Nit-tastic Tales
02-03-2017
, 08:02 PM
03-09-2017
, 02:43 PM
03-13-2017
, 11:15 AM
03-13-2017
, 01:38 PM
03-13-2017
, 01:40 PM
03-13-2017
, 01:49 PM
came to comment on fred, can't get past this. Fran putting in some good work
07-05-2017
, 01:03 PM
Bump, hope OP comes back some day 
07-05-2017
, 01:05 PM
09-12-2017
, 07:51 AM
Part VI: The Trial
Maynard called me. One of my last remaining friends in town, Maynard lived with his parents, and he had a bit of the pathological liar in his makeup. Knowing that, I decided not to mention that I'd seen a million dollar FBI fugitive up at the Gold Spike the night before, as I didn't want him to strain himself trying to make up a better story.
"Hows about we go the titty bar?" I said. It seemed like the right way to spend some of the $700 I'd just pulled from a five cent video poker machine after an all-night bender, Maynard was all for the titty bar, so long as I was footing the bill.
As we set off from his parent's house on foot. He suggested that we pregame with a quartet of forty ounce beers from the nearby 7/11, the festivities to be conducted with downing them all in the back parking lot. I thought that this might be his effort to pay for something that night, so I went along with it, but I was wrong about him wanting to pay.
While we worked our way through the forties, Maynard chose to reveal to me some details of his role as a higher-up in the top secret Golden Dawn society, and he also let slip some of his own and his cohorts' magical exploits, all the while darkly hinting at his group's role in the shadow government. I listened and nodded my head sagely as his story spun out looser and wider.
Having read some Aleister Crowley, and having seen the Golden Dawn mentioned in other works about Freemasonry and the Illuminati. I decided to follow up on Maynard's stories with a few questions, but my young friend didn't seem to be so much aware of his own group's history. All of this was much to Maynard's credit: what with him being broke, living with his parents, not quite retail shift manager material, and ignorant of a wide swath of occult history, and yet somehow having earned his way into a position as an important officer in the hierarchy of the secret society that controls the magical and temporal wellsprings of power in this world. I let him off the hook, though, not being in the mood to try to make myself feel better by picking on someone who had less going for him than I did.
We had nearly finished the second round of forties when the cops rolled in. By 'nearly finished', I mean that I had finished both of my bottles, but Maynard had left an inch of malt liquor in his second bottle and had gone off to the dumpster to take a leak, and that incriminating inch of backwash was sitting in a bottle on the asphalt ten feet away me, and that became an open container for both of us, as the cops introduced themselves by saying they were citing us both for that one inch of malt liquor in that one bottle. Maynard's strategy was to immediately start apologizing to them.
I cut him off and denied that the open container was in either of our possessions. So what? There was an inch of beer in an abandoned group of empty bottles a dozen feet away from where I was sitting. If a hundred innocent citizens walked down the street past an empty bottle with a trace amount of beer residue in it sitting unseen off in the bushes, were every one of those civilians guilty of possessing an open container? How could it be any different if I happened to be sitting down near a bottle? One of the cops told me to shut up while the other one wrote us citations that summoned us to appear in court a few days later. I didn't feel up for a trip to the titty bar after that, so I split off from Maynard and headed home. The next day, Maynard started a rumor going around the mall that I had punched one of the cops.
He and I were summoned to appear on the same day, at the same time, but in different court rooms. We split up inside and I felt immediately at a loss, having no idea what to expect. I had never set foot in a courthouse before. I didn't know if I was answering a citation or a summons or a subpoena, or if I would be attending a finding or a preliminary hearing or a trial, or if just a judge or a judge and jury would be waiting for me. I found myself in the back of a line with six other guys, and I quickly surmised that all seven of us were there for open container violations. I watched the guys in front of me, each one of them in turn, take their place behind a podium and plead guilty to the judge, who gave them each the same $50 fine and told them where to pay it, and I watched them all walk off, one by one.
When it was my turn at the front, the DA or prosecutor or whoever he was--the Law Talking Guy for the City, or maybe the county--I'll just call him the prosecutor going forward--he spoke to me.
"Stand in front of the judge. Plead guilty. You'll get a $50 fine. Pay it and be out of here in ten minutes."
"What if..."
"If you try to plead not guilty, you will face up to a $2000 fine and up to a month in prison. I'll be the one who asks the judge for the sentence. So believe me, it's never going to be something that you want to do."
Now, I was sure that I had a way forward from here. You see, I had spent a minute looking up the code number that the cop had written in the box that identified the law that I had broken. My expectation was that the description of the law would be something along the lines of, "No unsealed containers of intoxicating spirits shall be carried or displayed in a public area or thoroughfare." Instead, the statute called out by the code number was something like, "All of the laws pertaining to the city of North Las Vegas shall be considered as being sufficient in pertaining to the laws of Clark County." It may have been the other way around, I know that I'm not remembering it exactly right, but the description was definitely a placeholder law or an administrative law, and not the sort of law that a guy can be charged with breaking.
This case happened back in a time when search engines were adequate, but were not as trusted as they are now. So on the day before this hearing, I'd actually taken a trip to the Clark County Law Library and found my little law, or statute, or whatever, in a physical book. The law librarian had been helpful in my search, so I brought the book up to his desk and showed him the code in the citation and how it referred to an irrelevant statute.
