The envelope was sitting on the kitchen table when I returned home from work on a hot July afternoon. I saw the seal of the City of New York in the corner, but I didn’t know what it was. My mother just looked at me and shook her head; clearly she had a better understanding of the ways of the world than I. “You realize what you’re looking at, right?” she said.
I did; it was a summons for jury duty. I was incredibly excited for two reasons. First, I got to miss work, and I was going to be paid a ridiculous $17 an hour. Second, I had spent the better part of my youth watching Law & Order reruns, and now I had my chance to allow Sam Waterson to woo me into putting some sleazy bastard behind bars. I could finally begin to live out some of my many civics nerd fantasies.
As impassioned soliloquies ran through my head, my mother sought to bring me back to earth. She explained the mind-numbing boredom that accompanies jury duty of any duration. Worse, she explained that it is incredibly unlikely that I would ever be chosen for a jury because my father is a lawyer and I have an aunt and an uncle who are former members of the NYPD. No matter how reasoned her thinking, I dismissed everything mother dearest said, and began to prepare my remarks for the other members of the jury.
My adventure began easily enough: I was given a phone number and told to call the Sunday before I was supposed to report. A recording recited the numbers of the people who would be needed on Monday. My number didn’t make the cut, and as I hung up the phone I couldn’t help but feel a little dejected, like I had just been rejected by the girl at the party that no one else wanted.
I tried again the next three nights to no avail. I was probably the only person calling that recording hoping for their number to be called. That Thursday night, my last chance for eligibility, my luck reversed. I would be reporting to Long Island City, in Queens, at 8:30 in the morning to do my civic duty.
Arriving the next morning was somewhat anticlimactic. For one thing, the building was not a grand courthouse like the one in which Law & Order is filmed; it was run-down and inconsequential-looking. After passing through the metal detector I took a seat in a big empty room. Over the next fifteen minutes, the room would slowly fill up with other potential jurors. It played into my fantasies to see such an ethnically diverse group that would likely make up the jury. We would all come together to represent the best of the melting pot of New York City, and then, in all likelihood, we’d buy the world a Coke just for good measure.
To say that my idealism was knocked down a few pegs that morning would be a massive understatement. Once the room filled up, a woman in her mid-fifties with a Brooklyn accent as thick as syrup clued us into what we would be doing. In her monotone, she introduced herself as Ruth, and went through the day’s proceedings as quickly as possible in order to return to the Us Weekly sitting on her desk. Ruth was clearly not a fan of questions, and for some reason did not appear to share my enthusiasm for being there. She told us that jury selection would begin at 11 a.m. and that we were to stay put until then.
When jury selection was pushed back another two hours, Ruth offered to put a movie on for us. It turns out that the only one that the courthouse had was Mickey Blue Eyes, which spends a good deal of its time watching Hugh Grant try to act like a real “eye-talian.” I continued to sit in the room, listening to “Mambo Italiano” for at least the third time, ritually walking over to the coffee machine to refill my cup with a sludge that I imagine greatly resembles black tar heroin.
At three in the afternoon, Ruth reemerged to speak to us, this time with People folded under her arm (she’d clearly had a productive day). It turned out that the case was settled over lunch and we weren’t going to be needed. She gave us all slips of paper that exempted us from jury duty for the next six years. Once I got home, I put that piece of paper on the wall in my room as a reminder. There is no way in hell that I am going back to jury duty before those six years are up.
