My Muse may well be a seventh grade boy...

We have a new Criminal Courts building here in Fake Cow County.

That makes us sound all up town, don’t it?

Well, we ain’t.

It’s actually the old Sears store, a couple of blocks down from the Courthouse. In an excruciatingly slow and bumbling process, one old guy and a passel of jail inmates remodeled it into a courthouse annex. It has been a source of contempt and derision among county employees for a long, long time.

The powers that be decided that such a massive undertaking could only be properly appreciated with an equally massive bit of nomenclature. So they named it after three of our previous judges, whose claim to fame was either going on to bigger and better things or just living for quite a long time. They named it the Jones, Smith and Bob Justice Center. (Or something like that.) They prefer we refer to it as The Justice Center.

Not. Bloody. Likely.

For one thing, The Justice Center sounds like somewhere the Super Friends would hang out and wash their tights. No tight washing is going on here, let me tell ya.

Secondly, the building’s decidedly odd design negates any attempt at taking the thing seriously. There are flowerbeds in locations that deny them totally the light of day. There are dead trees imprisoned in concrete, a half city block from any source of water. There are numerous entrances, all but one of which are locked. The jury boxes in both courtrooms hold only 10 chairs instead of 12. The jury rooms are too small to accommodate a table. There are 24 restrooms, but they are ingeniously camouflaged in such a way as to prevent them from being located and accessed by the general public.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The building was called simply “The Sears Building” for the seven or so years it took to complete. Once it was finally ocupado and its many outstanding features came to light, it came to be known as the Thompson Tabernacle, after its builder and champion, Mr. I.B. Thompson.

However, I think its more permanent name was bestowed by a man who should be played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie. He - and subsequently the rest of us - named it “Carpet World”.

Evidently, Mr. Thompson got a damn good deal on industrial grade grey carpet. Every floor in the place is covered in it. As are the vast majority of the walls.

Ever tried to vacuum a wall?

It was evidently some sort of noise reduction strategy, one that has seriously backfired. The floor to ceiling carpet does a good job of absorbing ambient noise, making the courtrooms and offices quieter than most tombs when no one is there. You can’t hear the air conditioning or the hum of the electrical lights. There is an almost physical sensation of sound being sucked out of the room by a silent, unseen force.

Then you realize that all other interior sounds are intensely magnified. I can count my heartbeats and hear the blood coursing loudly through my veins when ever I wait in an empty courtroom. The sound of my breathing sometimes becomes obnoxious to my own ears.

When someone else enters the room, you can hear every step, every breath they make. And God forbid they plop down next to you on the pew and start to wax snarkolent about the current state of local politics. Every whispered word is magnified by a power of 50 and plainly audible across the expansive rooms. This has put a serious dent in the courtroom snark. In the past we’d sit in groups and do a quiet play by play analysis of the action on the witness stand or the state of the bailiff’s haircut or some other subject of equal importance.

Not anymore. We sit silent and stone faced. And we write notes.

Friday was my court day, so I got there early to secure a good seat for the morning session. The Court was hearing arraignments, divorces, juvenile hearings and a couple of felony guilty pleas. The place was packed. I sat against the wall on the next to last row of pews. The front two rows were crammed with jail inmates in various shades of orange and impressive entanglements of shackles. They looked like some sort of vaudevillian bondage troupe. Behind them were a couple of lawyers and sheriff’s deputies. I was on the next row, along with a lawyer, his secretary and a malingeringly distraught divorcee. There were several bail bondsmen and an out of town lawyer and his client on the back row.

Just a bit of unsolicited legal advice: Always, Always, ALWAYS hire a local attorney. If you wanna spend yer money on F. Lee Bailey, go ahead, but hire you a local guy to do most of the mouth work. It’s important. Out of town lawyers always suck hind tit. It doesn’t matter how good they are.

Anyway, during one of the juvenile hearings, the County Attorney requested a conference with Counsel at the Judge’s bench. They held a whispered confab at the bench. I was sitting behind the bar, across the room, four rows back. I could hear every word. Every Word.

During that conference, another attorney approached his client, one of the bondage boys on the second row. He whispered to the guy that his case was not being heard that day due to some sort of snafu. He was sorry they brought the guy up to the courthouse for nothing, but hey, at least it was a chance for some fresh air. The guy didn’t say anything.

However, I came to believe that the man was somewhat relieved and relaxed to know that his turn before the bench had been postponed.

No long after the attorney sat down across the aisle, someone’s stomach growled. Long and low and rumbling and downright rough. It was a gastric event of gargantuan proportions. I could tell it had come from the same guy by the way the two men sitting on either side of him whipped their heads around to stare. Then they both scooted in opposite directions down the pew, away from the man in the middle.

I felt kind of sorry for him, until I realized something about the acoustics of the room. For sound to be contained as it is, the very air itself must also be contained. I realized this a few short moments later, right after I realized that what I heard was not a man’s stomach growling.

A noxious green cloud had risen over the spectators and hung, heavy, in the air. You could almost see it. And it had no where to go. My eyes began to water. Several people coughed nauseously. I would have gotten up and run from the courtroom, except for the fact that the room is designed in such a way that the rear doors open directly to the front of the building, which means you can enter the courtroom without going through the metal detector or past the security cameras. The doors are kept locked at all times. The only entrance and exit is right up front, next to the bailiff’s desk.

There was no escape.


I’m starting to hate Carpet World.