from the mixed-up files of the county courthouse

Incident A.

During this time, the suspect ran 22 stop signs.

Incident B.

While conducting a helicopter search for marijuana fields, state police observed a man and woman sitting next to a mobile home. While one can’t know if this sight inspired suspicion, the man’s response, which involved running into a nearby lake, led them to contact on-the-ground law enforcement. Police reports indicate that they found the man treading water in the middle of the lake.

The man had no identification and gave his name as Mr. K­– [not his real name]; he spoke with an apparently phony Irish accent.

The subject in question was avoiding capture after allegedly absconding on bond from a previous incident [see Incident C]. When he claimed that he had not fled his court date, prosecutors argued that:

A man who shaves his mustache, dies [sic] his hair, assumes a false identity, and affects a phony Irish brogue to avoid capture, has a good understanding that he is likely to go to jail if and when he is caught.

Incident C. 

Two men entered the defendant’s property to serve a subpoena for a murder trial [unrelated to all incidents mentioned here]. It is likely that one of the servers had a vendetta against the defendant; he and the defendant were previously acquainted and he had volunteered to serve the order. The defendant came to the door with a gun and a mouthful of cuss words. He attacked the man he knew, although he and the other server eventually managed to leave the property: 

We got into our vehicle and at gunpoint waited for traffic to clear. As soon as it did, we drove away.

Records submitted in defense of the assault. 

March 10, 1998
Now the alleged Defendant is NOT an attorney nor does the alleged Defendant wish to become an attorney, but the alleged Defendant is stuck having to undertake his defense to the charges because of several factors out of his control. One, the alleged Defendant is a public person who is clearly constrovershal, because of his defense of the United States Constitute and this Constitutional Conservatorship has made it very difficult to obtain competent Counsel, who is willing to go to bat for the alleged Defendant due to this notoriety.

April 15, 1998
Did Mr. G– not understand the Kings English or was he here for no good deed. Now lets see, I’ll take Door No. 1, NO GOOD DEED!!! I do not think it took a ROCKET SCIENTIST TO FIGURE THAT LITTLE BRAIN TEASE NOW DID IT.

April 22, 1998
This is because Mr. G–’s brain is pickled in chemical valley, and he just does not think that he is going to get caught. They will believe every little morcel I drivel to them Mr. K– and remember I have friends in high places who would clearly like to roast your butt Mr. K–and I am going to help them!!!!!! Yeah and I’m the tooth fairy Mr. G–!!!!! Do NOT count on ANYTHING UNDER YOUR PILLOW MR. G–.

April 24, 1998
WRONG DOG BREATH!!!! I will jail you says the prosecutor or make you post a big bond.

What is perhaps most astonishing about all of the above cases is that they are not unrelated accounts, but appear in the records of one individual. Who, we might recommend, should henceforth seek only licensed counsel.

my day in court

The biggest problem with looking up records at the courthouse isn’t the ban on camera phones, even if this means you have to dig up fifty cents to store yours in the line of lockers near the entrance. (This also means that the courthouse foyer rings and vibrates regularly.) Nor is the biggest problem the computer system, which is slow and furnishes records in all dialects of gibberish—everything, it seems is written in acronyms. Someone has taped a translation sheet above the computers, but the list is incomplete and I’m not sure what the terms stand for anyway.

It is a bit of a trial to fill out record requests—you must write your name, address, and phone number on every request, which means, presumably, that the people I am looking into could just as easily look into me. Fair is fair, although I don’t know about the rule that limits requests to five per person per hour. Left alone with the files, there is a moment of panic when the papers slip off the folder’s metal prongs, for the clerk has said that under no circumstances should you remove any items from the files. Furthermore, while looking at the files, you may only write with a pencil. Copies cost enough so that I’m sure they rarely have to make them. 

Spelling is worrisome. It is a testament to the severity of the file clerk’s lecture that I restrain myself from taking my pencil and correcting the errors. I think of the person who stacked the papers, of all the stamps and signatures and motions that have been plunked and flourished and filed and are now tucked onto the shelves of the Washtenaw County Courthouse.

But really, the worst part about looking up court records is that there is just too much going on. There are restraining orders and name changes and overdue fines. There are defendants coming in after court appearances, and lawyers clicking around in business shoes. There are, like yesterday, two gentlemen, baseball caps wound to 7 o’clock, entering their own names into the records system.   

