So how about this: when I see a pregnant woman, I feel like kicking her in the stomach. I don't do it. And I only think as far as the moment right before actually kicking her - I don't think of what would happen as soon as I made contact, of the hard, rubbery skin and body that would hit my foot. I don't think of the pain and shock the person would feel. I don't think of the shame and embarrassment that I would feel as soon as I did it.

Urges like this one might have come from my family from way back, like my brown hair or freckles, a present from great-grandparents I never met. Perhaps from my father's side of the family, the Furthingtons, the farmers who ended up in Montana but came originally from Illinois, originally from England. Or maybe from my mother's side of the family, the Jews, from Europe, central Europe, the Jewish ghetto, full of brainiacs and wiseguys.

Wherever they came from, they buzz around like bees in my head wherever I go. I didn't really pay much attention to them, these bees, until the beginning of my second year of law school, when I was interviewing with law firms, trying to find a summer job. They just got too strong, like those killer bees I used to hear about coming up from South America.

It was a yearly routine; incoming second year law students like I was go through on-campus interviews with dozens of law firms. The student hopes a firm offers him a position for the summer after the end of second year. It would be best if it's a firm the student loves, that loves the student, and that asks the student, super-lawyer, whiz-kid, all-around-good-guy, to return, full-time, after graduation.

Before law school I thought I might be a law professor or a defender of the poor or the architect/overlord of some revolutionary social policy or an "international" lawyer. "I want to put to use the skills I have gained in the international, public service and legal arenas," I wrote in my entrance essay, rolling up all of the relevant experiences I could think of into a ball, like a Play-Do blob made of four different colors gobbed together.

But then I got a "C" in international law, I couldn't sleep before my contracts final ("B-") and I lost fifteen pounds because I was usually too nervous to eat lunch. I did end up making it through the first year, though, and even with fairly middling grades overall. I had gotten an OK job for the second summer, as a research intern for one of my professors who actually seemed to like me.

The first day of law firm interviewing I wore my grey suit, with the hand-stitched lapels, a dark red Polo tie, blue shirt. I checked the knot once, twice, three times in the window of my car, which had turned into a mirror under the glaring sun. I walked away, towards the building where the firms were conducting the interviews, then walked back to the car to check the tie again. Still fine.

They held the interviews in the basement of the law school's main building. Each interviewer, from each separate firm, sat in his or her own room all day. Law students went from room to room according to a schedule the Office of Career Services had come up with. Each session lasted twenty minutes.

It was about 8:55 when I made it downstairs. My first interview would be at 9:00. I went to the lounge, where five or six other students sat, gripping the leather folders that held their resumes and transcripts, fidgeting with the knots of their ties, doing some last minute reading-up on the firms they were about to try to impress.

I looked at the main schedule, posted on an easel in the middle of the lounge. I moved my eyes around until I saw my interview in the 9 am slot: "Law firm: Traylor Perkins Fallon and Coleman; Candidate: Martis Furthington."

I read it again. And again, making sure there wasn't something there I hadn't seen before -- was it really 9 am today? Was I reading the right line of the table? I was Martis Furthington, right? Was there another Martis Furthington at the school?

As these questions popped around in my head, another students in the lounge, a guy with slicked-back hair who got the answers wrong when the Property professor called on him, who smelled of cologne, who was always clean-shaven, even when I saw him on Sunday morning in the library, said to me, "Furthington, what the hell are you doing?"

8:58. He sat behind the easel, facing me. "What?" I asked.

"You never leave your collar stays in the shirt when you send it to the cleaners. You can see the marks they leave."

"Ahh, whatever," I said, with a forced smile. I turned and walked to the room where I'd be interviewing for a job at the law firm of Traylor Perkins Fallon and Coleman, room 125

"So, says here you went to Palmer College," said the interviewer after I had come in the room, shaken his hand and taken my seat. He was an elegant, meticulously dressed African-American man, mid-forties, probably.

"That's right," I volleyed. I thought of my collar stays, of the long, straight, pointy-ended, raised edge marks that burst off of my shirt and into the eyes of the successful corporate attorney in front of me, like water shooting out of a prank flower on my lapel. I looked at his eyes, watched to see if they moved down to look at the horror of my shirt. Hard to tell. He scanned up from my chin, perhaps, or maybe my throat, to my mouth, to my forehead, back down to my nose, over to my right ear, up to my hair. Did my hair look strange? Were there red spots on my neck? Did my glasses have too many smudges on them? "I really loved that place," I continued.

