I Am Not Stuart Dor-SETT, Nor Was Meant to Be

In our first day of Contracts class as first year law students, Professor Mary Malarkey called the roll, probably purely as a means to put names with some of the 50 or so faces in front of her: “Stuart Dorsett?” she called.

“Dorsett, yes, until I turn pro,” answered Stuart Dorsett. For the blissfully uninitiated, Tony Dorsett was a running back on the football team at the University of Pittsburgh. When he was drafted to play professional football by the Dallas Cowboys, he announced that he would thenceforth be going by “Dor-SETT”.

Professor Malarkey gazed up at him, smiling, and to this day I don’t know what her smile meant. As a former university instructor, my look would have been appraising: are you going to be trouble? Or just a little funny? Her look, if not that: are you flirting with me? Are you trading on your father and brother being partners in Smith Anderson Dorsett Blount of Raleigh? I wish I could go back and ask her.

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a line in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, by T.S. Eliot. The narrator of the poem is disclaiming that his diffidence has anything in common with Hamlet’s. And my diffidence had absolutely nothing to do with Stuart Dorsett’s confidence. He deserved his confidence; he was tall, slender, good looking with light brown wavy hair, intelligent, and, as a real son of the South, he knew how to find his way there.

(At this point, I would like to reassure two of my readers who are lawyers and always nervous if I use anyone’s real name. Stuart Dorsett is Stuart Dorsett’s real name. My reminder to my friends is that truth is an absolute defense to actions in defamation, and this is all the truth, or my opinion based upon the facts stated herein. That fact wouldn’t, of course, keep Stuart from suing me, but what better have I to do than take Stuart’s deposition?)

Stuart was indeed the scion of a noble North Carolina legal family, and, thus, was miles ahead of me in self-esteem. His middle name, Battle, was common in North Carolina, so he was related to everyone. There is, of course, a dark side; his grandfather, Willis Smith, was the U.S. Senator from North Carolina from 1950-53. One of his campaign posters illustrates this post at the end.

Thus Stuart’s easy ability to joke with a law professor during his very first day of law school. His father and brother, also a lawyer in Smith Anderson Dorsett (which grandpa co-founded), probably knew her. He had a B.A. in Economics from Davidson, an expensive private school in the state. IN MY OPINION, which is based on the facts stated herein, Stuart was one privileged white boy. I was, too, but not in North Carolina, where the only people I knew were destitute writers from my MFA days.

One day later in the semester, he walked up behind me as I was sitting in my plastic chair at our plastic benches waiting for class to begin. I was talking to someone next to me. Stuart pulled on the back of the collar of my white button-down shirt, and read out loud, “Mostly cotton!” and laughed.

Unlike Stuart, I had taught at Auburn for the last six years and made no money at all and wasn’t wearing tee-shirts with concert tour dates on them only because I didn’t go to concerts because I couldn’t afford to. I’m not trying to play my poverty card against Stuart’s privilege card, I promise. I just wasn’t in his league. My parents were underpaid university professors; Stuart’s father was a name partner in a prominent firm.

In Stuart’s defense, he wasn’t a Bad Guy; he was just like all the other southern fraternity boy types whose shirts were totally made of cotton. I just didn’t belong, and I probably gave off the vibe, Hey, I’m lost here, make fun of me!

OK, there were any number of fellows there who didn’t fit the stereotype,: John Polk, from New York who went to LA to do music; the Connell twins, one of whom accidentally made Law Review and thus lost all credibility as a fuck-off, and the other of whom formed a band, The Connells, that did well nationally. Jim, who is fluent in Spanish, French, German, Dutch, probably Portuguese and some other things, “can only read Italian”, and was lately known to have gone to a conference on Frisian. Malcolm from Massachusetts, who’s now a leading expert for banks on risk management. OK…so not all of those boys were Carolina fraternity

boys. But plenty were. There was a kid whose name was, no kidding, William Tiffany Diamond.

I would never have fit in, which is one of the overall themes of this blog. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I was entering a school room, and my belt loop caught on the extended lip of the strike plate (I had to look that up). My Latin teacher noticed and put her head in her hands. When your Latin teacher is laughing at you, you’re in bad shape.

For the rest of my life after law school, when I caught a metaphorical belt loop on a metaphorical strike plate, as I often did, I’d think, “Stuart Dorsett!” That sort of thing never ever happened to him, and you know it.

So my problem was multi-pronged, like a good antitrust inquiry. I had parents who didn’t teach me how to survive in the world. I wasn’t good at street-smarts anyway. My last name was mangled by every Southerner, most of whom followed up the mangling with, “JaRAcke? Whut kinda name is thay-at??” I hadn’t belonged anywhere since high school.

Law school, with its lockers, its continuous classes, and its cliques, is high school for consenting adults. At least I had a group I belonged to in high school. I did have my people in law school, but, while they were strong enough to make their way, I felt sweaty and nervous. I did well in law school, but not as well as the tall blond boys with all that southern boy confidence. I took a seminar on education law, and one big guy wrote his paper on, “My Analysis of Urinalysis.” What made him feel like that was OK to do? Whatever he was drinking, I sure wish I had a flagon of it.

My frustration finally blew my head off at a law school golf tournament during my last year. I used to be OK at golf. When I was teaching at Auburn during summer school, I shot any number of rounds in the 80’s (the course was short, I got to know it, and, in the summer, the fairways dried out so that a straight drive bounded and bounced and rolled to absurd lengths.) But I was pretty good. You still have to hit the fairway, and then you have to sink the putts.

I didn’t play any golf in law school. I don’t recall who was in my foursome for this tournament, or even what the tournament was for, except that one of the fellows wasn’t even in law school (who knows what the tournament requirements were). But he and one of the other fellows got on quite well; they took to calling each other by their last names, Merrydew and Merridale or such like. What is this, I wondered, English boarding school? They agreed cordially that if you went to a bar and UNC wasn’t playing, but maybe it was Wake Forest against Michigan State, the crowd was pretty generous about cheering for the Atlantic Coast Conference team, even if it wasn’t UNC. Good shot, Merrydew! Thanks, Merridale!

Late in the round, my second shot landed just off of the green, with a downhill, winding slope to the hole; hit it wrong, and your ball would have rolled twenty feet away for the next shot. In all honesty, with practice, my short game was excellent. But I hadn’t had practice.

Still, I lifted a short chip, it hit on the edge of the longer grass off of the green as I wanted, slowed down as expected, and then it curled downhill and dropped into the hole, practically a miracle from that spot and angle. Merrydew and Merridale didn’t react, but I did: “They’re going to know my name!” I shouted. “THEY’RE GOING TO KNOW MY NAME!” The boys looked at me, brows furrowed, then looked away. My emotions were too mixed to think about how I’d embarrassed myself.

Stuart Dorsett has gone on to a long and distinguished career as a trust and estates lawyer, and he serves on ritualistic and solemn committees and boards. He started out in Raleigh at his father’s firm, but, after a couple of years, decamped to New Bern. Good for him: He may well have decided not to be the next Dorsett in his father’s firm but to make his own way. But trusts and estates? That’s actually pretty wimpy, if you want to know the truth. Real men try cases. But that’s just my opinion, of course.