Grand Jury Duty: Seeing No Hands and Hearing No Voices

I spent the month of November in purgatory, i.e., grand jury duty in Kew Gardens, Queens. A Google search on the word, purgatory: “a place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before going to heaven.” At various times in my life – shortly after 9/11, hernia surgery, enduring various deaths of people close to me – I was made to understand that simply walking around freely, sane, and in good health, represented some form of heaven. We’re usually too dumb to understand this. Grand jury duty did a nice job of reinforcing this for me.

I had no idea what to expect going into this, so let this serve as a guide to any poor souls who go forth and find themselves ensnared in this unfortunate circumstance. Having a guide like this would have helped me!

In mid-July, I received a notice in the mail instructing me to report to grand jury duty at the Queens County Courthouse in Kew Gardens on August 5, 2019. This implied an entire month of service, 20 working days. My story really begins on January 28, 2019 when I was “laid off” from my job at the bank. I put that in quotes because there’s a long, convoluted, deeply screwed-up story as to how that happened. This was part of a bank-wide “10% of staff” layoff for no other reason than the bank had a terrible 2018 fourth quarter. This is the regrettable, shameful sort of thing corporate America does now to please shareholders. Suffice to say, when I walked around informing colleagues that this had happened, I was met with shock and disbelief. But really, the past few years, we had all witnessed very good to essential coworkers getting shafted the same way in near-annual mergers and periodic layoffs.

Almost immediately, I was asked to sign a two-month extension agreement to help my department “move on” without me, i.e., giving me time to write up my job duties (a roughly 120-page PDF document that accurately detailed a vast majority of “what I do”) and eventually train a colleague to do the essential, daily routines. One extension wasn’t enough. They asked me to sign another. Then another. Then another. By mid-July, I had signed my fourth extension agreement that would take me up through the end of September.

That’s important to note, because if I was a prick, I could have not said a word about this grand jury duty notice and, with signed extension agreement in hand, forced the Bank to pay me for being out of office for the month of August. In retrospect, I should have done this! But that’s not my style. I let the bank know, I had just received the notice and was allowed to reschedule once. When I did on the Queens County website, I was given a date in mid-October.

End of September rolled around, I left the job I had been at 13 years. (The bank claimed I had been there four, as I worked many years on contract. They short-sheeted the severance accordingly … see previous musings on corporate America.) It felt pretty good to leave a place that had constant upheavals and no recognition of my worth. The day before I was set to attend grand jury duty, I phoned up the court to make sure that this was happening. It seemed odd to me because my first day would be a Friday. It was lucky I called. The guy in the jury-duty office informed me that I had been misinformed, that grand jury duty was a monthly rotation, and the next one would start on November 4^th. I heaved a sigh of relief. That book you see advertised on the upper-right of this website?  Those two weeks gave me enough time to do all the last-minute things one needs to do to put a book out.

Eventually, the first Monday in November rolled around. I thought it would be hard to get to Kew Gardens. I found I could get there in just under an hour: walk 1.25 miles down to the Steinway Street R/M station (in lieu of taking the clunky Steinway Street bus that always runs late), take the R/M Train four stops to the Jackson Heights stop, get off there and catch an express E or F Train that arrived in Kew Gardens in 2/3 quick stops. I had been to the courthouse once before and knew where to go once I got above ground, even knew I had to be near the front of the train to avoid crossing major roadways with long traffic lights.

When I got there around 8:45, there was a huge line of people snaking from the side entrance of the courthouse where jurists reported. I had forgotten that there was a bizarre tourist attraction right next to the jury entrance: an old “Redbird” subway car.  You couldn’t go in. But you could walk up a wooden plank, gaze around and read the informative plaques. Having rode in those cars thousands of times, it made no sense to me. For one, if it had been realistic, this relic would have been bombed with graffiti, even the windows, and had McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts junk scattered around the floor, along with plastic water bottles and aluminum soda cans. Maybe some unidentifiable brown streaks on the corner seats where the homeless often slept. There were no tourists in this part of Queens, and I was never sure why that subway car was there!

I knew the courthouse drill: the long line was due to the metal detector, the most irritating part of this whole process. I underlined in this previous post how deeply offended I was to pass through these things. Presumably, I cannot be a jurist with a felony crime on my record. What felony requiring a metal weapon would I then want to commit in a courthouse filled with armed guards?  But never mind – you grasp how much I hate this horseshit.

(After my first day of service, I got on Amazon and ordered a military-style belt with a hard-plastic buckle. Why? Twice a day, people wearing belts with metal buckles had to take them off at the metal detector. That’s a minor irritant for one day, and something I wasn’t going to tolerate for a month.)

When I got inside, a female guard who had the exact look and personality of Tank Girl (as played by Lori Petty in the 1995 movie) made us file in to take up each empty seat as we arrived. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were all potential grand jurists, i.e., not a mix of different types of jurists. They would filter into this room throughout the month – most of them daily criminal court jurists. By our second week, those daily jurists seemed like elementary school kids in terms of navigating the courthouse.

At 9:45 when we were all assembled, a very loud, serious middle-aged white woman addressed us, laying down the rules. Some people didn’t understand we were there for a month and left out gasps. She was a no-nonsense hard ass who told us no excuses unless they’re in writing. She wasn’t as bad as R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, but she was firmly in line with that rigid courthouse vibe we all found vaguely nauseating. She then started reading out our names and asked us to form a line and approach the front desk (now manned by a handful of staff, not in uniform) and let them know if we had any issues with our service.

I don’t know how it happened, but a lot of people walked out of the room after this process. My interview was curt, with a nice older man who asked me if there was any reason I couldn’t serve. Sure, there was. I had spent every Thanksgiving of my life back in Pennsylvania with family and friends. I could not do this with jury service going through the end of the month. I didn’t even try to pitch a sob story as I had nothing in writing. As I wasn’t working, I was a perfect candidate. (This meant $40/day, roughly $800 for the month, payable 4-6 weeks after service, although I gather this will be taxed.)

Dozens of people got out that door, although many of them were sternly warned that they would be notified to serve again in May 2020 or face serious charges if they failed to show. Most of them appeared to have a very hard time with English. Some were old and infirmed; they appeared to get a completely free pass. Some tried to pitch their personal stories with no luck. One woman wept openly. Some claimed their employers wouldn’t pay them. This bellicose woman then informed them, call your employers right now and tell them I want to speak with them. Most of those folks ended up staying. (It’s against New York state law not to pay employees on jury duty of any sort, even for a month.) In summary, if you want to get out of grand jury duty, you need to get something in writing beforehand and be ready to pass this gauntlet.

About a third of the people who came through the door left. The rest of us were instructed to follow the head court guard, this elderly black man who seemed like a nice guy but also a bit flaky, to follow him across the street to the criminal courthouse to be sworn in. There were just under 100 of us, walking behind this guy as if we were school kids on a field trip.

We got into the courthouse, which seemed much more “on guard” then the jurist entrance in the other building and went into a large, mahogany-wood court room where a very bored judge swore us in. It was also here where we were split into four parts of 23 jurists, A through D, and these would be the grand juries for November 2019. When we were all assigned, the judge then picked out names at random for each group to serve as foreman (with a substitute) for each part. I heaved a sigh of relief when my name wasn’t read, as I normally get nailed for senseless shit like this.

