I landed in Vancouver
around 11 in the morning and made my way to passport control. Waiting in line
for immigration is always a nervy affair for me: when you’ve been deported from
the US three times, and had
one or two run ins with Canada
also, it’s bound to be.
Well, I say “deported three times” – it was actually one
deportation and two refused entries, but, for sake of simplicity, I usually
lump them all together. It amounts to much the same thing.
The first one was in 1998. I was 22 years-old and spending a
glorious summer thumbing it around the western US, hiking through deserts,
camping in wild Utah canyon country, whooping it up with drunk Indians, the
works. A couple of months of that and I was in heaven – so, naturally, I
figured a next logical step would be to jump on a freight train and ride it
clear across the Rockies from Montana plains to Seattle fog. I’d ridden one
before, earlier in the summer, a five hundred-mile journey all through the
night winding up and over the Continental Divide near Helena . It was wonderful, seeing that train
curve around the mountain switchbacks as it crossed rickety old high wooden
bridges hundreds of feet above crystal clear rushing pine tree creeks, me and
the train crew the only souls for dozens of miles, the roads nowhere to be
seen, and my youthful feet dangling over the edge and loving every lovely
second of it, a dream come true.
You can’t blame a boy for wanting more of that. And so I
waited three days to catch a ride out of Havre, up there in the plains not so
far from the Canadian border, and once on it, so delirious was I at the joy of
the whole thing, I danced and sang and waved at the traffic passing by on
parallel US-2 – and probably waved at some off-duty cop, some cop on his way to
work, some busybody citizen.
They were waiting for me when we slowed down and shuddered
through Shelby ,
barely a hundred miles into the trip.
They hauled me off and charged me with criminal trespass.
Called the nearby border agents. And they told me, being as I’d very clearly
overstayed my three-month tourist visa – I’d been there almost two and a half
years by then – that I would be on my way home and wouldn’t be allowed back for
a minimum of five years.
It wasn’t so bad: a free British Airways flight from
Seattle, pissed out of my mind on multiple free booze; and, in any case, I was
back in the US just a few months later – OJ was right: back then there simply
wasn’t much in the way of linked up computers nor record keeping. I’d flown
into Vancouver, decided to take a chance at the border, and the nice officer
there, after disappearing with my replacement, differently numbered passport
for a good fifteen minutes, had returned with a spanking shining new
three-month visa and I was back in the US once more.
I stayed another fifteen months, punctuated and
re-legitimised by a couple of trips into Mexico .
It was another groovy, good time. Great friends and great
travels. All those people and places I hadn’t seen for such a long time –
getting on for eighteen years now.
I’d tried, though – hence the twenty-year ban. I’d flown
into Boston
back in 2000 – and been shipped back the next day, my five-year ban now
doubled.
Airports, I figured, must be more on the ball. So the next
year, while on a trip to Canada, I headed once more down to that familiar
border south of Vancouver where I’d had my earlier success – but had no such
luck this time, post-9/11. An eight-hour interrogation by American officials. A
whole load of hassle getting back into Canada . And my ban doubled once
more.
This was 2001. Now it’s 2017. Not that long to go. But the
itch growing too strong to wait. And the urge for adventure, for doing
something outrageous, much more appealing than boring old bureaucracy and
shelling out money and waiting in lines and doing what I’m told.
Also, a year ago I’d told a bunch of American friends that,
in the completely unlikely scenario that mad-headed Donald Trump would be
getting into power, I’d definitely 100% do it, just to piss him off, knowing
how much he hates illegals and wants to keep those borders tight.
A flip comment. And no way a supposedly developed nation
could contain enough dumb bastard people to vote in a lunatic like that. But
they did. And not that I was on that plane to fulfil an off-the-cuff promise to
do something crazy because of Trump – and yet…my own urges, that Trump idea,
and now OJ and all the visions and dreams…it was all adding up to something I
could only describe as “meant to be”.
‘Trump’, by the way, means ‘fart’ where I come from. As in:
‘to trump’ (verb) or ‘did you do a trump?’ (noun) or ‘it smelled like someone
had trumped’ (past participle) (I think; never was much good at grammar).
That always makes me chuckle, and I think it’s a shame more
people aren’t aware of the true meaning of his name – as it’s also a shame that
he isn’t called Peter, like the rabbit, rather than Donald, like the duck.
