The Misinformation Of Walter White

I watch a lot of TV. I know, given my desire for academic cred, I shouldn’t admit that. I should probably tell you that I read a lot of books. Heavy ones. That smell old. Well, truth is, I don’t much these days. There is just some TV out there that is really too good to miss. I like to tell myself that at least I'm watching highly respected award winning shows, but I also have my guilty pleasures that won't be found on any critics Top Ten lists. End of the day though, I’m a bit of crime drama junkie (which could be the understatement of the year). I’ve seen every episode of Law and Order (the original only please). The Wire was the best show I had ever seen - that is until I finally finished Breaking Bad. It doesn't help any that I've become a bit of a homebody in my old age. I mean, we do leave the house and are social , but my life lately has sort of become rather boring, at least by my previous standards.        

    

Save me zucchini plant

Add to that the fact that I live in the suburbs, and I think my twenty year old self would be aghast. I haven’t always lived in this kind of a place. I grew up in a small coastal area on the Chesapeake Bay in a much larger city known nationwide for it's touristy boardwalk and ample military bases. My neighborhood was one of many small two street communities dotting a major four lane road. After that I lived in an urban-residential city that suffered from a bit of an identity crisis between its breathtaking antebellum architecture, its ultra-high housing prices, and its crime rate. I may have spent many a restless night there after foolishly plugging my address into the National Sex Offender Registry, but man I had a pretty view from my balcony. This isn’t the case in my current digs in the burbs. Oddly enough, I love it here. It's quiet. At night I hear crickets and bullfrogs, not trains and sirens. I have a garden. I feel safe here. Don't get me wrong, it definitely took some getting used to. No amount of homegrown cucumbers could initially make up for the lack of a corner store within walking distance. Even worse, the restaurant scene is virtually non-existent. I don’t even have the excuse that I’m inundated with chain restaurants. It’s quite the opposite in fact. The strip malls here are filled with independently owned but sub-par joints where the food comes second to being able to offer parents a place to bring their kids – well behaved or not.

But sometimes you find that you’re ok trading these conveniences for others. I mean really, it’s not too hard to drive fifteen minutes for good risotto if it means I no longer have to worry about being mugged when I walk the dogs at night.

On top of that, we even managed to find a neighborhood that’s older (well, old by this city's standards anyway) and which still holds a lot of charm. No two houses are the same and seem to have sprouted up organically over a ten or fifteen year span. This isn’t a planned community drawn up by some developer, and individuals take pride in their homes and in their sense of community. In a previous post, I said of my neighborhood “It’s the kind of sleepy little burg where kids play in their front yards – not in the back, fenced off from the world. The kind of idyllic middle class retreat of yesteryear, where people look up from weeding their well-kept flower beds and wave when you drive by, even if they don’t know you.” In fact, we got home the other day to find a flyer for a block party tacked to our front door. “Join us for an afternoon of games, activities, and lots of fun with your neighbors!” What a cool idea! And what great timing too.

It will help us all feel better about the meth lab that exploded here the other week.

The house wasn’t totally destroyed, and thankfully no one was hurt, but that doesn’t change the fact that the police were called to investigate two explosions in my neighborhood, and the night ended with lights and yellow police tape and crews in hazmat suits tediously sifting through the wreckage and trash.

Part of a transcript of one of the news broadcasts: “It’s such a quiet neighborhood. You’ve heard the cliché so often associated with this kind of story. But this one really is.”

I didn’t know this house prior to the news breaking. My husband had to show it to me. It’s not terribly close to us but is on his morning dog walking path. Looking at it for the first time, you can’t help but notice that it’s a total outlier. When you drive by, it sticks out like a sore thumb – overgrown grass, two immovable cars (one with its front wheel completely horizontal to the ground), and now a noisy orange condemned notice splayed on the front door.
       

I am the one who knocks - to ask if I can borrow some sugar.

Having a meth cook for a neighbor is not like Breaking Bad. I think back to those early episodes, where Walter and Jesse cooked in Jesse’s basement - emerging from their dank chemical closet into the fresh blue-skyed air of the burbs, wondering just how the hell things got so twisted and complicated. Was that how it was for my neighbor? Maybe he, like Walter White, had been befallen with some unimaginable expense, some life-altering obstacle. I could possibly develop a tenable kinship for him if that were the case, as I have for weird and scary Mr. White. The family man. The mentor. The victim. The criminal. Actually I don’t know much about the alleged perpetrator in my hood, and unfortunately, his mug shot belies this idea that he’s some working class shmoe who got caught up in a world of danger and exhilaration. According to that image, plastered on the news and the internet, he’s a scary old weathered dude doing that The Rock eyebrow thing. He doesn't give the impression of hiding in plain sight. There is no mild mannered Walter White facade. He looks and seemingly conducts himself like a ne'er-do-well.

Surprisingly, this turn of events hasn’t shaken my cushy sense of security in my so very much loved home. I know that this isn’t the new norm for my neighborhood. It’s the exception. It was the homeowner cooking the meth, alone, in one pot. It wasn’t a criminal enterprise or a haven for tweakers. Which is good, because meth addicts really freak me out. Something about that ever constant twitchy desperation makes me incredibly uncomfortable, not that addiction should ever be comfortable for those watching it. Yet amphetamine addiction is somehow different for me. The spastic hopelessness is so anathema to how I think and act, that it makes users seem all the more alien to me. They exist somewhere I can never understand, as I do for them in my grounded sense of intention.