(Later that morning, a secretary and substitute would be assigned based on volunteers, which two people in our group did. As it turned out being foreman and secretary were not at all stressful and rote routines by the second week. The foreman simply swore in witnesses and later read the charges for our votes; the secretary kept track of our attendance and noted the votes in a ledger.)

At each step, we were informed of how wonderful we were, good citizens doing our duty. Conversely, we were occasionally treated like assholes by the staff, especially at the entrance. But what else is new.  We were also given a handbook that covered everything about the process. This along with the paper badge that was torn from our notices identified us as grand jurists.

After the assignments, we all filed out. Parts A and B were to go back to the original building to serve, while C and D would remain in the criminal court building. I was in Part A. This was a minor stroke of luck as the C and D people were relegated to the much stricter, high-volume building, with the general public using the same main entrance. They also had to vacate their court room after each session, which meant picking up their stuff and moving to another room four to eight times a day.

We filed back to our building, this time going upstairs instead of into that main jury bullpen room we had been in. We were guided to a small, non-descript room, painted off white, with a bunch of padded wood chairs and small judge and witness stands at the front. It felt like a break room, and I assumed we would sit there until being moved to a much more grand, traditional court room.

Wrong. That was the grand jury room, where we would spend the month. There was nothing wrong with it; it just seemed so … undramatic. I had seen grand juries portrayed on TV: cool lighting, hushed tones, plush leather seats, dark-wooded court rooms, large windows. This felt more like the rubber room in high school, where the bad kids went when they were suspended.

The female guard who walked us over turned out to be our jury guard, a brassy black woman named Brenda. The first week, she wore an imposing pair of terminator shades that we assumed were part of her no-BS courthouse psyche. She later stopped wearing them and informed us she had an eye infection that required the sunglasses. She had a strange job. Part of it was setting us up so we could function as a grand jury, which took about half an hour on the first day. She was also a janitor in terms of keeping the water cooler, small refrigerator and microwave in order, along with the men’s and women’s restrooms off to the side. She threatened physical violence to anyone who flushed the harder hand-crank paper down the toilet as that would create a jam and make her life hell.

Most of her time was spent out in her smaller bullpen, waiting for Assistant District Attorneys to show up and present the jury with a case. Her main job was to schedule a steady flow of cases and not overwhelm us with one case on top of another. (She may have had a lot of other ancillary duties that we’d never know because we weren’t allowed to go out there, save for entering and leaving.) The bullpen was a small rectangular area with her desk, some benches, a small, waist-level door that opened into her bullpen (with another door leading to our enclosed jury room). She was busy in the morning and afternoon, and during the long lunches appeared to be watching Netflix on her laptop. Keep in mind, like any court guard, she was a police officer: gun in holster on her belt, bullet-proof vest, handcuffs, etc. While she enjoyed bantering with us … I found it hard to joke around with someone carrying a gun for any reason. No offense to her. She did everything in her power to keep things loose.

We were at the front of the upstairs hall, and Part B was just down the hall. We never saw them, save for lunch breaks when we were allowed to use the big jurist bullpen downstairs. Some days that area was filled with daily jurists, but most days it was just us, with Tank Girl and the rest of the jury staff in their enclosed office at the front of the room. Upstairs, the other side of the hall appeared to have numerous offices where police and staff went in and out, but I was never sure what they were.

There were 23 of us. As Brenda explained, it was our job to hear felony cases reported to us by Assistant District Attorneys (ADA’s), sometimes with witnesses (usually the victim, arresting officer and detectives), and occasionally defendants with their attorneys. It was our job to vote whether to go forward with an indictment on the felony charges, which would require 12 of us to find in favor. The two foremen sat in the judge’s area at the front of the room, and the two secretaries sat at a wooden table beneath them. (The water cooler/microwave area was to the right, with a witness stand on the left before the wall with the restrooms. When the ADA’s presented a case, they would stand at the entrance to the room right where our seats began, three rows of chairs on three small terraces. Every time they presented, they had a court stenographer with them, sitting next to the secretary and two feet below the witness stand.)

Of the 23 people, I took notes one day and came up with this loose demographic breakdown: seven black people (six women, one man), seven white (two women, five men), three Asian (all women), three Indian (all women) and three Hispanic (all women). No one clumped together. There were no recognizable lines drawn among any demographic. More recognizably, there were six guys and 17 women. Aside from one loose cannon, the guys kept to themselves. The average age skewed older, with a handful of clear retirees, and roughly equal numbers of middle-aged and younger people. The main foreman was a shy Indian woman, her second an equally shy Hispanic woman. The secretary was a large, affable white guy, his second a studios black woman.

We usually kept the same seats as when we first walked in. The second day, this black woman who would reveal herself as a bit of a nut and constant questioner, was in “my” seat by the window, which irritated me. I sat on the other side of the room, weathering a constant barrage of whispers from the women behind me having a meaningless personal conversation that went on for two hours. (The next day, I got there early and staked out my seat by the window. The only black guy sat next to me, a nice, reserved guy who ran his own party D.J. business. The black woman on the other side of him was equally pleasant and good to be around. The white guy behind me looked like Patrick Simmons from The Doobie Brothers and didn’t have much to say.)

I should point out the concept of hours. Hours sometimes passed between cases. We got there at 9:15 in the morning. The earliest first case we heard was 10:00. Normally, the first case would be closer to 11:00 or 11:15, quickly followed by another case. This would take us up to 12:00 – 12:30, at which time, we’d have lunch, always until 2:00. Usually there were two or three cases after lunch. There were times when we would sit there for two hours between cases with nothing to do, save whatever we brought with us. I brought along my Kindle and gave it good use for the month, reading constantly. Some people had laptops, magazines or paperbacks. Sometimes the TV was on. (I forgot to mention the TV was necessary and stationed next to the witness stand. There was a laptop attached on a shelf underneath it with a DVD-R drive that was used heavily for video evidence.) If you weren’t smart enough to bring something to pass the hours, and many people weren’t, you stared into space or chattered. I can tell you that having someone whisper a few feet behind your ear in a stone quiet room makes concentrating on anything very hard!

Eventually, the TV would get heavy use. One of the white guys insisted on watching the impeachment hearings during our down time, which was like watching the two most popular groups in high school have a prolonged catfight. I shouldn’t be too derogatory. That was like Masterpiece Theatre compared to The Wendy Williams Show that one of the black women favored. If it wasn’t that, it was The Kelly Clarkson Show in the afternoon. Watching either was like getting a colonoscopy without anesthesia.

It didn’t take long for the cases to come in. Patterns quickly developed. Many of the ADA’s were attractive women somewhere in their 30s. Why? I don’t have a clue. A few were average looking, but most were anywhere from reasonably attractive to stunning. The male ADA’s were more officious, guys who’d been to law school but still liked to high-five each other. It was their job to tell us stories, create narratives that led us from the Point A of someone being victimized, through identifying the defendant, informing us of evidence, apprehending the defendant, then charging us with full legal definitions of the crime before we voted. (Many were the same charges with different degrees, sometimes even the same degree with different legal sub-sections. You had to listen carefully to understand the differences.)

Seeing no hands and hearing no voices. That was a common refrain we grew all too familiar with. Any time an ADA presented a witness, questioned him or her and then asked if we had any questions … once all questions were answered, those were the words spoken each time, like a magical incantation. The witness was excused. Next!

