{"id":2709,"date":"2007-09-05T00:26:21","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T08:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/09\/eak_another_lawyer.html"},"modified":"2007-09-05T00:26:21","modified_gmt":"2007-09-05T08:26:21","slug":"eak_another_law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/09\/eak_another_law.html","title":{"rendered":"Eak, Another Lawyer!"},"content":{"rendered":"

And here you thought Coney Island wasn’t gentrifying<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For 15 years, Eak the Geek earned his living as a “freak” in the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, wowing thousands of spectacle seekers each summer with his spacey facial tattoos and signature stunt: the Bed of Nails sandwich.<\/p>\n

Then he decided it was time for a career change. He thought he’d like to be a lawyer — maybe even a city councilman one day. And so Eak — whose given name is Eduardo Arrocha — is headed back to school at age 45.<\/p>\n

“Coney Island was very good to me, but it was just time to go,” said Eak, in a recent phone interview from Lansing, Mich., where he will start classes in contracts, torts and constitutional law at Thomas M. Cooley Law School on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

He left the sideshow, but Eak is careful to point out this new foray into law isn’t a rejection of his fellow freaks. On the contrary, he’s doing it to help them.<\/p>\n

“I know it sounds weird, but I want to be a freak lawyer,” he said. “I hope to have a little office in New York and work with the alternative people . . . all the so-called riff-raff, to give them legal representation that is not judgmental.”<\/p>\n

Eak is six feet tall with a clean-shaven head and burly 220-pound frame, and says he’s been deflecting suspicious side glances and many times open looks of disdain since he began the process of having his body tattooed from head-to-toe.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And here you thought Coney Island wasn’t gentrifying: For 15 years, Eak the Geek earned his living as a “freak” in the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, wowing thousands of spectacle seekers each summer with his spacey facial tattoos and signature stunt: the Bed of Nails sandwich. Then he decided it was time for a career […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brooklyn","category-there_goes_the_neighborhood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}