Jury Duty (pt 2)

After another interminable period of waiting and seemingly endless exchanges of mindless pleasantries with the strangest of strangers, I have been excused. But not without first hearing how valuable George Washington believed my participation to be.

I awoke Monday morning from a dream. Listening to someone recount their dreams ranks right up there with looking at baby pictures of a co-worker's distant relatives so I'll spare you the unnecessary details of cross-pollinating palm trees and sneaky cobras. All that matters is that the setting was a courtroom. I was a lawyer.

Reliably, it was the cat who had awakened me with his plaintive cries. I'm sure he could sense a wood rat somewhere in the nearby brush outside the bedroom window. If not a wood rat, then perhaps a mouse or a rabbit - bottom line: if it's furry and fits in his mouth it's his sworn duty to pursue. The crying grows louder and more pathetic in exact proportion to my desire for him to cease and desist. I've never seen someone so eager to go to work. I guess you just have to love what you do.

We go through our morning ritual, he purrs, I moan, we both go to the kitchen. I pour him a fresh bowl of food and unlock the door that has mutually protected prey and predator. It's early. I can go sleep some more. My head hits the pillow and I ponder the outcome of the courtroom case I was trying. I was anxious to see what became of those palm trees. But as I tossed myself into an indescribably comfortable position folded deep inside a down comforter, my nervous system sprung to life. My endocrine system responded as the adrenal glands spiked my bloodstream with a torrent of nature's most potent energy drink. You want wings? Step aside Red Bull. Meet adrenaline.

I had remembered, not surprisingly given the obvious persistence of my unconscious mind, that I had jury duty that morning. I hadn't thought of it in a week.

Later that morning, I found myself in a large room with 180 people, give or take a misanthrope. They were all seated, facing forward, stranger abutting stranger, in a very orderly fashion. I instinctively searched for a pretty girl to sit next to as I slowly and nonchalantly circumnavigated the room. I spied but a single candidate meeting my visual criteria. One. Out of almost 200. Fortunately I noticed the oversized gold cross around her neck just in time and my stride wasn't even noticeably broken.

My subconscious took over and I found myself seeking any way to separate myself from the herd. And there it was. There at the front of the room was a table and chairs. I walked straight to the front of the room, turned around to look at all the sheep pretending to be jovial, pretending to read their meaningless novels, and I stared at them for a moment that was longer than natural, a moment that approached evaluation but fell almost imperceptibly short. And I sat down. Dozens upon dozens, sitting neatly in arranged rows of immaculate chairs on short-fibered institutional carpet, all facing forward politely, and me looking back at them.

Mercifully, the wheels of justice turned quickly and 30 of us were taken, make that herded, upstairs to a distant courtroom by an uncharacteristically pleasant bailiff. There I sat, hovering about two feet above my body, studying the process as the next three hours revealed to me a superficial glimpse of the inner workings of our judicial system.

There's one in every crowd. One yahoo. One who likes to hear himself speak. We had three. And not one was a lawyer. The questioning was obvious. In fact, the plaintiff's attorney made it patently clear: he only wanted to know if we could be fair and unbiased. Two women explicitly stated that they could not. It didn't even seem to them this was perhaps a character flaw, rather, they embraced their shortcomings proudly. For a brief moment I entertained the notion that they were being skillfully deceptive and answering so as to eliminate themselves from the process. But that would be giving them far too much credit. I felt like I knew them. They were the people I see interviewed by reporters on the local evening news. The ones with the most self-assured opinions. The ones who "just know" what happened. I scratched them off the list and so did the attorneys.

And then there was Mr. X. Oh, Mr. X. You are a book in and of yourself. The attorney asked you about "tort reform" and you took us on a journey through the fantasyland of your mind, stopping first in Viet Nam, then off to your recollections of stories of friends, and finally, unbelievably, taking us on a tour of Iraq and explaining, all somehow in the context of tort reform you thought, "why the terrorists hate us." You even had the court reporter struggling to contain her laughter and obvious pity. I swore I would bribe a physician for a doctor's note if I were made to serve on a jury with you. But, to their credit, the lawyers dismissed you shortly after your final tirade.

I knew I would not be asked to return. When asked if I had "security experience," I answered in the affirmative and explained my time as a boarding officer in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve some 17 years ago. Since this case was a civil suit and the plaintiff was suing for negligence based on a lack of security at the defendant's night club, it was clear I would be dismissed.

I had to come back the next morning and wait an hour to be sure. But in the end, I was sent home with a thank you and the promise of a $30 check to arrive by mail. What they didn't realize is that I would've done it all for free.