Court

Yesterday was a marathon that started with a 5am sting when I tried to shoe away a flying insect in the dark, not expecting there to be a bee in my bedroom. We had a court date for the UN protest where once again some of us had simply not been entered into the computer, raising the question of whether the NYPD is even more spectacularly incompetent than they used to be or whether there's a secret solidarity happening. I was not in the syatem last time, but this time I was, so Ben and I settled on a bench halfway back, chatting while we waited for the judge to take the bench. The impression that the NYPD are incompetent was reinforced as case after case was called, and almost all of them were dismissed for "facial insuffiency" - the failure of the police to fill out the paperwork correctly. Our big group took up half the seating and we were conspicuously older and whiter than the other defendants, and when our lawyer, Ron Kuby, also fairly old and white, addressed our group, the other people were not sure whether he was addressing them as well. I saw some bemused smiles at Ron's quirkiness, and some people who were clearly wondering what we did. When they began calling us to stand up one by one, reading out the disorderly conduct charge, I could feel the curiosity in the room increase. I thought about the time a bunch of us were at 100 Centre St for court, and someone asked Elizabeth Meixell, who was the picture of an elegant older woman, what we had done. She didn't miss a beat "Public Urination," she replied, leaving me desperately trying not to laugh so hard that I got kicked out of the courtroom. In the end, we wound up with 30 days of staying out of trouble,a good deal for those of us who remember when it used to be 6 months or a year, but disappointing for those who were hoping for 15 days or an outright dismissal. Later, Ron Kuby wrote that "our judge was not the greatest ever seen in Anglo-American jurisprudence." By 11am, we were all done, and as I made my way to Broadway to do some banking for a client, I thought about my years working for CASES at 346 Broadway, which was then a court building and is now luxury apartments. I thought about the many young people who were part of my peer programs and groups at CASES, the ones who successfully completed the program and the ones who got sent back to prison. I loved the work there, teaching the young people how to teach other young people about HIV, and STDs, my teen fathers' group, and the women's group which subversively met at a nearby McDonald's so that even the girls who had been kicked out of the program could still come if they were not locked up. It wasn't easy work, I will never forget the very quiet young man who waited until we were out of the building, on the subway on our way to do a workshop at a youth addiction center, to tell me that he thought he might have killed someone. There had been a fight and in the blur of the violence all he knew was that he had left somebody motionless on the ground, no idea if they survived or not. Then there was the really bright 16 year old who had used his natural leadership skills to run a mini drug empire until he got caught, who got rearrested, but swore that he was innocent. A guilty plea or a conviction on a new charge would have violated the agreement that sent him to CASES and brought back his old charge, which would have sent him to prison. I recruited a friend, a veteran lesbian defense attorney to represent him and knowing its hard to fight a chage while locked up, I took a risk and paid his bail. He won the case and years later I ran into him in downtown Brooklyn, delivering packages in his brown UPS uniform. As the years went by, the young people who I saw so making so much progress but wound up being sent back for things like testing positive for marijuana started to weigh on me. I was crying a lot, taking breaks to sit in the staircase nobody used and sob. Then weird thoughts started to creep in, looking out my 6th fl window. I thought, if I climb on the filing cabinet, and then onto the windowsill, then open the window...or maybe the window in the stairwell would be better, though it would be a little more climbing. But outside the window was a construction site, the pavement torn up exposing the soft earth below, and I didn't know if six floors would be enough. Finally one day, my boss was sitting in my client chair, and I just said, "Joe, I can't stay," and I packed up my things and headed off to Denver, where my best friend, who as in medical school there, had commanded me to come stay with her.