Whiskey Boys

Back in 2005, the day after my final law school exams, I packed up my ratty clothing and dog-eared book collection and drove 2,200 miles from Nowheresville, Illinois, to Portland, Oregon, a city where I knew not a soul and had no prospects—a city shrouded by rains that linger between the Coastal and Cascade Ranges like a memory of unkind words, a city so green and soggy it seemed I might sprout roots, commence photosynthesis, and become a shambling mound of ferny ennui. In the months to follow, I bought a waterproof jacket, popped Prozac like Pez, went totally broke and a little crazy, but never quite acclimated to seeing Portlanders sip coffee in the drizzle over moldering copies of The Oregonian.

Shortly before last call, on the evening before I was to sit for the Oregon State Bar Exam, a young woman with long dark hair and a husky voice took the stool beside my own. She ordered bourbon neat. Freckles dusted her nose and a gauzy scarf was twined around her throat. Back at her place, she put on some tunes and together we dove headfirst straight down the neck of a bottle of Evan Williams. Although my recollections get a bit hazy at this point, I recall a room aglow with vanilla candles, a TV flickering on mute, and her astraddle me and pushing that dark hair from her face before sparking a spit-dappled joint. A tumbler of Mr. Williams’s good whiskey rested on my chest all the while, the rich red liquor trembling along with my heartbeat.

Come dawn, gagging at the foul paste coating my tongue, I bolted upright haunted by a sense of being prone on the tracks, the horn sounding, lights flashing and metal shrieking. I glanced down at the elaborate tattoo on my companion’s rump and thigh—a gothic oak tree, leafless and windblown, with a squirrel peeking from a knothole and a raven perched in the skeletal branches. The night before, as I’d sipped bourbon at the witching hour, these images had struck me as quite novel; now, however, with that same bourbon roiling in my gut, the eyes of both animals seemed eerily judgmental. I leapt to my feet and yanked on my stale jeans.

“It’s so early . . .” she mumbled into her pillow.

Desperately searching for my shirt, I replied that it most definitely was not early, that it was in fact very late.

“Come back to bed,” she told me, and again pushed that luxurious hair out of her eyes, “you dumb, sad, lonesome fucker.”

Then I dropped into a squat, my knees firing like rabbit guns, and while knotting my sneakers explained I would love nothing more than to crawl back into bed—except I was scheduled to sit for the bar exam. Hearing this, she sat up, blinking. “The what?”

“The bar exam,” I said, and jerked my keys from my pocket, “the Oregon State Bar Exam!”

Her hoarse laughter trailed me outside into the drizzle. My old Honda was slung across two spaces, looking like a trail-worn green mule. In the trunk sat a milk crate full of study guides—twelve hundred dollars’ worth of pristinely unused study guides. As I wedged myself into the driver’s seat, a wild grimace on my face and the smell of fermented corn leaking from my every pore, those guides seemed as shame-inducing as neglected pets. And while I splashed away through the ashen puddles, the prospect of ever seeing girl, squirrel, or raven again seemed almost as unlikely as a good showing on the day’s multiple choice questions, essays, and practical skills testing.

________

Sure enough, a few months later I received a handsome letter printed on 100 percent cotton, thirty-two-pound, watermarked ivory stationery which expressed the bar examiners’ sincere regrets at my not having attained the requisite score for licensure.

But I’d merely gotten my just deserts. Consider my approach to my final year of law school. While my classmates were busy job-hunting, bar-prepping, and hastily offering to marry one...