I set out on foot, deciding to take the trolley rather search Downtown San Diego fruitlessly for a parking space, and then paying for the ten or so hours I'd be away from it.
It was cold and misty and invigorating and stuff. It was morning. True morning, I thing I see on only very rare occasions. On the trolley ride to Downtown, I first encountered the main difficulty that was to hound me throughout the day; if I sat still for too long, my head would begin bobbing strangely about as my mind drifted into sleeplund for a few seconds. It basically happened whenever my mind wandered, as it is frequently wont to do. On Wednesday, my body took "mind wandering" as being an excuse to start dreaming.
Fortunately, I was able to stay mostly awake for the journey--at one point I took out my notebook and did some strange doodles in it:
This seemed to help quite a bit. But once off the trolley, my body was quickly given cause to generate plenty of very useful adrenaline as I realised that it was now already 7:30am and I had to be at the Juror's Lounge at 7:45am.
The place's address was 330 W. Broadway, so I started walking down Broadway, assuming I'd come across it eventually. On the way, I was approached by two separate individuals asking for spare change (one of them specifically needed quarters), which I automatically gave to them, in spite of the fact that I was pretty low on cash at the time. But I'm a helluva pushover at times. Further down Broadway, at the Greyhound station, a guy asked me for six hundred dollars. I rather wished I had six hundred dollars I could randomly hand out to strangers.
I was reading the addresses on each of the buildings, and found that I had gotten to 220, and that 200 was across the street. Somehow, I guessed, I'd passed the 330. So I backed up.
The only place between 300 and where the 400s began was an abandoned building with construction scaffolding. So I took out the lousy little map that'd come with my summons, and began walking up and down each street intersecting Broadway, not daring to look at the time.
Finally, an old man on a crutch hollered out to me, "Where ya tryin' to go?!"
"Er, I'm looking for 330 West Broadway,"
"Oh, the Court House! Well, that's on Broadway!"
"Oh . . . well, I walked all the way--"
"Just go down that way and turn right [onto Broadway]!"
"All right . . ."
I started off again down Broadway, thinking perhaps the 300s began after the 100s. Which doesn't make much sense, but turned out nonetheless to be true. I passed the Greyhound station again and in my anxiety at being late, I hardly registered the guy who'd earlier asked me for 600 dollars asking if I'd at least give him 95. I really must look incredibly rich somehow.
There was a news crew set up in front of the Court House's big, predictable Greek column façade--I resisted the urge to stop and stare at the correspondent, whose TV-perfect hair and makeup and clothes seemed kind of silly in the light of day. Instead I hurried inside, deposited all my metal things in a tray, walked through the metal detector, set the thing off anyway (as always), had my ankles frisked, gathered my metallic possessions, and finally entered the Juror's Lounge. In this big room, a man was making a very boring orientation speech. Apparently he'd been a Special Guest or something, because he didn't give us any useful information. All the useful stuff came from the next guy, who would alternate between giving us utterly pointless, boring information, and giving us deadly pertinent information. And he wasn't very articulate. That's one thing I continually noticed about these employees of Law, from the last time I had Jury Duty to this one, all of these people were surprisingly inarticulate.
Once this fellow was finished--an acutely agonising 20 minutes later--we were all excused to the bathroom. It was on my way out of the bathroom that I spotted a girl in the women's restroom line carrying a hardback copy of Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
I sat down again, but after a few moments, I concluded the chairs were terribly uncomfortable, and that there was no reason why I should not sit on the far more comfortable floor. So I did.
I'd brought with me my notebook and my paperback The Brothers Karamazov. It's testament for what a very good book that is that I was able to read any of it at all, as I found reading gave me a similar problem to what I'd experienced on the trolley. Literature can be a bit too much like dreams on such occasions.
I also had to listen very carefully in case my name was called on the PA. I was very fervently hoping and wishing and willing that it would not be. But of course it was.
I was to go to department 52 on the fourth floor . . . instructions I'd barely caught off the PA and which were annoyingly not repeated. So I got up and hurried after the potential Jurors heading off for that department. It was up three escalators, across a bridge suspended above one of the city's streets, and then up another floor on an elevator.
I was surprised to see that the girl with American Gods was in my group, and I now noticed that she was really very cute. We were all waiting outside the courtroom for a few minutes, and I was considering going over to her and mentioning that American Gods is a fantastic book and that Neil Gaiman is my favourite contemporary author . . . but I was too shy to do so before the woman came out of the court room and began checking our attendance.
I decided that if the gods presented me with some kind of sign, then I'd go talk to the girl later on. Very cowardly bit of reasoning, I know.
So we all went in and sat down. 'Twas a little courtroom with lawyers and books and a judge and computers . . .
After we sat down, our names were read off in a certain order, and we were to sit in certain seats in that order.
I was number 9 and, for a moment, this put me right next to the girl with American Gods. This seemed like it could very well be a sign from the gods, and this did annoy me slightly. It's so much easier to be shy when you know for certain that it was just "never meant to be".