The cases were rarely a “one and done” process. A few cases were like that, where the ADA came in, went through this process, and we were done. Far more often, the cases were presented in two or three parts over the course of days or weeks, so note-taking on our part was important. I learned fast to take precise notes, particularly noting dollar amounts, whether or not the victim ID’d the defendant, the timelines involved, what types of weapons were used, etc.

Why were they done like this? Clearly, because the ADA’s had a scheduling nightmare in terms of presenting cases. There were often one or two witnesses who had to be scheduled to come in, usually an arresting police officer and often a detective or two who had to testify. Try getting people in New York just to go out to dinner, then think about how hard it would be to corral 4-5 of them to appear in court on the same day. Officers and detectives had to take time from work or come in on their days off. All of them were rarely scheduled on the same day. Keep in mind, we were charged with indicting a crime. If the crime actually went to the court? This would happen all over again, although I gather an officer or detective being summoned to a criminal/jury case must drop everything and be there as ordered. Also keep in mind, they didn’t just pull up to the courthouse before their appearance. Many of these cases were months, sometimes years, old, and they had to sit down with the ADA’s to review their notes and videos before appearing.

We all had voluminous pages of notes. I had about six pages, scrawled on each side, each page divided up into four sections. I was constantly running out of space. These were crucial on those turnaround days when we had to revisit a case that we hadn’t seen in two weeks. I could tell by many of the questions asked, some people weren’t keeping good notes (or simply didn’t know how to listen).

The main thing I learned in grand jury duty? Watch yourself in public: chances are, at least in a major city, you are being filmed. Nearly every case had video evidence of crimes occurring in public places, or at least evidence of a defendant going to or coming from a crime scene. The television got constant use.

The second main thing I learned? If you find yourself a defendant in a felony case, consider testifying to the grand jury, even when doing so kills your immunity. Why? Of the dozens of cases we voted on, only a few were not pushed forward to indictment. A vast majority of them were slam dunks, people caught in the act, often on camera, and there was no question. Two of the cases that weren’t put forward were the only cases where defendants came into court and offered their statements. In each case, the jury went in with the attitude of “this one is obviously an indictment” … but shortly found themselves wondering what the hell was going on when they realized there were two sides to the story.

And that became a problem for me, although there was nothing I could do about it. It occurred to me that in these cases, we were hearing only the prosecution’s side: a carefully-crafted story line to make it appear that this was an obvious case that demanded to be indicted, a slam dunk.

That’s not reality. There are two sides to every story? There are countless sides to every story. If you had a dozen people in an area witnessing a violent act, each one would have a different story, some wildly so that it would appear that no one had witnessed the same incident. Keep in mind, as part of a grand jury duty, we’re witnessing violence. People getting stabbed. Beat up. Held up. Molested. Or stealing things openly in public. Or breaking into stores and businesses. Selling illegal substances in public. The cameras used in those cases made everything relatively clear. Many cases did not have cameras and only testimony.

Not only that, some of the ADA’s were bad at creating narratives. I only blew a gasket once in the process, in the third week when, out of the blue, a witness was brought in identifying the defendant in a case as someone who had lived in a halfway house in the Bronx. (I’m changing the particular details of the case so it doesn’t match the actual, active case.) Apropos of nothing. The victim in the original incident we had viewed had already ID’d his mugshot. I had no idea why that witness was brought in, other to visually identify the defendant outside the constraints of the actual crime.

“How did the detective know to approach the manager of a halfway house in the Bronx, and why does it matter?” I blurted out. Fellow jurors looked at me as if I was insane. They were so used to being told what to do and think by the ADA’s that this weird detour was just something that blew right by them. What had probably happened was the detective running the case had researched previous convictions for people committing the same crime in that part of Queens, came up with the mugshots, narrowed them down to ones that resembled the defendant, ran the mugshots by the victim for a positive ID, one matched, tried to find his address, and all he could find was this halfway house the guy had lived in a year earlier. Why that mattered at all in this case, I had no idea.

You see, I’m assuming all this. We’re instructed to assume nothing and base our findings only on evidence that was presented to us. Quite often with bad ADA’s, we were not actually shown how the police came to apprehend the defendant.  It was usually summarized as, “I arrested the defendant on 1/21/19.” I would imagine at the grand jury stage, this is not as important, but in my mind there were some shady and inexplicable ways that some of the defendants came to be arrested. At that stage, the ADA’s were hyper-focused on the crime itself. But in my mind, it was just as essential to let the jury know exactly how this person was identified and eventually apprehended.

The Good ADA’s laid out each case as a complete narrative, making sure the detectives described how they came to apprehend the defendant, and dotting ever “i” from the moment the crime took place.  The bad ones left me shaking my head. Very often, there were unexplained bits of key research like this by the detectives, and very few grand jurists seemed to notice or care.  They assumed everything they were being told was unquestionably correct.

But hearing the defendant’s side of the case each time resulted in non-indictments. I fully agreed with one of them, an altercation that got way out of hand. But the other was shaky, with the defendant playing dumb in hopes the jury would believe his story that implied a friend was far more responsible for the crime. One of the black women, who had shown her hand a few times with truly insane questions to the ADA, was yelling out lines like that, “You know how it is! Snitches get stitches!” She made a few statements inferring that since the defendant was black, and she was black, she understood exactly what was going on, i.e., inferring, not basing her lunacy on actual evidence.  A few other women loudly chimed in, “That’s right! That’s right!” It became more like The Wendy Williams Show coming out of a commercial break, with the studio audience hooting and carrying on, than a court room. That was the only genuinely disturbing moment for me, and it came and went in less than a minute.

That woman had been stewing the whole time – I knew the vibe. We were all stewing in there at various points. It’s impossible not to get wound up and let it out at some point. Many of us had WTF moments where we either exploded or expressed exasperation with the process (as I had). While our days ran from 9:30 to 3:30 (4:30 at the latest), often with a two-hour lunch, I have never felt as mentally drained and exhausted as I have coming home from grand jury duty. Part of it was the excruciating down time between cases, but mostly it’s the after-effect of hearing these violent and/or stupid cases, over and over. A lot of nervous laughter and joking occurred after an indictment to cover the mild revulsion and horror we were all feeling at being exposed to this routinely for days on end.

Without fail, the people with the most mediocre minds were the ones who kept asking questions of the ADA’s. (This was a big process of raising your hand, getting out of your seat, going down to where the stenographer sat, and crouching there with the ADA so you could have your question on record.) Not one question asked ever made sense to me – it was either obvious or irrelevant. Someone asking a question to determine innocence or guilt. We weren’t there for that; we were there to determine whether the case and evidence were strong enough for an indictment for a criminal court to proceed.

Two black women (the one mentioned above), a white woman and a white guy. Always the same people asking senseless questions. The white guy got on my nerves. Queens native, older, pot-bellied, claimed to have bad knees from playing basketball through his adulthood (and he was hobbled). He had an odd, somehow aggressive face. His mouth appeared to be always slightly open, and he had hard, downcast eyes. He looked something like a sad clown without the makeup. Or if one of The Pep Boys had been a mass murderer instead of a car-parts salesman. Instead of typing texts, he loudly spoke words into his smartphone to translate to text (in an otherwise silent room). He fancied himself a deep thinker; we could all tell by his James Patterson paperbacks. I’ve come to realize James Patterson novels are comic books for white, middle-aged males. I’ve seen this countless times in offices!  Do you read?  Yes, I read quite a lot on the Metro North train when not reading The Wall Street Journal. My favorite author is James Patterson.

