City of Blows by Tim Blake Nelson

Author:Tim Blake Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press

CARTHAGE

By his senior year in college Jacob had already decided on law school. It was 1966 and in spite of having a now deceased father who’d served, he opted not to enlist but to complete the education that same father had coercively predicted for him.

“I’m the first person to go to college in this family,” Isaac Rosenthal had declared. “My father didn’t even finish high school before he came to America. And his grandson is going to go to law school.”

Desperate to leave Illinois and all the confining midwestern mores associated with it, Jacob also craved space to test the “freedoms” about which he’d heard so much, few of which had made it to Illinois colleges with the same potency he’d read of elsewhere. After no small amount of research, Berkeley and only Berkeley beckoned, though he had grades and LSAT scores that could have gained him admittance anywhere.

“Not even Harvard is out of the question,” complained his incredulous mother, suddenly expert on higher education though she had barely finished high school. “And you want to go out there and study with all the crazies?”

“That’s exactly what I want to do.”

“You think you’re going to waltz into a law office with that hair and beard and they’re going to be begging to hire you? Showering you and your Berkeley degree with offers? I don’t know which your father would hate more, the hair and the clothes or not fighting for your country.”

“You really want me in Vietnam?”

“I wasn’t talking about me. I’d kill you if you signed up.”

“I’m glad you clarified that, because you seemed to be complaining about my hair and beard and using what might have been my dead father’s opprobrium to prove your point. And by the way, he sure as shit wouldn’t have wanted me in Vietnam, where we have no business anyway.”

“Enough. You’re not a lawyer yet.”

Berkeley, while he enjoyed the climate, and particularly the winter fog, along with the wild unpredictability at any hour of the day along Telegraph Avenue and the phenomenon of women bedding him on the same day they’d met, ended up a decidedly mixed experience. Yes, he’d embraced the counterculture movement in clothes and grooming, but aspects of its ideology proved his midwestern upbringing in the house of a domineering father had more of a hold on him than he’d imagined.

First, there was the preponderance of liberal Jews, most of them from California, who seemed to be working out mind-numbingly uninteresting issues with their upper-middle-class parents. They spoke and dressed down expensively, haranguing professors and one another about justice, the war, racial and gender equality, the military industrial complex, and most of all the venality of corporate America. They would understand the law in order to tear it down. Then, predictably, he watched the opportunities awaiting Berkeley Law graduates temper their revolutionary fervor as one by one the overwhelming majority matriculated in partner-track positions at white-shoe firms.

Jacob underwent a different transformation. While his peers were being seduced by opening salaries

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