Woodpecker

You’ll have to excuse me. I over-dosed last night. Syringe full of Lysol. In my black, sleeveless “Lone Wolf” t-shirt but otherwise naked. I was looking for a quick pick-me-up after a rough day of seasonal allergies - not to Make Heaven Great Again. Luckily, I’m still here and now making an American flag for the next freedom protest, out of the walls of toilet paper that I couldn’t sell for $10/roll on eBay in early March.

Now that we’re coming down the other side of the hill with this virus in NYC, the song “White Cliffs of Dover” by Vera Lynn has been stuck in my head. The song came out in 1942, the “darkest hour” for Great Britain as they were under constant air attack from the Germans, the U.S. not yet fully engaged in Europe. There were multiple covers by American big-band artists shortly thereafter. “I’ll Be Seeing You” was another hit song that my Dad certainly had good memories of as many people took to its message during the war. (That song became particularly poignant after Dad died; the implication of the song isn't that the singer will be seeing someone again, but seeing vestiges and reminders of that person who is now gone.)

I remember Mom singing along to songs like these on a portable AM radio in the morning. That was her oldies show that she played while making Sunday dinner in the 1970s, usually meat loaf or pot roast. I would sit in a kitchen chair by the window playing the imp, poking fun at her. But she paid no mind as she worked. Call it osmosis, but those songs stuck with me for decades, through blizzards of teenage and early-adult cool, for me to appreciate how great they were. It’s strange, how the world was so much harder then, millions of violent deaths, yet this music was so light, hopeful and buoyant.

That’s how I’m feeling now, although this thing is far from over. Most people who don’t live in a large urban area have little idea what it’s like in New York City. (Thus, the black-covered book advertised on this site that’s selling like shit-flavored ice cream!) A vast majority of us have small apartments, no back or front yards, living literally on top of each other, not owning cars, taking public transportation everywhere. Even when this thing ends for most people, we’ll surely be wearing masks and gloves in certain social situations for months. I can see that now, as much as I wish we could drop this shit all together and go straight back to normal. That won’t be happening here for awhile.

I’m dreading my return to daily subway rides. Here’s what they look like normally and will surely be like as things get back on track. (This is what they look like now, thanks to the homeless taking over the empty space. That video reminds me of what it was like in the late 1980s at the height of the crack epidemic.)

Being on unemployment for the time being, that would imply going into Manhattan to attend my boxing workouts at various gyms throughout the week. I can only wonder how they’ll be … with the instructors wearing face guards when we do hand-pad combination workouts? We’ll be wearing boxing gloves on our hands, but I’m sure social distancing will still be an issue. I’m dreading the locker rooms, which are always the worst part of going to the gym, how cramped and unsanitary they are, in close proximity to childish buffoons who think the world spins around them. I have no clue how gyms plan to handle this.

I finally learned of someone I “knew” who got this thing, and that person died. I didn’t know her well. Back at the job, there was this woman I’ll call Beverly who worked on the other end of the (football-field length) floor. Usually the only time I saw her was in the lunch room, eating with her friends and talking shit loudly, which I considered perfectly healthy, for coworkers to commiserate over their injustices. If I saw her down on my end of the floor? Particularly walking up my aisle? It could mean only one thing: she was shaking everyone down for charity donations.

I know this should have been banned from work, but I’m not going to out someone getting money for breast cancer research. That was her big one, along with Girl Scout cookies for her daughter. She always called me “William” based on my cubicle name plate and was very polite. I usually had a $20 bill and would ask her for $10 in change. It irritated the hell out of me to see her skulking down the aisle, but I also knew she was doing it for causes she cared about deeply.

Well, I didn’t know she was in poor health herself and often suffered bouts of pneumonia during the cold season. Whatever happened in March, she got this thing, and it took her down. A strange passing. Someone I knew and would nod at or say hello to in the hallways, and liked despite whatever mild dread she inspired coming down the aisle with her sign-up sheet, envelope of cash and big smile. She meant well, and this thing took her like a truck on the interstate running over a deer in its headlights.

I say “only person I know” not even knowing if I have or have had this thing due to lack of testing. Given that a few million New Yorkers may have already had this thing without even knowing it, I would surely love to get tested, but who knows when that will happen.

But for now, it’s just the daily grind of waiting out the pandemic. Jumping rope and doing calisthenics on the back patio. Going for a long walk each day. Washing hands constantly. Sing “The Birthday Song” twice while washing? I’m singing “Hey Jude” in its entirety. Wearing a mask has been the hardest thing to adapt. When this whole thing kicked off and we were told masks would be a necessity, I found myself cutting up old pants, thinking the length of fabric from the knee to the thigh would make a perfectly-sized piece of cloth to cover my face.