Something about his light Queens accent, that hang-dog face, the predictable reading material, his inane questions and routine gerrymandering, made me dislike him. (Without fail, the loudest people on the grand jury were the most asinine. I indulged once or twice myself but not to the level of these other folks.) But given the circumstance, I could see this guy rarely got a chance to pontificate, thus he took it. He didn’t seem like a bad guy in general; I’d probably like him under different circumstances. But with a captive audience and an urge to expound? It was a bit much after the second week.

The only respite for me was walking around Kew Gardens and Forest Hills at lunch time for two hours daily. Believe me, I walked everywhere. Any direction you could go from the courthouse, I went. From Parsons Boulevard to the northeast, down to the huge Maple Grove Cemetery to the east, northwest along the Grand Central Parkway and the southern edge of Flushing Meadows Park, south along Austin Street, and as far southwest as Metropolitan and 71^st Avenue.

Two incredible neighborhoods! I’ve seen high-end suburbs and rural suburbs elsewhere. It’s rare to see neighborhoods that nice and well-kept within subway train distance of Manhattan. I would love to move out there but damn well know that whole area is out of my league financially. It was amazing to cut left on grimy Queens Boulevard at, say, Ascan Avenue, then walk down it, past Austin Street, and see this incredibly upscale, lush neighborhood of mansions and huge, ornate houses with large yards. There was also that style to so many buildings - the arched triangular fronts – that’s a hallmark of what must have been a gilded age in Kew Gardens. I’ll include a Google street-view map link here. Follow the camera under the bridge and take note of the scenery as you navigate down the avenue.

Another nice, unexpected thing I saw: weddings. I had forgotten that people get married at courthouses. Each day at the main entrance to our courthouse, there were various wedding parties. Usually young black or Hispanic couples, sometimes Asian, once even a white couple. Small gatherings, the bride and groom and a few family members, often small kids holding bouquets. They were clearly overjoyed, even in the rain, to be getting married at the courthouse. Almost as important was the hustling dude who had his SUV parked in front of the courthouse, with his homemade collage poster advertising his wedding photography business. He sat there each day in the front seat, with a few plastic bouquets on the shrubbery by the side of the entrance, waiting for just-married couples to come out with their small, well-dressed parties to see if they needed his services. Often, they did. I found myself walking, head full of clouds and recent violent crime footage, only to see these smiling groups of people thoroughly enjoying themselves on their big day.

Those were the big pluses I took away. Overall? At times, I felt like grand jury duty was a complete waste of time and money. It is a waste of time for the jurists, hours and days of down time. A month taken from their lives. Two weeks seems like a much more reasonable timeframe to me. If I had to hold down a day job throughout this? The pressure from the duty itself combined with slipping backwards at my job would have been tremendous. It’s too much to ask of every-day citizens.

I ultimately understood why we were there: to save court costs further on in the legal process. We previewed felony cases so that the District Attorney’s office could come up with as many applicable criminal charges as possible. (Nearly every case was overcharged with upwards of six charges for even the most basic crimes, with multiple degrees of guilt.) I go the impression this was done so when it came time to present the case to a judge and ask for the defendant’s plea, a vast majority of the time a plea bargain would be struck between the District Attorney’s office and the defense attorney. Thus, a criminal court case in front of a jury would be avoided.

Do you realize how much money that saves in terms of court fees and the enormous salaries of attorneys, district attorneys and judges? They’ll be there anyway, but plea bargains help to cut down the number of cases they handle and help push along what I gather is a deeply stressed and far behind schedule legal calendar for any criminal court in a major city. We were serving as the first, much more affordable line of defense in terms of the ADA’s coming up with a laundry list of charges that would be whittled down, and probably dropped a few degrees, so that a defendant could make a plea and end up spending much less time incarcerated than if he had taken the case to trial.

Or maybe I’m just full of shit and don’t know what I’m talking about!

The last Friday (after Thanksgiving) we all sat there doing nothing until 12:30 before receiving our certificates and getting the hell out of there. My Thanksgiving was completely blown, but I still felt great to know I wouldn’t be heading back there again. As I left, a few of the older black women were taking their time to say goodbye to each other. There was a strong matronly quality to them that I did appreciate throughout the month, particularly an older woman with dreads and a cane. That last day, she had dozed off in her chair and started snoring. I only wished I could have turned off my mind far enough to relax like that and sleep.

At times, it felt like a complete waste of time. Unless I’m one of those happy people getting married and posing on the steps, I don’t ever want to set foot in the Kew Gardens courthouse again. We were told that serving on a grand jury pushes out our next jurist availability date eight years. I’ll be damned if ever walk into that courthouse again. I’m feeling a bit numb and exhausted now, after a month of these shenanigans, and I’m sincerely hoping I never have to do anything remotely like this again. I did my time.

How You Are: Skipping Through New York City 1987 - 2019

After roughly six months of preparation, it's finally here: How You Are: Skipping Through New York City 1987 - 2019.

It doesn't exactly pick up where Skipping Through the Graveyard in My Puke-Stained Suit: Growing Up in 1970s Rural Pennsylvania left off.  As I describe in the new book's introduction, college was such a fleeting time. "Real" college, away on my own at a campus, was only two years. An incredible two years, but I'd have a hell of time remembering half of what really happened and haven't documented all that much through the years. I did provide a chapter that glossed over my college years, but I can't really do that period of my life justice.

I can do justice for New York City. I've been here over 30 years and much as with the first book, I eventually realized I had more than enough material to piece together a book. From my first days here, I was writing, often professionally, and I kept it all. Some of the pieces in books come from personal letters and articles that never quite made it with various NYC publications. As I told a friend recently, this book is a junkyard, and if you haven't already guessed, you can build some crazy shit with the help of junkyards.

The city has changed so much in the past 30 years, radically, something that crept up on me in the early 00s.  I began to realize, the place I moved to wasn't the place I was living - mainly in terms of the hyper-gentrification that kicked into higher gear around that time and hasn't let up.  I'm not going to tree-stump on this issue, but if I end up leaving New York City, this will be the overwhelming reason.  

You can see it in Long Island City.  One of the chapters details a friend, James, turning 30, and our celebrating this in a neighborhood Long Island City bar.  (This originally appeared as an article in NYPress in early 2002.)  I remember being a bit on edge going down to that bar, at night. As I noted, tumbleweeds would have blown through that part of town if NYC had tumbleweeds: vacant lots, taxi-cab dispatchers, parking lots, factories, a few gas stations. It's not fair to say "nothing" was down there, but I just described about 40% of the land area.

I recall a fire at the block of buildings at Roosevelt Plaza just before this in 1999, a frightening experience seeing billowing black smoke that close to the train. That seemed to have signalled something, because just after that, the first luxuy hi-rise was constructed. Then another.  Then another. Each one blocked the previous hi-rise's view of Manhattan. Not just there, on the north side of the 7 Train. A massive change started happening on the southern side.  Nearly 20 years later, there are dozens of luxury hi-rises dominating the Long Island City skyline, amidst the working- and middle-class people who have lived there for decades.  Every time the N Train hangs that low right turn into the Roosevelt Plaza station, I see all those massive, gleaming luxury towers that have overtaken the neighborhood. It's disheartening, to say the least, and I see it every god-damn day.

