Judiciary

By Gregory Jaynes

For three years Lloyd Carew-Reid, a classical guitarist living in New York City, played a cat-and-mouse game with Manhattan cops. What the man wanted to do was make music in the subway system, hoping his melodies would coax some change out of commuters' pockets. But there were rules against such conduct. In time Carew-Reid, an Australian, got down on himself for trying to make a living in so frustrating a fashion. Then one night a banal but correct notion changed his life. "This is America!" was his thought. "They can't do this to me! It's against my constitutional rights!" The musician and the First Amendment double-teamed the court and won. These mornings you can catch him happily playing below-ground Bach at 59th and Lexington, where he says, "It's a free world down here now."

So it goes throughout this litigious land. In Wisconsin, Selena Fox, a witch, is fighting local zoning laws so that she may conduct religious ceremonies on her property. In Oklahoma, Lucille McCord and Joann Bell, two mothers, successfully ended school prayer with a suit, then, after Bell was assaulted and her home burned, the women sued again and won undisclosed damages from the school district of Little Axe. In Montana, Donna Todd filed her tax return after typing on her 1040 form, "Signed involuntarily under penalty of statutory punishment." The Internal Revenue Service fined her $500 for filing a "frivolous" return. Todd and the courts battle on. Here and there, sanctuary, sanctuary, sanctuary is all the word. Kay Kelly of Tucson, for example, was placed under house arrest for refusing to give the name of the Guatemalan she had sheltered. She contended her right to keep silent on the name was a religious issue.

Well, one could go on, but the point is that the civil docket still makes room for more than whiplash, malpractice, what have you, still accommodates the citizen who has nothing grander to gain than the Republic's concession that he was right and it was wrong, which is pretty grand. In Louisiana, a Vietnamese schoolgirl, no bigger than a pencil sharpened to a nub, had no larger scheme than to publish a newspaper for the "out crowd" at her Louisiana high school, but she ran afoul of her principal nonetheless. In California, a black entrepreneur who sports a thick thatch of provocative dreadlocks and enjoys late-night strolls, even in white neighborhoods, didn't particularly care for being stopped 15 times for vagrancy. He felt that his looks, race and whereabouts were what had invited police inquiry and that these things added up to undue cause. Neither the schoolgirl nor the entrepreneur gave up; they went to the bench.

None of these people are larger-than-life Jimmy Stewarts in a Frank Capra piece; rather, they are obscure citizens who felt slighted on their home patch and sought redress. As subjects, they are what crusty journalists of another age called the "little people." Forty years ago, Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer, bridled at this condescension: "They are as big as you are, whoever you are." With that in mind, herewith the cases of the guitarist, Carew-Reid; the student, Cat Nguyen; and the entrepreneur, Edward Lawson.

Lloyd Carew-Reid, the street musician from Perth, is a squirrelly little guy, blond beard, soft speech, 37 years old, who lives on the rim of the Chelsea area of Manhattan in a dog-eared hotel where drug deals and muggings go down every month or so, where one mad woman thinks she's a rooster. His home environment to some would seem a nightmare; his work environment to most would seem hell. After a day of breathing the iron filings in the New York City subways, one would think he could blow his nose and sink a Hudson River liner. Worse, a braking train in a tunnel in this town can sound like a ten- ton banshee caught in a vise. And yet there he sits, caressing an acoustic guitar in bedlam, playing Bach and Mozart, Francisco Tarrega and Erik Satie, and one of the reasons he got his back up about it was that the city had the gall to hit him with an environmental charge: making unnecessary noise.

In 1985 the Metropolitan Transit Authority issued 3,000 summonses for "unauthorized noise through a reproduction device," a catchall ordinance that covered radios as well as musical instruments, amplified or no. In April of the following year, Carew-Reid was also ticketed three times for "solicitation for entertainment." "Right," the guitarist said sarcastically. "It's a horrible situation down there, and it should remain so." What really got his goat was "the bureaucratic arrogance of it all. Rules. Rules. You've got to have rules. How can rules apply to aesthetics?"

