At the corner of Broadway and Temple, the hundreds of supplicants of justice were already hurrying for their appointment with the custodians of legal wisdom. Black people, brown people, yellow, beige, white people; tall, thin, obese, short, graceless people; the homely and the proud, the gorgeous and the shy; old men wrapped in Salvation Army castoffs and Valley girls in soft Italian leather; Chicano gang members in their chinos, Pendletons and Hush Puppies; their old ladies, their rucas with their manes of hair teased out to the max framing drippingly mascaraed eyes; black South Central preachers clothed in cheap suits and dignity, accompanying their brethren, faith and Bible in hand; shiftless, incestuous white parents, chain-smoking cigarettes, herding their runny-nosed towheaded runts forward; bewildered jurors from the suburbs of Pasadena and Palos Verdes; the alcoholic defense counsel; the corruptible district attorney; the fair, the dark, the keen, the dull-witted, the happy, the dumb, the ones in pain, all streamed into the dark mausoleum with marble floors called the Criminal Courts Building.

I took a last look at Mount Baldy, knowing that by noon, when I left the building, the sublime, pristine shoulders and peaks would be a sootish yellow brown from the smoggy filth of life in this basin and that neither I nor anyone on this earth would be able to halt the besmirching tide that floats in the air and falls, with gravity's solemn pull, on us all, the virgin and the soiled, the hopeful and the lost, the searchers and the dead. I took a deep breath and joined the streaming flow.