1990 A.D.

 

That year is now 31 years past.  But it’s one of the more eventful ones I can remember.

 New Year’s Eve, 1989-90.  I spent this in Paris, France.  There was a girl named Mo (short for Maureen?  I never found out – or her last name) who I met at GMU, spring break 1987, and in Paris at the Air Show in 1989, who invited me to celebrate with her sister, in her sister’s tiny apartment.  Nothing happened, and I barely even drank.  At six a.m. the sister claimed her BF would be showing up – he might have been a Marine, I don’t remember as I never met him – and I went home.  Except at that time the Paris Metro was closed.  So I had to walk, from St. Paul/Le Marais, all the way home.  I walked along Rue de Rivoli westbound as far as Place de la Concorde (guillotine long gone), took a right to the Madeleine (Catholic church designed like a huge Greek temple) and then went up Blvd. Malesherbes (est. 1861) to home.

 21.  When I got back to Maryland from Paris, I reached 21 years old, finally able to legally drink and use my driver’s license as my ID. 

 LSAT scores.  The equivalent of SATs, but for law school, is the LSAT.  Back then the top score was 48.  Coming back from Paris in late August 1989, to begin my senior year at UMCP, I didn’t have enough time to study for the September 1989 LSAT exam, so I had to take the December exam, doing my LSAT prep at White Flint Mall in October and November.  However, I was sending out my law school applications, to all the top tier law schools in the US, around the same time, so I was sending them without the benefit of knowing my LSAT score.  I returned to Paris after the semester break started, shortly before Christmas.   When I got back in mid-January, my mail was waiting for me: including my LSAT results.   37 out of 48, well below the 42 necessary to be competitive for top tier law schools, and no time to take it again (in any case they average the scores of multiple tests instead of taking the highest one). 

 So I started my spring semester of my senior year: Production Management, International Marketing, Business & Government, Business Policies, and Comparative (Economic) Systems.  By this point I had a single in Montgomery Hall, on campus at University of Maryland, College Park.  I got along fine with the other guys in my suite, for once.  I’ll spare everyone the litany of horrendous experiences, but suffice to say that living on campus among strangers gives you a form of education well beyond the classes themselves.    

 Marshall combo.  I purchased my Marshall 2554 Jubilee 1x12” 25/50 watt combo from Chuck Levin’s in Wheaton, Maryland.  Finally a decent amp to go with my Gibson SG and my Fender Stratocaster.  I still have it today, and it still sounds terrific:  a warm, full bodied overdrive.  The Jubilee series amps have a knockdown switch which makes it even nastier and hotter.  In fact, Guns N’Roses lead guitarist Slash liked the sound so much he had Marshall reissue them in his own signature series.  Later, Marshall reissued them again, the reissues recognizable as having only two front switches.  With our fixation on stacks, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that combos (A) can be VERY loud, (B) can sound VERY nice, especially since the amp section is the same design as the one in the 50 and 100 watt heads, and (C) are considerably more practical if you’re playing at home.  Depending on your neighbors, even a 50 watt combo can get loud enough to elicit noise complaints. 

 Spring Break.   Not spent in Fort Lauderdale – in fact, none of them were.  Georgetown was the first law school to let me know I would not be attending in fall, politely wishing me luck…somewhere else.  I visited Chuck Levin’s again, and saw the newly issued 1976 Reissue Gibson Explorer (itself a reissue of the 1958 Explorer, though in a color other than korina): black, with a white pickguard and Dirty Fingers pickups; these high output, exposed coil humbuckers were another departure from the PAFs which a 1958 would have had.  NICE.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

 April.  As the rejections from Harvard, Duke, etc. continued to pour in, my father in his wisdom advised me to hedge my bets by applying to second-tier law schools:  George Mason (now Antonin Scalia), Catholic, and American.  Sure enough, I got into all three, but didn’t get into any of the top tier schools to which I had applied – not even GW or U. Maryland Law (in Baltimore).  I chose GMUSL, which had a corporate and securities specialty track, which was unique among law schools at the time. 

 May.  By this time I decided to buy the Explorer.  The I one wanted was sold out from under me, so the store simply ordered another one from Gibson, and it came two weeks later.   I still have it today, the oldest of my current arsenal.  Later on I replaced the white pickguard with a mirror pickguard, and the Gibson Dirty Fingers pickups with EMG81s – as per James Hetfield of Metallica, though by now he has his own signature pickups from EMG. 

