Friday, May 13, 1988.

Opposites attract—partly by complementing each other.

—Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron.

I was thirty-four years old and worked as a temporary paralegal at

the Strauss firm. The firm, one of the largest law firms in the
country, was managed at its highest level by its founder, legal
powerhouse Bob Strauss and civil rights leader, Vernon Jordan.
Jordan, a black man of humble origin, comfortably hobnobbed
with the elite and powerful in business and in government. He
was a friend of Arkansas Governor and later President of the
United States, Bill Clinton.

I had lunch that noon with Craig D. and Daniel C., two
paralegals at H&H where I used to work. This was the first time I
saw Craig and Daniel since I had left H&H in late February
1988. Daniel used to mock me: “Gary is desperate to be Craig's
friend, but they have nothing in common.” The three of us ate
lunch at Pershing Park, a short distance from H&H’s office at
Columbia Square. I gave Craig a belated birthday present, Fritz
Stern’s Gold and Iron, an historical account of the personal and
business relationship of 19th century German chancellor Otto
von Bismarck and the Jewish banker, Gerson Bleichröder, who
ambitiously penetrated the highest levels of the German
government in the late nineteenth century to become a trusted
adviser of the Chancellor, defying the obdurate antisemitism of
the day.
Daniel mentioned that he had recently been reading Hermann
Hesse’s Demian, a German coming-of age novel, or
Bildungsroman, about an adolescent boy raised in a middle-class
home who is torn between his carnal instincts and the strict
moralism of his parents. Demian detaches from and revolts
against superficial bourgeois ideals and aspirations and eventually
awakens into a realization of self. Craig was of German
extraction. At the moment Daniel cited Hesse, Craig interjected,
“My mother’s maiden name is Hess.”