May 31, 2006
And Justice For All
I was in court the other day for a speeding ticket. I haven't had one in a long time after getting a bunch of them in my early 20s, most notably once in Georgia where I had to write a check out to the county judge, by name.
I usually drive home very late from the office and there is a stretch of the road that crosses the Rio Grande that is deserted at night so, even though the limit is 35 mph I, and half the state of New Mexico, zip over at a comfortable 65 mph. Natalia had even warned me, during one of her periodic visits to my office, that the APD was out in force that week enforcing speed limits. Something about meeting a quota. But it was around midnight, I had Eric Prydze blasting, and totally forgot about Speed Week until I saw the red and blue lights in my rear view window.
So it was that I found myself in a courtroom a few weeks later waiting for my turn to talk to the city prosecutor and hopefully plead my case. The courtroom was packed and I didn't immediately find a place to sit. I finally spotted an empty bench (they looked suspiciously like church pews) whose only other occupant was a disheveled woman in black pants, heels and a tank top that kept sliding down her right shoulder. She kept pulling the strap over her only to have it slide down again. As I sat down I noticed she had the word "Joe" tattooed on the back of her neck in that cheap department-of-corrections-green.
In the year that I've been living in New Mexico it's amazed me how common it is for people to go to prison. People here talk about going to prison the way my friends back in New York and Boston talk about going to graduate school. There are more parallels than you might first expect. There is that vague 'what am I going to do with my life?' feeling you get in your mid 20s. In the northeast this usually means you go get an MBA or go to law school, places you can hang out for a couple of years in a socially acceptable way figuring out what do to with your life [answer: pay off all the debt you've accumulated getting degrees]. In the southwest, you go to prison to hone your skills and become focused (either by deciding you will run an even more efficient dope distribution network or by deciding you will dedicate your life to reaching out to gang members like yourself and reforming them. Either answer is socially acceptable). Plus, in both cases you get to tap an extensive alumni network, you make friends for life and have very deep late night conversations about the meaning of life.
There was a group of guys I used to play poker with here every other week. I used to love those games, no nonsense Texas Hold'Em tournaments with lots of booze and cigars and no one ever asked what you did for a living, unlike Boston where within two minutes of meeting someone you knew: a) what they did for a living, b) if their extended network could help advance your career in any way, and c) whether it was worth continuing the conversation or not. It was so refreshing playing with these guys, who were firemen and construction workers and janitors and morticians. My poker group in Boston was made up of mathematicians, economists, hedge fund managers and dotcommers. The former turned out to be the lesser gamblers.
The poker group was a lot of fun. That is, until Eddie, the host, announced he was going to be going away for a few years. There was no need to ask, though I did anyway. The feds nailed him in Ohio. Trafficking. Third offense. So the regular poker game ended and Eddie is but one of a half dozen people I have gotten to know fairly well who have had to "go away for a few years." I meet these women all the time, at clubs and bars, beautiful women fanatically devoted to a boyfriend in prison yet willing and wanting a relationship while their man does his time.
"How's Joe?" I turned and asked Cascading Tank Top.
"He's my son."
"Oh? How old is he?" Experience has taught me that where there is a tattoo that says Joe or Eddie or Jaime there was usually a Senior at some point who fathered the Junior. These come in pairs.
"He's five."
"That's cool."
The judge entered the room and everybody in the room rose in respect, albeit with differing degrees of enthusiasm. A clerk began reading off names one by one as each defendant rose went up to the podium and faced the judge. It's during times like these that I realize what a small insular world New Mexico still is. You hear the same names over and over again, whether it be in traffic court, at the Chamber of Commerce or on the 10 o'clock news. Montoya, Jaramillo, Maestas, Madrid, Baca, Gallegos, Tapia, Archuleta and others all tracing back to the original eight land grants the King of Spain made to the descendants of the first conquistadores who settled this corner of the Terra Incognita.
"There is a price tag on the bottom of your shoe," she said.
I checked. "You're right."
"Are they new?"
"Not really," I said as I took the tag off. I was wearing my best dress shoes, slacks and pants. Attire usually reserved for funerals, graduations and weddings. Or court appearances where you need the whole ensemble to say, 'I am a law-abiding, tax-paying, upstanding member of the community who will vote for you the next time you're up for reelection.'
"Are you from around here?" she asked.
"No. You?"
"Yes."
"What do you do?"
