Adventures in the Labyrinth Part 1: Robert Lange vs. the Traffic Court Minotaur

--Robert Langellier

An event about 2 months ago where I went 45 miles per hour on an almost empty street has resulted in an honest want to live in a different country. Damn you, judicial system.

When it comes to traffic court, I think the goal of Illinois’ government (and I imagine pretty much all other states’ governments) is to beat you into submission via boredom and mental exhaustion. You dare venture outside the literal boundaries of the law, and you will be duly punished and taught a stern lesson. Yes, you’ll pay a good $75-100 in fines, or an extra fee for supervision, or take an idiotic, I-could’ve-passed-this-without-eyeballs-or-eardrums driving course, but the real motivation to stop legally sinning is the bureaucratic rap on the knuckles you get from the time you get the ticket to the time you’re finally done with it. It’s a fear-based system – a fear of being really, really irritated for a really long time.

First you sit in your car on the side of the road for a half hour staring at the fireworks display of red and blue in your rearview while Jerome the Policeman unearths your English grades from summer school before freshman year. He asks for your insurance, you realize you have no god damn clue where that could be, and you wait while Jerome goes back and double checks that those English grades are correct, because there’s no way you passed school without knowing where your insurance is. Then he writes you a short biography about yourself on a yellow slip of $75 paper and thanks you for being so cooperative.

You go home and tell your parents how the child they’ve raised has grown up to be a failure, and you make a mental sticky note of your court date that remains in the back of your mind, occasionally resurfacing, for weeks and weeks. Of course, it hits you shortly that, on September 7th, you’ll have been in college for 3 weeks. Wuh oh! That’s okay, quick fix. All you have to do is call the Attorney General’s Office, allow them to transfer you between every employee on duty that day, and then be told that you can’t change court dates because your ticket isn’t on their record yet. Fortunately, you can call back a month later and be told that you can’t change court dates because that’s not allowed.

September rolls around eventually, and you’ve accepted the fact that you’re going to have to take the ticket in the face like a man, so you arrange the 4-hour ride back to old Springfieldtown. Traffic court is always packed, so you show up early, just in time to realize you’ve left your license at home. By time you’ve punished your steering wheel with a stern physical beating for making you forget, gone home to get your license, and returned to court, you’re 15 minutes late and just 2 short hours away from your 60-second guilty plea to Judge Indifference. You spend those 2 hours either sitting in line waiting to be let in the courtroom, or sitting between 2 strangers staring at the wall waiting to be let in front of the judge. In respect to His Honor (the judge, not God), there are no cell phones, no reading, no talking, and no practical way to whittle the seconds away except to pet your dislike for a system far more powerful and constrictive than you are. Minimal breathing is allowed.

They finally call the magic words, - “Robert Langellier” - and you step up to the throne, where you find that your supervision fee is slightly more costly than you were expecting (by $80). Good. On the 4 hour drive back to the college courses you’ve missed that day, you can contemplate the extra course you get to take now, one that will provide you with 0 learning opportunities, 0 opportunities for your future, and 0 enjoyment opportunities. But come November 30th, you’ll be done with all this. You’ll have mailed your Certificate of Completion back to Room 402 of 200 S. 9th Street, along with a check worth two and a half weeks of a college job.
And all you wanted to do was see Conor’s pretty face before you went to bed one night. I knew this was somehow his fault.

(End note: I was really torn between the ending I chose and finishing with “Fuck tha po.” I have some regrets.)