Jury Duty
(page 2 of 3)
We were told that we would eventually be summoned to serve on a particular case and to just wait patiently until that time. We were supposed to sign out if we left the room. We were allowed to use laptop computers if we had them (I didn’t), but had to go into the hall if we wanted to use cellular phones. The officer left, and everyone settled into a comfortable funk.
I now discovered that there were two other small rooms adjacent to the main room: a reading room, with a big desk in the middle and a lot of little desks to the side, very much like a college library, and a TV room, which was exactly the same, but with a TV. I found a desk in the reading room, feeling a certain smug superiority to the TV people. I imagined that we, in the reading room, would make far better jurors than those slack-jawed yokels watching Jenny Jones in the next room. A woman’s cell-phone rang, and the rest of us rattled our newspapers and glared over our spectacles until she left the room.
About an hour passed before the officer returned, announcing that he was going to call out the names of several people, who were report to a courtroom where some lawyers would select or reject them for the actual jury. He stressed that even if you weren’t actually picked for the jury, it had nothing whatsoever to with you personally. I felt a flush of anticipation. I wasn’t like that Spanish woman in the video: I knew I could judge someone. In fact, I can be very judgmental, and I wanted to put my talent to professional use. But as the officer began to read the list of names, I suddenly knew that I wasn’t going to be picked. I wasn’t. I was rejected before I even had a chance to be rejected. It was just like grammar school.
I trudged back to the reading room, but just as I took my seat, the officer suddenly announced that we should all take a half an hour break.
Outside, the day was sweltering and humid, and the guards to the building were wearily smoking cigarettes, trying to keep themselves awake. I went to a deli across the street to get something to eat. There was a family — a mother, father, and two small children — wandering around the salad bar, taking turns sampling from the bin. “Mommy, this is good,” the little girl said, stuffing something that looked like sliced beets into her mouth. “Well, if it’s good, then shut your mouth and eat it,” the mother retorted.
While I was paying for my food, the Korean woman behind the counter suddenly leaned forward and shouted past me, “Sir! Sir! You haven’t paid for anything yet!”
The father looked up and dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “We ain’t finished getting our food, yet, lady,” he protested around mouthfuls of bread.
The Korean woman scowled. “They eat like that for half an hour already,” she said in despair.
“These things happen,” I observed uselessly.
There was a park next to the court building, and I sat down near the entrance to eat. The park was full of a strange variety of people. Two men sat across from me chatting amiably, but whenever a woman passed — any woman — one of them would rise to his feet, shout, “God bless you! God bless you!” and then resume his conversation (which seemed to be about good places to go fishing). Nearby, a well-dressed man sat on a bench, conversing intensely with a shabby old woman surrounded with bags, while his baby daughter toddled after a pigeon, arms outstretched. The pigeon always managed to keep one step ahead of her, but suddenly — as if weary of the whole futile exercise — halted abruptly. Confused, the little girl skidded to a stop. Here was the object of her desire, presenting itself at last, and she didn’t know what to do. She shook her head, dashed towards her father and threw herself in his lap. There’s a lesson in that, I thought, but it was too hot to figure out what it was.
Two people I’d seen in the courtroom — a pretty young woman, and a clumsy-looking man in his early twenties — emerged from the park. The man was speaking animatedly, but as they passed, the girl looked at me desperately and rolled her eyes. I suddenly realized that they had probably met in the courtroom, and the young woman had made the mistake of speaking with this guy and now couldn’t shake him off. It had been a mistake the way speaking to a stranger on an airplane is a mistake.
I followed them into the building, where we stood in line to go through the metal detector. For some reason, the clumsy young man kept setting it off. He divested himself of keys, wallet, coins, watch, but it kept going off. They pulled him to one side, waved one of those wands over him, and let him through.
At the elevator bank, he kept talking about it. “That was really weird,” he said over and over again, flushed with excitement, as the girl nodded wearily. Perhaps it’s the plate in your head, I thought. I secretly gave him the name Boris Bonehead.
