Some of my friends never speed; more of them never get caught -- my wife, for instance. I don't often speed, but whenever I do, it seems, I get caught. But now, this year, last month, I had a life-changing experience in traffic court: From now on I will never speed, never get tickets, and never fret about insurance coverage.
Every so often, we leave the city of New York for what is called the country. In doing so, we drive a car. We shouldn't, I know, but we do because we usually bring a lot of stuff and because our idea of the country is at some remove from commuter trains and their wonderful little stations. Most of the time we take an up-hill-and-down-dale parkway that I will call here the Bucolic Parkway. It's a pretty road and one with no trucks on it bigger than monster pickups. Deer can present a serious threat on the Bucolic. Natural selection has not yet made them any more conscious of the dangers of darting into traffic than, say, our adopted little street dog. Still, I like the Bucolic and don't mind driving it, north or south. It doesn't get a lot of traffic. We listen to a well-acted audio-book or a podcast on neuroscience or the Supreme Court. The drivers who use the Bucolic seem to be sober middle-aged types in no great hurry and with no inclination that I can detect to road rage. (This is a huge relief to anyone who has ever survived the West Side Highway, where everyone of either sex seems to be drunk on testosterone and where no one passes in the left lane when they can careen in front of you from the right.)
Three months ago, in my former driving life, I was caught, I confess, going 73 miles-per-hour on the Bucolic; not such a big deal, you may say. Trouble was, I had gotten another ticket -- a big one -- two and a half years before. It was on the madcap West Side Highway, in fact, under the cliffs below the George Washington Bridge, where it changes its name to Henry Hudson Parkway. I had made it a religion at that point to never go much beyond the posted speed limit, wanting to keep my insurers content with my overall driving record. But in trying to survive the general rush to the north, I had completely missed the several signs saying 35 miles-per-hour on this one little curving stretch. The ticket that time, from a grim, booted city policeman, was for $280. I paid it, grudgingly, after dithering with a friend about whether or not to go to court in hopes of a knockdown to a lesser offense. Then, a month or two later, I got a bill from the State of New York for a "responsibility fee" of $300; this was for going more than 20 miles per hour above the posted limit of 35. I paid that, too, but now my grudge was deeper and stronger.
More than two years passed. Then this fall, driving alone on the Bucolic, I lost my dutiful concentration going down a hill. Before I knew it, there was a cop behind me with his lights flashing and his siren whining. "Oh, no," I thought. "My insurance company won't like this. It's not yet three years!"
The young policeman was nice about it, once we got to talking, but he still issued the ticket.
"How fast were you going?" he asked me.
I didn't want to say that I always tried to go 10 miles above the limit -- that would be an outright confession. "Uh, I try to stay with the flow of traffic," I offered.
"The laser had you at 73," he said. I thought of the responsibility fee and sighed with inward relief; at least I wasn't 20 beyond the limit, only 18. "Did you use cruise control?" he asked.
"I think so," I said.
"Sometimes on the hills," he explained, "it shoots you up with the RPMs and..." Hmm... perhaps I had been speeding unintentionally, involuntarily! He had planted a little seed of rationalization that grew over the next few weeks as I sent in the ticket with my plea of not guilty.
I then went online to find out when exactly it was that I had been caught the last time. Once I learned the date of that last, mighty ticket, I decided that not only would I make sure to go to the hearing, but I would also try to postpone the date at which I would be found guilty -- and thus the date at which my insurance company would date my conviction. With a little luck, I could reach the three-year point, whatever the fine. So I appealed to the clerk, twice, for delays of my appearance.
Then came my fateful court date. Here's how it went: I got off the Bucolic on a very snowy afternoon, coming to a stop at a desolate corner with nothing in sight except a big aluminum-sided warehouse facing me from across the little road. It looked like a depot for sand and salt: huge and cavernous, more or less new, with only a parking lot surrounding it, and nothing else in sight -- certainly no town to justify the notion of a municipality or a court. Kafka for the parkway, I thought. A sign across the way said, with eloquent concision, "Court." I drove into the lot, parked my car, got out and walked around to the front door, hearing loud Muzak at the back of the building. I entered a large room with rows of chairs, as if for a struggling fundamentalist congregation. Up front, where you might expect an altar, there is a shiny, wooden construction behind which sits the judge, ancient looking, sunken in his robe, bald, decrepit, red-faced -- in short, straight out of Dickens: a guttered-out Christmas candle. Next to him, to his right, the slightly less ancient clerk, a thin woman -- tidy, trim, alert, firmly coiffed, plainly in control.
