What We Are (31 page)

He's talking about procedural matters with his clerk, and I tune out by observing the DA. A rail of a man, so thin in the neck that the Adam's apple looks extraterrestrial. Sandy-blond hair, a Doolittle mustache, he's attaching cords into several speakers like a kid plugging away at a puzzle. He's got a laminated photograph of a brotha with a 'fro from what looks like the 1960s, Black Pantheresque, and underneath it the words,
Shout It, Brother
. I can't figure out the political connection until he says in the voice of a tracheotomy patient, “Testing one, two. Testing. Can you hear me, Your Honor?”

“As usual, I cannot, Mr. Weil. You're indecipherable.”

“Okay,” the DA says, immediately fiddling with the volume on his amps. I get it: he's got the Black Panther in lamination to encourage squeaking out his loudest voice through the trial. That's funny. Has nothing to do with the politics. The DA won't look at me. That's funny too. I want to reach out and say, Don't worry about the problem with your weapon. I'm sure there are a few cops out on the streets terrified of their guns.

About sixty potential jurors are now entering the courtroom, appraising me as if it were court-ordered. Looking back at them once for good measure, they hardly look just like me, not that it matters. I don't know who would, anyway, not that that matters either. Mr. Weil makes a point to smile at as many as he can.

In my scan for kindred faces, I spot a young woman with wide shoulders and frizzy hair pulled back into a parishioner's bun. No doubt a Poly at minimum, probably Samoan. She'll recognize my Samoan last name for sure, likely know someone related to me or related to my father, back in the old country. Every Samoan alive is related to every other Samoan, alive and dead both. But this is where the guessing game starts. Any variety of behavioral possibilities exists with even the tiniest culture in the world, less than 500,000 members.

Does she have the crab-in-the-bucket mentality, pulling down any fellow crustacean trying to crawl out and see the rest of the world? Or is she of the pious ilk whereby a troublesome cat like me brings shame to the clan's name? A guilty verdict would publicly disassociate her from my lawlessness, slicing the bloodline between us.

I take a quick peek back at her. She's in the third row, ignoring not only me but the people around her. I fear the way she sits, chest out, chin out, inflated with dignity. I can see that she'll destroy more than my life: she'll wreck the metaphor in my head. Jump with all her weight on my little imaginary bridge between opposing worlds, send me right up the river.

Today my peers are techies of every variety and culture, Southeast Asians, Indians, Pakistanis, one memorable no-doubt-American-born kid with a Mohawk sprouting not from the forehead to the upper neck but from ear to ear, a new twist on an old upstate New York tradition of a near-dead tribe. Somehow this unorthodoxy strikes me as being not creative but boring. My peers are old folks of Portuguese, Italian, Polish descent who've brought tablets and pens for posterity. A brotha who looks like a teacher maybe and who nods at me, the only one. There's a man with a shaved head and a supercilious look on his face that I want to slap off at this, my trial for assault and battery. All kinds of dutiful citizens with closets full of bones, no doubt, their two-week judicial clout indisputable in time, in history, a true portrayal of man, of me, American drifter who never sticks around long enough even to be an apostate, the dropout who's still here talking—at least thinking—a big game.

This jury is a reminder, the official stamp, of my breakup with my fellow Americans. Today it's a half-breed skeptic before a dozen assorted donuts who couldn't say a word about me that matters. Couldn't speak to why I love Johann Sebastian Bach and Tupac Shakur at the same time, polar opposites in bio and attitude, brothers in passion and pain, why I see Democrats and Republicans not on an issue line but a timeline, the former being futurists, the latter nostalgists, both equally beautiful and madly in love with our story, both equally seduced by error, inflexibility, arrogance, why I love and detest this country both, why I want to live the fullest life, whatever that means, and yet somewhere in the marrow how I long for life's validator, the qualifier, the end. What could they say about me related to this joke of an event?

