goalies are superhuman, theres no real way to score, just a defense
stop any glitch attempt game.
12 in 2 weeks or so.
brinin a controller, maybe we'll play some Nhl 11 at seans, on the PS3.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
nhl
what a sham of a game, 10 that is. lost twice. no skill involved,
goalies are superhuman, theres no real way to score, just a defense
stop any glitch attempt game.
goalies are superhuman, theres no real way to score, just a defense
stop any glitch attempt game.
Re: [Madness Writers] friday
Yeah, MRIs take at least 30 minutes. And in the hospital, you gotta wait longer.
get on the road, son
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
heather has an apptment tomorrwo at 530, i told her a month ago to
change it, never did i guess. so i told her i was leaving without her,
she said she'd change it, its an MRI or else i wouldnt mind os much,
those things take a while, its not a walk in walk out, plus knowin the
hospital it wont start at 530 either.we'll see what happens. i told her its up to her but i dotn want to
drive all night, rather leave at 4pm rather than last time at 11. im
arleady tired and i gotta write this paper tonight
--
Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 8/31/2011 07:27:00 AM
friday
heather has an apptment tomorrwo at 530, i told her a month ago to
change it, never did i guess. so i told her i was leaving without her,
she said she'd change it, its an MRI or else i wouldnt mind os much,
those things take a while, its not a walk in walk out, plus knowin the
hospital it wont start at 530 either.
change it, never did i guess. so i told her i was leaving without her,
she said she'd change it, its an MRI or else i wouldnt mind os much,
those things take a while, its not a walk in walk out, plus knowin the
hospital it wont start at 530 either.
we'll see what happens. i told her its up to her but i dotn want to
drive all night, rather leave at 4pm rather than last time at 11. im
arleady tired and i gotta write this paper tonight
yeah, game 9 the kick save. or skate save. Huge. He got a lot of recognition for it, hard to do as a stay at home Dman.
http://aol.sportingnews.com/nhl/story/2011-08-30/nhl-colleges-wage-war-with-canadian-junior-hockey-ohl-whl-qmjhl really good article.
What would you do as a top level hockey talent? No brainer. CHL all the way.
What do you do as a near-the-top taletn? CHL.
Middle of the pack? Tough, but the safer decision is college.
Bottom of the elite? College.
CHL is all about hockey. Why wouldn't you devote yourself to the best league if you were one of the best? You wouldn't get nearly as good by playing college hockey.
gonna do a mock draft on Yahoo Fantasy in 15 minutes
its 10 dollar gift certificate on amazon. use daedalus311@gmail.com
im joining a public fantasy nhl on yahoo. i did it a few years ago,
takes like a minute everyday. the gayest thing about the fantasy is
PIM are pretty important, which makes absolutely no sense to me...why
should you be encouraged to penalize when you put your team at a
disadvantage? i'll never understand that.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
nhl 12
played a tournament, won. i scored once doing that skate across the
blue line, cut back across the middle and shoot low, get the rebound
and open net. it wasn't very consistent to score much, clearly,
though the players were crashing the net looking for hte rebound.
blue line, cut back across the middle and shoot low, get the rebound
and open net. it wasn't very consistent to score much, clearly,
though the players were crashing the net looking for hte rebound.
went into OT against USA. nots ure how i got the puck but i got it in
the neutral RW side, passed it to the LW who was anticipating the
breakout, who crossed the line as the pass was coming across the line,
has a clear breakaway (not sure how against a team like USA, i had
full breakout though and i did notice at one point they had a pretty
high forecheck, guess the two opposing strategies allowed the
breakaway) , i come in against miller from the left, (raymond from
canucks had the puck, a lefthander) and toe drag, and then as i cut
across the crease shoot it short side. goal. pretty sweet play.
its pretty much how i do shootouts in real life, though it would be
considered more a far side shot because im already on the left side as
im shooting TR corner.
that would never happen in nhl 10. one of the legends videos, you
can see yzerman coming up to the goalie on a breakaway straight on,
has his stick all the way to his right, then takes it left, HUGE
amount of room movement just
with the stick, just like real life, would be really hard to stop as a
goalie.)
the anticipation, really showed itself in that one play. goona be a
good game, though I did notice if you continuously shoot low its a
rebound everytime, i guess just like real life, but it could be
spammed. sometimes it says you'll shoot off the ground, not sure
why, and the goalie gets it. mostly, it'll reboundoff the goalies
pads or off a Dman into the boards.
yeah dude, the fricken stick lift button is worthless as well as the
poke check. i stick lifted a guy twice in a row, he skates away with
the puck. only time i noticed poke check works is if the guy gets the
puck from a rebound and you're right by him and get a lukcy poke, but
its not guaranteed you'll get it.
really, the check is the most useful thing to stop people.
i did score a cross crease, but it was against the first team, the
shitty team. corey perry up the LW side, i didnt hold A but just put
the puck to his left, then cross creased it. they were using
collapsed D, the Dman went to the crease rather than stopping the F
comin to the net. actually, it was chara who did that, and i scored
against the bruins. i scored a point shot with 10 seconds left too,
the one Bruins F came to block the shot and the pouck JUST missed him,
went TL. pretty sweet shot.
http://www.ea.com/nhl/blog/online-blog-follow-up NICE dude, :
Do Club Challenges work the same as last year?"
Club Challenge still exists, however the results of those games are
now unranked. All ranked EASHL games will have to be played through
the Quick Match function. The reason this was changed was to fix an
issue where teams were win trading against other teams by challenging
the same club to Club Challenge games.
about time they get some common sense about that shit. not sure why
club hopping would be a big deal.
hopefully i can watch some games other than the pens with the
Gamecenter, do some analysis of hockey. gonna look into some books
maybe next weekend when i come up. books.google.com good resource.
scholar.google.com for my research, and the AMU library, all i really
need.
gotta work on this paper.
Friday, August 26, 2011
watching some NHL 11 - the checking is way too powerful. Gonna be the same in NHL 12. Too many big hits. not realistic.
Also, the goalies in NHL 11 were really bad. And the AI is horrendous - no wonder we sold our games.
can't wait to get back into hockey, man. gonna be a while.
too bad I wont be able to paly next week. We'd own just like we did the lsat time you came up. My shot will be spot on (definitely will be weaker). dangling is gonna be really rusty. Skating will take one session or less to get back into it.
I gotta get a job that has steady hours, consistent schedulign. None of this 12 hour shifts which can be different two days in a row. And no heavy lifting. I wouldnt' mind working 8 hours a day. You might think it sucks, but trust me, it gets you on a schedule. Never bein' on a schedule isnt' fun. Not for me, anyway. It's one reason I hurt my back. Lifting 300 lb. people doesn't help, either, no matter how many people help out.
Up to 160 lbs. Easy to gain weight when I'm eating 3 meals a day plus at least one snack in the morning.
Plus, bein' on a schedule, I'd be able to play in all kinds of hockey leagues.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
nhl 10
never playin 10 again. guy beats me, i had a 5 min major for no
fuckin reason, AI decides to hack and slash. he scores 2 PP goals off
that, both cross creases, that shit would NEVER fly in Nhl 12, not how
i played D on it. one i tried to check, then he holds in A as i
follow and pokje check. cross crease, please. i tie it up with 20
seconds to go, pull my goalie, 3-3. then with like 2 seconds left he
gets ANOTHER cross crease. i turned off my box.
fuckin reason, AI decides to hack and slash. he scores 2 PP goals off
that, both cross creases, that shit would NEVER fly in Nhl 12, not how
i played D on it. one i tried to check, then he holds in A as i
follow and pokje check. cross crease, please. i tie it up with 20
seconds to go, pull my goalie, 3-3. then with like 2 seconds left he
gets ANOTHER cross crease. i turned off my box.
NHL 12 is pretty amazing, 10, the passing sucks, the boardplay is a
fuckin joke (skate out of it? since when does that happen) do the
same thing everytime...skate up, cross crease attempt.
i finally beat Team USA, made it once earlier, lost in a shootout.
deking is a lot harder.
then finally beat them in the 2nd SO attempt. then i played as the
goalie, even that is pretty fun, got a lot more control than last
year. gotta be pretty accurate though. i was beating vancouver and
they tied it with a hail mary with 1 second left. oh well. i wa
sin position, said it went between my leg pad and glove.
for this iraqi we have to write 5 verbs and conjugate them. its the
same fuckin conjugation for every word (well, for the most part, maybe
one letter changes on certain conjugations) and so i typed up a chart,
hit control F, replace all with each word, takes a minute rather than
than the fuckin three hours to write each word, 26 times or so man,
fuckin stupid. and the teacher goes "where was your book last night?"
first off, i do this shit during class. i didnt say that. but i did
tel him im sick of writing each word when really the only point of the
exercise is to write the voweling (conjugation).
no, its not, you have to write each word.
but thats ridiculous, the point is to learn how to say and hear them,
not to learn how to write each word. its quite insulting to my arabic
abilities. we stopped doing that in the first few months at DLI, and
that was two years ago.
well, you can tell management.
yeah, its really stupid, pointless.
ill let them know your feelings are hurt, specialist Ross.
yeah? well fuck you and fuck these words. and i fuckin churned that
shit out as fast as i could, pretty much illegible. if he mentions
anything, ill write it in invisible ink and bring in a purple light
thing as verification. and then i did the nexst days words as well.
he never fuckin hands them back to us during lunch, when I have 70 min
tojack around.
fuck that. im not taking that shit home.
people dont speak up. i dont care what people think. if i was just
learning arabic i could understand, but this is a total joke. i spend
half a class writing the words out, no joke.im not evcen tryin
anymore. sucks sitting around doing mechanical fake bullshit all day.
send us overseas for 6 months, ill be a fuckin genious at the
language. 2 years here and i dont even care anymore.
i told the teachers at DLI what was wrong with their shit and ill
sure as day tell these fags whats wrong with their program. no joke,
the teachers the poast few days have been telling us oure homework
would be pretty difficult for someone who graduates this program (6
weeks later from my point in the class). yeah, i didnt even do the
listening tonight. i cant understand it anyway, no point in trying.
they speak like "i wen marketin my car try to get this penis out my
mout but tastes toogood" its worse than hood speak. so many silent
sounds, and they fuckin butcher modern standard arabic. so much
harder and they try to justify it as being easier. no idea how, if
it were me I'd just give everything an "aaaaaa" sound in between each
character. it sounds like it anyway, why even attempt to act like it
doesnt? only three vowels, aaa eee and uuuuuu, can mix and match, ow,
ay, wa, aaa and eee sound the same pretty much when you hear it.
uuuu can be different but you could get away with making that aaaaa
and it wouldntm change anything.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
http://www.pensuniverse.com/2011/08/kimbo-slice-vs-brent-johnson.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PensUniverse+%28Pens+Universe%29&utm_content=Google+Reader I don't remember the one punch KO of DiPietro.. no wonder the Isles were so mad the next game, hahahaha. It really wasn't a KO, more of a "I just broke your orbital bone in one punch".. no idea what DiPietro was doin', not protecting himself. It doesn't look like a KO either 'cause DiPietro falls to protect himself 'cuse he realizes he got hurt (broken eye bone, yeah that would hurt).