He leaned back in his chair so that it rested on its two hind legs. He'd catch himself from falling by snagging an underpart of the desk, at the bottom of one of the sliding side drawers, with his foot.

I never knew that about collar stays before that guy told me in the lounge. My father, the high school teacher, wore mostly button-down short-sleeve shirts when he wanted to dress up. He also didn't dry-clean his clothes. So the combination of no collar stays and no dry-cleaning meant that I had never learned the lesson that you never, ever, send your shirts to the cleaner when they still have those little pieces of plastic holding the collar ends down.

My mother probably knew, I suppose, my big-city mother, my New York City mother, my mother whose father, a knife-sharp salesman of everything, probably sold collar stays by the bushel. He'd killed himself in 1965, before I was born, because, from what I can gather from the bits and pieces I've heard over the years, he went crazy, talked constantly about the Vietnamese informants that he said followed him, about how he had to "get to Cuba, right away," about tracking his mother down (she had been dead for over forty years). I bet it just got to be too much for him. I can understand that. But, whatever, my mom had never taught me the collar lesson.

"Great school," he said, "Great school. And you were a . . . an English major, I see?" He looked down at my resume as he talked.

"Yes, I was," I said. Goddamn collar stays. Goddamn that cologne guy. Why would you say that to someone just as he was going into an interview? Couldn't you wait, tell me when I came out, so you wouldn't make me anxious? God, did I hate that motherfucker. I'd strangle him and bash his head into the side of the street. It appeared in my head, the vision of his head bouncing off the curb as I smashed it down, again and again, like a coconut I was trying to open on a hard rock near the shore. The hot shore, blazing hot under the Caribbean sun, where I was shipwrecked.

"And how was that?" he asked, after a moment. He kept bobbing back and forth, as if he sat in a rocking chair. If he fell, I thought, what would I do? Would I help him? Would I try to protect my resume from the blood that would undoubtedly spew from his eyes, like the water that comes out the top of Brooklyn fire hydrants on summer days?

"It was great. I feel like I learned a lot about literature and how to express ideas in there," I said. I heard myself and I shook my head, not visibly, but inside, so that my inside-my-head head wagged violently from side to side, expressing its displeasure at what the mouth, part of the outside-the-head head, was saying. Even as the words came out, before they sat on the table, like fresh dung left by a scrappy hyena that had run through the interview room, I wanted to stop saying them. I wanted, somehow, to talk and not talk at the same time, to add 1 and negative 1 to get zero, to inhale and exhale at once.

The interviewer, Mr. Patrick Coleman, Traylor Perkins Fallon and Coleman, as it said on the business card he gave me, didn't seem, at least at first, to be bothered by my answers to his bland questions ("It's a great place to grow up, if you love the outdoors," in response to "How was growing up in Montana?"; "I just love learning," in response to "How do you like law school?"). I could tell I had convinced him, despite the rumblings inside of me, deep in my skull, near the surface of my chest, at the back of my stomach, that I was not retarded, that I knew at least the kinds of things I was supposed to be saying, knew the part I was playing in the interview room and would potentially play as one of his employees at his big-city law firm. Except for the collar stays, of course.

I wondered what he thought about as he asked me the first hard question of the interview: "Take me through the process you use to make difficult decisions."

Did he think about what he was going to do as soon as the interviews were over, loosening his shimmering tie, watching SportsCenter on ESPN? Did he think of jumping over the table and hitting me on the top of the head, like I was one of the pop-up animals in a whack-a-mole game?

"First, I think about how . . . I mean I think of a common sense answer to the question, you know, I mean . . . I think it helps to have some idea of what I think the answer is, before I even start research or anything." This is true, I think, but it's not really how I start making a decision. I didn't even consider telling the real story, how I feel panic whenever someone gives me a hard problem to figure out. I get a queasy feeling down in my stomach, just in front of the base of my spine. I sweat a little, not profusely, not dripping sweat, but sweat that feels clammy and makes me smell, just a little. That is stage one.

He nodded, glaze clouding his eyes, like fog rolling into a bay. I kept talking, describing the second stage, the third, the fourth, making it up as a I went along, never having thought about this question before.