As destiny, in all its whacky wisdom, would have it, the week after his house blew up my neighbor was due in court on unrelated charges during the same week that I happened to find myself serving jury duty. Luckily I didn’t get his case. Lucky for whom, I’m not really sure, but I’m pretty sure it was a good thing somehow. I was sent to another trial, and while I wasn’t picked to serve on the jury I was assigned to, I did get to sit through over five hours of voir dire. It was at times infuriating, fascinating, uncomfortable, and downright good. I was actually excited to do my civic duty, unlike my peers who only complained and joked about making claims of racism or religious nuttery in an attempt to force dismissal. The look on my face in that courtroom, as I prepared myself to watch a real life Jack McCoy in action, would suggest that I needed only popcorn to complete my rapt enthrallment. At least, at first.

It was a violent crime for which we would sit in judgment. A man was accused of threatening to, and then actually beating his girlfriend and some form of kidnapping which we weren’t given the details of. Because of the nature of the crimes, each prospective juror was asked if they or their family members had ever had any dealings with violence. Of the twenty jurors who answered questions that day, at least half had stories to tell. There was the girl who helped a co-worker steal away in the middle of the night to a battered women’s shelter. The woman who witnessed a body dump in front of her apartment. The man whose daughter had been held hostage by a deranged boyfriend. The gentleman who’s grandfather murdered another man in cold blood. As these stories unfolded one by one, my earlier voyeuristic excitement grew to compunction for my morbid curiosity.

The DA was disappointingly reticent through much of the proceedings, seeming to simply go through the motions. However, the defense attorney was relentless, taking each person’s very personal tale as ammunition to berate them into thinking that, because they had once known violence, they couldn’t possibly be impartial to his client. Time and time again, despite the judge’s numerous admonishments, he would ask “Are you sure? Really sure? I mean, don’t you think your judgment is clouded?” It was this bullying that made the day so long. People shifted aimlessly but often on the hard wooden galley benches. The potential jurors sighed, rolled their eyes, and pursed their lips. People wanted out. You got a sense that those in the jury box had already banded together as a group. It was as if they stood as one against this man’s continual challenging of their integrity and character.

The day’s events came to a pinnacle when he got to this one girl. Our pre-trial commissions and the hours of voir dire ended shortly thereafter. I had actually met her earlier that morning, as we joked about the terrible coffee available in the courthouse deli (at least it’s hot enough to burn your mouth so badly you can’t taste it, am I right?). She seemed nice, and had we not been called to the courtroom when we were, I think we would have continued to make small talk – if for no other reason than to save her from the recently-hair-plugged business man who divided his time equally between reading a biography of the Pawn Stars guy and hitting on her. When it was her turn, she told the court room her story of the domestic abuse she and her mother suffered at the hands of a stepfather. Abuse that went on for years until the day her mother had found the courage to leave him. Despite this she adamantly insisted for the third or fourth or fifth time, as had the others, that she understood what it meant to be a juror, and that she wouldn’t let what happened to her get in the way of giving that young man a fair trial. She drew much more attention from the defense attorney than the others had, as he spent nearly thirty minutes prying at her for specifics about what she went through, seeming to pick at minutia on which to hinge his theory that she was unfit. 

“But how can you not let it influence you?” he demanded. 

Without missing a beat she told him, “We’re influenced by everything that happens in our lives, good or bad.”

What followed in that moment was total silence, as the DA fumbled in his failure to quickly respond. You could see the other jurors nod in appreciation. I swear the judge even cracked a smile. I kept waiting for someone to start the slow clap. Hell, I wanted to start the slow clap. With one sentence, she dismantled his argument, and everyone in that room knew it. Once the tension lessened and things returned to normal, the defense attorney gave up his line of questioning, thanked her for her time, and promptly told this very courageous girl that her services would not be needed.

Soon after, court was adjourned and those of us not picked were sent on own way. Now I'm free from jury duty for another two years, and I've received my whopping $12.00 compensation check from the county for my time. I didn't see my meth kingpin neighbor in the courthouse that day, and in fact, haven't seen or heard anything about him since. It seems things have neatly fallen back into the normal day in day out, and my life is boring and crime-free again. However, what I’ve taken from these recent brushes with malfeasance and the justice system is that violence and crime and safety and security are all wings on the same fly. We're never truly free from crime, no matter where or how we live, and total separation from it is an illusion. Everyone has their stories and brushes with danger, as my neighbor and those ten jurors showed me, but that doesn't mean that society is doomed.

No amount of TV, no matter how "ripped from the headlines" it is, can really prepare you for when you come face to face, neighbor to neighbor, juror to attorney, with these darker sides of humanity. Walter White and Jack McCoy are great characters that are part of even greater story lines. They are nuanced and thoughtful, and speak of worlds we hope to keep at arm’s length. And yet we misguidedly think of them as realistic. When they do find their ways into our lives, we find that everything we thought we knew, even if deep down we knew better, was just so amazingly wrong. But isn't that what keeps bringing us back? That unreal reality?

Honestly, I don't know. This is just me talking. This post isn't supposed to be some indictment of the pervasiveness of the media, the corruptness of the criminal justice system, or how crime is creeping into our neighborhoods. There's a saying among writers that sometimes a whale is just a whale, and the above is just a little baby whale, just a story I wanted to tell. Well, two stories that happened so serendipitously right after the other, that I couldn't not tell them. So, yeah folks, stay safe out there and thanks for listening.