Thursday, November 13th

My summons said to be in Room 340 at 141 Livingston at 8:45 am. I was actually climbing out of the Court St. station on the N at 8:45, so I guess you could say I was late. This had me mad. Not because I hate being late, but mainly because I hate being bitched at. I was short on sleep too, and cranky. The booth attendant wouldn’t talk to me through her microphone even though it was right in front of her. When I asked where Livingston St. was, she pointed me towards Montague instead. That ate up another ten minutes. Mentally, I was preparing myself to catch some major flak from the judge. Anyone who tried it was fucking with the wrong guy, though. I wasn’t going to put up with it. I’d be all, “Hey, man! Guess you gotta lock me up!” What assholes.

I got fresh directions from a Korean grocery and walked some more until I saw a long line of people. I followed them for a bit until they went inside. A cop asked me to empty my pockets, so I did. I followed the line a little more, and then I got the stuff from my pockets back in a plastic tub. The elevators also had long lines. It was irritating, but I thought the lines would be a good excuse in case I got bitched at. While I was squeezing into an elevator with twenty other sweaty people, I could practically taste the excuses in my mouth. They were tart and salty, like little kippers or herring. I imagined them on a little Ritz with some capers and a little piece of dill. Anyone who wanted to bitch me out could eat that, man.

Outside the elevator on the third floor was a line of people sitting in a row of chairs. I pushed out of the elevator and grabbed one for myself. The chair had a cushy black vinyl seat and back, although the arms were just chromed steel, no pads. It was low to the ground, which was very good. I stretched my legs out in front of me. The soft vinyl-covered foam curved gently behind my shoulders and under my neck. It was spectacular. I rolled up my scarf for a pillow and let my head fall back.

***

I jerked awake when I heard the sounds of a TV coming from an open door down the hall. I noticed the chairs around me were empty now. I had a feeling I needed to be where the TV was—a good rule of thumb. I wiped the wet corner of mouth on my sleeve and stumbled through the door into a much larger room. It was full of jurors. There must have been five hundred of them or more. I instinctively tensed up for a fight, but nobody even bothered to bitch at me. At the front of the room was a long counter with a black guy in a v-neck sweater behind it. The TV was on a rolling cart next to the counter, and all of the jurors were watching. On the screen, a mob of hooded druids were boiling a beggar in a big black pot. The voiceover remarked that the beggar might have preferred a trial by jury. Well, naturally. I paused for a moment to enjoy a burgeoning sense of purpose.

I walked carefully down the center aisle and found an empty seat next to a tall black guy with big plastic glasses. The seats in the jury room were those kind of stackable chairs that are bolted together in pairs. The arms and backs were straight and padded with black rubbery stuff and not at all like the cushy vinyl on the chairs in the hall. The legs were too long and the seat was too high for me to stretch out my legs. I tried folding them underneath me, one ankle over the other, and I guess that was comfortable enough. The black man on my left was switching his stare anxiously between his summons and the TV. He nudged me and indicated that he was Nigerian and had poor English. I communicated my sympathy. I refolded my scarf to fit under my jaw and nodded off.

***

Later, my head sort of fell over to the left and surprised me. I sensed that I was thirsty. Scanning the room carefully, I noticed that there were fewer jurors in the room now, like twenty or so. There was a water cooler by the up by counter where the man in the v-neck sat. I climbed over Nigeria and walked up to the cooler. A stack of paper cups in a plastic sack lay nearby, and I reached inside the sack to take one. The man in the sweater glared at me. A plaque on the counter identified him as the Clerk of Jurors.

“Now that’s twenty-five cents, son,” he explained. I narrowed my eyes to slits.

“Guess you gotta lock me up,” I spat back. He dropped his hand to the telephone and lifted it to his mouth.

“We got one,” he said. Then he grinned and laughed at me. I filled my little cup at the cooler and then emptied it slowly, finally crushing it in my fist. The clerk laughed again, louder. I went back to my seat and hid my face in my arm.

***

Later on, Clerk crackled his microphone and announced that we were free to go. He made a point of saying that we were dismissed, not discharged. We had to come back at 8:45 the next morning. The day was over. It was around five, most likely. I don’t know what happened to lunch. I must have missed it. I went straight home on the subway. It was dark when I got there, so I just got in bed and fell asleep.

