Kazakhan said:
Were you doing anything interesting, any good stories?
Glad you asked, actually. It has been a turbulent period, to say the least, but I feel like Brutus after he got the free vacuum cleaner: I win one sometimes.
In 1996, shortly after returning to Seattle from Oregon, I found myself cuffed and stuffed alongside Interstate 5 for suspicion of driving under the influence. I blew below the limit, but it should be noted that said limit would later be revised such that my BAC fell between the standards. When I left the police station after being processed, I understood that the District Attorney would review the record and decide whether to prosecute.
Fast-forward to spring, 1999. The state of Oregon sent me a letter advising that they would be unable to renew my driver's license due to an outstanding suspension in another state.
Whoops.
It quickly emerged that I had failed to appear in December, 1996, to answer the charge. Having just secured a job with an insurance firm--those who know me long enough will recall that many of my posts from 1999 through 2001 were written there--I figured to not panic. I had helped a friend get a lawyer in Oregon for all of $500 up front; I figured $1500 would suffice in Seattle. Regardless of the fact that I was short by a factor of three, I never managed to accrue even the insufficient number I projected. What followed was a miserable series of superstitious presuppositions that complicated the matter greatly.
Fast-forward again, leaving out many small details--e.g., presuppositions including summons, statute of limitations, and the nonexistence of arrest warrants--to March, 2005. Still running on idiocy, and aware that there is no statute of limitations when one is already in the system (e.g. arrested), I learned through a friend of a friend that there were, in fact, warrants issued for my name, renewed at least once in July, 2003 and set to expire in 2006.
As word of that development reached my family, my mother advised me to simply turn myself in. I refused; I had held out for some stupid fantasy of a lawyer, and I wasn't walking into a police station on a nine-year rap without representation. My father, of whom I have spoken and written variously over the years, stepped up and asked, "If I get you a lawyer, will you answer this immediately?"
Nobody in my position, knowing what I knew and believing what I believed, could posibly refuse. Within the week, we hired an attorney and started picking through the wreckage of what I had wrought.
There were moments of guilt, admitting that we wanted a shark despite a family resentment of lawyers, and the look that passed between my father and I at the prospect that the arresting officer could be anywhere: retired, working another jurisdiction, or even--and here we glanced at each other with nary a shiver--dead. A dead officer would mean everything went away.
Yes, it is strange to balance your fate against someone else's life. The police report saved me from hoping for a dead officer. It so enraged me that my one driving enthusiasm was the chance to get a piece of this guy.
And here's the thing: People 'round here know a bit about my anti-authoritarian rhetoric. Over the last couple years I've been easing up, though I won't claim my tantrums against the shield went away. But it did occur to me that for all the nightmares I hear about in my proximity, all my dealings with the police have been rather quite decent: when my car was stolen, and when it was recovered; when the Oregon cop pulled me for DUI and I embarrassed him; even my '96 arrest was as civilized as one could hope for.
And then I saw that effing police report. The good vibe went away. All of the abstraction felt suddenly validated by a police report that was incomplete, out of order, and grossly exaggerated. It is not just that the keys were put in my hand, but that two other people, in a moment aside, reminded me that I was good to drive that night. "But they were drinking, too," my father pointed out. This was beside the point; I resented the suggestion that a woman who claimed she loved me, a friend whose faith is validated in the years since, and my own brother would send me out--encourage me to drive--if I was visibly intoxicated.
The question I ask when explaining this point to people (it really does bug me) is simple:
You are accused of a crime. What do you want your police force to do? Perform an investigation? Or bend over backwards to hang you?
I made three court appearances, or maybe two, since we did not see the judge at all the second time. For arraignment, I went before a judge who looked tired and read through his script mechanically until he came to me. He asked the prosecutor: "Is there anything the state wishes to add to--and I hate to say it this way--the 'normal' terms of release?"
That did not bode well.
For pretrial, though, we drew another judge, and this guy impressed me. For the first pretrial conference, I sat around for a while until my attorney finagled an off-the-record continuance that got me out of there in an hour instead of three. While we were there, though, I watched the judge refuse to hear from anyone without counsel until they had been screened for public defense, and also listened to him lecture a woman on "Umpteen reasons why you do not want to take deferred prosecution", and then grant it. I liked the guy after that, and was happy to find myself before him a month later when we came back for pretrial.
The continuance was perhaps a saving grace. My attorney did not wish to go forward without dealing with the supervising prosecutor; the underlings had no power to bargain, and thus we had nothing to offer the court.
In a fit of desperation, I explained to my attorney what I would accept in order to end this without trial. If they had written tickets for the offenses (speeding and lane violations) leading to the DUI stop, I would have pled on them. But we had nothing to go on, and I would be damned if I would go down on a reckless charge, as who knows ... someday I might want to go to Canada. You know, that sort of thing. Sure, I wanted a piece of the PoS cop for writing that damnable report, but I also come from the age when the courts did not like to question police officers, having actually known a judge to reject a friend's defense for a traffic offense by explaining that it would not be wise for the state to question the veracity of its police officers. And explaining to a jury that they ought to acquit you on the grounds that you're a moron ... well, who looks forward to that?
