The Corruption of Michael Levitt

By Joel Levine

"The Corruption of Michael Levitt" is a rollicking ride through life seen through the eyes of Michael Levitt--Harvard Law School graduate and survivor of his Long Island childhood.
It's a story of a bright but naïve guy who, while trying to make it in this world is, with the best of intentions, gradually corrupted by the universe in which he exists.
As Michael moves from the high pressure life of an associate in a prestigious New York law firm to the uncharted playground of Miami, the reader is caught up in Michael's personal and professional fast times. Readers will follow Michael through the maze that becomes his life—underworld business dealings, sex, drugs, friends and enemies, and ultimately murder- enjoying his perceptive, often hilarious view of his own situation.

Michael Levitt's universe is populated by flawed characters and aberrant behavior. The novel is a great read for anyone who just started out anywhere...For anyone who is a lawyer or knows, likes or hates lawyers... Anyone who wants to lose themselves in a decade long saga of hope, ambition, angst, sex, friendship and betrayal...For those who appreciate complex schemes and scams and enjoy laughing at the strangest circumstances...For People who enjoy an intelligent, entertaining and engrossing read and want a book they can’t put down.

The story, while totally unique, feels something like a John Grisham/Woody Allen Odyssey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joel Levine
• Release date: Dec 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465795502

Book preview

PROLOGUE

1942-1969

I come to the end of my childhood. Where dreams lie mainly in the past. Where idealism collides with pragmatism and nothing is ever again done without an eye to the consequences. For the rest of my life, summers will only signify a change of weather. For the rest of my life!

Having observed two bitter generations before me plod through menial, laborious and ill paying work as truck drivers in the ever eroding garment industry, I fervently hoped to lead a diverse and exciting life. I never dreamt that within a decade of finishing law school I would have been involved with a multitude of serious crimes, unwittingly perpetrated one of the largest real estate frauds in U.S. banking history, wittingly moved billions of dollars of ill-gotten funds several untraceable times around the world, and, with my own hand, committed murder. Who can say that once a man commits murder he cannot lie, cheat, steal, even jaywalk, rip the do not remove label off mattresses and leave bathrooms after urinating without washing his hands. Yet, I still consider myself to be a profoundly moral person, good to those who are good to me and compassionate toward the less fortunate, a civil libertarian believing in equal opportunity and treatment for all members of the human race, even Hezbollah and politicians.

My coming of age took longer than most, intentionally protracted, I imagine, by an unclear vision of my future and some sense of the inevitable drudgery of the pursuit of comfort. After college I attended the best law school in the country, amazed as anyone who knew me that I was accepted. The fourteen hour workdays, including classes and the constant fear of not keeping up with my 800 law board - Rhode Scholar classmates, eroded my spirit and fatty tissue.

As my ability to reason geometrically expanded, I began to resemble my ancestral Dachau relatives. As matter cannot be created nor destroyed, any increase in my mental facilities came at the expense of my physical being. Yin Yang.

Is it a universal law that whenever something gains, something else loses in order to keep a preordained cosmic balance? If a man in Paris is joyful, does a woman in Tegucigalpa suffer? If a child in Russia triumphs in gymnastics, must another die of starvation in the Sudan? Did God really create cancer, blindness, starvation and floods so we would appreciate all the wonderful things the world supposedly offers?

In our cosmic insignificance we try to win from the eternal score sheet as many victories as possible while the balancing hand distributes the losses to our fellow human beings. Maybe if we are blessed, we celebrate our good fortune by trying to alleviate the suffering of others, and, if we can't help the unfortunate, at least spend some time screwing the miscreants who intentionally contribute to the global malevolence.

