TJ Gets A Ticket…
I’m going to assume you listen to Live, from a Shoebox and more specifically that you’ve listened to Episode 14 where Alison talked about getting pulled over and Episode 20 where she talked about getting pulled over again. As in, a second time. By the same cop.
Her courage and determination to fight The Man has inspired me to share my story where I, too, fought against The Man.
The year was 1989, or maybe early 1990. I’m about 16 years old, driving with my Dad in his fully tricked out 1988 Chevy Cavalier, by which I mean it had power windows, seats, and a cassette deck with auto-reverse.
We were driving the 8+ hours to my sister’s house in Erie, PA, which mean about 7.5 hours on I-90, which is referred to as The Mass Turnpike in Massachusetts. We were driving along in “fairly busy but moving along” traffic, and I was keeping up with the flow of traffic. All of a sudden we came around a bend, and there is a State Trooper standing on the side of the road, and he pointed at me, then pointed at the side of the road. No radar gun, standing outside of his car in his big Trooper hat and sunglasses, standing at the side of the road.
So I pull over, my heart pounding like the wings of a hummingbird-on-crack, and my Dad is telling me to relax and be polite. I’ve been driving for less than a year, and I’ve never in my life talked with a police officer who hadn’t come to my school to give some sort of a safety demonstration.
He comes to the window and asks me if I know why he pulled me over, and I said no. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going 55MPH, but no one was going 55, so… why me? He says, “I clocked you doing 79 in a 55. License and registration please.”
79MPH.
My Dad opened the glove compartment and started looking for the paperwork. I tried to get my wallet out of my back pocket, but it was stuck and wouldn’t come out. All the time I’m thinking to myself, “What? 79? There’s no way…” I hear my Dad say something to him that I wasn’t going anywhere near that fast, and the cop says that he has my on radar, which is of course absurd because he was already standing outside of the car when we came around the corner. He was waiting for me.
He went back to his car to do whatever it is that they do, and I hoped that he would seem my clean record and tell me to just slow down. No such luck. He comes back with a ticket for $190. Now think back to when you were 16 years old, and what would $190 sound like? It sounded like $1,000. He asks me to sign the receipt, indicating that I’ve received the ticket, not indicating guilt, and shows me where to send it in.
We resumed our trip and I was beyond livid. I was driving exactly 55MPH for as long as my Dad could put up with it before he said “It’s going to take up 12 hours if you keep driving like this, you’re not going to get another ticket, just stay with the traffic.” I said something calm like “I WAS JUST STAYING WITH THE TRAFFIC WHEN HE GAVE ME THAT TICKET AND HE SAID I WAS GOING 79 THERE’S NO WAY IN HELL I WAS GOING THAT FAST AND I CAN’T BELIEVE HE GAVE ME A TICKET OH MY GOD MOM IS GOING TO KILL ME AND I’M NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO DRIVE AGAIN EVER.”
Finally I did pick up my pace a little bit, but I drove the rest of the way (the final 90% of the trip) in a foul mood. At one point my Dad said, “I want you to try to get the car up to 79 MPH.” WHAT? “I want to see how it would feel to drive that fast.” After assuring me that he would pay the ticket if I got another one, I started accelerating. At 72 MPH we both started to get nervous. At 75 MPH, the car felt like it was going to careen out of control. I let my foot off the gas and slowed back down to about 62 MPH (which is the official speed of “the speed limit is 55 but you probably won’t get a ticket if you’re going this fast.”)
“And he thinks we were going faster than that and didn’t notice?” my Dad asked rhetorically. Then we remembered that another white car had sped past us just before we got pulled over. We theorized that there had been a hidden cop car with a radar gun which caught that car, and then radioed ahead to the guy who pulled us over, and he got the wrong car. My Dad told me to request a hearing for the ticket.
I was still afraid of telling my mom about it, but he said it would be fine and we went about the rest of our visit. I got home a few days later and quite honestly had forgotten about it. A lot of other stuff had happened and I had thought about it so much it was no longer shocking or even news… I was sure that they had just spotted the wrong car.
Only problem was that I completely forgot that I had put the ticket in the pocket of my jeans. Which my mom then washed. And dried.
The ticket looked like I had balled it up. You have never seen anything more crumpled and faded, torn, etc. I was sure I was going to go to jail for contempt of court or something — and I still had to mail it back and request a court date. My mother literally ironed it, trying to make it look less wrinkled. It didn’t help.
So we mailed it off.
And heard nothing.
For several years. (Not a typo.)
I was sure that it had just been thrown away, but something like three years later I got a court date. Except that I was now in college and couldn’t go. I asked for a rescheduled date over Christmas vacation, and they sent a date back for the following summer.
Now I had always heard that if the cop who wrote the ticket didn’t show up, they had to throw out the ticket. That is apparently not true. The guy who was at the court that day made no bones about the fact that he wasn’t the guy who had originally written the ticket. I explained about the other car and that I was sure that it was the wrong car. The judge asked me if I had been speeding.
Here’s the thing: in the meantime, the speed limit for that area had been increased from 55MPH to 65MPH. I had planned to argue that aspect of the case as well. But I didn’t know what to answer. So I went with the truth.
“I was probably going more than 55, but there’s no way that I was going 79—” and I was just about to mention about the speed limit change when he said.
“How about a reduction? $50?”
Wait, did he mean $50 off the $190 or a reduction to $50? Either one was better, but the way he said it, I wasn’t sure.
“What do you mean?” I asked, obviously confused.
“I mean you write a check to this court for $50, and that’s the end of it. Does that sound like a good deal to you?”
“YESABSOLUTELYIHAVEACHECKWRITEHEREWHODOIMAKEITOUTTO?”
My Dad had sent me with a literal blank check, with his name already signed, and told me to make sure that whatever I did, I didn’t lose the check.
That was the first time I got a ticket… with my Dad in the car. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the other time…s…
