SPEED TRAP RELAXER
10-27-07
”There is no such thing as a speed trap,”
Sgt. Robert Hogan, traffic supervisor for the New York State Police Troop K
”People miss town lines all the time. You’ll be in a 55 and go down to a 30, 35. You’ve got to be on alert. Most towns are very proud of themselves.”
CASEY W. RASKOB III
This town is shrinking, a rock turned to a worried sponge in a dessert. I feel less vomit in me. My walks are a purgative collection of quick or slow steps. There is no place to walk to. This is fine with me. This is fine with me, and I’m glad it is like that again. I live in the future but what difference does that make now? Maybe a little bit of difference.
I ignore these roaring trucks, brand new small trucks, and well-tested cars with their sensors and blue lights. There is a place where all the old car advertisements go, living on long after the financing specials and rebate enticements have retired into the landscape. Voices of these vanished commercials are of a regular guy tiptoeing hue or a bumptious panicky gravel loaded into local clouds with jaundiced repetition. I hear them depending on the general weather, and mine.
Do I live here? I live in a house. I will walk back to it. I will avoid looking at it when it is first possible to see it from whatever distance or area. I think I see my wife Dess fiddling with a laser radar gun in the line of sight of oncoming traffic concealed behind some makeshift mural of an investment bank sunrise on wheels. I have become superstitious. I wasn’t always so superstitious. It doesn’t mean that I believe in gods necessarily, or that I will think I will win the state lotteries if I write curse words on certain gas station bathroom stalls, or otherwise. I am sensitive about being called too superstitious by certain friends. Certain of my friends don’t believe what recently happened to me, what recently happened to Dess.
They presume that an old retired investigative reporter who has not read a newspaper or much books in many years is attempting to dazzle them with a piece of reporting or witnessing that will renew their interest in him or respect. Some of these friends that are kind enough or friend enough to put up with my prolonged periods of taciturnity, think my speed trap relaxing wife has gotten to me. Meaning, she has finally caused me enough heart ache, confusion, or conjoined embarrassment and general trouble, that I have resorted to bandying around impossible bullshit as a means of gathering some sympathy or help.
I said my wife is a speed trap relaxer. I will try to explain. Explain. I once lived in a spreading dessert called Explain. First off a speed trap is not simply some officer of the law bunkered in his vehicle with a dirty acrostic crossword puzzle sneakily inserted like a limp hoo-ha between trees dividing the directions of a highway. A speed trap is a sudden change in speed for ostensibly public safety reasons, but sometimes simply to rake in money for a municipality. If a state puts together a speed limit that a large percentage of the everyday driving population simply never drives, it’s a speed trap.
Now, I don’t drive much any more, but I still have sympathy for people caught in these traps. I’ve even heard of mayors that have been fired from their jobs by setting up illegal speed traps, having cops target people that were less apt to challenge tickets in court! There was a time when I would even bring a long a drawing pad and some pastels and draw some speed trap scenes that I would jokingly try to sell to art rags in Spain and Bolivia, and California. I’m not that interested in any of that anymore. I am not, nor was I ever a speed trap relaxer. I would never take a kernel of pleasure surreptitiously espying or listening in with powerful audio devices and other gadgets, the scenes of a speed trap cling-drag-and-ticket. My wife is a different story. She will try to persuade you that she has some sociological agenda or something, but Dess is nothing but the worse kind of speed trap relaxer, the kind that goes to bed thinking and then dreaming she is simultaneously warning drivers with an elaborate system of semaphores or something, as she aids the ‘better cops’ in some farcical way with nailing the lane weaving speed-slugs.
Dess and I had been shrinking apart from each other as much as this town, as much as the bank accounts from the countless drivers snagged in what might be the most notorious speed trap in North America. I didn’t know it at the time. Hell no did I know. But I would find out. We moved to Swam Larkos because it was ranked # 1 speed trap town for at least ten consecutive years in a small publication for speed trap relaxers that I will not mention. Dess’s first husband was the editor of this publication, and now in jail somewhere in Europe for interference with a police investigation.
Dess and I have known each other for over thirty years. She had worked as a substitute teacher in nearby towns which were never so near, up to about 1997 or so. Often times she would simply not come home. I often wondered if she just wasn’t some aged truant kneading her white whale of an obsession. Dess also worked on a book here and then about speed traps, the beauty of watching them, watching the police officer watch or not watch the road, his speed monitoring equipment. My wife would videotape certain speed traps; have beautiful music with ‘period’ instruments synched with carefully lapping images.