So I was playin' the one guy last night,he wasn't bad at all. I had shutdown D. he had decent D, not as good as me. I got the 5 minute major in the 1st period and had to kill it off so of course I was messin' around wtih the puck, making sure he wasn't gettin' it. It was obvious after that PK that he was gonna do the same during his PK's. He coudl never get through the neutral zone with my trap.. I always had one guy, usually the center or a winger, skate freely to stop his advance so the only thing he really could do was pass it from L to R or from R to L where the guy would be open 'cause the D doesn't go wide enough to stop those passes (true in real life, too). Then he'd hold in Y on the boards to prevent the check so after 1 or 2 times of that, it was easy to just hold in Y with him.. I hate when you boardplay and when you go to poke check the puck to steal it, they get away. or they flat out get away for no reason.
He gets a few one on ones in the slot with a dman and shoots it, any of them could have gone in. Whoever scored a goal was gonna win 'cause the D was too impenetrable for a high shooting game.I got a lot of 2 on 1's but couldn't score. I got at least one breakaway.
I played a 2nd guy, won 5-2. I was up 3-0 (2 of these were because just as he was changing D lines, I passed to the RW [his bench was on the L], got two breakaways. first with Malkin, hold the stick back L and shoot far L.. 2nd was I think Dupuis and did something similar), stopped one of his cross-crease passes by poking the puck which deflects slowly to my goalie and somehow goes 5 hole.. any NHL who did that would have been fired on the spot. No big deal, 3-1. Get a breakaway wtih Geurin I think, hold in back hand and skate up the middle slightly right, go forehand top shelf. 4-1. Then, somehow he gets a breakaway, no idea how, so I just let him go, he skates really wide and the goalie didnt' even attempt to move over. 4-2, oh well. Then he pulls his goalie with 110 left 'cause I slashed him. 6 on 4, I wasn't gonna mess around, I wasn't losin'. So I dump the puck, no goal. Get the puck again, shoot it from center court, miss. somehow I checked him as he comes down the ice and get the puck, skate up the R side and protect the puck, go to about the mid slot from R circle and shoot, 5-2.
One thing that I always mention is that you gotta change your lines a lot.. if the line is yellow, that's too tired. Even more than probably 2 missing green bars is too tired.Maybe 3. Sometimes I'll change if it's one missing green bar if the other 2 or 3 lines are fresh just to keep it fresh unless it's the first line.. you NEVER change the first F line if they're not tired 'cause that's your bread and butter line. You gotta change lines during play, and during every whistle. During play, I always change forwards when on the breakout, and change D on a dump in or turnover behind their goal line. They might get an easier advance out of their zone, but it's still hard for them to get out of the neutral zone.. and even if they do that, they can't get any quality shots. At least not with our D play.
If the puck's in the neutral zone, you can change the D line if you're about to enter their zone, or you can change the F zone if you have them trapped well enough, but I wouldnt' really recommend it. I've done it, but that's only 'cause i've never played against anybody that's clearly better than me.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Re: [Madness Writers] booom
the player hub page won't load, so i can't see the videos yet.
to get across the blue line in a neutral zone trap, you have to skate almost parallel with the blue line to cross it. Very rarely I'll skate up one side and dump it to other or slap it around the boards, but rarely 'cause it's too easy for the Dmen to get it, and unless you can boardplay, it's a blatant turnover.
You have to switch lines a lot.. EVERY whistle. And pretty much every time the puck gets turned over you gotta switch either D or O, depending on which zonei t's turned over.
I think I have at least 1400, if not 1500 points. Top 4 or 5000.
Yesterday, I wanted to write about how I played the team of 3 guys twice in a row on Sunday night. I switched teams the 2nd game so they hopefully wouldn't know who I was. Maybe I did write about it. I couldnt' save the goals 'cause they quit, unfortunately. The first game I was up 2-0 wtihin the first 5 minutes. First goal, I had Guerin I think like a freight train up the middle of the O zone with the puck, Kunitz or somebody in the L circle with a Dman in between. I pull the stick back, drag the puck and I was gonna pass for the one timer but I accidentally shot it and it went in, haha. This was at 17:xx, so they couldnt' quit. Then, I was on the L circle with the puck, Kunitz was on the L side of the crease with a Dman on either side, so I pass it to him, turn around (his back is to the goalie) and shoot it bottom R. Too easy, man. Goalie put his pad out but no way he could stop it. Then, they quit, haha.
So we play again, I picked chicago, I think,. I dont' remember. All I know is that it was wtihin the first 4 minutes, I got a PP, took a point shot from the R, hits the goalie's chest pad and falls down. As it falls, I hold in L trigger to avoid a check and take the rebound shot - Brouwer whacks it right as it's goin' between his legs. 5 hole goal. they immediately quit, haha.
I played two games before those. the first, the guy was dancin' all over the neutral zone and the R side of his ice. I must have taken a Dman out of position, he passes it from just outside R circle to the R point, skates to the middle, wideo pen shot, no screen or anything, goalie lets it go top shelf. It was within first 2 minutes so I quit.
The other game, I was winning at least 2-0 if not 3-0 and he quit beginning of 2nd period. i was gettin' bored of winning too easily so I stopped, called it a night.
I think the demo for 12 comes out next tuesday. Could be wrong. Doesn't matter either wayt o me.
I uploaded 2 more videos of NHL goals.. not sure ify ou saw 'em. One was a deflection (by Staal?) in the mid slot to the L corner. 2nd - I skate behind the net from the R, Chara pokes the puck, I stick lift him quickly and go back to the R side... take one or two strides tot he point, skate back to the goal line, then turn around to the point and somebody was WIDE OPEN in the L side of the slot, one timer, goes bottom L, goalie puts his pad out and misses.. barely. In real time it didn't look close, but upon replay, it was pretty close.
That Iraqi.. you gotta live there to understand it? Come on, teacher, you gotta have more teachability than that. I don't fully understand, but if it's like learnin' Ebonics before English, well, that's an apt description for a waste of time.
So, I have that dog lined up to pick up on Saturday evening. I'm gonna get a dog crate on Saturday afternoon for $25 regardless of whether or not we get the dog, 'cause you can't get 'em cheaper than that.. maybe 15 or 20 but you'd have to drive a distance to get it. I'm gonna look up some info on mini poodles in a bit to see what we're looking at. Emily is extremely against getting it right nwo 'cause of the wedding and she's stressed out. I wanna get it to take care of, love, be a parto f the family. She's also worried about it chewing up the furniture that's coming on Thursday. HOw? It'll either be in the crate when we aren't home, or it'll be around us when wea re home.. take him on a walk daily, feed him twice a day and put water in his bowl one or two times a day. Not a lot of responsibility unless he does decide to go on a rampage. Consistent Discipline and exercise keep those demons away.
I dont' know if I'm gonna get him or not. I dont' see why it makes a differencei f we get a dog now or in two or three weeks after the wedding.
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 10:40 PM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
sellin my two books from the last class. bought one for 35 and
another for 5.50, add a few smackers for shipping each. sellin them
for 45 and 10.50, thats how in demand they are apparently. really, i
look around for the cheapest price. the 35 i bought on half.com where
im selling it, rather odd. amazon has a lot for 15 and under 20.
crazy. hiopefully people dont look too hard and pick mine up.so this douche was figure skating in the game, takes an early lead of
1-0. my d was out of position for some reason, who knows. i playu my
shut down D otherwise, score on a crazy turn over into a nice cross
crease, not much later. 1-1.next 2 periods, nothing. i had 3 penalties in the 1st, probably 3 in
the second and third each, and start off the overtime with another,
and then another! he got maybe 3 in the reg game, only 2 i can think
of. then with 2 min left after i get my 2nd in OT he gets one. its 3
on 3. i win the faceoff in the O zone, even the announcers were
talkin about how if i win this faceoff I have a lot of room to work
with. hell yeah I did. win to R D and pass to LD, Lilja (detroit). i
skate...well, here, watch, he was tryin to fuck over my AI and D all
game, so I put it in his face. he sent me a message saying "bull
shit" and i told him "maybe but my D is shutdown and plus I had a
shitload of needless penalties called" never heard back from him.
checked his stats, like 300 wins and 230 losses or something. he was
good with his strategy, figured he'd have a mnuch higher rating. i
have 1106 (well, i just beat a kid 7-1, no idea how he even scored, so
my rating is higher, whatever) and he had 1020 or something. but my D
shut him down. his D was in the neutral trap all game, hard to get
across that blue line. i figured skated all day just like him,
usually playin keep away, esp on the PK.http://www.easports.com/player-hub/360/daedalus311311 its on there
somewhere, the page isnt loading for me for whatever reason. look for
the newest date upload. its a decently long video.gonna play some Witcher and go to bed. on study hall, gotta start
stayin until 420, fuckin retarded, Iraqi is gay. i have no interest
in learning it. after toady, when its just a shitload of slang and no
knowledge of their daily life, im not gonna sit there and act like im
studying. i did that at DLI for a year and a half. at least that
made sense. this is like "oh, i have a house, build him a (term for
item of totality, something that's inclusive, but a very generalized
word) house of his own." really? that word and house are the same?
not even fuckin related. do that about once a sentence, plus words
i've never learned in Modern standard arabic and now I gotta learn
them here when Ill never use them nor see them again...no thank you.another passage had a guy callin the cops because the home beside him
had no females inside (how he knew that I have no idea, mayve the
women were cooped up inside) and the cars always parked outside were
used by only males, and there were no children. first off, i couldnt
even understand the listening passage. then im reading trying to
understand all the bullshit and i can understand this much. i told
the class, this is just a bunch of slang and words Ive never learning
in Modern Standard so ill never use them in Iraqi, might as well learn
Ebonics as an English language learner. and the teacher was poilte,
saying i would understand it if i lived there. no shit, sherlock. but
i dont live there and now i have tofigure it all out rather than just
focusing on the fuckin language.i just dont see myself learning that language. people might say "be
positive, youll never get ahead with that attitude" nah dude, trust
me, i have no interest in learning gibberish.
my homework listening, i was doing them for about 15 min when i was
talking to you around 330 earlier, i just write down what i hear, not
even attempting to understand nor figure out indiivdual words. the
kids who took Iraqi at DLI (not very many) said the basic modern
standard class here was pretty hard. it was a fuckin joke for me.
guess im in their boat now.watch that video, good stuff.