Friday, November 14th

Friday morning was basically the same as Thursday. I stopped outside 141 and took a moment to observe my surroundings. I saw a breakfast cart, a pizzeria and a deli. There were two parking garages, one behind the building and one underneath it. There was a storefront for a psychic and a stationery store, too. It looked like downtown Brooklyn, since it was. You’ll forgive me for not mentioning that shit earlier, since you probably figured it out already.

I waited in a few lines. I crammed in a sweaty elevator with some strangers. I went to the jury room and took my seat next to Nigeria. On the TV, Ed Bradley was explaining that jury service was burdensome but vitally important to our way of life. While agreeing, I nodded myself softly to sleep.

***

I heard Clerk call out my name on his microphone. There were only eight people left now, including Nigeria and myself. He and I were sitting together in our paired seats, surrounded on all sides by rows and rows of mostly empty chairs. There was also a Vietnamese guy, two black ladies, another black dude, a lady who was probably Indian or maybe Pakistani, and this other guy who was a white guy like me but older by twenty years at least. They all had names, but I can’t say them because there’s probably a law against it and besides I never bothered to learn them. A young man in a suit led us all to a much smaller room in single file. I wondered if all eight of us would be on the jury together. I thought of a good subtitle: “Twelve (or Eight) Angry (or Contented, or Indifferent) Men (or Women) (of Various Ethnic and National Heritages) (Representing a Cross-Section of the Brooklyn Community)”.

In the smaller room, a different man in a suit and a blonde girl were waiting for us. They introduced themselves as lawyers and told us to sit. The seats were low-slung, worn, fabric-covered stackers. The seat was rigid and the fabric was coarse and uncomfortable. The back too low for my to rest my neck on, and the arms had black plastic covers, like mockeries of real armrests. The lawyers explained that they were going to ask some questions and then do some selecting. I remember Nigeria looking confused. I twisted my hips to the left and set my cheek into the palm of my hand. This wasn’t very comfortable, but somehow I made it work. I heard some people talking. Then there was some more talking, and some time passed.

***

The man lawyer called my name and I sat up. This was my moment. I’d heard from some knowledgeable people that if I handled the Q&A portion correctly, I could spring myself from the rest of service for five whole years. I had even prepared some responses:

A) Yes, sir. I believe all drugs should be decriminalized. I will not convict your dope pusher under any circumstances.

B) No, sir, I am fundamentally opposed to capital punishment. I will not recommend the death penalty in any case, regardless of the evidence.

C) Yes, sir. I hate the Jews. All of them. In fact, I consider my surname to be a Zionist conspiracy.

When Man Lawyer’s question came, though, it was a real ballbreaker. He asked: “Mr. Ancowitz, do you have any strong feelings about personal injury lawsuits?” After some consideration, I was forced to admit that I didn’t. I don’t know why I get so sincere when I’m caught off guard. It’s a flaw. After hearing that, Man Lawyer pronounced me Juror-Number-Six.

***

We got sent home after that. It was probably around one-thirty, so we’d just missed getting a lunch break. I left the building and stopped at a deli on Clark St. by the N. I got a turkey melt, which is like a tuna melt, but with sliced deli turkey instead of tuna. I got American cheese for the cheese. I got it on a hero roll, because I was feeling pretty hungry. I also got lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t like mayonnaise on a hot sandwich, but you know what? I think it’s actually really, really good. On a meatloaf sandwich, too. I like to meatloaf sandwiches on hero rolls, too, because I’m usually pretty hungry. I ate it all the way home, where I got straight into bed and fell asleep.

Saturday, November 15th

The sun was streaming in the window when I woke up on Saturday. I closed the blinds and got back under the sheets. It must have been ten or eleven. In the morning, I think. Yeah, it would be the morning, wouldn’t it?

Sunday, November 16th

The sun was trying to stream in the windows when I woke up on Sunday, but no joy. Ha-ha. Still, I imagined that I could hear the little light particles pinging off the slats of the blinds, like a chorus of millions and billions of tiny screeching voices dying every infinitesimal subdivision of a second. This depressed me, so I got up and went across the street to the Pavilion to see The Matrix: Revolution.

I watched with rapt attention. It was really fascinating in the context of mandatory jury service. Think about it: when a person is suffering some injustice at the hands of a anything with more than two eyes, then I think it is proper and correct to take justice into one’s own hands, as they say. Particularly if the eyes are red. Furthermore, where would you get an impartial jury of your peers if everyone else in the world was a hundred million copies of the same guy? I didn’t enjoy the movie itself very much, though. I crossed the street back to my apartment and got back in bed. It was probably five. Maybe six.

