The Writer’s Predicament

 

I thought you might enjoy this little story, especially since it’s true.

I’ve done some things that I suppose people would look at and say, “Hey, that guy’s pretty smart.” But I’ve also done some stupid things, and in my late-thirties, I wasn’t making any money to speak of and I decided I needed to make a major change. So I took the LSAT, the test people have to take to get into law school, and I did it without taking any prep courses like everyone takes now. The score I made, along with the grades I’d made in college over the course of my twenty-year undergrad career, got me into the University of Tennessee College of Law. Good for me, I thought. Maybe you won’t be poor if you can get through this place.

Persistence and toughness got me through law school, because I was thirty-eight years old when I started, I was a husband and father, I had a part-time job, and I was commuting more than two hundred miles a day. I made that commute for three years. I’d get up at 4:30 a.m., leave a little after five, drive the hundred and ten miles campus, study a bit, go to class until noon or two or three, depending on the schedule, drive another hundred and ten miles home, do my best to love my wife and kids, study, work, blah, blah, blah. I’d listen to cassette tapes about contract law and criminal law and tort law and civil procedure during the drives. I drank a lot of coffee.

I remember I used to get tears in my eyes occasionally when I would think about walking across the stage at graduation while I was driving to and from Knoxville day after day after day after month after month after year after year. Graduation always seemed so far away, and the process was so difficult, and I’d think about it finally being over and how proud my wife and kids would be and I’d tear up. And then it finally happened. Graduation day arrived. Kristy, my wife, said to me on the drive down to my graduation ceremony, “I won’t believe it until I see your name in the program.” I said, “Thanks a lot.”

When we got there, I went into the building to put on the robe with all my classmates and my wife and kids and my mother and my grandmother had to go sit in the audience. There weren’t any programs available to the graduates while we were getting ready, so I didn’t know if my name was in it. I was relatively certain my name would be in the program, because I figured somebody would have told me if it wasn’t, but Kristy had spooked me, so I wasn’t going to believe it until I walked across the stage and the dean of the law school “hooded” me. (They call it a “hooding ceremony” when you get a doctorate, which is what a law school degree is. A doctor of jurisprudence.)

So I got in line and walked into the auditorium with all the other graduates and I sat down and looked around and spotted Kristy and she was holding a program and she gave me a thumbs up.  My name was in it. I had graduated. I felt a sense of relief like I’d never felt in my life, but I also felt this strange sense of rebellion, a sense that I’ve felt before and that has never done anything for me besides get me in trouble.

I didn’t care much for law school, especially the arrogant professors who had never actually practiced law and who flirted with the pretty young girls. I didn’t care much for the fact that they’d put me through three years of hell and hadn’t taught me a damned thing about the actual practice of law. There was a dean of students at the law school with whom I’d had a nasty encounter who was arrested for possessing child pornography a couple of months before I graduated. His name was Pollack, may he rot in kiddie porn hell forever. Maybe I disliked it because I was fifteen years older than the rest of the students and had developed a keen sense of cynicism, or maybe it was because it was just so freaking hard, or maybe it was because I’m just a jerk by nature. But once I was certain my name was in the program, once I was certain I had graduated, this irresistible impulse took over my mind and my body. I had to get out of there. So what I did was, I walked onto the stage from the right, went through the hooding, walked off the left side of the stage, turned right, and walked out of the auditorium. I didn’t go back and sit with the students, didn’t finish out the ceremony, didn’t toss my cap with the rest of the graduates, didn’t hug anybody, didn’t take any pictures. I just left.

About halfway to the car, I looked back and sure enough, here came Kristy, along with the rest of the fam, hurrying across the parking lot. Kristy was smiling. My mother was not.

“I knew you’d do that,” Kristy said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. I told your mom you’d leave and she said you wouldn’t dare.”

“She looks mad,” I said.

“She is. I bet her ten dollars you’d leave. She owes me.”