--
Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 8/15/2011 07:40:00 PM
Monday, August 15, 2011
booom
sellin my two books from the last class. bought one for 35 and
another for 5.50, add a few smackers for shipping each. sellin them
for 45 and 10.50, thats how in demand they are apparently. really, i
look around for the cheapest price. the 35 i bought on half.com where
im selling it, rather odd. amazon has a lot for 15 and under 20.
crazy. hiopefully people dont look too hard and pick mine up.
another for 5.50, add a few smackers for shipping each. sellin them
for 45 and 10.50, thats how in demand they are apparently. really, i
look around for the cheapest price. the 35 i bought on half.com where
im selling it, rather odd. amazon has a lot for 15 and under 20.
crazy. hiopefully people dont look too hard and pick mine up.
so this douche was figure skating in the game, takes an early lead of
1-0. my d was out of position for some reason, who knows. i playu my
shut down D otherwise, score on a crazy turn over into a nice cross
crease, not much later. 1-1.
next 2 periods, nothing. i had 3 penalties in the 1st, probably 3 in
the second and third each, and start off the overtime with another,
and then another! he got maybe 3 in the reg game, only 2 i can think
of. then with 2 min left after i get my 2nd in OT he gets one. its 3
on 3. i win the faceoff in the O zone, even the announcers were
talkin about how if i win this faceoff I have a lot of room to work
with. hell yeah I did. win to R D and pass to LD, Lilja (detroit). i
skate...well, here, watch, he was tryin to fuck over my AI and D all
game, so I put it in his face. he sent me a message saying "bull
shit" and i told him "maybe but my D is shutdown and plus I had a
shitload of needless penalties called" never heard back from him.
checked his stats, like 300 wins and 230 losses or something. he was
good with his strategy, figured he'd have a mnuch higher rating. i
have 1106 (well, i just beat a kid 7-1, no idea how he even scored, so
my rating is higher, whatever) and he had 1020 or something. but my D
shut him down. his D was in the neutral trap all game, hard to get
across that blue line. i figured skated all day just like him,
usually playin keep away, esp on the PK.
http://www.easports.com/player-hub/360/daedalus311311 its on there
somewhere, the page isnt loading for me for whatever reason. look for
the newest date upload. its a decently long video.
gonna play some Witcher and go to bed. on study hall, gotta start
stayin until 420, fuckin retarded, Iraqi is gay. i have no interest
in learning it. after toady, when its just a shitload of slang and no
knowledge of their daily life, im not gonna sit there and act like im
studying. i did that at DLI for a year and a half. at least that
made sense. this is like "oh, i have a house, build him a (term for
item of totality, something that's inclusive, but a very generalized
word) house of his own." really? that word and house are the same?
not even fuckin related. do that about once a sentence, plus words
i've never learned in Modern standard arabic and now I gotta learn
them here when Ill never use them nor see them again...no thank you.
another passage had a guy callin the cops because the home beside him
had no females inside (how he knew that I have no idea, mayve the
women were cooped up inside) and the cars always parked outside were
used by only males, and there were no children. first off, i couldnt
even understand the listening passage. then im reading trying to
understand all the bullshit and i can understand this much. i told
the class, this is just a bunch of slang and words Ive never learning
in Modern Standard so ill never use them in Iraqi, might as well learn
Ebonics as an English language learner. and the teacher was poilte,
saying i would understand it if i lived there. no shit, sherlock. but
i dont live there and now i have tofigure it all out rather than just
focusing on the fuckin language.
i just dont see myself learning that language. people might say "be
positive, youll never get ahead with that attitude" nah dude, trust
me, i have no interest in learning gibberish.
my homework listening, i was doing them for about 15 min when i was
talking to you around 330 earlier, i just write down what i hear, not
even attempting to understand nor figure out indiivdual words. the
kids who took Iraqi at DLI (not very many) said the basic modern
standard class here was pretty hard. it was a fuckin joke for me.
guess im in their boat now.
watch that video, good stuff.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Re: [Madness Writers] good story, better ending
gotta be fiction. that part about emotional bonding in the decision
makin' room was too fictional in prose.
makin' room was too fictional in prose.
could be wrong, but im sure im right.
On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
> On the Jury
> Had the young black been caught with a loaded revolver? Or was the gun
> planted by the white policeman who made the arrest? The judge asked jurors
> to reason from the evidence; no one counted on the implacable weight of
> racial hostility.
>
> by Vivian Gornick
> The case before the court was a criminal one: illegal possession of a loaded
> gun. The elements in the case were the testimony of two undercover
> policemen, the testimony of the accused, and the presence of a gun on the
> prosecutor's table. The policemen--both white, in their middle
> thirties--said the defendant had the gun in his hand when they arrested him.
> The defendant--black, eighteen--said it was all a lie, he'd never seen the
> gun until the moment the cops were pushing him up against a wall and
> handcuffing him. The gun--silver-plated, .32 caliber--lay there mute, an
> indifferent prop to be seized upon alternately by the prosecuting and the
> defending lawyers.
> It took a day and a half for all the principals in the case to say what they
> had to say. At the end of that time, the judge turned to the jury box. He
> reminded the jurors, twelve good and true, that the burden of proof lay with
> the People; that unless, in their judgment, the People had proved beyond a
> reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused, it was incumbent upon them to
> bring in a verdict of not guilty. He enjoined the jurors to reason out of
> the evidence. He further enjoined them to search and make up their own
> minds, but at the same time to be open to the thought and feeling of their
> fellows, as the essence of deliberation was the interaction of open minds.
> The judge spoke these profound words easily and carefully, yet mechanically
> and rhetorically: somewhat like a stewardess on a plane rehearsing her
> passengers in the lifesaving steps they were to take in case of an emergency
> whose potential reality no one believed in.
> The policemen (whom I will call Galella and Kowalski) told substantially the
> same story: At approximately 7:30 P.M. one night last July, while on a
> regular tour of duty (wearing street clothes, driving an unmarked car), they
> spotted two boys, one of whom was the defendant, sitting at the edge of an
> alley on West 37th Street, a few feet in from 10th Avenue. As this was a
> neighborhood that Galella and Kowalski knew well--densely commercial during
> the day, equally dense with prostitution after dark--they automatically
> registered the presence of strangers. They drove on by and continued their
> tour. An hour later they heard over their car radio a report that someone
> had been seen with a gun in or around those same streets. They drove back
> and found a marked patrol car parked at the corner of 10th and 37th. These
> uniformed police said they too had had the gun report and had seen two boys
> they thought suspicious, had questioned and searched them, found nothing,
> and sent them on their way. The uniformed police described the two boys
> Galella and Kowalski had seen earlier. The four policemen parted and went
> back to their respective cars.
> Galella and Kowalski drove up 10th Avenue, turning east on 38th Street.
> Halfway to 9th Avenue, they spotted the two boys in question walking back
> towards 10th Avenue. Why, they wondered, when the boys had been told to
> leave the neighborhood? They decided to swing through a bus lot in the
> middle of the block and return to 37th Street. They parked their car a third
> of the way up the block, beside a parking lot enclosed by a chainlink fence.
> In a few minutes they saw the boys standing on the corner, looking around.
> Then, the cops said, the boys walked into 37th Street, one of them ducked
> for a moment in and out of the alley, and they continued at a quick pace,
> half walking, half loping up the street toward Galella and Kowalski. When
> the two boys were within thirty feet or so of the unmarked car, both Galella
> and Kowalski said, they saw a gun in the left hand of one of the two. They
> leaped from their car, their own guns drawn, and said to the two: Don't
> move. Police." The boys froze in their tracks. Kowalski said, "Drop the
> gun." The boy with the gun stood motionless. A second time Kowalski said,
> "Drop the gun. Then, Kowalski said, in one swift motion the boy raised his
> arm and threw the gun back and up over the chain-link fence. The cops pushed
> the boys up against the building beside the fence, their faces turned toward
> the wall. Galella stood watch over them. Kowalski climbed the fence,
> retrieved the gun (with four bullets in it), and arrested the two. The one
> with the gun was the defendant.
> The defendant (whom I will call David Moore) told an entirely different
> story. He said he and a friend of his neighborhood in Queens had decided to
> go that evening to a disco at 39th Street and 9th Avenue. They took the
> train into Manhattan, arriving at Times Square at 8:30 P.M. When they got to
> the disco, it was just opening for the evening. They decided to take a walk
> and return later, when their friends would have arrived. They walked down
> 9th Avenue, looking for a place to buy a beer. Couldn't find one. Walked
> over to 10th Avenue. Found a grocery store, bought the beers, and, returning
> along 10th, found the alley on 37th Street with steel drums in front of it.
> They sat down on the drums and began to drink their beers. Suddenly, a
> police car appeared at the corner. One of the cops came over and began
> questioning them: Who were they? What were they doing here? Did they have
> any weapons? They told them who they were, said no, they didn't have any
> weapons. The cop looked around, pushed his feet through the trash around the
> steel drums, frisked them, then told them to get going.
