedure. My mouth was open for ten seconds and I'd made the hole exponentially deeper. That's all it takes.

"But I just graduated last year. There's got to be some sort of thing you can do. You don't want to prosecute alumnae. I mean... I'm in law school. I think it'd screw up my career. I think they'd throw me out."

"You're not a student anymore."

"But I--"

"I'll tell you what. I'll see what I can do."

Was it just that quick? One day you've got the privileges of youth; the next you're a criminal?

Yes. People love to break life into "Stages." These "Stagers" navigate it with a guide book of status quo behaviors observed by others they can comfortably follow at different points. As they reach the milestones, whether they want to or not, whether it feels right or it doesn't, they act like other people in the category to which they think they belong. I was at a party recently where a person offered me and an old college buddy some shots. I didn't feel like getting ripped, so I declined. My buddy said he didn't drink hard alcohol anymore. I asked why. He said he had kids and his wife didn't allow it. The friend was by no means an alcoholic or anything close to it, and I could tell from the way he eyed the bottle in the offeror's hand he really wanted a shot. No dice; he was a Dad now. I considered asking him to explain the difference between the wine he was drinking and the liquor in the bottle held before him. I thought about asking him why hard alcohol was verboten. His wife was hovering in the corner. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bow; she wore a broad Jackie O smile; the clothes were what my wife's friends would call "Talbot's Mothball Specials." Stepford Uber-Alles. My buddy wasn't a Dad - he was playing one on television.

The simplest mind can assign certain actions to certain ages. At 20 you do This; at 30 That; at 40 Something Else. We're pack animals, observing what's around us and following the herd. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a simple survival instinct. Fold into the center of the gazelles and you're protected from the leopard. And for a shrewd operator, looking proficient's an easy ticket to a fat salary. Everyone knows a grifter who's conned his way up the ladder on self-promotion and Looking the Part. A slice of people know perception's reality... a very thin slice. The rest are the Royal Blue Shirt Crowd.

Around 1995, I saw a royal blue dress shirt hanging in a clothing store in London. It was a deeper color of blue than any men's shirts I'd seen before, so I bought a couple. I wore them for about four years, until they started falling apart. When I went to replace them, there were a million different varieties of the shirt hanging in every men's store in Philadelphia. Around the same time, I noticed the shirts started popping up in the office. It was a natural marketing phenomenon - some Madison Avenue geek decided around 1998 that royal blue dress shirts would be the "in" thing. There was probably a glut of the fabric in Taiwan or the Philippines at the time. The shirts multiplied like Gremlins in a water park. The Fashion Forward crowd followed the trend, as they always do. That's not the interesting part.

The interesting thing was watching how the shirts spread. They didn't color the whole male population at once. They jumped from group to group, like water filling one compartment then moving to the next in a sinking ship. First a few young hipster associates bought them. After three or four of them had the shirt, everyone in the young associate group suddenly had it. To borrow from Malcolm Gladwell, there was a "tipping point" where even the most conservative white pinpoint collar wearers in the circle decided the stigma of being left behind the herd outweighed the risk of looking unprofessional. From that group, the shirt spread to the partners. The mid-forties recently divorced lawyers who fancied themselves players (the fake tan and manicure crowd) bought them first. The fiftiesh bald-with-a-beer-gut crowd followed, shamed by their last remnants of aesthetic dignity into at least trying to keep up with the players. Finally the old partners jumped in, destroying up the look, tagging tacky white collars and cuffs onto the shirt. By 2000, the look was officially Dead, a standard life span for a fashion craze. The queer thing was, the lemmings hadn't run to the cliff in one frenzied mass. They'd gathered for the jump in groups, one at a time, segmented by a combination of shared professional station and age. Experience, the wisdom of years... having seen trends come and go - none of that had any bearing. The process from group to group, from greenest to most seasoned, was identical. The rest of the people at My Stage did it, so must I.

Right out of college, Stagers fall into a "Sharp Young Professional" mode - the belief that by acting hyper-serious, determined and ambitious, one is already halfway to the brass ring. When you're on the subway tomorrow morning, take a look at the 28ish lawyer with the heavy dark leather briefcase in his hands... the guy who looks like David Spade in "PCU." He doesn't need it. It's too thin to be of practical use. It'll barely hold the morning paper and four or five thin court filings with exhibits attached to them. People who know better don't drag those archaic anchors around anymore. But he's carrying it because it's what lawyers carry. Perhaps a relative who was proud of him bought it for him as a present when he passed the bar, or maybe he really didn't know any better. Maybe he has a leather folder with little brass clasps on its corners and a Mont Blanc pen to go with it.