‘Peter’, you see, is the French verb meaning ‘to fart’.
And, as if by magic – or, rather, so I can manufacture
something of a segue – right there in that slowly shambling queue of weary
travellers full of airplane food and airplane movies (both of which I love) I
felt my arse cheeks parting and a steady gasp of air gently making its way into
the outside world, innocent and fresh as a new born babe.
I shuffled away from it. I looked around and wrinkled my
nose. I did my best impression of a man who had picked up the scent of another
man’s fart and was trying to figure out where it had come from, grimacing disapprovingly
that someone would have the audacity and lack of shame to release such a stink
in such tight and public quarters.
Raisins, it smelled of. Chewed up raisins and curry. Which
was about right, I figured, given I’d eaten half a kilo of Sainsbury’s Basics
raisins that morning, and enjoyed a lovely piping hot microwaved airplane
vegetarian lentil curry on the flight.
I wondered if it would still be there, lingering and waiting
for me, when the queue snaked back around.
It was.
Oh, those poor people! Did any of them suspect? Did any of
them know it was me?
But, how could they? There were hundreds of us: it could
have been anybody’s anus hole that had opened and squeaked its mystery into
existence.
“Trump,” it had said – and then moved on, leaving behind its
stink, for the rest of the world to inhale.
I approached a lady sitting in her little immigration booth.
She was small, but hot: something about all that uniform and padding and
weapons that really does it for me.
The hottest women in the world, of course, are Israeli women
soldiers: their ill-fitting pea green uniforms still unable to disguise the
loveliness of shapely young bodies; groups of them hanging out at bus stations
ready for their weekend leave, masses of lovely Jewish hair flowing like the
Jordan; a latté in one hand, a mobile in the other – and, strung across their
backs, casual as you like, a massive, beefy submachine gun, all black and oiled
and dripping with potential. She stands there laughing and chatting with her
friends. She seems so beautiful and sweet. But you just know that she could
kick your ass any time she felt like it: throw you like a ragdoll to the ground
and stamp her heavy Israeli boot across your throat. Then she’d point that gun
in your face – shove its nozzle in your mouth, even – and, uttering guttural
Hebrew indecipherables that may well be threats, may well be pleasantries –
it’s impossible to tell – give you the biggest boner of your life.
Hot, I tells ya. Incomprehensibly lovely.
But that’s Israel ,
and that’s a whole other story. This is North America ,
where immigration officials are generally considered the most unpleasant people
on earth, and you’d better tread carefully, lest you find yourself deported, as
I invariably do.
She takes my passport and places it facedown on her little
scanner. I would give anything to know what information is flashing up on her
screen, find out what I need to lie about, where I can be truthful.
“Purpose of visit?” she says.
Probably this is one of the places where I need to tell some
lies: probably it’s not so smart to tell her I’ve come to Canada so I can break
into America and go visit OJ Simpson because he wants me to write a book about
how he and George Bush and some space lizards and Martha Stewart masterminded
the whole shebang of 9/11.
Or – who knows? – maybe it is one of those places where
honesty is the best policy. Maybe it’ll be like one of those moments in the
movies where the cornered protagonist is forced to blurt out the truth and the
truth is so ridiculous that all the baddies just laugh and send them on their
way.
“Yeah, right,” she’ll say, “good one” – and stamp me in.
She’ll wipe a tear from her eye and seek to compose her chortles just in time
to pretend to be badass for the next person in line, which won’t be quite
quickly enough – which will then cause that person to think they can make a
joke, mistakenly, and that’ll lead to them getting into a whole host of shit,
deported or jailed or maybe even tasered and left writhing on the floor in
having multiple heart attacks and then dead, all because an immigration
official for one moment failed to suppress her smile.
Such are the fine lines, the seemingly inconsequential
moments of decision, between life and death.
I think better of it. I tell her I’m there to visit some
friends, see a bit of the country.
“Can I see your return ticket?” she says.
I reach into my back pocket. I’m all prepared. Those
twenty-four hours between buying the flight and getting on board have allowed
me to get up to all kinds of innocent deviousness: for when you’ve travelled as
much as I have, in the way that I have, you’ve learned a few tricks.
