Saturday 25 October 2014

Imagined Diary - US Customs

In the days before I go to New York City I am doing an imagined diary. This week I’ve written imagined diary entries and we can compare them to the real diary entries next week. Note: I have never been to the places in these imaginings… yet. This is the third one.

I wonder what it's like being a US customs official. Knowing that your default position is hostility and suspicion. All day, every day you are looking for clues that these aliens entering your country are coming to spread havoc in whatever way they decide to do so. We all drug smugglers, terrorists, or disease carrying lepers.  Guilty until proven innocent, everyone's a wrong 'un, a world full of enemies. It must be a grim life. 
To add to the misery most of those aliens have been on long flights and smell like the bins at the back of Katz's.
I want to say the queue edged forward, but it didn't. It moved periodically. When one person had satisfied the customs official in the glass booth that they were not here to cause mischief we all shuffled forward. I waited patiently, butterflies zooming around my stomach like kids high on E numbers. I get nervous in the face of officialdom. I have the guilty conscious of the innocent; the conviction that I will be wrongly accused of some heinous crime.
I'd passed the tests set so far. I'd got a biometric passport last time I was in the UK and got my permission to try to enter the USA - my ESTA. Now all I needed was the final nod from the king of paranoid in front of me. I practised my lines, here on holiday, pod 51, leaving on the 31st, no criminal record. I had nothing to worry about, I am as clean as a cat's backside.
It was my turn next, I took a deep breath and approached the man. The first thing I noticed was his breath - staler than mine. His eyes were red and tired. He looked like a man who was at the end of his tether. My internal monologue was repeating my mantra - no jokes, no jokes, no jokes. My default setting when nervous is sarcasm and humour but now was not the time or place.
In Ukraine a smile is seen as weakness, but here in the land of the free, surely it would help.  I smiled tentatively at the tired grumpy man in front of me. There was pleading in my eyes. He looked at my passport, looked at the screen, looked at me. Then repeated the process. He seemed to be taking an age. My heart thumped, my overactive brain feared the worst. The computer must having been searching for some long forgotten slight against the USA that I’d made in my youth. Maybe Maggie’s Milkman was seen as an anti-American text that would have McCarthy spinning in his paranoid grave, showing that I was a red and certainly not under the bed. Maybe they’d got an advance copy of Extraordinary Rendition.  He drummed his fingers and creased his brow, looking inquisitively at the screen of doom.

Then he smiled and said.
‘Welcome to America.’

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