I'm twiddling my thumbs at the concept at hand, drumming my fingers at the core of the American way. Twelve peers just like you. Anonymous to be judicious. And things are getting better, they say. No longer Tom Robinson before a dozen white men.

I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.

What I do know is that money sings in this system. The poor get robbed in court on a regular basis. So the state's got the Robin Hood story in reverse:
steal again from which side to give to which side?
If you've got the cash, you can pay for a bigger lawbroker. If you don't, you can seize on your constitutional rights and have the state hire you a public pretender. No one can dispute that. When's the last time a fat cat accepted this free gift from the state? If it were worth it, a capitalist would hit it up for sure.

The judge says to the potential jurors, “Thank you for coming today, ladies and gentlemen. We shall begin with an overview of the day's schedule, and then I shall speak to some of the procedures. After that, the court will call you up to answer the questions put to you by both attorneys. Please hold your questions until the end of the session. The likelihood of my covering your particular problem is very high.”

I tune out and look back over my shoulder and everyone, it seems, is paying close attention, all except my own attorney—who isn't here of course, whoever he or she may be at the moment. During the arraignment and then again at pretrial, I had three different attorneys assigned by the county, each one rushing into court at the last moment, to the irritation of the judge and the amusement of their client, me. Their representation took the form of some variation on three or four sentences transitioning their client—me, Paul Tusifale—to the next bureaucratic session. This system is as big as the Himalayas and as perilous. People are lost in it, people die in it all the time. You don't find their bodies until a few seasons have passed. I, Paul Tusifale (SSN 660-04-9116, case #D459293), never bothered to say a word to any of my attorneys, a gift each had taken without gratitude, as if I were not only inarticulate but comatose as well and thus unable to delve with any intelligible bearings into the complicated court proceeding I'd just witnessed, all three minutes of the preliminary stage
that they, untested legal rooks or tested legal hacks, had been assigned by their bosses not to screw up. It's not only elementary but, when a life is on the line, inflammatory.

I make a decision: it's strong, pure, and maybe even right: I will forego any further complimentary samplers from the state. If I must, I'll represent myself.

I look up at the judge, confident now that my place here is clear, the lines of my life at last drawn, when he stops in mid-speech, looks directly at me, shakes his head, then looks behind me. For a second I'm miffed, until I feel a palm massage my shoulder and the judge says, “Nice to see that you are on time as usual, counselor.”

“Dong-hoo Choi, Your Honor”—here he claps my shoulder, then begins rubbing it possessively with the kind of attention my previous attorneys lacked—“representing Paul Tusifale.”

The judge does not nod. He, like me, wants to know what the catch is. The DA seems intimidated, fiddling again with his sound system.

“My most humble apologies for my tardiness, Your Honor. I assure you it will not happen again.”

“I am sure it will not, Mr. Choi. Shall we return to the court's instructions?”

“By all means, Your Honor.” My attorney sits and pats me on the knee.

I whisper, “Stop touching me, mutherfucker.”

He pulls out a legal tablet from his briefcase, writes:
Write it
.

I take the pen he offers, write:
Stop touching me, mutherfucker
. He attempts to take the pen from me, but I push his hand away, write:
What makes you think I'm going to pay your outlandish corporate fees, you fucking jackal? You ain't even getting a bottle of kimchi from me
.

He takes the pen and taps twice on the desk, to hammer home whatever he's about to write:
This is pro bono
.

I write:
What's the quid pro quo on your pro boner service
?

You either flunked or forgot your Latin. I'm free. Your lucky day
.

I look back at the potential jurors glaring at me, as the judge recites instructions, write:
That has yet to be proved, counselor
.

Just treat it like another day at St. Cajetan
.

Look at the nuns-in-residence
?

He smiles.
Exactly
.