Well, I found that denim and khaki pants were too heavy and bothered my ears when I tried to hook the fabric around them. It was then that I discovered a few old pairs of Uniqlo thermal underwear that I’ve rarely worn. Using the same methodology, I’ve found these much more agreeable: breathable and easy to drop up-and-down while out walking and not encountering anyone for at least 50 yards. As you can see from the photo, I look like that Bazooka Joe character with his turtleneck pulled up over half his face. And I don't quite understand some folks' horror that I'm wearing old underwear - as if I shat them first before putting them on. I haven't worn these things in at least two years, and they were surely washed before then!

This doesn’t feel like a long-term solution; I’ve ordered some silk cycling half-face masks that will hopefully work better and last longer. (And no lectures please, on the do’s and don’ts of wearing masks. The two articles I’ve read imply that we should wear these things as if we’re going into surgery, as opposed to providing minor, largely ineffective positive reinforcement to fellow pedestrians.)

I don’t bust balls when I see people not wearing masks in public. While I feel a mild sense of unease that they're not going with the flow, I’m not convinced it makes any difference. I’m saving the outrage for the first time someone sneezes or coughs near me without covering his mouth, which is sure to happen given the levels of stupidity I witness routinely on the streets. It’s so easy to not share your “droplets” with others by practicing common sense and simple hygiene, but I guarantee you there are millions of people out there who are too stupid to do either.

The last thing I’d like to note is the woodpecker. With life growing so quiet in New York City, the main thing I notice now is the sound of birds in the morning and evening, chirping away in the trees. One morning, I heard this insistent tapping sound. Rhythmic, but not steady. Every few seconds. Son of a bitch, I thought, that’s a woodpecker. I ran out, looked up at the bare branches, and sure enough, there was a woodpecker hammering away at the tree outside my window. It’s amazing to watch them at work, bashing their beaks into the wood. I did some research online to see why they do this (often a mating ritual, or to mark their territory).

The best explanation I came up with was from a site called Trusted Psychic Mediums that lists “spirit animal” justifications of woodpeckers: “When the woodpecker comes knocking, it seeks to rekindle your passion in finding the truth. It also encourages you to be innovative and creative and to protect those who are too weak to protect themselves. The meaning of the woodpecker can help you be more open to changes and opportunities and invite more luck into your life. The woodpecker appears to you because you need to protect your wisdom and creativity from threats. Do not be too open about your pursuits because there are many threats out there that will take them away from you. People will always want to take advantage of your kindness and generosity. The woodpecker encourages you to strike a balance between being kind and being cautious. It symbolizes the need to understand different rhythms, patterns, and cycles, and to do your best to adapt to them and flourish.”

Fuckin’ A.

Gloves

That’s what I’ve been seeing the past few days walking around various parts of Astoria. Gloves on the ground. Rubber medical gloves. I’ve seen at least two dozen scattered throughout my walks. In the past, I would find these things when out sweeping the sidewalk on Saturday morning. Before all this, that meant some strange remnant of the drug culture (people getting tuned up in cars before/after attending a nearby nightclub) that I’ve never quite understood. Now, it’s people throwing away used medical gloves on the street due to the Coronavirus.

The gloves are indicative of two things to me. One very minor hopeful aspect: more people are wearing gloves. That’s the only positive. The much larger takeaway for me is that despite the good intentions of whoever was wearing the gloves, the slovenly tendency to throw a used medical glove on a public street at the height of a pandemic suggest a near-criminal sociopath. This person could be walking around in a hazmat suit all day, and I can guarantee he will still get and spread this thing if he’s this pathologically stupid.

This week, New York City feels like a scared, shivering dog with its tail between its legs. We’re all on edge, underneath. I’m sick to death of the media, of press conferences, the heavily weighted news reports designed to humiliate politicians and get partisans riled up. I’ve had it with the media – worse than politicians, if that’s possible. This stuff is brain-eating cancer to someone in a major city during a pandemic. People don’t know how to act here, save to keep their distance. As crazy as it sounds, the most humane thing I see people doing is maintaining a safe distance. I routinely encounter people on the sidewalk who, if we both keep our course, will pass within a foot of each other. One of us, most likely me, will stop, back off and let the person (or people) pass. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got a friendly nod or “thank you” for doing this – and done the same in return. Maybe it’s the civility of being scared shitless, but it’s civility, nonetheless.