"That's not gonna work," the librarian told me. "Just pay the fine and be done. It's like a $50 fine."
Now, in court, with my turn about to come up, I told the prosecutor about this mismatched code.
"It's not gonna work," he told me. "Just pay the $50. Don't drag this out. You will get the maximum sentence if you mess around with this."
He gestured me up to the podium and I got up in front of the judge, and I was so nervous and intimidated that I didn't hear or don't remember most what he said to me.
Judge: Blah blah blah possessing alcohol in an open container blah blah. Blah blah blah blah?
Someone, probably the prosecutor, handed me a piece of paper with my next court date on it and I walked out.
"No, they let all of us go. Cases dismissed. Nobody had to pay a fine. The prosecutor told us to use this one weird trick, and the judge had to drop all of our cases." This was Maynard, having met me outside the courthouse. For the life of me, I can't remember what the "one weird trick" was that reportedly set him and his cohorts scot-free. I only remember thinking that it sounded as dubious as hell.
Still, I was gullible and desperate and entirely ignorant about the legal process. The judge had actually remembered my name from the 15 seconds that I had been in front of him.
"Mr. Justice, what is your problem now?"
"Your honor, I ask that the court dismiss my case in the light of this one weird trick." The judge and the prosecutor looked at me as if I'd just strapped on a pair of homemade wings and demanded to be granted access to airspace over Area 51. "Mr. Justice, your one weird trick does not apply to this case," said the judge. "Besides that, we've already set your trial date. We'll see you then. Don't miss it or you'll have a bench warrant out for your arrest."
A few months passed between the hearing and my trial, and I spent the time given to me by sliding further down the meth spiral. My work at the bookstore started tailing off, and I received my first meh performance review from the district manager. The store was not looking great. I started spending time after the store closed trying to straighten things out, but I didn't actually do any work during that extra time. I just sat and read and procrastinated, or I concocted wild marketing and ordering schemes which would never have panned out if I'd bothered to write them down or remember them for more than a few minutes, or I'd set up crazy displays, then tear them down an hour later when I'd had a fresh look at them and noticed their ridiculous flaws.
One day during this time, the father of an ex-coworker stopped by, introduced himself, and he dropped an envelope with my name on it on the counter while I was busy with a customer, and he left before I could open it. Inside was a check made out to me for $100. It was puzzling to say the least, until I found out that someone had started a rumor that I was broke and homeless and living at the bookstore. At the time I still had my apartment and just north of $3000 in the bank. For reasons that I still can't explain to this day, I cashed the check. I didn't need the money, but if I'd torn the check up it might have seemed ungrateful, and it also would have screwed up their balancing their checkbook, and I was too lazy or in denial perhaps to try to explain to them or lie about why I'd been staying so late at the store and...alright, there's no excuse for it. I cashed the damn check. It was the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyways. One of these days, I'm hoping that I'll remember the gentleman's last name. Then I can find him, mail him a check for a hundo and maybe some interest, along with a nice card thanking him for helping me out during a rough time, and letting him know that I'm doing better now in most aspects of life. Maynard, of course, denied that he'd started the rumor.
The night before the trial found me back at the Law Library, studying hard for my case--or I would have been doing that, if I'd been my old nitty self, but I was pretty far gone by then. I was actually up most of the night drinking and eking out the few last crumbs of speed in my bag, and alternately fighting and grinding up levels for the increasingly ridiculous Final Fantasy X Monster Arena bosses.
My trial was set for 3:30 PM, and my dealer Dean showed up at my apartment around noon. "Do you have any gack?" I asked him. "I have to go up to court and I'm dying here." Dean just gave me a look.
"Why am I here, knucklehead? You're the one who called me."
Dean had twenty years of steady meth use on him, but somehow he still looked like a Hollywood extra. And not the drug dealing extra, skulking around an abandoned factory in the inner city--he looked like the squared away, gym-muscled first officer on a cruise ship kind of extra.
"Yeah, you're right. Sorry. What's on the menu today?"
"Look at me, " he said. And he actually waited until I looked him in the eye. "You have to be careful with this stuff. It's North Korean."
"You mean South Korean."
"North Korean."
"How the hell could anyone make meth and smuggle it out of ****ing North Korea without getting caught? That did not happen."
Dean shrugged. "That's what they're telling me. It's industrial grade. It's strong as hell. Just do a small line. A tiny line. A tiny bump. Got it?"
"Tiny lumps," I said. "Got it."
Two hours later, I was sitting at the bus stop, writing furiously in my notebook and trying to stop my legs from flying off on their own.
A black lady in her late forties with a kind face was sitting on the bench with me. She asked me what I was drawing. To the best of my memory, It was a new system of assessing personalities and predicting outcomes through the placement and analysis of geometric shapes on a grid, sort of like a series of Venn diagrams, but much more complicated. Different geometric shapes stood in for a person's known personality traits, and these interacted with other shapes representing their past and present goals, along with any environmental influences, peer groups and current challenges. The sizing and placement of the shapes were dependent on the perceived importance of the various factors and on their respective effects on each other. The shaded areas where the shapes intersected with each other could be interpreted as probability figures for future outcomes.
