When about to stand before a judge, as Milo was, there’s a certain urge to get your story straight. Milo focused: His legal problems had seemingly begun with the cat he had gotten for his girlfriend. At best, he was an innocent man. A man involved in a misleading series of unfortunate events linked with shocking coincidence.
This day in court had been set in motion by a simple traffic ticket. Milo had been pulled over on his way to the pound for having an out of date inspection sticker, which was actually a fresh one, but the inspector had neglected to punch a hole out of it to show the next month the inspection was due. So when he was cited Milo had simply noted the court date on the ticket, deciding he would represent himself in this small matter, simply going there and explaining.
There was a reason after all he had not noticed the inspector’s gaff. When Milo had gotten out of the car that day, he had left a grapefruit behind that he planned to eat later. After the inspector returned the car to him, supposedly street-legal now, Milo had gotten in and looked down at the passenger seat where the inspector had seat-belted the grapefruit. Milo had looked strangely at the inspector and driven off quickly. The grapefruit was part of his defense. Open and shut case.
But as luck would have it, the day after he got the cat he was pulled over for a broken headlight and got another ticket, and that oh by the way he smelled like marijuana, but that was, he explained, actually his natural scent. He was cleared of this second charge after watching from the backseat of a police cruiser while some high school graduates with a minor in violating the Constitution rifled through his car, then let some local dog into it as well, but now he had two moving violations.
Quickly followed by a third. He got a call from the pound saying that his new cat had been trapped. The cat was a tuxedo-coated little fellow he had named Mr. Excitement, and Milo first assumed the cat had gotten trapped in a tight spot somewhere. Poor little guy. But when Milo went to pick him up they revealed he had actually been trapped by a neighbor. In a trap.
Milo’s old curmudgeon of a neighbor who built high rise apartments for birds and left mounds of deer corn in the street apparently couldn’t abide cats. He had not only trapped Mr. Excitement, but then sent him up the river. Apparently, and only the pound and the most anal citizens of the town knew this, but there was actually some obscure law that cats have to be on a leash.
Milo was stunned. Then they handed him a ticket for $100. And then he was tazered. Not really, but you get the idea.
Adding insult to injury the girl behind the counter was implying that he was a bad cat owner for not keeping his cat indoors like the pound’s own voluptuous mascot who was slumbering on the counter through fits of sleep apnea. This cow-cat? Milo said. I’m sorry, but we all take a risk when we walk out the door but it’s worth it.
But the point is, he now had a nice little shopping bag of tickets to haul in front of the judge. His originally open and shut case was going to be fouled up by all this. Tell the judge you’re innocent once, OK. Tell him twice and he squints at you. Tell him three times and the bailiff is taking your shoes. Take revenge on a senior citizen and society has forced you to cross the line. Plead grapefruit and well…
So Milo restrained himself and tried to make his court appearance, stopping by during breaks in work to see the judge, but usually the courtroom was so full he would leave to come back at another date. Until one day he found a completely empty courtroom. He sat down to wait.
The first person to enter was the bailiff. He walked over to Milo and interrupted his daydreaming to tell him that he couldn’t wear shorts in the courtroom. Milo smiled and laughed, thinking the bailiff was kidding. New Braunfels, Texas was a German tourist town where most everything that leads to courtrooms was done in shorts: Wurstfest, “The Annual Nine Day Salute to Sausage” was celebrated in Leiderhosen while singing “Roll Out the Barrel.” Two rivers flowed through town where tourists came from miles around to “toob”. Floating on inflated inner tubes drinking beer like a Mardia Gras on inflated black donuts, Milo couldn’t guess how many had been plucked off the river to stand before the judge in their bathing suits. But he didn’t want to be disrespectful. He could even appreciate the formality. It was a courtroom after all, not the beach. He followed the bailiff out of the courtroom and down to the hall where he was shown a tattered cardboard box and asked to select a pair of loaner pants and put them on over his shorts.
There were two well-used choices. The first were Guatemalan pants. Milo picked them up and searched this pattern as if they were possibly a warning from the Mayans, that these pants could destroy civilizations. The second option was a pair of purple warm-ups. Milo humbly pulled these out of the cardboard box and put them on.
It was bad enough they were communal, but they were also tailored for someone suffering from elephantitis. They were simply enormous purple pants. But worse than that, they were also so stiff they retained their own shape, so Milo looked as if just the lower half of his body was filled with sacks of rice and the occasional balloon.
He began making his way back down the hall, his new rump swaying side to side. And this is the proper moment to bring up another key detail. Once a year Milo’s lower back, as it was now, refused to carry his frame upright without severe penalty of spontaneous lightning bolts of pain shooting through him. It forced him to walk in corkscrew fashion and sometimes pray to forgotten saints in curse words. In short, it didn’t fit into his defense any better than he fit into these pants.
Back in the courtroom he sat and waited and tried to convince himself that it was really how you acted, not what you wore or how you writhed in pain, that you were judged upon. That was what people would pick up on and the judge would see him for what he was. An innocent man caught up in a series of unfortunate events linked with shocking coincidence who was wearing clown’s pants, smelled like grass, and appeared to be invisibly tazered every few minutes.
Three women entered the empty courtroom. They appeared to be being given some sort of tour. They were professional looking. Milo looked over at one out of the corner of his eye and her gaze fell upon him, testing his confidence over fashion theory, then lowered, her eyebrow raising slightly. A single indignant match of imaginary anger flared in Milo’s head.
You wouldn’t like Milo when he was angry. He was like David Banner before he turned into the Incredible Hulk. The very picture of the calm quiet scientist type belying a monster inside. Except instead of post-freakout having a green weightlifter in raggedy cut off shorts in front of you, Milo had apparently only half-transformed and was wearing purple warm-ups. And he was still just sitting there. The judge called his number.