Law firms, and any corporation for that matter, mint mimics at an amazing rate. Copying is the cheapest form of education, and it offers the added benefit of flattering the copied, who set the copier's pay. Every firm I've worked in has been littered with "Career Plagiarists" imitating the behaviors of partners. I understand learning from someone. What I'm describing is full-on personality theft. Would wearing a cotton-candy comb-over, your tie down to your testicles and a constant scowl be a step toward making you Donald Trump? Why would affecting the mannerisms of your mentor or any other older lawyer you might pass in the hall make you partner material? Unless, of course, the people you're trying to impress were Stagers.

The Stagers run a predictable course. The Sharp Young Professional passes 30 and moves into Senior Associate status. He gets hitched, buys a house, has a kid and starts talking with a subtle authority in his voice, as though he's experienced. By 35 he's on the cusp of being a partner. Now he's a politician - every word is measured; everyone's a friend. He listens more than he talks. By 45 he's a partner, either in his first firm or somewhere he jumped to when his first firm didn't make him one. He talks loosely now, mostly about his investments. He might have a humidor in his office. At 55 he's in his prime. He wears Tommy Bahama golf shirts under blazers and bitches about his kids' tuitions. At 60 to 65 he's playing the aged lion. He doesn't bother talking at meetings because he knows at his age, alongside his creaky posture, jowls and whitish grey hair, silence conveys a mind that's seen it all before and has everything figured out on a level none of the younger people in the room would ever understand. He's phoning it in, riding out his last big money years.

The later transitions are smoother because the Stagers are calmer and more experienced. The only one that's always embarrassing is the recent college or law school graduate's attempt to construct a professional persona. It's a second adolescence - a "maturity makeover" contrived as a business might pick up a new marketing campaign.

Sift through the "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," "How to Win Friends and Influence People" or any Tony Perkins speech from the last 20 years and you'll find ample support for proactive staging.¹

As savvy self-marketers as they may be, I'm not having a drink with these people... Which is a much bigger issue for me than them, since they seem to multiply like Irish Catholics, pulling our lives into their scripts from every conceivable angle. One day Mom's telling you the Presidency's in your grasp. The next day you discover beer and pussy. Ten years later you're trying to figure out how you wound up playing a fugitive in some cosmic societal screenplay, charged with acting outside the behaviors written for people at Your Stage.

I sat through a few days of classes wondering what Chuck would do, wondering whether I'd get a call from the _____________ Police asking me to turn myself in at their station. They had a confession from an accomplice. They had fingerprints if they wanted them. They had a campus full of people who could verify I was there that weekend. I had no defense. If they sent my case to the real cops and handled Spalding in house, I could pin it all on him and they'd never win. That didn't matter. The prosecution alone was Doom. I'd have to hire a lawyer. I'd have to show up at a hearing or two, pay a fine... Between that and the four-day-weekend excursions to Washington DC, I'd never be able to go to class. My only hope was to offer Chuck contrition, which wasn't hard. He deserved it. I hadn't annoyed his office enough while I was student? I had to come back to his campus and break into buildings?

Chuck eventually called back. I pleaded for mercy, telling him I'd be thrown out of law school if I were convicted, which was true. I confessed every detail I could recall and apologized, leveling with him - "You know how it is. I forgot I wasn't a student anymore." Chuck asked for a formal letter of apology, to keep in the record if I ever came back and committed any other crimes on campus. I FedExed it the next morning.

My last conversation with Chuck was to confirm he got the letter. "Yes, I got it."

"Great. I really appreciate this and it won't happen again. I really mean that."

"I'd hope you would. Look, we all like to have a good time. You just can't do this kind of stuff anymore."

A few weeks later I was sitting in a Criminal Procedure class, half daydreaming, half following a student named Gary arguing some hypothetical with the professor. Gary was my age, maybe 6'3 and if I had to guess, about 280 lbs, carried like pudding in a trash bag. You recall Gary distinctly because you couldn't miss him, and because he announced to the class during his first week that he was really into volunteer firefighting. Gary wasn't a bad guy, but he liked to argue. "Well, I would demand a preliminary hearing, and I would file This, and argue That, and then I'd make a motion for Something Else." Gary'd hit the books... He was rattling off one procedural move after another at the professor. He even sounded like a lawyer, or at least what television had taught us they sound like. The pronunciation was crisp, deliberate, emphasizing the consonants. Still it all came off wrong... It was being forced and maneuvered out of the mouth of a man in a turtleneck and suspenders, who looked like Ricky from "Better Off Dead." That this suddenly Churchillian orator had all but certainly been masturbating to a frayed Penthouse with meatball sub remnants in his teeth less than twelve hours ago didn't escape me. I'm a big fan of existential progression, but you can't leap from Ham Radio Enthusiast to Smooth Courtroom Operator at funny car speed. There's a transition period...