When I finished explaining all of this, the lady was pointedly looking away from me into the middle distance. That's when I realized that I had far too much high grade speed in me to be trying to represent myself in a court of law. The courtroom was right up the street from me, and when I jumped on the bus I realized that I was at least an hour early, and for no good reason other than I was super spun up and unbelievably restless.
Downtown near the courthouse, I dropped in at the Golden Nugget and hit one of the bars on the casino floor, spending the next 45 minutes sipping off two, maybe three vodka martinis and going over my scattered notes. The drinks took some of the edge off and I felt better. I ordered a coke for my last drink, downed it, and popped five or six Altoids into my mouth, and worked them around, trying to get a full breath cleanse.
On my way out of the casino, I found myself getting funny looks from people. Were my eyes bugged out? Was I bleeding? Did I have boogers showing? Or was I just being paranoid? I elected to turn around and check myself out in the bathroom. In the mirror there I found a broad white streak of powder pasted diagonally across my and shirt and tie. It was residue powder from the Altoids tin, but nevertheless, it was not a good look for the courtroom. I wiped it off, feeling like I'd dodged the first bullet of the day, and I headed off to my trial.
The bulk of the trial was a reeling whirlwind of me screwing things up. About every 30 seconds, I made some sort of procedural gaffe and the judge had to shut me down and make me start over or try another tack. The prosecutor interviewed one of the cops and--through the magic of testimony--Maynard's offending inch-full second bottle was lifted off the parking lot pavement and teleported 10 feet through the air, and placed into my hand, with the other three empty bottles also transported and left to surround me at closer range, like so many mute and bereft witnesses to my crime.
I was then allowed to cross examine or whatever you call it. After a number of starts and stops and sustained objections, I was able to get to a somewhat metaphysical line of questioning with the cop.
"If there was one open container on the scene, how is it that both my friend and I were charged? How can two people possess one open container?"
"You can pass it back and forth, and both can drink from it." the cop said.
"You mentioned that there were three empty bottles of the same brand of beer near to the bottle with the inch of liquid in it."
"The malt liquor in your hand and the bottles that were laying next to you."
"At the time, when I brought up the fact that all the bottles were not, in fact, laying next to me, you told me to 'shut up,'..."
That earned another sustained objection.
"I was starting to ask a question, your Honor."
"Start with the part that's actually a question, and leave out the statement-making and the obvious grandstanding." The judge told me.
"Did you tell me to shut up?"
The cop denied that he had told me to shut up.
"Do you believe that my friend and I bought four forty ounce bottles of beer and passed each of the four between us, in turn, one by one?" I asked him.
That line of argument, falling somewhere between stupid and inspired, threw him off for a second. I remember that I had something strong to follow up with while he was chewing on that, but I don't remember what that might have been, because the bailiff took that moment to approach the judge and whisper something in his ear, and I was interrupted.
"Mr. Justice, the bailiff says you smell strongly of alcohol, have you been drinking today?"
"Your Honor. I have to admit that I was up late last night, and that I had quite a few drinks last night." This was not a lie. The prosecutor chimed in, saying it was impossible for me to still be smelling like booze the next afternoon. I needed to keep talking, so that the judge wouldn't ask me again if I'd been drinking today.
"Your Honor, if you recall the case of Captain Joseph Hazelwood, he tested at a high blood alcohol content ten hours after he reportedly had just two drinks. At the time he certainly might have smelled..."
I had to stop there and catch up with myself. In my own defense, in a court of law, I had just brought up the drinking history of the man responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, and I'd compared my current situation to his. I looked around and, sure enough, there was a court stenographer tapping away. I was on record.
"We're going to pause proceedings here and I'm going to send you upstairs to take a breathalyzer test. If it turns out you've been drinking today, I will have you held for 30 days for contempt."
That's when the handcuffs came out.
The bailiff walked over with them and I was made to stand up and have the cuffs fitted to my wrists. Then he marched me over to the elevator for the ride up to county lockup. In the elevator, it was just me and him, a sour balding white guy in his sixties with a crew-cut, who looked like he'd just walked out of central casting from any given court drama filmed in the last forty years.
In the elevator, he stood uncomfortably close to me and stared into my face, expectantly, as if to say, "Well, what do you have to say for yourself now?" I knew better than that, and I took a page from the lady at the bus stop earlier and kept my mouth shut, and I stared off into the middle distance for what seemed like a ride without an end taking us just three or four floors up.
Once we got up to the cells, the attendant or whatever-you-call-him relieved me of my personal effects. As part of this ritual, he opened up my woefully ineffective tin of mints and looked inside, "Altoids, eh?" He asked me. This felt like an opening for me to let loose with some offhand quip about the mint's ineffectiveness that would have done me no good. I clamped my mouth shut.
I wasn't given a cell. I was chained to a bench in the reception area while they hunted up a breathalyzer-giver or whatever he was called, so I had the time to consider the fact that my wallet, now tucked away in a plastic storage bin, currently held more than 8x the $50 fine that I could have paid at the preliminary hearing if I'd just stuck to being a nit.
