Last Day Grand Jury

At long last, my month in this purgatory is over! I'm looking forward to trying to get back to my summer schedule, just in time for my sojourn in Dakota Norte to begin sometime next week. I haven't booked my flight yet, but once I do this I will be oh-so-happy to get out of Mussolini-ville for a glorious, stress-reduced week.

Now that I'm in my last day of this difficult month, I'm looking back over the slow slide into isolation and impotent rage that I allowed into my life. It's tough to expose myself to that consistently angry and repressed energy embodied in our police and legal systems. I think I wrote about the two angriest cops whose energies I've been witness to--both worked for financial institutions. The other jurors I have had the most problems with also work for financial institutions, interestingly enough. (They wouldn't know that I had problems with them--is that to my credit or detriment? Sometimes I can't tell when I'm working good Al-Anon or just being codependently wimpy.)

Others remind me that all of these other people are me--the ADAs with their varying degrees of competence, repression and despair, the uptight cops, the mostly unseen accuseds, the witnesses, the jurors and the wardens. The employees of the court. In a way I've been both participant in and audience member for, a parade of characters each of whom is me. I am Richard the ADA who populates his prattle with "ers" and "ums", I am the enraged, red-faced Irish cop who answers all of his questions concisely and with venom, I am the easygoing, baby-faced warden who's engaged to marry one of the court reporters, I am the Texas-born, Virginia-raised white-collar criminal--I mean banker who serves on the jury and votes to indict on every single case, I am the gay psychotherapist serving as secretary for the proceedings who secretly wishes he was a white-collar criminal and so forth.

How accurate all this is really has no bearing--it's all about my perceptions and judgments, and that is what I've been having to confront with the most unease and discouragement: my ease with making judgments. "The more one judges, the less one loves" reads a t-shirt that I used to wear when it was thinkable for me to wear size 3X. I sort of wish I had the courage to put that t-shirt on and wear it to the grand jury room, but I never dared to be so spiritual so brazenly in all this time. (And would it really have been spiritual to try to show people up in such a way? Still, it might have been interesting to get someone to film the reactions of others to reading my t-shirt in such an environment. Talk about drama!)

So I'll probably populate some of this blog now with some of these pithy observations about the different versions of myself, as per a suggestion made by a good friend. Here's the first:

"Hi, I'm Richard Chitra Bombay, and I'm an assistant district attorney for the county of New York. I'm here to present several charges against Richard African-American Defendant. On the charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree, New York Penal Code ___.__ subsection __ under the theory that the defendant possessed a narcotic with the intent to sell, and I'm charging you with the count of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fifth degree Penal Code ___.__ subsection __ under the theory that the defendant possessed more than 1/8 of an ounce of a narcotic, and also criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree under the theory that Richard African-American Defendant possessed a controlled substance, and I'm also charging you with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree under the theory that the defendant possessed a firearm that has been defaced. I will have two witnesses before you today, and now I'll bring in the first witness, Richard White-Plainclothes-One."

My vision of Richard Chitra's subtext: "I'm a great ADA. I don't exactly love this job, but I'm going places all right. It doesn't hurt that I'm a cute person of color in a society that is dominated by all notions of color. Even New York City pays attention to color, and I can see as an Indian woman that I have a leg up on most of the other minorities here. It is interesting to note however, that the racial element is losing force. It all comes down to how we represent ourselves. I may some day see some Punjabi boy gangbanger on the other side of the court, and I'm sure I'll wonder how he got that way, how the parents were involved, etc. But there's a good reason that jobs from here are being shipped to Bangalore and Lahore. It's because of our work ethic. I really don't like agreeing with Dinesh D'Souza--"Distort DaNewza" some Dartmouth friends said about him--but my observation does bear him out a little. Though it's not as much racial as it is about how these near-destitute people can't back up and see the whole picture. I don't know if they're incapable or if they just don't have the tools or if they're just plain lazy--maybe a combination of all three. I talk with Richard LaQueisha J.D. Washington, Esq. and Richard Marianne Jean-Veniste about the black defendants and the victims too, and they have an even more jaundiced viewpoint. I don't really know what to think, but hey, I've got a job and pretty good security with it. I don't doubt I'd have a harder time if I lived in Selma, Alabama or Tucson even. But even so, if all these drug cases keep coming in, I'll be set for quite a while. That feels good."

Note: I do have a specific person in mind with this characterization, though I don't think she represented any cases like the one I have pieced together. The case itself is a compilation of several different kinds of cases I have heard. The subtext section is just my musing about "Richard-Chitra" based on my own internal temperature and texture as it responds to the information she presented to the "Richard Foreman." (Hilarious! There Really is a Playwright with that name--he won a Macarthur Fellowship even, and runs the St. Mark's Ontologic-Hysterical Theater on St. Mark's Place in the East Village!) How "true" is it? I don't know. I'm putting out my perceptions just to say "Given the information of what I've seen of this person, and she's one of the four or five I've seen on a couple of different cases--this is what I perceive may be going on behind the lenses of her eyes, in her soul. Again, not to judge, just to bring my perceptions out and say this is what I see and nothing else but."

Remember. Even though a real person inspired this, "Richard Chitra" is another me. As I am another you.