Surviving at the best law school in the country was hampered by my intellectually repressive upbringing -- no books, no music, no culture, no discussions, and, the only home newspaper, delivered as a by product of my paper route. Any inquisitive expression or childhood curiosity was taken as a challenge to parental authority, founded in deep insecurity and ignorance, and met with slaps in the face for being fresh. From time to time, to demonstrate their versatility, my parents added belts, kitchen gadgets and fists from my 240lb. truck driver (a position my mother described as owner of a trucking company) father. My mother, who goaded her husband into pummeling me, somehow recalls her role as peacemaker because she occasionally saw fit to pull my father off me after he proved he was capable of beating the shit out of a curious teenage boy.

My law school classmates came Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, ninety strong from Harvard, 30 each from Yale and Princeton, and from the top of their classes at Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley and the rest of the best colleges in the country. Their familial, academic and professional pedigrees made me wonder if I was not the poorest culturally, intellectually and economically in this class of '66.

My English dictionary was used as much as my Black's law dictionary as I searched for the meaning of words like adjudicate and federalism which apparently my classmates learned in the prep school womb. Prior to entering law school, I never read a case, took constitutional or business law, observed a trial, read a legal document and never even met a lawyer. The first case I ever read was the evening before my first class.

The Socratic method, almost exclusively used in my day at the best law school in the country, seemed to assume complete knowledge of everything we were about to study. For all I understood, they could have chosen to teach us in Sanskrit, but I assure you had that been the language of choice, my 534 classmates would have been fluent in Sanskrit, including the 103 dialects spoken throughout Ancient India.

The first case in the first textbook in the first course I ever took was entitled Sibbach v. Wilson & Co., Inc., which dealt with compelling an accident victim to be examined under Rules 35 and 37 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for District Courts of the United States. Okay, so now we know that there are some rules effecting Civil Procedure. Of course, I had no idea what civil procedure meant and as far as District Courts of the United States, what other types of courts were there? Tennis courts? There was a Supreme Court or was there more than one - like in each state? Then there were other not so supreme courts. Truly, I was an innocent afloat in a Jabberwocky sea.

Sibbach v. Wilson involved an action by petitioner (the textbook told us that is the party who seeks certiorari) in a District Court for Northern Illinois to recover damages for bodily injuries inflicted in Indiana...

It was my habit in college to underline the more significant lines in the text. Because I was totally unable to understand or distinguish one sentence from the other, every single line in my casebook was underlined. What else does one seek besides certiorari? Would it have made a difference if the District Court was in Southern Illinois? What if the person was injured in Wyoming?

The Supreme Court found that the trial court and the Court of Appeals was wrong in forcing the petitioner to submit to a physical examination because -

Congress has undoubted a power to regulate the practice and procedures of the federal courts...; but it has never essayed to declare the substance of state law, or to abolish or nullify a right recognized by the substantive law of the state where the cause of action arose...

The pain still lingers, but I am pleased to say that most of law school was somewhat easier than Sibbach v. Wilson & Co., Inc. and I did eventually graduate.

I entered law school with fear and determination. During my last year of college, I would walk across campus with tightness in my chest and tears in my eyes convinced that all my classmates were going into their parents' businesses or were otherwise endowed with some unique skill or extended family safety net which I lacked. I knew that whatever I got out of life would be the result of my own indomitable spirit. No one would help me. Whatever battles I had to fight, I would fight on my own and I would survive. I had to.

It's funny how the vicissitudes of life play out against our hopes and plans. There are so many bright hardworking people who make the right choices, and yet, in their later years, suffer abysmal failure, and so many of moderate intelligence who ultimately become great successes. Who knew in the painful but still protected ivy halls how our weaknesses and the changing world would impact our futures, how the lowest would rise to the top and the highest sink to the bottom. How some of us would be cheated out of our legacy and others would thrive beyond rational expectations. Is it because intelligence is overrated? Or because some of us mastered venality, manipulation and deceit, while others followed the prescribed path expecting to be rewarded for hard work and good character?

My 1963 college graduation came at the end of a long period of historical quietude - apathy, imperialism, subjugation, authoritarianism, sexism, deep-seated racism, intolerance - yes, of course. But things seemed so immutable then. So predictable. My classmates and I saw the future with unwavering clarity -- and it was the past.

