Cops and Stops Part 3

I was traveling down the Santa Monica Freeway, the part that runs through Gonzales, Texas. You know where Gonzales is, it's not too far from either Luling or Shiner. They don't call it the Santa Monica Freeway in Gonzales. About two hours to the east, in Houston, they call it the Katy Freeway. But in Gonzales, it's simply the interstate. But I was headed west, going to home to Los Angeles, so it was the Santa Monica Freeway to me.

Work had required me to spend every other week in Houston for just about a year. My company paid to keep an apartment for me. This job was now finished. I had packed up my apartment, loaded up the car and was headed home.

I was anxious to get home. It's about a 1600 mile trip. Most people recommend making the drive over three days. If you averaged a constant 65 miles per hour, it would take a bit more than 24 hours. I hoped to drive straight through and make the trip in something less than a day.

I was driving a red SAAB 9000 Turbo. What a machine! This car was capable of amazing performance. Press that pedal all the way down, the turbo would start to whine, and you would get pushed back into your seat as the car seemed to sink down and hug the road. Unfortunately, as amazing as that car could be, it was not reliable. I cannot begin to describe the assortment of weired mechanical problems that this car presented. I cannot count how many times that car broke down on me. But when it ran, it ran. Assuming that you weren't going to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, it was a a great freeway car. This car could fly, a car that could outrun the speedometer. I've driven as fast as 110 mph in that car and if I wasn't such a coward I could have gone faster.

My road trip had just started. It was a Saturday morning, there was no traffic. The road was clear, the weather was beautiful, and I was headed home. Only doing about 100 mph.

In this location, the freeway had a couple of lanes going east and a couple of lanes going west. The east and west sides of the freeway were separated by a very wide grass divider. Headed west, something on the eastward bound side of the freeway caught my eye. There were flashing lights way, way off in the distance. It was, as they say in Tejas, the "poe - lease." This "poe-lease-veee-hick-uhl" swerved off the freeway, straight into the grassy divider. It was moving fast and it was headed straight for me.

I started slowing down, pulled way over into the right lane, and quietly prayed that he was going for someone else. Unfortunately, there wasn't anybody else on the road. I can't deny the existence of G-d for the simple reason that every time I've ever gotten into a troublesome situation, I start to pray. I started praying. Maybe if I made a habit of praying when I wasn't in trouble . . . .

As the freeway divider was simply covered in grass and it wasn't paved, this police car was bouncing around all over. Still traveling on the grass divider, he passed me - headed in the opposite direction - on the left-hand side. Now watching him in my mirrors, he got onto the westbound lanes headed east, swerved around doing a 180 to change direction so he was now headed west, and, with his tires still smoking from that turn, came up right behind me. This guy was one hell of a driver.

I pulled over and watched him through my mirrors. Something told me to keep my hands fixed at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. The officer got out of his vehicle and with his hand on his holstered gun, cautiously approached my car. When he was standing alongside my door, I slowly moved one hand to lower the window.

The officer asked, "Is there some kind of an emergency?"

"No sir, I just finished a job in Houston and was headed home to California. I was just anxious to get home"

"You were doing 90."

"Yes," I admitted, "I was speeding." Now thinking to myself, "thank you Lord, I know I was going 100."

"May I have your license and vehicle registration please."

I handed him my license and registration. As he looked them over, I had a chance to look the officer over. He was pretty young, under 30. A big guy, probably played football in high school. Like all Texas Department of Public Safety officers, he wore a white cowboy hat. He also wore a pair of aviator style reflector sunglasses that seemed way too big for his face. He was frowning.

The officer looked up and said, "You have a California driver's license."

"Yes, I do." It was just great to be in this kind of an awkward situation and listen to this guy state the obvious.

He said, "Your car is registered in Texas. This car is not registered in your name."

More of the obvious, "Yes sir, that is correct." The Saab was still, technically, a company car. The company bought the car, kept it registered in its name and maintained the registration and insurance. The company was in the process of transferring title to my name.

The officer looked confused.

I said, "Yes officer. This is a company car. Here is my business card that shows my company's name. It's the same name that is on the registration. I was living in Houston and this is the car that I used when I was living in Houston. Now I'm going back to Los Angeles and I'm taking the car with me."

The officer asked, "If you were living in Houston, why don't you have a Texas driver's license? State law requires you to obtain a Texas driver's license within 30 days of moving into the state."

I tried to explain, "I wasn't living in Texas all the time. I was also living in Los Angeles. I commute between Los Angeles in Houston, so - you see - I was also living in California and since I intended to eventually return to California . . . ."

"Step out of the car please."

