Mike’s Blog

It was an insane summer and I have been neglecting you, dear blog. Thank you for sticking around.

For anyone out of the loop, I made 12 short films in 12 weeks this summer and there are many, many blog entries to read about the whole project. The films were a blast to make and the blog was originally designed to chronicle our trials and tribulations – with honesty, full disclosure and transparency. But as the project went on, disagreements sprang up, some minor, some major, people left the project, not always on good terms and before too long the whole full disclosure thing sort of went out the window. We started directiong the tone of the blog toward diplomacy and promotion as Keith and I tried to put the best swing on all the curve balls fate sent our way. Also, as young filmmakers, airing petty grievances kind of kills both credibility and karma all at once and waiting a while to air out dirty laundry is probably always a wise decision.

It’s easy (and fun) to be frank about ex-girlfriends, bosses I’ve had and hated, the calculus teacher who tried to destroy me – but that’s taking shots at ghosts. They are the untouchables -  almost as dead to me as I am to them. My words here cannot pierce their alabaster skin and if someone gave voice to my mortal barbs, they would pass through one transparent ear and out the other. Shooting bullets at the living is a much more dangerous proposition and though it can be frustrating for a trigger-happy gunslinger like myself, who wants to live in a town in which you’ve killed everyone?

Everyone needs friends. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone can forgive and be forgiven. I am no different.

I worked my ass off on those movies. But that is over. On to the next one, whatever that may be.

A few years ago a lot of my friends got married just as my long time girlfriend was leaving me. It was a time of unbearable solitude and I wondered how I could physically survive it. Not that I sat around staring contemplatively at razor blades or sleeping pills; it literally felt like my body would cease functioning, that I would collapse mid-stride onto the streets of Brooklyn and join the taxi-crushed pigeons like the animal I was.

Remarkably, my heart and surrounding organs continued to function.

Coping.

Years later, many of those same people are getting divorced or breaking up and now they turn to me for some kind of advice, or worse, solace. My old college friend Lisa IM’ed me last week. She had left her long time boyfriend and asked me what she had to look forward to. I dated my ex, Reni, for six years and, as I told Lisa, after the break up I thought about her every single day for two years. It was midday and I had caught Lisa in a rare moment of sobriety. She emitted a low groan, “Fuuuuuck.”

This American Life had a great piece last year on break ups, and specifically, break up songs. I would suggest you listen to if you’ve been there or are currently residing there.

And in that vein, my solitary piece of advice to Lisa or anyone else limping through the streets of Splitsville would be: music. I made countless break up mixes for Reni which I never sent her. They just sat in an ever-expanding iTunes playlist. S0 here they are, for the world, lumped together as one. Yes, it’s Mike Lavoie’s Stupid Break Up Playlist. Because at the end of those days when you go home to nothing and nobody, when the tales of the trials and successes of your day rot in your brain, when a pillow is the only thing that holds your weight, the only words that matter are the ones with a soundtrack.

Enjoy. Or whatever. You won’t die.

Love,

Mike

This February I lost my favorite winter hat on the F train. I put it on my lap at Carroll Street and forgot about by the time I got to 23rd. Greeted by the arctic conditions of 6th Avenue, I found nothing but Trident wrappers in my pocket. The horrible, freezing cold truth exploded in my brain. I had lost not only the warmest winter hat I’d ever had but it was also the only hat of mine that had ever acquired sentimental value. Val, my latest relationship catastrophe, used to steal it from me at bars and wear it home and then to bed. Making out, I would pull it down over her eyes and kiss her all over her face. We both enjoyed this little game immensely and I would smell her Monday and Tuesday whenever I put on the hat. By Wednesday she wore off. Weeks after we fell apart, a dirty blond remainder would caress my face now and then that had wormed its way into the fabric but now wanted to escape.

Two weeks after losing my hat, it came back into my life, or at least my subway car. I spotted it perched atop a Chinese gentleman on the F. Not a hat like mine. My hat. I am sure of it like Jesus freaks are sure of Jesus. I have never seen anyone else wearing a Mountain Hardwear Dome Perignon hat. Ever. Logically,  surely someone in Brooklyn owns a Mountain Hardwear Dome Perignon hat, but it is an unlikelihood approaching impossibility that I would lose mine and then one of the exact same color and model would appear some 14 days later on the very subway line I lost mine. I took two photos on the sly to document the occasion for historians.

