My car loves me.  I've taken it on many a Tour de Upstate New York, as well as kept it company on a few homeless nights.  It's true that I've put it through some stressful situations and once we were hit by a bus, but my record stands as a mostly careful driver.  My entry into the Speeder's Club came about not for any lack of love or respect for my car, but more by that universal human need to belong.

I first became conscious of the world of habitual speeding one barren December when I came home from college. Returning to Rochester, New York, I was regaled with tales of friends who had made it from Richmond to Rochester so fast that they had to go see a movie to kill time and fool their parents.  During a New Year's Eve trip to Montreal I sat shotgun as my friend did a steady eighty miles per hour without incident.  Through these experiences it dawned on me that despite all my vehicular escapades I had allowed myself to be limited in the most fundamental regard.  I had never continuously sped over a great distance.  Trips to Syracuse or Buffalo had all occurred at a speed of 70 miles per hour, only five miles over the posted limit and usually the speed of traffic.  I had literally been living in the slow lane.  Now aware, I decided to change that.

Early in the new year I found reason to travel to the Binghamton suburb of Endicott, a scant four and a half hours from Rochester.  Seizing the opportunity, I fired up my tan Volvo and headed south.  I sped past the state college at Geneseo, usually a haven for radar-toting cops.  I averaged about eighty miles per hour and easily passed the slower elements.  I even found time to race a soccer mom in a Ford Expedition. As we traded the lead, I came to believe that we were in fact trading insults, criticizing the other's lifestyle: me for her gas-guzzling capitalist wagon, and she for my bumper-sticker clad rust-bucket.  Looking back, we were both merely infuriating each other.

She exited at Waverly with me in the lead, though it means little to me now.  I merrily sped along Route 17, all the while waiting for the signs to read "Endicott."  The last leg of my journey, however, gave me more than I bargained for.  No sooner had I been alerted to the swiftly approaching Endicott exit than I rounded a group of trees and caught sight of a State Trooper's navy blue buzz kill staring straight at me.  Fearing the obvious admission of braking, I tried to coast down to speed.  It was ineffective, though, and after having sped for 150 miles, I was pulled over with ten to go.

Ten minutes later I held my first speeding ticket.  Eighty in a sixty-five.  It seemed fitting, somehow; my luck was such that it always seemed like everyone could get away with murder but me.  I spent the next ten miles trying to figure out how my friends could make it from Virginia in record time without so much as meeting a cop, and yet I couldn't make it halfway across New York state.  For those ten miles life just wasn't fair. Speeding, it seemed, was not for me.

I stayed in the Binghamton suburb for only a few hours before hitting the road again, this time as a passenger in my friend's car as we continued east to New Paltz.  My Volvo was safe at his girlfriend's house.  With the day's events fresh in my mind, I bitterly told my friend of the massacre in west Endicott and my retirement from speeding.  He replied with words of wisdom and enlightenment.

"Did you have a rabbit?"

I was perplexed. "A rabbit?"

"Yeah, man," he said, "you gotta have a rabbit.  See, you find a car that's going really fast, and it's gotta be one that the cops go for, like something red.  Most of the cars that get pulled over are red.  Did you know that?"

I had heard that before, though never really known if it was true.

My friend continued, "So you wait for one of these red cars to pass you, and then you just match its speed and hang back for a half a mile.  Then if you pass a cop, they'll go for that one.  That's called 'using a rabbit.'"

I was initially skeptical, but my friend continued on with tales from his own experience.  He had watched as half a dozen red cars were pulled over before him.  This technique, he assured me, was fool-proof.

A few days later I found myself once again behind the wheel of my Volvo, now leaving the Southern Tier city of Binghamton.  Having said thanks and goodbye to my friends I boarded Route 17, this time headed to the west.  With unseasonably warm weather the roads were in perfect shape...for speeding.  It was with great joy that I was passed by a red convertible not minutes after leaving the on-ramp.  My experiment into methodological speeding had begun.

Together the red convertible and I passed a dozen cars.  I never had to worry about when to switch from the right to the passing lane; I was always alerted half a mile in advance by my newly-acquired trailblazer.  The hardest part was maintaining the suitable following distance.  Speeding, at least for me, was synonymous with catching the guy in front of you, and often I found myself having to coast and allow the convertible to regain his exaggerated lead.    It was no matter.  We were a pair.  At least for the first five minutes.

