Newark Airport. Border control. 11.1.11
“I wasn’t able to fill in the declarations form. I didn’t have a pen.”
“What were yu doin’ fu nine owas?” The customs officer responds gruffly in an accent as deep and thick as the soupy wetlands scattered across northeast New Jersey.
I shrug my shoulders apologetically and wonder if I should just come clean and answer his question honestly. The truth is that I passed the nine hours of my flight crowbarred into the foetal position because the f**kwit in front of me fully reclined his seat as soon as we’d taken off (I would have done the same but I consider it bad manners to drive my headrest into a fellow traveller’s skull). Crammed into this miserable seating arrangement, and for such a long period of time, I soon realised that ruthlessly ransacking the booze trolley would be the only sensible way to endure this journey. And so, tray table flipped down and jammed into my navel, I sat slugging mini-beers as the Atlantic zipped by below. When I finally trundled off the plane, half-drunk on free Warsteiner, I had totally forgotten about the customs declaration form crumpled in my pocket.
“Um, it totally slipped my mind. I’m really sorry,” I say, meekly. “May I borrow your pen?” I nod towards the pen on the kiosk’s desktop.
“Nah. I don’t gotta pen,” he says, ignoring the one lying next to his hairy knuckles. I look at the pen, then up to his face, all monobrow and malice. Doesn’t he notice it? Perhaps it’s a family heirloom and he’s just unwilling to hand it out to strange looking foreigners. I peer over the counter in search of an additional pen and notice that he has a handgun holstered to his side. F**k me, this man is armed! He’s armed and capable of blasting my head to smithereens before I’ve even stepped foot upon American soil. But still, I really need that pen.
“What about this one.” I nod towards his pen. “Can I borrow it?”
“Nah. This is my pen. I need it.” He taps his finger impatiently, starting to look even more pissed off. I wonder if he’d shoot me if I tried to grab it.
“I’ll just be a second. I promise. I write very quickly, I assure you officer.” I smile weakly, my hopes of charming him fading fast.
“You gotta go to the back uh the line. Go getta pen from the guy in the red coat. He’s at the endu the line.”
I turn to look back at the line, see it snaking endlessly across the vast expanse of carpet before me, writhing with tracksuited tourists and duty free bags. I’ve come too far to turn back now, waited too long for this moment. One year to get my visa and then one hour in this hell. It’s as if I’m a mountaineer a step away from Everest’s summit, poised at the threshold of glory, told he must return to base camp to retrieve a pen. A pen! There’s no way I’m going to give up that easily.
“Um, please can I have the pen?” I smile hopefully, wondering if politeness will win him over.
“No.” He furrows his brow and jerks his thick bowling ball head towards the back of the line.
***
“Have you got a pen I can borrow?” I ask the man in the red coat at the back of the line.
“You got 50 dollars I can borrow?” He replies.
***
When I finally reach the front of the line for a second time I’m the last person waiting to be seen. I decide to approach a different border patrol officer, thinking that my chances of getting through might be better. I go for a woman, a big haired smiling woman, smiling with those big American snowdrop-white teeth. Until she sees me.
“You gotta go to the next booth.”
I go to the next booth. Inside a stout Hispanic man shakes his head and thumbs towards the next again booth.
At his point I’m starting to wonder if I’m trapped inside some kind of fable and the officer at the third booth will embrace me, praise my perseverance and let me into America.
He doesn’t. Still, I’m thankful because the third officer only half grimaces when he sees me, as if I’m merely a case of mild indigestion rather than a major pain in the arse. I hand him the large white envelope containing all of my visa information that I’ve been clinching under my arm for the past hour or so. He tears it open, tilts his head and levels me with a withering look.
“K1 visa huh.”
“Uh, yes, that’s right.”
He’s giving me a kind of quizzical look now, like I’m a piece of abstract art that he doesn’t fully approve of.
“You like marryin’ a 90-year-old woman or somethin’?”
“Uh, no. No I’m not,” I reply, wondering if I should take this as a joke or if he genuinely suspects me of being a gerontophile.
“How old is she?”
“Uh, 26.”
“Okay. You gotta come with me.”
***
I’m held in a waiting room that seems to be some kind of immigration limbo. I sit on a leather chair, its upholstery mottled and warped by the wringing and gouging of hordes of nervous fingers. The room has two exits, each to the side of a central bank of raised desks where stoic looking customs officers stand like preachers at the pulpit, handing out passports and deliverance.
One of the exits, a narrow corridor to the left, appears to lead to a series of interrogation booths. Intermittent sobs and wails drift down this doomed passageway. At one point a Hispanic woman charges through, ink black mascara tears zigzagging down her cheeks. An officer, face blank as a taxidermist’s tiger, trails after her, shooing her into the women’s toilets. I hear the muffled echo of howling noises and something that sounds like Spanish.
To the right there’s another exit that, presumably, leads to America.
My name is called out. I walk to the bank of desks, trying to look as inconspicuous and law abiding as possible.
“You have 90 days to get married,” the officer says, handing me my passport. “Welcome to America,” he says, ushering me to the exit on the right.
livin' in 'merica 