I thought I'd told this “more of Shannon's bad behavior” story before but I couldn't find it anywhere. I apologize if it's a retelling. This takes place at my old house on Bathurst in Toronto while I'm driving my Audi TT. I'm trying to get back home, but the light ahead is red so even though my driveway is only a few hundred feet in front of me, I'm going to have to wait for the light to change to green, move ahead, change to red again (so the oncoming traffic will stop), and then pull in… Fuck that, I'm not wasting three minutes!
So I pull out into what would be oncoming traffic if anyone on the cross street turned, and floor it. I don't have much space to accelerate so I probably don't hit more than about 30 mph, but as I do so, I tear past a police car and then swerve into my driveway. As is expected the cop fires up his cherries and pulls in behind me blocking the driveway. I open the door and he walks up to me, clearly quite pissed off.
All he says is “WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?!?”
“Oh, it's alright,” I say. “I live here.”
“NO, WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?!?”
Yeah, well, I'm not about to make the number one dumb-criminal mistake of self-incrimination, so I just tell him, “Well, you see, I live in that house right over there, and this driveway connects at the rear, so I'm just parking in my driveway like I always do.”
“I JUST SAW YOU SPEED THROUGH FIVE HUNDRED FEET OF ONCOMING TRAFFIC!”
I've started the game now, so I decide to continue with my strategy of complete and categorical denial and simply say “no I didn't.” This really flusters him and he's getting visibly upset. I'm pretty sure that because of how I passed him I'm not on video, and by this point the light has changed and all potential witnesses have driven off. I'm quite sure I have the winning hand.
He sputters something about charging me with reckless driving, and I say, “Reckless driving? That's crazy — how do you expect me to park here? I mean, this is where I live! Are you telling me that I can't park here?”
“Are you saying you always drive through oncoming traffic?”
“Well how else am I supposed to get into my driveway?”
The cop is starting to realize that I'm basically saying “fuck you, take me to court if you think you've got anything,” and that he does not in fact have anything that will stand up against me in court. I guess that doesn't happen much to traffic police or something, because he was obviously shaken and not really sure how to proceed.
“Look, are you writing me a ticket for something or can I go?”
He then gives me some meaningless warning to save face and leaves.
I'll tell one other reckless driving story from the TT. I really must have felt invincible or something back then (although having been dead once before, you kind of lose the fear of death, so maybe it's just that)… Anyway, I'm on about a two hour drive with the TT back to Toronto, and I've got it maxxed out at 207 kph (that's where the limiter kicks in and I hadn't yet chipped my TT when this happened) for most of the way. Whenever I'd come up behind another car, I'd flash my high-beams at them from a half click back and tear past them as they pulled over.
I guess some people don't like pulling over when flashed so one guy not only didn't pull over, but he matched the speed of the person next to him (maybe 120 or 130) and blocked the highway… Yeah, well, Audi makes a good four wheel drive, right? So I just dropped back a little, gunned it, and pulled off the road and tore past him in the ditch.
I guess it made him really angry or offended his econocar-driving manhood, because as soon as I drove past the next on-ramp a police car was immediately on top of me. I pulled over and the young female officer came up to the car. She told me that the guy I'd passed called in a reckless driving complaint from his cellphone and that she'd just radar'd me speeding as well. Luckily I'd coincidentally slowed down and was probably only about 45 over the legal limit.
This was Christmas 1999 if I remember right, so the TT's had only been out for about a month. She told me this was the first time she'd ever seen one and wanted to check it out going on and on about how sexy it was and how she'd love to take it for a ride. A moment later she's leaning over me into the car and running her hands over the various features of the interior (the TT is a really nice piece of industrial design). I'm sure it's something women have to deal with in reverse all the time but it's kind of a strange experience when a cop is hot for your car and flirting with you.
Anyway, she let me go with either a warning or a greatly reduced ticket, I can't remember which.
I think maybe there was something in the water at that Bathurst apartment… while I was living there my neighbor got busted doing 300 kph (187 mph) in his supercharged Monte Carlo (a really obnoxious muscle car with a big blower sticking up out of the hood) on the DVP!
