Redeployment(86)

We’d met up in Morningside Heights at the railroad apartment he shared with his two roommates. The place was schizophrenically decorated with old “Rage Against the Machine” posters, framed New Yorker covers, and Tibetan prayer flags.

“America is broken, man.” Paul took a swig of beer. “Trust me, you don’t want to be the guy bailing water out of a sinking ship.”

“Iraq vet,” I said, pointing at my chest. “Been there, done that.”

“Me too,” he said. “I’ll throw my middle school tour against your deployment any day.”

“They shoot at you?”

“One day a student stabbed another kid.”

That wouldn’t have trumped Vockler or Boylan, and it sure as hell didn’t trump dead, heroic Deme, but it trumped the shit out of me. Closest I ever came to violence was watching the injured and dying come into the base hospital.

“Saddest thing in that school,” he said, “was the kids who gave a shit. Because, honestly, that school was so f*cked the smart option would have been to check the f*ck out.”

“So what’s the solution? Charter schools? No Child Left Behind? Standardized testing?”

“Yo, I got no idea. Why you think I went to get a master’s in education leadership?” He laughed. “So if you go public interest—”

“I need to make sure I’m not the Band-Aid on a giant sucking chest wound.”





? ? ?


“You’re not doing public interest,” Ed-the-investment-banker told me while the two of us smoked cigars at a James Bond–themed bar that required khakis and nice shoes to get in.

“But I think—”

“How long have I known you? You’re going to a firm. It’s the easy option. Let me break it down for you.”

“Joe says—”

“Joe’s a lawyer. I hire lawyers.” Not strictly true. His bank hired lawyers, though I suppose it doesn’t really make a difference, because a guy like him can make a guy like Joe work until five A.M. if he wants.

“Listen to me,” he said, spreading his hands. “There are fourteen top law schools. Not thirteen. Not fifteen. There’s fourteen that matter. And guess what, congrats, you’re in one of them.”

“NYU is top five.”

“Top six, but who’s counting,” he said. “The top firms, they hire pretty much from those schools. Maybe a handful from schools a bit lower down, a few kids from Fordham or someplace who did amazing and are so shit-hot they learned to shoot fireworks out of their dicks. But for the most part, if you’re not from one of those schools, it’s a hard life trying to get a job in this city.”

“You mean getting a job like Joe’s. And Joe hates his job.”

“Of course he does. He’s at a law firm, not a brewery. He works longer hours than you did in the Corps, and I guarantee that at no point in his life will a complete stranger walk up to him and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ But here’s how it works. All the top firms pay the same, except for one, which is the top, which you’re not getting into unless you too learn to shoot fireworks out your dick—”

“I didn’t know that was an important legal skill.”

“In this city, it is. There’s a million lawyers and only so many really good jobs. Even the top public interest jobs, like the U.S. Attorney’s Office or Federal Defender, tend to hire people from top firms. So everything matters. What school you go to determines what clerkship you get, what firm you work at. If you don’t have the right credentials from the right sorts of places, you’re f*cked.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“Don’t screw around like you did in college. Welcome to adult life. What you do matters.”





? ? ?


I found out about Vockler a month later, alone in my empty apartment, bare walls and one lone chair next to the windowsill where I put my computer. The Corps had accustomed me to spartan living, though I figured if I ever brought a woman home, it’d probably give off a serial killer vibe.

The one thing the place had going for it was the view. Facing midtown from a side street off York Avenue, I had the city from Central Park to the Empire State. Late evenings when I came in drunk, I’d stop and gape at the constellations of apartments. And then, sometimes, I’d open my computer and check DefenseLink. The idea was to go through the Web site to see if anybody I knew had died. On their “Releases” section, there’s a mass of links running down the Web page, and I generally click on the ones that read either “DoD Identifies Marine Casualty” or, if it’s a bad day, “DoD Identifies Marine Casualties.” Then it takes you to a page with the names.