I described the second stage (stated second stage: assemble materials; real-world second stage: call girlfriend), the third (stated third stage: think about which materials to review first; real-world third stage: go to bathroom, even if I don't have to), the fourth (stated fourth stage: begin review; real-world fourth stage: eat ham and cheese sandwich).

As I talked, my hands flew in front of my face, like the metal wands in the interior of a mechanical typewriter that slap forward when you hit a key. I watched Patrick Coleman, who nodded as I talked, said an "mmmhmmm" every ten seconds or so, and, maybe once a minute, looked down at the resume in front of him and jotted a note or two. And, of course, the rocking back in the chair.

He stroked his un-stubbled chin as I went on to the fifth and sixth stages, which I can't even remember now. Whatever I said had nothing to do with how I made or make decisions.

Somewhere part way through my description of the sixth stage ("outline," I think), things changed. My stomach churned, like it was actually turning over, and it pumped. I felt dizzy, as if I had just been up, spinning in a circle twenty times, in front of Mr. Patrick Coleman.

I kept talking ("then I outline more"), but felt my body, the feeling, spiritual one, move above my body, the earthly, physical one, slowly, like a dead person's ghost floating out of his skin and up in the air in a cartoon. I looked down on myself, hot, sweaty, uncomfortable, in front of this elegant lawyer. I looked around the room and saw it at that high level, up above myself, at the top of the room.

Maybe I was dreaming? But my down-low body still talked, explaining the most logical of subjects, how to solve a problem.

Then it ended. I flew back into my body, down in the chair, on the floor, I saw again through my own, real-world eyesockets. I stopped talking. I grunted. I tried to pass "it" off as a cough. I looked to the side, then down at my watch, a no-no the career counselor had told us to avoid, because it made the interviewers think you were bored. My watch ticked as normal, and it was right about the time it was supposed to be - fifteen minutes after I walked in the room. I had five more minutes to go.

I bit my bottom lip and looked back in Patrick Coleman's eyes. They didn't have that glaze anymore - he squinted them sharply, though just slightly. He held his chest high, didn't appear to be breathing.

Blood poured into my face, making it hot. My eyes got warm, too. My forehead started to sweat, and my upper lip. My underarms itched. Had Mr. Patrick Coleman watched me take this weird journey to the top of the room?

"You alright?" he asked. He kind of sneered it, like he already knew the answer, that I was not alright. He kept pushed back in his chair, far back, now the soles of his feet resting on the edge of the top of the desk to stop him from falling forward. "Do you need some water or something?" he asked.

"No, thanks," I said. "I've been feeling a little sick today and I think it just came back a bit." He nodded while still looking into my eyes. He didn't look like he believed me, that I had been sick, which, of course, I hadn't.

Race cars vroomed through my head. I tried to keep them under control . . NO JOB zoom, zoom . . . MY COLLEGE FRIENDS WILL LAUGH AT ME zoom, zoom . . . I WON'T EVER BE A LAWYER . . . zoom, zoom. . . COLLAR STAYS . . . .

And then a race car shinier than the others started driving around, in the right side of my head. It was cherry red, an old-style car, one of those ones where the driver wears goggles and a scarf.

I knew I had to get it out, this vintage race car. It felt like a cough or a sneeze, or even the moment right before you vomit. I knew that there were two, three, four seconds, maybe, of feeling bad coming up and then a long period, forever, really, of feeling "normal." I had to do it, my body and brain told me, I had to.

I jumped up out of my chair, over to just in front of Mr. Patrick Coleman, in front of his right foot. I looked in his eyes, his squinting eyes, as he sat still, back on two legs. I reached my left hand down, placed my palm, facing out, on the sole of his shoe, put my weight behind my hand and pushed. Hard.

He fell back. He closed his eyes. The look on his face didn't change as he went back -- there wasn't time.

His head hit the radiator attached to the wall that rose up to just under the window. I looked down at him as I sweated and breathed, the clock ticking. He kept his eyes closed as he lay on the ground, his ass resting on the part of the chair where the middle of his back had rested just a moment earlier. His legs were draped up and over the seat of the chair so that he was in almost the same position a woman has to endure in the stirrups at the gynecologist's office.

