It was reckless endangerment of the spirit, I knew that: going back again. I have a voyeur’s mean instinct: any lit window will inveigle my eye. I can’t number the eaves I’ve dropped down from. And my pulse did an Unser-fast shift when I saw it: Queens Criminal Court. In my after-adolescence, through at least half of one year, I would loiter there: a six-month sentence for curiosity, aggravated, first degree. Court calendars were my playbill: book, film, nothing could methadone me off it. I was a groupie for felons: I indulged in, related to, the stink of their desolate fear: maybe I was laundering Protestant guilt at a safe remove. There is no more awful, aweful amusement: medley in court of nervous boredom and the sudden shock that an owlstruck rabbit must feel on his last night out.
Power on: a judge has come in: as if he carried paten and chalice, we stand. “Put all reading material away. End all conversations.” A court officer will prohibit my notebook. Tedium must be glassy of surface: undistracted: a ball- bearing roll. By 10:30, 15 or 16 items have been put off: for hours, days, months, -ever. Complainant not present; lawyer not present; defendant not present: they’d have better luck getting a quorum of passenger pigeons together. Police Officer X will wait from 9:30 to 3:30 and then give evidence, so help me God, in the grim matter of a misused bus pass. But more to come: after we hear this case, this little etui, Lawyer Y will request and achieve a jury trial —two months hence. My pocket, your pocket, Fagin-picked: but nobody is under indictment for that.
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