I zero in on the stenographer's desk. Upon it, a tribute to all things leather. A name plaque—Ms. Dendela Dido—wrapped in leather, a penholder encased in leather, the phone handle gripped with leather, the base of her super typewriter enveloped in leather, a photograph of the stenographer on the back of a hog framed in leather. In theme, she's leathered down from ankle to chin, her arms halfway around the global gut of the bad boy in the bucket seat, also leather, before her. He's got no exposed skin except the tip of his nose, everything covered in leather or hair. I find none of this odd or even noteworthy this late into the game, until I realize that as she's slamming away on her encrypted keyboard, recording every word said in this legal hovel, she's winking at me and blowing kisses my way. I shake my head, look down, look back up again.

The signals are fired off so rapidly that I give her the benefit of the doubt: she has a nervous tick—yes, two ticks—made manifest by the unconscious trials of labor; they're habitual, tied to performance like the trigger and the hammer of a pistol.

One of the jury members is explaining with unguarded passion that he has no prejudice in his heart, absolutely none, not even against his Pakistani neighbor who never says hello back, who beats his kids and makes his wife cover her face with a scarf, they have the freedom, he says, to be themselves in this country and that's what's great, he says, and also, he adds, what sucks about it at the same time. As I look for some potential jurors of Pakistani blood, hoping for some volatile excitement, I finally meet Ms. Dendela Dido's two ticks head on.

She adds a third signal to the mix: her tongue delicately splitting the lips, in and out, in and out, et cetera, et cetera. She's so smart,
she's using me as cover, typing away and pretending that I'm the neutral spot in the distance upon whom—or, rather, upon
which
—she must focus to keep up with the dialogue.

The judge is falling asleep but nobly fighting it, Mr. Weil is revising his notes and stroking a lucky rabbit's foot dangling from the control panel of his sound system, my attorney is asking the prejudice-free juror if he agrees with the Don Imus firing, the potential jurors are tuning out, tired, annoyed, everyone except this breath of fleshy air, the leather princess. Everyone's indifferent, awaiting the entertainment or the end of it all.

I admire her initiative, wink back, curl up my lip and growl a little. She frowns ever so slightly. She's the kind of girl who takes pleasure in pain. My attorney sits, says, “Sure, we'll take him, Your Honor, why not?” and writes,
Archie Bunker over there is the last of his kind, ain't he?

I don't write anything back. Obviously I haven't been paying attention. I tap on the pen and try to focus on the next potential juror, a techie in an Intel polo shirt and specs thick as telescopic glass. Still, I've got my mind on leather and all its usages.

Putting the mic to his thin lips, Mr. Weil asks the techie what he thinks about the new law across California prohibiting spanking, a question that makes the stenographer shift in her seat, frown, and look back at the judge.

The techie answers, “What no-spanking law?”

That earns giggles.

Judge Nguyen throws in some innocent humor. “I am sure you are glad that you came to court today then, yes, Mr. Thommavongsa?”

“Yes, sir!”

The stenographer is still puzzled. I want to walk over to her with the best debonair air I can summon, lean over the desk, and whisper in her ear, It's the kiddies, my little mistress. The kiddies can't
get the paddle, baby girl. But you, a consenting adult who's been very, very bad—

My attorney takes the pen from me and writes:
Forget about it
.

I write back:
Forget what?

She does that shit with every violent felon who sits in your seat. She's debunked half the county's tough guys that come through here in chains
.

Who has?
I write, testing, hoping, yet knowing.

I'm telling you: she has priors
.

Who
?

Ms. Dendela Dido
.

All that means is she never gave you a shot. So what's she got against attorneys
?

He writes:
What've you got against attorneys?

Finally, some truth in this place. How big is your database? Got a list as big as the atom bomb. I'll destroy your world a hundred times over, counselor
.

He tries to change the topic.
Don't you have any poems for me, Shakespeare
?

I put the pen to the paper and he seizes it, one admonitory shake of the head. A breech of courtroom etiquette? I look up at the judge and he doesn't have a clue about our dialogue, or so it appears. Who-dung writes:
I want a
real
poem
.

I take back the pen hastily, write:

the problem:

the black of birth

and white of death

belie a life of gray

Yeah
, Who-dung writes,
you're the problem
.