Jury: Rigged

I found myself in the San Francisco Courthouse the other day. It was pleasant to be there, mostly because it was a very low-stakes situation. For me, anyway. I was with my wife, who’d asked me to go with her to support someone who was there, in turn, to support someone else. I could take the time to explain it better, but it’s a complicated case and it’s not really my story to tell. Also, it’s kinda boring. But between my emotional distance from the proceedings and a tardy judge, my mind had the space and time to wander to another, even more, pleasant experience I had in one of the driest and most serious places in SF: the last time I had jury duty.

In fact, as we waited in the hallway in the mid-morning sun for the goings on to get going it occurred to me that I might have been one of the only people in the building who has any fond memories of it at all.

Pictured: Good Time Central

This was back in the hazy days of the aughts. Or perhaps for me, it might be more accurate to say “the hazy days of the oughts.” As in “I ought to have eased up on all those drugs,” because what year this was is not exactly clear. And while I could work out the date, I don’t feel like it’s worth wading through all those memories. Let’s leave it at sometime after 9/11 but before our first Black president; “between Osama and Obama, at the height of all my drama” you might say.

Anyway, regardless of the year, decade, or century, when you ask yourself “what’s so bad about jury duty?” all you come up with is that it’s pretty dull. And not too much else besides that. It’s not hard or painful. Nothing rides on the outcome (not for you, anyway). It can be a financial setback for some, of course, but overall, the worst of it is that it’s boring.

And sure we had cell phones back then, but this is when cell phones were still mostly just actual telephones. Not the miniature portal to the Internet they are now. There were games, like Snake and… Adjust Settings, but that’s about it. Music and podcasts were still relegated to a separate device and if you weren’t into books or knitting, you were out of luck, entertainment-wise.

I’d brought a book, to be sure. Unless this was soon after that incident at the bus stop waiting for the 38 Geary when my (soon-to-be-ex) girlfriend told me, in no uncertain terms, that I read too much. Looking back on it now, it seems obvious we should have become exes much sooner than soon, perhaps that very afternoon. Who tells someone they read too much? Even funnier when you consider all the bad habits I was engaging in at the time— that we were engaging in together! Reading was maybe one of the only things I was doing that was good for me.

Either way, it turned out I didn’t need to bring any entertainment with me, as Lady Fortuna collaborated with Lady Justice and handed me something even better: one of my best friends! In the same little jury group I was in!  Who needs Snake or a book when you have someone you can make dumb jokes and snide comments with? We could unleash our reptilian selves and read our fellow jurors.

This was back at the height of my “Entitled Phase of Life,” when the good things I experienced felt like a given, and the bad things I experienced felt like a personal insult. It was all part (and parcel!) of my mindset at the time. But the reality was it was all just happenstance. I expected life to unfold for me just so, and when it didn’t, I got upset. 

Things always seemed to work out for me and it felt right, or I didn’t and I was offended— I existed in a privilege-fueled obliviousness. 

I’d leave the house late for almost everything, but “only just a little.” I'd show up after whatever had started but I wouldn’t feel like I’d missed anything and would have asserted I’d been “perfectly on time” regardless. 

I somehow had great skin during this time. More dumb luck, of course, probably despite my habits rather than because of them. But I really did think it was all the water I drank, washing my face the right way at night, and wearing sunscreen. That’s what I told strangers when they’d ask me. (The whole “strangers asking me for my ‘secret’” thing, btw, was how I knew I really did have good skin.)

I got into performing when someone saw me working out and asked me to come down and audition at the place where I ended up spending nine years of my life dancing on stage and getting drunk. 

In short, I had what the kids today called main character syndrome. 

So when I was saved from the mind-numbing boredom of government bureaucracy by the addition of one of my very favorite people in the world, I was young and dumb enough to think I was entitled to such a cool coincidence. We unknowingly became the stars of the jury pool— at least in our own minds. We carried an air of “of course it happened this way, we deserve it,” as we whiled away the morning in that basement holding area, like the queen cows in a cattle call. Probably distracting any others who were left to their own devices. People asked us how we arranged it, assuming we knew how to work the system or had discovered some life hack (and this was before the idea of lifehacks was even a thing).

But like with everything else, we had no control over it. They were just saying different versions of the question I got a lot in those days: “how are you so lucky?” And I’d be like “I guess I’m just great.” and then shrug.

And the bummer part of it is that there is no real story to it. It didn’t last too long. Not that day, nor that time in my life. Just a moment in the glorious naivete of my youth, so purely ignorant of my situation I didn’t feel the luck of it. But that’s part of the wonder of it I suppose. I didn’t know any worse so I didn’t know any better.

We didn’t get to see a case or anything. We were dismissed pretty much as soon as the lawyers running the show had a chance to give us the word to leave. At the time it felt like we were just too dang smart. Getting roped into jury duty was a sucker’s game, something that happened to dummies. But it was probably because my friend and I were having too much fun, or, in my case at least, I was just too full of myself and not much else.