Murder trials every day upcoming, due to the backlog from COVID. I see that Judge Hollingsworth has the bulk of them. She is the chief criminal court judge.

  February 10, 2021

  Kierkegaard’s unexpectedly boring one-hundred-page discussion of Don Giovanni prompted me to search for my own lengthy study of it, the one conducted on the screen porch on St. Charles Avenue when I was twenty-three. I know where it is.

  Then again, I knew where the diary of my mother’s funeral was. And it wasn’t. I took notes at my mother’s funeral in a small blue-and-white notebook. Since then I always knew exactly where it was—being a precious item of key importance, I kept it in a highly visible and accessible place. I often saw it. But when I searched for it the other day for hours, it was nowhere to be found.

  February 11, 2021

  Judge Hollingsworth has forty-two cases on her docket today and twenty-five of them are murders.

  Lawyers missing. Boy is she mad. Always at the end of her rope. Indeed it would be hard not to be. I have seen how other judges handle it: they are just calm and congenial and accept that this is how it is. “It’s the story of Section K—waiting for the lawyers,” says Judge DeBose. That’s the story of every courtroom as far as I can tell.

  I do find it refreshing to encounter Judge Hollingsworth’s opposite mode: on the warpath. Her technique is to call the docket and if no one’s there, tough luck.

  •

  Of the twelve criminal court judges, ten are black, and most of those are black women.

  Black women are by far the best judges. Because they’ve had it up to here and they don’t have time for falderal. Like Judge Hollingsworth.

  Mardi Gras scheduling conflicts annoy her greatly. Lawyers also annoy her. She doesn’t like the police either. Everyone is sort of quavering in fear of her.

  She is protective toward the defendants.

  “I’m tired of going to jail,” said an incarcerated defendant.

  “We’re tired of putting you there,” said the judge.

  There was a juvenile rape case. No plea deal. They were at an impasse on the case. She set it for trial, maneuvering between her other rape cases so that they would be on different days: “I can only take so much sex in one day.”

  A public defender in a domestic abuse case was missing. “He’s in a murder trial down the hall,” said his colleague (the young handsome one with long hair—looks like Don Gio­vanni), whom he had authorized to stand in. The judge asked if the defendant was a multiple offender; the stand-in PD hemmed and hawed—like Ed Norton in The Honeymooners shooting his cuffs to procrastinate before executing a task. Just answer the question, Yes or No, said the judge.

  The DA recommended ninety more days in the domestic abuse intervention program. The stand-in PD said he didn’t feel comfortable with that.

  It was at this point that the judge’s patience began to fray. She had thirty-five items on her docket scheduled for Wednesday already, so she didn’t really want to reset this case. But she had to, owing to the unflinching ideals of the romantic long-haired stand-in PD, who would make no concessions in his quest to protect his client from censure.

  •

  Things came to a standstill after that because of all the no-shows, and she took a recess. So I watched the new production of Don Giovanni on my device, comparing it to the one I’d seen twenty years earlier. The star, Erwin Schrott, was no longer a stick of a boy. But he still had the magnetic allure of the Don. He was maybe more sedate. Middle age? No, that has nothing to do with it. Don Giovanni could be middle-aged and still ravishing. Dialing it in? Not exactly. More like the spark of divine fire burned slightly more dimly, on its inexorable path toward decrepitude and extinction. He still had the same resounding bass. It was still gorgeous. It still emanated from his entire body and his entire soul.

  The ultimate rotation may be that the Don is the same but a million different opera singers play him through the centuries, variously altering his persona. Erwin Schrott has an innate elegance and grace that some lack and if they lack it then the Don can be creepy. I don’t think that is the true spirit of the thing. It’s meant to be that you adore him and he is bad; you adore a bad thing.

  They changed the end, when the Don is swallowed by the inferno of hell. Instead they made him cower in fear alone on the stage for five minutes. It is not in Don Giovanni’s nature to cower. He does not have a cowering soul.

  Otherwise the essential thing remained the same. The essential thing being that he is a heartthrob. The cad we have all been ravished by who always breaks your heart, but he makes your heart beat faster. Otherwise it would be a boring morality play.

  Yes in the end he is punished, but some of the boring moralizers heralding his downfall are subtly skewered, and there is a giant hole in your heart where he was before. You miss him.

  •

  The last time I saw Walker Percy, who lived across Lake Pont­chartrain in Covington, a giant storm was rolling in over the bridge—the longest bridge in the world—that I would be driving on to get back home. We looked out at the gathering storm and he said, “Delery, the next half hour is going to be good for your soul.”

  Because fear is good for the soul? The way despair can make you notice things more? That is the whole point of everything—to notice things more. But I don’t know exactly what he meant, as I suspect his comment had a religious connotation; he was a zealous Catholic convert. Good for the soul, as in the bracing fear of the wrath of God? Or when you think you are lost, salvation is near?

  Impressively ominous and dramatic and threatening cyclone-­ style vast black clouds were forming, which somehow I was able to note philosophically and absorb the beauty of—despite being about to drive into them. Maybe that’s what he meant, to face a trial, to meet what comes. But I don’t really know.

