At that point, I knew everything was going to turn out OK and what little nervousness I felt evaporated.

City court is a funny thing. Most of what comes through are homeless people, vagabonds, and other street characters, many of whom know each other on a first name basis through jail alone. It wasn’t too long after Hurricane Katrina, so almost every one of the ne’er-do-wells brought before the judge claimed to be a New Orleans refugee, hoping for sympathy. The judge didn’t care. But watching these people once again I felt this strange sense of dislocation- a disbelief that I had wound up here, that playing games ever since I was a kid would lead to this day, this hour, and this moment.

The Barrister and I were called up and the charge was read. The prosecutor stood up and made his statement of intercession. The Barrister asked to read a statement and the judge allowed him to do so. He had a piece of notebook paper with red ink scrawled on it. His prosaic, jargon-filled statement basically added up to the following:

Michael Barnes is hereby forbidden to enter the premises of Atlanta Game Factory and will be considered a trespasser on private property and subject to arrest if he attempts to do so.

Now, I don’t know how that statement would have held up legally or if it was even valid- particularly since I was one of the store owners and was a partner in the business but I was effectively banned from my own store. The judge didn’t seem to dispute his statement so I assumed that there was some weight to it. I told her the situation and she simply said that was for us to work out outside of her courtroom.

I was sentenced to twenty hours of community service. I wound up doing research for a Rosa Parks exhibit at the King Center for an Atlanta-based nonprofit. I actually had a really great experience with it and actually offered to do more volunteer work for them- they were nice folks, and they let me out of about ten hours of the service. Hard time indeed.