"I'm a dancer."
"Where?"
"The Rhino."
"You like it?"
"Actually don't work there much these days. Mostly do private shows."
"How long have you been doing that?"
"About five years. Look me up in the Yellow Pages. It's called Private Eyes."
"How is it?"
"The money is very good."
"Mostly girl-girl stuff?"
"Mmmmh. That and then some." She looked bad, too skinny and her face seemed older than she actually was. Like she'd been used and abused. She looked so bad, that it almost became erotic.
"You don't work for Albuquerque's Finest?"
"What's that?"
"An escort service."
"No, it's called Private Eyes. I'll give you a card."
It's a big inside joke: Albuquerque's Finest is the nickname of the APD. It's also the name of the fake escort service the police department runs to nab people for soliciting prostitutes. It's surprising how many people they get each year who open the Yellow Pages and call Albuquerque's Finest looking for a hot time.
We talked some more. She asked what I did, where I was from originally, why I came to Albuquerque, and so on. She said she wanted to leave Albuquerque. I told her it was a great town. I asked her why she was in court and she said she was stopped without a license, with no plates and no insurance. And she'd missed her first court date. She pulled her tank-top strap up. Not exactly conveying upstanding member of the community, are we?
"I don't have a boyfriend," she said out of the blue.
"Why not?"
"Because I have a five year old son. And most people can't handle what I do."
"How long have you been without a boyfriend?"
"Too long. Do you have a pen?"
"No. Why?"
"So I can give you my number."
"No, I don't have one. And they wouldn't let me come into the building with my cell
phone."
"I'll give you my number outside when we're done."
"Okay."
When her turn came, she sauntered up to the podium and replied to the judge's "Good Afternoon" with a "hey". His Honor asked her why she had missed her first court date and she said she forgot. He asked her why the car had no insurance or plates and she said it was a friend's car. He asked her why she didn't have a license, and she said she forgot it. Surprisingly, all she had to do was pay a hefty fine. She winked at me on her way out.
By the time my turn came I had already met with the city prosecutor and worked out a plea bargain. If I don't have any traffic tickets in the next 90 days then the speeding charge is dropped and not reported to my insurance company. So my sartorial strategy worked.
This is a key difference between the US and Mexico. When you get pulled over by a cop in the US you want to show respect. "Yes, officer" and "No, officer." Be polite, cooperative and contrite and at least half the time you get off with just a warning. This is a land of laws: show that you respect the law and you are treated reasonably well.
In Mexico, on the other hand, if you get pulled over by a cop you want to show, in subtle ways, how little respect you have for the cop. Take a long time complying with requests, challenge the cop when he makes a statement and do it all with a slight tone of contempt. The reason is that Mexico is not a land of laws, but of raw power. You want to show the cop that you have more power than he does (why else would you be so blase in the face of authority) and therefore he shouldn't try to screw you over. You plant the seed in his head that if anything bad happens to you, you have powerful friends you can call on to make his life miserable. Otherwise, if the cop gets the feeling you are powerless, you will have to pay a huge bribe at best and could be robbed and beaten at worst.
There is a great Mexican joke that, like all great jokes, speaks volumes about the truth of a culture. A man gets pulled over by a cop who asks, "Didn't you see the red light?" "Yes, officer I did. What I didn't see was you."
It was a skill I fine-tuned. I got a car midway through my junior year in high school and got pulled over repeatedly by the police. True, I was a bad driver. But everyone in Mexico City is a bad driver: cutting people off, not using turn signals, speeding, making illegal turns, running red lights, and so on. This is normal stuff. In fact, if you don't drive aggressively you are more likely to get into an accident. And true, my car was a junky car. By the time I was done with it the door did not work (I had to enter through the passenger side), it did not go in reverse, the gas gauge was broken (I would stop at red lights and put a hose in the tank and pull it out to get an idea how much longer I could drive before I needed to fill up), the brake lights were out and the radiator overheated after about an hour of driving. But once again, most people in Mexico City drive crap cars.
No, I got pulled over because I was a 17 year-old gringo and I had "Big Bribe" written across my forehead. So I learned to play the game well. I had to. I asked semi-literate cops to show me the traffic code I had violated. They usually fumbled through the Reglamento de Transito before giving up or, most amusingly, handing me the law book and asking me to find my own infraction. I debated the nature of law with them and the morality of bribes and corruption.
