About Last Night

I found the following note in my e-mailbox this morning:

Perverse as it will seem to you, I have always liked jury duty, as a great escape. My last stint began on 9/11, and we were evacuated just in time for me to see the second tower collapse.

I also found the weather forecast for Thursday, printed in capital letters and sounding very much like a message in a fortune cookie: TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED THIS MORNING. Opening the blinds, I saw five inches of freshly fallen snow. I bundled up, headed downstairs, and started to make my way from the Upper West Side to the courthouse at 111 Centre Street. It was nine a.m., an hour before I was scheduled to report for my second day of jury duty.

No subway line goes directly from my neighborhood to Centre Street, and I didn’t care to walk halfway across town from the Canal Street station to the courthouse in eight-degree weather, so I trudged four blocks north to the nearest bus stop, figuring to take a crosstown bus through Central Park to the Lexington Avenue subway line, board a southbound express train, and change for the local at Fourteenth Street, emerging just two blocks from the courthouse. (If you live anywhere but New York, that itinerary will give you a taste of the travel-related decisions we carless Manhattanites make every day.) On paper, it was a brilliant plan, but it started to break down almost immediately under the pressure of real life, as such plans are wont to do on snowy winter mornings.

The trouble began at the bus stop, where I found a jam-packed crosstown bus that turned away a dozen or so shivering passengers and drove off. It was followed by two empty out-of-service buses, followed in turn by a bus into which the rest of us crammed ourselves. As anyone who has boarded a New York bus at rush hour will know, I use the word “crammed” literally: the last few people who forced themselves through the open door shoved me three-quarters of the way into the lap of a well-dressed woman. The going was slow and got slower, and by the time I reached Lexington Avenue, a half-hour had crawled by, most of which I spent staring at a “Poetry in Motion” placard on which was printed the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” surely an odd choice for the purpose of diverting bored commuters. I amused myself by imagining ignorant armies clashing by night on the M86 crosstown bus, though it struck me that a line or two from Joseph Conrad might have been even better suited to the occasion. I couldn’t decide whether to opt for “The horror! The horror!” or “Exterminate all the brutes!”

I got off the bus and inched my way down the snow-encrusted stairs to the subway. As I approached the turnstile, I ran into a mob of irate passengers who told me through clenched teeth that the downtown express trains weren’t running. I barely caught the next local, which pulled into my station a half-hour later. From there I slithered atop the icy sidewalks to 111 Centre Street, where I lined up to file through the security checkpoint, then waited 10 minutes for an elevator. I finally reached the jury room at 10:20, just as the clerk started calling the roll.

Much to my surprise, the atmosphere in the waiting room was light–almost festive–and several of the people around me were actually chatting. A pleasant

The shockingly beautiful Our Girl informs me that

(1) her computer is belching smoke, preventing her from posting, but

(2) she’s got some good stuff in the works, and

(3) you’ll see it as soon as the glue dries.

Also:

(4) She promises to answer her e-mail soon.

So do I, only I’ve been making the same promise for the past couple of weeks.

No doubt OGIC will make good on her promise–she’s that kind of girl. As for me, well, I’m not any kind of girl.

From Lileks:

In the summer of 1979 I drove around the South as a representative for the seed dealer Northrup King. I took orders for the next season and gathered the racks from the previous season. Had a yellow Hertz van and a farmer tan. Slept in small motels, drank a lot of Nehi. At night sometimes I’d find myself sitting outside watching traffic and smoking a cigarette

Jury duty today. I have to set my alarm at 6:30 in order to be there by 8:30. Believe me, that is not my usual getting-up time. (In the immortal words of the bon vivant, I don’t finish throwing up until 10 at the earliest.) I spent Tuesday writing like a crazy man, hence no blogging, and OGIC is also in dire work-related straits. God only know when one of us will have time to write something.

I’m going to the ballet to see Balanchine’s Apollo and Concerto Barocco tonight, but I’ll try to at least give you a snapshot of my daily service when I get home in the afternoon, assuming I get home in the afternoon. In the meantime, read some of those other cool blogs in the right-hand column. Not only are TMFTML and Old Hag really dirty this week, but Maud is back!

Quoth Superfluities:

I’ve written in the past about the American Film Theatre and its role in my life. The series has been cropping up lately all over the place

In case you haven’t noticed, “Sites to See,” the “About Last Night” blogroll in the right-hand column, is constantly changing–well, maybe not constantly, but fairly frequently. Our Girl and I both keep an eye out for interesting new arts-related sites (though sometimes the relationship is tenuous), and add them to the blogroll on a provisional basis whenever they’ve amassed enough of a track record to look promising. Sometimes they don’t pan out and we drop them (silently), but the best ones become permanent fixtures. The most recent additions are Artsfeed, Beatrice, Boomer Deathwatch, Danger Blog!, Return of the Reluctant, …something slant, Superfluities, and Symphony X.

If we were more conscientious (read: anal), we’d draw them to your attention on a regular basis. In fact, OGIC and I know we don’t do nearly enough link-driven posts, and we plan to do something about it someday, just like I plan to empty the mailbox once I get done with jury duty. (I swear!) For the moment, though, I simply suggest that you make a point of trolling “Sites to See” every week or so. Chances are you’ll find something new, or be reminded of something old that slipped your mind.

I woke up at 6:20 this morning, ten minutes ahead of the alarm. I started to roll over and go back to sleep, the way I usually do. Then I remembered why I’d set the alarm: I had to report downtown for jury duty in two hours.