Kennedy's assassination notwithstanding, no one could foresee the cultural, social and moral upheaval about to rock our country. Ahead we saw the grim predictability of working until our hair turned gray and somehow migrated from the top of our heads to our noses and ears, until our children graduated, procreated and kissed us off, and until senior partnerships were made and presidencies attained. It all seemed so inevitable.

A faint but trusted voice told me that once I was fully immersed in adulthood, experiment, risk and adventure would take a back seat to hard work, responsibility and predictability as I clawed up the slippery rungs of commerce. So, after passing the New York Bar exam in 1966, I went into the Peace Corps, careful to avoid any contentious lawyer program, and joined thirty-six survivors out of fifty-six candidates community developing in Venezuela. What wonderful times, living a life which was so different from anything I experienced before or after that my memories of those days seem like a different incarnation. While hitchhiking by airplane all over Venezuela, learning to speak Spanish and sharing incredible experiences with thirty-six special people still dear to me -- although I see none of them anymore -- I even managed, hopefully, to do some good for the Venies, as we jokingly called the natives. Thereafter, fluent in Spanish, I learned of a legal fellowship program which recruited supposedly exceptional and liberal leaning attorneys to do poverty work throughout the United States. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was in full swing and beckoning me. A brief training in 1968 at the University of Michigan Law School and a remarkable year as a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at the Waterbury Legal Aid Society in Connecticut, protecting the poor in two languages, was my last stand of concentrated humanitarianism.

When I was six years old, my parents gave birth to another son named Fred Richard Levitt. When I was nine and he was three, Fred Richard Levitt developed respiratory problems. For four days, he labored. When his health deteriorated to the point where even my parents and their doctor recognized it, they rushed Fred to the hospital. The next day I was picked up from school by my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Ruby and driven, not to my home, but to theirs in some distant reaches of Queens. I was taken from the car and lead into the house where my tearful parents told me Fred had died. From there, I was basically kept away from my distraught parents and ignored by everyone. If Jeff Weber and Noel Stillman, two neighborhood kids hadn't befriended me, the feelings of utter abandonment may have driven me over the edge.

Why did he die? Why do little children who have done no harm to anyone die? Was it my fault?

The death of one's child is torturous to the parents. It would take remarkable people to recognize the pain of a sibling and give succor during such time. My parents were not remarkable. Of course, Harry and Elsie Levitt were grief-stricken, but at no time, then or many years later, when I wanted to discuss my brother's death, would they ever deal with what happened. I guess they were of the If you don't talk about it, it will go away school. But the only thing which went away was Freddie.

Because of ignorance, neglect or perhaps understandable self-preoccupation of the adults around me, I was forced to keep a lot inside, simmering unresolved, but indelibly imprinted upon my psyche. Only so much frustration and anger can be suppressed for a while, but eventually the inner scream will be heard.

My parents' best friends, George and Elaine Zane were around so much I began calling them Uncle George and Aunt Elaine. Through a rare lapse in communication, Aunt Elaine gave birth to a son on the exact same day my brother was born and named him Fred Richard Zane. For three years my parents and Uncle George and Aunt Elaine would laugh at the odds against naming the boys with the exact same first and middle name. It wasn't so funny after one died and one lived.

While the difference in our ages separated Fred Zane and me during our childhood, the Zane's proximity to Manhattan led me to live at their house once when I was working on construction during a summer vacation and again when I was studying for the New York bar exam. During those periods, I sat around with Fred, his younger brother Louie, his sister Karen, Uncle George and Aunt Elaine, and experienced, for the first time in my life, how children could voice their opinions and disagree with their elders without getting clobbered. I saw how parents encouraged discourse and reasoning. In my house, if I disagreed with my parents, I was told to shut up. If I persisted, I was whacked. We know what's best for you, my parents would often say, Show some respect, I never talked to my mother in that tone of voice. Or perhaps my favorite, This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

As the years went by and I learned to reason and marshal facts, my folks became even more protective of their diminishing power over me. It was not until I lived with the Zanes at age 22 that I first realized I came from a dysfunctional family. 22 years old and I thought all parents discouraged their children's expression, banging them around from time to time just to show the righteousness of their intellectual positions. What a wonder to discover families actually encouraged their children's curiosity, questioning and debate.