 Classes ended around Memorial Day.  My buddy Phil and I took a road trip to Ocean City for the weekend, only to find it was raining – and would be for the entire weekend.  So we drove back, saw “Back to the Future III”, which had just came out that weekend, and then Honor Among Thieves at Hammerjacks in Baltimore. 

 June.  Back in fall 1986 I had purchased a Japanese made Fender Stratocaster (black, rosewood fretboard), to replace my Strat copy.  But later I decided to sell both and buy a US-made ’62 Vintage Reissue model (black, rosewood fretboard).  I handed both over to my guitar teacher in Paris, Joel, who sold them for me.  I used that money to buy the US Fender Stratocaster, also at Chuck Levin’s, that summer when my parents visited in town briefly.  In January 2000 I traded that in for my current Stratocaster, a Mexican model with a humbucker in the bridge position, black pickguard and pickup covers, rosewood fretboard, and large 70s style headstock.  I’ve since modified it with locking tuners, a DiMarzio zebra coil humbucker, and a V-Runner tremelo. 

 June-July.  Summer Session I.  COBOL and Money & Banking.  Normally my senior year would finish at Memorial Day, the end of the spring semester.  I was on a double degree track, 156 credits.  Part of that was accomplished by taking both summer sessions after my sophomore year in 1988, meaning that summer I did not go back to Paris.  The other part was doing two things.  First, I’d be highly selective in course choices, picking classes which satisfied multiple requirements.  Second, I frontloaded any classes which were prerequisites for later courses, and left dead end classes until last.  That was COBOL (the programming language used for payroll systems) and Money and Banking.  Had I not been so clever, I might have needed the fall semester of the fifth year to finish the 156 credit curriculum, putting law school off until fall 1991.  Again, the way things worked, I was able to finish college that summer and start law school in the fall. 

 I stayed on summer campus housing again, New Leonardtown – as I had during 1988 – but this time I only needed the first summer session. On July 14, I flew back, overnight, to Paris.  [July 14, 1989 I spent in Paris enjoying the bicentennial of Bastille Day].

 From 7/15 to 8/1, I was back in Paris for the last time.  I can’t recall much of what I did, aside from Roscoe’s, FNAC, the US Embassy, i.e. the usual places I’d go.  My father was finally being reassigned back to Washington, the Dept. of Commerce building on Fourteenth Street and Constitution Ave (Herbert Hoover Building, with the National Aquarium in the basement, which has since closed).  This was ending 11 years in Paris, since January 1979. 

 We still owned our family house in Montgomery Village, rented out to tenants that entire time despite several even-year visits back.  Since we were only visiting for six weeks every other summer, as my father noted it made no sense to kick tenants out for those brief periods of time when a house is rented on a yearly basis.  The flip side was that whoever was doing the property management all that time dropped the ball big time.  The house was a mess, a prime candidate for withholding the security deposit.  My family was due to return at the end of August, with the sea shipment of furniture to arrive in mid-September.  So I had a month to do my best, with my friend Phil’s enormous help, to undo the damage of 11 years of consistent neglect.  I recall sleeping on an air mattress during that time and had the entire house to myself.  I watched “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii” on VHS, rented from Erol’s.  The Village Mall had disappeared, turned into an outdoor strip mall.  And the lessons Phil learned with my experience helped him when his family moved to India but kept their house in Sterling, Virginia; he was able to act as property manager.    

 In 1984 my parents purchased a studio/efficiency in Rosslyn, on the Virginia side of Key Bridge from Georgetown, a four building co-op complex called River Place.  In 1986, our whole family stayed there – two adults, two teenage boys (my brother and I) and our 11 year old sister, in a one-room studio apartment.  Now it was time for me to live there myself.  Having lived on campus all four years of college, and at home up until that point (Maryland and Paris) this was my first place alone.  I stayed there from September 1990 to October 2004, when I moved to the place I live in now.  From 1994, when he returned from Memphis, TN until 1998, when he moved in with his wife in Chantilly, my brother Matt lived with me there too.   So for my entire adult life, I’ve lived in exactly two places outside home or college.