Ninja photo!

Ninja photo 2!

Five days later, I saw this same gentleman, again with my hat, coming out of Vinny’s pizza on Court Street. I didn’t have the heart or gall or what have you to strike up a conversation about the hat. I don’t even want the hat back.  It just feels strange that some guy has my favoritest hat of all time and I can’t remark on it in any way. I wish it were socially acceptable to say, “Hey, I used to own that hat! No, that exact hat! You found it on the F train, right?” but I guess wouldn’t want some guy coming into my living room and saying, “Hey! I threw out that coffee table last fall! Yeah, the one you tell everyone you bought from Ikea but actually found on Smith Street and just 409′ed a lot!”

At the end of the day, however, I am glad that a nice human is getting use from my old hat. I just hope his girlfriend isn’t finding blonde hairs on his pillow.

I went on vacation with my 15-year-old step sister to visit my (now our) Grandmother. She wanted to play pool but I told her I had to write a screenplay. Twenty minutes later, she asked me if I was done. I told her I was not.

“Set your scene, start your first line and just roll with it. I don’t know why it’s taking you so long.”

I sighed and told her I was writing that down for my blog.

“You write down too much of what I say. That’s why you haven’t gotten very far.”  And she stalked off.

I moved out of my Bond Street apartment in Brooklyn for four months so that my landlord could refurbish. On January 6, 2009 I moved back in with my friend James. A week later, between two packed boxes we found this:

The note appears to say:

Let’s get rid of them.

We keep the $.

I have an idea.

Neither James nor I claims ownership or knowledge of the Creepy Mystery Note. We are both scam artists and artful dodgers so we agreed to submit writing samples to each other. We wrote samples with both hands, a little lesson we learned from Zodiac. Sadly, we don’t know and can’t afford a handwriting expert, but in our non-professional opinion, neither of us wrote the note.

Me (R), James (L).

We interviewed all “the friends” we had over the house in that first week, eight in total. They all denied scheming against James and I. Of course, actual schemers would say that. As usual, it’s hard to tell where the friends end and the back stabbing bastards begin.

Thinking back further, the guys who moved us in seemed like nice fellows but they very well could have been planning a robbery/murder. In fact, they were black and so is James and their on-site supervisor was white and so am I, so James and the movers (”US”) could have been hatching a “rob and kill whitey” scheme against me and the supervisor (”THEM”) but that’s probably a little unlikely. Even the KKK would have a hard time finding reasonable cause in that scenario.

I guess James and I will keep on living here on Bond Street in utter ignorance of what was already taken from us or just blithely awaiting the day when these mystery persons’ grand plot is sprung and we shake out heads and wonder how we didn’t see it coming.

Your thoughts and conspiracy theories would be appreciated.

My “friend” James. To be used as evidence in the event of my death/disappearance/dismemberment.

Grand Jury Duty, Week Two

Continued from Week One

By the end of week two we were a well oiled machine, the 23 of us knew the drill, the procedure, what slows down procedure, how to avoid that, and toward the end, we were able to close out cases in about 20 minutes. Week two was mostly conflict free except for one instance when a man was found in a deli, with keys to the deli. He was not the owner and he did not live or work there. Police found 45 zips of cocaine hidden behind a vending machine in the deli. Some jurors argued that he had access to the drugs but had no intent to sell. I countered that he didn’t have 45 zips of coke with intent to juggle. This convinced no one. We voted 12-11 to dismiss that charge. So it goes. Maybe he learned a cheap lesson. Maybe he was totally innocent. The facts don’t really matter. It’s all about the perception and credibility. Those and a decent lawyer…

A few terms I forgot to include last week:

• Pedigree information: height, weight, fingerprints. All vital information collected upon arrest
• NYSID #: New York State Identification Number issued from Albany. They are generated from fingerprints ergo no two numbers are the same.
• The Baskerville charge (the coolest sounding charge): If you have are hiding something in your pocket or a bag and pretending it is a gun, even if it just a toothbrush or your fingers, even if it looks nothing like a gun, you can be indicted of this charge.
• “The block’s on fire” – criminal slang for “there is a high police presence on the street.” One of my favorites.