I'd be shitting bricks if I was living there; hell, I feel the pressure miles north of there in the Ditmars area of Astoria.  I heaved a quiet sigh of relief when the Amazon deal was turned down in those empty trainyards in Long Island City; the already sky-high rents around here would have entered San Francisco's impossible stratosphere of overpriced real estate.

But enough of that. It's an every-day fact of life now for those of us who have lived through decades in this city, and something all of us need to pick up and keep moving with.  It's like we're being chased by a wolf pack, and every few months, the pack consumes one of us. My time will surely come!  Until then ...

I've done the best I can with this book to present the New York City that I know, slightly on the underside, far from down and out.  At best?  I hope this book invokes the spirit of The Basketball Diairies by Jim Carroll.  Not the heroin. But that voice, a hard sense of working-class New York City, of neighborhoods, subways, corner bars and bodegas. I'm not Jimmy Breslin. If anything, I hope the book underlines what it's like for an average American kid to move to a place like this and make it work for him.  If my sensibilities are "New York," they are in the sense of any other emigrant coming here and mixing his heritage with the reality of the city he comes to understand.

So, have at it, if you're interested, buy a copy, I'd surely appreciate it.  I wish I could dedicate more time to the blog, but I've been working my ass off the past few months to make this happen, and that took over all my spare time. If and when I do get back into this, I'll surely shoot for shorter passages. Thank God I kept this blog going, as it's provided roughly half of each of my last two books. I knew it all meant something; it was just a matter of learning how to present it. I'd like to keep this going, but let me think about how I can do it. In the meantime, let me steal your money ...

Book Update II

I've decided to forge ahead and put out a collection of New York stories similar to Skipping Through the Graveyard in My Puke-Stained Suit.  Why not.  I don't think I can do the same for my college years, although this book will dip back into my college years to show the roots of how I decided to move to New York way back when.

Same set-up: loose collection of pieces, sorted by year, pulling from my various published and unpublished sources.  Along with new stuff.  I can already see I need to fill in a few blanks about my decade in the Bronx.

This will take a few months to pull off: a lot of editing.  I know how much work this is from last time, so I would guess late summer or the fall.  Possibly sooner if I get on top of this early and grind it out.

So, stay tuned.  I think this will be a good read.  A much different emotional landscape and set-up compared to growing up in a rural area in the 1970's.  But hopefully it will all make some kind of sense in the end.  And it would be nice if I could write here more often.  This is sheer laziness on my part: I'll work on it.

Book Update

The book, Skipping Through the Graveyard in My Puke-Stained Suit, has been out for roughly seven months.  How has my life changed?

In a nutshell, as Mr. Welker would often say, not much.  Sure, it feels great to have it out there.  People back in that part of Pennsylvania have told me, it’s good that someone has finally written about here in a reasonable way.  Hell, in any way!  Nostalgic, but no too nostalgic.  Not demeaning, not looking to take some “Trump/Red State” style dump on the Coal Region.  (Reading that sort of nonsense makes me see red, too.)  Anyone raised there is sure to have some negative feelings about it, as with any working-class neighborhood or area.  I know those people too well, I know myself too well, to understand that there’s a lot more going on in rural American than mediocre, desperately out-of-touch nimrods in most media will ever understand.  Their version of rural America may as well be rendered in crayon and the size paint brush you’d use on a house.

A few people in New York have told me that I should be contacting the local papers back there, hitting them up with promo copies.  But I’m not so keen on that as most of those papers don’t have any sort of book section, not even an Arts section these days, and this would be positioned more as a “human interest” story.

I’m particularly not so keen on the home-county newspaper, The Pottsville Republican.  When I graduated from college back in the 80s, I blanketed the country’s magazines and newspaper with my resume and clips from the campus newspaper.  I got one writing assignment out of that, for Musician magazine (thank you Scott Isler and Bill Flanagan!), about The Georgia Satellites (just before they broke big with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself”).  (More importantly, that was my introduction to New York City.)  Two papers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press, wrote back enthusiastic, positive letters of support, each running 2-3 pages long – while not offering jobs.  I got one-line rejection letters from most major newspapers and magazines.  The Pottsville Republican ignored me.  I had included them on a lark, not really wanting to write for them, but I had the stamps and envelopes, why not.  I can’t recall any other publication that ignored me with that mailing, but you better believe I remember my home county newspaper doing so.

Of course, I’m seeing that any sort of publicity is good publicity when you’re trying to sell books.  But it’s also my attitude that a paper like that isn’t going to set the world on fire.  If they approached me, I’d be amenable as I realize most or maybe all people working there now weren’t around in the 80s.  This book isn’t my livelihood … by a longshot!  This has helped me see the pay scale for books and how they relate to a person’s life.  Sell a few hundred or thousand copies, you can break even, make some nice pocket money, or a tax-return size chunk of change for sales in the high thousands.  Tens of thousands, you can have this as a respectable side income.  Hundreds of thousands, you could probably support yourself.  Millions, you’ve hit the jackpot, and time to look at the next mansion over from Stephen King’s in rural New England (which always seemed to be the high-school daydream for me).

Anyone who writes a book, the secret hope is that he can make a living doing nothing but that.  But that is such a rare option for so many writers, me included.  As I’ve noted previously, that would be a “lightning in a bottle” situation, probably involving movie or streaming-service folks catching wind and throwing money around.  I never know who’s reading this thing (the only way Amazon sale analytics falls short is in demographics), but I surely can’t count on some producer in the HBO office reading it and blurting out: “Man, this would make a great limited series!”

The every-day reality for me is the second paragraph, and it’s not bad.  In the past month, sales have slowed down.  Every quarter, I can do a “countdown sale” on Amazon, which means pricing the Kindle version of the book at a buck or two for a week.  It’s not even the pricing scheme that matters: it’s getting free publicity as Amazon will promote the book more visibly in that time period.  There’s always a windfall of sales that week, although I’m hardly making any money in the sale.  It’s worth it for the free publicity.  The ads I take out roughly every quarter tend to be break-even proposition in terms of the sales they generate.

The one heartening aspect of selling a book on Amazon, at least this one, is that roughly a third of my sales come from Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s program that charges readers $9.99/month for the ability to read thousands of books, mine included.  It started slowly but really picked up after the first Countdown sale in January.  For every 300 pages read on Kindle Unlimited, that’s roughly one digital book sale for me.  Some days creep along with only 0-50 pages read.  Other days, I’ll check in and see 500-900 pages read (haven’t hit 1,000 in one day).  That means people are reading all over the place, seeing an ad, or getting good word of mouth.  Not taking too much of a chance: it’s “free” or at least part of their monthly service payment.  That’s been the one consistent plus through this whole experience.

The worst part?  When you’re an author and you look at your sales page, you can see worldwide sales.  That’s right, Kindle will make your book available on their sites in over a dozen countries.  The problem being, you’re more than likely to see sales only in your country.  I’ve sold three books in the United Kingdom, one to someone I know, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the other two were friends of hers!  I know this book would do well in Ireland as Irish Catholicism, and the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) friction between my Protestant mother and dad’s Catholic family are running themes, along with that black Irish sense of humor I was raised with in the Coal Region.