I thought about raising my hand for a second. "As a person who just successfully pled himself out of an 'indictment' of sorts, my advice is, hope you get a mensch for a prosecutor... Oh, and if you're going to run from the cops, wear a good ski shell in case you have to go over barbed wire." I probably could have offered some insight on plea bargaining. But what would I say? That I'd zenned it? That I'd guessed my opponent was a decent guy and would cut me a break? Life's a lot more reactive than proactive? Some things you can't analyze or control? You make a lot of decisions in the moment, based on scant anecdotal evidence, if you're lucky enough to have that? This was law school... I'd do as well advocating public buggery. I drew pictures on my legal pad and watched the clock.

I'd like to say the pumpkin throwing trip was my last visit back to ___________. It wasn't. I went back for one last bender in the Spring of 1995 with Harris and another friend, Bennett. Most of it's an awful kaleidoscope of slurring incoherent conversations, shouting, falling down, dry heaves, bed spins, bong hits, plastic cups of flat beer, Jagermeister vomit and those instances of terrible lucidity where you realize you're smoking the filter through the tobacco. The only memories are snapshots of moments violent or strange enough to force temporary clarity through a viscous ethanol fog.

Two pieces of mental video stand out. First was Harris suddenly and for no apparent reason smashing his wristwatch to bits in front of a room full of people. It sticks in my head as a piece of pure performance art - no back story at all. A group of us - Harris, Bennett, me and a group of seniors were sitting, drinking whiskey, talking and watching television. Out of nowhere, Harris stood up, put his drink on a table to the side, unclasped the watch from his hand, placed it on the floor, stomped it half a dozen or so times - to a puddle of springs, clasps and casing bits - sat down, picked up his glass, took a swig and jumped back into the conversation. I never asked why; it seemed impolite.

The second was Bennett and I discharging a fire extinguisher through the apartment where we'd been drinking. I remember standing in the kitchen, holding the hose in my hand, seeing Bennett walking toward me through a grey cloud of industrial flame retardant. When it settled, the place looked like the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens - every surface coated in dust. I remember running my fingers over the kitchen table, making a line in the grayish white "snow" and suddenly being overcome with that that sinking feeling we'd gone too far.

"Dude, we have to get the fuck out of here. These guys are going to be pissed." Bennett laughed at my concern.

"They're all tripping. They won't be back for hours." He was right. The seniors who rented the place had eaten acid earlier and were probably lost somewhere in a grassy field on campus, as far as possible from their dingy downtown apartment. The upstairs neighbor used to scream and throw things at his wife. Without the damage we'd inflicted, it was the last place anyone would want to come back to on acid. That didn't stop us from leaving, quickly.

We finally wound up at the apartment of a friend, Katie, where Bennett and I were staying, around what I'm guessing was 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Bennett took a futon on the floor. I sat on the couch next to Katie and watched television. Harris disappeared to the back of the row home, I assumed to get himself a beer.

"Where have you been?" Katie laughed.

"Everywhere." I did not elaborate.

Half an hour or so later, someone pounded on the door. The seniors from the apartment Bennett and I had douched with the fire extinguisher were standing outside with a half dozen friends, arms folded across their chests. I opened the door. Mike, the biggest of them, slammed his finger into my shoulder. "What the fuck is your fucking problem?" I smiled back. They weren't going to fight me. The doses they'd eaten had either worn off or were close to it. They were down, disoriented and feeling the opening swells of an acid hangover. Doc Gooden famously said he only did cocaine so he could stay up and drink more. Doc woke up with hangovers that'd kill the ordinary man, and were more than enough to kill his career. Hallucinogens have a similar effect, but it's involuntary and accidental. In days gone by, before colleges were flooded with Xanax, Ambien and Ativan, when you were peaking on a hallucinogen and thinking you might be losing your mind, alcohol was your sedative. The hook with this was, once you'd flipped into drinking mode, you'd inhale liquor like Jim Morrison. A person on hallucinogens is immune to alcohol's stronger effects. You get slight sedative effect from the first few drinks, but nothing more. Like the 300 cigarettes you'll smoke during a mushroom trip, drinks are just something in your hand - a thing to consume. You'll find yourself guzzling a glass of warm whiskey because, for the first time, you understood what people meant when they said Maker's Mark had a "hint of orange in it." Schnapps is fruit punch; rum soda pop. You'll find yourself slamming beers one after another, two sips apiece, for no other reason than your arms being locked into the addictive repetitive motion of pressing either a cup or a cigarette between your lips.