The bond between Fred Zane and me grew and although the six year age difference was still significant, we began sharing many experiences while I was in law school. When Fred came up to interview at Harvard undergraduate, we spent a terrific weekend together sleeping with Deidre, a magnificent bohemian art student at Simmons college in Boston's Back Bay. Fred even learned to drive when I loaned him and Deidre my beat up stick shift Volkswagen Bug.

It was Fred who convinced me to finish out my Reginald Heber Smith Community Poverty Lawyer Quasi Eleemosynary Fellowship in Cambridge in the summer of 1969. Now in his junior year at Harvard, Fred planned on taking physics at Harvard summer school, applying to med school, and completing his senior year in New York City in a special mayoral internship for exceptional college seniors. Fred introduced me to a few Harvard classmates who needed someone with Peace Corps and community activism experience to prepare a training manual teaching others how to organize, protest, influence and change the Establishment. Fred found a triplex house on the Charles River vacated for the summer by a wealthy women's shoe manufacturer and promised to set a ceiling on the rent I'd have to pay. Moreover, for three years I'd been working so hard for others in the Peace Corps and as a poverty lawyer, I almost missed the sexual revolution which had apparently occurred when I wasn't paying attention. Fred promised to remedy the situation with alacrity - The summer of '69 Cambridge, Massachusetts a fully furnished triplex, free love, psychedelica. Did I mention free love? The summer of '69 where an earth mother from Radcliff gave me the choice of Woodstock or a weekend on LSD walking along the Charles River screwing our brains out to the sounds of Blood Sweat & Tears and Bob Dylan. Lay Lady Lay.

August 1969 wound to a close. The mud of Woodstock washed off the feet of the love children forever and I became certain that the men on the moon was not a drug hallucination. I realized with sadness, trepidation and excitement, my childhood was over.

I

NEW YORK

1969-1973

CHAPTER ONE

I graduated from Law School $22,500 in debt. In 1966 you could buy a house for $22,500. It didn't have to be $22,500, but when I tried to assist my father in filling out the financial aid forms, he told me, Just because you got into Harvard Law School, doesn't mean you now know everything, wisenheimer.

I responded, But dad, you've never done this before. There's a very simple trick. You just have to be sure...

Look, I've run a business my whole life, he interrupted. I know what I am doing and I don't need your help.

Okay Dad, but if you have any questions, ask! Just be sure it looks like I need a scholarship.

In the back of my mind I was fearful that he would, out of some sense of false pride, fill out the forms to indicate that Harry Levitt, who according to my mother, owned a trucking company, could provide for his family.

My aid request was rejected. Frustrated, I spoke to the head of financial aid, who, after learning my father averaged less than $8,000 a year, was as equally perplexed as me.

Kindly Ms. Thatcher, the sixty year old financial aid veteran, suppressed an ironic laugh. Michael, she said, I don't understand this, but your application shows that on $8,000 a year, your father is able to pay the family's mortgage, car expenses, insurance, food, clothing and all the little incidentals of life plus your law school room, board and tuition of $10,000. Pure genius.

Ms. Thatcher noted, In all my thirty-four years of administering scholarship funds, I have never seen anyone lie in this direction. Everyone else tries to understate income and overstate expenses showing a deficiency equal to the scholarship or loans they seek. Not my dad. No sir, he showed Harvard he's no slouch.

Ms. Thatcher apologized as if apologizing for the entire adult world and told me that for sure I would receive some financial aid for the second semester. Only this time, I had to be sure to fill out the forms myself. I promised.

Upon learning of my meeting with Ms. Thatcher, my father challenged, Well, I never did this before, Michael. How was I to know?