Actually, I got to know the system very well as a result. Every cop has to pay for his uniform and gun and even his bullets. And he has to pay a weekly quota for the right to work a certain street corner, the more upscale neighborhoods commanding a larger fee. And if they didn't make their quota, they were punished, demoted to a worse intersection, made to clean the bosses house, even beaten. So they usually gave up, since time is money after all, and there were less pesky motorists to harass. A few times though they did take me into the police station and so I resumed my arguments with a judge. A couple of times I even spent a few hours in jail before I was let go. And eventually I always was.
At first I felt a certain moral superiority: I do not pay bribes. I am not corrupt. My friends always paid the bribe, some of them rolling down their window and sticking a bill out in an exquisite mix of contempt and expediency. But not I. I am not corrupt, I said. But this was an illusory superiority. The real reason I got off was because I had immunity: I was a fair- skinned American who was not worth the trouble. Even though my family actually didn't have any money or real power to speak of, I was a member nonetheless of the tribe that has plenty of both. If I had been a dark-skinned Mexican my moral stance would not have been worth much. And in fact, the couple of times that I did get in real trouble I did pay a bribe. Just like everyone else, I had my price. In a lawless land, before a predatory justice system, you very quickly become a realist.
Back in the land of speed limits, I now have to be very careful driving for the next 90 days, which will be hard because I just discovered a new way home that takes a bit longer but follows the rim of the mesa behind the five volcanoes that overlook the city. The drive is spectacular and the road mostly deserted...except for the occasional cop hunting for a speedster.
Whenever friends or family would come visit us in Mexico City they would remark how nerve-wracking it was to drive in the city. My uncle, who used to be an amateur race car driver, said it was like car racing in slow motion. But I find it a lot more stressful to drive in the US than in Mexico. There are so many laws to be constantly looking out for. In one stretch of road the speed limit can change from 45 to 35 back to 45 and then to 25, except when school is in session it is 15, then back to 45 and so on. What a way to ruin an enjoyable ride. Personally I'd rather keep my eye out for kamikaze commuters and let the rest sort itself out.
When I lived in Boston about 10 years ago I was friends with a colleague at work, a guy from Italy who had been living in the States for about five years. We quickly had a common interest: the amount of parking tickets we were getting. Milan, like Mexico City, is a city where you can park just about anywhere and where traffic laws are no more than suggestions. Being a motorist in Boston, on the other hand, requires a PhD. There are parking signs that say, "No parking third Wed of every month April - Nov, 8 am - 12 am, except during Snow Emergency." Driving and parking are abstractions. In Mexico City any spot of asphalt is fair game though you probably end up paying a guy with a red rag a tip or extortion fee, depending how you look at it, to make sure your car is intact when you return.
"They humiliate you into submission," Alessandro said with Etruscan flair.
"Yes, I finally gave up after four or five parking tickets and do exactly as they say," I said.
"I've learned there is no such thing as the immaculate parking spot."
"It's inhuman," he continued. "We are not children. All these rules." Alessandro proceeded to tell me about all the times he'd gone to traffic court to contest the parking ticket, how despite his oratorical skills and appeals to common humanity and common sense, he was always browbeaten and fined anyway.
"It's inhuman," he said. The funny part about this story is that we were on our way to Harvard Square for a an official company dinner and running late. Harvard Square is the Mt. Everest of parking challenges. Alessandro first swore me to secrecy and then drove us down an alleyway I had never noticed before and had me jump out of the car and lift the arm of a parking gate long enough for him to drive in.
"What's this?"
"Harvard faculty housing," he smiled the smile that said the Massachusetts Bay Parking Powers had not beaten all of the humanity out of him after all. "Parking by permit only."
After I spoke to the judge I waited for my name to be called so I could get the $56 bill for court costs. I left the court room and headed downstairs where I knew Cascading Tank Top was waiting. I could see our life together unfolding: I pay her court fine, we have crazy sex, she gets evicted and moves in, we have crazy sex, she asks to borrow money, we have crazy sex, I confront her about her meth habit, we have crazy sex, Joe Jr and I play soccer in the park, we have crazy sex, Joe Sr is let out of prison and breaks my nose in the park, we have crazy sex, she asks to borrow more money, we have crazy sex, I get home one day to find all my stuff missing, and so on until we're back at this exact same courthouse where it all began.
I discreetly slip out a side exit and put a check in the mail for $56 payable to the City of Albuquerque.