Now, I wasn't dressed in my uniform of those days, a three button Brooks Brothers suit. I had California on my mind and I was dressed for driving comfort. This amounted to a t-shirt sporting the logo of a popular Houston restaurant, a pair of billowy, bright orange, nylon athletic shorts, the ends of my silver/gray, knee length, lycra aerobics pants were sticking out from under my shorts. I had on a pair of waffle-style running shoes that made my feet look about twice as wide as they are. And I was wearing a pair of Oakley, wrap-around biking sunglasses. The kind that had this UV protective coating that made them look like something a physicist would wear to protect her eyes while conducting experiments with radioactivity. I wasn't dressed for small town Texas.

I got out of the car and stood on the shoulder. As the officer started talking about the mismatch between my driver's license and registration, the absence of "reciprocity" between California and Texas, he walked around my car and looked into the windows. The Saab was a hatchback, a quasi station wagon, there was no trunk. All of the stuff that I kept in my Houston apartment was piled into the car.

The officer stopped and pointed to something in the back. "What's that?"

"What's what . . . sir?"

"What's that rolled up in the back over there."

For years, I've had a couple of original oil paintings from an artist who was a friend to our family. I needed to get those canvases stretched and reframed anyway, so the easiest was to transport them was to remove them from their current frames and roll them. I said to the officer, "They're paintings . . . sir."

"Paintings?"

"Yes sir, paintings."

The officer looked at me and said without expression, "You were traveling more than 10 miles an hour over the speed limit. Your license does not match your registration. I could write you a ticket but you don't have a Texas driver's license and you're headed out of state. Since we don't have reciprocity with California, I can't be sure that you will pay this ticket. You need to see the judge."

I started to think about this. My plan was to get to Los Angeles in 24 hours. Seeing the judge wasn't in my plan. It was Saturday. Did they have a judge on Saturday or were they going to throw me in jail for the weekend?

The officer said, "You need to follow me. We're going to have to cross the divider and head east."

East was the wrong direction. My plan was to head west. I wanted to ask if there was any way to avoid this, but also thought that this was not the kind of question that I wanted to ask this guy. I got back into my car, waited for the officer's signal, and followed him across the divider and into the eastward-bound lanes. Once we got back onto the freeway, the officer started pulling way ahead of me. He was speeding. I wasn't sure what to do. Do I speed up and break the speed limit - again? Do I maintain the speed limit and try to get the officer to slow down? Will that piss off the officer and get me into some other trouble? I sped up. Thankfully, it wasn't for a long period of time. We got off at the first exit and started down a country road.

Forty-five minutes later, I was still following this officer down country roads. He was on his radio the whole time. I felt certain that he was talking about me. Where were we going? Why was this taking so long? I wanted to flag down the officer and ask, it just seemed better to stay quiet and keep on following.

A half hour later, I felt more than a little panicky. Where is this guy taking me? Wait a minute! I read about this kind of stuff before. They take you out to a deserted place and then they kill you and dump your body in an irrigation ditch. It was 1988. I just saw, "The Thin Blue Line," a movie about a man who was framed for murder by a group of corrupt Texas officers. I'm thinking, "'Thin Blue Line,' 'Thin Blue line!' Oh Lord, this guy's been on the radio talking to his police buddies about framing me for something. He's setting me up. He thinks I'm some kind of California nut and he's going to teach me a lesson. I shouldn't have worn orange shorts. Can I make a run for it? This car is a turbo, it's fast. No, that's crazy! He's in a freeway cruiser and this is Texas. He's gotta have more than 300 horsepower. And if I get away, every cop in the state of Texas is going to be looking for me. What do I do? What if he tries to hurt me?" I started looking around for a weapon. If this guy pulls over in the middle of nowhere, what can I use to defend myself? I felt sick to my stomach.

Worrying myself sick for what seemed like an eternity, we arrived at a small town. It looked like something out of "Last Picture Show." There were a bunch of run-down houses with poorly kept yards. An emaciated dog crossed the street in front of me. The officer pulled up next to a house that had an old truck parked on the front yard. A couple of wheels were missing and the truck was perched on cinder blocks. The house used to have a garage that had been converted to a room. You could see the outline of the garage door, where the garage door had been replaced by new siding. There was an entry door punched into the new siding that was installed to replace the garage door and the hand painted sign above that door read, "COURTHOUSE."

I had entered the Twilight Zone. Parking my car behind the officer's, I got out and followed him in.

The courthouse was minimal. The floor was a plain cement slab. The walls were covered in unfinished sheetrock, nailed to the studs, they had not been taped or floated. There was some old wooden furniture, just four tables and mismatched chairs. Three long tables were shaped into a "U." The fourth table, a small table, was back in the corner. There was a phone on the small table and nearby, on the floor, sat a radio that was plugged into an electrical outlet. It was tuned to a country music station. The flags of the United States and the great state of Texas stood behind the center table, the table in the middle of the "U."

