Santa Maria Sans Michael: Back to Semi-Normal

"Something like that won't happen here again," Parker says. "It's like the hundred-year flood. Something will happen somewhere -- every 10 years. Just not to us. It's California, there are lots of celebrities. It's bound to happen."

On this particular morning, Parker says, he was walking into his office when a man asked him two questions: "He said, 'Is this where I pay my traffic ticket?' and I said yes, and then he said, 'Is this the place Michael Jackson was?' and I said yes, and he said, 'So I'm going to get in trouble for doing nothing, and he got off,' and I said yes."

So, then, a kind of normality. ("This place was never normal," says a woman working behind the bulletproof window where the adjudicated masses pay an assortment of court-ordered fines.) The courtroom where the Jackson trial played out is currently being used for jury selection for the trial of Bruce Lynn Sons, who was charged in 1995 with the killing of a state highway patrolman in Bakersfield. His first conviction was overturned in 2002; two other trials resulted in a hung jury, and so Santa Maria was picked in a change of venue, and there's a gloomy sense of futility about this, Parker says, far more than the 18 months the entire Jackson saga -- from arraignment to acquittal -- took.

"Four days and they haven't seated a single juror yet," Parker complains. ("Why can't it be quicker, like Michael Jackson was?" whines an elderly woman in the jury pool to one of her cohorts while they're on break.) In the courtroom next door, Commissioner John F. McGregor is working through a laundry list of arraignments with an assistant DA and a public defender. Many cases deal with methamphetamine, shoplifting, drunk driving. There's a domestic violence charge. Upstairs, a woman from New York pleads out a forgery charge. She gets her probation paperwork and comes down to the entryway and calls her boyfriend, telling him in another language to come pick her up. She paces back and forth across the very spot where Jackson and his entourage arrived each day last spring.

Back inside, a peroxide blond transgendered woman in floral capri pants and a sleeveless hoodie is facing meth-possession charges. She fidgets and sighs and switches seats every five minutes. Her court-appointed attorney at last advises her to plead no contest; she wants a trial. Bring on the drama. The whole thing is pushed back a few days and she leaves in a swirl and gets on her bike, repeating, "Oh, my gosh" over and over, and begins pedaling away to some other sort of Neverland.

In his office, the day's proceedings winding down, Parker shows off some of his Jackson mementos: a framed printer's plate of the front page of the Santa Maria Times from the acquittal verdict. TV reporter Diane Dimond's book, "Be Careful Who You Love," about all the dirt -- "signed," he says. A rubber ducky on the wall that refers to an inside joke among the staff.

In the weeks after the trial, to cheer them up, Parker threw an appreciative barbecue for the staff. One hundred sheriff's deputies and other key players were given framed, pastel courtroom sketches from the proceedings, donated by the artists who drew them.

Rodney S. Melville, the judge in the Jackson case who is well regarded for keeping the trial sane and orderly, has gone back to his usual diet of family court matters in a smaller courtroom. (On this day, he is in San Francisco representing the county court at a budget committee hearing.) Tom Sneddon, the district attorney who lost the case, is going to retire after a new DA is elected this fall. Thomas Mesereau Jr., Jackson's defense attorney, and his colleague Susan Yu abruptly dropped their client three weeks ago, without comment.

And Jackson has been living in Bahrain all this time, according to the Associated Press. Tabloid rumors have him doing push-ups every day, considering a macho makeover to reignite his career. The state has given him until Tuesday to make financial amends with his staff, which hasn't been paid for months. Local animal welfare agencies have taken many of Neverland's animals away.

Parker shrugs.

"People ask me about Michael Jackson, or if I've seen him since, as if I have any connection at all to him," he says. "I ask them, 'Have you seen Elvis?' "