In January, I realized I could get on Kindle UK and order books as gifts to send to various magazines and publications in Ireland and England.  So I did, 10 copies to various Irish newspapers and literary magazines and two newspaper in England, focusing on book editors in the publications’ reviews sections.  I even picked two prominent Irish-American newspapers here, both with offices in New York City, and sent them copies.

I’ve been pissing in the wind: total silence.  I don’t expect to sell books in France or Spain.  I do expect to sell books in the UK but, for the life of me, I don’t know how at this point.  When I buy ad space on Amazon, it’s only for the United States, nowhere else, with no option to buy space internationally.  This is the one thing that sticks in my craw, probably the only thing.  Sure, I want the book to take off like a rocket, but it was just as important to pull it together and make sense of that time of my life.  I’ve been meaning to do that for years, could sense I had enough stories and material to do this.  So I did.  Didn’t want editors monkeying with it.  Didn’t want some false narrative inserted into it, as that’s not how life works.  Our lives do have a beginning, middle and end, but as far as I can see, the type of drama you read in fiction or see in movies is rarely part of our every-day lives.  As I’ve learned, the end leaves a lot to be desired.  In fact, it scares the shit out of most people.  But I don’t believe our lives are horror stories or fairy tales with happy endings.  Thus, this book.

Will I do it again? Sure, why not.  I already have a lot of material for another one, although this one would be fiction, and I already have a few missing chapters in mind.  Completely different from a memoir, but in my mind, a fun read.  Will I get it out this year?  It’s possible.  I have to rouse myself from mid-summer stupor and make it happen.  But give me some time, and I think this thing can happen again.  At least now I know how to navigate the Amazon publishing system.  I’d still rather do it this way than deal with publishing houses and editors, assuming that would even be an option.  I’ve spent so much time on the outside of that world that I feel perfectly comfortable on my own.  About the only thing I envy them for is the marketing department!

The Pulitzer Prize and Kendrick Lamar

What will those zany members of the Pulitzer Prize committee come up with next?  First it was the Nobel Peace Prize committee awarding Bob Dylan for "literature.”  (He’s not a poet, unless you own a copy of Tarantula, and if you do, you’re stouter than I.  Chronicles, a partial autobiography, is a rambling mess: a fun read, especially for fans, but not Pulitzer material.)  Now the Pulitzer committee is giving the prize for music to Kendrick Lamar, as opposed to some respected-but-obscure jazz or classical musician.

Let me check off the names I’m familiar with in the list of past winners: Aaron Copeland, Wynton Marsalis, Ornette Colman, Steve Reich and in 2015, Julia Wolfe for Anthracite Fields.  I actually went out and bought this, based on the similar Pennsylvania Coal Region background.  (Unfortunately, it didn’t register with me.  I like the fourth movement, "Flowers," but there's a lot of modal choir patterns in the longer pieces that felt repetitious.)

I want to listen to more classical and jazz music, particularly more modern pieces.  I do, as I go along.  I’m a provincial in these areas, but a well-meaning one who wants to learn more.  As opposed to hiphop which, along with the rest of society, I’ve been bludgeoned with since the mid-90s or so, when the majority of a cool genre devolved into gangsta rap and overbearing clichés.  It’s been a major industry since that time, like any other, like rock or country before it.  Much as with rock or country, things get strange and hollow when they become industry and dominate the culture.  It would be nice to walk past a jeep with blacked-out windows and hear bass-heavy Mozart blasting from the speakers, but come on now.

I hadn’t realized the monetary reward for the Pulitzer was $15,000 … which Lamar could spend in one night in the VIP section of a trendy L.A. night club.  That sort of money can probably make a huge difference for a classical or jazz musician struggling to make ends meet.  I’m sure the cultural exposure puts a few more asses in seats, which is what it’s all about for performing artists.

The whole endeavor feels hollow and self-congratulatory, like any other prize, be they Oscars or Nobel Peace Prizes.  It feels like it’s given more to prove how wonderful, insightful and all-encompassing the august group of people giving the award are, as opposed to the artists themselves or their work.  A look at the Pulitzer Board reads like an Upper West Side wine-and-cheese fund raiser for Bernie Sanders.  Shamefully, a majority are New Yorkers.  Gail Collins?  Do you really picture her listening to Kendrick Lamar?  And do you picture her or any of these women being OK with being called “bitch” as a matter of course (as is the case in Lamar’s lyrics)?  I’m certain their explanations would be the usual condescending “different cultural qualifiers” tripe that subtly creates lowered expectations for off-white people and holds white people who don’t agree with them to irrational standards.  (You would be taking your life in your hands to call any of countless number of women I’ve worked with in NYC “bitch." This is abhorrent behavior in our every-day lives, particularly at work.  Why is it OK in this instance?)

The comments sections of publications and message boards have been the predictable shootouts between older, white rock fans and younger, white hiphop fans.  Or even worse, this type of person.  I was writing about indie rock snobs in that piece, but college-educated hiphop snobs fall roughly into the same category.  (All those 90s kids wearing sideways baseball hats are now around 40.)  With the caveat that they’re “of the people” because they’re championing a genre that’s selling in the overall culture.  But not omniscient in that old way we were raised to believe in with 60s and 70s rock.  Those days are gone.  I’m certain that I’m oblivious of the Top 10 hiphop acts of the past few years.  Most people are.  If I’m aware of them, it’s because they’re being hyped ad nauseum via reality shows or social-media fanned negative press coverage.  Like most sane people, I don’t pay attention to things that don’t appeal to me.

I’ve seen more than a few incidents where the offended hiphop fan, having his unquestionable taste called into question, quotes direct lyrics, often for the entire track.  Supposedly for the lyrics they consider the best Lamar has to offer.  I actually found a few sites that let the fans state their favorites.

Maybe it’s like comedy?  When someone describes it to you, the humor somehow disappears?  I’m reading those lyrics, and all I’m seeing is the blustery, violent posturing that decades in NYC has taught me is adolescent male insecurity, half-assed political statements that sound like someone drunk spouting off, and shallow self-aggrandizing that has always annoyed me with hiphop.  And the occasional good one-liners and rhymes!  I’m reading a lot of emptiness, a lot of lines that sound like they're trying to impart something important but are actually saying nothing important.  Let’s not forget the silly cultural references to products, movies and TV shows … which a lot of people seem to mistake for brilliance.  It just means the dude had the TV on when he wrote the lyrics.

And that’s fine.  Most lyrics do not stand alone when separated from the music.  (The music I've sampled on youtube is OK, the usual repetitious riffs that hiphop employs that are boring more often than not, but sometimes pretty cool and inventive. Lack of melody or memorable choruses are what turn off most rock fans.  Cool production touches and smart musical references are two of the few things I like about most hiphop.)  People like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen wrote far better lyrics than this, but even with them, you read their lyrics on the printed page, they’re not anywhere near as meaningful without the music.  Lyrics are not poetry.  They’re not meant to be.  If Lamar’s lyrics read like gibberish to me?  Well, so do David Bowie’s lyrics, although I find Bowie’s music far more compelling that anything in the history of hiphop.  Little Richard sounds like a mental patient in his lyrics.  His music changed the world.

So, I can accept that and expect the usual defensiveness you get with fans of any genre when someone points out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.  All emperors stand naked to anyone who simply doesn’t subscribe to what the emperors put forth as common wisdom.  Millions of people get this?  That’s true.  Millions of people got Arrested Development and De La Soul, too.  For however many of millions got it, there are far more people who didn’t get it.  Or who got it, and time marched on.  (The great lesson most rock fans learn as they age: yes, time even marches on your favorite artists you thought would last forever.  Very few do.)