I had to feel for dear old Harry working his ass off on the truck, waking up every morning at 5:00 a.m. driving to Brooklyn because he couldn't afford a garage in New York. Sweating in the unairconditioned truck in the summer and freezing in the unheated truck in the winter, my father lifted the raw material of men's suits and pants hundreds of times a day, thousands of times a week, day in and day out, in all weather, in terrible traffic, dodging tickets for double parking in the narrow streets of Manhattan's garment district, and, finally, picking up the finished suits and having them stolen off the truck when he returned for another load.

My father always told me, When you work for pennies, you earn pennies. He would receive a quarter of a cent per pound for the raw material and an eighth of a cent for each suit he delivered. The suits hung in the sweatshops on rolling racks resembling portable closet poles, only he was not allowed to take the hanging racks down for they were needed in the factory. My dad had to bring his own rolling racks, lift the suits ten or fifteen at a time, spreading both arms and grabbing as many hangers as he could hold and transferring them to his own rack. Then, he would wheel the rack out and down the filthy freight elevator into the street. Because the racks were too heavy to lift when full and he could not afford an electric lift on the truck, and cramped parking spaces precluded long ramps, he then had to reverse the process, lifting the suits from the rack on the street to the racks in the truck, each time climbing into the truck and hanging the suits on the built in bars and repeating this process over and over until each rack was empty. He also lifted the pre-cut cloth either in tied bundles or in large canvas baskets weighing between 100 and 200 pounds. Hundreds of times a week, thousands of times a month, a million wearing times though his life?

I was always grateful to the various institutions which lent me money to obtain an education and I swore I would repay every cent. I never could understand why students defaulted on their loans. The legal and moral obligation seems overwhelming. When again in one's life will people be so generous, help at such a critical juncture and make such an impact on your future? In any event, I not only wanted to repay my student loan, but, having used Law School, the Peace Corps and poverty work to avoid responsibility for six years now after college, I began to feel that if I didn't join the parade, it would pass me by.

There was nothing I wanted to do. I always admired people who had a great passion to direct, paint, design, act, practice medicine or explore New Guinea. My passion was to do well. It was never directed in a specific area, so I took inventory. At 5'10 I was not going to be a center for the New York Knicks; tone deaf, Frank Sinatra had nothing to fear; and average looking on the cute side, I was attractive to women but would never adorn the pages of GQ or Esquire. I had the opportunity to marry rich, but being more of a romantic than I realized, could only marry for love. My mom always said, Rich or poor, it is good to have money. Mom always said, Why marry poor when you can marry rich. My mom always said, Get out of the bathroom with that magazine." However, as I began to realize that my mother's brain was an intellectual wasteland, I tended to ignore her imprecations, maybe even rebelling too far in the opposite direction.

So, here I was one week left with the flower power generation in Cambridge, a degree from Harvard Law School, membership in the New York Bar, Peace Corps and Poverty Law experience and an average sized penis. My classmates from law school were not inclined to fritter their lives away in long term humanitarian endeavors and I was rapidly falling behind my peers. If I did not join the traditional legal community, I would soon be too old to ever enter the commercial practice of law. As it was, many firms wouldn't consider me because, at three years out, I had zero commercial law experience. Why employ an old man of twenty-eight when they could get a ripe young law school graduate of twenty-five, the mind all the more malleable. I had no family contacts, no special prospects, and a leg up because of my legal training. In the calculus of life, the equation resolved that I should seek work at a law firm.

Awash with a jumble of conflicting emotions, I visited the law school placement service to obtain a list of law firms seeking individuals like me. They informed me that, (a) there was no alumni placement service, (b) the best they could do is give me a list of firm's which recruited seniors last semester. Hundreds of law firms placed recruitment notices on the law school bulletin boards during senior year, so I assumed this procedure would continue long after we graduated. I was wrong.