I was in court the other day for a speeding ticket. I haven't had one in a long time after getting a bunch of them in my early 20s, most notably once in Georgia where I had to write a check out to the county judge, by name.
I usually drive home very late from the office and there is a stretch of the road that crosses the Rio Grande that is deserted at night so, even though the limit is 35 mph I, and half the state of New Mexico, zip over at a comfortable 65 mph. Natalia had even warned me, during one of her periodic visits to my office, that the APD was out in force that week enforcing speed limits. Something about meeting a quota. But it was around midnight, I had Eric Prydze blasting, and totally forgot about Speed Week until I saw the red and blue lights in my rear view window.
So it was that I found myself in a courtroom a few weeks later waiting for my turn to talk to the city prosecutor and hopefully plead my case. The courtroom was packed and I didn't immediately find a place to sit. I finally spotted an empty bench (they looked suspiciously like church pews) whose only other occupant was a disheveled woman in black pants, heels and a tank top that kept sliding down her right shoulder. She kept pulling the strap over her only to have it slide down again. As I sat down I noticed she had the word "Joe" tattooed on the back of her neck in that cheap department-of-corrections-green.
In the year that I've been living in New Mexico it's amazed me how common it is for people to go to prison. People here talk about going to prison the way my friends back in New York and Boston talk about going to graduate school. There are more parallels than you might first expect. There is that vague 'what am I going to do with my life?' feeling you get in your mid 20s. In the northeast this usually means you go get an MBA or go to law school, places you can hang out for a couple of years in a socially acceptable way figuring out what do to with your life [answer: pay off all the debt you've accumulated getting degrees]. In the southwest, you go to prison to hone your skills and become focused (either by deciding you will run an even more efficient dope distribution network or by deciding you will dedicate your life to reaching out to gang members like yourself and reforming them. Either answer is socially acceptable). Plus, in both cases you get to tap an extensive alumni network, you make friends for life and have very deep late night conversations about the meaning of life.
There was a group of guys I used to play poker with here every other week. I used to love those games, no nonsense Texas Hold'Em tournaments with lots of booze and cigars and no one ever asked what you did for a living, unlike Boston where within two minutes of meeting someone you knew: a) what they did for a living, b) if their extended network could help advance your career in any way, and c) whether it was worth continuing the conversation or not. It was so refreshing playing with these guys, who were firemen and construction workers and janitors and morticians. My poker group in Boston was made up of mathematicians, economists, hedge fund managers and dotcommers. The former turned out to be the lesser gamblers.
The poker group was a lot of fun. That is, until Eddie, the host, announced he was going to be going away for a few years. There was no need to ask, though I did anyway. The feds nailed him in Ohio. Trafficking. Third offense. So the regular poker game ended and Eddie is but one of a half dozen people I have gotten to know fairly well who have had to "go away for a few years." I meet these women all the time, at clubs and bars, beautiful women fanatically devoted to a boyfriend in prison yet willing and wanting a relationship while their man does his time.
"How's Joe?" I turned and asked Cascading Tank Top.
"He's my son."
"Oh? How old is he?" Experience has taught me that where there is a tattoo that says Joe or Eddie or Jaime there was usually a Senior at some point who fathered the Junior. These come in pairs.
"He's five."
"That's cool."
The judge entered the room and everybody in the room rose in respect, albeit with differing degrees of enthusiasm. A clerk began reading off names one by one as each defendant rose went up to the podium and faced the judge. It's during times like these that I realize what a small insular world New Mexico still is. You hear the same names over and over again, whether it be in traffic court, at the Chamber of Commerce or on the 10 o'clock news. Montoya, Jaramillo, Maestas, Madrid, Baca, Gallegos, Tapia, Archuleta and others all tracing back to the original eight land grants the King of Spain made to the descendants of the first conquistadores who settled this corner of the Terra Incognita.
"There is a price tag on the bottom of your shoe," she said.
I checked. "You're right."
"Are they new?"
"Not really," I said as I took the tag off. I was wearing my best dress shoes, slacks and pants. Attire usually reserved for funerals, graduations and weddings. Or court appearances where you need the whole ensemble to say, 'I am a law-abiding, tax-paying, upstanding member of the community who will vote for you the next time you're up for reelection.'
"Are you from around here?" she asked.
"No. You?"
"Yes."
"What do you do?"
"I'm a dancer."
