“I can’t see you right now, Jane,” he said, and started to shut the door on me. Then the door jerked open again, and this giant ape of a guy stepped up behind Ganesh and belly-bumped him so hard he nearly fell on his face.
“Hi there, Jane,” the ape said, grabbing Ganesh by the back of the neck to steady him. “What brings you here?”
I kept my voice casual: “Just dropping by to say hi.”
“Oh yeah?” He looked down at Ganesh, turning him like a can whose label he wanted to read. “You sure about that? Because Ganesh here, he likes to sell things to people—he’s not so good about paying bills, but he likes to sell. You sure you didn’t come to do some shopping, Jane?”
“No, really…I’m just here to say hi. But if you guys are busy…”
“Yeah, we kind of are…” He started dragging Ganesh back inside. “So come back later. Much.”
I hadn’t seen or heard from Ganesh since, and I naturally assumed the worst.
I hadn’t seen Julius Deeds since, either. His lawyer had him cleaned up for the trial, but King Kong with a haircut is still King Kong, so I should have recognized him right off the bat. But I was so gung-ho to get on the jury, I spent my first half hour in the courtroom focused on the juror questionnaire. It wasn’t until I got done bullshitting my way through that and handed it in that I noticed Deeds staring at me, trying to work out where he knew me from.
We both got it at the same time. Then he smiled, like Christmas just came early, and all my good intentions went straight out the window. I started hoping three things in quick succession: one, that I didn’t get picked for the jury after all, two, that Deeds hadn’t made bail, and three, that if he had made bail, Ganesh was either dead or out of the country, because Ganesh knew where I lived.
I’m going to guess that none of your hopes were realized.
Of course they weren’t. I’d done such a great job on the questionnaire that I was the first juror seated—Deeds looked really happy about that—and then later, after we were dismissed for the day and I’d snuck out of the courthouse, I saw him on the sidewalk shaking hands with his lawyer.
So I tried calling Ganesh, but his phone had been disconnected. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I thought it might be a smart idea for me to skip town regardless, but first I made a stop at the house of this other dealer I knew, to re-up my Valium stash. And it gets hazy after that, but I guess between the Valium and the bottle of vodka I kept in my freezer, I decided not to skip town.
Now there’s one other important thing I haven’t told you, and that’s the date that all this happened. I got summoned to jury duty on Monday, September 10th, 2001. And so the next morning I came to in my living room at around six a.m., and the TV was on, and at first I thought it must be tuned to the Sci-Fi Channel because there was this image of the World Trade Center, and one of the buildings was on fire. Then I saw the CNN logo in the corner of the screen, and I’m like, hang on a minute. And it had just registered that this wasn’t a bad movie, this was real, when the second plane flew in.
I turned up the sound and sat there for about an hour with my jaw hanging open. Then my phone rang.
It was King Kong: “Hi there, Jane.”
Instead of being freaked out like I should have been, like I was supposed to be, I actually felt sorry for the guy, because the world had just turned upside-down and he obviously hadn’t gotten the memo yet. So I said: “Are you near a TV set?”