It starts with a funny joke: the building with the big sign that says "Justice Center" is not the actual Justice Center. The guard inside is saying "Next door, you want next door for jury duty" to everyone who comes in. What's his building for, then? No idea, he's not letting anyone in. He looks weary and it's not even eight oclock.
I go over to the right building, where I drop my jacket, put the wrong things through the x-ray machine, lose a hairpin, drop and step on my juror slip, and walk off without my phone. Everyone, including me, is quickly sick of my shit and I know I'm in everyone's way. My face on fire, I wander off clutching my crumpled juror slip like a fucking rube. It's so evident I don't know where to go that three separate people bark "Room 1740" at me before I even reach the elevators.
I have to wait in line before I am allowed into the pleasureless wasteland of Room 1740. The woman in front of me has twin girls, beautiful in matching pink raincoats but different haircuts. She is reprimanded over and over by everyone in charge. I'm a stay-at-home mom. The girls aren't in kindergarten yet. Is there any way I can postpone this till the fall, when they'll be in school? She pleads her case over and over and eventually she and the kids are herded away, being grumbled at.
I sit and, as I've never done this before, wait for the procedure to be explained. It isn't. The woman on the PA tells us where the vending machines are (down the hall), then says we are not allowed to leave the room. She says we will be paid $25 per day of jury service, and, should we wish to donate our pay to the county library system, report to floor 3, room 65, second window, where you will be provided with a form. This gets the first and only laugh of the day. We'll be paying you a pittance, and if you'd like to jump through some more hoops, you can give it back to us. That's real gall.
The PA system says to watch the orientation video. I do. Beautifully, it begins with a young woman opening her mailbox, finding a juror summons, and exclaiming, "Oh no, I don't have time for this!" Then Brenda Woods (local dingbat news anchor) defines words like "prosecution" and "defendant." She says "duty" over and over until it almost gets funny, but not quite. I learn that I provide the vital link to the freedom we all enjoy. Brenda Woods shows us a courtroom map, pointing to where the judge, jury, and witnesses will sit. It's stuff anybody who ever saw a commercial for Law & Order knows by heart. What is not ever explained is how the selection process works, or, much more importantly, how soon we can expect to be either picked or dismissed.
When the video ends, the screen slides back up into the ceiling, which robs the room of its only focus. Now it's just big banks of interconnected chairs facing nothing, no screen, no podium,just a vast gray wall like we're in an enormous square airplane going nowhere. I'd like to lie down on the floor but there are guards posted all around the perimeter and I think I'd get scolded. The shootings have made them (understandably/regrettably) intolerant of everything.
A man with a hunchback, a limp, a warped face and a speech impediment is selling newspapers. This doesn't bother me until, like a drunk who's given up on the country, he totters around the room shouting Lasht call Constitution, lasht call!
The man next to me is making a good show of it. Dated pants, yellow polo shirt, black and white houndstooth jacket, all thrifted and ill-fitting. Carefully ridiculous hair. The usual glasses. He's reading the poetry of Marlowe and underlining virtually all of it in red. He is a fraud. If he were so sensitive, he would not have his elbow in my ribs.
Every hour or so they call more names. None of them are mine, but I learn that some of my fellow potential jurors are Rhoda Sue Applebaum, Roderick Stubblefield, Chauncey Haliburton, and Paul Newman. There are two Mark Smiths, which causes much confusion. No shit there are two Mark Smiths. There have been two Mark Smiths in every room I've ever been in in my entire life.
After hours of nothing happening, I'm told to take a lunch break, which is the opposite of relief because how do you take a break from waiting? Lunch represents another whole hour in which my name is guaranteed not to be called, but during which I must stay in or near the fabulous funland of the Justice Center.
There's a cafeteria (intuitively, I find it by going the direction opposite to that indicated by the "cafeteria" sign. seriously.), but I can't decide whether I'm allowed in it because the doors are shut and all the people going in and coming out are crabby men in suits. I'm in a grubby sweatshirt and fourth-day pants so I leave the building, cross the street and sit on the courthouse steps, where the guards look pissy but aren't telling anyone to move. I sit and drink sugar water with the pigeons and the trashy huddled masses bitching about missing work for this retarded shit. Over and over the point is made: if there wasn't so much bullshit involved, jury duty wouldn't be such a big deal. There's got to be a better way to do this.
A group of teenagers on the corner, clearly skipping school to go to Underground, wave and scream at a passing prison bus. I'm in as foul a mood as anybody else but I don't complain - that's for the internet later. I watch the people walking by and think, there's a remarkable diversity of people in Atlanta, but most of them are fat. This, of course, as I eat my lunch of candy.
