edit: Ha now i have controls over when things get published. I can move this train a lot faster.

Its a social D sorta holiday: The Story Of My Life

2005 was a weird time for my family. It was time for bar attempt number 2, my grandfather and I lived all alone in his rather palacial home on the waterfront. It was too much for him. He told me I had to go in May of that year. He wasn’t terribly thrilled when bar attempt 2 came up short. He didn’t really care anymore. My relationship with him pretty much ended at that point. He didnt ask about me, rarely called, or seemed to even care. That’s when I moved back to City 17.

That summer through the end of 2006 didn’t really amount to much. I was struggling to pass the bar, working in dead end restaurants and telemarketing jobs, with intermittent clerk work in between where my license status was never brought up. My loans were in deferment, and my private loans were.. well.. falling behind. One day I got into a minor car accident, and a $1000 deductible was more than daunting. I had to beg the family for help with it and I nearly didn’t get it. Nobody bothered to tell me my grandfather had the month before paid off my entire private loan debt to the tune of 88 thousand dollars. I never knew either until I confirmed it with the loan company. He was a cosigner to the loans, and more likely than not did it just to protect himself. Who can blame him. A heads up would be nice, so it didnt seem like I was just a begging mooch even though in some ways I was. That Christmas with the family was marred because I was the odd man out; the black sheep. I felt guilty even receiving a Christmas present. At least I had the MBE taken care of.

2006 was where a light started to shine at the end of the tunnel. Well, not until the July exam, as the February marked another failure on the state exam. Amazingly, I found a tutor who helps people from my TTT for free with writing essays. Writing really fucking good essays. Our state exam tests state specific law with essays and multiple choice, and strategically, he said, you score the most points with essays, and its where people leave the most points off the paper. If I would have met with him years before I might have gotten this right the first time. Anyways it all fell into place and I passed. Only problem was, I hadn’t submitted my application to the bar. Big fucking idiot number 1 mistake: why the fuck didn’t I start the application when I was a 1L when it would have cost 75 dollars and I would have dealt with the ethics crew a lot sooner. As it stood, my application got held up because I didnt file my 2000 tax return until right when I got my passing score. The reason: that year I sold a bunch of stock to pay for college. Nobody told me about the capital gains tax, and I had a 3000 dollar tax bill blossom into 5500 bucks. It’s paid off now, but thats more stupid tax, to say the least. Of course in the meantime I had to retake the MPRE since my law school score had expired. Lovely stuff, this bar exam process. 2006 ended with me spending Christmas in Jurisdiction X with my loved one, who told me shortly after coming back that she was moving to X to stay. Oh good, another bar exam.

She left in February 2007, which really hurt. She and I had been dating since 2002, and for one reason or another we hadn’t lived together. It was mostly my fault for not getting the bar exam settled. She never got a serious job down here, working essentially part time and commuting 1.5 hours one way for part time wages. Believe it or not I made more than her working 2 jobs, and she was the attorney. Now I finally had my shit together, and found the job I work at now, and she was out of my life. I decided I would face the damn demon again and take another bar exam and dig up all the shit I had to dig up for Florida, including a 1986 divorce decree that changed my surname, and do it all over again. I’ll be damned. I was told the essay section tested common law, MBE type concepts. 5 essays. No biggie. Until I got the blue books and noticed 6 of them, and noticed a 6th essay question. Civil procedure. Well, fuck me. I called my old lady from her car in the parking lot, and we talked civ pro as much as we could bullshit. Well, it worked. Even with a 121 MBE for that test, I bullshitted my way to a passing grade, since the civ pro essay was all about perfect diversity jurisdiction or whatever the fuck it is to get your way into federal court.

I informed my family that I was going to try to move to Jurisdiction X, and that I was doing okay, and was an actual fucking lawyer, and doing something with my life. They started to warm up to the idea, but for my grandfather it was too late. He had started dating some woman 18 years his junior, and it was obvious to everyone she only liked him for his money and he only liked her because she was someone to hang out with. Then his health started its decline, as senility set in. I spent that Christmas with the family, and my grandfather’s girlfriend was nowhere to be found.

2008 marked the beginning of the end for my Grandfather. I kept up with him from time to time, but he was suffering from dementia. The new girlfriend he had encompassed much of his free time, and he practically adopted this woman and her family as his own. Posthumously I found out the extent to which he did, it was rather disgusting seeing photos of him doting over a family that had no idea who the hell he was. But there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I was busy trying to find work in Jurisdiction X, since I got sworn in. I was flying all over east jesus to job interviews. The shitter was that I got an offer, and a damn good one. 55K plus benes for a barely 1 year lawyer about 25 minutes from my old lady’s home. It’s just she wasn’t having any of it. Long story short, I had to turn it down. I’m not going to go into detail about the where and why, cause me and my old lady, we could fill pages on that tale. Let’s just say 2008 was aggravating on many fronts, but with my family, it was quiet. Not much really happened, Christmas was boring and tepid and my grandfather was barely coherent. Fast forward to 2009.

July 2009 rolled around, and on a rainy day I got a phone call at work. It was Uncle “Hot” Carl. “Toiletlawyer, I just wanted to tell you that your grandfather is dying and he won’t make it through the day. He suffered a cranial aneurysm. We don’t know when he will go so don’t be in a rush to get over here.”
Just then the 80 thousand in private loans he paid off and never told me, the golfing trip to Pinehurst North Carolina, the Mazda 626 he bought me, the Country Club, the times we spent together in his better days, him reattaching my right thumb, all these memories flooded my brain as I put in “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell,” the signature Social D album, and jammed my shitty Mitsubishi across the state in rainy weather. I was scheduled to go to Jurisdiction X two days later for a pre-established trip. And here I was going to watch the man who was essentially my father die. I had no father figure in my life worth a damn aside from him. My biological father left my mom and I for his gay lover when I was 2. My mother dated and married a few shitheads in the interim, two of which beat me, and one of which I beat back when I was 13. My friends say I am rather well adjusted for coming from such a fucked up background, but I digress.

I arrived at the Hospital, one in which he performed many surgeries as a cardiovascular specialist during his 30 year surgical career. There he was, snoring obnoxiously in a tiny hospital bed, surrounded by my family. He was put on painkillers while the bleeding did it’s dirty work. Doctor after doctor, family friend after friend, came by to pay their respects. It was surreal. The one thing I will remember most about the whole damn thing was the baseball player on tv hitting a home run as my grandfather breathed his last. I’ll always remember Carl Crawford for that. Life has it’s weird juxtapositions.

This meant a lot of changes for my family. With no central figure to rally around, we felt lost and disparate. Sure, we tried to rally together for a while, but as the will settled out and everyone got their money and purchased their luxuries, fissions grew. A spite grew over one of my cousins, who, along with his mother, frequently used drugs and alcohol, and had sunken to a gaunt 5′10 135 pounds from a more appropriate 175. He drank heavily and frequently, and wrecked his 2009 lancer evo more times than i can think of, all purchased with his mother’s money, the same mother/aunt whose neglect of my older cousin led to his drunk driving death so many years before. This fight came to a head during thanksgiving this year, and it directly weighed upon Christmas. I was actually glad to spend Christmas eve at the dog track, and part of Christmas day in a jail visiting a client.

To think it would come to this: I’d rather be around gamblers and criminals than my own family during the holidays. I hope that changes, I really do.