“This isn’t no felony,” says the one.

His friend glances at the screen. “It is if you do it more than once,” he replies. He types in another name. “I’m gonna look at your dad’s file,” he tells his friend. Fourteen records—some of them minor traffic infractions, but he’s still astonished.

The son looks over. “He got another one in 1986?” he asks.  A 1987 charge involves possession of a short-barrel shotgun. “I wish I could bring this to my momma,” says the son. “I’d be like, ‘You remember this?’” 

“Oh, she remember it all,” says his friend. He skims his records. Of the twelve incidents on the list, three are for domestic violence.

lead, stick figures, and a bagel or two

The Fundred Dollar Bill Project hopes to clean up lead contamination in New Orleans. At the time I wrote this story, soil-based lead was the city's primary toxic waste concern. Of course, thanks to offshore drilling (and, by default, my commute to work), that is no longer the case.

Want to design your own fundred? The art advocacy project has only collected 10.6% of its goal, and could certainly benefit from a few more bills.

A few fundred ideas:

Stick figures. For those, like Brian Banks, who declared himself to be a "stick figures kind of guy." Banks is an academic advisor at the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design. He's been working there for awhile, so he's not too concerned about the discrepancy.

Portraits. One student at the School of Art and Design drew a fundred in honor of Banks, entitled "The Fundred Man." (Banks orchestrated the Ann Arbor fundred pick up, which included both the university and area schools.) Banks showed me the drawing, confessing that he thought the ears and neck were too big. "That looks like Will Smith!" he said, proving that artistic talent does not necessarily a critic make.

Peace signs. They are still as popular as they were during my tenure in elementary school. Overall, though, the fifth grade class I visited while working on this story was ambivalent about the project's success. One ten-year-old told me he was pretty pessimistic about the whole affair--the government, the environment, collective responsbility. He also told me that "lead is a metal and comes in three different forms."

Coincidentally, it was "wacky hair day" at Thurston Elementary. One girl was wearing bagels at the base of her pigtails. When I saw her at lunchtime, one bagel was missing. "It fell on the floor," she said. "I didn't eat it."

our trespasses

On Sunday I ducked out of a Mennonite hymn sing to go stand in the rain and shoot pistols. There was a man wearing an oilcloth duster and matching Stetson and the air was thick with gun smoke and spent shell casings. The gunslinger fantasy was a bit difficult to sustain at the sight of our safety glasses and industrial-grade earphones, and dissolved completely when considering our targets, which were bowling pins donated from a local bowling alley.

The Tri-County Sportsmen’s League hosts monthly bowling pin shoots, and has been doing so every summer for over ten years. The signs order you to check in at the clubhouse, but the men at the bar wearing camouflage baseball caps tell will just tell you to head to the range—“they’ll get you sorted out down there.” They are shooting rifles on the hillside and the dogs hunched against the fog think nothing of the persistent reports. I’ve unconsciously pulled a red rain jacket from the closet, leftover reflex of a childhood measured by hunting seasons and men wandering through the back woods despite the orange and black rebuke of our neighbors’ No Trespassing signs.

I’ve just finished a book about the Haitian revolution, and guns have been much on the mind, particularly the trick of keeping gunpowder dry in tropic climates, or the logistics of moving firearms over steep mountain trails. When the French Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax passed out muskets to former slaves, he declared, “Here is the liberty which Sonthonax gives you; whoever would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.” The politics behind this 18^th century soundbite are ambiguous—by this point the slaves had already been freed, and while Sonthonax was a noted abolitionist, he expressed as much enthusiasm for killing those colonists who were against slavery as he did for abolishing it.

Thinking of this, of our equally ambiguous right to bear arms, of how one might shoot through the paradox at the heart of “a militia being necessary to the security of a free State” and manage, unlike Raskolnikov, not to mangle something genuinely resembling freedom, I take a .44 and shoot down five bowling pins in 7.62 seconds.

Except Edd, who works at Cabela’s in the firearms department and wishes he could buy the .44 Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with its red dot sight and retails for over $1,000, which essentially makes it the Cadillac of pistols, although you can purchase a custom engraved replica of Smith & Wesson’s 1917 Cenntential for $7,500—Edd tells me to count the pins and shoot them in a circle because that way I won’t think so much, and this does work, at least as far as time is concerned: the next set goes down in 6.34 seconds and by then I’m pretty much hooked.

