Yesterday I got a speeding ticket.
I was on the way to lunch with my wife, and the State Trooper had come speeding up from behind, lights blazing.
I pulled to the opposite lane to let him aside and he followed on my bumper, urgently pointing for me to pull over.
I did so, watching through my rear view mirror as the officer leapt out of his car and strode to my window, asking for my license and registration.
Procuring them, I listened carefully as he said, "I pulled you over because this is a 55 zone, but I clocked you going..."
I held my breath.
"...69 miles per hour."
Exhaling, I responded, "Oh. Okay, I'm sorry."
He took my documentation and marched back to his cruiser.
Beside me, my wife asked, "Do you think you were really going 69?"
I answered her with total honesty. "I've been driving this road nearly every day I wasn't deployed for the past eight years, and I don't think I ever did below 70 in any car during that time.”
The list of previous vehicles was rather undistinguished, consisting of a '96 Explorer, an '05 Trailblazer, and my wife's Toyota Highlander, each of which I'd received speeding tickets in throughout the years, albeit on other roads.
I continued, "And especially not this fucking car."
She nodded, understanding the implicit truth.
The vehicle I now piloted was a 2009 Cadillac CTS-V.
The car’s very name inspired sheer reverence among those who knew what it was, myself included. Far from your grandfather’s Cadillac (or mine), this was a 556-horsepower, supercharged 6.2-liter V8, four-door monster of a vehicle.
I had been driving it daily since 2011, and in that time had spent far more time over the speed limit than under it.
While I was born to a three-generation strong lineage of Cadillac owners, I had long been content, as evidenced by my vehicle ownership history, to drive beater cars.
That all changed in 2010 when, as best as I can describe it, I became aware of the Cadillac CTS-V in the same way that the machines in Terminator became aware of their own consciousness.
After that point, during my final year as a bachelor, my days and nights were hallmarked by using bourbon as an appetite suppressant while saving a down payment and researching the finer points of CTS-V acquisition.
Through aggressive savings and even more aggressive financing, I ordered my dream CTS-V in 2011. It was a used, 33,000-mile, Crystal Red, manual transmission beast, and on one fateful day I watched its arrival to my front door on a flatbed that performed a 6-point turn in front of my house while churning up chunks of asphalt from my cul-de-sac.
The truck driver had apologized profusely, but I was nearly in tears with joy. The small details, such as the fact that my street was destroyed or that I didn't truly know how to drive a manual transmission, would be rectified in the years to come.
The CTS-V had a versatility shared by few other vehicles.
At my wedding a year later I exited the church, opened the door for my new bride, then flipped a U-turn through a 4-way intersection to execute a deafening wide open throttle run in front of a crowd of my drunken, cheering Polish relatives.
The next day, the same car had transported four passengers to the airport in total comfort with their luggage secured in the spacious trunk.
The back roads near my house bore no small amount of tread marks from frantic, supercharged, face-warping, tire-melting accelerations whose top speed ended somewhere in the ether surrounding the upper limits of a rather generous speedometer.
And I couldn’t count the number of times that I'd pulled into my garage to the intoxicating smell of molten rubber, the grand car’s noble engine ticking loudly in the throes of post-redline bliss.
Two years later, the back doors of this modern day American supercar open to reveal a kid seat surrounded by dolls, diapers, and baby wipes, and its Bose speakers can often be heard blasting Pandora Toddler Radio as I drive my 2-year old to and from day care.
And when the back seat is vacant, down to the floor the accelerator goes.
Truth be told, as I was pulled over on the side of the road a few miles from my house yesterday, the first time my beloved CTS-V has suffered such an indignity, I was profoundly grateful that my uniformed accuser alleged an excess speed that could be compressed into two digits.
When the officer came back to the driver side door, I accepted the ticket without complaint. We told each other to have a good day and parted ways—he to whip a U-turn and reestablish his back road radar vigil, and me to have lunch with my wife.
A $90 overage of the ticket price, I knew well by that time, would pay a lawyer to reduce my charge to a non-moving violation. The lack of increase in my insurance costs would fully compensate the cost within a year or two, and I would live to speed again. Hopefully, I will go uncaught for another few years before the next sighting of flashing lights in my rear view mirror. But if not, well, that’s just the price of doing business.
And a worthwhile price, at that.
As I watched the patrol car return from the direction it had come, I shifted into first gear, accelerating into the road with the vicious growl of the 6.2-liter V8 engine offset by the squealing whistle of the supercharger spooling up.
When the engine redlined at 6200 RPM, I hit the clutch with my left foot, throwing the stick into second gear and punching the accelerator as my dream car barreled down the same roads it had been dominating for half a decade.
Jason Kasper is the author of the David Rivers Series. Read more and contact him at base1178.com.