 River Place was nice – it had its own pool.  The Rosslyn Metro was just blocks away.  Key Bridge was likewise down the street, meaning Georgetown as well, if you didn’t mind a bit of walking.  In January 1996, I saw Motorhead at the Bayou, a club down under the Whitehurst Freeway.  When I walked to the show, the neighborhood was clear and dry.  When the show ended, the whole place was covered in 3 feet of snow.  No vehicle traffic at all, nor any snowplows.  Leaving aside snow, Rosslyn features I-66 coming in from Fairfax, Route 50, Route 29, and the GW Parkway, all in the same place.  Now I’ve seen pictures and drawings of Aqueduct Bridge, which Key Bridge replaced in 1923.  For a long time there was literally nothing at all in Rosslyn.  Then for some time from the 20s up to a few decades ago, Rosslyn was a rundown, dangerous red light district (gambling and prostitution, maybe some violent crime thrown in as well).  By the time I arrived it had cleaned up, and even featured Tom Sarris’ Steakhouse, now gone.  The Iwo Jima Memorial is right across Route 50 from River Place. 

 George Mason University began in the 1950s as the state university of Virginia in northern Virginia, University of Virginia (UVa) itself being down in Charlottesville, southwest of Richmond, and Virginia Tech being in Blacksburg, over on the I-81 corridor on the way to Roanoke.  It soon became a four year college, then a proper university, with graduate programs.  Around 1981 it acquired the International School of Law, and renamed it the George Mason University School of Law.  By 1990 it was in the former Kann’s Department store on Fairfax Drive in Arlington.  After I graduated, in 2000, it moved next door to a new, purpose-built building, with the old building fenced off, now being demolished to make way for another school building, presumably not with escalators. 

 Law school was a much more intense animal than college.   Everyone had to be an excellent student just to get in, whereas UMCP had quite a few slackers.  This hit me with a grading curve producing C’s, whereas B’s were rare for me at UMCP.  A fellow UMCP grad, Ira Mirsky, was there as well, though we weren’t close friends back at College Park.  A closer friend was John Greenside, who I knew from GMU undergrad, one of Phil’s best friends.  These days he’s married with children and is a successful attorney down in Virginia Beach.  Anyhow:  we had assigned seats, and the professor had a seating chart and would call on you by name.  None of this college business of disappearing in a crowded lecture hall.  First semester was Torts, Property, Contracts, Quantitative Methods, and Legal Writing.  I had Robert Bork for Constitutional Law in second year.  Welcome also the Socratic Method, wherein the professor gets us to examine cases and determine exactly WHY they were decided – what the material issues were in the case.  Regardless of what states we would eventually go off to practice in as attorneys after graduating and passing the bar, law school would teach us the basic principles which applied everywhere, and the basic thought processes and logic which lawyers would use as such.  It was far more than the mere black letter law, so to speak.  Anyone can open up a statute book and read a statute, or look up a case, either in the volumes, on LEXIS, or online these days.  It takes a lawyer to see the bigger picture, to spot the issues, to recognize the core issues involved in a particular situation.  This is what we learn in law school, why those three years and that J.D. are so important.

I might also add:  to practice law, you have to have a bar license.  To get a bar license, you have to pass the bar exam (except for Wisconsin).  To even TAKE the bar exam, you need a law degree from a reputable law school, or the foreign equivalent.  “Reading the law”, an apprenticeship arrangement, is a thing of the past.  We had paralegals at the law school who figured they might as well take the extra step and get that law degree and take the bar.  Some states allow attorneys who have passed other bar exams and practiced as an attorney to “waive in” without taking and passing their own bar exams.  I passed the Maryland and Virginia bar exams, and waived in to D.C. and New York.    

 In December 1990 I actually went back to College Park for my graduation ceremony from University of Maryland. I didn’t attend the general ceremony at Byrd Stadium, but did attend the college-specific ceremonies, both on the same day, at Cole Field House.  Technically I graduated on August 28, which was how I could start law school at GMUSL for the fall 1990 term. 

 Concerts.  The year started off with The Cult, on their Sonic Temple tour, at the Baltimore Arena on February 8.  That and Electric are my favorite albums.  Setlist Wiki does not have that particular show’s setlist.  Then it was Ace Frehley at Hammerjacks, in March, also in Baltimore.  In November, at the Cap Centre (Landover, Maryland), we saw AC/DC on The Razor’s Edge tour.  I seem to recall being in the bathroom when “Thunderstruck” opened the set.  Finally was seeing Hawkwind, with my buddy Dave, at the old 930 Club in DC, back when it was at 930 F Street and a fraction of its current size over on V Street.  Despite being closely after Xenon Codex, they didn’t play anything from that album, nor was there much focus on Lemmy era (Space Ritual) material, most of it being late 70s stuff I hadn’t yet heard by that point.