TWO VIEWS FROM CIVIC CENTER

JURY DUTY brought me to McAllister Street at the northwest corner of Civic
Center Plaza. The contrast between life outside and inside the courthouse
is stark and unsettling.

Outside the courthouse is immersion into civic hell: homelessness,
insanity, substance abuse, throngs begging for scraps, sometimes fighting
over them, sometimes sharing them in joyless camaraderie.

A woman wrapped in a ratty pink blanket rages alternately at passersby and
the deity. A staggering young man stops to urinate on the grass in full
view of the children in the play area. Tourists and office workers shake
their heads and walk on.

Not 50 yards from the courthouse door, several bodies lie submerged under
sleeping bags and sundry possessions. Their positions do not change from a
visitor's morning arrival to afternoon departure. Are these people alive?
Will anyone check today?

Inside the well-appointed courtroom, the very picture of austere dignity,
two articulate and compelling lawyers set out the logic of their cases. A
"factoring company" is suing PacBell for breach of contract. The money
talked about is in the millions.

The business involved is phone sex. A dirty-talk operation in Florida had
been bought out in 1994. The new ownership was financed by the plaintiff,
who was supposed to receive payments from customers' phone bills. But
PacBell kept sending the checks every month to Florida, not the plaintiff's
bank in South San Francisco. It is a close call as to whether PacBell was
given proper notice.

So we jurors followed along for three full days as piles of documents were
submitted and witnesses were flown in from across the country to testify.
We deliberated and came to a verdict: PacBell wins.

In retrospect I see something really twisted. If a fraction of the
intelligence, care and money invested in this tawdry litigation had gone
instead into the treatment of those individuals camped in the Civic Center
Plaza, that problem would be a fraction of what it is today.

Irresistibly, phone sex emerges as a perfect metaphor for the broader
politics here. The gap between haves and have-nots in our society widens
and deepens, and we sit around playing with ourselves to the accompaniment
of professional liars.

Examiner contributor Jeff Zorn, a San Francisco writer, teaches English at
Santa Clara University.

)1998 San Francisco Examiner