So You Had a Bad Day…

By now it must have been 3:00 in the morning and I really felt the need to talk to Dena. I couldn’t just knock on the door, so I tried the old rocks-at-the-window-technique. It got her attention, but also her parents. So I had to wait…

  That gave me time to do nothing but think about the whole thing over and over. Trying to see it from everyone’s point of view and even tried justifying things in my head. It would eat me up on the inside and I couldn’t let it go. I was mad at Rich, but I didn’t trust Dena or her version. I’ll never know what really happened and now, after all these years it doesn’t matter. Water under the bridge. But those next few months it always came up.

  Finally, one day I just ‘got over it’. What was done was done. And I never brought it up to Dena again. By now we were dating for about a year and things were going pretty smooth those last few weeks until she started hanging out with a ‘friend’ from work. He was a shopping cart boy from the grocery store that she worked at. I forget his name, but he looked like a brown haired frog with glasses. I think it was Dan, but we’ll call him Frog as we already have a Dan in this story… I was a little jealous of this ‘new friend’ and more than a little suspicious. My suspicions became realized when she told me she had to study after school one day, so I made arrangements to pick up Jean from their school and take her to her job at a nearby country club. When I went to the school to wait for her, Dena came out of the school. I got out of my car to say hi, but she was already on her way to go into Frog’s car. I was like “Hey, what the Hell?” Dena tried to play it down, but I wasn’t buying it. Our relationship was over. We didn’t say it, but I felt dumped when she choose cars and she chose his.

   Furious, I drove Jean to work and got pulled over by a cop for speeding and blowing a stop sign. When the cop came over and asked “What’s the rush?” I snapped back that I wasn’t in a rush. He just said “You were going 50 plus and ran a stop sign” This time around, there was no getting out of it so I told him I’d get out of that ticket.

He came back and told me next time not to speed past a police station. I was in no mood. We had a mutual dislike for each other.

  I went to court for the speeding ticket. I pled guilty for the stop sign. But the fact he said ‘50 plus’ meant he had no radar gun on me.

   I went to traffic court and made a spectacle of myself. I watched the first few cases to get a feel for it. The judge announces the charges then the cop states his facts, then I may question the cop and say any defense that may be required.

  My cop showed up, he had another case in which he gave some guy a ticket for not having a license plate, but because the driver couldn’t speak English, he couldn’t explain he had one and as he drove away, the cop saw it. He asked the case be thrown out.

  I was like ‘great, the judge already thinks this cop is a moron, which he is because he gave me a ticket.’

  Then they got to my case. The cops said blah blah blah car…southbound on blah blah in which he said I was going 50 with his “visual observation estimate”

  When I got to question him, I asked about his visual observation estimate and not know what speed I was actually going. He claimed he took a course and got a satisfactory grade. I said “Satisfactory was like a “C” and questioned his skill, it came off bad and I was getting nervous. The judge asked if I was done, but I thought I was losing the case, so I said no. I asked the cop if he saw my break lights go on at any point. He said “Yeah, so?”  I didn’t know… The judge asked if I was done yet. I said no. He said “You’re done.” I blurted out “I was going no faster than 40”. The judge scowled at me. I was dead.

  Then the judge says that based on the case and the fact the officer didn’t indicate any signage that he was forced to assume that the speed limit on the road in questing was the state speed limit of 55 and that 50 was not over the speed limit.

  The cop stormed out of the courtroom pretty quickly. The judge called me over and scolded me. “He (the cop) is pissed. You’d better watch out for him in the future. 40 mph in a 30 mph is speeding. Don’t do it.” I remember that scolding to this day, but the important thing was I still had faith in our justice system. Faith that it doesn’t work…