He reached his hand up to the top of his head and kept his eyes closed. I stood in front of him.

He opened his eyes slowly, still holding his head. "What the Christ are you doing?" he asked.

Mr. Patrick Coleman, still holding his head, looked straight at me, into my burning eyes, through my eyes, out the back of my head, into the Dean's office, into my file. His eyes, on their own, picked my file up and threw it into the fireplace, burning brightly in the central area of the Dean's office, even though it was the normal, warm fall, even though the Dean had no fireplace, even though no law students, including me, had "files" in the Dean's office.

Patrick Coleman's eyes twinkled, somehow. The corners of his mouth moved up, just a bit, into the smallest possible smile. If I hadn't been watching him as his mouth moved so slightly, he wouldn't have seemed to be smiling, but it was just-so-little-bit different from the moment before.

I stared, for a moment more. I took in a shallow breath. My collar closed in around me. I held my leather resume-holder, turned and walked out. I closed the door on my way out.

I received the letters from my law school and the law firm the same afternoon, four days later. The firm's was, almost comically, a form letter that told me what a "difficult decision" it had been to turn me down for an invitation to do further interviews at their office. They thanked me and encouraged me to apply in the future.

The law school's letter was, on the other hand, a wholly original work of art. In it, the Dean explained how disappointed he was to learn how deeply I had offended and physically hurt not just a man, not just a good man, not just a good man who happened to be an alumnus, not just a good man who happened to be an alumnus and a trustee of the university, not just a good man who happened to be an alumnus and a trustee of the university but a past president of the American Bar Association, a senior partner at one of the nation's most prestigious firms, a doting father, family man, American . . . .

"Still," the Dean went on:

"I and the others serving on the law school's disciplinary board hoped, prayed, even, that there was some benign explanation for this, perhaps a misunderstanding, a miscommunication, a medically-explicable tic, even a joke in very poor taste. But you have not answered our repeated phone calls and emails. In the absence of any response on your part to an incident that shocked you enough to make you walk out of the room in the middle of a coveted interview with one of our best recruiters, we have no choice but to accept in full the rendition of events presented to us by our esteemed and trusted friend Mr. Patrick Coleman of Traylor Perkins Fallon and Coleman.

Consequently, we must ask you to withdraw from the law school and the university immediately, with no hope of reinstatement. Additionally, given the gravity of the situation and your apparent unwillingness to cooperate in any capacity, we will be forwarding copies of this letter to admissions counselors at all major accredited law schools in the nation, with a cover letter indicating that they might find it in their interest to reject your application should you seek to attend another of this nation's fine law schools. Finally, we will contact the local law enforcement authorities and request that you be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Etc., etc., with deep regret, etc."

Anyway, I left school on my own, before I got the letter from the Dean. Actually, I never went back after that interview with Patrick Coleman -- I just went back to my apartment and had a ham and cheese sandwich, no mayonnaise.

It's not one of those things where life goes on fine just like before and everything happens for a reason and I've found my true calling after getting thrown out of law school and I never wanted to be a lawyer. That kind of thing only happens in movies, I think.

Until now, I never really told anyone, except my psychiatrist, why I left law school. Pauline the Cute, my girlfriend doesn't know. I met her later, anyway, but I told her it just really wasn't for me. My folks don't know, my friends don't know. I told all of them that I had an epiphany and realized, mid-interview, that I was supposed to write and join the Peace Corps.

Everyone accepted my story. The school and Patrick Coleman seemed to enjoy keeping the whole incident quiet - I've been searching for any news article or other mention of the whole thing anywhere on the internet, and I've come up with zilch. It makes sense, I guess - the school has no interest in having people know it once had a student like me and Patrick Coleman, who surely doesn't want to look like the fool who got abused by a lowly second-year law student, probably accepts that the school did as much as it could by nuking me.

My psychiatrist tells me I had a panic attack, that normally in these situations, when a person feels like I did in that interview room and he or she has an urge like that, he or she doesn't act on it. But I did act on it. "Our time's up - we'll have to cover that next week," my doctor said.

A few nights ago, I had a dream about Mr. Patrick Coleman, where he was eating salad dressing and I came up to him and made him laugh it out through his nose. Then he fell back in his chair again, only this time his head broke apart like a flower pot that smashed on the ground. Whoops.