Jury Duty - 10

Back at the courtroom for another round of excuses. The prosecutors with their manila folders with rows of sticky notes representing each of us. Some covered in handwriting and some not. The court clerk wrapped up in her shawl, looking bored. The defendant glum, head swiveling almost imperceptibly to cast his glare upon the room.

Then the judge asked, has anyone here ever committed a crime, been the victim of a crime, known anyone who's been convicted or known anyone who's been a victim? If so, stand up and form two lines.

I thought, this is my chance to get out of this trial. But curiously my back was pinned to the chair. I don't know why. Maybe I thought I was fated to be on this jury and I didn't want to impede fate. But I was compelled to after a few minutes. I once plead guilty and I have a friend in jail. So I, too, got up and got in line.

It rained and it got warm before the rain quite ended and then it got sunny and quite hot.

People on the subway read their papers warily, just a bit distracted. Like they are waiting for something to happen that never does.

When I was playing with George and Joe in Washington Square Park the other day. As usual a clutch of derelicts, head cases and addicts gathered 'round us. And some marginal cases too – quiet guys, some with guitars, suspended from the bearings of a dull and cozy life. Sitting amidst the cigarette butts and the trash, watching, listening. Smiling strangely.

Jury Duty - 9

I went to an Italian restaurant outside of space and time. Giant potted plants, and tablecloths, and napkins. An easel with a chalkboard, specials written in pink chalk.

I heaved myself up to the bar like a shipwrecked man to shore.

I ate pasta and meat sauce, drank Chianti. I listened to some rich old lady prattle on. To her husband and their friends. The put-upon bartender, who wore red.

She wore a long coat and a scarf.

Somewhere in the world it's raining hard and I like to think about that.

One night I fucked a girl on the L-shaped sofa in my friend's parents' living room. Some drunk, young girl I kind of remembered from high school. Everybody upstairs.

I didn't ask, but she said the reason she let me fuck her is: She likes guys in bands.

After some exertions I came into the unfathomable darkness inside her. At once I evidently was despondent and remorseful, and said or acted to the effect.

I recall realizing she might perceive this as a slight and so steered my melancholy musings toward the abstract.

And that's when she was moved to ask me.

Did I think I would ever do anything bad to anyone. Do I think about doing bad things. She asked.

She seemed quite concerned.

With my softening cock inside her still I reassured her best I could.

Jury Duty - 8

When the first phase of laborious and faltering rationalizations, supplications and concessions ended we were dismissed for lunch. A period not to exceed one hour and one half.

We tromped out of the box and out the stately door.

The defendant, froglike, sunken in his chair and neck, examined us with jaundice.

If ever he leaves I bet he takes the back door out.

Jury Duty - 7

During the course of his preamble the judge said: This case is a racketeering case. It is a case, you will hear talk of the Mafia. You will hear talk, la Cosa Nostra. The defendant's name is Gregory DePalma. Here he is now, sitting before you. He is an elderly man. He is in very poor health. He is an ailing man.

And he recited the charges against this man, a garish hodgepodge of loan sharking, bookmaking, assault, intimidation, embezzlement, payola.

And more.

His candor had a rhythmic, mesmerizing effect, as of some litany or chant.

Mafia. Cosa Nostra. DePalma.

Bookmaking. Loan sharking.

He duly introduced the prosecution and defense.

Then, one at a time our numbers were selected by the languid black girl from some ancient, hallowed tumbler. It was six-sided, I think, all nicely wood.

Number 27 please. Take the first seat in the box.

I was the third juror.

There began the litany of excuses.

I have a house reserved in the Hamptons. It's quite expensive.

My son is graduating and I can't miss his graduation. He's graduating.

My wife requires medical attention and I am afraid no one will look after her.

Some tearful.

I for one saw no reason to reject my duty though I felt as though I were sliding inexorably toward something strange and new. Bewildering.

Jury Duty - 6

They opened the door and we filed in processional. Tomb quiet. Maybe fifty of us in all.

It was startlingly, remarkably cold in the courtroom. Colder than the moment you were born.

The court clerk, a young black woman with a languid posture, told us instructions. Sit in these rows. We will be calling your name, your number. We will call you to sit in the box.

A door somewhere opened and a black-gowned figure floated in.