There was no one in the courthouse. The officer started calling out towards a door that led into the house (the judge's residence?), "Judge? Judge? Are you there? Judge?"

I held my breath.

A woman's voice called back, "Just have a seat, I'll be there in a minute."

The officer called out again, "Judge, may I use the telephone?"

The judge yelled back, "Go right ahead."

The officer instructed me to have at one of the tables. He positioned himself at the small table in the corner, the one with the phone. He was seated behind me and I couldn't see him without turning around. I didn't want to turn around and it was also unnerving to have him seated behind me. He was on the phone speaking in a quiet tone. With the radio on, it was hard for me to hear what he was saying. I heard him spelling out my name, talking about the Saab, the registration, the paintings.

I imagined that this officer thought he was on the verge of solving the crime of the century. That he was calling every law enforcement agency he could think of to learn whether a man of my description was suspected of stealing valuable paintings from an art museum. It reminded me of Officer Obie in the Arlo Guthrie song "Alice's Restaurant." Like Officer Obie, "He was making sure." A smile came to my face, thinking that he would soon be on the line with Interpol.

The officer mentioned my company's name. It hit me. I thought "Shit! I gave him my business card. He's going to call the Houston office and check my story. No!!!"

You might think that calling my Houston office would be a good thing. That my Houston colleagues would be concerned for me and that they would rush to my assistance. The problem was that my dear colleagues in our Houston office had a cruel sense of humor. The practical joke was considered to be a high form of art. And there was one guy in that office who didn't care for me. There was a real possibility that if this officer called my office somebody might think it would be real funny to have me spend a couple of nights in jail. They might say that the car was stolen. It was Saturday. It wasn't very likely that somebody would be in the office. This one guy did come in for a couple of hours on Saturday. I started to sweat.

A few minutes later a round, matronly woman entered the courthouse. The officer said, "Howdy Judge."

The judge waived hi. Her robes consisted of a black cotton sweat suit, the kind that you might buy at a Kmart. It had a collarless sweatshirt and the type of sweatpants that are gathered at the ankles and held up at the waist with a drawstring. The front of her black judicial sweatshirt was adorned with the cartoon of a pink, wide-eyed, kitten.

Eager to show respect, I stood up.

The judge motioned for me to sit down. She had a warm smile on her face as she seated herself at the table in the center of the "U." She said, "Ok, court is in session," and asked the officer, "What have we got here?"

The officer stood up and said, "Speeding judge. He was doing 90."

The judge looked at me and asked, "How do you plead?"

I said, "Guilty. Can I pay in cash?"

The judge smiled and said, "Of course."

This was an expensive ticket, a couple of hundred bucks. The judge, in her gentle way, explained the various fees. I wasn't listening so closely, didn't want to hear any explanations and was simply happy to pay the ticket and get out of there. She said something about a fine for the basic speeding ticket, penalty for being more than 10 mph over the posted limit, courthouse fee, weekend hearing fee, law enforcement fee, hazardous materials disposal fee, educational fund for her grandchildren fee, suggested donation for flowers for the courthouse and a new transmission for the truck out front that was on cinder blocks. Good thing I decided to travel with cash. I pulled the money out of my man purse. The judge accepted my cash with a smile and wished me a pleasant journey home.

I walked to the door. I felt like running, but didn't want to appear too excited about leaving. I smiled nervously at the officer. He frowned back, still on the phone talking to some one about California, Texas registration, and paintings. I was thinking about just how badly I wanted to be back in my car and someplace that was at least a hundred miles away from here. Reaching for the door, it occurred to me that it had taken me almost two hours of following the officer to get "here" and that I had no idea of where "here" was. I turned back towards the courtroom. The officer was on the phone. I asked the judge, "Judge, ma'am, would you be kind enough to provide me with some directions back to Interstate 10?"

She said, "Oh, it's easy. You parked out front? Just make a right at the corner, it's about a quarter mile down the road. Just take you a minute to get there. Drive safely."

I left the courthouse and returned to my car. I had some trouble putting my key in the ignition, my hands were shaking. I just wanted to get myself out of there. As the judge suggested, it didn't take any time at all to get back on the interstate. Setting the cruise control to something that was just below the speed limit, I wondered, "What the hell just happened?"

I swore to the heavens above that I would comply with the speed limit all the way back to California. That oath was good for a couple of hours, until I was about 50 miles past San Antonio. It was getting late, I had a schedule, the road was long. My plan was to take a break and have dinner in El Paso, still a few hours away. And nobody's going to stop you for driving just a little bit faster than the speed limit. It's ok. I would reach El Paso in time for a late dinner.

Little did I know that before dinner, I was going to meet Mr. CB.