"Where?"
"The Rhino."
"You like it?"
"Actually don't work there much these days. Mostly do private shows."
"How long have you been doing that?"
"About five years. Look me up in the Yellow Pages. It's called Private Eyes."
"How is it?"
"The money is very good."
"Mostly girl-girl stuff?"
"Mmmmh. That and then some." She looked bad, too skinny and her face seemed older than she actually was. Like she'd been used and abused. She looked so bad, that it almost became erotic.
"You don't work for Albuquerque's Finest?"
"What's that?"
"An escort service."
"No, it's called Private Eyes. I'll give you a card."
It's a big inside joke: Albuquerque's Finest is the nickname of the APD. It's also the name of the fake escort service the police department runs to nab people for soliciting prostitutes. It's surprising how many people they get each year who open the Yellow Pages and call Albuquerque's Finest looking for a hot time.
We talked some more. She asked what I did, where I was from originally, why I came to Albuquerque, and so on. She said she wanted to leave Albuquerque. I told her it was a great town. I asked her why she was in court and she said she was stopped without a license, with no plates and no insurance. And she'd missed her first court date. She pulled her tank-top strap up. Not exactly conveying upstanding member of the community, are we?
"I don't have a boyfriend," she said out of the blue.
"Why not?"
"Because I have a five year old son. And most people can't handle what I do."
"How long have you been without a boyfriend?"
"Too long. Do you have a pen?"
"No. Why?"
"So I can give you my number."
"No, I don't have one. And they wouldn't let me come into the building with my cell
phone."
"I'll give you my number outside when we're done."
"Okay."
When her turn came, she sauntered up to the podium and replied to the judge's "Good Afternoon" with a "hey". His Honor asked her why she had missed her first court date and she said she forgot. He asked her why the car had no insurance or plates and she said it was a friend's car. He asked her why she didn't have a license, and she said she forgot it. Surprisingly, all she had to do was pay a hefty fine. She winked at me on her way out.
By the time my turn came I had already met with the city prosecutor and worked out a plea bargain. If I don't have any traffic tickets in the next 90 days then the speeding charge is dropped and not reported to my insurance company. So my sartorial strategy worked.
This is a key difference between the US and Mexico. When you get pulled over by a cop in the US you want to show respect. "Yes, officer" and "No, officer." Be polite, cooperative and contrite and at least half the time you get off with just a warning. This is a land of laws: show that you respect the law and you are treated reasonably well.
In Mexico, on the other hand, if you get pulled over by a cop you want to show, in subtle ways, how little respect you have for the cop. Take a long time complying with requests, challenge the cop when he makes a statement and do it all with a slight tone of contempt. The reason is that Mexico is not a land of laws, but of raw power. You want to show the cop that you have more power than he does (why else would you be so blase in the face of authority) and therefore he shouldn't try to screw you over. You plant the seed in his head that if anything bad happens to you, you have powerful friends you can call on to make his life miserable. Otherwise, if the cop gets the feeling you are powerless, you will have to pay a huge bribe at best and could be robbed and beaten at worst.
There is a great Mexican joke that, like all great jokes, speaks volumes about the truth of a culture. A man gets pulled over by a cop who asks, "Didn't you see the red light?" "Yes, officer I did. What I didn't see was you."
It was a skill I fine-tuned. I got a car midway through my junior year in high school and got pulled over repeatedly by the police. True, I was a bad driver. But everyone in Mexico City is a bad driver: cutting people off, not using turn signals, speeding, making illegal turns, running red lights, and so on. This is normal stuff. In fact, if you don't drive aggressively you are more likely to get into an accident. And true, my car was a junky car. By the time I was done with it the door did not work (I had to enter through the passenger side), it did not go in reverse, the gas gauge was broken (I would stop at red lights and put a hose in the tank and pull it out to get an idea how much longer I could drive before I needed to fill up), the brake lights were out and the radiator overheated after about an hour of driving. But once again, most people in Mexico City drive crap cars.
No, I got pulled over because I was a 17 year-old gringo and I had "Big Bribe" written across my forehead. So I learned to play the game well. I had to. I asked semi-literate cops to show me the traffic code I had violated. They usually fumbled through the Reglamento de Transito before giving up or, most amusingly, handing me the law book and asking me to find my own infraction. I debated the nature of law with them and the morality of bribes and corruption.
