Billionaire Los Angeles Chargers owner, Dean Spanos, drives east from the coast on Interstate Highway Number 15 to scout out amenities for his squad’s January trip to play the Las Vegas Raiders. The hardtop down on his AMG GT C Roadster, Spanos slows, accelerates, and weaves through the midday traffic with his voice drowning into the wind as he hollers along with his road trip mix.

“One, two, three, four! The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive! Everybody’s –”

Cresting a curve outside Barstow, he slams on the brakes seeing a sea of cars before him. A typical California highway traffic jam meandering to the Nevada state line, Spanos calmly checks his watch and works his way to the right lane, reminding himself that he, Dean Spanos, is anything but a typical Californian — the like for which these structured four-lane time drains were a necessary part of life. But for a momentary interruption to his one-man singalong as his tires crossed the rumble strip, his travel continued unimpeded on the shoulder of the road. Cruising alongside the masses on his own personal detour to I-40, Spanos calculated that he had time to reroute to northern Arizona, cross into Nevada at the Hoover Dam, and still make it to Las Vegas for his dinner meeting at Restaurant Guy Savoy. He shifted his eyes and grinned as the paralyzed sedans in the travel lanes honked their horns, waived their middle fingers, and vanished in the reflection of his side mirror.

Enter, Dean Spanos. Successful, comfortable, powerful. Carrying no specific authority but a Maker nonetheless, Dean moves through his empire with a fiscally-granted impunity, carving his own paths around traffic as he does any other obstacle in life. In the poorest regions of the American Southwest, laws cannot be made, enforced, or executed to stop his immense wealth. His dollars naming every man in a starving public bureaucracy that could only afford to govern over all if it did not govern over him. By design. By creation. Always had. Always will. Now racing through the endless sand and barren desert landscape on a highway detour, our driver will enjoy that nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

Three hours after taking the exit onto an empty I-40, Dean reads a sign notifying him that he is approaching Kingman, Arizona. His stomach growls but, more importantly, his bladder swells. He eases off to the shoulder, exits the vehicle, and walks around to the passenger side. Resting his left hand on the trunk while shaking his right foot awake, he stands otherwise still as he listens to the urine puddling next to the rear tire. His content enjoyment of the mountain views is interrupted as a police cruiser pulls in behind him, broadcasting its presence with the duet of squealing and crunching as his tires brake on the loose gravel. Two doors are heard opening next. Two sets of footsteps. Two door slams.

“I hear you two. Just let me wrap up here, gentlemen.”

Wrap this up? Dean laughed to himself. His class of escorts came as clean as a porn star. Maybe he’d share this fact with these lowly constables on their patrol.

Dean’s voice was an honest refection of calmness. Mojave County was under his purview, he knew this. During the San Diego hotel tax campaign, Dean had wisely expanded the geographical footprint of his campaign donation activity from Southern California to expand west to the New Mexico border. Standing here now with his stream turning to a drip, he simply could not name whatever bumpkin he had solo-fundraised onto the local justice court bench. Then he realized the name didn’t matter and he snickered at the absurdity of the situation. He turned to the police.

“You can put it away now, sir.”

“Oh,” he looked down with a smirk and quickly, but gently, returned his genitals to hiding after one knee-bending final shake. He honestly had forgot — not that it mattered. He was already reaching into the cupholder for his wallet when a uniformed arm presented him a citation.

“Public urination. Judge Huerta will handle your case. Do you have any questions on this service?”

“Huerta! That’s right! I remember because I was a little concerned he was a colored. He’s white, right?”

“How about we step in the cruiser and go find out right now, sir?”

The police car parks in front of the courthouse and the officers assist the handcuffed billionaire out of the backseat. His patience worn out during a ten-minute wait at a railroad crossing, he resumes his objections as the three walk through the doors.

“My top is down and I feel the raindrops starting! Come on! That interior alone is more than five years of your government salary! Wonder how Judge Huerta is gonna feel about this!?”

Reminded that he could “tell it to the judge”, Dean grit his teeth and took a deep breath. He would tell it to the judge. He would tell it to his judge. And then he would establish some order around this dirty, white trash, truck stop of a town. How dare they challenge him.

Other than a brief objection to the government holding his identification during his intake — a matter he could push very little from his handcuffed position — Dean spent his attention peering at the citation on the table next to him. A seemingly-random application of letters, numbers, and symbols, Dean didn’t even know where he would begin with his further administrative objections. He once tried to draw attention to the blank boxes marked Required on his citation but was interrupted by a contract security guard staffing the metal detector warning him to, “not give them an excuse to take you in the back.” His nametag read Walton.