Now, I was going to jail. For how long and where to and when it would start were all a mystery to me. Would they take me right away from the courtroom, or would they give me some time to go home and square things away? Would I serve my time right here, above the courtrooms, or would they send me off to the Pound in the Ass real-ass prison out in the forsaken desert on the lonely highway North to St. George? I was in for a month for contempt at the least, and maybe another month for the original charge. Would there be early release for good behavior? In any case, my job at the bookstore was probably gone, and I'd come back out owing two months or more on my rent and other bills. Now, what about court fees? Were they going to bill me for trying me and throwing me in jail, and how much? Busto and rock bottom appeared in the middle distance, looming larger and larger. They led me over to the breathalyzer kit and I breathed into the straw.
"Your test results say that you have an alcohol level of .03%, which, while not intoxicated per se, I feel is still disrespectful to the court." The judge took his glasses off and wiped his eyes and sighed. He was not a mean-looking man. He just looked to be fed up with me, and rightly so. After all, I'd done nothing but trip over my dick and waste everyone's time for the last hour. "Umm, we'll deal with this issue later." he concluded. "Let's just...let's just finish with the case."
There was no jury present, so it had to be just the judge who would be deciding my guilt or innocence and giving me my sentence. I probably should have spotted that earlier.
"It's your turn as the defense, Mr. Justice."
"Your honor, I call myself as my sole witness." I was a tweaker idiot, but not dumb enough to have Maynard the Pathological Liar take the stand. "Um. Do I ask myself questions and then answer them..."
"Just tell the court what happened."
I flipped through my patched-together notes and told the story. On that night, months ago, the malt liquor bottles, empty and otherwise, flew back through the air and settled back their proper places, a good ten feet away from my recumbent form. And on that night the cop once again told me to shut up, in the place where he had been silenced by his own testimony.
"Do you believe that Officer So and So is lying about the open container being in your hand, and lying about the placement of the bottles, and lying to the court about not telling you to be quiet?"
After I'd finished, this was the extent of my cross-examination from the prosecutor. Once again I avoided an obvious invitation to say something stupid.
"No. I think the officer is...mistaken...in his recollection."
So that was it. It came down to the word of a police officer versus the word of an idiot who couldn't be arsed to show up sober to defend himself from an alcohol-related charge.
"Do you have anything else to say in your defense, Mr. Justice?"
And I thought, the hell with it, I might as well throw my last little piece of spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. I told the judge about the code and statute discrepancy on my ticket, then I produced said ticket for him when he asked to see it.
As the judge looked it over, the prosecutor started flipping wildly through his notes, then he snapped his binder shut with an audible crack. He looked up and over to me, really looking at me for the first time, his eyes wide and startled. I'm sure the prosecutor was a busy man, and I'd suspected that he hadn't recognized me fully from the first time we'd met back at my preliminary hearing. But now I'd called his bluff from back then and I'd shown up with the goods.
And I believe that's about the time that I exited from my body. Now, I'm not someone who leaves his body very often. Really, not at all. In fact, I can say definitively that this was the one and only out-of-body occurrence that I can recall. There was no more worry, or pain, or sadness, or craving for a cigarette or a drink or a bump. The idea of wanting things did not exist and had no meaning. There was a species of detached happiness, though, and the happiness was a part of the world, or maybe all of it. And it was in partnership with this happiness that I watched the prosecutor and the judge agreeing that they'd have to let the man who was sitting in the front row go free. He had pulled it off, that man in front, and he'd won his freedom. Somehow I knew that he had done it with the odds against him. And the happiness that was some or all of the world was also with him. Next I contemplated how, if there was a prosecutor and a judge and a man who would be free, then there had to be a me, separate from the three of them, and the notion of there being an ego and of it being a me that possessed it threw me back up front and into my body, a place where I have steadfastly remained ever since.
"...you're free to go, Mr. Justice. And you're very lucky this time. Anything more than 0.03 and I would have had you held. Don't drink before you go to court. That should go without saying. That's a really dumb thing to do, and I don't think that you're really that dumb, Mr. Justice. So you might want to think about getting some help if you have a problem with alcohol. There's a lot of programs out there that you can look into, things that won't cost much or anything at all. Think about it. Case dismissed."
Outside, the late afternoon summer slammed down on me like a hammer. It felt to me like months since I'd seen the outside.
I was free! I was actually free! I was a hundred percent absolutely certified scot-free! I pivoted and held the door for my citation-flubbing cop, whose glare I'd felt on the back of my neck beginning in the courtroom, all the way through the corridors, and out through the lobby. He wouldn't meet my eye, though, at our last moment of parting. Everyone seems to have that middling distance stare they can pull off when called upon.
I tried not to skip and dance across the two blocks back over to the Golden Nugget. The same bartender was there and recognized me from before.
"There you are." he said. "Been having any luck today?"
"Aw, jeez. Yeah, um you might say that!" I answered.
"Another vodka martini, slightly dirty with olives?"
"Yes, please. I'm gonna take this one outside, though, and walk around with it, if that's okay with you."
"You betcha!"
Maynard called me. One of my last remaining friends in town, Maynard lived with his parents, and he had a bit of the pathological liar in his makeup. Knowing that, I decided not to mention that I'd seen a million dollar FBI fugitive up at the Gold Spike the night before, as I didn't want him to strain himself trying to make up a better story.
