I got popped by the Man just like in that book they made us read in high school.  You know the one.  1984.  They got them cameras on every street corner now and on the freeways in town too.  Everybody takes his chances these days.  You run a yellow and the booty end of your SUV shows up later on the wrong side of the crosswalk they send you a photograph and a ticket and you send them a certified check for 125 bucks—that’s the Man.

            I got mine on the 202 eastbound. 138 mph.  Criminally excessive speed they call that and you don’t get to go to traffic school to wipe it off your record.  First time offense: automatic and immediate suspension of license, plus the fines, criminally excessive fines, to match your criminally excessive speed.  They got the photograph and they send you the proof.  It’s airtight.  So airtight you can’t even breathe, man.

Thing is 138 mph ain’t even my best time.  138 mph ain’t shit, man.  Once outside a dump called Quartzsite I got it up to 141 in my baby brother’s Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder.  Nero Noctis Black with black leather interior, convertible top, 6-speed automatic transmission, MP3 player, DVD and GPS.   And once across this flat stretch of desert between Barstow and Blythe I pushed it all the way up to 152 at high noon, sun on my shaved head, no shirt, sixty-dollar Italian wraparounds to keep the wind from blowin’ out my eyeballs.  152 mph: my unofficial personal best.  But that 138 mph that was inside city limits, and that’s the end of the line for me.  Judge some kind of hard-ass wants to set me down as one of them bad examples, you know what I sayin’ here, it’s all over for my criminally excessive dumb-ass. 

My name’s Azarra.  Raymond not Reuben.  The one who got the four-year ride on an athletic scholarship to the University of Arizona and first round NBA draft choice a few years later, that Reuben Azarra.  I’m his older, shorter, slower brother.   Reub’s 6’ 7”.  I’m 5’ 9” and outweigh him by fifty pounds, most of it Big Macs and six-packs.  Believe it or not, there was a time when I could whip his skinny ass in hoops.  It’s all in the genes maybe, or fate maybe, or maybe in the luck.  I mean we practically got the same genes, just different mamas.  Mine died a year or two after I was born and my daddy remarried and then along came Reuben, future NBA superstar who now averages 33 points a game, and who sprung up taller than I did by the time he was twelve and I was already in high school.  Genes.  I’m thirty-one now and Reuben’s twenty-seven, and it’s all downhill for me.  Shit.

I don’t mean to go negative here.  I don’t.  I mean, and I’ll be the first to admit this, I ain’t ungrateful or anything like that, working for Reuben.  He got me this good job when he turned pro and, for me anyway, it’s probably the best gig I’ll ever have in my life, even if it don’t pay all that much.  I mean what I do is I carry Reuben’s bags from the parking lots to the locker rooms all across this country, that’s the shit part, but when the team flies to LA or Denver or San Diego, Reuben pays me to drive his spider back and forth from Phoenix where we live.  Reuben just wants his wheels after the games, to party and shit, but he don’t like the long drives back to Phoenix.  Me?   I like them long stretches of nowhere but don’t ask me why.  For me, haulin’ ass at five or six in the morning in my little brother’s booty magnet with a couple of his credit cards in my back pocket, I know it ain’t ever gonna get any better than this.  So that’s the deal: Reuben flies and Raymond drives and Reuben he pays me a little out of his own pocket to keep his Black Spider nice and clean and the tank topped off.

It’s just about the greatest little job in the world for Reuben Azarra’s unemployable big brother, and all that’s comin’ to an end in a week, tops.  The newspapers don’t have the story yet, but they will, you can’t keep something this big a secret forever—not with Reuben Azarra’s two hundred thousand dollar Lamborghini, and the Suns in first place and Reuben’s fifteen million dollar contract comin’ up for renegotiations—and when it does there won’t be much in the way of gainful employment for a thirty-one year old minority with no skills or education like his brother’s and no driver’s license and no financial future.  That’s it, I had my days of glory under the moonlight and it all came to a crashing end on the 202 eastbound at exactly 3:21 a.m. goin’ 138 mph and they sent me the photograph to prove it.  With my record I might even end up doin’ a little time for the Man for my transgressions.  See, I’ve been in trouble with the Man before.  Drugs when I was younger.  In a fair and equal world it wouldn’t mean much, but I’m a thirty-one year old Hispanic-black man with a record, I ain’t gonna lie to you on that.  My brother Reuben, I know he’s gonna have to cut me loose on this one.  I mean he’s got a good reputation and an excellent career goin’ for his self—he’s gonna look after his self.  I would.  And it ain’t like he didn’t give me a chance or anything.  And it ain’t like I haven’t gotten a couple of minor speeding tickets before, you know what I sayin’ here. 

But, no excuses, man, I just couldn’t help myself.  You see, out there in the desert under the stars halfway between LA and Phoenix, all that power and sex under the hood got to be a little too much for me, even if I was all by myself in my baby brother’s Lamborghini.  Shit.  It’s a little hard to explain what it’s like exactly to be the nobody brother of a genuine superstar.  It’s like given the opportunity we all go over the speed limit out there.  That’s because in our society today time and speed and distance equal some kind of irresistible energy.  A man called Einstein or one of them other atomic geniuses proved that once.

Yeah, don’t remind me, it’s all gonna be downhill for me from now on.  Reuben’s up in Seattle this week and he hasn’t seen the photograph yet.  Friday he’ll be down in LA and he’ll want his wheels at the Forum by the end of the game.  I figure I got one more Phoenix to LA and back run before the shit hits the fan and I plan to make the most of it out there in the middle of nowhere, maybe even break my own land speed record just for the hell of it, not that anyone will ever hear about it except me.  What I mean is they haven’t stooped to putting cameras inside the trunks of cactus.  Not yet, anyway, but don’t kid yourselves, that day ain’t so far off.

And, you wanna know something else, bad as my luck has been lately, I’m still glad to have that photograph of me in my brother’s Black Spider doin’ 138 on the 202.  It’s something, anyway.  Proof of my accomplishments, maybe, or my existence, maybe.  And, because it’s on record maybe, it’s something that I can always hold in my hand and point to and nobody can ever take that away from me for the rest of my life.

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