The transit authority replied that musicians setting up shop on densely packed platforms posed safety problems. Said a spokesman: "We do not allow any unsanctioned playing of instruments on the subways." Carew-Reid chose to challenge the constitutionality of the authority's rules against his unsanctioned playing. The T.A. dropped all charges against Carew-Reid in January, stopped issuing summonses to musicians (unless they are found to be blocking an entrance or interfering with train operations -- rare instances, both), and said it would rewrite its regulations.

"It was the best possible victory," Carew-Reid says. "I was almost developing a hate-cop mentality. Now I feel pleased when I see one come up. Sometimes they say, 'That was nice.' "

One recent drizzly morning, a lot of people expressed similar sentiments. "God bless you," a woman said in a note she dropped into the musician's guitar case, along with a dollar. "Lovely," said others. "Just beautiful." At the end of the day, the guitarist pockets between $40 and $60, his normal take. Then he returns to the fleabag he calls home, takes up his duties as president of the tenants' association and works for better housing conditions. "This is America, isn't it? People don't have to live in squalor."

A year ago this spring Cat Nguyen was 16, an honors student at West Jefferson High School, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, and an editor of a soon-to-be mimeographed school paper called Your Side. Five years before that she had reached this country from Viet Nam, with no command of English. Having come so far so quickly, she thought the world was at her ! feet -- until Principal Eldon Orgeron saw the paper and banned it.

He had not been consulted, Orgeron said; what was more, he seemed to read the paper's tone as seditious. Nguyen went to the American Civil Liberties Union. "I had to do it to prove I can fight for my rights and to show other kids they can fight for theirs."

Nguyen is one of those wunderkinds who inspire pride, envy or both. Her mother came from Saigon to New Orleans in 1980 to be near a brother. Cat soon followed. Her mother got a job teaching elementary school and rented a long, skinny house -- a shotgun house -- hard by the levee in the little town of Gretna. Cat conquered English, became an honors student and grew to a height of 4 ft. 9 in. She also got an after-school job in a grocery, where she has to stand on a case of beer to reach the cash register.

Last year, as part of a class project on freedom of the press, she and her friend Regina Saenz and a couple of casual contributors put out their 14-page mimeographed paper. They thought they were being ironic, funny, irreverent. They included references to unresponsive counselors, the selling of term papers, sex, drugs, cheating. "Don't try to cheat unless you're really sneaky, have years of experience and sit way in the back of the class," they wrote in a parody of an advice column. To a would-be dropout, they preached, "Just stay home, get a job at some gas station, get married, have a couple of kids, and before you know it, you'll be 70."

"This was not responsible journalism," said Orgeron. "This school does not extol those kinds of things. That's why this paper has to stop." The principal seized the last 30 of the 150 copies Cat had run off. She had sold the rest at 50 cents a pop. The young woman likes to tell her own story:

"I used to be a waitress in a restaurant, and I knew some lawyers, and they told me to call the American Civil Liberties Union. For a week they didn't accept me. They thought I was just some student mad at my principal. When they did accept me, the A.C.L.U. contacted the school and threatened to take it to court. The school board's lawyers settled out of court. I got the right to print more issues, but I couldn't sell it. We had no money. How could I print without selling?

"I could not sue without parental approval because I'm underage, and my mother works for the school board and she wouldn't sign. If I had my way, I would have taken it all the way. At the end of the school year I decided to publish another issue. Since I couldn't sell it, it came mostly out of my pocket. I just wanted to prove my rights. It made the teachers mad. The principal said he decided not to censor it -- with the lawyers and everything he didn't have the right -- but he just wanted to sound tough."

What dispirited her about the ordeal, the student says, was the apathy of the student body. "I wanted a paper for the majority, the D students. The minority, the A students, have their own paper, the official paper, the Jolly Roger. But when my paper came out, the minority was against me and the majority couldn't have cared less. I wanted to be a lawyer and change the world. But when I saw the minority wasn't with you and the majority didn't care, it looked to me just like politics. I have decided to become a doctor and help people whether they want it or not. I don't want to have anything to do with politics."