Monday, November 17th

On Monday morning, I waited in the couple of different lines and removed and replaced the contents of my pockets. If you’re curious about what was in my pockets the whole time, I’ll tell you: a pack of Trident Original flavor sugarless gum, some quarters for laundry, my phone and my house keys. All these things have metal in them, so I had to take them out every day. And so it goes. Then the elevator line, and then the jury in the jury room. Diane Sawyer was on TV explaining that jury duty was a hassle but necessary to the proper functioning of the democracy. I observed that this was Ed Bradley’s point, too. I couldn’t see Nigeria anywhere. I wondered if he hadn’t made the cut. I worried after him a little, and then took a nap.

***

Clerk called out the name of our case. Seven people stood up, so I did too, making eight. I recognized some of them; others I’d never seen before. We lined up in single file and a bailiff led us back to the elevator and up to the fourteenth floor. There we encountered another jury room, but this one was much smaller and reserved only for us. At this point I got a little confused, because sometimes there were six jurors, and other times there were eight. The bailiff kept taking the same two away and then bringing them back, almost like he couldn’t decide. Also, sometimes the bailiff was a woman.

I took a seat for myself around the jury room’s beat-up conference table. The seats here were similar to the ones in the jury selection room, but a little bit nicer. The fabric wasn’t as coarse, and the cushion was a little softer. I decided to try the same maneuver that had worked yesterday. I twisted my hips to one side, wedged my elbow against the wall, and put my chin in the palm of my hand. I found I could sort of lift one knee up onto the seat. This wasn’t too bad at all.

***

Later, Bailiff came back through the other door and told us to line up. I’d never done so much lining up in my life, but I think I can humbly say that I was improving with practice. I was able to do it without even waking up all the way. We were led into the courtroom in formation. We marched past the bailiff’s desk, around in front of the judge’s little stable, past Man Lawyer and Girl Lawyer, and then around again against the left wall. Eight seats were arranged in two rows there, in front of a window that stretched the whole length of the courtroom wall.

The jurors’ seats were carved wooden chairs mounted on pivots in the floor. I was a little apprehensive at first, seeing the wood. But after we stood in front of our seats and the judge told us to sit, I was happy to find that these juror chairs were very, very comfortable. The seats were carved so that they kind of cradled your ass. The back and arms were one continuous curving piece of wood, and the surface was smooth and cool against my neck as I slouched in it. It was better that the massage chair at Brookstone. Amazingly, the pivot in the floor let you turn the chair from side to side and also rock back and forth. I turned myself around to the left and leaned far, far back, peeping the Brooklyn vista from the fourteenth floor. It was all sooty and gray, but in a way that really thrilled me. I turned back around and faced the judge. He had a moustache. It moved from side to side as he spoke.

I’m not going to go on and on about the part that followed because I’m a little hazy on the details. First Man Lawyer talked for a while and then Girl Lawyer got up and talked too. A little Dominican boy came in and sat by the judge. Man Lawyer and Girl Lawyer both asked him some questions, and he answered in a very small voice. I couldn’t really hear, and that was irritating to me because the microphone was right in front of him and he wasn’t using it. I didn’t feel very sympathetic to him, so I sort of looked at my knees for a while. When I looked back, it wasn’t the little boy anymore, but an older man with the same complexion but way worse skin. Man Lawyer and Girl Lawyer got up and repeated the question routine. The man didn’t speak English, though. He only spoke through an interpreter, who was a very elegant looking Argentine fellow with a shiny patent leather briefcase. I don’t hear people speak in foreign languages very frequently, so instead of listening to the interpreter’s English translation, I tried to listen carefully to the man’s Spanish and figure out what he was saying. Oh, yeah--every once in a while, Girl Lawyer would get up and complain. The judge usually waved his hand at her because he was annoyed. I didn’t feel very sympathetic to her, either. She seemed bitchy.

After the man was finished talking, the judge sent us all to lunch for an hour and a half. I walked around the shops on the Fulton Mall. I thought for a while that I might buy some clothes, but they were all too baggy. Then I went to a little underground restaurant and got curry chicken with rice and beans and fried plantains. God, fried plantains are so good. After that, I went to Toys-R-Us to play Xbox for the rest of lunch, but they didn’t have the video games set up so you could play them. I figured that was probably because we were in Brooklyn and not Manhattan. Racist fucks.

