Mine involved stalking–a common enough crime in America, these days, but this was an only-in-New-York variety. The defense attorney, an enormous woman of attack-dog disposition, made that abundantly clear. “My client is a lesbian and an opera singer,” she barked. “Does anyone here have a problem with this lifestyle?” Classic juror specimens–retired schoolteachers, born-again Christian bus drivers–were quickly winnowed from the pool of 40 or so prospects. “Have you ever been witness to a crime?” the judge asked a young Hispanic city-services worker. The reply: “You mean the kind you get caught for?” He’s in. So is a corporate lawyer, who makes a speech against the death penalty, as well as an Upper West Side television producer, a gay DJ with earrings and an editor of a science magazine–the only other female, our “foreperson.” I am Juror No. 6. Not quite 12 angry men, just six put-upon middle-class professionals. A jury of your peers, like it’s supposed to be.
The case is an almost existential murk of confused identity. Defense claims that the two women were lesbian lovers. The plaintiff insists they were just “close friends.” Whatever, their relationship evidently ended in a one-sided fashion, resulting in a court order barring any contact. It is our duty to determine whether the defendant violated this order, wading through precisely 101 ominous-sounding charges from “aggravated harassment” to “assault with intent to harm.”
Our next four days were a blur of mind-numbing testimony, accusations piled upon counteraccusations. On the Richter scale of criminality, the faintest tremor was the alleged “filing of false police reports” against the plaintiff’s gay male “best friend.” (“He told me that soon I will be singing in the cemetery!”) The loudest consisted of 41 hang-up calls received by the plaintiff over the period of three days. Witnesses were quizzed about their sexual orientation. The plaintiff batted her eyes so furiously she had to be asked to compose herself. The defendant smoldered silently and occasionally shed a histrionic tear. Pavarotti was evoked to bolster her credibility, and we learned of fine distinctions between different types of mezzo-sopranos. The judge appeared to not have been awake at all times. The DJ slept throughout.
The testimonial nadir came when the defense attorney entered into evidence four Valentine’s Day cards. The plaintiff was made to read out loud every word of her embarrassingly purple prose. “You are the mirror of my soul,” “I dream of gardenias and magnolias.” Whereupon the defense attorney demanded: “Isn’t it a fact that references to flowers, especially magnolias, are commonly used in the lesbian community as a metaphor for the female sexual organ?” The plaintiff claimed she knew of no such metaphors, was not a lesbian and wrote notes like this practically every day to all her dear friends, male and female alike. The entire courtroom groaned. The D.A. chortled into his papers. The DJ woke up. The cards, hand-embellished with butterflies, were passed around to the jury.
Obviously, this case should never have seen the light of day, let alone mushroomed into a full-blown criminal proceeding that consumed five days. I said as much as we retired to our deliberations. My fellow jurors thanked me for expressing the common sentiment, and we settled down to do our duty.
A jury of your peers is supposed to reflect the values of the community, as well as their own common sense and life experience. In the absence of any hard evidence, this is what we did. We agreed that everyone’s credibility was shot–and that opera singing is apparently no way to make a living in New York City. Our young Hispanic shook his head at every charge and proclaimed, “Insufficient evidence.” The lawyer displayed a modicum of sympathy for the plaintiff and questioned her motive in pressing unfounded charges against the defendant. He was promptly educated in the concept of “nasty divorce” by his more world-weary colleagues. The television producer requested that we order in lunch from Nobu. But the fanciest Japanese eatery in Manhattan seemed to ring no bells with the court officer.
After four hours we acquitted the defendant on all of the charges but one. She was guilty of shouting “Lesbian!” at the plaintiff. Why? Well, this is the only event to which there was a credible witness, even if he was a real-estate agent. Besides, screaming on the street seemed to us like the sort of thing a spurned lover would do. At least in New York.
title: “Letter From America” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Walter Santiago”
Buried in the heaps of rubble is the story of that day–September 11. There are watches that still tick, telling the time. Others do not, like one stopped eerily at 10:08, the moment its wearer’s life ended. There are passports, driver’s licenses, bracelets, rings, wallets, guns and the broken bronze torso of a man, with no head or feet. It’s a Rodin sculpture once on display at Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that lost hundreds of employees in the tragedy. It lies now on its side, not far from a pile of airplane parts, muddied and weirdly vulnerable, unnervingly human. The detritus of all these lives is overwhelming. Fighting disbelief, I take a deep breath.
It is cold and raining as I begin my tour of the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, the place that’s now home to more of the World Trade Center’s remains than lower Manhattan. Wreckage from Ground Zero is excavated and brought here to be sorted through and eventually buried. I was one of thousands of people who watched the buildings collapse from just a few blocks away. Now, exactly four months later, here I am watching huge cranes feed their remnants into giant red boxes, called shakers, which separate small pieces from larger chunks. The loud rumble of demolition machinery permeates the air. Front-end loaders scoop pieces from the shakers and dump them into a giant sifting machine. Conveyor belts carry the fragments past law-enforcement agents, who are bending over, hunting for human artifacts. I stand beside them, hoping to pick out a body part, perhaps, or something that might give someone, anyone, a sign of a lost father or wife, lover or son or daughter. But everything that passes by is that same ash gray color, that same chunky dust. However intently I stare, I cannot tell whether I am looking at a rock or a piece of a building or a door hinge or a human bone.