All rise.

His honor So-and-So.

He welcomed us in the sternest possible manner. Yet I could perceive in him a trace of hard-won benevolence, a real thing, not put on nor imagined, that sustained him through these trials with their evidence of repeated, fateful failings of our kind.

I liked him.

Jury Duty - 5

We were told we would be moving. To another courtroom. The two officers in charge occasionally excused themselves to ascertain the preparedness of this next stage; of its judge, its officers, God knows what. They'd leave and say, Don't leave. They inspired in us solemn and unquestioning consent.

Finally we filed out into what, an antechamber. We piled into elevators in disordered, deferential sets.

When we had to wait we waited.

When we arrived on the 23rd floor the courtroom was, strangely, still not ready. We hovered in the lobby next to windows to the north. The windows looked upon Canal Street, Chinatown, Little Italy, the Lower East Side, the East Village, Chelsea and, looming in the midst, the Empire State Building.

For Christ's sake.

Jury Duty - 4

We sat for what seemed like hours in the deep mahogany pews of some courtroom on the what was it, sixth floor. Like schoolkids on detention.

We were each assigned a number and urged in the strongest possible terms to memorize it.

"You will be handed a card. Memorize the number on your card."

I received a card and memorized the number.

"Do not forget the number on your card. This number is your number. The number on your card."

I thought about my number. I liked my number. I thought about the number on my card.

My number was 17.

Vaguely I worried: What if that was not the number on my card?

What if the card said 19?

I pried the card out of my pocket, a card just like some business card. Of someone you met at a party or a bar.

It said 17.

I was 17.

Jury Duty - 3

I had a solitary lunch at a bar with a friendly bartender, she seemed to be from something like Wisconsin. She recommended the California Cab and who was I to refuse.

Back in court we waited. I drifted off to sleep on crooked elbow. They emptied the room in sets of three dozen or so throughout the course of that drowsy afternoon, sending them all up there to their fates as dispensers of justice. And then they said: Come back tomorrow.

Lightning blinked beyond the kitchen window. Home at last.

I walked a balance beam of asphalt across a puddle on the treed and tessellated sidewalk by the Park. Fifth and oh, 108th or so.

Fire engines were parked before the hospital, silent. Flashing.

Her theory was: Every man becomes my stalker. And it was nearly self-fulfilling.

What I Remember from the 1977 Guinness Book of World Records

1

There was some miser, Hetty Green? Meanest woman in the world. She parlayed two scraps of soap into an incalculable fortune; a sum to rival any captain of industry's.

There she was walking across the gunmetal cobblestones of some Manhattan alley. Corseted and severe. Her grim and unforgiving mouth curled by the faintest trace of terror.

What was a miser, in fact? I had no idea.

She seemed to know she was despised. Yet in her pride she could not fathom why.

2

A man in the shade of a fairground tent hung his head over a paper plate splattered with ropes of spaghetti. He ate more of it in 21 seconds, or something, than any man before him.

His head hung like a penitent's, or like a hajji's, finally arrived. Bowing tremulously to pray.

Beside the plate was a paper cup bearing the Coca-Cola ribbon. I imagined the sweet, cold and dark liquid flowing over my tongue. Soaking my thirsty throat in prickly bubbles.

3

A tiny man on a massive rock formed like a bridge, somewhere in the West.

4

The fattest man in the world who had to be buried in a piano case. Three questions nagged me:

What did he do before he died?

Who came to the funeral?

What did they do with the piano?

Jury Duty - 2

I was trying to read the New Yorker with my head propped on my hand, my elbow on the arm of the chair. I felt melatonin seep gently into my brain.

Before you knew it there was some kind of announcement regarding lunch.

I explored the strangely timewarped environs of the court. I walked east, I think, yes, east. No – west. I walked west. Toward Broadway and everything. All the stores were old stores, discount stores with corrugated faces, cigar shops, luncheonettes. The very streetlights and lamps took on the aspect of mid-20th-century modernity, the days we all said wow.

In the living room my roommates are unconscious on the La-Z-Boy and the sofa respectively, or maybe dead.

What noxious spirit hath permeated this space?