Number one, they like you to have a ticket out of their
country. Not only do they not want you staying and, I don’t know, picking fruit
or something, but they also don’t understand the idea of freewheeling, of
making it up as you go. They, like most people, live in a world of concrete
plans and dates that are fixed well into the future. They can’t conceive of a
man like me, who lives one day at a time, just like their beloved spiritual
leaders long ago told them to do.
I’d go into a travel agents – well, back in the day when I
used to go into a travel agents, before I forgot that it was possible to buy
things from another human being, face-to-face, rather than clickety-click on a
machine – and I wouldn’t know what to say when they asked me the question, “and
when do you want to come back?”
What I really wanted to say was: “How should I know? I
haven’t even gotten there yet. I don’t know if I’ll like it. I don’t know who
I’ll meet, what opportunities might arise. What if I meet the woman of my
dreams and want to marry her? What if I get offered a job? What if I bump into
someone I hit it off with and decide to go with them to a neighbouring country?
Or what if I’m impossibly bored and immediately realise that I’d rather be home
in my own comfortable English bed watching the cricket and sipping tea with my
pinky raised and godblessing the queen?”
Oh, for the day when we live in a world where you can just
rock up to an airport – or a train station, even – and buy a one-way ticket to
where you want to go, and it isn’t a three times as expensive as buying one a
month in advance, and I’d never have to plan ahead ever again.
But, then again, I don’t do so bad, what with miracle
tickets like this one: it does seem that, whenever I need to be somewhere, the
ticket is there waiting for me.
Plus, there are always ways around it.
I pull out a piece of paper. It’s a real genuine paid-for
airplane ticket for an Air Canada flight from Vancouver
to Mexico City ,
departing in a month.
It’s got my genuine name on it. There’s nothing bogus about
it. It’s not like one of those photoshopped tickets I sometimes knock up for
the megabus, when I’ve left it too long to buy one for a reasonable price.
She checks it out. She’s satisfied by it, and so she should
be: like I say, it’s absolutely legit.
But, at the same time, there’s no way I’ll be getting on
that plane. You see…
Here’s what you do: Canada wants to see a return
flight, but you don’t want to buy one. Except there’s a loophole: for, in
Canadian law, you can 100% refund any plane ticket within 24 hours of purchase.
So, the morning of your flight, you buy your ticket outta there. It doesn’t
matter how much it costs, nor where it’s to – hell, buy a first class ticket to
Monte Carlo if you want to feel momentarily Rockefeller – ‘cos you’ll be
getting all your money back anyway. Then you land. Then you show it to them and
they accept it. Then, when you’re through the other side, you cancel it and –
voila – you’re in the nation, on a one-way, free from any obligation to be
anywhere in particular on any particular date, when you might much rather be
some place else. Just as it should be.
Number two, they sometimes want to see how much cash you
have – just to ensure that, once again, you won’t be scampering off straight
from the airport to a fruit farm somewhere to earn minimal wage putting peaches
into barrels and keeping the economy afloat. So, also in my back pocket, I’ve
got a nice printout of my very healthy bank statement, which shows that I’m a
moderately well-off white guy just here on a trip to visit his friends and no
danger to the fruit-picking industry whatsoever.
Only thing is, it’s totally bogus: after buying this plane
ticket out here, I’ve only around three hundred dollars (US) in the bank. But
I’m good with photoshop. And it’s easy cutting and pasting numbers, moving a
few digits here and there, cranking up the balance till it’s enough to satisfy
one of them there ‘normal human beings’ who can’t conceive of being in a
foreign country and living on less than a hundred bucks a day with all your
hotels and excursions lined up, and a big giant safety net woven from money
ready to catch you should anything go amiss.
Those things – thanks to my hitch-hiking youth spent
sleeping by the side of the road and existing for months purely on faith and
trust and the kindness of strangers – aren’t a problem for me. I’m lucky in
some ways. And unlucky in others.
But that, like what happened to me in Israel with those gorgeous Israeli
women soldiers, is a whole other story.
“Enjoy your stay,” she says, her eyes already moving onto
the person behind me.
Is it just my imagination, or is he grimacing, scrunching up
his nose, looking for all the world like a man who’s been walking – nay, wading
– through a cloud of invisible brown-green gas these past ten minutes?
Have I been silently trumping more, and not noticing, so
focused was I on this final barrier into the great, grand nation?
I stop for a moment and take a whiff. Glance at the guy now
standing in front of my tiny lovely woman, and at the people standing behind
him.
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