I can't recall if we caught up with them or they caught up with us, but at one point my dynamic duo joined with a red pickup and a third car: a red Pontiac coup.  The Pontiac took the lead, and the rest of us happily followed.  At eighty miles per hour, I not only felt safe from cops and radars, I also felt like I belonged.  Together, this chain of speeders overtook everything from Honda Civics to tanker trucks; from minivans filled with god-knows-what to RVs with god-knows-who inside.  We were a team, a clique, the masters of the roadway.  We were the Speeder's Club.

We even admitted members.  From the monotony of the slow lane we pulled an old Jeep who quickly assumed a place fourth in the pack.  In this formation we were an unstoppable force, spanning miles of the road and moving in time.  The Pontiac would change lanes, we would change lanes.  The Pontiac sped up, we would speed up.  From my position at the tail end I saw us all: the Pontiac, the pickup, the convertible, the Jeep, and myself.  Without the luxury of a passenger, these were my companions.

The best part for me, besides the peace of mind of believing that I was immune from prosecution, was that I wasn't taking on individual speeders anymore.  No longer would I get into fights with the soccer mom.  No longer would I race the Saab that had eluded me on the Mass Turnpike.  I now realized that the cars that had passed me before my epiphany had done it as a team, and I was now a part of that winning team.  We didn't need to prove ourselves to anyone.  We were all simply people who didn't want to get pulled over, with the exception of our fearless leader the Pontiac.  I don't know what he was thinking.

Our convention was at Horseheads.  A small, rural town, Horseheads' only claim to fame on Route 17 is that it includes a stop light.  At all other times, 17 acts as a major highway.  But not in Horseheads.  Backed up traffic, usually a nuisance, was for the first time enjoyable.  The red light gave me a closer look at my speedometer-ignorant comrades, or at least at the backs of their cars.  Horseheads was a chance for all of us to break off, retire, or attempt to pass.  None of us did. Exiting Horseheads in sequence and time was an affirmation of our allegiance to each other and to our leader, not to any superficial speed limit.

I was sad when the red pickup left.  Not at first, though.  At first, I was just confused.  Why was he signaling?  Had something happened to the Pontiac?  Then I realized: it was merely his time.  He returned to the right lane, eventually shifting to the far right exit lane which is seen only once every twenty miles or so.  He was already up the ramp by the time I passed him, too high for me to see his face.  Though we never met, and though he may or may not have been aware of my presence, for the last seventy miles he had been my friend.  His turn signal was his goodbye.

Things fell apart after that.  The Pontiac departed not long after the pickup, leaving the convertible to lead.  The Jeep, for whatever reason, decided not to follow the convertible's right lane change and instead attempted to pass.  "What's he thinking?" I asked myself.  "Doesn't he realize that we're a team?"  The convertible stood his ground and the Jeep realized his error; he resumed his old position in the middle of the line.    The next few miles were solemn.  As dusk ended and evening began, my companions left the roadway.  By the time I passed Dansville I was alone.

I tried to shack up with a silver Dodge Stratus, but I soon learned that he wasn't into the speeding scene.  Without a rabbit and still shaken up from my ticket a few days earlier, I went back into the right lane and did seventy.  I was too sad to even notice I was almost out of gas.  When I finally did, I decided to push it rather than find an exit and fill up.  I needed to do something exciting.  Besides, I was broke.

This time I took it easy as I passed Geneseo.  With twenty miles to go I cautiously talked on my cell phone, illegal to do while driving in New York.  Soon my eyes beheld the city skyline.  Over the preceding years I had begun to drive and travel more, and in that time the Rochester skyline had become an immensely soothing image to me.  No matter what had happened on my journey, the tall buildings of Rochester always lit up to welcome me home.  They had no knowledge of the speeding ticket in Endicott, nor had they of the break up in Springfield, Massachusetts or the trouble in Syracuse during past arrivals.  Like my mother, the city loved me unconditionally, and - though it had taken me years to do so - I loved it too.

I intend to plead 'not guilty' to my speeding ticket.  I've heard that sometimes State Troopers don't show up at the hearings, and in that case you get off free.  I've also heard tales of overtime pay for cops so that a 'not guilty' plead automatically results in a decreased fine.  I don't know if any of this is true, but I still intend to do it.  If nothing else, I'm looking forward to the drive back to Binghamton.

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