Dean held a brief conversation with Walton, finding him to be the only other individual in the room with a functioning brain, while he was ignored by the clerks and officers as they maintained a familiar conversation about the upcoming Heritage Days events between routine filing tasks. He was glad no one recognized his name as the one who singly-handedly bankrolled this judge’s campaigns since 2015. He wanted them to be surprised. Once the paperwork was finished and an additional five minute conversation about the office manager’s most recent boat trailer purchase had wrapped up with the group praising her wise financial decision to include the Monster Energy decals, the two officers escorted him to the holding cell. Walton gave Dean a supportive nod before he vanished from site.

Dean sat quietly on a stripped bunk while the officers finagled the rusty cell lock closed. “The judge will see you shortly,” one officer carelessly informed him. Receiving no response, the policemen shrugged and exited the room. Dean stared at his watch, his time ticking away under the powers of a broke, stupid, community that wouldn’t even have a courthouse if not for him. A wave of rage rushed over his body —

“I BUILT THIS! THIS IS MINE!”

A storm rolled through the valley, rattling the courthouse and before a surge of energy killed the electricity. Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Finally, the generator coughed to life and illumination — though dimmer than before — returned to the courthouse. A robed man entered the room, flanked on either side by heavyset clerks in their Monster Energy Drink sweatshirts — one black, one florescent green.

“Judge Huerta”, relief flowed through Dean’s body as he addressed the figure as his equal, a futile attempt to establish rapport. “I hope you got my congratulatory basket from your big local election win?”

The figure did not respond. Instead, the clerk on the left spoke to Dean.

“No ID huh?”

“It’s up front. Remember I told you –”

“Citation says Mr Dippel. You wouldn’t be lying to us when you say your name is Spanos then?”

“I’ve never heard that name. Look, it doesn’t even matter. Nothing on that citation is correct. The statute isn’t even a valid number! It just says I’m charged with violating Statute 111818 — that’s not even a law!”

The other clerk chimed in. “I’ll help ya darlin’. Just plead it low and he’ll mark it as an administrative fee — not even a fine. It’s a good thing.”

“Plead what? I have the right to know with what I am being charged! So how would you suggest I –”

The clerk’s caring demeanor evaporated. “We don’t give legal advice! If you want to argue, you can take it up with the judge!”

“I’m trying but you keep talking over –”

“You the Spanos taking all the public money for your private ventures?” The first clerk was back in the conversation.

“Look. I’m not one of these vagrants that you people harass and shake down to fund this little kangaroo court operation. I have rights! I pay the taxes! I put him on that bench!”

“You’re who now? Because I don’t see an ID?” The second clerk peered at the papers in her file folder.

The robed figure between the clerks turned his head to the same file folder. “I don’t have time for this. I’m a judge. A JUDGE! No one for a hundred miles carries the authority entrusted to me! And now some out of state big government liberal is going to tell me how to run this community? I don’t think so.” He turned and exited while the guard, Walton, held open the door. The clerks waddled out behind him, the one in the black sweatshirt pivoting her body sideways to navigate the single-width doorway.

Standing at the bars with only Walton in the room with him, Dean’s head was reeling. “How does a small red community be so damn excited about government expansion and abuse like this? I thought these Trump folk were all about being left alone and liberty and –”

“You thought wrong. They’re just fascists. Gotta admit, I always thought it was funny that anyone would want these dicks to be in charge but, you know, they control everything else around here so I guess it made sense that –“, he checked his vibrating phone, “oh look, new stock market record! I got a 401K, ya know. When I get out of here the Mrs and I are gonna take us a trip to Disney. You been to Disney, Mr Dippel?”

Dean saw his opening.

“Hey come unlock this cell for me and I’ll take you, the Mrs, and your entire family to Disney. Just get me out of here and I’ll make sure you never have to work another day in this hellhole again. How does head of event security at a soccer stadium sound for a new career opportunity?”

“Oh gosh, that’d be swell, Mr Dippel. But, like I said, they control everything in this town. Years ago when the courthouse was still a bastion of justice and integrity — back when I was the judge — you’d have been back in your car to drive out of town when the citation number was wrong. That’s just your right. But now we’re no longer a community ruled by laws but, rather, a community ruled by men. Fascist men. Fascist men with big out of state donors. These fucking Californians with their elite coastal money, man….”

Walton shook his head and opened the door to return to his post in the lobby. Dean pressed against the bars to keep the view of his only ally in sight for as long as possible.

“But how could I have known? I just….I couldn’t have possibly known, right?”

The guard just gave him a glance. A very sad, sad backwards glance.

“You’re not wrong. But you can see that I can’t help you either. The rot is too deep.”

A toothbrush moustache. A double-headed axe. The Parteiadler Eagle. Without the symbols of fascism proudly displayed, how could any man see his free choices contributing to the Authoritarian Whole? We exhibit for you Mr. Dean Dippel. A man who entered these walls Dean Spanos, free and with inalienable rights, if nothing else. But when the monster he created discovered the brutal power of its own hands, Dean will now have time to enjoy his indefinite status of ‘second class’ from a locked holding cell hundreds of miles from civilization in a bleak barren desert wasteland known as….The Twilight Zone.