Dess needed to know how certain officers interacted with certain speed trap people. She had a problem, a larger problem than I could fathom. I thought perhaps she was fooling around with some bored perverted cop. Maybe they had a copious amount of rendezvous spots, speed traps spots around Ressocation County? But this would have been a tad too simple to conclude, and ended up being conclusively false. Yes, I began to trail her now and then. I was retired, scared by her obsession, sort of lonely in a can’t get lonely way.
Equipped with her own radar gun and a sweet lemon drink with hints of a homemade white liquor carried in a very old thermos with an ancient glass interior for insulating in heat, Dess sat stock still with an equanimity that would frighten many a soul if there was a soul to see her. She would lean up on some makeshift hiding spot, enthusiastically marking a notebook with her notes. I would get dressed up in my old suit, the only one I owned that was now frayed and always too long in the sleeves, catching sight of her in my cheap binoculars. There was something sexual about her excitement. I might be wrong about this, but there was a constantly deferred lust rush that kept recirculating through her as she looked far down various roads waiting for a car burning rubber to meet with it’s punishment. Her slightest twists of neck or wrists were perplexingly animated as she panted into the empty paper bag that held her sandwich and fruit. Dess took in a mundane or even depressing sort of scene and transposed it to something intoxicatingly exciting, orgasmic.
We didn’t get along much. It had been so long ago since the last time we were interested in each other as opposed to being used to each other to the point of thinking permanent separation in the here and now hard to imagine. One evening upon returning to our house she was intoxicated with this lemon drink of hers. She went on and on with various perches, hiding spots, furtive niches around the world that would be her perfect place to conduct research on international speed traps. I was folding paper, involved in my origami, as was my usual routine immediately after eating dinner. No sooner was a last morsel masticated and swallowed with consummate deviltry, than I would take up my origami. She chose this important moment for me to discuss the methodology of speed trap operations on some Greek island, perhaps it was called Nixy or something repellently cute-cat name sounding.
After enduring what became a sort of harangue disguised as a disinterested yet hyperventilating lecture on her so-called methodology… I became gloomy with a jaw cracked rage of adrenalin lightening my head till it felt disembodied, relocated several billions of years ago in a burning cold landscape of beginning eruptions. It was time to speak. I waited to speak. I did not blow my lid off that day. I began to reach out to old friends I had not spoken or written to in a score of years. I received some kind minded advice, suggestions that ran the gamut from taking a lover, to having her see a mental health specialists, to traveling with Dess to some location where there were no cars at all.
After all Al, Dess doesn’t even drive a car. Maybe a long break away from all things speed limit, and radar gun, and all that, would have a miraculous curative effect?
I thought this was sound advice. I brought it up to Dess one night while we were both looking up at the stars with our new telescope. At first she pretended not to hear me. She spat into the fire that was coolly glowing as I took a stick to it, adjusting a bra strap and almost dropping her thermos as she poured some of her lemon drink into a cup marked ‘Al.’
No. I don’t think traveling anywhere is a great idea now. What would we do?”
What are we doing now? We could do the same thing elsewhere and more. …. See different places, here new tongues, take in a places history as seen through architecture, relics, or simply to sit down next to some common every day person from a different part of the world and share some conversation and wine with or something. I mean it doesn’t make any sense Dess. What are you doing all day relaxing around these speed trap points, gathering all sorts of data for a book that you want to put out… Fine, put it out. I would love to see you do just that. I will help you in any way you would like me too. Let’s just take a break from this first. It doesn’t seem to be healthy what you’re doing everyday. I don’t care what objective you have in mind. I know we haven’t been so close in the last few years, but maybe we can rejuvenate something special we once shared?
Oh windbag it down a bit clackity clack Al, cloacality clap. Go fold some goddamn paper or walk around the dessert. What’s wrong with that? Do I bother you, pester you, come down on you, on you for what you do, get all hair fussed and flake mouthed dry tongued worry wet ear popped knee squeaked bent fingered on YOU? Do you think I’m just relaxing there the whole time? I know what I’m doing.
Dess, has it ever occurred to you that you leaning up on that fence with you’re notebook, cameras and imaginary research devices is a total waste of time? Or never mind thinking of it as a waste of time. Maybe there is no such thing really.
But I must. They get a bead on you. They are perfectly concealed, line of sight clear, use a laser gun. Sneaky cops just wait and wait, and I will wait and wait to count how many are fined, shouted at, what were the speeds, mean speed, high speed. I can admonish a driver from far away, farther and farther away, if I see something about the driver the family or friends I like, not like, I don’t know what. I can do it, I can guess, and warn, and keep warm, and look and wait and lean in, and hide, and see a trap not seen. I’m not done reading this laser gun manual yet Alan, so don’t think about recycling it or something. These cops I know in Rarshen use specially painted cars to blend into the damn trees. You should see these cars. Alan, Al? Christ Alan, AL