It was, I admitted at the time, an unrealistic expectation. We went to pretrial the second time expecting no movement; the prosecutor was known as a hardass with a reputation to build in the department she supervised. Perhaps she is. But there she was, standing in the aisle muttering to her underlings, negotiating with sharks, and then my attorney introduced us so that she could know who she was prosecuting and I could know who so badly wanted a piece of me. Hardass or not, she
is a smart prosecutor. She didn't care about the charge itself so much as the fact that I took nine years to answer. She shook my hand, turned to my attorney, said, "Okay," turned to her underling, said, "Neg, go", and we had a deal.
The deal was complicated only in the sense that it harkened back to the laws extant in 1996; since then, Negligence has been separated into two charges. Neg. 1 involves drugs and alcohol, and is a crime. Neg. 2 involves accidents and stupidity, and is a civil infraction. And a civil infraction is what we were now hunting for; the thought of having the whole thing over that day, the idea of getting exactly what I said I would take was too tempting to keep fighting. We agreed and went before the judge.
And then the deal fell apart. The judge would not accept it because the point of the deal, as explained and agreed by the attorneys, was to let the state close the file, let me get on with my life, and let everybody put it behind them. This was all fine with him, except Negligence under the 1996 law was the only crime on the books with no jail associated in the sentence. A little piece of what I call Claven trivia (named for the barfly) that saved my ass. We pulled back from the table, sought another charge, and, failing to find it, calculated the ripple effect from accepting a plea deal for a crime. Everything else worked out the same, and the age of the incident was such that it would almost instantly disappear from most records that would affect my life--e.g. insurance, employment, &c. We returned to the courtroom prepared to accept the deal as it was; I was still getting off easy, all things considered.
While we waited to appear before the judge, the supervising prosecutor appeared again as she bounced from courtroom to courtroom to maintain influence over the cases. Let's count: my attorney, the prosecuting underling, and the supervising prosecutor--the judge had schooled all three by rejecting the deal. She was, I think, embarrassed by this turn of events. She leaned past my attorney, said to her underling, "Forfeiture," and left. It took a few minutes for me to realize what was about to happen. "No," my attorney explained to me. "You're not pleading to anything."
The state got its say. In the end, I coughed up $250 for a bail forfeiture, what amounts to a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution and, daresay, a sweeping win for my team. Everybody got a piece; it is, technically, a very happy ending.
Is there a moral to the story, though? The bail forfeiture suggests that it does not pay to avoid your problems, but we must consider that fighting in court to achieve a similar result--e.g. the charge goes away--would have cost thousands more. There is no conviction, there is no charge. I avoided my problems for nine years, borrowed some money, and walked away
virtually unscathed.
Hard to figure what that equals.
The flip-side is to wonder how much this whole issue has hurt me over the years; I had no idea how heavily it dogged me until we were well underway. It is actually difficult to think of myself as unfettered on this front; I am accustomed to the knowledge of an unresolved, important issue. And, hey, try getting a decent job when you live on the border between the boonies and the sticks, and don't drive. It was easy enough to ignore the license suspension when I lived in Fremont, Greenlake, or Wallingford (neighborhoods in Seattle), as they were all on major bus lines. But living in an unincorporated area of Bothell ("for a day or a lifetime") it becomes as much as a four-hour transit commute in order to get the jobs I can get that will pay what I need. (I must, in the long run, be prepared to operate as a single parent; it seems almost inevitable.)
Don't get me wrong, though; among that list of what would otherwise be called regretful effects of my, uh, disastrous mistakes, Sciforums does not appear. I probably would have written fewer words here over time, but I would be a poor man for the loss.
I've missed you all. Even those folks I simply don't like. This evening, reading through old, unanswered messages, it struck me that even the people who act as if they hate me are not without their redeeming affection or, in some cases, devotion. Within these hallowed, electronic halls, the human condition is, at least, accessible.
Of course, it's probably for the best that few witnessed the depths of my foul mood over the last five months. As the DUI issue recedes, everything else that hid beneath that dense layer of pollution shows itself anew, and some of those things have some sharp edges.
May not be a good story, as such, but it's the one that's been playing. I'll spare you all the tale of how I finally hit my rhythm with the television scripts and then clashed my internal hard drive into oblivion, except of course to remind:
Defrag, defrag, defrag.
I'll try to hang around more often, but no promises until I fulfill the hypocritical demands of a coked-up drunk. Remember, kids: If it's wrong for a boy or man to do, it should be encouraged in women. This concept is a double-edged sword; if it's something like sex, hey, whatever. But if it's something important, like lying, hinging the financial plan on excess, failing to keep your laundry or dirty dishes under control .. hey, a man just isn't a good partner unless he accepts and encourages these developmental explorations. Feminists were surprised, it seems, to achieve a certain par in the workplace only to discover that the equality they fought for was the right to be treated like shite. It is a work of pure genius, however, to turn that shite into lemonade. Remember, guys: if your woman lies, ignores bills, stays out all night with other guys, and demands that you do what she cannot before she will afford you the slightest human respect, it's your own damn fault. You're not trying hard enough. You need to love her more. And if you have to steal that love away from your children, do it, or else you're not a man.
That story, however, is not for today. Nor can it be said to be a good story. Nor interesting. Nor ... well, yeah. You get the picture.
"We are born,"
sings Rob, "and we die. And the waves roll on."