The girl was moved, though, when number 10 was called and put in her place, a bald middle aged man who, from the questions he answered from the judge and the attorneys, turns out to have a very naughty and unruly daughter who's probably breaking parole as we spoke.
We were all asked questions individually. When I was asked if I'd ever served on Jury Duty before, I told him I'd been called a few years ago, but the whole jury had been excused for some reason. When I was asked whether it had been a civil or a criminal case, I was forced to reply, "Er, to be honest, I wasn't really paying attention at the time . . ."
Which made a number of people in the room laugh, especially the defendant, and was probably the reason I later wound up being excused. It was a little disquieting that when I said that about not paying attention, the judge replied to me by saying, "Yeah, I have those days too,"
It turned out that only I and one middle aged woman who'd served on Jury Duty every three years for the past twelve years or so were excused. Maybe it was what she and I had in common that had been cause for our being excused:
When the defence attorney asked the entire group if we thought that we would be more likely to take a policeman's word as a witness than the word of a civilian, I was the only one who raised my hand. I told the attorney that the fact that a fellow's a police officer implies at the very least that he's had education and training, while "civilian", a very broad term, could mean just about anybody.
The middle aged woman who ended up being excused also raised her hand then to agree with me.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the American Gods girl had also been excused much earlier on for having a job that would not pay her for the period she would need to be retained.
She wasn't in the Jury Lounge when I got back, maybe because it was during the two hour lunch break, during which the orientation guy had encouraged us to explore the wonders of Downtown San Diego. I decided I would rather chill in the lounge than be forced to go through the metal detector again.
I tried reading awhile, and I was able to for at least ten minutes, but I simply couldn't carry on longer than that. Then I brought out my notebook and decided I'd try writing, figuring as this would be a more actively engaging exercise, it'd have a better chance of keeping me somewhat lucid.
I'd finished part 5 of my novel several days earlier, and in the few days afterwards, my daily writings had been to work upon the sort stories I'm submitting for the Acorn Review or to editing some of the last few chapters of part five. So it was there, in the jury lounge, without any sleep for the past twenty four hours, that I was to begin part 6. I suppose I could've picked a better time to pen such a crucial part of my novel.
I didn't get far anyway. It was only a couple of paragraphs before I noticed that my pen had stopped making discernable words and letters and had begun making a squiggling alien scrawl, and that I was rapidly forgetting words coming from my brain before I could put them on paper. Still, after the long digression of part 5, it was nice to get back to Nesuko . . .
I wasn't sure what to do after that. I stood up several times, paced, got an orange juice and a bag of chips from the vending machines, changed seats, sat on the floor, went back to one of the seats . . .
I wanted to try taking a nap, but I really couldn't do this as I needed to be alert enough hear if mine name was called. So I finally resorted to watching the television--and I somehow managed to prop my consciousness up well enough with episodes of All My Children and One Life to Live.
I came dangerously close to completely falling asleep at one point . . . but then I heard something through the fog . . . some dim familiar stimulus of noise that for a moment I thought was even calling to me personally . . . as I forced myself into full fledged consciousness, I realised what it was.
It was "I'm Deranged" by David Bowie.
Amazingly the makers of One Life to Live had decided to use this song in their episode, and it came to me like a life raft tossed into the needy ocean of slumber in which I was floundering.
It was the Lost Highway edit of the song, and I wondered if the TV show's writers even knew about the Outside album.
I got up to use the restroom and saw the American Gods girl was back and that she was talking on her cell phone. When I returned from the bathroom, she was relaxing in a seat, feet propped up on the chair in front of her, American Gods open on her lap.
I, cowardly, walked past her, back to my seat. It occurred to me that making conversation with someone would probably be the best way of keeping awake and that I had ample full for one with the girl, knowing, as I do, so many useless facts about Neil Gaiman. In my head I ran through things I could have possibly said to her; "Did you notice Delirium and Barnabas's cameo?", "Are you gonna go see Neil Gaiman when he's here for the Comicon?" and so forth.
I think what mainly kept me awake from then on was just the exercise of wrestling with myself, half of me trying to drag me over to her, the other half coming up with lame excuses like, "Oh, but it'd be so rude to interrupt her reading . . ."
I think I was just about to try talking to her when the voice on the PA excused everyone. I watched her go into the bathroom before leaving, and then I decided that I should use the bathroom before I left, so I did. She wasn't out yet when I got out . . . I couldn't wait for her. That would be too weird.
I left the room, and as I was going out the door I saw her behind me. I saw her behind me as I exited the courthouse, and as I walked a ways down Broadway, and then I saw her turn north on one street and that, as they say, was the last I saw of her.
Oh. Well.
We had actually been released early, at around 2:30, and I decided to go to Horton Plaza. I do so love that mall. I hung around there, drinking a Chai Latte, and having absolutely no trouble staying awake while reading The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe it was because of the very good feeling of freedom.
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