ESSAY | BIO

More About Me — Phillip Steven (“Alex”) Alexander

Installment 2 — One person, three personas

Phil (left) ca. age 10, Steve (middle), from his U.S. Courts identity card ca. age 32, and Alex (right), studying in law school ca. age 27. | images from the author’s collection

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Just who is this devilish old cuss, anyway?

Phillip (Phil S. on his Social Security card his grandmother got him when he was six) was the original incarnation. Known as Phil, and that alone by family, none of whom knew Steve very well and have never cared to know Alex, he was the dutiful son and brother who loved his siblings and mother and always feared and later loathed his father. He died when Steve took the stage at 13 but arose Phoenix-like when Steve returned to his family’s bosom (absent his by-then-dead father) at 58 to help care for his mother in her downward spiral into Alzheimer’s.

It’s Phil, whom his brother and sister know today.

Steve, the contrary 13-year-old who would be his own man, not his father’s whelp, sprang from the chrysalis of Phil’s teenage rebellion and later morphed into a hard-ass litigator, a word mercenary, merciless to those who were Goliath opposed to David, his client. At 27, he discovered the law and found not a job, not a career, but a calling that ended at 42 when the first in a fourteen-year series of chronic, severe…