Ticket

Getting a traffic ticket in the city of Los Angeles is very different from getting a traffic ticket in Virginia. Yes, I got a ticket. No, it was not recently, but I hid this information from you all because I take tickets really personally, for some reason. I think it has something to do with my father, and I don’t normally say that.

The standard dads give you crap for a ticket, and that’s understandable, because you’re going to negatively alter their insurance. My dad, however, did not really care about the insurance; it bothered him, yes, but that’s never what you heard about. The problem with receiving a ticket when I was growing up was that in so doing, you created an excuse for dad to begin an extended dialog on the “lesson” learned from the experience.

He has a gift, my father does, for picking the moment you are the most sensitive about your mistake to begin your instruction. Sometimes it’s not even the same day you got the thing, and it’s never the day you go to court, because that’s when you’re expecting it. He’ll pick, like, a Tuesday evening before dinner, and you’ll walk into the kitchen and he’ll be standing there with the ticket in his hand for no reason. He’s normally got a glass of something, probably orange juice or Diet Coke. “You know…” he’ll say, and the metal bar is already upon you before you even have time to recognize that you were in a mousetrap.

There’s no malice in these little talks, if anything there’s a hint of gratitude, because the sheer tonnage of what my father knows about the operation of an automobile is stunning. He is married to a woman who could not possibly bring herself to care less about this hobby, so these vast resources begin to crowd in his mind, desperate for release; it’s not entirely dissimilar to a volcano. As soon as a police officer hands you that little slip of paper, the door is wide open. It’s just a matter of time.

Also, my dad is a pretty tough nut to crack, so your anger does not frighten him. My mother has told me many stories of the times she has tried to win arguments through sheer intimidation and/or vulgarity, and received a disdainful chuckle in response. This is no small feat, my mother could scare the devil out of hell, but even she has to earn it with this guy. You can’t be like, “Don’t mess with me today, man!” because you both know that he brought you into this world and paid for your education.

I’m not going to claim my father scarred me by politely pointing out my mistakes, but I will insist that my already-fragile ego has developed a Pavlovian response of hyper-defensiveness to this event. My wife just called me as I was writing this to inform me that she thought the price of the ticket was far too steep. She intended this as a form of commiseration, but I responded by more or less hanging up the phone. Tickets just bother me, they make me feel stupid, especially because whenever you get them, no one else has one. I don’t know why that is, but tickets never occur within groups of people more than one at a time. You’re always totally alone, trying to justify your behavior to a cooly sympathetic but distinctly aloof audience. “That sucks,” they’ll tell you, but secretly they’re thinking: That’s why I always double-check. Good for you, you smarmy little barracuda. I am going to wait patiently for the next time some girl/guy breaks up with you, then whisper, “I’m married.”

See? See that? See how nasty that was? I hate tickets, do not mess with me when I have a ticket.

I never get pulled over for anything serious, nine times out of ten I just made a U-turn late at night where I technically wasn’t allowed. That angers me even more: my mistakes are harmless, I’m polite and cooperative, and I get slammed every time anyway. One time I went to traffic school, a place I absolutely did not deserve to be, and the instructor made a point that stayed with me: “Someone’s gotta pay for these roads.” He was right, handing out tickets is a business enterprise. They don’t take your money to teach you a lesson, they effing want that money. They got crumbling highways, vanishing pensions, and Crown Vics that don’t run without gasoline. A polite, well-meaning driver who sometimes makes a mistake is their bread and butter: they can keep you on the road, you won’t kill anyone, and every now and then they’ll find some reason to take your money. These guys would stop you without provocation, saunter over to your window, and bellow “Fork it over” if they could, that’s how bad they need your money. But they can’t do that, so they have to wait until you give them an opening.

Knowing that has a double effect: it makes me feel better, and it makes me angrier. The former because now I know I’m being strip mined, not treated like some kind of hoodlum. The latter because they insist on their little “bad boys whatcha gonna do” attitude when they fine you, which is just ridiculous. Yes, I made a U-turn where that was not permitted. God help us. Talk to me like a human being, not a coke dealer with an Ak-47 in the backseat.

Anyway, like I said before, it’s different here. I showed up at the courthouse after weeks of frustrated attempts to pay my ticket beforehand, dressed in a nice suit and ready to talk to the judge. I actually rather like judges, and as long as you address them with due respect, they’ll normally give you what you deserve. Turns out, though, that the officer who served me didn’t enter the ticket correctly and it got kicked out of the system. As as result, I had to get the LAPD to re-register my ticket.

The absurdity of this dawned on me as the local sergeant dutifully punched the thing into the system. Right now they have no ticket for me, and I’m assisting them in producing one. Unable to hold back, I asked him, “Am I being a moron here? If I just walked away, would you guys ever know I was ticketed?”

“Yeah,” he politely responded, “It’s just a typo in the writing, we deal with this all the time. We’d have found out you had one, and that you missed your scheduled appearance. It just would’ve taken extra time.” Fair enough. So after that, I just paid someone at a cashier’s window and that was that. The sheer volume of people in Los Angeles who arrive to do this every day in is stunning, so they don’t really have time to put you in front of a judge unless you really want to. I probably should have set a date, got dressed up again, stood up in front of the judge and said, “Come ooooonnnn.” But I’ve got enough on my mind, I wanted this ticket gone, and that’s exactly what the LAPD was counting on.

Seriously, I hate tickets.