> The boys got up and began walking up 37th Street toward 9th. As they walked,
> David Moore's friend said to him: "Come on. They're gonna be back. They
> ain't gonna leave us alone." And they began to walk quickly. Halfway up the
> block, as they came alongside a chainlink fence, two men with guns in their
> hands appeared from out of nowhere. They said they were police, and they
> wanted to know where the gun was. "We know you got a gun," they said. "Where
> is it?" The boys said: "We got no gun." The police pushed them up against
> the wall, made them kneel facing the wall. David Moore said: "We asked them,
> 'Why you doin' this?' One of them began to climb the fence. The other one
> said, 'It's all right. If he don't find a gun, we'll let you go.' And then
> the other one, he came back with a gun."
> We were six women, six men, five blacks, seven whites on that jury. Our
> occupations were postal worker, nurse's aide, clerk-typists, school
> secretary, community center worker, engineer, actor, writer, carpenter,
> investment analyst, housewife. It was impossible, sitting in the jury box
> during the trial, to know much more about any one of us, so well concealed
> did the people behind these surface identifications remain during the voir
> dire (jury selection process).
> I had become irritated with the questions about possible police prejudice,
> and had said I thought these questions were designed to elicit stereotypic
> responses rather than to encourage thinking about individuals; after all, a
> policeman was only one human being, not the entire police force. Afterward,
> the postal worker (a bullnecked black man with steady eyes behind thick
> glasses, who had been chosen as a juror during the same round in which I was
> chosen) shook his head at me and said, "Didn't think you'd make it. Nosir.
> Not after all that lip you give 'em."
> I looked around at the ten people then occupying jurors' seats: Mary Davis,
> the clerk-typist; Loren Levine, the investment analyst; Todd Graham, the
> engineer; Shirley Silvers and Laura O'Connell, the housewives; Oscar
> Williams, the community center worker; Anna James, the nurse's aide; David
> Barnes, the postal worker; Claire Moran, the school secretary; Richard
> Garcia, the carpenter. I thought back to the moment when the judge and the
> lawyers had asked each of us to assure them that we could and would be
> impartial listeners, that we would reason out of the evidence given, that a
> policeman's testimony would "give us no trouble" (what a euphemism!). Each
> of us had without hesitation simply said yes or no, and I remember thinking
> then, We lie. Every last one of us.
> But we were all surprised when Gerald Anderson, the actor, was chosen as the
> last juror. The judge asked him if he was married and Anderson replied, "I
> live in sin, judge, but no children." All heads in the courtroom jerked in
> his direction, but Anderson's face bore an unflappable expression, and his
> smile of resignation said plainly: "I've seen it all; nothing you can say or
> do would unbalance me; being off balance is my natural condition." Then,
> when Anderson revealed that one of his many odd jobs as an often unemployed
> actor had been that of a worker in the New York courts, Richard Garcia
> laughed merrily and poked Claire Moran in an open, friendly manner, saying,
> "that's it."
> Suddenly, we all knew why Anderson was accepted as the twelfth juror: it was
> six o'clock in the evening; we had been jury-picking for a full day and a
> half; if Anderson was rejected, the court would have to call for a fresh
> batch of prospective jurors. Neither lawyer was willing to sustain such a
> delay on "a simple gun possession case."
> The jury room was a gray-green, institutional rectangle: coat hooks on the
> wall, two small bathrooms off to one side, a long, scarred table surrounded
> by wooden armchairs, wastebaskets, and a floor superficially clean, deeply
> filthy. We entered this room on a Friday at noon, most of us expecting to be
> gone from it by four or five that same day. We did not see the last of it
> until a full twelve hours had elapsed, by which time the grimy
> oppressiveness of the place had become, for me at least, inextricably bound
> up with psychological defeat.
> We ate the sandwiches brought up from the coffee shop, drank the atrocious
> coffee, carefully put the wrappings and the remains of our lunches into a
> large paper carton, wiped off the table. Then the guard took out the
> garbage, locked us into the room, and we began with a vote around the table.
> It took exactly two minutes for each of those voices to be heard pronouncing
> the words guilty, not guilty. The vote was eight not guilty, four guilty. I
> was one of the four who voted guilty; the other three were Loren Levine,
> Gerald Anderson, and Shirley Silvers.
> A wave of surprise. Most of the jurors voting not guilty had seemed
> vigorously conservative as they sat in the box, the ones voting guilty,
> predictably liberal. Then--perhaps appropriately--the guiltys had been
> spoken in hesitant, musing, this-is-open-for-discussion voices, while the
> not guiltys had been announced in flat, closed, nothing-to-discuss voices.
> "Well," said I, the novice juror, to myself, "it's just like the movies. Now
> we begin. Now we will talk, we will listen to one another, we will see how
> we have arrived at these opinions. Because that, surely, is all they are
> now: opinions, not settled convictions."
> But I was wrong. The twelve hours that followed would in no essential alter
> the attitudes made clear during those first two minutes. What did happen,
> though, is that, one by one, all four guiltys were "persuaded" to change
> their votes to not guilty. That persuasion came about not through the
> irresistible uses of reason but through the disintegrating power of
> emotional cave-in.
> Nearly everyone seemed to speak at once: over, under, and through each
> other. No one heard anything anyone else said, and no one actually said
> anything new, just repeated, in ever louder tones, guilty, not guilty.
> Richard Garcia said: "I just feel he's innocent. Don't ask me why, I just
> feel it." Anna James--whose voice bore an uncanny resemblance to that of
> Butterfly McQueen--said, "I can't believe that boy ain't innocent." Claire
> Moran and Laura O'Connell stated flatly: "I don't believe the cops." Todd
> Graham, a solid man whose rimless glasses made his large afro look
> conservative, simply smiled and shook his head repeatedly, "No way, no way."
> Mary Davis, a large black woman endowed with a maternal appearance,
> compressed her lips, crossed her arms on her huge bosom, and shook her head,
> loudly. Shirley Silvers, middle-aged, well-dressed, brimming with nervous
> sweetness, turned agitatedly from one to another, chattering: "I don't know,
> maybe I'm wrong, I think he's guilty, I don't know."
> In the midst of all this, a sudden flare-up between Richard Garcia and Loren
> Levine: yelling, footstamping, slamming of bathroom doors, Garcia's voice
> shrill, crying, "Let me talk! Dammit, will you let me talk?" Levine
> retorting hotly, "That's all you've been doing. And not saying a single
> thing of substance. If we let you go on, we'll be here for a week!"
> What was this? Levine--thin, remote, with a voice trapped between nasal drip
> and lockjaw, always reading the Times when the others were talking, and
> polishing his glasses, thoughtfully--why was he standing there with a
> faceful of twitching irritation as though he were exploding inside? And
> Garcia--blackhaired, wide-faced, mustachioed, manner expansive, above all
> jolly--why was he on his feet, his voice screeching, his hands on his hips,
> as though to say, I can't take this another minute"? Were we going to have
> juror "revelations" so soon? We had only just begun.
> Order. Order. Let's have some order here. Now calmly--let each one of us
> tell the others exactly why we think guilty, not guilty.
> We went around the table again. Richard Garcia, Mary Davis, and Anna James
> repeated that they couldn't believe that boy wasn't innocent.
> Loren Levine, under tight control again, said quietly that he felt the
> police story hung together; it was logical in all its parts and it made
> sense to him.
> Laura O'Connell--born, raised, married, and still living in the same
> working-class neighborhood--said an uninflected, tenement-pitched voice: "I
> don't believe the cops. I know cops. Some of my best friends are cops. I
> know what they do. I just don't believe em."
> Claire Moran, a small, thin, birdlike woman in her forties, nodded her head
> and said, "That's right. I can't help feeling the same. I just don't believe
> that police story."
> It was my turn. I said, "In order for me to vote not guilty, I would have to
> believe that these two policemen deliberately framed this boy. I would have
> to believe they planted that gun on him. I find that almost possible to
> believe."
> "Oh, for God's sake," said Mary Davis.
> "They do it all the time," protested Todd Graham. "Everybody knows that,"
> cried Laura O'Connell. "That's true, you know," said Claire Moran.
> "Yes," said Gerald Anderson, speaking for the first one, "they do do it all
> the time. But only for a reason. This case there was no reason." Everyone
> turned to Gerald, the street-smart actor who proved to be the best juror in
> the room, the man who most loved reason, and the only one to return again
> and again to the question of the evidence before us.
> "I probably know more about cops than anyone else this room," Gerald said,
> "and I certainly know they are capable of planting a weapon on somebody.
> But, in experience, it's almost always because they know or they think they
> know a person they're after is guilty of a crime they can't prove. Usually
> it's narcotics. Sometimes it's some hard-nosed kid in a neighborhood they've
> worked in who's given them trouble, they hate the kid, they want to put him
> away. But to plant a gun on a perfectly strange kid? Just to bring a charge
> of gun possession? When there are a thousand such arrests a day in New York,
> all perfectly legit? That doesn't make any sense to me at all."
> "Besides, where would the gun have come from?" asked Shirley Silvers.
> "Oh, cops have two guns on them quite often," said add Graham. "The one you
> see, and the one you don't."
> "Oh, for Chrissake," said Gerald Anderson. "Do you realize what you're
> saying? You know if a cop walks out of the station house with a gun secreted
> on his person, and he's discovered, it's his job? Right then and there. He's
> finished. You think a cop does a thing like that so lightly?"
> Todd Graham shrugged his shoulders, closed his mouth, and looked down at the
> table. Clearly, Gerald's words had only silenced him.
> "Well, that may be true, Mr. Anderson," said David Barnes softly, his voice
> all self-conscious dignity, "although we only have your word for it, you'll
> pardon my pointing out, and some of us here may have had experiences that
> contradict that statement, but I don't believe the police story either. I
> can't exactly say why. It just don't sit right with me. And if it don't sit
> right, I gotta vote not guilty."
> Six people turned to the right and to the left and mouthed, "That's right.
> That's the way I see it, too. If you don't believe the cops..."
