Murgatroyd, No One Has Budged

To how many places can you return after a 16-year absence and find every one of the cardboard characters sitting or crying exactly where he was sitting or crying in 1990? Nobody has moved. It was astonishing. I am positive they are the same people. I know they are wearing the same clothes they had on 16 summers ago. Same cocky petitioners, the same distraught defendants wearing frightened masks because they are convinced they have no influence over the outcome. Same iron-brained, uninvolved lawyers. The same emotionless, cement-faced men and vanilla-legged women. The gentlemen are so predictable that if they were chess pieces, you could go undefeated by playing them. Fastidiously faultless in their Brooks Brothers suit and high-gloss loafers, they are distinguished from the rest of Los Angeles by their invariably bad haircuts, courtesy of the Helen Keller School for Flighty Fingered Budding Barbers.

Hurry, Get Yer Tickets, Pal

You may know that some screenwriters hang out at the courthouse, plumbing the deliciously fertile human soil for next-story material. The pint-sized courtroom I entered reminded me of a motion picture set. Surely those people called on to testify were actually actors who came over from the Pasadena Playhouse to try out for a new production. Open a can of tuna, then run your index finger around the edge of the just-liberated lid. That was the quality of acting, which coincidentally matched the lousy haircuts of their attorneys. But I digress because there is an extremely serious point to make.  

An Influential Environment

If I were to craft these essays every morning from 111 N. Hill instead of the Culver Hotel, the rhythms and tones would be markedly different. If the wisecracking would not go away, at least it would be aimed at different targets. Gay marriage and illegal immigration aside, I developed strong strains of empathy for the under-appreciated vulnerabilities of gay men and Spanish-speaking immigrants. The dehumanizing rawness of their vulnerability to the vagaries of daily life disturbed me. We should talk about this later at greater length.  

Shall We Dance — or Fight?

In the courtroom in question, the judge hands out, or denies, restraining orders to almost cartoonish characters, some of whom would rather feud with each other than breathe. We in the audience should have been charged admission to watch the first case. It pitted a brass-tongued, jarringly loud former New Yorker — we know because she couldn’t resist telling us, over and over — against the manager of her upscale apartment complex, a sincere, composed, clearly vulnerable, apparently gay man. No question the rooting interest was with the gentleman, and you hoped he would win 50 to 0. The judge had difficulty limiting the woman’s “yes” or “no” answers to 10,000 words apiece. 

Was She Real?

The gentleman said that when the woman comes home intoxicated, she is sometimes abusive to his staff. He said the obnoxious woman, in a burst of electrifying vulgarities, made repeated anti-gay cracks. She not only did not deny the vulgarities but amplified them. The truth of that claim as the best bet of the day.  The officious woman had one syllable too many in her four-syllable name. She resembled a survivor from the early days of television when there were snowy screens you wished had not cleared up. She tried to stuff 20 too many pounds into a suit that must have shrunk since the last time she wore it in 1945. She w as either pregnant at a record late stage of life or her boozing had leaked, unattractively, into the middle western section of her generous tummy. Demographically, the Grand Canyon must have been carved from this woman’s mouth.

He Had a Bad Hair Decade

The obnoxious woman had walked into the courtroom accompanied by a tall, slender fellow. He wore, shall we say, an arresting haircut, meaning he should have been arrested, fingerprinted and shaved for daring to go out in public this way. After the attorney and client had linguistically teased the judge several times in their exchanges, they reluctantly admitted to being husband and wife. The husband’s taste in barbers finished in a last-place tie with his taste in spouses.

Postscript

Leaving the courtroom two hours later, I was pleased the vulnerable, apparently gay apartment manager prevailed over  Vulgar Vera. The judge, obviously a reasonable man, also denied Vulgar’s attempt to secure a restraining order against the building manager. The husband-attorney insistently, skeptically questioned the building manager about fearing his wife, especially when she has been drinking. The husband-attorney, evidently a survivor of his wife’s liquored-up tirades, seemed not to believe the building manager when he said he was afraid of her. He was not alone. Shoot, I moved two rows deeper during her testimony.