Cat Nguyen was graduated from West Jefferson High last month with perfect scores and a four-year Martin Luther King Scholarship to Brandeis University, where she will start the long road toward becoming a physician.

"The dictum that for every wrong there is a right is not true reality. There are a lot of people out there who have been wounded, with no remedy." This is Ed Lawson talking, and can he talk. It is a stunning San Francisco dawn, and Lawson has rejected an invitation to breakfast. "I do not like to do two pleasurable things at once, converse and eat. I find one gets in the way of the other. We'll find someplace outdoors to languish." In moments he secures a public bench not far from Union Square, and occupies it with a self- assurance that all but says aloud, "I am a taxpayer. This is mine."

Lawson ran into trouble in San Diego, where, as an "avid pedestrian," he was stopped repeatedly for vagrancy on his midnight walks, prosecuted twice and convicted once under a provision of the state's penal code that required him to produce "credible and reliable" identification for any police officer who had reason to be suspicious. Lawson saw the matter simply: he was black, his looks were not conventional, and he was treading white sidewalks. His suit called the law unconstitutionally vague and said it violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination protection. The U.S. Supreme Court did not subscribe all the way with Lawson, but it did agree that the statute was % too vague to satisfy the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. Today Ed Lawson's nightly constitutionals are nobody's business.

"I took a terrible beating for years," Lawson says, drinking in the day. "Somewhere back in here is Melvin Belli's office." He sweeps an arm round San Francisco. "I sat there. He said, 'No remedy. No money in it.' I went to the best-known attorneys, the highest priced. They said by and large you don't win against the police department. They didn't understand that I knew I could beat them on my own turf, the media. Most people who can communicate, communicate. Those who can't, carry guns. I thought surely at some point sanity would prevail. But they would not give up, and so it went all the way to the Supreme Court."

In May 1983, the night the Supreme Court struck down the California statute that the San Diego police had used to nail Lawson for vagrancy, Lawson, who was called the California Walkman in headline shorthand, was all over the networks, sauntering, as the news programs had it, wherever he pleased. He said at the time, "If you are one of those individuals who, over coffee and the morning paper, says, 'This is terrible. Somebody ought to do something about this,' you will probably see the person who should do something when you look in the mirror to shave."

To this day he keeps his principles handy, as you would a wallet. Born 41 years ago in Buffalo, he remembers blacks rapping in the streets in a time before they were called raps. "They were always saying, 'They won't let me do this.' My frequent comment would be, 'Who are they?' Much of my life has been uncovering that prevailing myth."

Somewhere along the line, Lawson, an odd duck by any measure, got press smart. He knew he was photogenic, he knew he was bright, and he knew his cause was right. Innocent black man arrested for taking a hike? It was a natural. The notoriety his case received has led to his involvement in other "meaningful battles," as he calls them.

Lawson makes a living in an ill-defined sort of way. "I'm neither a butcher, a baker nor a candlestick maker. I do joint ventures with the entertainment industry. I'm a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I wrote a screenplay. I've got a horrendous project involving the integration of entertainment with education. You want to call me a consultant? Will your stomach settle? Okay, I'm a consultant. But really I do whatever the Sam Hill I want to." Lately he has been involved in something called Pro Per Inc., + which is "attempting to de-lawyer and re-people the American court system by encouraging Americans to represent themselves in court." And there is something Lawson calls the "Unauthorized Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution." He is publishing a biweekly pamphlet called Common Cents, which encourages the common man to celebrate his favorite part of the Constitution in his own way, as opposed to what Lawson sees as a white, snobbish celebration along the Potomac.

"The measure of an advanced civilization is how it treats its worst people, not its best," he says, rising from his bench. "Those who have the most reason to celebrate a Constitution are the poorest. The people in the BART ((Bay Area Rapid Transit)) station. That gentleman asleep on that bench over there." Then Lawson strides away, a man with a purpose.