Recognizing the humanity of someone you’re passing on the street is something ingrained from my rural upbringing, but not so much the city. Sometimes you get it, usually not. Under normal circumstances, there are just too many people here. It becomes much easier to acknowledge in a pandemic! In that sense, New York City feels like a small town now. Less people on the street, all of us going through the same shit, easier to be kind.

Will it last? I’m sure you’ll read many articles in the next few weeks how this will change everything and mark the beginning of a new age. I suggest you take these articles with a grain of salt.

Why? Let’s go back to the fall of 2001. Post 9/11 world. Everything had changed. I can’t tell you how many articles I read at the time that put forth all sorts of grandiose concepts regarding humanity in general and New York City in particular. True, for at least a year or two, there did seem to be something else going on here. A few new threads weaved into our lives. Surely, efforts to combat terrorism took a quantum leap throughout the world.

But really? New York City went back to business as usual within a few years. Rents and property values sky-rocketed. It’s become much harder for middle and working-class people to live here – almost impossible in many neighborhoods. Whatever sense of humanity was generated and/or rhapsodized over by the media at the time, New York City became more cut-throat after the brunt of 9/11 lessened. Entire classes of people have been erased from neighborhoods they built and lived in for decades. The cost of living has grown prohibitive and inhumane. But this pandemic is going to change everything and transform us into higher life forms!

No, it won’t. Yes, it will for awhile, I would guess for a few years. But then it will be absorbed into a city with centuries of history, and a world with a much longer and larger history. This city has absorbed wars, depressions. influenza, outbreaks of civil strife, riots, uprisings, crime waves, etc. The coronavirus pandemic of 2020, sure as any other major event in world history, will be absorbed, too. Many things will be learned from it. Hopefully, there will be some major breakthroughs in vaccines and pandemic prevention. But I suspect if you revisit New York City in 2030, you’re going to find a much harder, less diverse, more expensive place to live.

A few words on face masks, the burning issue of the week. Do I wear one? Sometimes, but not all the time, when I’m in public. If I’m out walking, and clearly not encountering a lot of passers by on the street, I don’t have a face mask on. I don’t like these things. They don’t feel sanitary: sweaty lips and wet nose, stuffy, breathing recycled air. From what I’m seeing, if people are exercising in some respect – running, biking or hard walking – they’re not using face masks. I can’t imagine doing my normal 3-4 mile walks with one on. (I usually walk along a near-deserted stretch of road leading past the power plant in Astoria, down to the river and Astoria Park. If it's raining, I'll walk along the park edge as there will be far less people. Sunny day, forget it, too many people. I've noticed the same phenomenon with supermarket lines.)

That said, when I find myself approaching a stretch of road where I see more people, I put it on, particularly the normally bustling streets of my neighborhood (31^st Street and Ditmars Boulevard). I can see, more people around, more contact. I surely wear it in supermarkets, drug stores and getting take out. All the supermarkets have lines now to get in, taking anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour. Once in, it’s a comfortable shopping experience with few customers. I still don’t waste any time – get my shit and get out. I normally make small visits to supermarkets during the week. It’s a much better idea now to do it once and stock up. Most people I encounter in these enclosed public spaces are wearing masks and gloves, staying the hell away from each other.

I note this because the media has me feeling like I’ll be clutching at my throat and shrieking if I dare go out the door without a mask on. I’ve been acutely self-aware and careful since this thing began. I don’t sneeze or cough in public. My bare or gloved hand does not touch my face. I wash my hands thoroughly, at least four times a day, sometimes more. If you get this thing from me, I have no clue how that would happen, with or without a face mask. You’re not going to get “droplets” in the air or on any part of your body from me. From the moment the severity of this pandemic was made clear to me in mid-March, I assumed that I “had it,” was asymptomatic and conducted myself accordingly.

If someone is acting like a slob on the street – which I see routinely - you’re going to see me walking in or crossing to the other side of the street. Asshole avoidance. This is nothing new. Anyone who’s worked in midtown Manhattan knows what it means to walk in the street to avoid packs of aimless tourists and smartphone zombies. Sometimes now I’ll walk in the street to give someone passing by their six feet. Like foot traffic, car traffic in NYC has greatly decreased. Most people I’m encountering these days have their shit together, regardless of what they’re wearing or not wearing. I’m not worried about offending someone who’s carrying himself like a complete dick.

Your other choice is to barricade yourself in a small apartment and drive yourself insane. I have to get out, every day. It preserves some sense of normalcy – the main lesson I learned in the days after 9/11. I’ve had it with celebrities, “sheltering in place” in massive duplex apartments and mansions with sprawling properties light years away from our cramped living spaces. Try “sheltering in place” in studio or crackerbox one or two-bedroom apartments. It’s a struggle.