"Hows about we go the titty bar?" I said. It seemed like the right way to spend some of the $700 I'd just pulled from a five cent video poker machine after an all-night bender, Maynard was all for the titty bar, so long as I was footing the bill.
As we set off from his parent's house on foot. He suggested that we pregame with a quartet of forty ounce beers from the nearby 7/11, the festivities to be conducted with downing them all in the back parking lot. I thought that this might be his effort to pay for something that night, so I went along with it, but I was wrong about him wanting to pay.
While we worked our way through the forties, Maynard chose to reveal to me some details of his role as a higher-up in the top secret Golden Dawn society, and he also let slip some of his own and his cohorts' magical exploits, all the while darkly hinting at his group's role in the shadow government. I listened and nodded my head sagely as his story spun out looser and wider.
Having read some Aleister Crowley, and having seen the Golden Dawn mentioned in other works about Freemasonry and the Illuminati. I decided to follow up on Maynard's stories with a few questions, but my young friend didn't seem to be so much aware of his own group's history. All of this was much to Maynard's credit: what with him being broke, living with his parents, not quite retail shift manager material, and ignorant of a wide swath of occult history, and yet somehow having earned his way into a position as an important officer in the hierarchy of the secret society that controls the magical and temporal wellsprings of power in this world. I let him off the hook, though, not being in the mood to try to make myself feel better by picking on someone who had less going for him than I did.
We had nearly finished the second round of forties when the cops rolled in. By 'nearly finished', I mean that I had finished both of my bottles, but Maynard had left an inch of malt liquor in his second bottle and had gone off to the dumpster to take a leak, and that incriminating inch of backwash was sitting in a bottle on the asphalt ten feet away me, and that became an open container for both of us, as the cops introduced themselves by saying they were citing us both for that one inch of malt liquor in that one bottle. Maynard's strategy was to immediately start apologizing to them.
Spoiler:
I cut him off and denied that the open container was in either of our possessions. So what? There was an inch of beer in an abandoned group of empty bottles a dozen feet away from where I was sitting. If a hundred innocent citizens walked down the street past an empty bottle with a trace amount of beer residue in it sitting unseen off in the bushes, were every one of those civilians guilty of possessing an open container? How could it be any different if I happened to be sitting down near a bottle? One of the cops told me to shut up while the other one wrote us citations that summoned us to appear in court a few days later. I didn't feel up for a trip to the titty bar after that, so I split off from Maynard and headed home. The next day, Maynard started a rumor going around the mall that I had punched one of the cops.
He and I were summoned to appear on the same day, at the same time, but in different court rooms. We split up inside and I felt immediately at a loss, having no idea what to expect. I had never set foot in a courthouse before. I didn't know if I was answering a citation or a summons or a subpoena, or if I would be attending a finding or a preliminary hearing or a trial, or if just a judge or a judge and jury would be waiting for me. I found myself in the back of a line with six other guys, and I quickly surmised that all seven of us were there for open container violations. I watched the guys in front of me, each one of them in turn, take their place behind a podium and plead guilty to the judge, who gave them each the same $50 fine and told them where to pay it, and I watched them all walk off, one by one.
When it was my turn at the front, the DA or prosecutor or whoever he was--the Law Talking Guy for the City, or maybe the county--I'll just call him the prosecutor going forward--he spoke to me.
"Stand in front of the judge. Plead guilty. You'll get a $50 fine. Pay it and be out of here in ten minutes."
"What if..."
"If you try to plead not guilty, you will face up to a $2000 fine and up to a month in prison. I'll be the one who asks the judge for the sentence. So believe me, it's never going to be something that you want to do."
Now, I was sure that I had a way forward from here. You see, I had spent a minute looking up the code number that the cop had written in the box that identified the law that I had broken. My expectation was that the description of the law would be something along the lines of, "No unsealed containers of intoxicating spirits shall be carried or displayed in a public area or thoroughfare." Instead, the statute called out by the code number was something like, "All of the laws pertaining to the city of North Las Vegas shall be considered as being sufficient in pertaining to the laws of Clark County." It may have been the other way around, I know that I'm not remembering it exactly right, but the description was definitely a placeholder law or an administrative law, and not the sort of law that a guy can be charged with breaking.
This case happened back in a time when search engines were adequate, but were not as trusted as they are now. So on the day before this hearing, I'd actually taken a trip to the Clark County Law Library and found my little law, or statute, or whatever, in a physical book. The law librarian had been helpful in my search, so I brought the book up to his desk and showed him the code in the citation and how it referred to an irrelevant statute.
"That's not gonna work," the librarian told me. "Just pay the fine and be done. It's like a $50 fine."
Now, in court, with my turn about to come up, I told the prosecutor about this mismatched code.
"It's not gonna work," he told me. "Just pay the $50. Don't drag this out. You will get the maximum sentence if you mess around with this."
He gestured me up to the podium and I got up in front of the judge, and I was so nervous and intimidated that I didn't hear or don't remember most what he said to me.
Judge: Blah blah blah possessing alcohol in an open container blah blah. Blah blah blah blah?