> Oscar Williams, the community center worker--tall, thin, middle-aged, very
> black-skinned, a face and manner suffused with a quiet that passed for
> calm--had not said one word during this entire time. I turned to him: "Mr.
> Williams, what do you think?" He looked at me for a long moment before he
> spoke. There was silence in the room. And then, in a low, steady voice,
> making extraordinary use of the rhetorical device of dividing a sentence
> into its phrases, Oscar Williams said: "I cannot believe. That boy raised
> his arm. With a gun in it. When a policeman had told him to freeze. And that
> boy ain't a dead boy. I simply cannot believe that."
> One instant of utter stillness, and then a jam of voices in the already
> thickening air: "Amen!" "That's right, that's right." "I'm with him." "I
> can't believe that either." "Nosir. I don't believe that either."
> Gerald Anderson and I stared at each other. We were shaken by Williams's
> eloquence and its effect on the room. "But still," I could almost see me and
> Gerald thinking at the same moment.
> "Mr. Williams, does that mean you think the cops framed the boy?" I asked.
> "I didn't say that." He closed his eyes and spread the fingers of his thin,
> fine hand in the air. "I don't know whether they framed the boy or not. And
> I'm not sayin' they did. I'm only sayin' I cannot see that thing happening.
> "
> Williams took off his glasses; the skin just below his eyes and on the
> bridge of his nose glistened. He wiped his face with a soft white
> handkerchief. He carefully lifted one pressed pants leg over the other. Then
> he said: "I'm no social worker. I'm no bleeding heart. I know how rotten
> kids are. They stink. And there is absolutely nothing worse than a teenager
> with a gun in his hand. Don't you think I know that? But," his voice dropped
> one husky octave, "I cannot see that thing happening. And I keep thinking:
> If I blow this, if I give that kid a record...well, I just wouldn't be able
> to live with myself."
> Mary Davis removed her arms from across her capacious chest and said, "Well,
> as far as I'm concerned, the man just said it all. Now we either all vote
> not guilty or we go in and tell the judge we are stuck." She was sitting
> directly opposite me. She leaned across the table toward me and said,
> "Sweetheart, cops, they shoot first, ask questions later. All of 'em."
> "You said in the courtroom you weren't prejudiced against the police," I
> said faintly.
> "I ain't prejudiced!" she replied angrily. "I'm just telling you what they
> do."
> "It doesn't matter what they do," I said. "You've got to look at what these
> two did. Or what you think they did. And why you think they did it."
> "Oh, there's no talking to this girl," Mary Davis said, twisting her face
> and body into a tortured profile position. (She really was a very large
> woman.)
> "Yes," said Gerald Anderson dryly. "Well, I do think the question of whether
> we think the police framed the boy is the crucial one, and it isn't enough
> to say you can't or won't think about that one. Now, no one's experience
> here is sacred. It carries no more authority than anyone else's. Our
> experience is all supposed to be in the service of the evidence before us.
> Not the other way around."
> Everyone nodded, but Gerald's words meant nothing. On and on it went. For
> hours. It was not merely that the same words and phrases were repeated
> endlessly; it was that our "positions" seemed to have become congealed;
> minds and eyes glazed over; we didn't even hear ourselves speaking after a
> while.
> Two curiosities emerged during these hours. One was that Anna James--the
> nurse's aide who just couldn't believe that boy wasn't innocent--proved to
> be a near mental incompetent. She could not keep in her mind the details of
> the story told by the police and the one told by the boy. At one point she
> mused out loud, "How that boy get over from Lexington Avenue so quick? They
> must be crazy to think we swallow that." We all stared at her. Lexington
> Avenue? What on earth was she talking about? Worse yet, what had been
> transpiring in her mind all this time?
> I discovered afterward that Anna James was the most professional juror among
> us. She had over the years been chosen to serve in innumerable criminal and
> civil cases; and before my own term as juror was over, I saw her chosen to
> serve on a complex case of embezzlement. I knew why, too. Her manner was one
> of middleclass reserve, indicating (to one who asked no vital questions) a
> quiet but firm capacity to think, slowly but responsibly. During the twelve
> hours I was locked up with her, I discovered that that manner masked a
> slowwitted stubbornness functioning in the service of two profound
> disabilities: she was at all times oblivious to evidence, and she hated the
> cops. Hated them.
> The second curiosity was that each of the others who had voted not guilty
> also hated the police. Hated distrusted, disbelieved, did not want to think
> about anything said or done by anyone who was a policeman "Cops shoot first,
> ask questions later." Young, old, black, white, blue-collar, white-collar:
> they all drew a pugnacious blank on police testimony.
> At six o'clock, Gerald Anderson, who had been staring morosely at a
> diagrammatic chart of the streets in which "the incident" had taken place,
> said, "Hey, wait a minute. I just realized something." Everyone perked up.
> Anything to break this deadly boring tension. "The kid may or may not be
> innocent," Gerald went on, "but one thing is certain. He lied on that stand.
> Look, everyone agrees that four policemen questioned him. I mean, the cops
> said that, and he said that, too. There's no argument there. Now, he says he
> was questioned at the corner by the uniformed police. And then questioned
> again halfway down the block by the undercover cops. If that's true, then
> the undercover cops must have been sitting in their car when he was
> questioned by the uniformed police. Because it only takes half a minute to
> get down the block. They'd have seen it. Why would they have grabbed the
> kids a minute later if they'd just seen them questioned and searched? That
> certainly doesn't make sense. He must be lying about that."
> Excitement generated quickly. Confused, disturbed, everyone was glad to have
> something new to think about. Eager attention was turned to Gerald's
> "discovery." None but one thought of where this attention could lead. Oscar
> Williams sat still and silent, hands folded on knobby knees, glasses
> glistening in the dull yellow light. He looked up into the noise and very
> softly said, "Just because he's lyin' don't mean he's guilty as charged." It
> was as though a schoolmaster had rapped the children for rowdiness. Todd
> Graham said very soberly, "Yeah, that's right." So did Mart Davis. So did
> Claire Moran. So did Richard Garcia.
> Shortly after this we were taken to dinner, herded together at two or three
> tables in a chop house, given a selective menu that did not permit so much
> as a glass of beer, watched over by the guards. It was a depressed and
> depressing meal.
> No sooner had we returned to the jury room, hung up our coats, and taken our
> seats, than David Barnes stood up, approached the diagram, cleared his
> throat and said, "I've been thinking." We all looked at him, supposing him
> about to carry Gerald's point further. Barnes then, after a fashion,
> repeated the original point as though he were introducing it for the first
> time, and then proceeded to garble the details so that the point was utterly
> lost and the exercise at the diagram without meaning.
> It seemed impossible that everyone in the room would not instantly see that
> Barnes had just caricatured not only the point but the point of the point.
> But no. Garcia said, "Now there's an idea." Claire Moran said, "Would you
> mind going over that again, Mr. Barnes?" Laura O'Connell, straining
> nearsightedly at the diagram, said, "I kinda see what you're getting at."
> Todd Graham looked down at the sheet of doodle drawings under his right
> hand. Oscar Williams inspected his fingernails. Loren Levine nearly took out
> the Times.
> I swung in my seat to look at Gerald. He was staring into space. I thought I
> saw something close over his eyes, some invisible shutter come down, and I
> think in that moment his switched vote was being born. As I looked at his
> face I knew we were lost. I remembered a moment a few hours earlier when
> Williams had said something, and Gerald had replied curtly: "You know you're
> putting pressure on us," and Williams had demurred, and I had thought: "No,
> the pressure is being applied from within."
> I did not know if my conviction that the police did not frame David Moore
> constituted evidence any more than Oscar Williams's conviction that the boy
> could not have raised his arm with a gun in it and not be shot dead
> constituted a reasonable doubt. And I did not really care if the boy was
> guilty or not guilty, if he was punished or set free, if the police were
> supported or attacked. But the abdication of thought frightened me. That did
> matter. In fact it seemed to be the only thing that mattered, and it
> mattered that it was we--Gerald and I and all the rest--who wouldn't do the
> thinking. I realized that I had become strangely attached to the people in
> the room. In these hours together, unwilling and most peculiar bonds had
> been forged. It was not that we had revealed ourselves to each other, though
> to some extent we had. It was certainly not that we were sealed by shared
> understandings of the mind or heart. No, it was rather, I began to see, that
> we had been locked up here randomly, thrown together willy-nilly like a
> family, and like a family had inflicted our emotional prejudices on each
> other. This act cast long shadows. Certainly it touched something in me,
> made me responsive to mysterious claims I could not at that moment identify.
> The situation began to seem metaphoric. Civilization seemed to hang on the
> willingness here in this room to think. In the emotional grandiosity of that
> moment was born my switched vote.
> For an instant I saw things clearly. "Hang the jury," I said to myself,
> "there is no way out of this." But the last moment I said to myself, "No.
> They must see. I must make them see." And from that moment on I was,
> essentially, pleading with everyone "to see" what was happening here. I knew
> I should hang the jury but I simply could not do what I knew should be done.
> It was then a given that I would let myself be overcome. Clearly, I needed
> them more than they needed me.
> At nine o'clock Shirley Silvers cried out, "I change my vote! I vote not
> guilty." Half an hour later, Gerald Anderson, still staring into space,
> looking absolutely bleak, said, "I vote not guilty." Directly afterward,
> Loren Levine, who had retreated into near total silence since his
> altercation with Richard Garcia, said crisply, "Me, too. Not guilty." Why
> had none of them hung the jury? What personal mystery struggled up in each
> of them? To what were they "attached" that they had caved in, one by one?
> I was the last holdout. All around me pressed voices, faces, shadows, that
> said, "Explain yourself. Justify yourself. We know who we are. Can you say
> as much? What is all this nonsense about? Never mind the others. What are
> you doing here?"
> I looked at Oscar Williams now sitting silent, watching me. I begged him
> with my eyes to understand and support me. He looked at me. His face said.
> "I do understand, but you're in this alone." The memory of his voice saying,
> "That boy would be a dead boy" entered into me, made me quail somewhere
> inside myself. Conveniently, I lost my nerve against that haughty pain of
> his; conveniently, couldn't hold on to what I knew, began to get fogged up,
> didn't quite know anymore what was evidence, what a reasonable doubt...