It comes down to how much shit you can handle and stay sane. How empathetic and disciplined you are. If you’re a good New Yorker, these things are ingrained in you. Or they are not. Plenty of people live here, are sometimes born and raised here, and are lost and forsaken. Thus, the dirty, crumpled medical gloves in the streets, and the uneasy feeling that the door is going to hit our asses on the way out.

Social Distancing

I’ve been practicing social distancing in New York City for years, although I have a different name for it: Getthefuckawayfromme.

I can’t recall exactly when I started in with Getthefuckawayfromme. Surely not my first decade or two here. I loved crowded bars, concerts, movies, museums, even parades. Coming from a rural area and never having experienced it before, I reveled in the novelty of the city’s bustle. When you’re new to a city, you embrace everything about it, the good with the bad. I’d yet to realize that being on packed subways, then in crowded office buildings, then in gyms, then in jammed restaurants and nightclubs could have a corrosive effect.

But it surely did, over time. In the last decade, I’ve found myself placing much more emphasis on “alone” time when I get out of work. Not worrying if I wasn’t seeing a great band play. (Of course, never the opening act, usually in a deeply uncomfortable, nose-to-back-of-head club, sometimes standing for hours, while one act, then another, played, and my band would finally come on around 10:30, play until midnight, then I’d have to take a ghostly and sometimes frightening subway ride back to the Bronx or Queens, then get up for work the next day with about four hours sleep. That didn’t get “old, fast” … but it got old.)

As time went on, I found myself irritated by people who didn’t respect boundaries. There are myriad subway circumstances of riders invading personal space. People who stand too close in grocery and drug store lines, never mind shopping as though they were high and oblivious of everyone around them. The advent of smartphones. This was a catastrophe in terms of respecting social space; I’ll never get used to it. Previously, New Yorkers had prided themselves on that quiet street savvy: how to move, read body language, avoid being a pain in the ass for other people, avoid people who were a pain in the ass. Life after smartphones, we’re plunged into a world of self-absorbed zombies with the street smarts of a five-year-old. (“Street smarts” are simply self-awareness and empathy in a tight urban environment.)

Thus, the past few weeks in New York City have been a more acute version of Getthefuckawayfromme. To a lesser degree, I’ve been practicing it for years. After jury duty in November, my big daily ritual involved boxing classes in gyms. Without the daily routine of work, I focused on something that would get me out of the house for a few hours, doing something positive, connecting to people socially, etc. Even in a gym, the worst times are in the locker room, being jammed in too closely with flaming narcissists and ageing frat boys.

It’s been a surprise to realize that social distancing now implies a few slight tweaks to my lifestyle in New York City, as opposed to a major overhaul that leave many feeling alone and despondent. I sure do miss boxing. I miss work, too, that casual sense of power and self-importance we all get from bringing in a nice paycheck and feeling “essential” in a social format. Well, a CEO sneezes, and you’re no longer essential.

I’m not sure where this thing is going. I read something today, that the mayor is saying “half of all New Yorkers” will get the coronavirus. Does that seem odd to you? We’re coming up on 500,000 people having this worldwide. So … 4.3 million New Yorkers are going to get this thing? The fuck? I can’t decide whether the guy’s lost his mind or if he has a mad, blind seer on his staff, in a hooded robe, who foresees dark things that no one in their right minds can.

We need to define what “getting this thing” implies. For all I know, I may have already had it or have it now (another reason to be careful around other people). I feel fine – some minor sinus stuff that I get every year when the trees begin to blossom, which is full-on right now. Apparently, there’s a huge cross section of people who will get this thing and not even know it. Another large cross section of people will get this thing and receive a “stay home and rest” diagnosis similar to having the flu. A smaller number will get this thing and be hospitalized, and of that number, a much smaller number will die. I’ve seen reports that the usual diagnosis rate for people getting tested now is around 10%, meaning 9 out of 10 people who go to these testing sites don’t have it. They’re either having symptoms of something else, or are hypochondriacs who have had their heads filled with fear and paranoia by the media.