My guide to this netherworld is Richard Marx, an FBI agent from Philadelphia who has been at Fresh Kills almost every day since Sept. 12, building this city of workers and machines to sort the 650 tons of debris that arrive daily by barge, more than a million tons so far. His walnut-colored eyes are glassed with the by-now-familiar look of a person in shock. I can tell instantly that he has seen things at Fresh Kills no person should have to see. We drive through the mazelike streets of the landfill. Gigantic Payhaulers, eight wheels apiece, pass us bearing loads removed from the day’s first barge. They turn left at the top of a hill and when I get there I see why. It is a city of the dead, ringed with huge tent-like structures where workers are outfitted with protective suits and respirators. There’s a mess hall, toilets and a dozen or so trailers used by federal agencies and the New York Police Department, some of them to decontaminate evidence found at the site.
We get out of the truck. Heaps of mangled metal rise 15 feet in the air. Long rods are torqued into tiny shapes; thick steel beams lie around with their ends frayed into thin, wiry strips. Stacked nearby are these giant metal wheels–engines from the elevators inside the WTC, says Marx. I find someone’s shoe, with the sole ripped off, completely coated in gray.
Not all the debris can fit on the conveyor belts. In a muddy field beyond the sifting machines, cars crushed like tin cans are stacked up four or five high, too many to count, but according to the FBI there’s more than twelve hundred. A row of burned, mangled fire trucks stretches at least the length of a city block. At the end of the row lies a crushed car. Its roof has been stripped away. The back seats are gone. Hunks of building sit on what remains of the two front seats. The car radio, flattened to the size of a floppy disk, lies amid shards of broken glass. I can tell the car once was white, with streaks of yellow and blue. I trace a blue stripe along its crumpled body to where I spot the word police.
We drive to the top of the biggest mountain of debris, 40 feet high. Looking down I see all the cranes at work in an area nicknamed 42d Street, after one of Manhattan’s busiest thoroughfares. This, too, was once nothing but an empty field. Now it’s an efficient factory that produces tiny mounds of death. The rain finally relents. Clouds shift and I glimpse the city in the distance, where the towers used to mark the skyline. I glance down at my feet and notice a red speck the size of a stamp. Marx pulls on it and slowly more red comes out of the ground, until he holds an entire flannel shirt. It has orange squares in a plaid design. Some of the bottom buttons are still closed. I can’t help but wonder, what happened to the man who had worn it? Looking into Marx’s eyes, I know.
title: “Letter From America” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Samantha Andrews”
Soon after we became Bluestoners, our education in rattlesnakes began. The snake-stick gent, whom I’ll call Mr. Shivers, regaled us with stories about his friend, Jack, who used to make a living “milking” rattlers for pharmaceutical companies. “He’d catch ’em along by the tracks right here,” Shivers drawled, pointing just beyond our house. “Grab them behind the head.” He made a decisive grabbing gesture ending in a sharp pinch, then bugged out his walleye to signal astonishment: “Catch the venom in a jar!” He drew out the word “Jaaaar” for folkloric emphasis. Once, Shivers told us, a rattler spat venom in Jack’s eye. “Turned the eyeball dead white. Thought he’d gone stone blind!” And here Shivers delivered a long suspenseful blink.
The point of these tales, to me, was that our rattlers were an optional peril. You had to practically beg them to attack you. Naturalists describing them use the word “shy”; you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you. “You don’t want to step on one, though,” such people always add with a smile. That’s because the bite, while seldom fatal to healthy adults, can kill a child.
Timber rattlers winter in dens up in the mountains behind us. As the summer grows hot and dry, locals say, “they come down looking for water,” mercifully ridding the area of excess rodents as they go. Because they’re useful, and because suburban sprawl has driven them out elsewhere, they have been officially labeled a “threatened species,” their lives protected by law. How well protected isn’t clear.
If you swerve to run one over in the road, Shivers will tell you, “nobody will know,” and if you find a rattler on your property, even if it’s in a bashful state of repose or retreat, no one will rat you out if you shoot it. I didn’t understand how people could be comfortable with such duplicity until a rattler took up residence in the stone wall beside our front porch. It was large, as timber rattlers go, nearly four feet long, some six inches around, and it was dark, nearly invisible in Bluestone’s shadows. If it shook its rattle, you could hear it and avoid it. If it moved, you might see it in time. But if a curious child or one of our cats surprised it, a tragedy could occur–one in which, as host, I’d be complicit.
The toddler-rattlesnake encounter, although unlikely, was such a frightening prospect that I suddenly understood the local inclination toward pre-emptive action. I ached to kill the menace for no immediately justified reason, then lie about it to myself and everyone else, a bit in the manner of our current administration.
A few weeks ago, hiking, I ran across a terrified couple on the trail. They had thrown a rock at a timber rattler and injured it. Now it was blocking our path, experiencing some nasty mix of pain, fury and shyness. “Get a stick,” I instructed cheerily. “We’ll just walk around it!” Only later did I realize how harshly I would have been judged had it lunged and bitten one of us. That’s the thing about living with rattlesnakes. They leave you feeling oddly compromised, in a way that I have trouble explaining to my snakeless friends.
