Audio By Carbonatix
I want to start the Burn Down the South Dade Justice Building (after everyone goes home) Club. But in the interest of diplomacy, I’ll settle for re-naming the place The Castle of Poop and Inconvenience. Any takers?
Frankly, I feel like all of my constitutional rights and bodily orifices have been violated in that terrible, terrible hole in Cutler Ridge. Here’s why:
Some time in October, I was helping an irate German Big Cat care taker clean out his cages. We drank lots of beer and got shit in our eyes. After I’d finished sweating out all of the alcohol and could no longer see, I climbed into my shitty car and began puttering back to the office.
As I headed back to work, up the expansive and seemingly empty Turnpike, I was shanghied by a swarm of Florida Highway Patrol cars. The airplane was out and they were just picking us off like tin cans at a carnival.
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Two hundred bucks, they wanted. Well I didn’t do it.
I pled not-guilty. It took almost two months to get a hearing in the middle of the day. I drove to the Castle of Poop and Inconvenience to find a set of fat County cops stood chewing cigars. Inside, an ornery judge was chewing out a Haitian woman, who seemed on the verge of tears.
He asked me how I pled. I told him I’d already pled not guilty. He offered me the option of paying a lot of money. I said no.
I asked if I could get my next hearing somewhere less in the middle-of- nowhere.
He said no.
So I got another hearing in the middle of the day in the middle of nowhere.
This time, the guy in front of me was some kind of downtown lawyer. The cop didn’t show. Red-blooded American that he was, he demanded his hearing. He asked for a downtown hearing. The judge said she had no control over that –it’s based on the officers’ schedule.
If we miss a hearing, we get our license suspended. If the cops miss a hearing, they get another hearing.
Apparently, my cop was up in Tallahassee attending a training course. So I have to come back to the worst place in Dade County in another month.
The judge said I could pay a hundred dollars and go to traffic school. Well, fuck that. I’ll leave Florida forever before I return to the damnable Castle of Poop and Inconvenience (which I honestly hope someone burns down – when no one is there, of course). —Calvin Godfrey