As I entered, I saw that they both had the same last name -- the judge and his wife (or sister), presiding.
Various slovenly men in suits smiled at me as I entered -- lawyers all, I soon learned, hoping for instant business. A very pretty young cop in a black, vaguely Mussolini-esque outfit greeted me with a smile and lots of paper. I signed in, choosing "defendant" rather than "attorney" for my identity -- the only two choices in this particular gathering. The seats accommodated a handful of other defendants -- not a crowd but, at $200 or $300 a head, enough to keep the municipality running for a few days at a time. Nearly all of these defendants seemed to be working to suppress ironic, utterly unguilty smirks. I sat by a woman who wanted to talk while her husband spoke with one of the two male cops. I had already noticed how each of the cops kept busy going back and forth among small side rooms and the judge's "bar" (which, come to think of it, had no bar but looked more than anything else like a counter at a new but austere, rural pub).
I am not sure what the lawyers were doing, but they gave and received lots of greetings -- with the judge, the cops and us, the defendants. The woman behind me said -- a little too loudly -- that the lawyers were thieves and this was a farce. "My husband was clocked at 77," she told me, "but there's no way he was doing that. His whole family are cops. And my brother-in-law's a lawyer, but they're all out on Long Island, so a lot of good it does."
Reassured that I wasn't the worst criminal in the courtroom, I waited to hear from her much more taciturn husband. He lumbered back from the cop, and the judge and the clerk herself to report with a little smile, "disregarding signs." Now I knew I had come to the right place. This was definitely the sort of crime I could get enthusiastic about having committed.
My turn came when the young cop who had stopped me called out my name and waved me towards his particular cubicle. I made sure to keep my eyes locked innocently on his, telling him that he had been helpful when he pulled my over because he had offered the explanation that the fault was not in me, but in my my cruise control. He seemed to like this line of discussion -- as I knew from our first meeting -- and set about telling the story once again but at greater length: "Yeah, it's a hill... the cruise revs up the RPMs... the car can't do anything but speed up... and it's downhill so it goes way to fast with all those RPMs... I pull 'em right over." I nodded eagerly like any good student confronted with an exculpating theory that he has never dreamt of before. The cop looked at the paper when I mentioned the day of the arrest. "Hmm, 1:58... early on my shift... You were my first that day." Then he paused. "Mmm, 73..." He looked up at me with a smile. "You are the slowest one of all that day. Early in the shift..." I took this to mean that early in the shift he takes any paltry little fish that his laser can hook. "I'll mark this one down to parking." I nodded, trying to suppress my inward giggle: I hadn't even managed to "disregard signage," but had only stopped somehow where I wasn't supposed to -- going over 70! This is the law as an ingenious, physics-defying wonder, re-imagining the world with some serious post-Einsteinian quirks.
I went before the judge, who mumbled I am not sure what. The cop spoke clearly, but incomprehensibly of sections of the New York State statutes. I looked up at the cartooned seal and wondered why the motto was "Excelsior." The judged mumbled some more and looked to me for commentary. I said, "Yes, your honor." The policeman nodded good afternoon to me. The judge handed a pink sheet to his wife, who seemed to know exactly what we were all doing, namely, I thought -- putting one over on the universe and its notions of justice.
I sat down again, this time next to someone named Bloomberg, who had not been found guilty of parking on the Taconic, but of "disregarding signage." She was suitably disconsolate -- perhaps envious of me as an unruly parker. The good clerk called out my name after Bloomberg's. I went up and, as instructed, wrote out a check for $125. The clerk did not look up. Unlike her near relation, I assumed, she was not prepared to let the section headings confound her sense of justice. Unable, from her seat, to look down at me and my ilk, she did the next best thing, which was to speak to us peremptorily and without a glance. Or perhaps she was merely thinking that you'd have to be a real fool to park on a parkway where most people seemed to be going pretty fast.