Actually, I got to know the system very well as a result. Every cop has to pay for his uniform and gun and even his bullets. And he has to pay a weekly quota for the right to work a certain street corner, the more upscale neighborhoods commanding a larger fee. And if they didn't make their quota, they were punished, demoted to a worse intersection, made to clean the bosses house, even beaten. So they usually gave up, since time is money after all, and there were less pesky motorists to harass. A few times though they did take me into the police station and so I resumed my arguments with a judge. A couple of times I even spent a few hours in jail before I was let go. And eventually I always was.
At first I felt a certain moral superiority: I do not pay bribes. I am not corrupt. My friends always paid the bribe, some of them rolling down their window and sticking a bill out in an exquisite mix of contempt and expediency. But not I. I am not corrupt, I said. But this was an illusory superiority. The real reason I got off was because I had immunity: I was a fair- skinned American who was not worth the trouble. Even though my family actually didn't have any money or real power to speak of, I was a member nonetheless of the tribe that has plenty of both. If I had been a dark-skinned Mexican my moral stance would not have been worth much. And in fact, the couple of times that I did get in real trouble I did pay a bribe. Just like everyone else, I had my price. In a lawless land, before a predatory justice system, you very quickly become a realist.
Back in the land of speed limits, I now have to be very careful driving for the next 90 days, which will be hard because I just discovered a new way home that takes a bit longer but follows the rim of the mesa behind the five volcanoes that overlook the city. The drive is spectacular and the road mostly deserted...except for the occasional cop hunting for a speedster.
Whenever friends or family would come visit us in Mexico City they would remark how nerve-wracking it was to drive in the city. My uncle, who used to be an amateur race car driver, said it was like car racing in slow motion. But I find it a lot more stressful to drive in the US than in Mexico. There are so many laws to be constantly looking out for. In one stretch of road the speed limit can change from 45 to 35 back to 45 and then to 25, except when school is in session it is 15, then back to 45 and so on. What a way to ruin an enjoyable ride. Personally I'd rather keep my eye out for kamikaze commuters and let the rest sort itself out.
When I lived in Boston about 10 years ago I was friends with a colleague at work, a guy from Italy who had been living in the States for about five years. We quickly had a common interest: the amount of parking tickets we were getting. Milan, like Mexico City, is a city where you can park just about anywhere and where traffic laws are no more than suggestions. Being a motorist in Boston, on the other hand, requires a PhD. There are parking signs that say, "No parking third Wed of every month April - Nov, 8 am - 12 am, except during Snow Emergency." Driving and parking are abstractions. In Mexico City any spot of asphalt is fair game though you probably end up paying a guy with a red rag a tip or extortion fee, depending how you look at it, to make sure your car is intact when you return.
"They humiliate you into submission," Alessandro said with Etruscan flair.
"Yes, I finally gave up after four or five parking tickets and do exactly as they say," I said.
"I've learned there is no such thing as the immaculate parking spot."
"It's inhuman," he continued. "We are not children. All these rules." Alessandro proceeded to tell me about all the times he'd gone to traffic court to contest the parking ticket, how despite his oratorical skills and appeals to common humanity and common sense, he was always browbeaten and fined anyway.
"It's inhuman," he said. The funny part about this story is that we were on our way to Harvard Square for a an official company dinner and running late. Harvard Square is the Mt. Everest of parking challenges. Alessandro first swore me to secrecy and then drove us down an alleyway I had never noticed before and had me jump out of the car and lift the arm of a parking gate long enough for him to drive in.
"What's this?"
"Harvard faculty housing," he smiled the smile that said the Massachusetts Bay Parking Powers had not beaten all of the humanity out of him after all. "Parking by permit only."
After I spoke to the judge I waited for my name to be called so I could get the $56 bill for court costs. I left the court room and headed downstairs where I knew Cascading Tank Top was waiting. I could see our life together unfolding: I pay her court fine, we have crazy sex, she gets evicted and moves in, we have crazy sex, she asks to borrow money, we have crazy sex, I confront her about her meth habit, we have crazy sex, Joe Jr and I play soccer in the park, we have crazy sex, Joe Sr is let out of prison and breaks my nose in the park, we have crazy sex, she asks to borrow more money, we have crazy sex, I get home one day to find all my stuff missing, and so on until we're back at this exact same courthouse where it all began.
I discreetly slip out a side exit and put a check in the mail for $56 payable to the City of Albuquerque.
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