And I guess that’s about it. Now I’m free for 8-10 years in the county of Kings. Of course if I change states or even if I just move to Astoria, I’m back on the roster like everyone else. It was pretty fun and I highly recommend doing it, if for nothing more than civic duty.

Also: I opened up the Village Voice and saw an article written on of one of my fellow jurors. Apparently his name is Andrew D’Angelo and he is a Jazzbo. I have no idea what a Jazzbo is, but he has a fascinating story about having most of his brain removed due to a tumor. Check it out if you are into tumors or Jazzbos.

Preface

On Friday January 30th in the county of Kings, city of New York, state of New York, I was selected at random for two weeks worth of grand jury duty. I knew nothing of grand jury proceedings and was not looking forward to it. It’s actually pretty interesting. Here are some lessons learned.

Grand juries decide which cases will go to trial; they do not decide on the guilt or innocence of the accused. Their job is to consider two questions:

•    Was a crime committed?
•    Could the accused have committed the crime?

If the answer to either of these questions is “No,” they are compelled to vote for a dismissal.

If they answer to both of these questions is “Yes,” they are compelled to vote for a “True Bill,” or an indictment.

There are 23 jurors. There must be a vote of 12 either way, for True Bill or dismissal. If there are less than 12 votes in either direction, it is a called a “no answer” and I don’t know what happens then. We had one of those this week.

I am prohibited by law from revealing the details of cases so I’ll have to write in generalities. If I overstep my bounds, I’m sure I’ll be contacted by The Man, fined and jailed.

Procedure

The foreman sits where the judge usually sits. The foreman position is filled by a jury member; the jury is supposed to vote who this is before we begin (as I later learned in the yellow handbook they gave us) but our foreman was just told he was the foreman by the court official who welcomed us on Monday. The court official just selected the foreman to be foreman because he was Juror #1. He is Juror #1 because his last name comes first alphabetically, not because of his SAT score. An ideal foreman should be attentive, focused, not easily confused and, since it is he who swears in all witnesses and tallies the votes at the end, he should have a solid grasp of the English language. Ours is none of these things. Although he has no more power than the rest of us he still can make a mess of the proceedings by the simple virtue that he is our focal point. We look to him for guidance but he just looks back with enormous deer-in-headlight eyes. You can tell he wants to lead, he just doesn’t know how.

Jurors 2 and 3 sit at the “prosecution table” (the one on the left, near the jury box). Juror 2 is the assistant foreperson and would take over should Juror 1 be absent. Juror 2 is an odd duck who doesn’t talk much and has developed the custom of escorting the Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) out of the courtroom and waiting outside until the next ADA enters. We call him “The Mayor.” If our foreperson was absent and The Mayor had to take over, it would be anarchy. I think he would be despotic.

Juror 3 is the secretary. The rest of us are in the jury box, 4-13 in the front row, 14-23 in the back row. I’m #13, far right, first row, closest to the witness box. This has no strategic advantage, I just get to watch everyone at once, like James Stewart in Rear Window.

One ADA comes in at a time and presents his or her case. If they are good, they can knock these out in under 30 minutes. If they are new, incompetent or just unprepared it can take over an hour. We have one ADA (who will remain, legally, nameless) who is a consummate professional. He is clear, concise, he gets the story he needs out of the witness and gets them the hell out of there. We call him “The Closer.”

We only had two defendants come to court to plead their case. One was, in my opinion, laughable guilty; we indicted the hell out of him.  The other was very credible but had the Holy Bible with him, as a prop, in my opinion. But twelve people bought it, despite the fact that everything he said flew in direct contradiction to the arresting officer. Some people, specifically some of the people of this jury of my peers, just hate cops. They want to believe that the NYPD is full of evidence planting pigs. These people watch too much CSI.