When people from other parts of the country check in with me, they assume the city is in a state of pandemonium. It’s not. Earlier today, I jumped rope on the landlord’s back patio for half an hour. I saw a guy walking his dog. About three cars passed. That was it. In the afternoon, I went out for a long walk. Just as in the past few days, I saw a handful of runners and other walkers along a quiet stretch of road by the big Con Ed plant leading down to the East River. I walked down to Astoria Park, and I saw more people doing the same, but much less than usual. I walked the circumference of the park and saw a few guys using the outdoor calisthenics gym. (When this thing broke out, I thought I’d do the same myself but saw too many people using it without gloves – no way.) As I cut back through Astoria, I saw a few people here and there, a vast majority practicing safe Getthefuckawayfromme. More people are out on a nice day, hardly any on a rainy day.

I’m not bolting from my apartment, screaming and naked, floundering in a vision of hell like some medieval painting of lost souls being pitchforked and herded by government employees in hazmat suits, onto packed subway trains heading for the reorientation camps. It’s actually quiet, much like the blackout we had back in 2006 that I wrote about in the last book. The nights are very quiet. If there wasn’t a worldwide pandemic going on, I’d think the city had gone sane. (Keep in mind I have no idea what goes on in hospitals, which sound like war zones.)

My last subway trip into Manhattan was early last week. I had ordered a DVD from Amazon to ship to one of their Hub locker locations on 34^th Street. (I ordered this before the world ended.) I left around noon, making sure to wear gloves, not touching anything in the subway station or train. There were a half dozen people on the car: a homeless dude sleeping in the corner, a guy and his girlfriend with facial tattoos on there with a bicycle, two burly guys with beards and a guy on his smartphone who got a serious dose of Getthefuckawayfromme attitude from me when he started in with that meandering, walk-nowhere-in-particular-while texting style referenced above. None of them was wearing gloves or masks. Everyone was touching handrails and doors with bare hands. I realized I was on a subway car with a small assortment of bozos who weren’t properly grasping what was going on.

I got into Manhattan, subway station had roughly a dozen cops in it. When I got above ground, I was shocked to see how desolate midtown was. I likened it to the scene in the original 80s version of Red Dawn where Patrick Swayze and a few of the other kids go back into town after the Russians took over. Bereft of the usual throngs of workers and tourists, the only people left were the assorted freaks, weirdoes and assholes you’d normally find haunting Port Authority and Penn Station. It was depressing much more than frightening. I decided to walk back to Queens from there. Luckily, when I got into a more residential neighborhood (the 50s on the east side), I could see life was more normal, people carefully going about their business in gloves and masks. But I made a vow not to take another subway ride until this thing blew over. Since then, I’ve been in Astoria the whole time in the much more sedate environs I’ve described.

It’s only when I watch the news, or more directly, go into supermarkets or drugstores that I feel the brunt of this thing. I’m more prone to watching the press conferences now and only the local news at 6:00. The rest of it is indicative of a society where the media blows every crisis into “end times” proportions, making everyone upset and angry. I’m ignoring that. Mind you, not ignoring what I need to know when I head out the door every day. But ignoring all this other bullshit that feels like cancer of the soul – watching too much of the news must be what it feels like to lose your mind.

You’ll find the main reason why this thing is spreading in the drugstores and supermarkets of New York City. At the height of this thing in our country, maybe in the world right now, no other place is more contagious, yet you still have people in these public places without gloves. This is going to be how a vast majority of people get this thing: by touching contaminated surfaces and transferring the virus to their noses and mouths. Young and old alike, there’s a blithe unawareness of what’s going on right now and how you should be handling it. I’m trying to go to the supermarkets as little as possible – never mind the depressingly picked-over shelves. Last Friday, I went to the Best Yet market down the hill from me, near the Steinway Piano Factory. Since this market has a parking lot, it draws in a lot more than neighborhood people who can walk there. Approaching the store, I saw there was a line of about 30 people waiting to get in. It had opened an hour earlier. It was then I realized people were treating this like Black Friday, showing up early to get "the best" groceries. The manager must have set crowd limits and was letting in customers one at a time, like a crowded night club.

Fuck that. I haven’t gone back since, although when I walked by yesterday, it didn’t look as bad. There are other options in the neighborhood, strictly walk-in stores. Toilet paper? Forget it – not yet in NYC! Luckily, I had bought a four-roll before the world ended and realized long ago there are better ways to do this. Hand sanitizer? None to be found, anywhere. My landlord’s healthcare assistant came back with a bottle the other day; the nearby dollar store had them behind the counter. I went down, and they were already gone, another feeding frenzy in the time it took her to walk up the hill and me down. Surprisingly, the meat section in all the markets has come back since being non-existent for the better part of two weeks. Bread is doing better, too, after being decimated. I needed 100-watt lightbulbs as I just ran out, only to find some asshole(s) completely wiped out the supply at the Trade Fair on Ditmars. Luckily, the C Town by the subway train was well stocked. That’s how it is now, piecing together what you need in different places.