They give me a .44 special and a 460 Smith & Wesson revolver and then a tiny .22 which feels, in comparison, as light and harmless as a songbird. For never having handled a handgun, it is amazing how much I know after 27 years of murder scenes, military invasions, and bank robberies. There is that moment, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, where you grip the metal rail, listen to the stones under your feet, and contemplate tossing your body down into that stretch of vertical space. Shooting pistols, the line between imagination and homicide is horizontal; I aim for the pins, albeit poorly, never doubting that any member of the league would hesitate to shoot me down should I suddenly decide to turn towards them and pull the trigger.

roaring twenties

Today is B's eighty-first birthday. "How much makeup should an 81-year-old woman wear?" she asks me as she examines her face in the mirror. She is delighted when her son calls her to sing happy birthday and all the members of her Tuesday social group join in too. She says she wonders how many more birthdays she will celebrate.

I've become so accustomed to reciting her birthday to pharmacists and doctors and customer service agents that I hand the grocery clerk a six-pack and don't understand his confusion when I tell him my birth date is April 27, 1929.

articles of free speech

What happens when tongues and feet vie for space in the oral cavity:

in a day

The Roman Empire has not fallen: It merely moved to west Houston. Yes, took the brick walks and the arched piazzas and the rococo gateways and landed with a weighty sigh right off the beltway (the outer beltway, that is). The pansies and wide, sturdy grass are American additions, planted perfectly among freshly spread bark dust, which coats the adjacent air with the heavy, medicinal smell of treated wood. Rome, now, is luxury condominiums and tasteless jewelry stores and thickly sauced entrees. There are fountains—birds and angels and abstract figures, although there are few, if any coins glistening beneath the water. Marquis. Miramar. Empire Lofts. Plantation. These are places people call home. “Sweet home Plantation. Where the skies are so blue,” and, one suspects, the eyes are too.

Few zoning laws in the fourth largest city in the United States will get you this: high-rise apartment towers casting shadows on the arches of infinity billion served, and the woman on the sidewalk with two overweight Chihuahuas. Parking lots—many parking lots, empty but for a figure cutting across their right angles, running through sound waves issuing forth from fake rocks. Roads are unreliable, ending at fences or passing by guarded kiosks. In the service lot behind Aurturo’s restuarant, a man is watering a bed of basil. “You like?” “Si!”

The only sidewalk leading to the hotel ends at a locked door; the front entrance is tucked up against the highway exit ramp, and thus fleet footed folk must hedge the corner carefully to avoid the valets on their way to the garage. The Texas Ski Council SkiBidFest is in full swing, which has something to do with skiing and Texans who love it, and means women in sparkly shirts and suntanned men and all of them clutching glasses of wine and talking about the snow in Park City.

We, meanwhile, are in professional dress and tap tap tap our heels to meeting rooms with names like Topaz and Saphhire and Glass Palace and click click click our way through the day on a wave of endless PowerPoint presentations. Miracles exist: the east wall of Topaz is a sheet of windows. The blinds are only partially drawn, and through them is a highway, and all around shines natural Texas light.

half a grand idea

Shortly after the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. government announced that Haitians living illegally in the United States could apply for temporary protected status, which grants permission to work legally in the United States.

It was a reassuring move on two counts: it showed that the Obama administration recognized the informal supply lines that run through Western Union service stations—it is estimated that 1 to 2 million Haitians live outside their country (half a million of who live in the U.S.) and send $1.9 billion to family and friends back home annually. This was the second reassurance: temporary protected status could provide better job security and thus a steadier stream of funds to those in Haiti.

But the money orders and the checks are written in slim, double-or-triple digit amounts—according to the Inter-American Development Bank, the annual monthly remittance is $150. It is a number nothing short of miraculous when considering the cost of rent and food in, say, New York City versus the wages paid for the type of work that most legal employees avoid.

And thus it appears that government foresight is a bit myopic. It costs nearly $500 to apply for temporary protection status. Waivers are granted, although eligibility is based on meeting criteria such as providing “a list of all assets owned, possessed, or controlled,” “your monthly essential expenditures for each of the three months prior to the filing,” and “your monthly gross income from all sources for each of the three months prior to filing.” Presenting such information would be a hassle for any individual, let alone those who likely live much of their life on U.S. soil explicitly off the books and under the table.

