Although I grew up in fast-paced Hot-lanta where most, if not all, my friends were getting learner’s permits and eventually their own cars, I was one of the late bloomers, made lazy by the convenience of Marta, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, which had bus and rail service to virtually anywhere I needed to go at any time of day or night my mother would allow me to travel. I also figured that even if I did get a Georgia driver’s license, it wouldn’t do me much good, as I was certain my mother would never,… ever… ever trust me,… at any age, accompanied or alone, behind the wheel of Anna-Lee, her recently refurbished ’69 Chevy Malibu convertible. Blue. Rag top. To this day, the only car she has ever owned. A car-jacking just waiting to happen.

It wasn’t until I was a 21-year-old single mother, living, where sometimes it felt more like being stranded, in small-town, Home-of-the-Gators, Florida, that I finally came to the conclusion it was probably time for me to learn how to drive. My super-incentive was Gainesville’s horrible attempt at public transportation and the limited edition ’79 Chevy Nova that sat under a tree in my grandmother’s front yard gathering mold and pollen because she, at sixty-something, decided to upgrade to a Jeep.

     I remember being pregnant and timid and scared, waddling up to the counter to take the written exam to get my learner’s permit, looking at the question diagrams and wishing I’d studied just a little bit more than I had. Conversely, with the exception of the parallel parking section where I accomplished the task in the required three movements, but left a small river’s width between my car and the curb, the rest of the driving test is a blur. “Aw, you just made it!” My country bumpkin driving instructor chimed in his best twang after he tallied my score. If 250 was passing, I think I got a 251. Good enough.

     Finally, I’d been legally unleashed to zoom-zoom the streets of Gainesville, where, for those of you who know the two accepted ways to pronounce Alachua, the name of the county in which the city of Gainesville resides, you know that wasn’t saying much. Even so, by the time I’d packed my bags and headed North 14 years later, I’d managed to drive my way through four cars: two were rear-ended, one flipped over and one died; I’d racked up an undisclosed number of speeding tickets; one car was booted twice and towed once, and I’d gotten two tickets for driving with a suspended license and went to jail the same number of times for failure to appear even though I did,… both times.

Each time I got pulled over while driving with a suspended license, the ticketing Officer took out a little pamphlet and looked up the traffic court dates that corresponded to the first initial in my last name and wrote that date on my ticket, and both times each one gave me the wrong court date. “So, what am I supposed to do now?” I asked the traffic court clerk after she told me I’d missed my court date.

     “You have to turn yourself in.” She said it like we were in a department store, and I just wanted to change the skirt I’d bought the day before for a smaller size. I waved the yellow copy of my ticket in her face.

     "You mean, turn myself in like, do-not-pass-go and go-straight-to- jail turn myself in?" I asked stunned and confused.

     "Yes," she answered like I shouldn't be surprised or upset.

     “But it’s NOT MY FAULT!! I’m standing here… in your face… on the day the ticket told me to be here.” And I pointed to the date on the slip of paper, which actually may have been pink, I was still waving in the air for the entire room to see.

     “I know, and it doesn’t matter.” The clothing store cashier who was doubling as a traffic clerk replied. When I calmed down and accepted my fate, the clerk walked me through the whole turn-yourself-in process. “You should try to get there no later than 6:30 in the morning,… and you’ll be out by three.” Great. I called my babysitter, my grandmother and then a friend who could drop me off at the Pokey. “Gasp!” Was pretty much everyone’s first response, which was soon followed by more laughter than I thought necessary once I explained the details of my pending incarceration.

     The second time I was caught speeding with a suspended license, I made a point to ask the ticketing Officer, “Are you SURE you’re giving me the right court date?!!!” He said he was and kept on writing. But this time when the court house security guard paused two minutes longer than I thought he should, I commented with my smart-assed conspiracy theory undertone, “Let me guess, I’m not on the docket today.” He looked up at me with wide-eyed surprise and asked,

     “How’d you know?” 

“I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you.” And I hurriedly turned around and walked out the building before bells, whistles and sirens went off to alert the authorities of my presence.

The next day I went to work at the Alachua County Waste Management Facility in Archer and told my boss I was once again going to have to turn myself in. And she, just like the others, laughed much longer than I thought she should have, then, in the vein of the easy-going way of Gainesville life, and without judgment, she said, “Just let me know what day works best for you.” If I’d been smart, I would’ve sat down with my boss right then and picked out a day to go to jail and had her put in on her calendar. Instead, I just put it off. “Ah,… today’s not a good day for jail.” Or “I’m too busy,… the sun is too bright. I don’t feel like being uncomfortable today…” whatever sounded good enough to issue an official, self-decreed postponement until I finally did what I was supposed to do or my luck ran out.

Yeah,… my luck ran out.

I was driving a beat-up Volks Wagon Jetta with a broken driver’s side head light that I’d tried to fix with packaging tape. It was raining that night, the tape wasn’t secure and the water blew the bulb. “You know you’re going to jail tonight, right?” A little voice in my head asked me on the way home. A City Police car passed me in the opposite direction, and I cringed while I looked in my rear-view mirror, waiting for him to turn around and pull me over. He kept driving. “Whoo hoo!!!” One part of me thought, while, I promise you on everything that is sacred to me, the other half said “You’re still going to jail. You’re just going to make it home before they get you.” My eyes darted the four lane highway from Gainesville to the city of Alachua where’d I’d moved almost a year before. It felt like the longest trip I’d ever made in my life. And just as I was about to relax, making the right turn that was only blocks away from my house, I saw two County Sheriffs sitting on the corner. “Maybe they won’t follow me… maybe, hopefully,” I thought. As I went down that one last street, another County Sheriff’s car approached me in the opposite direction. “Damnit!” I drove into my drive way, and two Sheriff’s cars pulled up behind me.

     By this time I didn’t even have a driver’s license to show them, so I offered the truth of my crime right away. They laughed, and I was calmed a little, glad to see they were in good spirits. “You were going to find out anyway,” I added.

“If you didn’t have a warrant out for your arrest, I would just write you a ticket for a court date…”

“No more court dates! Please! Just take me to jail,” I said cutting him off. He was nice about it all, and let me take off my earrings and my watch and leave them in the car. He drew the line at letting me go in the house and change into something more jail appropriate.

I’d done a story for the local newspaper about the Alachua County S.W.A.T. Team tryouts a year earlier, and chatted with the Officer about some of the Sheriffs we both knew. “How many speeding tickets do you have to get before they deem you habitual,” I asked the Officer, changing the subject. After some prying and as much disclosure as I felt comfortable giving, he assured me I wasn’t going to get any heavy fines or have to do some real jail time.

“I’m going to have to put handcuffs on you know,” he said apologetically when he pulled into the jails bay area. “I’ll get in trouble if I walk you in without them on.”

“Okay, I’ll forgive you for your brutal force, I guess.” We both laughed, and I felt like I’d made a friend.

“Have you been here before,” the female Officer asked me in receiving.

“Yep!” I laughed. “Too many times now.”

I was processed, and every guard who heard my story sympathized with me. It didn’t change the process any, but at least they didn’t think I was some crack-head criminal.

I was just a girl who had a need for speed and a pocket that was too shallow to pay the penalties.