The worst part is the people without gloves. Almost as bad, the smug looks on their faces, young and old alike: this thing is bullshit, and I’m not changing a damn thing about how I live. I can see it in their eyes. You want to know why this thing has spread like wildfire in NYC? It’s not the “hub of international travel, people from all over the world pass through here” bullshit. Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world – why aren’t they pounding the same numbers? It’s because of people like this who, through sheer arrogance and stupidity, think they’re above it all, in a cramped city where people are in constant contact with each other. Given that I’m in contact with a few older folks who could have a death sentence if they caught this thing, I’m not above it all. That’s not the only reason, but reason enough to wear gloves when I have to touch anything in public, wash my hands thoroughly before and after I’m around other people, etc.

Will the rest of the country get hit as hard as New York? I hope not. From what I’ve heard, the supermarket insanity has gone on everywhere, with hoarders and resellers making life hard on everyone. It’s easier to feel safer and more isolated in places where you drive your car to get things done, like go to work or buy groceries. Reality is, people aren’t safe or isolated when they go out in public and interact, whether it’s a city teeming with people or a rural outpost. There are ways to make yourself safer in this respect. I would wager how seriously people take these things will determine how deep and wide this thing goes in America.

Coronavirus

While New York City isn’t Ground Zero for the coronavirus in America, it’s not too far from it. We are in the shit, so to speak, in ways that feel mildly similar to how the city felt in the weeks after 9/11. The vibe back then was utter devastation that at first was mixed with profound sadness, but quickly turned to rage, then defiance. We were going to live like normal human beings again, no matter what, knowing that wasn’t going to happen for months.

This time, who do you get mad at? A bunch of poor-ass, rural Chinese eating crazy shit purchased in “wet” markets? While we probably don’t have markets as unregulated here, I’d bet you’d have your mind blown visiting smaller scale markets in Chinatown and Flushing, Queens. Just down the road from here is a small slaughterhouse that handles live chickens, goats and cows, customers coming in and purchasing meat directly from them. Blame Trump? Go ahead, but despite his initial address to the nation that felt like a sophomore reading off a teleprompter in a high-school TV production class, he’s getting better as this thing goes along and made the smart move of blocking travel to/from China when the rest of the world was dumping on him for doing so. (And I’m no fan!) I’ve turned off much of the media as it’s shady and alarmist by nature, but I can’t be bothered with finger-pointing articles. Now’s not the time.

At first, I resented the NYC restrictions that went into place on Monday morning. I had my last boxing class at the gym with my instructors, Peter and Kid, that morning down around Wall Street. Two of us showed up! I hadn’t realized the gym had already contacted staff and instructors to let them know there would be at least a two-week shutdown (although I suspect it will be longer). Peter worked my ass off, putting me through five rounds of pad work. (We normally get one two-minute round for a class of 8-12 people, two if we’re lucky.) We finished with Peter's patented "500" - 500 stomach reps comprised of five separate 100-series exercises. It was good to work that hard, knowing it would be the last session for awhile. I was pissed to know this was it for a few weeks and left wondering how I was going to stay healthy in the meantime.

Then I walked out on Pine Street and watched some douchebag blow his nose by pressing one finger on a nostril and exhaling a glob of mucus on the sidewalk. It was then I realized, this is all necessary. There’s no escaping people like this, who seem to be living in a permanent vacuum. And we’re all in the same world of shit when it comes to contagion, no matter how careful or slovenly we are.

I promptly went home, found my leather jump rope, the push-up handles in my closet and the yoga mat I never use, realizing I could put together a solid workout on the landlord’s back patio a few times a week. Never mind that I’ll feel like an inmate in Super Max getting his one hour of daylight. I can also go running or walking in various parks in the city, for now. I’m not sure what this “lockdown” implies, but it seems to me that keeping yourself in good physical condition, in open air without being in physical contact with anyone, is a reasonable concept. The way this thing sometimes feels – like a 10-ton weight hanging over my head – I get the impression I’m supposed to be in my apartment 24-7. People are guaranteed to lose their minds living this way; I hope we don’t cross that bridge.

I think most people are out of their “party like it’s the Weimar Republic circa 1920” phase. Officially, they have to be as the bars are closed, but I saw more than a few people jamming the bars last Saturday afternoon and laying it on thick, young and old alike. I also suspect this will be a time of “decadence” in that people will conspire to have clandestine drinking sessions in public places. Because we’re young, wild, free, etc. I’m as sick of the hype and overkill as anyone else, but I’m still not going to tempt fate, especially in a house with elderly women living in the apartments above mine. Why run the risk of ruining or ending their lives so I can live out my Baz Luhrmann movie?