I knew the mindset of the angry mob facing me on the porch. They'd come home to sleep and found the home a frightening war zone. I couldn't blame them for being mad, but they couldn't hope to fight either on or coming off a psychedelic drug. It's far too intense for the mind of a decent person. In the peak you'd flail, palsied, swatting the air, tripping over your own legs and winding up crumpled on the ground, petting the pavement and begging for mercy. Coming down you'd be jelly; a half sober opponent would ring your bell before you got off a single punch.

Mike barked at me for about twenty minutes - the usual male posturing. "Give me a reason we shouldn't fucking kick your asses."

"Look, I'm sorry dude. I don't know how it got that far out of hand. It wasn't intentional." Of course it was. I hadn't accidentally knocked over the extinguisher, causing it to go off in every room of the apartment. But what was I going to say? The only honest answer was "I can't." No dares; they were acid casualties, but I was far outnumbered.

Mike turned, threw his hands up and walked off the porch. "You're assholes. All of you. Fucking assholes."

I closed the door, bolted it and sat back on the couch next to Katie. Bennett sat up from the futon. "They were fucking pissed," he laughed, fishing through his jacket for a lighter.

"Thanks for all the help."

"You had it under control." He lit his smoke and fell back into the futon.

Harris came running into the room a few minutes later. "What the--?" Katie smacked me on the leg and I turned from the television. Harris was wearing a t-shirt, bright red lipstick smeared all around his lips and face and nothing else. I locked eyes with him for a split second. He smiled and leapt forward, onto the futon, landing next to Bennett.

"I'm going to fuck you." Harris growled, leaning against Bennett, who'd been turned sideways, putting out his cigarette in a beer can next to the futon. "Gimme some."

Bennett turned, looked at Harris and struggled to pull himself away. "Get off me! Somebody, get him off me!"

Harris groped forward toward him. "I love you."

Bennett thrust himself backwards, trying his best to push Harris off the futon while avoiding contact with his lower body. "He's naked. What the hell's the matter with this guy?"

As suddenly as he appeared, Harris jumped up and ran from the room. Bennett looked at Katie and me. I shrugged. "I think you hurt his feelings."

I woke up early the next morning and stepped out onto Katie's porch. A chubby redhead passed with a backpack slung over her green Patagonia pullover jacket. A bearded kid in a filthy "Maryland Lacrosse" hat, khaki shorts and Birkenstocks jumped into a rusty old Saab and peeled out in the direction of campus. The shirt I'd come in Friday was hanging out of my pants, which were turned sideways from wrenching on the couch in my sleep. My neck was kinked from using the armrest as a pillow and all I could smell were the fire extinguisher chemicals coating my sinuses. I sat on the stoop, running my fingers through my hair and rummaging through my pants for a blister pack of antacid tablets. A blonde girl with her hair pulled through the back of a baseball hat started up the stairs to the other side of the double house. "Hello," she chirped. "Hey," I coughed back, staring at her calves as she bounded up the steps. Pert, pleasant... cute. Why wouldn't she be? So it was Monday morning... So what? I stood, stretched and walked to my car.

Most commencement speakers are fat white politicians, CEOs, poets or comedians past their edgy stage. They offer generally decent career advice or a vague charge to clean up the system that's put them in a position to collect $20,000.00 for twenty minutes of platitudes peppered with bits of Jay Leno standup. "Be audacious!" "Never be satisfied." "Dream... never stop dreaming." I graduated from college on a random Monday morning two years after I'd officially graduated, and mine was a bottomless Ziggy Stardust, dry humping a buddy's leg. His address was interpretative dance, crystallizing one concept - one word repeating in my head - "Next." Seemed about right. No need to say goodbye; I'd see them all again, Somewhere Else. I turned the key and gunned the car down the street.

----------
¹ "Proactive staging" being in air quotes, of course.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:52 PM

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