Day 51 of 365 (Or the Beginning of a Tale Whereby our Hero Finds Himself Wedged Between a Lesbian and a Gay Man under a Twin Bed While a Glock Waving Lunatic is Seeking Vengeance. Our Hero is of course Praying that His Parents Will Not Have To Read About his Demise in the Local Newspaper – it is a long story and will be told in several parts).

My troubles all began when I first graduated law school. The Law and I were not tight you see. For whatever reason and I am pretty sure other who enter law school seeking certainty, my legal education took my moral compass and spun it about quite wildly. The people most drawn to the law, the folks that believe that there exists ultimate principles and that those principles are codified and knowable, are the least suited for the law. Law school teaches you that with words and wily artifice you may say black is white and that a cow in this context is a horse. Lawyers live in the area of uncertainty where rules fail. When everything is arguable that what fixed morale principles are left to guide you? The spinning of that compass lead me to beer.

While I don’t publicize this fact I don’t hide it either. The first time I took the bar exam in the great State of Michigan I failed it. Despite three years at the University of Jesuit Knowledge I had not really anticipated how much of law was simply business, buying, selling and trading and all the things that could go wrong in those processes. In reality the core of law was arguing about who had the monetary responsibility for grandiose fuck ups in the manufacturing and delivering of widgets. . In each and every year of law school I struggled with the Uniform Commercial Code. I passed the courses but those were the courses I got 2.1 s in. Constitutional law, contract law in the abstract, those I did well. I was a truth seeker; I was drawn to ultimate moral rules. In Constitutional Law I set or helped set the curve.

When you graduate law school you are a doctor of law but you are not a lawyer. To be a lawyer you must pass an exam showing mastery, showing creativity and showing the ability to think quickly. While you may have gotten the knowledge to face the questioning of the masters of the legal profession at some point in your law school experience time had lapsed. Arcane issues like the fee tail in property may have become buried under more recent concepts like original intent versus the living constitution.

To deal with what had been lost to time as I passed through law school I like every other bar student took a preparation course. At the time I took the bar the first time I was living in Detroit. Each day I would trudge off to do clerking work drafting briefs asserting that it was a God given right, a Constitution right to have nipples jiggling in your face as you drank beer. I was working first amendment law then. Yup I was defending the constitutional right of communists to assemble and the constitutional right of strippers to dance in bars where alcohol was being served. If you can’t tell my career path defending the constitution was on a high moral arc. This was the purity of the law I had so desired to defend.

The bar review course I took was the Josephson Bar Review. Funny thing about that, one or two of the lecture were actually taught by Barry Josephson. Does that name look familiar? He doesn’t do bar review anymore. He has moved on and is now the producer of Bones, the television show. Some people like Mr. Josephson saw the writing on the wall that said the law is a suck ass profession. He got out and he got rich. One of my closest buddies simply went up north and bought a canoe livery.

Each night as the exam approached the other lemmings and I would arrive at a room in the law school the prep course had rented. We would then spend three hours trying to create mnemonics that when faced with an oddball question on a bar essay prompt we could use to craft an answer. Go ahead, I dare you, ask me about a bill in the nature of interpleader damn it.

After the night of trying to cram a one specific year’s worth on knowledge into my head we would head out to relieve the pressure that had build up in our brains. This in my case usually meant going to the Post Bar on West Congress. On a pale green wall that ran the length of the building someone had written in magic marker, “You can only give yourself away for free so many times.” Yeah the Post was that kind of place.

When exam came it was clear that my balance of time between the post and the lecture hall had not bee well spent. It is the clarity you get when you realize you are entering into a spin on an ice covered road, oh yeah I was driving too fast. I chocked. I gagged. I fell flat on my face on a question about a bogus check and a question on taking a security interest in grain being transported in a railroad car. I might have stumbled on the meaning of FOB also (Freight on Board) too.

When the bar results came the bar examiners posted on the doors of all the law schools in the state. Hearing word the results we in I ran from my office in the Cadillac Tower in downtown Detroit to the University to see if I had made it. I hadn’t.

At the time to pass the bar in Michigan based solely on the multistate portion (multiple choice) of the test you had to get 150 points. Both times I took the exam I got 149 points. With 150 points they didn’t even bother to grade your essays. On the first go round I had essay scores of 8, 9, 10 until you got to commercial transactions. On those U.C.C. questions I had 1s or 2s. Later when I was having an informal conversation with the head of the bar examiners he told me personally that he had never seen a person get a 149 and fail on the essays.

At that point I had to make a decision.