If my experience with hard times in New York holds true, meaning the AIDS epidemic, L.A. Riots (which had a frightening, under-reported effect on NYC), 9/11, the various blackouts, numerous recessions, the 2008 financial collapse, people are going to both lose the thread and come together in ways that will be troubling and uplifting. The vibe I get walking around the streets the past few days is one of mild optimism. People know bad shit is going on, it will get worse, but what can you do except go on living and try to make the best of it. I haven’t seen people losing their shit or causing scenes; the only places I’m sensing that are on the nightly news and at the supermarket. If you want to be “a New Yorker” in a true sense you must do something: live through this. Whether “this” is a depression, the ass falling off the city in the 1970s, the crack and murder epidemics of the 80s … or this pandemic, right now. You get a few dog-assed eras like that under you belt, then you get this place in ways most people never will. I can’t tell you how many people bailed on this city after going through shit times like those noted above. (Of course, some just bailed because they found better options elsewhere, but let’s ignore those people.)

Lately I feel like I’m losing the thread here, like trying to find a job the past few months and wondering if I’m the invisible man. Or feeling like I’m about to be erased at any moment by skyrocketing rents. These aren’t pleasant feelings, and they’re persistent. But really? Compared to the massive doses of fear and paranoia generated over the past few weeks, I’m not feeling overly upset. I can control how I handle the coronavirus because I’ve dealt with worse over the course of years here; I’m having a harder time controlling these other more personal things that in a more subtle way are as destructive as any hurricane or pandemic.

I saw a strange thing yesterday afternoon while walking in Astoria Park, down by the East River. Cars park along the river drive all the time. Guys comparing street rods. Families taking pictures by the bridges or admiring the view of Manhattan. People relaxing and trying to get away from it all for a few minutes. There was this white guy, probably in his 50s, had not aged well, pasty, gray and paunchy, leaning on the side of his muscle car. “Asshole” was the thought bubble that appeared over my head. I caught the smell of skunk weed on the breeze. A guy this age smoking pot in public? Come on, man. Not only that, I could hear “Don’t Believe the Hype” by Public Enemy echoing from a car stereo. Turned out it was his! It was such an incongruous mix of images and details that I had my mind blown. The guy looked like R. Lee Ermey gone to seed. He didn’t say anything as I passed, only scowling and smoking as the dark water of the East River rolled towards the sea, the towers of Manhattan shining in the background.

It took me about 50 yards of walking away from that dude to realize how much I liked him. Maybe an asshole, I thought, but an asshole I could respect at this moment in the city’s history. That guy’s not going anywhere, and he’s going to get through this thing.

My final words on this: if you’re going to hoard anything in these strange days, don’t let it be toilet paper. Let it be sanity. I will forever be at a loss with the “toilet paper” thing. Either people are taking astonishingly large shits out there, or a lot of my fellow countrymen have completely lost their minds. I stand to be corrected, but it sounds like many of us would rather sit.

Unemployment

Well, I’m three months into my six-month allotment of unemployment. Didn’t think I’d make it this far – that I’d have surely been working by now. Go figure, now I’m wondering if I’ll be working before it ends!

I’ve never been on unemployment before. Doing a lot of temp and consulting gigs over the years, there were times in my adult life where I desperately needed the option. Unfortunately, when you leave them or work is slow between jobs, you generally can’t get on unemployment. There was a time in my late 20s where I nearly zeroed out my accounts, which was frightening. I think it was from that point forward that I made a vow to get away from more “creative” industries and find work “where the money was” – or at least more stability. If you did a chart of my earnings and savings since then, you’d see a gently ascending line to a much higher point than that late 20s low point.

What bothers me most? The unemployment rate is as low as it’s ever been in my lifetime. What they don’t tell you: that still doesn’t mean people who hate their jobs aren’t putting in applications for other positions in droves. (I would wager the low unemployent rate encourages them to find work, knowing they don't have to cling to their jobs.) I thought, near 3% unemployment? I’ll have a job in no time. For the few dozen applications I’ve filed, I’ve received about seven or eight responses, none of them leading to a job. That’s a huge problem with social-media sites. Your resume is one of dozens, sometimes hundreds, coming in for a position, and there’s just so much you can do with a piece of paper. I’ve listed out my dozens of skills, dozens of years of employment, over a decade at last job … and it feels like I’m pissing in the wind some days.

