The Big Smoke

It’s my second hour in US borders police custody. I’m sitting among some disconsolate Indian gentlemen. Not Native Americans, but gentlemen from India, who are being refused entry into the United States. One of them has no money and no proof of the university course he claims to be attending in New York. To his credit, he seems surprised that the officers are so concerned about something he clearly regards as mere detail. Feature continues

Not everyone is so relaxed at the thought of being ejected from America before they can properly get in. Take me, for instance – I’m very ill at ease at the prospect of deportation. Usually, I like to get in to a country and do something bad before I’m made to leave (and, to be fair, it’s only happened once). But this time it looks like the bad stuff happened before I even left the UK. To be precise, it happened ten hours earlier in SE26, where I picked up the wrong passport. Which is stupid rather than bad.

There is also a weeping Polish woman and an angry German girl near me. Altogether, I’d say there are 40 people in the room, most of whom are displaying varying degrees of despair or anger. The room is lit badly by strip lights and, at one end, there is a raised wooden dais behind which several officers laugh and joke with each other. Occasionally, they turn their attention to us.

I’m playing it quiet. It seems best. The officers have guns and doughnuts; anything could happen. But, as yet, nothing has happened other than being pulled out of the passport queue at Newark’s Liberty Airport and, with some irony, having my liberty curtailed.

The officers are not in any hurry, but occasionally they call someone up, as if the operation runs entirely at whim. The Polish woman is beckoned to the dais.

‘Your overstayed your last visa by five months,’ says the officer. ‘What makes you think we’d let you in?’ She sobs some more.

My name is called as a question. Like this: ‘Michael… Hodges?’ Being English, I say: ‘Yes, here’, and walk up to the dais.

‘What’s your story?’
‘Story?’
‘Yeah, story. You are trying to get into the United States with the wrong passport. I’m going to call Washington about you and I want to know what to say.’
‘Wrong passport? That’s a straight-back-on-the-plane,’ says one of his colleagues.
‘I don’t have a story,’ I say.
‘Sit down and think of one.’

I sit down again. Now I’m sweating. How can I explain the real reason I have two passports – one was lost, cancelled, then accidentally found again this morning, without me realising that I’d found it again, as I rifled through the sock drawer – and not look like a total idiot or an agent
of the global jihad, Sydenham branch? And call Washington? What does that mean?

I watch the news on the TV set suspended above the weeping Polish woman. A Brooklynite has been shot for his motorbike, which he was cleaning in front of his home.

‘Nice bike,’ said two passers-by.
‘Yeah,’ he replied.
‘Think we’ll take it,’ they suggested and pulled out guns.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said. But they did it anyway and shot him dead.

Two other guys took a dead friend, balanced on a chair with wheels, to cash in his social security payment at a cheque-cashing store. They were charged with attempted fraud, but they got off, successfully pleading they didn’t know their friend was dead as he spent a lot of time in diabetic comas. They often had to push him around in a computer chair if they wanted to get him out of the house.

Bodies on wheels, casual murder… this is a strange and unlikely country. Really, there is only one story to tell. I play the idiot angle. And you know what? They believe me.