Maybe the young man learned a cheap lesson and will walk the line from now on. Or maybe he’s free to commit worse crimes. Or maybe he was just reading the good book in the lobby with his pals when the NYPD framed him. We will never know. God bless this mess.

As Sartre famously wrote, “Hell is other people,” and it is no different in the seemingly exitless courtroom environment. Invariably, the same two or three jurors will have an additional question for the witness that is completely irrelevant to the case, but the ADA is compelled to bring the witness back into the courtroom. So the ADA exits, brings the witness plodding back in, the foreman reminds the witness he is still sworn in, the ADA asks the foreman (for the record) if the witness has been reminded that he is still under oath, the foreman says “Yes,” the ADA says “Let the record so reflect,” asks the witness the irrelevant question, gets an answer, excuses the witness from the stand, waits until the witness has plodded out of the courtroom and asks the jury if we have any additional questions. Often we do. Sometimes this happens three or four times per witness.

Worse still, some jurors will ask the ADA to refresh their memory about details about the case that they should have written down. We are allowed to take notes in green notebooks that we must leave at the court every day, but only a few of us actually do. Every single time a juror asks a question of the ADA, the ADA must say this:

“Nothing I say constitutes evidence or has probative value – it is your recollection that controls and not mine. That being said, it is my recollection that …”

Sometimes the ADA fields 10 questions from us per case. Last week we had about 30 cases. Those words started making their way into my dreams on Wednesday night.

I can tell this frustrates the ADAs, but it is their job to get a True Bill out of us and if they have to re-spoon feed us facts, dates, and testimony mere minutes after we heard them, by God, then that is what they are going to do. It is Hell for them too. At least I am not alone.

Sexy Court Terminology

•    “Hard” = street slang for crack cocaine
•    “Rocas” = Spanish for “rocks,” Spanish street slang for crack cocaine
•    To Voucher – when a police officer confiscates an item from a crime scene he “vouchers” it, putting it in evidence. A voucher number takes this form: P-######.
•    Zips –  bags which drugs come in. A fellow jury member described the size to me as a dime or nickel bag worth of weed. Cops will testify to finding “30 zips of a white powdery substance on the suspect.”
•    Cops cannot say they found drugs on the defendant, since they did not technically know what was in the zip. Thus we hear a lot of “white powdery substance” (coke), “white rocky substance” (crack), and “white milky substance” (methadone, which is sold in a bottle)
•    Pre-recorded buy money: US currency that is used in the drug buy. The serial numbers are photocopied beforehand by the police.

Elements of a “Buy and Bust”

One of the most popular types of cases we have had to vote on is called a “Buy and Bust.” It’s pretty straightforward and is hard not to vote True Bill. This is what happens:

•    An Undercover agent (UC) slips in through the back door of the courtroom and is put under oath
•    He testifies that on such a date and time he approached this type of male wearing this and that and asked him for some “hard”
•    He receives a white powdery substance in exchange for pre-recorded buy money
•    He leaves the scene and does a field test, which is 99.95% accurate
•    He calls in his field team which makes the arrest on this type of male wearing this and that.
•    He vouchers the evidence and sends it to Albany for testing
•    The UC leaves the court and the arresting officer enters and is sworn in
•    The arresting officer says on such and such a date and time he got a radio communication from the UC and arrested this type of male wearing this and that and recovered X amount of Y and Z dollars, usually including the pre-recorded buy money
•    The ADA submits the lab tests from Albany as evidence, confirming the contents of the zips to be some controlled substance
•    Then we are “charged,” which means we hear the charges and we have to vote on each charge. The ADA and stenographer exit.
•    To streamline operations we started doing a blanket vote for all charges for open and shut cases like this. As long 12 jurors want to vote True Bill on all charges, it doesn’t matter if some jurors would have voted to dismiss on one or two charges.

More adventures next week!

*** Post Scriptum ***

Two of the female ADAs are extremely attractive, which is mildly distracting but I would never let this sway my vote or affect in any way my impartial nature. For the record, one is a younger, hotter version of Sarah Palin (accent included!!) and another is a younger, hotter version of Sarah Silverman. I’ll have to Facebook them when I’m done with my civic duty.