Jury Duty - 1

Downtown where the courts are the doors are tall. I saw iron gates and columns, and steps and steps and steps. Of extraordinary breadth. Steps whose breadth will make you comatose. Whose breadth suggests the world is without purpose. And that the world is flat. That you'll fall off it one fine day.

We crowded into the juror's waiting room and awaited further instruction. Finally we were instructed to wait.

There's some news story on the TV, I've never heard of it and can't even fathom:

GRICAR SIGHTINGS

It might as well have been invented by a child. Were it not so knowing, so taunting in its electronic urgency. Is that a word? A name? It is a thing, now that it's been lobbed into the living room like a radioactive ball. Guess I'll put it under my pillow and go to bed.

My dentist of indeterminate North African origin.

My sexy dentist.

She pried off my temporary crown and I yelped from not so much the pain as shock the wrenching force and - suddenly - razed tooth laid bare.

The temporary crown. The false crown.

It sat on the tip of my tongue before I spat it out upon my aquamarine bib.

She was contrite. I was OK. I said, I'm OK.

Sorry, she said. With that dark and throaty voice, the accent, yes?

The precisely not quite sure how do you say.

I suppose I love her, but she hurts me so.

Every time the sun sets it's like it's never set before. Every time it rises.

I came so close to dying today.

I walked out of the office and headed east on desolate Canal Street to the terrifying intersection of Hudson and Watts and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. At night I don't think so much about it, maybe 'cause I'm tired and it's dark and the whole world seems somehow less perilous, softened in the gloom.

I got the light and I walked.

My ears plugged with earbuds and Donald Fagen cooing in his Jersey know-it-all, adenoidal snarl.

A car raced around another heading west on Canal and abruptly cut across. In the space of about half a second I formed the following distinct thoughts, apprehensible as gradual stages in some deliberate process of realization or at least of coming to terms:

1. That car can't possibly be coming at me.
2. Can it?
3. Is that car coming right at me?
4. I mean, right at me?
5. At full speed?

I broke into an awkward, loping gallop, three steps maybe, just enough for the demon car to squeal past my back, not slowing nor swerving nor honking nor giving the least indication.

I exploded into motion, it occurs to me now, the way they said that new defensive tackle the Eagles drafted, the way they like him for his explosiveness, and I thought at the time, what a dumb football cliché, explosiveness.

To explode into motion. All the requisite muscles suddenly and completely given to the task of displacement at the instigation of a subconscious or superconscious thought.

When it was over and I reached the other side of the street, I thought, What now?

The Cake & the Square Plates, the Smudgy Glass with a Puddle of Wine

At the end of his birthday Johnny was breaking up with Val. Through the half-opened door we heard his murmurings in the dark. Conciliatory words of endearment and atonement, perhaps. Soft but ruthless half-truths, devised to extract himself from her with surgical precision.

Not damaging nearby tissue.

We figured we'd see him soon enough, within an hour or two, and he'd be returned to us with his freedom, relieved and hungry.

Then maybe we could watch TV.

But a more sinister process seemed to be at work. When you end a thing like this, the implications have no bounds. Must you punish yourself, scar yourself ritually, to measure up to them?

Will Johnny survive?

Day drew alarmingly into night with no developments. It was spooky to imagine them in there on his bed. What on earth were they saying? What was one saying to the other? And the other saying in turn? The proceedings had the solemn and semisecret air of eleventh-hour union negotiations or the drafting of a weapons treaty. But there was no intervention from civilization, nor even life; no breaks for food or drink or rest.

Interactions of any kind with others were clearly taboo.

But at around 1 am Johnny shuffled out to take a piss. As he walked back toward his door Sam called out, "How's it going in there?"

Trying for a little levity maybe.

Johnny shook his head almost imperceptibly, not looking our way. Conveying no of course, but most of all don't ask. He was embarked upon a journey that we ordinary mortals could not hope to understand.

Then there was a savage creaking of their bed accompanied by muffled groans and urgent whispers.

They were fucking, just like that. And we were left to wonder by what alchemy.

By what godless process this had occurred.

Human beings and what they do.

Except a funny thing happened the following day. Johnny came out alone, early in the afternoon. Where's Val, we asked; Val is gone. She left under cover of the raw, white morning.

"Are you back together?" I asked, quizzical.

"No," he said. "It's over."