White Man's Problems by Kevin Morris

Author:Kevin Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Starting Out

On a Monday morning in November 1988, Oscar Rothbart pointed at a yellow Post-it note stuck to my faux-leather, semi reclining, office-grade chair on the twenty-first floor of the Citibank Tower in downtown Los Angeles. I was unfocused. It was 10:13 a.m., and I was just getting into my office. Or I was getting into “our office,” since this particular eight-by-ten-foot “junior executive exterior” was also occupied by Rothbart, a French Canadian who started at the firm with me on the same day.

For the first time anyone could remember, through some mistake in planning, some HR fuckup, the twenty-odd new lawyers were paired together in offices. It was April, and we had been sharing since we’d started in the fall. Beginning work at a major law firm seemed strikingly similar to other education cycles: the randomly assigned roommate, the orientation meetings, the new class of people, and the older guys who talked about how great everything used to be. It was like school in these ways but different. This was the mystical real world we’d all been warned about, and, bit-by-bit, it sunk in that the fun of college and the dress rehearsal of law school were done. Some embraced it, and some recoiled. The ones who had been forty years old their whole lives settled in; the eight-year-olds panicked. Playtime was over.

Rothbart looked up. “Hank came here himself looking for you.” He had been named after Oscar Wilde by anthropologist parents in Montreal. “And your phone rang twice.”

Our crowded office struck a contrast to the venerable solitude of the firm. Green carpets and dark walnut trim defined the corridors and lobbies, along with brass lamps, framed clipper ships, and old-time Vanity Fair portraits of solicitors. Rothbart’s side was minimalist, as he was extremely anticlutter. He had a glass desk, and it smelled of antiseptic, which smelled to me like work. The only thing on it was draft interrogatory responses he’d been marking up since he arrived, as he did on all days, at seven. By the time I stumbled in, he’d done as much as I would do in a week. He was a machine, cranking out the mindless work product of a first-year associate. Rumor had it he was already doing footnotes on one of Dave Van Wyck’s appellate briefs. He was, by all accounts, going places.

He was postmodern and sarcastic, and he liked right angles. He was one of those people always chewing gum but not a full piece—just a tiny speck of gray momentarily visible between his molars. He looked the part: average height, good looks, striking designer eyewear. His body was in great shape, as befits the disciplined barrister on the ladder of success. He was natty, treading the line between downtown boring and Westside stylish. He knew to get one-inch cuffs on his pants. His shirts were crisp, he had good ties, and, following a maxim he’d read in Vogue (“If you want to know if a man is well dressed…look down”), he had great shoes.

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