THE TICKET

The feeling you get when the red light flashes behind you on the road

is very depressing, very demoralizing especially if you just left work and are going home.

You wonder, “What’s going on?”

Why you! If everybody else passes you like maniacs

and you are driving at legal speed and the sound of the stereo is below normal

because you are listening to Jazz and that kind of music is like good wine

you have to take your time to enjoy it. Oh, my bad, I shouldn’t compare the music with wine, especially if this story is about a ticket, so let me paraphrase that, Jazz is like an expensive cheese that you have to melt in your mouth very slowly and absorb the flavors and the textures and the aromas. That’s better.

What do you say to the CHP officer?

What is your right to defend yourself?

In this case there is nothing to do; they will not listen to you if you are a male Hispanic

You fit the profile and probably the officer will make the assumption that you have no education and do not know the traffic law.  Perhaps the real reason is the amount of tickets they have to write in order to keep their jobs.

Don’t take me wrong, they are doing a terrific job by keeping accidents from happening

So in this case I will not fight the citation even though I did nothing wrong? When I signed the ticket I noticed the officer’s writing was really good, in fact it was excellent, a quality that is hard to see this days. Everything was correct and he was very polite, that I have to admit, they do have good manners. So why I am writing about this, well when the letter from the traffic office came, my last name was changed, I was not Vasquez anymore, I was Yasquez a mistake that is normal, we all are humans and do make them often. The keyboard has the letter V in the fourth row. The four key from left to right. The letter Y is in the second row seventh key from right to left and in order to make that mistake you probably are writing with only two fingers, which could explain the mistake.

I do like the idea that this matter could be closed if you pay your citation on-line, that not only saves you time, but it saves the city paper waste, men hours etc. Well guess what? The same mistake was found on-line. So I decided no to pay the ticket on-line because what could’ve happened if there is somebody with the last name Yazquez and happened to have my first name, that would be really bad for me, don’t you think?

The next day I drove to the Superior Court of Los Angeles in Lancaster, California ready to pay my ticket. I am an artist and always have extra pens and pencils with me, and a little pocket knife to sharpen the pencils when need it. Yes I forgot about it and my face couldn’t be any more radish-red when I had to return to my car and put the knife back.

Once again the officers were very understanding, since I didn’t have tattoos in my body, nor do I have any marks that will put me in the category of a gang member. I did dress very presentably and yes a little cologne to make me feel fresh.

Once I passed the check point, I went to the left passing the lines for criminal and other felonies. Finally I was at the traffic line and it was heavy like a freeway on a Thursday afternoon. The feeling of the hard floor and the cold air in the beautiful building felt like a prison’s cell.

One sign that really called my attention was the one that tells people that if a check is return, it is going to have a returned fee of thirty three dollars.  Please don’t tell me that there are people that stupid and they actually write a bad check when paying for a citation inside the court, next to the criminal lines.

While waiting in line, I noticed some ladies wearing fake furs with shorts and pink sleepers. Other people wore black socks with leather sandals and NC hats. The majority of people waiting in line were young with their parents next to them. I noticed all races and all ages, males and females; so contrary to my previous statement, there must no be a profile for tickets, maybe the color that really matters is the green. What do you think?

I almost forgot about the three human specimens, I do not want to offend the ladies. These three rags were bragging about their felonies and how they got into fights with others of their kind. They were speaking in something to resemble the English language, which was really hard to understand because every other word was F that and F this, and S that and S this.  The sentence “know what mean!” was almost used after every explanation. So I was guessing that it translates in something like this. Do you understand my statement or do you agree with the way I handle the matter.

I guess if Albert Einstein was explaining the theory of relativity to somebody in the line in front of me, my understanding would be that he is talking about “what a beam of light would look like if you could race alongside of it”.  Perhaps it would be easy to understand and to explain his famous equation E=mc² the most celebrated of them all, where energy (E) equals mass (m) multiplied by the speed of light square (c²); but that would be hard to do, since Einstein did not get a damn ticket and he could defend himself when the officer asked him: Did you know what speed you were driving at?

The feeling you get when you are in line to pay the ticket is very depressing, especially if you just left home and were going to work after this horrible experience.

Yours truly,

Edwin Vasquez.