According to the New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security reported that thus far, less than 35,000 of the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Haitians living illegally in the U.S. have applied for protected status. Aids groups are petitioning the government to it easier to apply for a waiver.

For those who qualify, one wonders what happens when the 18-month protection period ends. Often, aliens apply for renewals, and this seems to be the proposed plan for eligible Haitians. But with the tumultuous history that marks U.S.-Haitian relations, one can understand why many Haitians living illegally in the United States might feel there are better ways to spend $500.

man with the orderly mind

Despite the downward screech that is the Michigan housing market, B’s house in the Detroit suburbs closes tomorrow. It’s located off what must have once been a farm road; there’s a Steinway showroom a mile away and the predictable replication of chain restaurants and grocery stores. To get into the housing development, you carry a device, much like a garage door opener; when you press the button the gate zips into the air at such a speed that makes it a tempting catapult launch. Lacking such a gadget, you speak to the man sitting in the sentry-house. “6400 P–,” I say, but this is not enough. “Mrs. H–. The house is selling tomorrow.”

“Oh yes,” he replies. “Mrs. H–.” The gate flies up.

B and her husband lived in the condo association for over twenty years; they kept up with the couples on their semi-circle, but now B runs through the ailments and the deaths. Alzheimer’s. Stroke. Deceased. And now B, a year after her husband’s death, has officially moved away. The house has that flat, forlorn look—carpet exposed for the first time in years, walls bare but for hooks and smudges.

A man comes to haul away the residual items and refuses my repeated offer to help, even after a large metal desk crashes off his dolly, so I slip into the house to give him some privacy. (One would think that with such a peculiar name as “Kosher Garbage,” employees might have a sense of humor, but he didn’t appear in the best of spirits, even after I reassured him that I really was kidding about the “Oh, I forgot—there’s a couch” comment, which I had saved up for the moment he began pulling tie-downs over the overflowing bed of his pickup truck.)

The garbage cans are stuffed with hangers and headless broomsticks and rusting screws harvested from the toolbox. A frequent mover of homes, I am loathe to leave the garbage and cannot believe my luck when I spot the garbage truck lurching its way through the neighborhood. “You saved the day!” I exclaim, fearful that the garbage man will be annoyed with two stuffed cans and my poorly parked car. But this is indeed a day for miracles. The M– Village garbage man, who must not be unaccustomed to medical rubbish and the non-bodily remains of the deceased, looks at me, upends one of the cans into truck and replies, “You know, with the way people are leaving this earth, I’m just grateful for every day I get.”

           What do you think of us in fuzzy endeavor, you whose directions are

            sterling, whose lunge is straight?

awry

I have thought more than once this week of the times I quoted Burns to my students, wondering if the care I spent explaining how language could evolve from gang aft agley to oft go awry made me neglect the underlying lesson. 

And thus, after an afternoon session on hold with Delta (Northwest has now merged with Delta…), and an evening with Spirit (You can book one of the big front seats. Did you know that Spirit offers Spirit snacks and drinks? Spirit offers snacks and drinks!), I am trying to remember the lessons easily forgotten. How my indignation, righteous as it may be, is oxygenated by life in a place where we expect airlines to contact us in a timely fashion regarding canceled flights. A place where $500 plane tickets can be purchased with little forethought, and are guaranteed some degree of recovery. A place where letters can be written, questions can be asked, and it is not unreasonable to expect a reply.

Certainly, this is not black and white. I am still waiting for an answer as to why it might take a week to inform a customer of a canceled flight; as well as why one airline may fly, but not another; which also spurs the question: In the temporary absence of competitors, is it merely good capitalism for an airline to increase its fares, or might that carry a hint of crime about the starched white collar?

One needn’t travel outside of the United States to learn that what often gives money its strength is the convenience it can buy. Yes, dear choir, I hear your robes rustling, and so here is the lesson of gang aft agley: My record for trips to Haiti is now 1 in 3. The frustration of such a record pales, however, with details drawn during the 10 days I have managed to spend there. The assassination attempt, suspiciously political, that remains unsolved after 10 years. The long journey to the capital, merely to obtain a drivers license. The hours spent studying for a high school exam written in French and not one’s childhood tongue. The impossibility of paying for the apprenticeship required to become a lawyer.

Did you know that Spirit Airlines sells snacks and drinks?