> "For God's sake," I cried as though I were going under. "What reason would
> these two cops have had for framing this kid? Cynically, recklessly,
> cold-bloodedly, framing a boy they'd never seen before? Now you know goddamn
> well it's not these two people whose testimony you've been listening to.
> It's cops. All cops. So what have we got here? Where does that leave us?
> With two stereotypes: on the one hand" (I raised my left arm at the elbow,
> hand palm out), "we have 'the cops.' On the other hand" (I raised my right
> arm), "we have 'a young black boy'..."
> The word black was a match struck to a can of gasoline: conflagration blazed
> in less than thirty seconds.
> "Color, color, who said anything about color?" David Barnes thundered. "What
> chu bringing in color for? I don't like that. Nosiree, I don't like that one
> bit."
> "I knew she had that in her mind all the time!" Anna James shrieked, "I knew
> it."
> "I don't wanna hear a word about black or white," Mary Davis boomed. "Now
> you hear me? That boy's mama raised him up just like everybody else's.
> Didn't do it no different from yours."
> Shirley Silvers got hysterical and began to scream: "She didn't mean it. She
> didn't mean it."
> Todd Graham smiled mockingly at me and said, "I know. You're not
> prejudiced."
> Oscar Williams's eyes met mine in amazement for a single second. Then he
> buried his face in his hands.
> Gerald Anderson and Loren Levine stared, openmouthed, but remained silent.
> It was just easier for everyone to let happen what was happening.
> As for me, I felt relief. The charge of racism--painful and frightening at
> first--was, in fact, a smokescreen behind which everyone, myself included,
> was only too glad to hide. "You win," I said. "Not guilty." Everyone looked
> down, or away.
> At midnight the verdict was announced in the courtroom. The jurors fell all
> over themselves fleeing the building. Claire Moran turned in the doorway and
> said, "Please don't misunderstand this, but I hope I never see any of you
> again!"
> Only Gerald Anderson and I stayed behind. Ours was the sick feeling of
> cowards that compels hanging around. The lawyers, both of whom were young
> and eager for details as to what had happened in the jury room, also hung
> around. We talked a long while together.
> We told them many things, and then we told them how persuasive had been
> Oscar Williams's assertion that he couldn't imagine the boy making a motion
> with a gun in his hand while facing a cop and not being shot, and how
> Williams had agonized that this was the boy's first arrest and Williams
> would be ruining his life with a conviction. The young assistant district
> attorney listened silently, nodding his head forlornly at every word I spoke
> as though he knew this litany by heart. I looked at him, puzzled.
> "It was Moore's first arrest, wasn't it?" I asked.
> "No," he shook his head. "He was arrested in 1974 at the age of fourteen."
> "What was the charge?" asked Gerald.
> "Pointing a loaded .22 caliber gun at a policeman."
> On Monday morning I returned, as directed, to the large jurors' room in the
> Criminal Courts Building. Almost everyone from the jury was there. Mary
> Davis, Richard Garcia, and Anna James sat together, but everyone else sat
> alone in widely separated seats. I walked directly over to Oscar Williams.
> He rose as I approached him. We looked at each other. I told him what the
> district attorney had told me about David Moore's previous arrest.
> Williams's black skin turned the color of cigarette ash. It exactly matched
> the taste in my mouth.
>
>
>
> --
> Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 8/10/2011 05:32:00 AM
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The only ways to score:
Cross crease
Breakaway go forehand, toe drag, short side (goalie goes down on the toe drag for no reason)
Breakaway go forehand backhand forehand (barely works)
Breakaway go backhand forehand (rarely works)
Cross the blue line, skate sideways and toe drag the puck, then shoot far side (it’s a glitch ‘causet he goalie will be out of position)
Garbage goal where the goalie goes down and there’s a wide open rebound
Garbage goal where there’s a rebound and you shoot it even without having htep uck and it goes in luckily
Other rare goals:
Shot from the point
Semi-breakaway – come in from the side and shoot far side top cheese
I haven’t see any deflection goals yet
Wrapper (can’t get it to work most of the time, I think I only did it once or twice)
Pass from behind the goal line to a breakout winger and it hits your goalie’s skate and goes in (lame, happened that one game we played)
If there are any others, I haven’t seen ‘em
good story, better ending
On the Jury
Had the young black been caught with a loaded revolver? Or was the gun planted by the white policeman who made the arrest? The judge asked jurors to reason from the evidence; no one counted on the implacable weight of racial hostility.
by Vivian Gornick
by Vivian Gornick
The case before the court was a criminal one: illegal possession of a loaded gun. The elements in the case were the testimony of two undercover policemen, the testimony of the accused, and the presence of a gun on the prosecutor's table. The policemen--both white, in their middle thirties--said the defendant had the gun in his hand when they arrested him. The defendant--black, eighteen--said it was all a lie, he'd never seen the gun until the moment the cops were pushing him up against a wall and handcuffing him. The gun--silver-plated, .32 caliber--lay there mute, an indifferent prop to be seized upon alternately by the prosecuting and the defending lawyers.
It took a day and a half for all the principals in the case to say what they had to say. At the end of that time, the judge turned to the jury box. He reminded the jurors, twelve good and true, that the burden of proof lay with the People; that unless, in their judgment, the People had proved beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused, it was incumbent upon them to bring in a verdict of not guilty. He enjoined the jurors to reason out of the evidence. He further enjoined them to search and make up their own minds, but at the same time to be open to the thought and feeling of their fellows, as the essence of deliberation was the interaction of open minds.
The judge spoke these profound words easily and carefully, yet mechanically and rhetorically: somewhat like a stewardess on a plane rehearsing her passengers in the lifesaving steps they were to take in case of an emergency whose potential reality no one believed in.
The policemen (whom I will call Galella and Kowalski) told substantially the same story: At approximately 7:30 P.M. one night last July, while on a regular tour of duty (wearing street clothes, driving an unmarked car), they spotted two boys, one of whom was the defendant, sitting at the edge of an alley on West 37th Street, a few feet in from 10th Avenue. As this was a neighborhood that Galella and Kowalski knew well--densely commercial during the day, equally dense with prostitution after dark--they automatically registered the presence of strangers. They drove on by and continued their tour. An hour later they heard over their car radio a report that someone had been seen with a gun in or around those same streets. They drove back and found a marked patrol car parked at the corner of 10th and 37th. These uniformed police said they too had had the gun report and had seen two boys they thought suspicious, had questioned and searched them, found nothing, and sent them on their way. The uniformed police described the two boys Galella and Kowalski had seen earlier. The four policemen parted and went back to their respective cars.
Galella and Kowalski drove up 10th Avenue, turning east on 38th Street. Halfway to 9th Avenue, they spotted the two boys in question walking back towards 10th Avenue. Why, they wondered, when the boys had been told to leave the neighborhood? They decided to swing through a bus lot in the middle of the block and return to 37th Street. They parked their car a third of the way up the block, beside a parking lot enclosed by a chainlink fence. In a few minutes they saw the boys standing on the corner, looking around. Then, the cops said, the boys walked into 37th Street, one of them ducked for a moment in and out of the alley, and they continued at a quick pace, half walking, half loping up the street toward Galella and Kowalski. When the two boys were within thirty feet or so of the unmarked car, both Galella and Kowalski said, they saw a gun in the left hand of one of the two. They leaped from their car, their own guns drawn, and said to the two: Don't move. Police." The boys froze in their tracks. Kowalski said, "Drop the gun." The boy with the gun stood motionless. A second time Kowalski said, "Drop the gun. Then, Kowalski said, in one swift motion the boy raised his arm and threw the gun back and up over the chain-link fence. The cops pushed the boys up against the building beside the fence, their faces turned toward the wall. Galella stood watch over them. Kowalski climbed the fence, retrieved the gun (with four bullets in it), and arrested the two. The one with the gun was the defendant.
The defendant (whom I will call David Moore) told an entirely different story. He said he and a friend of his neighborhood in Queens had decided to go that evening to a disco at 39th Street and 9th Avenue. They took the train into Manhattan, arriving at Times Square at 8:30 P.M. When they got to the disco, it was just opening for the evening. They decided to take a walk and return later, when their friends would have arrived. They walked down 9th Avenue, looking for a place to buy a beer. Couldn't find one. Walked over to 10th Avenue. Found a grocery store, bought the beers, and, returning along 10th, found the alley on 37th Street with steel drums in front of it. They sat down on the drums and began to drink their beers. Suddenly, a police car appeared at the corner. One of the cops came over and began questioning them: Who were they? What were they doing here? Did they have any weapons? They told them who they were, said no, they didn't have any weapons. The cop looked around, pushed his feet through the trash around the steel drums, frisked them, then told them to get going.
The boys got up and began walking up 37th Street toward 9th. As they walked, David Moore's friend said to him: "Come on. They're gonna be back. They ain't gonna leave us alone." And they began to walk quickly. Halfway up the block, as they came alongside a chainlink fence, two men with guns in their hands appeared from out of nowhere. They said they were police, and they wanted to know where the gun was. "We know you got a gun," they said. "Where is it?" The boys said: "We got no gun." The police pushed them up against the wall, made them kneel facing the wall. David Moore said: "We asked them, 'Why you doin' this?' One of them began to climb the fence. The other one said, 'It's all right. If he don't find a gun, we'll let you go.' And then the other one, he came back with a gun."
We were six women, six men, five blacks, seven whites on that jury. Our occupations were postal worker, nurse's aide, clerk-typists, school secretary, community center worker, engineer, actor, writer, carpenter, investment analyst, housewife. It was impossible, sitting in the jury box during the trial, to know much more about any one of us, so well concealed did the people behind these surface identifications remain during the voir dire (jury selection process).
I had become irritated with the questions about possible police prejudice, and had said I thought these questions were designed to elicit stereotypic responses rather than to encourage thinking about individuals; after all, a policeman was only one human being, not the entire police force. Afterward, the postal worker (a bullnecked black man with steady eyes behind thick glasses, who had been chosen as a juror during the same round in which I was chosen) shook his head at me and said, "Didn't think you'd make it. Nosir. Not after all that lip you give 'em."