I had to visit with a counselor at an employment center in Flushing, Queens back in early December. Her take on me: “Ah, that level of experience, all the skills you have. These are things employers find highly valuable.”’ I just smiled and nodded but in the back of my mind was thinking, “If I had a dime for every time I’ve seen a flashy bullshit artist hired instead of someone who knew what he was doing, I’d be retired by now.”

Grand jury duty in November proved a huge impediment. It took up a month of my life when I could have been charging out of the gate, looking for work. I went ahead and filed the minimum “three applications per week” to get my unemployment benefits, knowing that I was way too pre-occupied to handle looking hard for work. When I got out in early December, I was exhausted. My attitude was, end of year, how many people really are hiring in December, just ride it out through Christmas and start bearing down in January.

First week of January, I get an email from a major bank telling me that since I haven’t replied to their emails, I’m no longer in consideration for a position. Huh? This was the first time they contacted me.  I then looked in my Spam folder in Gmail (which is normally not visible) to see that, sure enough, I had received three robo-emails from their HR Department over Christmas week asking me to fill out a more detailed application and take a test. (Word of advice to HR Departments: stop using robo-emails to contact job applicants. I can only imagine how many other people are getting jammed in similar scenarios.)

That started a flurry of activity, and since then, I’ve had about “once a week” interactions with places I’ve applied to, even a home interview I did with the camera on my phone answering pre-screened questions, but nothing resulting in employment. It’s discouraging to have this much experience, not demanding a huge salary, and feel like I’m looking for work in a void. I suspect most people looking for work are going through the same process. Most likely, the world will not be beating down your door, no matter what your experiences and accomplishments are.

Getting paid a reasonable amount of money weekly on unemployment certainly helps. I’ve been losing money, albeit very slowly. I saved up a ton of money (having a nine-month lead in from notification date to the actual layoff date). I’ve dialed back my expenses and held off on big purchases. Low rent has been key – without it, I’d be hemorrhaging money. As it is, I’m about to get a healthy tax refund in the next few weeks. Money isn’t a problem and won’t be for at least another three months.

One of the bigger problems is staying motivated. I can handle the bits of rejection and mostly silence after filing applications. When you’re a writer, rejection is part of the landscape; you either have faith in your machine or spend a lot of time doubting yourself. Doubt will leave you dead in the water, something I learned in my 20s. It’s simply the amount of daily down time for months as opposed to having your personal life crammed into the weekend. Unlike college, when I had free time with other like-minded individuals, this is more like playing hooky as everyone I know is working!

Boxing has provided a crucial routine to follow. I’ve realized that there are a series of late lunch-time boxing classes in my gym at various Manhattan locations that I would normally never consider (due to taking a two-hour lunch). They give me a sense of structure three days a week: doing unemployment stuff in the morning, then boxing, then taking my time to ensure I get back on the train after the asshole school kids afternoon rush (after 3:00 pm). It makes for a well-rounded day. Tuesday is the only hard day as I have my normal 5:45 boxing class and tend to burn through the whole day in the apartment to get there. Thursday, I’m in the habit of taking walks through parts of the city I haven’t seen in years. I’ve had my mind blown by the Hudson River Park, the Highline, Hudson Yards, Riverside Park, the northern paths of Central Park, the Wall Street area, etc. My first decade here, I made it a point to explore as much of the city as I could, and it doesn’t feel bad to do so again.

Our lives are structured so that either you have no time at all or too much. Unemployment past a month or two becomes too much down time. At first, it helped me get out the second book as I used the few weeks between the job ending and grand jury duty beginning to do some last-minute editing and the leg work required with launching any book. But I’m not burning with ideas to write another one yet. As history has shown me, when I’m not working/bringing in money, I’m just not that inspired. A strange dichotomy – you would figure I’d be bursting with ideas. But the times in my adult life when I wasn’t working have been pre-occupied with worrying about working again. If I didn’t have to worry about money? It would surely free up that part of my mind, but I’ve never experienced that luxury.

I’m trying to avoid the inevitable – headhunters – but another month or two of this may force me to contact them. The social-media method feels like a bit of a mirage, all these jobs for the taking, just click a button. That simplicity of just clicking a button should clue you in that something so easy is going to invite overkill. People who aren’t qualified to do the work but like the company. People with perfectly good, normal jobs who have talked themselves into hating their workplace. And, of course, those of us who need to find work, know what we’re doing, have the skills and experience to prove it, but get lost in the shuffle.

So, it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, but I should have known. Nothing ever is.

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.