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Coney Island's 'Eak the Geek' goes to law school

By Lauren Johnston | lauren.johnston@newsday.com

September 4, 2007

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 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.

"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.

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.

"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."

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.

Too often people took him for a shady weirdo, or a rounder with no prospects and few skills. They figured he worked the sideshow, because what other options are there when you've got stars and planets inked all over your face?

But that's not Eak's story. His father is a corporate lawyer in Mexico. His younger brother is a lawyer. His mother and older brother are professors. He started off on the "straight path" - he just found the detours more his style. But he owns an apartment in the East Village, and the mortgage is even paid off.

That's another reason he's heading for law school: to fight discrimination.

"You might have a certain impression of me and how I look. But at the same time I'm a very productive and ordinary member of the community I choose to live in," he said. "A lot of places, if a guy has tattoos all over his face, he just has no possibilities. He's stuck in Coney Island for life."

Not Eak.

"Eak the Geek is the performance, but I'm also a person. I do so many more things than just the show, and that's part of why I left," he said.

What many sideshow-goers may not know is that Eak is a prolific poet and was first drawn to the gritty Coney Island of the early 1990s to inspire his writing. "It was really the Wild West back then," he said.

The Mexico City native is also a bookworm with a deep interest in philosophy, and the works of Durkheim and Voltaire are as familiar to him as the wooden planks of the Coney Island boardwalk.

Eak had completed a year or so of college in Kentucky in his early 20s but dropped out and arrived in New York City in 1989 after stops in Albuquerque and Newark. He went back to school in 2005, while still working the sideshow, and earned a bachelors degree in political science from Marymount Manhattan College in May.

He got good grades and was accepted to Cooley as an honors scholar. Next step, the big move and good-bye to his beloved East Village.

Eak rented out his apartment on East 2nd Street (which will pay a chunk of his tuition), packed up 39 poetry journals and some clothes and in late July, hit the road for the Midwest and life after the sideshow.

"The people here are very curious about me," he said. "I'm the new zoo animal here."

But then, stares and gawks are nothing new. The biggest adjustments? The food and the dress code. "I really miss New York pizza," he said. "And I have to learn to tie a tie knot. I've never had to tie a tie before."

So far, he seems to be making a good impression.

"I've worked at Cooley for 25 years and I've met a lot of interesting people and Eduardo ranks right up there and not just for his looks also for his energy and personality," said Tony Alvarado, Deputy Director of Admissions.

Eak says he'll likely never stop performing, "It's in my blood. It's just kind of what I do. I'm a performer." And he's even met some sideshow people in Lansing, though it's doubtful he'll have much spare time for the stage.

So for now, he's Eduardo - not Eak - and trying to finish the few hundred pages of pre-semester reading assigned to all first-year students. But he's not afraid of the hard work

"I'm not a sideshow. I'm a person, and I want to be part of the main act," he said. "The sideshow is great, but the main act seems to be better."