TRAFFIC SCHOOL EXPERIENCE NOT ALL LAUGHS.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy

Let me get my sniveling out of the way first. I'm innocent. I swear.

No way I was going over 45 mph. OK, maybe 50, but no way was I doing 55, which is what the cop wrote me up for in a 40 mph zone on a dark, one-lane highway.

I was going to fight it. The judge would listen to reason, wouldn't he? They're wise men, right? He'd have to see there was no way a solid, upstanding citizen like me would lie to save his hide.

Yeah, right. Of all the stupid, inane ideas we fools tend to toss around from time to time, fighting a speeding ticket has to be one of the stupidest.

I walked into the Calabasas courtroom of Commissioner Robert McIntosh, took one look around and folded like a house of cards.

He was in the middle of telling some woman that it was her constitutional right to fight her speeding ticket, but if she lost, it was his constitutional right to throw the book at her.

If you fought and lost - in effect, wasting the court's time - McIntosh said, he was not about to look favorably on giving you the magic Get Out of Jail Free card - traffic school.

Your call, McIntosh said. Make his day.

Being a chicken, I took traffic school. Better to live to fight another day.

I figured even a nun would be no better than even money to beat the rap with this guy, so what chance would a despicable, lying newspaperman have? Zilch.

The woman behind the counter smiled as she took my $106 for the ticket and handed me a list of approved traffic schools.

Unlike some commissioners and judges, McIntosh was old school. He wasn't buying any of this ``stay at home and go to traffic school on the Internet'' nonsense now being offered, he said.

You do the crime, you do the time - in traffic school, not at home.

Finding a school was the toughest part. I couldn't make up my mind whether I should pay my debt to society by attending the ``Free Pizza, Comedy and Fun'' traffic school, or go with ``Pizza For You-Comedians'' traffic school.

Tough call. I like pizza and laughs.

I went with the free pizza, but they bombed on me. Three times they canceled my weekday class, saying not enough people had signed up. I was running out of time, so I finally went with ``Funny For Less Money'' traffic school, which had a weekday opening.

We met on a Thursday last week in a back room over at Cafe 50s restaurant on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I sat in a booth next to an old juke box.

There were nine of us: a tour guide, a property appraiser, a data processor-waitress, a custom shutters manufacturer, a products supervisor, two retired guys, a clothes model and me.

Steve, the guy running the class, added up our fines. We had just enriched the coffers of the judicial system in this county by $1,126, he said. Congratulations, and thanks for the donation.

``Traffic school is like the morgue,'' Steve then said. ``They just keep on coming.''

If this was funny for less money, I began thinking I should have held out for the free pizza.

Steve said it was probably for the best that we didn't fight our tickets because it wasn't like the old days where you stood a good chance the police officer who wrote you up was too busy to show up in court to bury you.

These days, they were getting overtime pay if they had to go to court on their off-duty hours, so a lot of cops were all of a sudden doing their civic duty and showing up to bury you on the stand.

Steve asked for a show of hands on how many of the nine of us were actually guilty of our traffic crimes. One hand went up, which was about the average, he said.

Either there are an awful lot of bad tickets being written out there - or an awful lot of great liars behind the wheel. You figure out which.

We spent the next hour or so talking about our jobs, the weather, housing prices and Steve trying to break into the real estate business before we went to lunch.

This traffic school thing was a piece of cake, I thought. But when we got back from lunch, Steve got down to business. He slipped the movies ``Red Asphalt I and II'' into the VCR.

If you haven't seen them, good. You don't want to. They're some of the most gory highway accident scenes, and the CHP hopes seeing them will shake you up and slow you down when you get back out on the road. They work.

After the movies, we took a little oral driving safety test before Steve looked at his wristwatch and said we were free to leave - we had served our time.

Seven hours and $25 later, our driving records would now be wiped clean by the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Our car insurance companies would never know about that ticket we got - the one we didn't deserve.

Right.