Your Honor, the Whole Damn Vending Machine in the Hall is Out of Order the commune's Omar Bricks answers the call of duty, only not the kind you're thinking of
Monday, Dec. 10, 2001
One night several weeks ago, I got home after a grueling day of
communing to find a strange-assed envelope in my mail box, wedged between
the usual offer for Sea Monkeys and a Carmen Electra poster catalog. At
first I
thought I might have won a Harley or maybe my report card from the third
grade had finally shown up. No such luck. When I studied the return-address
more closely, I realized it was from the Jury Commissioner’s Office, and
that could only mean one thing.
The game was on.
Ever since the I was in shortpants, watching my dad do battle with unseen
foes over the telephone line, I'd waited for this day. The time had come
to do what any honest, red-blooded American would do when they got the call:
to match wits with the American justice system and try like hell to get
out of jury duty. This is what our fathers have fought and died for time
and time again, compadres: the right to outsmart The Man and avoid having to
find parking downtown.
I decided to warm up by trying my old stand-by dodge. I called the number
listed on the back of the summons and, in a bone-chilling facsimile of my
mother’s voice, told the jury duty operator that Omar would be unable to
make it, because he had the measles or some shit. Looking back now, it was
probably throwing that “or some shit” on the end that sunk my subterfuge,
because the operator said I’d have to reschedule for another date. I thought
fast and tried adding on that I had whiskey-dick as well, but she seemed
pretty unimpressed by that improvisation.
I knew then that the old stand-by
wasn’t going to cut it this time, not by a long-shot. It was like trying to
carve a jack-o-lantern with a piece of cooked spaghetti: damn useless. I was
pretty surprised, too, because the exact same ploy worked wonders that time
when I had to get out of a date with the ugly-assed daughter of one of my
uncle’s business partners. Shit, by the time I got to the whiskey-dick part
I don’t even think she wanted to go on the date any more, but these jury duty
mugs had far tougher nuts to crack.
Several subsequent calls to the jury duty line proved equally unsuccessful:
it turns out that swearing like a motherfucker, being a Communist or having a
thick Mexican accent are all honky-dory if you want to be a juror these days.
Go figure.
I went to the drawing board and read the pamphlet that came with
my summons, figuring I had to beat these hard-asses at their own game.
According to the pamphlet, there were only three excuses that would get
you out of jury duty: you don’t speak word uno of English, you’re so damned
old you scare little kids, or you’ve already been on a jury in the last two
years. Now I know what you’re thinking, and believe me I thought of it
first: between that wet pajama contest I judged locally and being in the
audience for that taping of Divorce Court last year, I should be good for
another four years at least. Not so, claim the Jury Nazis.
Since they had to be such assholes about the whole two-year thing, I decided
to play a little hardball and spent the next two weeks answering the phone in
a made-up nonsense language that was like some kind of cross between German
and the ingredients of a Snapple. Once again, those clever motherfuckers got
the drop on your friend Omar by calling at eight in the morning when I was
dead asleep and had momentarily forgotten about the whole “No English” ruse.
So much for project “Nein Sorbate Verboten.”
I briefly considered making some kind of old-man suit out of croissant mix
and talcum powder, but after a particularly nasty talcum mishap I got pissed
off and just called those uptight pigfuckers and told them that it’s my
constitutional whoozumwhatzit to have them kiss my pale white ass, with
whipped topping if you please, and that in the mean time I hoped they all
choked on a turd. It was a bold shift in strategy, I admit, but for a while
I thought it might have worked and that I’d scared them off.
Then one day I received a notice in the mail saying that if I didn’t show up
for jury duty, I’d be held in contempt of court and fined $121. Woah. Now, I
don’t know how they arrived at that figure, I suspect they were peeking into
the old Bricks Checking Account again, but suffice it to say they were now
officially speaking my language. These were some stone-cold bastards.
After a rousing rental of “A Few Good Men”, I decided that jury duty
probably wouldn’t be that bad, and that maybe I’d luck out and get some
kind of case that involved a dude being smothered by fake boobs or
something. Really, any case that involved topless testimony would’ve been
cool by me, I’m flexible.
And to tell you the truth, in the end, I actually had a good time. And man
was I glad
that I’d thought to wear my judge costume from last Halloween, because they
treat those regular jurors like assholes. I got a much better seat and even
got to give some dude the chair for eating his neighbor’s horse in some kind
of funny-assed cultural misunderstanding. The rest of the day probably would
have been a blast too if the real judge hadn’t shown up and had me
re-assigned to some boring damned murder trial. Since when does it take
a whole friggin’ week to figure out that the dude with the chain-saw did
it? I’d planned on two hours tops, with maybe a break for a romantic
interlude in the middle. Some fussy sacks of juror-scat might argue that
it would have been over sooner if I hadn’t been playing the “Do you have
a verdict?/Your honor, we have a dickfour” game with the judge, but that
only added twenty minutes, tops.
And the memories, as they say, will last
a lifetime. I think the taser scars probably will too.
Milestones
the commune's scratch 'n sniff look at last year's office potluck
Opportunities
Pants a Capitalist
Free Virus Baggies
Take a Kitten, Please
the commune book selections
the commune's Bear in Rearview
the commune's Big Book of Duke
Faces of the commune
the commune 100: Leaders and Revolutionaries
the commune 100: Traitors and Noodledicks
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Site Map's Somewhere in the Glovebox |
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