I looked around at the ten people then occupying jurors' seats: Mary Davis, the clerk-typist; Loren Levine, the investment analyst; Todd Graham, the engineer; Shirley Silvers and Laura O'Connell, the housewives; Oscar Williams, the community center worker; Anna James, the nurse's aide; David Barnes, the postal worker; Claire Moran, the school secretary; Richard Garcia, the carpenter. I thought back to the moment when the judge and the lawyers had asked each of us to assure them that we could and would be impartial listeners, that we would reason out of the evidence given, that a policeman's testimony would "give us no trouble" (what a euphemism!). Each of us had without hesitation simply said yes or no, and I remember thinking then, We lie. Every last one of us.
But we were all surprised when Gerald Anderson, the actor, was chosen as the last juror. The judge asked him if he was married and Anderson replied, "I live in sin, judge, but no children." All heads in the courtroom jerked in his direction, but Anderson's face bore an unflappable expression, and his smile of resignation said plainly: "I've seen it all; nothing you can say or do would unbalance me; being off balance is my natural condition." Then, when Anderson revealed that one of his many odd jobs as an often unemployed actor had been that of a worker in the New York courts, Richard Garcia laughed merrily and poked Claire Moran in an open, friendly manner, saying, "that's it."
Suddenly, we all knew why Anderson was accepted as the twelfth juror: it was six o'clock in the evening; we had been jury-picking for a full day and a half; if Anderson was rejected, the court would have to call for a fresh batch of prospective jurors. Neither lawyer was willing to sustain such a delay on "a simple gun possession case."
The jury room was a gray-green, institutional rectangle: coat hooks on the wall, two small bathrooms off to one side, a long, scarred table surrounded by wooden armchairs, wastebaskets, and a floor superficially clean, deeply filthy. We entered this room on a Friday at noon, most of us expecting to be gone from it by four or five that same day. We did not see the last of it until a full twelve hours had elapsed, by which time the grimy oppressiveness of the place had become, for me at least, inextricably bound up with psychological defeat.
We ate the sandwiches brought up from the coffee shop, drank the atrocious coffee, carefully put the wrappings and the remains of our lunches into a large paper carton, wiped off the table. Then the guard took out the garbage, locked us into the room, and we began with a vote around the table. It took exactly two minutes for each of those voices to be heard pronouncing the words guilty, not guilty. The vote was eight not guilty, four guilty. I was one of the four who voted guilty; the other three were Loren Levine, Gerald Anderson, and Shirley Silvers.
A wave of surprise. Most of the jurors voting not guilty had seemed vigorously conservative as they sat in the box, the ones voting guilty, predictably liberal. Then--perhaps appropriately--the guiltys had been spoken in hesitant, musing, this-is-open-for-discussion voices, while the not guiltys had been announced in flat, closed, nothing-to-discuss voices.
"Well," said I, the novice juror, to myself, "it's just like the movies. Now we begin. Now we will talk, we will listen to one another, we will see how we have arrived at these opinions. Because that, surely, is all they are now: opinions, not settled convictions."
But I was wrong. The twelve hours that followed would in no essential alter the attitudes made clear during those first two minutes. What did happen, though, is that, one by one, all four guiltys were "persuaded" to change their votes to not guilty. That persuasion came about not through the irresistible uses of reason but through the disintegrating power of emotional cave-in.
Nearly everyone seemed to speak at once: over, under, and through each other. No one heard anything anyone else said, and no one actually said anything new, just repeated, in ever louder tones, guilty, not guilty. Richard Garcia said: "I just feel he's innocent. Don't ask me why, I just feel it." Anna James--whose voice bore an uncanny resemblance to that of Butterfly McQueen--said, "I can't believe that boy ain't innocent." Claire Moran and Laura O'Connell stated flatly: "I don't believe the cops." Todd Graham, a solid man whose rimless glasses made his large afro look conservative, simply smiled and shook his head repeatedly, "No way, no way." Mary Davis, a large black woman endowed with a maternal appearance, compressed her lips, crossed her arms on her huge bosom, and shook her head, loudly. Shirley Silvers, middle-aged, well-dressed, brimming with nervous sweetness, turned agitatedly from one to another, chattering: "I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, I think he's guilty, I don't know."
In the midst of all this, a sudden flare-up between Richard Garcia and Loren Levine: yelling, footstamping, slamming of bathroom doors, Garcia's voice shrill, crying, "Let me talk! Dammit, will you let me talk?" Levine retorting hotly, "That's all you've been doing. And not saying a single thing of substance. If we let you go on, we'll be here for a week!"
What was this? Levine--thin, remote, with a voice trapped between nasal drip and lockjaw, always reading the Times when the others were talking, and polishing his glasses, thoughtfully--why was he standing there with a faceful of twitching irritation as though he were exploding inside? And Garcia--blackhaired, wide-faced, mustachioed, manner expansive, above all jolly--why was he on his feet, his voice screeching, his hands on his hips, as though to say, I can't take this another minute"? Were we going to have juror "revelations" so soon? We had only just begun.
Order. Order. Let's have some order here. Now calmly--let each one of us tell the others exactly why we think guilty, not guilty.
We went around the table again. Richard Garcia, Mary Davis, and Anna James repeated that they couldn't believe that boy wasn't innocent.
Loren Levine, under tight control again, said quietly that he felt the police story hung together; it was logical in all its parts and it made sense to him.
Laura O'Connell--born, raised, married, and still living in the same working-class neighborhood--said an uninflected, tenement-pitched voice: "I don't believe the cops. I know cops. Some of my best friends are cops. I know what they do. I just don't believe em."
Claire Moran, a small, thin, birdlike woman in her forties, nodded her head and said, "That's right. I can't help feeling the same. I just don't believe that police story."
It was my turn. I said, "In order for me to vote not guilty, I would have to believe that these two policemen deliberately framed this boy. I would have to believe they planted that gun on him. I find that almost possible to believe."
"Oh, for God's sake," said Mary Davis.
"They do it all the time," protested Todd Graham. "Everybody knows that," cried Laura O'Connell. "That's true, you know," said Claire Moran.
"Yes," said Gerald Anderson, speaking for the first one, "they do do it all the time. But only for a reason. This case there was no reason." Everyone turned to Gerald, the street-smart actor who proved to be the best juror in the room, the man who most loved reason, and the only one to return again and again to the question of the evidence before us.
"I probably know more about cops than anyone else this room," Gerald said, "and I certainly know they are capable of planting a weapon on somebody. But, in experience, it's almost always because they know or they think they know a person they're after is guilty of a crime they can't prove. Usually it's narcotics. Sometimes it's some hard-nosed kid in a neighborhood they've worked in who's given them trouble, they hate the kid, they want to put him away. But to plant a gun on a perfectly strange kid? Just to bring a charge of gun possession? When there are a thousand such arrests a day in New York, all perfectly legit? That doesn't make any sense to me at all."
"Besides, where would the gun have come from?" asked Shirley Silvers.
"Oh, cops have two guns on them quite often," said add Graham. "The one you see, and the one you don't."
"Oh, for Chrissake," said Gerald Anderson. "Do you realize what you're saying? You know if a cop walks out of the station house with a gun secreted on his person, and he's discovered, it's his job? Right then and there. He's finished. You think a cop does a thing like that so lightly?"
Todd Graham shrugged his shoulders, closed his mouth, and looked down at the table. Clearly, Gerald's words had only silenced him.
"Well, that may be true, Mr. Anderson," said David Barnes softly, his voice all self-conscious dignity, "although we only have your word for it, you'll pardon my pointing out, and some of us here may have had experiences that contradict that statement, but I don't believe the police story either. I can't exactly say why. It just don't sit right with me. And if it don't sit right, I gotta vote not guilty."
Six people turned to the right and to the left and mouthed, "That's right. That's the way I see it, too. If you don't believe the cops..."
Oscar Williams, the community center worker--tall, thin, middle-aged, very black-skinned, a face and manner suffused with a quiet that passed for calm--had not said one word during this entire time. I turned to him: "Mr. Williams, what do you think?" He looked at me for a long moment before he spoke. There was silence in the room. And then, in a low, steady voice, making extraordinary use of the rhetorical device of dividing a sentence into its phrases, Oscar Williams said: "I cannot believe. That boy raised his arm. With a gun in it. When a policeman had told him to freeze. And that boy ain't a dead boy. I simply cannot believe that."
One instant of utter stillness, and then a jam of voices in the already thickening air: "Amen!" "That's right, that's right." "I'm with him." "I can't believe that either." "Nosir. I don't believe that either."
Gerald Anderson and I stared at each other. We were shaken by Williams's eloquence and its effect on the room. "But still," I could almost see me and Gerald thinking at the same moment.
"Mr. Williams, does that mean you think the cops framed the boy?" I asked.
"I didn't say that." He closed his eyes and spread the fingers of his thin, fine hand in the air. "I don't know whether they framed the boy or not. And I'm not sayin' they did. I'm only sayin' I cannot see that thing happening. "
Williams took off his glasses; the skin just below his eyes and on the bridge of his nose glistened. He wiped his face with a soft white handkerchief. He carefully lifted one pressed pants leg over the other. Then he said: "I'm no social worker. I'm no bleeding heart. I know how rotten kids are. They stink. And there is absolutely nothing worse than a teenager with a gun in his hand. Don't you think I know that? But," his voice dropped one husky octave, "I cannot see that thing happening. And I keep thinking: If I blow this, if I give that kid a record...well, I just wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Mary Davis removed her arms from across her capacious chest and said, "Well, as far as I'm concerned, the man just said it all. Now we either all vote not guilty or we go in and tell the judge we are stuck." She was sitting directly opposite me. She leaned across the table toward me and said, "Sweetheart, cops, they shoot first, ask questions later. All of 'em."
"You said in the courtroom you weren't prejudiced against the police," I said faintly.
"I ain't prejudiced!" she replied angrily. "I'm just telling you what they do."
"It doesn't matter what they do," I said. "You've got to look at what these two did. Or what you think they did. And why you think they did it."
"Oh, there's no talking to this girl," Mary Davis said, twisting her face and body into a tortured profile position. (She really was a very large woman.)