I realized I wasn't very sophisticated in these matters. I really didn't know what to do. Almost everyone at law school had gotten jobs from their senior interviews with the recruiting firms. I did have a second year summer clerkship at a law firm in Tucson, and while I'm not certain how much weight I gave to the fact that a disgruntled associate shot and seriously wounded the senior-most partner, in any event I did not want to return to the stagnant land of sagebrush and cactus.

Most of my Harvard classmates were well into the practice of law and I, a total neophyte, felt uncomfortable calling for advice. I was only really close to Daniel Ferry and Ron Baylor. Unfortunately, Daniel was practicing in Chicago, but did suggest I look in the classified section of the New York Times for headhunters. Ron seemed more promising. He was practicing in the antitrust department of Williams, Talbert & Young, a 220 man international law firm engaging in most aspects of commercial practice. Ron said he had to be in Boston on business and suggested we meet for lunch at Donatelle's, a posh Italian restaurant with large private booths.

He greeted me with the news that he was extremely angry at me, but because we were once friends he would help me a final time.

Once? I thought. What was going on here?

I had the list the placement service gave me of law firms recruiting third year students and thought I would run them by Ron. He studied the list and out of 122 firms crossed off 67.

What is this? I asked.

Firms which don't hire Jews, he glared.

I stared unbelievingly as he continued, Did you know there are secret eating clubs and societies at Harvard where Jews aren't invited?

Later that day I called Daniel in Chicago and asked him if he knew of any of this and he, too, had been in the dark. He was not aware there were secret organizations to which the WASPs, preppies, debate champions, and intelligentsia belonged. The lower middle class Jewish public school caste was ostracized without ever knowing it.

Ron continued to tell me, with an edge of reprobation, You are three years behind the class and most firms won't take you because they could get recent graduates in their training program for less money.

I wouldn't ask for any more money than a recent graduate, I countered.

That's a choice you probably won't have, he replied with veiled pleasure.

I asked Ron, What am I perceiving here? I sense a fair degree of animosity.

Ron replied, You always prided yourself on being so socially aware and so perceptive, but you didn't know shit or you ignored it. We always discussed your dates and the fact that I never went out. You tried to fix me up with a girl once and I gave you a platonic report back. I never went to social functions. You must have known that I was gay.

My mouth dropped. I, who had attended gay parties in 1959 and considered myself aware of people's idiosyncrasies, preferences and natural tendencies, didn't, for the love of me, sense this at all. So, when I taught you how to swim at the Y and I was holding you up and we were floating along, you were thinking of me as a lover, not a friend?

Maybe. I think so, Ron wavered.

You never said anything. You never intimated. You never showed it. You never hinted and never discussed it. We were very close. We discussed everything. We went out to eat all the time. You and I spent more time together than I did with anyone at law school. Why didn't you say something?

Ron, still snippy, replied, Because you should have known.

You were one of the smartest guys in the school. I was open and candid with you about everything. I was so experimental and adventuresome had you told me, who knows, maybe we would have jerked each other off, but you didn't say a thing, I paused reflectively. Well, at least we would still have been friends. Did you think I'd abandon you if you told me you were gay?

Not abandon me. But when it came time to share a place while we studied for the New York Bar, you said you were uncomfortable, but you couldn't explain it.

So, there! I couldn't explain it. I did feel uncomfortable, because I was interested in women, dating, partying and sports and you were never interested in any of that stuff. Other people I knew were.

And after our second year when everyone was moving off campus, you didn't want to room with me, Ron continued.

I didn't say I didn't want to room with you. I said that I wanted to room with you and Daniel. You didn't want to room with Daniel, you wanted to room with me alone and I didn't want that.

Why didn't you want to room with me? You were much closer to me than Daniel?

This sounds like a lover's quarrel for Christ's sake. We were good friends. So now I know what made me feel uncomfortable, but we were also so different we wouldn't have made good roommates.

Yes, we would have. Just like we were good friends and went out to eat together and studied together. Just like we had a good time during our first year, we would have also clicked as roommates.