  What I do know is that he had looked about him and said, I pick out that drab tortured girl to be interested in. I like the drab tortured one. She’s the one I will stretch out my hand to.

  February 12, 2021

  Judge DeBose’s courtroom today was incredibly composed and dramatic. You could hear a pin drop. It’s not only that he keeps order but that people are spellbound by being in the presence of greatness. The docket was short and the proceedings were delayed because, being Mardi Gras time, all the police were out on the streets, so they couldn’t testify.

  He was briefly expounding on football during one of the many delays. “We’re the Saints. We show up. Because we’re professionals. But then we can’t even beat the Giants.” He went on in that vein for a while. Which was endearing in view of his meticulous judicial comportment.

  At the end of the docket he always asks me if I have any questions (and I have a giant crush on him), so after the usual tedious inquiries about continuances, I asked him if the Saints were doing any better, since I like hearing him complain about them in that tortured way he has, alternating accolades with condemnation.

  Next week all the courts are closed for Mardi Gras—with thirty murder cases pending on the docket.

  February 16, 2021

  My nerves were shot. It was Carnival. That meant I had to get up at six a.m. and dress up as a gigantic dice.

  Forty years ago that’s what it meant. Now it means I just lie low.

  March 8, 2021

  You don’t always get to hear the real story in court because of all the boilerplate legal protocol, where the judge has to say the same lines over and over as if staging a play, and the huge random recesses where nothing happens, like on a movie set. Which makes the law boring at times. It reminds me of when people expect you to observe their religious rituals. How they’re trying to make you fit in their mold.

  The law is like pouring batter into a mold. A mold that it does not necessarily fit. But they have to pour the batter into the legal mold, because everything must be kept within the narrow parameters of legal procedure—what you can say, what you can’t say. The law is a rigid mistress. You have to fit into its mold. And even if you don’t fit, they have to stuff you into it. Like people who assume that you will observe their religious rituals.

  I’ve done the same job in Maryland. The same job in Maryland is endlessly different from the one in New Orleans. In Maryland you have to have a partner every day in court and then confabulate with a bunch of ladies when you’re filling out the forms. Because they don’t trust you to do it all correctly on your own, and there is more likelihood of accuracy with a consensus. Which is actually a wise move, but in New Orleans you’re strictly a lone wolf.

  My preferred status.

  The courthouse in Maryland was filled with giant signs that said DO NOT BRING EXPLOSIVES IN HERE. (OK, I’ll just bring my explosives somewhere else?) After a string of shockingly paltry cases in civil court—a man complained that his neighbor poured glue on his car, a woman complained that a man in her office pushed her aside at the microwave—Tom and I went outside to discuss the cases and the paperwork. He was a fellow court watcher, a nice young man.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” said Tom after we had filled out the forms. “It’s very serious.” Gee, this is finally getting interesting, I thought. We’re finally getting some drama around this place. I had never met him before that day. Then he dropped the bombshell: He was being dismissed. Canned. Fired. From a volunteer job.

  He was very discreet when I asked him what the heck happened so I don’t really know anything. I think I could have wormed it out of him but it seemed better to keep it fairly brisk. He mentioned something about lacking humility by having reported the incompetence of his fellow court watchers. At that point I loosened my collar and broke out into a slight sweat, since I’m obviously the most incompetent of them all.

  In Maryland you’re not allowed to read—the newspaper, a book—in court, despite the many interstices of time when nothing happens because of unexplained delays, recesses or bench conferences, etc. Whereas in New Orleans you can do whatever you want.

  The thing that stays the same in New Orleans, defining a failed rotation (Kierkegaard’s fear that things will NOT change), is the horrendous poverty of a kind you will not see anywhere else, adjacent to grandiose prosperity. “Downtrodden in many areas,” I could say—but we all know what that means. It means unimaginable poverty. Anyone subjected to those conditions for centuries would go berserk. It’s almost as if a scientific experiment in noble behavior is being conducted. How much can one group of people take and not go berserk? It irks me to observe the prosperous wondering why there is so much crime, as if unable to execute a math equation. But I don’t exonerate myself for standing by while all this is going on.

  March 15, 2021

  I collated my records and identified the sources of my remorse:

  Failure to act

  Inability to be decorous/gracious/kind (snapped at guests)

  Obsession with criticizing in-laws and their religious practices

  Heartlessness and failure to empathize

  Self-absorption

  Being a bore

  Self-congratulation/self-justification

  Laziness/apathy/lack of energy

  Spiritual paralysis

  Overall impotence

  Pretty succinct, I must say.

  July 5, 2021

  While looking for my missing treatise on Don Giovanni I read some old notebooks in New Orleans from my early twenties that were in my father’s house in my old room. I found the person/girl who wrote them to be shockingly unpleasant and ridiculous and unworthy and lame. Other times I saw her quiet unsung deeds. And my heart bled for her. But if you want glory, I guess go do something public and stop being so saintly and soft-spoken about it.

