The New York paper (specifically our friend Carol Pogash) today reports that the people who run the Golden Gate Bridge will finally for heaven’s sake, install a suicide barrier.  The average last year of about one successful and two foiled jumpers per week is apparently, at last, too many.  So good.  And about darn time.

And here’s a story about a jumper not so widely known.  

Charles Rudnick introduced me to the late Nate Cohn, a wonderful old-school criminal defense lawyer in San Francisco. He was of the Mel Belli - Jake Erlich school of colorful courtroom artists, just the guy you want if you’ve done something stupid and want not to go to the gas chamber for it.  

He, Nate, told us that for a time he represented Show People of America which was the guild of movie stunt people, one of whom (I've got the name here someplace) needed to raise money to pay off an amiable divorce. Naturally, being a stunt person, he thought of making some money with a grand, attention-getting trick and convinced himself he could jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and live, have the stunt filmed, and make money selling the movie.  Nate represented the widow in the murder case that followed. 

Here is her picture, with Nate the balding guy on her left. 

Nate told us the DA charged the divorcing wife because she was to be the beneficiary of the stunt, had it worked; the money to be made selling the movie of the jump was for her. The reason the trick didn’t work, in spite of careful preparation and practice, is that a Highway Patrol Officer grabbed at the performer as he jumped and threw him into an uncontrolled spin. So, you know, he was killed.... not that he wouldn't have been anyway.  Nate got the widow off, during the inquest as I recall, by demonstrating that the 'murder' was really an accident.

PS.  the film of the fatal stunt may still exist, a possibility that sometimes entertains me late at night.

And PPS.  there's a whole book of Nate's stories -- although maybe not this one, I think.  It's called Murder He Liked and was written by Rory McGahan.  Lovely book.

24 Hours to Life in Reno

First off, the statute of limitations on my crime has surely expired and one little inter-state move of a ‘quantity for sale’ of marijuana probably doesn’t matter as much now as it sure as hell did in 1970.   Second, jail is weird space.  If you haven’t been in, there’s no way to get it.  Time, logic, reality, and the very meaning of innocence is altered there.  This is the story of how one hippie first learned about the weirdness.  

This is July 1970.  The kid with me in the van knew about the dope I was carrying too, which could well have been a problem.  When I met him he was hitchhiking on I-80 outside of Salt Lake, headed west to Berkeley, part of the pulse of young folks toward California.  God bless them.  I picked him up.  He was a runaway, 16 I think, from Michigan.  We talked and smoked some of the dope and drove my green hippie van west, toward Berkeley, toward Reno.  

Now at that time — you have to imagine — the Interstate did not detour around every city and town it came to.  It went thru them on Main Street. In 1970 the Interstate had intersections and cross traffic and stop lights.  This story I’m telling surely would not have happened in later times. Because these days I would rocket right around Reno at Interstate speed.  Because nowadays I would not really ever have been in Reno, driving on the street.  Because  these days I would have dropped the kid at a freeway ramp and just gone on my small-time way down 395 toward Lee Vining and the back way to Yosemite. Because it was the Reno cop who had seen the bulletin about the armed robbery in South Lake Tahoe and it was he who, reasonably it turned out, figured that I and the kid were probably the armed robbers he was looking for and followed us down the street in the middle of Reno.  

Law and Order

There was loud shouting and banging from the stairway inside. On the 2nd floor balcony of the apartment building a man and an elderly couple stood, she crying, the young man -- her son, it turned out -- talking almost continuously to the people, including half a dozen police officers, below. This is in Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb portion of Bosnia, after the war. The dispute, between the balcony and the people banging on the door inside, was over control of the apartment... both sides were internally displaced by the war, and competing authorities had given each a claim on the place to live. I was there with a reporter from the Serb TV network. Onwards of half the population of Bosnia left home during the fighting, voluntarily and not, and there are a lot of this kind of thing -- who owns what.

The police seemed bemused. They didn't much want our crew to shoot video. They didn't do much except keep the door bangers from breaking in. And I'm so naive, I asked the reporter who would decide who gets the apartment. 'Nobody knows,' she said. I think I asked her and she said 'nobody knows' three times before I actually heard her. In fact, nobody knows. There was no system to resolve disputes, no judge, no court, no proceedure. The apartment went to whichever party paid the right bribes, or had the most powerful friends, or knew the nastiest thugs.

Justice, order, predictability, rule of law, the kind of thing we can assume without thinking, just were not available in Bosnia.

Don't have a war.