No, we wouldn't have. It is more clear to me now than it ever was and you know damn well that's true. I can tell from this discussion. We wanted different things from the roommate situation. But we were good friends and I don't understand why we can't still be friends?

I'm still pissed at you for not writing to me from the Peace Corps and when you got back you wouldn't even consider us rooming together...

Ron, let me stop you. All of this is the same issue. It's about me not responding to your desire to be roommates. For a bright guy you're missing the point. We would not have made good roommates.

Look, Michael, you hurt me. You weren't a good friend. You pride yourself on friendship...

Which I do, I maintained.

...but you were a lousy friend to me so this is what I am going to do. I am going to help you this once and then I never want to have anything to do with you again.

Look, your mind is obviously made up and you set this whole thing up so that you could get me alone when I needed you and have your hurtful say, but this is ridiculous. Now that I know you're gay and you know I know, why don't we just go on being friends?

Because you are not a good friend.

Okay, fine. You want to split?

Ron replied, This is my advice to you. You want to go to work for one of the Jewish firms. There are lots of them, especially midtown, which at least gives you the advantage of being in the better part of the city. I don't know of any looking for attorneys because I travel in a different world, but look in the classified section of the Sunday Times for the headhunters or law firms advertising for people and apply there.

Okay, look Ron, if you change your mind, and I hope you do, give me a call, the door is open.

I won't, he said as he walked out leaving me with the check.

I returned to the house drained but focused. I value friendship highly and am always there when my friends need me. Ron and I did share some experiences which I would almost describe as great times if they did not occur in such a difficult setting for me. Ron was truly a unique person. A polymath with 800 law boards, national debating finalist in three years of college, magna cum laude at Haverford which he attended on a full scholarship. Because he made the time consuming Harvard Law Review after his first year, he did not attend many classes in his second year. Ron and I were in the same Estate Planning class, although I never saw him after the second week. On the eve of the final, Ron came to my dorm room and asked me to show him what we had studied during the year. I opened my dog-eared, underlined, highlighted and well-worn text, and identified all the pages we were assigned. He literally cracked open his pristine unmarked text and began to check off the entire syllabus which he read that evening. Ron got an A in Estate Planning. I got a B-.

While I was shocked and disappointed by our lunch, I steeled myself against adversity. If Ron was not going to be my friend, I was certainly going to use his parting advice well.

CHAPTER TWO

I guess it was logical to move to New York City with Fred. New York was my home. I passed the New York bar. I had an idea how to go about looking for a position. And Fred, eager to start his New York City Mayoral Internship, found a neat West Village apartment on Jane Street. Uncle George and Aunt Elaine were going to furnish it. Fred would share a bedroom with a high school friend of his, Randy Garn, and I could have my own smaller but private room. We'd split the rent three ways.

It was an uncomfortable muggy New York Friday in September of 1969. Randy was off registering at Columbia University for his doctorate in psychology. Randy it seemed would spend innumerable hours studying sleep deprivation in the basement of the Robert Strand - an area assigned to poorly funded struggling new behavioral sciences disciplines.

Our air conditioning wasn't working properly and our landlord, recent beneficiary of our first and last months rent and two months security deposit, was blaming us for breaking it. For no reason at all I was annoyed at Fred, feeling his sacrifice for me was somehow diminished by the recent disclosure of Randy's sleeping arrangements which effectively gave Fred his own (and larger) bedroom. I was irritable. Fred and Randy were excited about their new ventures - ones with fixed hours, known responsibilities and predictable next steps. I didn't know what I was doing tomorrow.

You know, Fred pondered, almost thinking aloud. Some day I want to change my name to Frederick.

"To confirm to the world that you are a full grown putz? You're a Fred. A regular guy. A good person. The day you change your name, you will announce that the spirited young you has died and some pretentious asshole has taken over."