  I stopped in the back patio of a café and sat on a couch under a ceiling fan where I read about ego disorders because I have one and I want to get to the bottom of it. Probably there is some kind of unsung hero thing of being ignored in my Freudian childhood script. Boys in the family were favored over girls in the South. The emotional response to this age-old lament is quite violent, though somehow more obscure when I’m up North.

  Here it resonates with the clarity of a tuning fork.

  July 6, 2021

  Time went on. It was hurricane season. Malaise/damage from a year ago was still apparent on front porches packed with random stuff, masses of Mardi Gras beads choking the fences, defunct appliances thrown out on the curb awaiting nonexistent trash pickup. The tropical conditions and lack of prosperity were not conducive to efficient recovery.

  A disturbing day in Judge Hollingsworth’s courtroom, with fifty-nine items on the docket. During the course of the morning a defendant exposed himself on Zoom in his car while we were waiting for all the cases to be called. I wondered whether to report this shocking incident to my supervisor. Instead I recorded it in the comments section of the data-entry form. But who knows whether anyone reads my comments, which tend to be rather elaborate, on the data-entry form.

  It was a prurient episode transporting me in a Proustian flashback to the time a guy exposed himself on the playground in front of my grandmother’s house in childhood. As if it were all part of the local color—New Orleans—or key to the initial mysteries of life. In my report I seemed to be madly defending the guy who exposed himself, for some reason. Adelaide (my millennial daughter) says it’s because I have Stockholm syndrome for the patriarchy.

  July 7, 2021

  Adelaide was in town working at an anarchist bookstore. We met for coffee after work. I had spent most of the day in Judge Blanchard’s courtroom. Judge Blanchard was associated with vastly lowering the bail bonds of gang members, which would make Adelaide proud but many others worried.

  Things sometimes got dicey when Adelaide’s inability to modulate her crusade against injustice in a social setting clashed with certain members of the establishment—such as my stepmother—and I had to mediate or gloss things over.

  Adelaide says I have Stockholm syndrome for my step-mother.

  Then she rushed off to a leftist picnic.

  •

  I was staying at my childhood home.

  “I don’t have any diseases, but I’m obviously sinking,” said my father, unraveling his cigars. He had taken to unraveling his cigars instead of smoking them.

  We looked out at the teeming garden and the leaning palms. The paths were laid in sand and bordered by black pansies, amid the overgrowth in the sweltering heat. I questioned why he was unraveling the cigars, while dimly concluding that his constitution could no longer tolerate smoking five cigars per night.

  “They’re going to unravel eventually one way or another so I’m trying to beat them to the punch.”

  Seems like a metaphor for a lot of things.

  Then I had to bid him adieu and go back to my regular life in the capital.

  July 27, 2021

  The lockdown isn’t a problem for me as I’m pretty much always in lockdown. The virtual format persists, so I still get to monitor the courts in New Orleans even when I’m not there. And I’m not there a lot. Because I don’t live there now.

  And feel remorse to have forsaken it, and whenever I return, for the stark reality there is a constant rebuke.

  Back in the courtroom of the heroic Judge Hollingsworth, who had seventy-eight items on her docket. A defendant on Zoom from the jail wanted to talk to her. His public defender wasn’t there and Judge Hollingsworth is a stickler about that and won’t talk to defendants without their lawyers in case they say something incriminating. But the defendant would not be silenced. He said he had been in jail for twenty-eight months and had missed Mardi Gras twice. It was determined that this is because his lunacy hearing keeps being postponed amid COVID and hurricane confusion.

  The whole day was basically devoted to resetting matters due to hurricane-related damages/delays affecting everyone—of whose fortitude I am in awe. Their mode is often levity. Aside from the few who find Mardi Gras annoying, no one would let a little adversity get in the way of the revels. Such celebration is built into the personality of the town and by consequence the nature of the inhabitants.

  So the curtain quaintly rises. The tragedies begin.

  Intermission

  My mother, trained as a psychologist, always thought that peoples’ marriages were disintegrating and was always predicting disasters. Her predictions were always accurate. She knew the worst was coming. It would never surprise her. I always thought when she kept saying everything was disintegrating, that it wasn’t really. But of course it turns out that it is. Unraveling, like my father’s cigars.

  A Yankee girl with high ideals transposed to New Orleans, she had to adjust to many alien dictates of the society surrounding her. Such as hosting an unnatural amount of parties.

  “How was your dinner party?” I would ask her.

  “It was harrowing.”

  “Harrowing?”

  The frenetic pace of my mother’s dinner parties is what is harrowing to contemplate. She was taught not only to give elaborate dinner parties, but their menus and seating arrangements she must record in a special leather-bound book so as not to embarrassingly repeat them for the same group. Everything about my mother seemed at odds with her fierce dedication to mastering these rituals. But she dutifully filled out all the categories—the details diagrammed like strategic battle plans—concluding with General Remarks, where she would summarize the outcome:

  “Food extraordinarily good. Conversation extraordinarily excruciating.”

  And when it came to me—and/or the wastrel cohorts of my youth—she was one lone heroic soul who kept saying Pull yourself together, This is unacceptable.