That's taken me decades to wrap my mind around as a rock fan.  Not everyone gets it.  Not everyone is on your wavelength.  Especially with music, which tends to intertwine itself with pop culture of given time periods and specific age groups of the fans.  It might stand the test of time in your life, but most lives, it won’t.  Very little does.  The problem with hiphop tends to be the avalanche of words in each track … there’s often nothing solid to grab onto over the course of time.  That’s the key to people listening to something decades later: something identifiable in a piece of music, something that really stands out, grabs the listener.  In the case of music, it’s usually a melody or a riff, a memorable chorus, something that makes sense to people beyond the immediate fans.  There’s very little of that in hiphop, which is why older artists tend to get ploughed over.  Maybe it says something about me, but the most memorable thing about Public Enemy to me is that screeching sound in “Don’t Believe the Hype.”  Believe me, when I was new in NYC, living in the Bronx, the summer of 1988, all you could hear blasting from cars was that sound!

At that time, I was a lot more amenable to exploring that sound.  Decades on, I’ve done the same dance too many times, with the overall culture, with critics, with white hiphop fans acting like they need to educate me, when I spent close to a decade living in a neighborhood they would never set foot in.  I recall Chuck D. stating that hiphop was CNN for black America.  It seemed more like The Cartoon Network, or at least became that in a hurry.  I was living there and didn’t need him, much less an army of white suburban shitheads, to define my experience.  All I was seeing was poor black and hispanic people in much the same boat as the poor white people I had left behind in rural Pennsylvania.  And they were being encouraged to ignore and hate each other with horseshit like hiphop fanhood and divisive politics, rather than recognize they had much more in common.  It goes on today, maybe even worse given Trump’s berserk victory.  (If the working and under classes of America ever get on the same page culturally and politically, look out.  But that won't happen any time soon.  I don't see too many white liberals with any understanding of the white working class, nor non-white people who are politically engaged but can't seem to recognize this important bridge that needs to be crossed.)

On one hand, it feels like an empty gesture for the Pulitzer Prize committee to give a music award to a hiphop artist.  Much as with the Nobel Peace Prize in literature for Bob Dylan.  They’re trying to generate hype for their prize, and it seems as though they’ve shied away from hype over the course of decades.  Why now?  Maybe there’s a younger wave of voters on the committees, and they feel a need to make a point, to “move with the times”?  I’d say it would be just as intriguing to pull the same stunt with a country act, but tip of the hat to Kendrick Lamar and hiphop in general, there is nobody on a mass level in country doing anything remotely interesting these days (nobody in rock either).  Plenty of cool stuff going on in alt. country, but I don’t want to come off sounding like one of those white hiphop-fan jackasses preaching about “underground hiphop” and how much better it is.

On the other hand, yeah, this is pretty interesting, not a bad move. I don’t particularly like the guy’s work, it sounds false to me, then again, a lot of hiphop does, and has since the mid-90s.  It’s all right to recognize a lot of kids and young adults do get this guy on some important level that makes no sense to me.  It’s fruitless to say I don’t get everything.  It’s obvious.  When you really understand music, the depth of it, how many hundreds of genres there are, how many decades and centuries of history there are with some genres, how many artists have come and gone in the history of the world … I’m OK with accepting that I “get” maybe a dozen genres and a number of artists somewhere in the high hundreds.  And I’m someone who pays far more attention to music than your average fan of any genre.  The more you learn, the less you know.  I suspect understanding how dumb you are probably prevents one from being nominated to join organizations like Pulitzer Prize committees!

Blue Mountain and a Bucket or Rocks

Well, get ready for the anti-rural Pennsylvania pile-on.  I just read the story about the school superintendent at Blue Mountain High School suggesting that having each classroom equipped with a bucket of “river stones” to throw at potential school shooters is somehow a valid defense against this ongoing wave of semi-automatic, schoolhouse genocide.

The really strange part of this for me?  You need to be from there to gather this (and I am from Schuylkill County).  Blue Mountain is, by far, the best school district for miles around, in county or out.  I didn’t go there.  In fact, I often disliked kids from Blue Mountain when I ran into them my two years at the Penn State branch campus in Schuylkill Haven.  (Blue Mountain is to Schuylkill Haven as Cinderella is to her sisters.)  There might have been Catholic schools that rivaled Blue Mountain for academic excellence, but this was a public school.  They were always the best high school in the county, and they still are now.

Those kids would carry around a sense of entitlement on campus, and it was irritating.  Actually, the Pottsville kids, too.  (Pottsville is the county seat, and I would guess the largest school in the county.)  It was that “south of the mountain” smugness.  (Schuylkill County is divided in half by the Broad Mountain, with the general concept that the north half is a bunch of factory-working rednecks, and the south side the more refined “upper class” of the working-class county.  There really is no comparable community or school on the north side to Blue Mountain.  Then again, there are south-side towns like Minersville, St. Clair and Pine Grove, among others, that are virtually identical to “north of the mountain” towns.  It’s possible the dichotomy exists because of the infamy of Shenandoah, the north-side town permanently known for its well-earned, rough-and-tumble image. Call it the antidote to Blue Mountain.  That ‘Chendo toughness embellishes the entire “north of the mountain” image.)

Some of the Blue Mountain kids would carry themselves around with that “Big Man on Campus” vibe.  They were from the best school district, and the Penn State branch campus was in their backyard, on the edge of Schuylkill Haven, just down the road on Route 61 from their tasteful country homes, usually helmed by two college-educated parents.  The thing is, when I got out of high school, I was hoping to ditch that vibe, anything to do with one bunch of kids seeing themselves as superior to all others, a malady that made high school such a shit endeavor.

I recall one English class, reading some forgotten passage out loud, and two kids from Blue Mountain snickering at me for my Coal Region accent.  I would later befriend these guys, but they came off like James Spader in an 80s teen flick when I first met them.  Never mind that I left that place with a 3.9 grade average, one of those guys flunked out and the other muddled through on the six-year party plan.  In their minds, I was a redneck because of the accent and where it indicated I was from.  (As it turned out, my eclectic taste in music, particularly all those great 80s indie bands, cemented our friendship.)

In my book, I get into being on the golf team, and how we always got out asses horrendously whipped when we played at the prestigious, much-harder golf course at the Schuylkill Country Club.  This was Blue Mountain, and those kids were raised playing that course.  Us playing there was like the scene in Caddyshack where the caddies take over the country-club swimming pool for the afternoon.  We didn’t belong there, in more ways than one!

Moving on to the main Penn State campus, then the world in general, then New York City … I look back now on that whole north/south of the mountain divide and laugh.  It is laughable in the overall scheme of the world, but I’m sure, is still a very real thing for the people who live there.  It might be a matter of degrees, but it matters.  That’s why I was mildly surprised to see Blue Mountain in this news story about the “bucket of rocks vs. AR-15 assault rifle” insanity.  If the story had said Tamaqua, Schuylkill Haven, Shenandoah or any other town around there?  Yeah, that would have made more sense in my mind.  But Blue Mountain?  The gem of the county?  I suspect people not from there think that school superintendent is some Li’l Abner caricature, running around in bib overalls and a jug with XXX on it.  Not realizing that’s an extremely smart individual running a highly competent school district.  How this bucket of rocks thing entered his mind, I don’t have a clue!

