“Please spell your last name for the court reporter.”
It is my first day on the job, a per diem assignment
replacing a woman purportedly skiing in Colorado.
My hands fly over the keys.Please
spell your last name for the court reporter, I write.
I have trained for almost four years for this.I feel good, I feel ready.My hands, poised mid-air, await the man’s
last name.
The man on the stand begins to speak.“P-R-Z-Y-J—“
Wait, what?WHAT?!
P-R-Z-Y-J-what?!
I look up in time to see Diane, a fellow reporter, in the
very back of the room.Our eyes meet and
she grins, lifting her cup of coffee.
Welcome to court
reporting!
Frozen.I am
frozen.My hands remain over the
keyboard, mid-air.I feel my mouth go
dry.I’m pretty sure that I can feel my
pupils dilate.
I have never heard those letters, in that order, in my
life.
O, Wisconsin, you little Polish-immigrant state you.
None of this was covered in school, where we took mock
testimony from Mr. Ronald Peterson and Mr. Jose Garcia.I curse inwardly as the name of the man on
the stand goes on for what seems like an alphabet worth, ending, eventually, in
“ski”.
Panicked, I write:SOMETHING-SKI.HIS NAME IS TODD
SOMETHING-SKI.HOLY BUCKETS SPEAK TO
CLERK OF COURT IMMEDIATELY.
The next 20 minutes are a blur. My confidence shattered,
I am ready to weep.The integrity of the
verbatim report has been compromised.
I drop my head, close my eyes, and focus on the speakers
with the grim intensity I normally reserve for reclaiming overflowing toilets
and cleaning up after vomiting children.
At the end of it, I open my eyes, sweaty and shaken.The attorneys are packing up, the judge is
gone, the Clerk is gone – and Diane is in front of me.
She hands me a scrap of paper with a name written on
it.“Przyjcymski,” she says.“It’s a common name around here.”
I take the paper gratefully.
My first friend in the court system grins at me.“You a drinkin’ gal, Pearl?”
And I allow that I could be talked into a drink,
maybe.