Spoiler:
Someone, probably the prosecutor, handed me a piece of paper with my next court date on it and I walked out.
"No, they let all of us go. Cases dismissed. Nobody had to pay a fine. The prosecutor told us to use this one weird trick, and the judge had to drop all of our cases." This was Maynard, having met me outside the courthouse. For the life of me, I can't remember what the "one weird trick" was that reportedly set him and his cohorts scot-free. I only remember thinking that it sounded as dubious as hell.
Spoiler:
Still, I was gullible and desperate and entirely ignorant about the legal process. The judge had actually remembered my name from the 15 seconds that I had been in front of him.
"Mr. Justice, what is your problem now?"
"Your honor, I ask that the court dismiss my case in the light of this one weird trick." The judge and the prosecutor looked at me as if I'd just strapped on a pair of homemade wings and demanded to be granted access to airspace over Area 51. "Mr. Justice, your one weird trick does not apply to this case," said the judge. "Besides that, we've already set your trial date. We'll see you then. Don't miss it or you'll have a bench warrant out for your arrest."
A few months passed between the hearing and my trial, and I spent the time given to me by sliding further down the meth spiral. My work at the bookstore started tailing off, and I received my first meh performance review from the district manager. The store was not looking great. I started spending time after the store closed trying to straighten things out, but I didn't actually do any work during that extra time. I just sat and read and procrastinated, or I concocted wild marketing and ordering schemes which would never have panned out if I'd bothered to write them down or remember them for more than a few minutes, or I'd set up crazy displays, then tear them down an hour later when I'd had a fresh look at them and noticed their ridiculous flaws.
One day during this time, the father of an ex-coworker stopped by, introduced himself, and he dropped an envelope with my name on it on the counter while I was busy with a customer, and he left before I could open it. Inside was a check made out to me for $100. It was puzzling to say the least, until I found out that someone had started a rumor that I was broke and homeless and living at the bookstore. At the time I still had my apartment and just north of $3000 in the bank. For reasons that I still can't explain to this day, I cashed the check. I didn't need the money, but if I'd torn the check up it might have seemed ungrateful, and it also would have screwed up their balancing their checkbook, and I was too lazy or in denial perhaps to try to explain to them or lie about why I'd been staying so late at the store and...alright, there's no excuse for it. I cashed the damn check. It was the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyways. One of these days, I'm hoping that I'll remember the gentleman's last name. Then I can find him, mail him a check for a hundo and maybe some interest, along with a nice card thanking him for helping me out during a rough time, and letting him know that I'm doing better now in most aspects of life. Maynard, of course, denied that he'd started the rumor.
The night before the trial found me back at the Law Library, studying hard for my case--or I would have been doing that, if I'd been my old nitty self, but I was pretty far gone by then. I was actually up most of the night drinking and eking out the few last crumbs of speed in my bag, and alternately fighting and grinding up levels for the increasingly ridiculous Final Fantasy X Monster Arena bosses.
My trial was set for 3:30 PM, and my dealer Dean showed up at my apartment around noon. "Do you have any gack?" I asked him. "I have to go up to court and I'm dying here." Dean just gave me a look.
"Why am I here, knucklehead? You're the one who called me."
Dean had twenty years of steady meth use on him, but somehow he still looked like a Hollywood extra. And not the drug dealing extra, skulking around an abandoned factory in the inner city--he looked like the squared away, gym-muscled first officer on a cruise ship kind of extra.
"Yeah, you're right. Sorry. What's on the menu today?"
"Look at me, " he said. And he actually waited until I looked him in the eye. "You have to be careful with this stuff. It's North Korean."
"You mean South Korean."
"North Korean."
"How the hell could anyone make meth and smuggle it out of ****ing North Korea without getting caught? That did not happen."
Dean shrugged. "That's what they're telling me. It's industrial grade. It's strong as hell. Just do a small line. A tiny line. A tiny bump. Got it?"
"Tiny lumps," I said. "Got it."
Two hours later, I was sitting at the bus stop, writing furiously in my notebook and trying to stop my legs from flying off on their own.
A black lady in her late forties with a kind face was sitting on the bench with me. She asked me what I was drawing. To the best of my memory, It was a new system of assessing personalities and predicting outcomes through the placement and analysis of geometric shapes on a grid, sort of like a series of Venn diagrams, but much more complicated. Different geometric shapes stood in for a person's known personality traits, and these interacted with other shapes representing their past and present goals, along with any environmental influences, peer groups and current challenges. The sizing and placement of the shapes were dependent on the perceived importance of the various factors and on their respective effects on each other. The shaded areas where the shapes intersected with each other could be interpreted as probability figures for future outcomes.
When I finished explaining all of this, the lady was pointedly looking away from me into the middle distance. That's when I realized that I had far too much high grade speed in me to be trying to represent myself in a court of law. The courtroom was right up the street from me, and when I jumped on the bus I realized that I was at least an hour early, and for no good reason other than I was super spun up and unbelievably restless.
Downtown near the courthouse, I dropped in at the Golden Nugget and hit one of the bars on the casino floor, spending the next 45 minutes sipping off two, maybe three vodka martinis and going over my scattered notes. The drinks took some of the edge off and I felt better. I ordered a coke for my last drink, downed it, and popped five or six Altoids into my mouth, and worked them around, trying to get a full breath cleanse.