"Yes," said Gerald Anderson dryly. "Well, I do think the question of whether we think the police framed the boy is the crucial one, and it isn't enough to say you can't or won't think about that one. Now, no one's experience here is sacred. It carries no more authority than anyone else's. Our experience is all supposed to be in the service of the evidence before us. Not the other way around."
Everyone nodded, but Gerald's words meant nothing. On and on it went. For hours. It was not merely that the same words and phrases were repeated endlessly; it was that our "positions" seemed to have become congealed; minds and eyes glazed over; we didn't even hear ourselves speaking after a while.
Two curiosities emerged during these hours. One was that Anna James--the nurse's aide who just couldn't believe that boy wasn't innocent--proved to be a near mental incompetent. She could not keep in her mind the details of the story told by the police and the one told by the boy. At one point she mused out loud, "How that boy get over from Lexington Avenue so quick? They must be crazy to think we swallow that." We all stared at her. Lexington Avenue? What on earth was she talking about? Worse yet, what had been transpiring in her mind all this time?
I discovered afterward that Anna James was the most professional juror among us. She had over the years been chosen to serve in innumerable criminal and civil cases; and before my own term as juror was over, I saw her chosen to serve on a complex case of embezzlement. I knew why, too. Her manner was one of middleclass reserve, indicating (to one who asked no vital questions) a quiet but firm capacity to think, slowly but responsibly. During the twelve hours I was locked up with her, I discovered that that manner masked a slowwitted stubbornness functioning in the service of two profound disabilities: she was at all times oblivious to evidence, and she hated the cops. Hated them.
The second curiosity was that each of the others who had voted not guilty also hated the police. Hated distrusted, disbelieved, did not want to think about anything said or done by anyone who was a policeman "Cops shoot first, ask questions later." Young, old, black, white, blue-collar, white-collar: they all drew a pugnacious blank on police testimony.
At six o'clock, Gerald Anderson, who had been staring morosely at a diagrammatic chart of the streets in which "the incident" had taken place, said, "Hey, wait a minute. I just realized something." Everyone perked up. Anything to break this deadly boring tension. "The kid may or may not be innocent," Gerald went on, "but one thing is certain. He lied on that stand. Look, everyone agrees that four policemen questioned him. I mean, the cops said that, and he said that, too. There's no argument there. Now, he says he was questioned at the corner by the uniformed police. And then questioned again halfway down the block by the undercover cops. If that's true, then the undercover cops must have been sitting in their car when he was questioned by the uniformed police. Because it only takes half a minute to get down the block. They'd have seen it. Why would they have grabbed the kids a minute later if they'd just seen them questioned and searched? That certainly doesn't make sense. He must be lying about that."
Excitement generated quickly. Confused, disturbed, everyone was glad to have something new to think about. Eager attention was turned to Gerald's "discovery." None but one thought of where this attention could lead. Oscar Williams sat still and silent, hands folded on knobby knees, glasses glistening in the dull yellow light. He looked up into the noise and very softly said, "Just because he's lyin' don't mean he's guilty as charged." It was as though a schoolmaster had rapped the children for rowdiness. Todd Graham said very soberly, "Yeah, that's right." So did Mart Davis. So did Claire Moran. So did Richard Garcia.
Shortly after this we were taken to dinner, herded together at two or three tables in a chop house, given a selective menu that did not permit so much as a glass of beer, watched over by the guards. It was a depressed and depressing meal.
No sooner had we returned to the jury room, hung up our coats, and taken our seats, than David Barnes stood up, approached the diagram, cleared his throat and said, "I've been thinking." We all looked at him, supposing him about to carry Gerald's point further. Barnes then, after a fashion, repeated the original point as though he were introducing it for the first time, and then proceeded to garble the details so that the point was utterly lost and the exercise at the diagram without meaning.
It seemed impossible that everyone in the room would not instantly see that Barnes had just caricatured not only the point but the point of the point. But no. Garcia said, "Now there's an idea." Claire Moran said, "Would you mind going over that again, Mr. Barnes?" Laura O'Connell, straining nearsightedly at the diagram, said, "I kinda see what you're getting at." Todd Graham looked down at the sheet of doodle drawings under his right hand. Oscar Williams inspected his fingernails. Loren Levine nearly took out the Times.
I swung in my seat to look at Gerald. He was staring into space. I thought I saw something close over his eyes, some invisible shutter come down, and I think in that moment his switched vote was being born. As I looked at his face I knew we were lost. I remembered a moment a few hours earlier when Williams had said something, and Gerald had replied curtly: "You know you're putting pressure on us," and Williams had demurred, and I had thought: "No, the pressure is being applied from within."
I did not know if my conviction that the police did not frame David Moore constituted evidence any more than Oscar Williams's conviction that the boy could not have raised his arm with a gun in it and not be shot dead constituted a reasonable doubt. And I did not really care if the boy was guilty or not guilty, if he was punished or set free, if the police were supported or attacked. But the abdication of thought frightened me. That did matter. In fact it seemed to be the only thing that mattered, and it mattered that it was we--Gerald and I and all the rest--who wouldn't do the thinking. I realized that I had become strangely attached to the people in the room. In these hours together, unwilling and most peculiar bonds had been forged. It was not that we had revealed ourselves to each other, though to some extent we had. It was certainly not that we were sealed by shared understandings of the mind or heart. No, it was rather, I began to see, that we had been locked up here randomly, thrown together willy-nilly like a family, and like a family had inflicted our emotional prejudices on each other. This act cast long shadows. Certainly it touched something in me, made me responsive to mysterious claims I could not at that moment identify. The situation began to seem metaphoric. Civilization seemed to hang on the willingness here in this room to think. In the emotional grandiosity of that moment was born my switched vote.
For an instant I saw things clearly. "Hang the jury," I said to myself, "there is no way out of this." But the last moment I said to myself, "No. They must see. I must make them see." And from that moment on I was, essentially, pleading with everyone "to see" what was happening here. I knew I should hang the jury but I simply could not do what I knew should be done. It was then a given that I would let myself be overcome. Clearly, I needed them more than they needed me.
At nine o'clock Shirley Silvers cried out, "I change my vote! I vote not guilty." Half an hour later, Gerald Anderson, still staring into space, looking absolutely bleak, said, "I vote not guilty." Directly afterward, Loren Levine, who had retreated into near total silence since his altercation with Richard Garcia, said crisply, "Me, too. Not guilty." Why had none of them hung the jury? What personal mystery struggled up in each of them? To what were they "attached" that they had caved in, one by one?
I was the last holdout. All around me pressed voices, faces, shadows, that said, "Explain yourself. Justify yourself. We know who we are. Can you say as much? What is all this nonsense about? Never mind the others. What are you doing here?"
I looked at Oscar Williams now sitting silent, watching me. I begged him with my eyes to understand and support me. He looked at me. His face said. "I do understand, but you're in this alone." The memory of his voice saying, "That boy would be a dead boy" entered into me, made me quail somewhere inside myself. Conveniently, I lost my nerve against that haughty pain of his; conveniently, couldn't hold on to what I knew, began to get fogged up, didn't quite know anymore what was evidence, what a reasonable doubt...
"For God's sake," I cried as though I were going under. "What reason would these two cops have had for framing this kid? Cynically, recklessly, cold-bloodedly, framing a boy they'd never seen before? Now you know goddamn well it's not these two people whose testimony you've been listening to. It's cops. All cops. So what have we got here? Where does that leave us? With two stereotypes: on the one hand" (I raised my left arm at the elbow, hand palm out), "we have 'the cops.' On the other hand" (I raised my right arm), "we have 'a young black boy'..."
The word black was a match struck to a can of gasoline: conflagration blazed in less than thirty seconds.
"Color, color, who said anything about color?" David Barnes thundered. "What chu bringing in color for? I don't like that. Nosiree, I don't like that one bit."
"I knew she had that in her mind all the time!" Anna James shrieked, "I knew it."
"I don't wanna hear a word about black or white," Mary Davis boomed. "Now you hear me? That boy's mama raised him up just like everybody else's. Didn't do it no different from yours."
Shirley Silvers got hysterical and began to scream: "She didn't mean it. She didn't mean it."
Todd Graham smiled mockingly at me and said, "I know. You're not prejudiced."
Oscar Williams's eyes met mine in amazement for a single second. Then he buried his face in his hands.
Gerald Anderson and Loren Levine stared, openmouthed, but remained silent.
It was just easier for everyone to let happen what was happening.
As for me, I felt relief. The charge of racism--painful and frightening at first--was, in fact, a smokescreen behind which everyone, myself included, was only too glad to hide. "You win," I said. "Not guilty." Everyone looked down, or away.
At midnight the verdict was announced in the courtroom. The jurors fell all over themselves fleeing the building. Claire Moran turned in the doorway and said, "Please don't misunderstand this, but I hope I never see any of you again!"
Only Gerald Anderson and I stayed behind. Ours was the sick feeling of cowards that compels hanging around. The lawyers, both of whom were young and eager for details as to what had happened in the jury room, also hung around. We talked a long while together.
We told them many things, and then we told them how persuasive had been Oscar Williams's assertion that he couldn't imagine the boy making a motion with a gun in his hand while facing a cop and not being shot, and how Williams had agonized that this was the boy's first arrest and Williams would be ruining his life with a conviction. The young assistant district attorney listened silently, nodding his head forlornly at every word I spoke as though he knew this litany by heart. I looked at him, puzzled.
"It was Moore's first arrest, wasn't it?" I asked.
"No," he shook his head. "He was arrested in 1974 at the age of fourteen."
"What was the charge?" asked Gerald.
"Pointing a loaded .22 caliber gun at a policeman."
On Monday morning I returned, as directed, to the large jurors' room in the Criminal Courts Building. Almost everyone from the jury was there. Mary Davis, Richard Garcia, and Anna James sat together, but everyone else sat alone in widely separated seats. I walked directly over to Oscar Williams. He rose as I approached him. We looked at each other. I told him what the district attorney had told me about David Moore's previous arrest. Williams's black skin turned the color of cigarette ash. It exactly matched the taste in my mouth.
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