The Defendant Pleads – Jon Doughboy

September 16, 2025

“This was in the 70s, leaded gas and pit-stained polyester, wide collars and wider cars, and I had one of those blond wigs because the Son of Sam was out there, a monster lurking just a couple of neighborhoods over, so I’d run out of my apartment in Rego Park and dive into my ex-husband’s Fiat though back then he wasn’t yet my husband let alone an ex, a cute yellow toy of a car that was always breaking down and I jumped in as it was rolling, the idiot left me in the 80s for a frog-faced secretary from New Jersey after all I did for him, made him, really, pushed him to get a job, to dress right, guy didn’t even own a collared shirt till he met me, didn’t know what chambray was, not that anyone seems to know or care about clothes now, it’s all sloppy pajamas for kids these days, torn jeans, fast fashion, disheveled sluts and wimpy slobs instead of real men,” she told the jury, the lawyers, the judge, the faux-oak panels, the sheetrock, the marble floors, the dusty courtroom air, she’d tell anyone who’d listen and even those who wouldn’t, had the telling sickness from the day she was born in a stucco house in Tétouan, standing on the balcony, once she could, on pudgy toddler legs and giving an earful to the sea “and the wig was itchy but I thought I looked cute too, as a blonde, you probably can’t see me as a blonde, or even as a woman anymore because once you hit seventy, sixty, sixty-five, it’s over for you as a sexual creature, it’s all ‘ok, boomer’ and bitterness about how good we had it, cheap housing, free college and well, they’re not wrong, but am I responsible for that? Not that we can’t or don’t have sex, we’ve all heard the stories about what those horny old biddies in senior housing get up to between the sheets, Viagra has made a lot and I mean a lot, possible” and she waggled her fingers in a vaguely sexual, suggestive way “maybe even what should no longer be possible, but you’re not an object of sexual fascination is how I’d put it, no longer seen, hit on, not that kids these days do much hitting-on anymore, it’s all online now, ‘apps,’ my daughter says, ‘it’s all apps, mom,’ swiping this way and that, but nevertheless as I was saying, what was I saying?” and here she looked at the crumpled judge stupefied on her bench “yes, the blonde wig and I’m a dark brunette by birth and nature and even temperament, not really the light-hearted surfing ditzy blonde sort” and she broke into song, briefly, hoarsely, a courtroom karaoke “let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learnin’ how” then resumed “no offense intended to any natural blondes on the premises, but a serious brunette I was, sharp-witted, even my ex-husband said so, the moron, the good-for-nothing oaf, and we’d roll out of the neighborhood to go back to the city to dance and drink or we’d go to the new Chinese place on Queens Boulevard for all-you-can-eat egg rolls and food was cheap then, affordable, you could live then, now I’m not so sure how the kids are going to make it, you know, start families, buy homes, the bridges are collapsing, the hospitals are crammed, yet somehow we have money to send guns to countries half-way across the world, makes you wonder? Where was I? In the 70s, Son of Sam, Chinese food, right—though my father-in-law was a real Archie Bunker old-school Queens-type and refused to eat any ‘China food,’ he said, ‘no China food, it’s all rats and pigeons,’ and in that yellow Fiat with that fake blonde hair I felt like a true American starlet, not a Moroccan girl with a degree from an Albany secretary college making chump change as a switchboard operator in the Diamond District, but Grace Kelly, elegant, or a Kim Novak type, class and charm I mean though I suppose some of you are too young to even know who Kim Novak is, huh? Anyway the ride was magical so I kept on wearing that wig now and then, putting on my blonde self, transforming into an American sweetheart for romantic getaways and we drove once to Mt. Fuji in New Jersey where the chefs flipped hot shrimp into their hats and put on a real show, a teriyaki carnival, and I’m convinced that’s the night my daughter was conceived, in a motel near there, I’m not embarrassed to say it, why should I be? Viagra is a little gross, yes, but I was young then, beautiful, we were in love, and I missed some of the smells of Morocco, the sea, the lamb and spices bubbling in tagines by the bus station, the sweet mint tea my grandmother guzzled by the liter, my father in a dark jellaba haggling over the cost of olives, winter medina scents of wet wool and preserved lemons, but that night, at the foot of Mt. Fuji, wearing a blond wig and lying naked with my soon-to-be husband in the sheets of a New Jersey hotel, I felt like I was finally American. I’m sweating now and maybe partly at the memory of it but it’s also got to be the crummy a/c you have here, it’s not even proper air-conditioning, it’s one of those heat pumps, isn’t it? Near as I can tell all they do is pump in heat. This must be what my daughter calls enshitt—pardon my French—ification. Back to the wig. The significance of the wig. You can understand why, after all I’ve told you, that, last week, when I was dressing the mannequin in the women’s department at my job at Macy’s and I want to remind you that I’m in sales, I mean I was in sales, before they canned me, unlawfully, mind you. In sales. I’m there, really, to sell. Years ago they would have had someone else to do the displays, someone in merchandising, but now we have to do everything ourselves not that I’m complaining, necessarily, I do the work, don’t I? but it is annoying” and here she turned her palms up as if to say “what can you do?” and then did in fact say “what can you do? and this particular mannequin had on this beautiful blonde wig, nothing like the bird’s nest I wore trying to hide from the Son of Sam, and I just knew I had to put it on, it was calling to me, my head had a predestined date with it and who was I to deny destiny? With the wig on I waltzed out of Macy’s and into the mall proper, toward the escalators and the food court and for about five minutes I was young again, wrinkle-free, svelte as I was at the Copacabana because fine I’m on the fat side now, plump, you could say, and can’t afford Ozempic and I walk a lot but not as much as I used to because there’s water in my knee but I weighed ninety-five pounds on my wedding day, before the ceremony anyway, because I probably ate five pounds of couscous during the reception. I was gorgeous on my wedding day but also in the mall that day, a blonde bombshell, a goddess, something those flyboys in WWII would have painted on the nose of their B-52s, something wonderful, soaring, lethal. I’d regained all my youth and looks and vigor, gained even more than my own, channeled all of Old Hollywood’s combined glitter and glamour and when mall security chased me down and ripped that wig off my head like they were renovating an apartment and it was grody shag carpeting, and when they called the police who took me—me, a 75-year-old woman with no record who spent, no, who wasted thirteen years of her life loyally working for Macy’s—in cuffs to be processed in jail—Jail!—even though I was released right away, I can never, will never, forgive them, for it wasn’t only me in that moment they were defiling, no, it was the whole American dream, the America that landed on the moon, the America I worshipped as Moroccan girl huddling in front of our tiny tv at the northwest tip of Africa, all that we’ve fought for, exported, and imposed on the world, apple pie and blue jeans and democracy, in that wig I was Marilyn Monroe as Uncle Sam setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July, happy birthday, Mr. President, bombs bursting, I was a shrimp popped hot and fresh off the hibachi and right into your hungry mouths, I was proof through the night, I’ll swear it on the Bible you have over there, I was, I was, and they took that from me, from you, and put it on trial, so if you’re asking me how I plead, of course the answer, even if it’s a little long, is—has to be—not guilty.”