On my way out of the casino, I found myself getting funny looks from people. Were my eyes bugged out? Was I bleeding? Did I have boogers showing? Or was I just being paranoid? I elected to turn around and check myself out in the bathroom. In the mirror there I found a broad white streak of powder pasted diagonally across my and shirt and tie. It was residue powder from the Altoids tin, but nevertheless, it was not a good look for the courtroom. I wiped it off, feeling like I'd dodged the first bullet of the day, and I headed off to my trial.
The bulk of the trial was a reeling whirlwind of me screwing things up. About every 30 seconds, I made some sort of procedural gaffe and the judge had to shut me down and make me start over or try another tack. The prosecutor interviewed one of the cops and--through the magic of testimony--Maynard's offending inch-full second bottle was lifted off the parking lot pavement and teleported 10 feet through the air, and placed into my hand, with the other three empty bottles also transported and left to surround me at closer range, like so many mute and bereft witnesses to my crime.
I was then allowed to cross examine or whatever you call it. After a number of starts and stops and sustained objections, I was able to get to a somewhat metaphysical line of questioning with the cop.
"If there was one open container on the scene, how is it that both my friend and I were charged? How can two people possess one open container?"
"You can pass it back and forth, and both can drink from it." the cop said.
"You mentioned that there were three empty bottles of the same brand of beer near to the bottle with the inch of liquid in it."
"The malt liquor in your hand and the bottles that were laying next to you."
"At the time, when I brought up the fact that all the bottles were not, in fact, laying next to me, you told me to 'shut up,'..."
That earned another sustained objection.
"I was starting to ask a question, your Honor."
"Start with the part that's actually a question, and leave out the statement-making and the obvious grandstanding." The judge told me.
"Did you tell me to shut up?"
The cop denied that he had told me to shut up.
"Do you believe that my friend and I bought four forty ounce bottles of beer and passed each of the four between us, in turn, one by one?" I asked him.
That line of argument, falling somewhere between stupid and inspired, threw him off for a second. I remember that I had something strong to follow up with while he was chewing on that, but I don't remember what that might have been, because the bailiff took that moment to approach the judge and whisper something in his ear, and I was interrupted.
"Mr. Justice, the bailiff says you smell strongly of alcohol, have you been drinking today?"
Spoiler:
"Your Honor. I have to admit that I was up late last night, and that I had quite a few drinks last night." This was not a lie. The prosecutor chimed in, saying it was impossible for me to still be smelling like booze the next afternoon. I needed to keep talking, so that the judge wouldn't ask me again if I'd been drinking today.
"Your Honor, if you recall the case of Captain Joseph Hazelwood, he tested at a high blood alcohol content ten hours after he reportedly had just two drinks. At the time he certainly might have smelled..."
I had to stop there and catch up with myself. In my own defense, in a court of law, I had just brought up the drinking history of the man responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, and I'd compared my current situation to his. I looked around and, sure enough, there was a court stenographer tapping away. I was on record.
"We're going to pause proceedings here and I'm going to send you upstairs to take a breathalyzer test. If it turns out you've been drinking today, I will have you held for 30 days for contempt."
That's when the handcuffs came out.
Spoiler:
The bailiff walked over with them and I was made to stand up and have the cuffs fitted to my wrists. Then he marched me over to the elevator for the ride up to county lockup. In the elevator, it was just me and him, a sour balding white guy in his sixties with a crew-cut, who looked like he'd just walked out of central casting from any given court drama filmed in the last forty years.
In the elevator, he stood uncomfortably close to me and stared into my face, expectantly, as if to say, "Well, what do you have to say for yourself now?" I knew better than that, and I took a page from the lady at the bus stop earlier and kept my mouth shut, and I stared off into the middle distance for what seemed like a ride without an end taking us just three or four floors up.
Once we got up to the cells, the attendant or whatever-you-call-him relieved me of my personal effects. As part of this ritual, he opened up my woefully ineffective tin of mints and looked inside, "Altoids, eh?" He asked me. This felt like an opening for me to let loose with some offhand quip about the mint's ineffectiveness that would have done me no good. I clamped my mouth shut.
I wasn't given a cell. I was chained to a bench in the reception area while they hunted up a breathalyzer-giver or whatever he was called, so I had the time to consider the fact that my wallet, now tucked away in a plastic storage bin, currently held more than 8x the $50 fine that I could have paid at the preliminary hearing if I'd just stuck to being a nit.
Now, I was going to jail. For how long and where to and when it would start were all a mystery to me. Would they take me right away from the courtroom, or would they give me some time to go home and square things away? Would I serve my time right here, above the courtrooms, or would they send me off to the Pound in the Ass real-ass prison out in the forsaken desert on the lonely highway North to St. George? I was in for a month for contempt at the least, and maybe another month for the original charge. Would there be early release for good behavior? In any case, my job at the bookstore was probably gone, and I'd come back out owing two months or more on my rent and other bills. Now, what about court fees? Were they going to bill me for trying me and throwing me in jail, and how much? Busto and rock bottom appeared in the middle distance, looming larger and larger. They led me over to the breathalyzer kit and I breathed into the straw.