Writers who work at home gradually become sealed off from some of the common experiences that unite people with nine-to-five jobs. One of them is getting up in the morning. I’m out most nights attending performances, after which I generally stay up reading or writing until two a.m., my normal lights-out hour. The only time I get up as early as 6:30 is when I have a plane to catch–more often than not, I arise between nine and ten–and I can’t remember the last time I rode a subway at rush hour. I did both those things today, and didn’t much care for either, though the C train wasn’t especially crowded at 7:45, and I was able to sit down all the way to Canal Street.

It was cold in Manhattan today–15 degrees–and the wind pelted me in the face as I made the longish crosstown walk from my subway stop to Centre Street, trudging past dingy storefronts to the edge of Chinatown, where the faces and signs suddenly changed as if somebody had thumbed a button. My destination, 111 Centre Street, was a nondescript medium-rise distinguished only by the homemade 9/11 memorials inside and out. It looks gray and tired. The elevators are slow.

I reached the jury room precisely at 8:30, the time printed on my summons. It’s dingy, too, a windowless rectangular box lit with fluorescent fixtures and full of not-quite-comfortable chairs upholstered in institutional blue. In addition to the main waiting room, there are two smaller rooms off to the side, a TV room and a room full of carrels where people with laptops can work while waiting to be called. As I entered, an orientation video was playing on three TV monitors, the same one I saw the last time I served on a jury, Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer mouthing banalities about the justice system with uplifting faux-Copland music blasting away in the background. I got there just in time to see the funny parts, a reenactment of a medieval trial by ordeal in which the officers of the court throw the defendant into a river to see if he floats, followed by a couple of clips from old episodes of Perry Mason intended to illustrate what most trials aren’t like. About half the seats in the waiting room were already full, and most of the occupants appeared to be watching the video, or at least facing the monitors. Their faces were closed, non-committal, and sallow. (Nobody looks good under fluorescent light.) I wondered how many of them knew who Perry Mason was. Up until I boarded the subway this morning, my attitude toward the prospect of serving on a jury had been sour and resigned, pretty much what you’d expect of a busy New Yorker with deadlines to hit. During the ride to Canal Street, my civic-duty juices started to flow. By the time the video was over, they’d dried up again, and stayed that way.

A door opened and out stepped a jury clerk, a middle-aged, red-faced gent with a dis-is-a-bad-ideer accent who told us that we were there to hear criminal cases and walked us through the day’s routine. His manner was friendly, no-nonsense, cynical but not disagreeable. He explained that we’d be released if we hadn’t been empaneled on a jury after three days, adding that things had been so slow during the first part of the week that the jurors were sent home at the end of the second day. He dealt briskly but mercifully with a half-dozen questions, one belligerent and most of the rest inattentive, after which he was joined by a chipper, cheerful woman who helped him collect our summonses.

I took a closer look at my fellow citizens as they lined up at the desk. One woman caught my eye–she had the long neck and slender frame of a dancer–but the rest were mostly nondescript, except for the usual sprinkling of freaks, morons, malcontents, and grotesques likely to be found in any random sample of New Yorkers. One of the latter stumbled back to his chair, opened the bottom button of his shirt, exposing his pale belly, and started snoring at once. I’ve never doubted that democracy was a good thing, but like so many good things, it often looks better from a distance.

A few self-important folk pulled out cell phones and started placing calls, ignoring the clerk’s explicit instruction not to use them in the waiting room. Everybody else produced newspapers or books and began to read. I checked out the magazine rack, passed over a copy of Newsweek with Lance Ito on the cover, then settled down with Patrick O’Brian’s The Wine-Dark Sea. For the next two hours, nothing happened. Nobody in the room struck up a conversation with anybody else. A dozen or so people signed out to go get coffee, returning in due course. The rest of us sat in silence, waiting vainly to be called. At 12:15 we were released for lunch, 45 minutes ahead of schedule, but it was too cold to search the neighborhood for interesting places to eat, and most of us had drifted back into the waiting room well before two o’clock.

The afternoon was as uneventful as the morning. At one point I stood to stretch my legs and look at my fellow jurors, and noticed that I was the only person in the room who was standing up. Everyone else was reading or napping. No one was smiling. I’ve never seen so many people look so bored. This must be what it feels like to be a stand-up comedian in hell, I thought.

The red-faced clerk reappeared at 3:15. “O.K., the fun’s over,” he said over the microphone. “Everybody go home. Be back here at ten a.m. sharp.” The waiting room emptied out within seconds, and 45 minutes later I was home, wondering whether tomorrow would be as stupefyingly dull as today. Would it be worth carrying my laptop all the way to Centre Street? I checked the weather forecast for Thursday morning–four to six inches of snow–and sighed.

I spent Sunday and Monday writing (and attending two performances, about which more later), and now I’m preoccupied with my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, which I have to file, move, and close by the end of business on Tuesday so that I can report for jury duty Wednesday with a clear conscience. Jury duty, arrgh!

On the other hand, you obviously didn’t miss me, since Our Girl’s postings (plus a couple of fortuitous big-traffic links) racked up some 1,700 page views, a more-than-nice number for Monday. So I’ll try to post something on Tuesday, but if I don’t, I’m sure you’ll be more than adequately taken care of. Sniffle.

As for what jury duty (did I say arrgh?) will do to my schedule for the rest of the week, well, I don’t even want to talk about it. Or think about it. I hope they have the good sense to bounce me as quickly as possible. I have a book to write and a blog to…blog? Does one blog a blog? Or keep a blog? Or tend a blog? Beats me.

We won’t talk about the backed-up e-mail, either, but I promise you that I’ll read and reply to every single piece, eventually, except for the spam from Nigeria. Really. Truly. Madly. Deeply.