I went back to the courtroom after that big letdown. I lined up and lined up and lined up and lined up and sat down and listened to this black girl talk for a while. She seemed very nervous, and I felt a little sorry for her. Girl Lawyer was her lawyer, and since she was particularly bitchy through this part, I went back to being only indifferent about the black girl. The story was some people had stopped their car at a stoplight. It was raining. I guess it was slippery and dark. After the first people stopped, someone else came up and hit them. It wasn’t clear if this was by accident or on purpose. It didn’t seem like the lawyers could decide between themselves, and the judge also didn’t seem to want to say one way or the other whose fault it was. If I‘m not sure whether the accident was on purpose, how am I supposed to decide who gets the settlement? Also, maybe there was an oil slick on the road. No one mentioned it; why not? What were they hiding?

Later, after the black girl was done talking, the judge said we could go and come back again the next day for closing arguments and deliberations. And that’s pretty much what I did. It was five or five-thirty, and nighttime already because it was November. I felt tired, so I got in bed and slept.

Tuesday, November 18th

Tuesday was a whirlwind of activity. After waiting in line, I waited in line. Then I waited in a line. I tried to sleep in the first jury room, but I was taken to the fourteenth floor before I had made any progress. Then I tried to sleep in the other jury room, but the bailiff put us in another line. Back in the courtroom, Man Lawyer and Girl Lawyer talked for a while, but about familiar sounding things, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention. I tried to stretch out a little while the judge spoke, but he didn’t have very much to say and we were taken back to the jury room before I had a chance to relax.

Bailiff left the six of us sitting alone around the conference table. I looked around. There were some pictures and a packet of papers on the table. I noticed again that Nigeria wasn’t there and I wondered what he was doing these days. The Vietnamese started talking in an argumentative tone of voice. I rolled my scarf up between my head and the wall and nestled against it. Everybody talked for a while and then sometimes they’d sign one of the lines in the packet of papers. When the packet came around to me, I signed it, too.

After that was done, Bailiff brought us back into the courtroom. We all took our seats and the Vietnamese guy read to the court from the packet of papers. The lawyers got very tense, but the judge mainly just nodded. I noticed some seagulls flying in spiral shapes outside the window. I wondered why they should be called seagulls since the only local bodies of water are harbors, rivers, bays, canals, and tidal estuaries.

Then Bailiff lined us up once more time and we retired to the jury room. Now we sat for a long time. I could hear a lot of arguing in the courtroom, but all of the jurors stayed pretty quiet. A couple of the overachieving jurors tried to solve the Kobe Bryant case too, but the others took naps. I did, too.

***

Bailiff took us into the courtroom one more time. I noticed that both Man and Girl Lawyers looked mighty peeved and tried really hard not to look at us. The judge was very cheerful though, so I didn’t worry about the lawyers too much. Judge talked for a while about how he appreciated the work we’d done even though we hadn’t come close to finishing. He didn’t go into details about what we didn’t do, or else I don’t remember. Then he said we were discharged and told Bailiff to take us away. I was so happy, I felt like cheering. We went back down to the first jury room and waited while Clerk gave us certificates and little key chains shaped like gavels. After that, we all split up and left.

I went straight home on the subway. When I got there, though, I felt strangely anxious. I didn’t feel like sleeping at all, so instead I walked across the street to Prospect Park and walked around. I went to one of my favorite places, with is the big hill on the south side of the park that has to be the “Prospect” that they’re talking about in the name. I climbed up all the stone steps from terrace to terrace until I was at the very peak of the hill. A little below the highest terrace is a round clearing in a bunch of trees. The grass in the clearing was high, but it was late in autumn and the grass was mostly wet and rotting. While I was looking at this, I imagined for a bit that it was springtime instead. I imagined a maypole in the center of the clearing, and I imagined my fellow jurors and me dancing around it. Clerk was there, and so was Nigeria. Bailiff, Judge, and Man and Girl Lawyer were there, too. Girl Lawyer even had bunches of fresh flowers woven into her braids. Everyone was holding the end of a piece of maypole ribbon, and we all bobbed under or over the other guys’ ribbons as we laughed and hopped and danced. All the while, sunshiny light kind of gleamed off of all of our faces. Imagining all this felt pretty good to me. It felt like Justice.