"Your test results say that you have an alcohol level of .03%, which, while not intoxicated per se, I feel is still disrespectful to the court." The judge took his glasses off and wiped his eyes and sighed. He was not a mean-looking man. He just looked to be fed up with me, and rightly so. After all, I'd done nothing but trip over my dick and waste everyone's time for the last hour. "Umm, we'll deal with this issue later." he concluded. "Let's just...let's just finish with the case."
There was no jury present, so it had to be just the judge who would be deciding my guilt or innocence and giving me my sentence. I probably should have spotted that earlier.
"It's your turn as the defense, Mr. Justice."
"Your honor, I call myself as my sole witness." I was a tweaker idiot, but not dumb enough to have Maynard the Pathological Liar take the stand. "Um. Do I ask myself questions and then answer them..."
"Just tell the court what happened."
I flipped through my patched-together notes and told the story. On that night, months ago, the malt liquor bottles, empty and otherwise, flew back through the air and settled back their proper places, a good ten feet away from my recumbent form. And on that night the cop once again told me to shut up, in the place where he had been silenced by his own testimony.
"Do you believe that Officer So and So is lying about the open container being in your hand, and lying about the placement of the bottles, and lying to the court about not telling you to be quiet?"
After I'd finished, this was the extent of my cross-examination from the prosecutor. Once again I avoided an obvious invitation to say something stupid.
"No. I think the officer is...mistaken...in his recollection."
So that was it. It came down to the word of a police officer versus the word of an idiot who couldn't be arsed to show up sober to defend himself from an alcohol-related charge.
"Do you have anything else to say in your defense, Mr. Justice?"
And I thought, the hell with it, I might as well throw my last little piece of spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. I told the judge about the code and statute discrepancy on my ticket, then I produced said ticket for him when he asked to see it.
As the judge looked it over, the prosecutor started flipping wildly through his notes, then he snapped his binder shut with an audible crack. He looked up and over to me, really looking at me for the first time, his eyes wide and startled. I'm sure the prosecutor was a busy man, and I'd suspected that he hadn't recognized me fully from the first time we'd met back at my preliminary hearing. But now I'd called his bluff from back then and I'd shown up with the goods.
And I believe that's about the time that I exited from my body. Now, I'm not someone who leaves his body very often. Really, not at all. In fact, I can say definitively that this was the one and only out-of-body occurrence that I can recall. There was no more worry, or pain, or sadness, or craving for a cigarette or a drink or a bump. The idea of wanting things did not exist and had no meaning. There was a species of detached happiness, though, and the happiness was a part of the world, or maybe all of it. And it was in partnership with this happiness that I watched the prosecutor and the judge agreeing that they'd have to let the man who was sitting in the front row go free. He had pulled it off, that man in front, and he'd won his freedom. Somehow I knew that he had done it with the odds against him. And the happiness that was some or all of the world was also with him. Next I contemplated how, if there was a prosecutor and a judge and a man who would be free, then there had to be a me, separate from the three of them, and the notion of there being an ego and of it being a me that possessed it threw me back up front and into my body, a place where I have steadfastly remained ever since.
"...you're free to go, Mr. Justice. And you're very lucky this time. Anything more than 0.03 and I would have had you held. Don't drink before you go to court. That should go without saying. That's a really dumb thing to do, and I don't think that you're really that dumb, Mr. Justice. So you might want to think about getting some help if you have a problem with alcohol. There's a lot of programs out there that you can look into, things that won't cost much or anything at all. Think about it. Case dismissed."
Outside, the late afternoon summer slammed down on me like a hammer. It felt to me like months since I'd seen the outside.
I was free! I was actually free! I was a hundred percent absolutely certified scot-free! I pivoted and held the door for my citation-flubbing cop, whose glare I'd felt on the back of my neck beginning in the courtroom, all the way through the corridors, and out through the lobby. He wouldn't meet my eye, though, at our last moment of parting. Everyone seems to have that middling distance stare they can pull off when called upon.
I tried not to skip and dance across the two blocks back over to the Golden Nugget. The same bartender was there and recognized me from before.
"There you are." he said. "Been having any luck today?"
"Aw, jeez. Yeah, um you might say that!" I answered.
"Another vodka martini, slightly dirty with olives?"
"Yes, please. I'm gonna take this one outside, though, and walk around with it, if that's okay with you."
"You betcha!"
Spoiler:
09-12-2017
, 12:43 PM
09-12-2017
, 03:06 PM
09-12-2017
, 03:30 PM
09-12-2017
, 04:03 PM
Thanks Colin 
I don't know what you do in the profession but hopefully it doesn't involve having to deal with legal fish like me.
I don't know what you do in the profession but hopefully it doesn't involve having to deal with legal fish like me.
Spoiler:
09-13-2017
, 12:24 AM
09-13-2017
, 12:29 AM
People representing themselves is a common occurrence in my line of the law (Family). I would not recommend anyone to do it, especially not at a trial.
09-13-2017
, 01:00 AM
09-13-2017
, 11:11 AM
Evil friend Maynard, North Korean meth, legal battle, victory, side plots, characters painted in one sentence that you can see them, even mental state which japan buddhists call kensho, it has everything.