Look, if I do change my name - 'Dr. Frederick Zane', he vocalized testing the new sound like a schoolgirl matching her name with an infinite assortment of possible future mates, 'Dr. Frederick Zane'. Yes it sounds more dignified. A name patients can trust. I'll be a better doctor for it.

No, you won't. What you'll do is prescribe diet pills, turn patients over every five minutes, perform unnecessary tests, focus on profit margin rather than patient health and wind up suing people who can't pay their bills. That's what goes with Frederick. Fred cares about making a humanitarian impact, a great medical economic contribution, perhaps a national health care system or something. Fred cares about how people feel, not how much they can pay, but Frederick only cares about arbitrage and net worth.

Adjusted Gross Revenue and Defined Benefit Retirement Plans, Fred added absentmindedly.

Don't you have to enroll in the Mayoral internship today?. I quickly said, peeved more with my free floating anxiety than Fred's innocuous ruminations.

Yeah, Fred said, glancing at his watch obviously eager to terminate this dialogue, catch ya later.

I left Jane Street and walked to a local newsstand on 6th Avenue to pick up a copy of the Sunday papers.

What, are you crazy? the newsstand attendant exclaimed, It's Friday.

Don't you have last Sunday's issue of the Times? I asked.

We tend to get Sunday's papers on Sunday, he replied with typical New York irascibility. Usually sell out by noon, so you're about four and a half days late.

I walked around the city smiling at single girls who ignored me. I guess I looked about seven years younger than my 27 years at the time with my black-rimmed glasses and clothes from an earlier century. I definitely did not have the look of a successful Manhattan attorney. Perhaps this was because I wasn't a successful Manhattan attorney. The combination of looking much younger than my years, wearing rather unattractive glasses and dressing like a reject from a university thrift shop, caused few smiles to be returned. It didn't take me long to notice what had been chic for college girls was not so appealing in the general populace where the average age was no longer 19. Most of the single women were older than I and seeking men who at least appeared to be, or would soon be, successful.

Some of the toughest street basketball is played in New York City playgrounds. I paused to watch at the well trodden 6th Avenue and 13th Street al fresco arena. The sides seemed to have been chosen blacks against whites. The competition was rough but equal. I was enjoying the skill of these playground athletes. I was not a bad athlete myself and even made twelfth man on my high school basketball team. After being called off the bench ice cold to embarrass myself in front of my Sky Lake classmates for two or three minutes every Friday night during my junior year, I concluded my time was better spent humiliating myself one person at a time in a futile adolescent attempt to engage in various sexual activities. Now, many years later, my basketball skills had diminished considerably but I still admired the incredible coordination of these athletes. Immigrants asked what sport they had the most trouble learning -- baseball, football, or basketball, almost always say basketball. The ambidextrous nature of the game plus the constant movement, stamina, peripheral vision and hand eye coordination is extremely difficult to master.

With my face pressed to the chain link fence, I watched the two teams become an undulating pendulum swinging first to one side of the court and then the other. Each turn at the ball heralded new opportunities. From time to time, one player or another would matter of factly holler the score,

Niggers eight, Honkies six.

Honkies eight, Niggers ten.

They were not terms of derision, simply the agreed delineation of teams. The tone and subtext no different than, Shirts 12, Skins 10.

Lost as I was in this reverie of eternal motion and renewal, I was startled when a voice behind me asked plastic surgery? gently touching my face.

Her touch gave me chills, although I never thought of the top of the forehead, bridge of the nose and orbital eye area as an erogenous zone.

Huh? I cleverly replied.

Those lines on your face.

Oh, I said realizing that the fence made Frankenstinian indentations which I had been unaware of until that moment.

The woman stood close at an angle behind me and I couldn't as much see her as feel her presence. I barely felt the outline of her breast brushing against my side but it didn't take long after two weeks of externally imposed abstinence to feel carnal stirrings. Fred's promise of immersing me into the sexual morays of the '60's had been fulfilled and I was accustomed to having one form of sex or another with zealous young women two or three times a day. The moment I became a landed immigrant on the shores of Manhattan Island