Starting out
As I start this solo legal practice, I am thinking fondly of some of the people that got me to this point.
I went to my first day at my first office job when I was 20 years old. I had dropped out of college the year before to be an artist and live life in the great City of New York. I was not technically destitute, but it was a lean time. It was also an exhilarating time, and the need to have a job and the excitement of getting to know the city went hand in hand. I had already spent time as a busboy on Columbus Ave., a delivery driver on the Upper East Side, and Jenny Holzer’s studio assistant on Rivington, and someone had tipped me off to office temping as an easy way to work shifts when you needed them without being committed to any particular employer. Perfect for me!
So I showed up at a small PR firm with an office in a first floor of a brownstone off Madison. The proprietor was a short, well-dressed woman named Harriet Schoen____. She and her two employees, recent college grad types, were sending out a large client mailing and needed someone to help assemble the packets, the components of which were lying around her office in boxes freshly delivered from the printer. I was wearing a tie, probably, and thrift store slacks, ready to enter the white collar world.
In fact, my job was to move the boxes of print stuff around, then do something else. The boxes were full of glossy print material and looked pretty heavy, so I squatted down to get hold of the first one. But when I started to lift it, the seam at the seat of my pants tore open from the bottom of the zipper nearly to the back belt loop, with a loud, slow sound that made me realize where the phrase “ripping a fart” comes from.
Everyone was silent as I stood up and looked around at the funniest expressions on the faces of Harriet and her team. My flapping pants were creating a surprisingly chilly breeze on my legs. Well, I said, the good news is, that wasn’t a fart, but the bad news is, my pants just tore in half, so excuse me while I figure this out. I took a roll of plastic packing tape and backed into the bathroom, where I tried to tape the seam together from the inside. It was not really going to hold, though, and I was getting around to understanding that I would be spending a good part of my day going around New York basically with no pants.
What should Harriet do? At this point, it’s like an outtake from Annie Hall. Harriet needs to get this mailing out by deadline, and now, instead of the extra help she’s paying for, she’s got an idiot trying to fix his pants with tape in the bathroom. It would be reasonable for her to call my agency and say, send me someone with viable pants.
Instead, when I came out of the bathroom, she gave me $20 and suggested I go to the Gap a couple blocks up the street. Basically she bought me new pants, when $20 was a considerable windfall to someone grossing less than $7 an hour. I waddled up the street, got viable pants, and we finished her job, which only took one day. As I write this I am ashamed to realize that I probably never thanked her or paid her back. Yet I’ve been telling the story of her kindness for years.
Years later, on the first day of my first law firm job, I lost a button on the pants of my suit. I went to CVS on my lunch break and bought a sewing kit that’s still at my desk today. Lawyering does seem to have created quite a bit of strain on my pants at the waistband, so I’ve had to sew a couple of buttons back on over the years.
Harriet, thanks to your thoughtfulness I’m able be here today. I am dedicating my first day in business to you!