It’s not fair to say I hate it when people dump on rural Pennsylvania.  I do it myself sometimes.  And I think about it all the time.  The people in cities who dump on places like this, who aren’t from there, I can see, these people often don’t know shit about life.  They think they do, but this vast blind spot concerning working-class white people, when they are white, too, tells me so much more about them than anything else that will come out of their mouths.  It bothers me much more when people who are from there, who know that environment, dump on it, unapologetically, all the time, no looking back, fuck that place, fuck those people, I’m in a much better place, thank you very much, look at me now, so much better than all those dumb hillbillies.

No.  Just no.  You can’t reject your roots: know who you are.  I probably entertained those kinds of thoughts straight out of college, in my mid-20s, but I quickly came to realize, there’s just as many bad, shitty aspects of life you run into no matter where you live, particularly cities, with their own special brands of darkness and stupidity.  We’d all be wise to erase this upper-middle-class, suburban world view from our lives.  It’s sterile and reeks of all the false values I’ve come to reject in my adult life.  It’s permanent high school and the rigid caste system that ragged, immature way of life implies.  (Of course, I recognize this is America now and will go on being this way for a long time.)

As for guns and Pennsylvania – guns and any rural area in America – don’t get me started.  I’m all for anyone in America having hunting rifles, antique guns, even hand guns or a shotgun for home protection.  Let’s make another constitutional amendment to protect every American’s right to always own this level of weaponry if he so chooses.  But let’s get rid of everything else.  If you’re worried about “the government” breaking down your door and taking you prisoner all because you’re not toting semi-automatic weapons and semi’s converted to machine guns, you don’t need to find yourself another country.  You need to find yourself another fucking planet.  If the “end times” come, the survivalists are right, and these armed-to-the-teeth militants are the only ones surviving in their bunkers?  Ask yourself if you want to live with these folks.  I’d rather go down fighting hand-to-hand with the killer cyborg robots, winged skulls and nuclear mutants.

The last few years when I’ve visited Pennsylvania, I’ve noticed something alarming.  In terms of gun ownership, I’m not crazy about one man owning dozens of guns.  It suggests a level of fear and constant state of paranoia that seems debilitating.  But I can surely live with that.  I have to – it’s the way things are in America for a lot of frightened, deeply intimidated men.  (This is the greatest ruse, something I learned boxing: self defense is fear.  Maybe fear that is entirely justified.  But fear nonetheless.  When you can admit that to yourself, that’s when the lightbulb goes on over your head.  It’s all right to be afraid.)  I can live with the outrageous levels of gun ownership, but I’m having a hard time living with the open-carry law.

I wouldn’t mind this so much if the few times I saw people carrying guns in public they were staunch, dependable, John Wayne types.  But that hasn’t been the case.  The first time, my brother and I were getting ice and hot coffee for the road at a Sheetz in Cressona, PA.  Somebody called out my brother’s name, we turned to see a chunky dude in a camo hooded sweatshirt and pajama pants approaching him … with a .38 special holstered on his hip.  Apparently, this was one of my brother’s former coworkers.  He had been fired for exceeding his absence level at work (which takes some doing), was known as a bit of nut.  I really needed no background on this.  I could see in his eyes, no one was home, much less hearing him speak and realizing this guy had mental problems, surely not enough to be institutionalized, but enough for daily meds.  And he’s openly carrying a hand gun in public?

The handful of times I’ve seen this since then, while I didn’t have this level of direct contact with the person, I wasn’t overly enthused to see some hard-edged, scowling, middle-aged dude sporting a holstered hand-gun on his hip … in the St. Clair Walmart parking lot … walking down the main street of Ashland … coming out of a Dunkin Donuts in Shamokin, etc.  Like we were in the Old West, and this guy was going to have to draw on a cigarillo-smoking desperado in black.  You can read me off all the statistics you want.  This is way out of bounds and totally unnecessary.  I’ve lived in New York since 1987 and lived in a crack-ridded neighborhood in the Bronx from ’87 to ’97.  If I put myself in the mindset of these dudes openly carrying guns in a comparatively safe rural area, I would have been walking around with a flamethrower those 10 years.  It wasn’t unusual to hear gunshots in the distance at night in that neighborhood, and there were a few notorious murders in my neighborhood.  You learned fast what to do and what not to do to avoid trouble.  Your mind was your greatest weapon, developing the traits and abilities to avoid meaningless, violent confrontation.  Not a gun.  (Granted, there are situations, urban or rural, where a gun could save your life, but they’re surely not an every-day aspect of existence, and something I’ve thankfully yet to encounter.)

So, think about the superintendent and the bucket of rocks in Blue Mountain.  If anything, this is the antithesis of our gun-crazy culture, albeit more than a bit nuts.  Biblical in a sense, like Davey slinging rocks at Goliath?  Only in this case, I’d rather not go up against some deranged 15-year-old with an AR-15 assault rifle … with a bucket of rocks.  I don’t like those odds!  Nor do I like the concept of arming teachers.  Teachers don’t strive to obtain their degrees and dedicate their lives to broadening the possibilities for children with the thought of one day gunning them down in a crisis situation.  The concept of armed teachers is the antithesis of education: it’s more like prison.  And the few teachers I knew in high school that would have been comfortable handling guns in school were people who scared me nearly as much as the thought of some unhinged kid on a shooting spree.

Then again, there’s a lot I no longer understand about high school and this horrible, dark strain of shootings that has somehow become normal in our society.  We used to have fire drills.  The bigger end of the baby-boom generation, those kids would have nuclear-attack drills, hiding under their desks when the alarm went off, waiting for Russian warheads to rain down on them.  Kids are doing the same thing now, only they’re hiding under their desks when the alarm goes off, waiting for a psychotic American teenager with a semi-automatic weapon to kill them.

A few years back, when we were staging our 20^th high-school reunion, I went back to the high school for an informal tour.  (The concept was to gather as many people as possible the Friday before a Fourth of July weekend, but I was the only person who turned up!)  I hadn’t set foot in the high school since graduating.  Approaching the front door, I was shocked to realize it was locked down (even in July).  There was a camera on the far wall overlooking the far-left door, which appeared to have a buzzer/intercom set-up.  I pressed it, announced who I was and why I was there.  The woman at the front desk in the office buzzed me in, then escorted me to wait for the principal.

The tour went fine.  It was amazing to walk through that place again and have the teacher guiding me grasp that not a lot had changed culturally there in the past 20 years.  But that front-door buzzer stuck with me.  Back in the 70s and early 80s, you just walked right in or out.  There was no need for lock downs, shooter drills or armed guards.  Then again, at that point in history, there were relatively few, if any, school shootings on record, and only a handful of mass shootings serving as templates for what would become societal norms decades later.  Is there something wrong in our society that horrible scenarios are now the norm?  Obviously.  And the concept of dozens of people, particularly kids, being murdered, would be a lot harder to envision without semi-automatic weapons.  (Imagine what Charles Whitman would have done in that tower in Austin in 1966 if he had one instead of a hunting rifle.  Then again, you don’t have to, as Stephen Paddock did just the same in 2017 in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding 422 others.)  A bucket of rocks doesn’t seem any more or less sane against those kind of numbers.