Don't Get Too Comfortable Page 2
The INS center, a one-story sprawl devoid of character, fits into its very unprepossessing surroundings of a highway of strip malls with empty storefronts. Still, the air is electric with a sense of occasion as we line up at the door. No one has come alone and people are dressed to the nines. We are separated from our friends and family and pass through the final sheep dip before becoming Americans. I have to answer once again whether, in the intervening four weeks between my interview and now, I have become a dipsomaniac, a whore, or traveled backward in time to willingly participate in Kristallnacht. They take back my green card, which after ten years is barely holding up. It was always government property. There is a strange lightness I feel having turned in the small laminated object that has been on my person for an entire decade. Something has been lanced. For the brief walk from this anteroom to the main auditorium, I am a completely undocumented human. The only picture ID I have is my gym membership and it has my name spelled wrong.
There is absolutely nothing on the walls of the huge fluorescent-lit, dropped-ceiling room into which we are corralled. It's the new federalist architecture. Even travel agencies give out free posters of the Grand Canyon or the Chicago loop at night. Alternately, how hard could it be to get a bunch of schoolchildren in to paint a lousy mural of some politically neutral rainbows and trees? Our guests are already seated way in the back; I cannot find Sarah in the sea of faces. I am grateful for the newspaper I have brought with me as it takes well over an hour for everyone to register and find their seats. Across the aisle from me, one of my fellow soon-to-be new citizens has a paperback. He is reading American Psycho. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to read about a murderous yuppie dispatching live rodents into women's vaginas. Welcome, friend.
I catnap a little and one of the guards turns on a boom box perched on a chair for the musical prelude. A typical pompy instrumental of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by a very atypical “America the Beautiful” rendered in a minor-key full-strings orchestration straight out of a forties noir. Three women and one man then get up on the dais. The man checks that everyone has turned in all their documents. It's a minor federal offense to keep them. “Your old passports from the countries you came from are souvenirs and can never be used again.” The people in the back are instructed to applaud loudly, people with cameras are told to take lots of pictures. There is pretty well only joy in this room, save for some extreme Canadian ambivalence.
They lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. I leave off “under God” as I say it. Oh, maverick! I feel about as renegade as the mohawked young “anarchist” I once watched walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday evening. For some reason the streets were choked with limousines that night. My young friend spat contemptuously at each one that sat unoccupied and parked, while letting the peopled vehicles go saliva free.
To lead us in singing the national anthem for our first time as Americans, we have a choir. Not a real choir, but a group of employees who come up to the front. We sing and I cry, although I'm not sure why. I'm clearly overcome by something. It's a combination of guilt over having shown insufficient appreciation for my origins, of feeling very much alone in the world, and—I am not proud to say—of constructing life-and-death grass-soup scenarios for the immigrants standing around me. Strangely, no one else that I can see sheds a tear. Perhaps it is because they are not big drama queens.
One of the women on the dais addresses us. “There are many reasons each of you has come to be here today. Some of you have relatives, or spouses. Either way, you all know that this is the land where you can succeed and prosper. You've come to live the American dream and to enjoy the country's great freedom and rights. But with rights come great responsibilities.”
Shouldering that great responsibility is primarily what I came here for today. Question 87 of the citizenship test is “What is the most important right granted to U.S. citizens?” The answer, formulated by the government itself, is “the right to vote.” As we file out of the room, I ask someone who works there where the voter registration forms are. I am met with a shrug. “A church group used to hand them out but they ran out of money, I think.”
I don't go to the post office to then have to buy my stamps from a bunch of Girl Scouts outside, and if the Girl Scouts are sick that day, then I'm shit out of luck. A church group? Why isn't there a form clipped to my naturalization certificate? It is difficult not to see something insidious in this oversight while standing in this sea of humanity, the majority of whom are visible minorities.
Sarah presents me with a hardbound copy of the United States Constitution and we head back to the station. We have half an hour to kill before our train. If I thought the lack of America-related decor in the main room of the citizenship facility was lousy public relations, it is as nothing compared with this port of entry: the town of Hempstead itself. Sarah and I attempt a walk around. My first glimpse as a citizen of this golden land is not the Lady of the Harbor shining her beacon through the Atlantic mist but cracked pavement, cheap liquor stores with thick Plexiglas partitions in front of the cashiers, shuttered businesses, and used car lots. The only spot of brightness on the blighted landscape is the window of the adult book and video store, with its two mannequins, one wearing a shiny stars-and-stripes bra-and-G-string set, and the other in a rainbow thong. Just like dreamy former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, I could comfortably dance in either of these native costumes of my twin identities.
MY FIRST INDEPENDENCE Day as an American comes scarcely two weeks later. I mark it by heading down to the nation's capital to celebrate with my old friend Madhulika, also newly American herself. Washington, D.C., is a sultry place in July. We stay indoors, hanging out and preparing a proper July Fourth meal of barbecued beer-can chicken and corn on the cob. In the evening, once the heat has broken, we head off with her husband, Jim, and their two daughters to see the fireworks. In the past, we might have lain out on the vast lawns of the Mall, but they have been fenced and cordoned off for security, so we park ourselves in a group of several hundred, sitting down on the pavement and grassy median in front of the DAR building.
The fireworks are big and bombastic and seem much louder and more aggressive than those in New York. Then again, in New York I'm usually on some rooftop miles away from the action. We are right under the explosions here. A little girl behind me, strapped into her stroller, twists in fear and panic as the percussive reports of the rockets thud through her rib cage. “No no no,” she moans softly throughout the entire thirty-minute show.
She has my sympathies one hundred percent. I have made a terrible miscalculation, at least insofar as coming down to D.C. I adore my friends, and the floodlit Greek revival buildings of Capitol Hill are undeniably beautiful and a suitable representation of the majesty of this great nation of which I am now a part, but I'm not being glib when I say that one of the most compelling reasons for my having become a citizen was to entrench and make permanent my relationship with New York, the great love of my life. Being down here feels a bit like I chose to go on my honeymoon with my in-laws while my beloved waits for me back at the apartment. There is a supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home.
THERE ARE ALREADY forty people waiting on line by seven o'clock on Election Day morning. My local polling place is in the basement of a new NYU dormitory on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. An ugly box of a building, it was erected on the site of the old dirty bookstore where, coincidentally, one could also enter booths to manipulate levers of a different sort.
It has been an awfully long time between drinks for me. I haven't voted since I was eighteen, when I cast a ballot in Canada during my first summer back from college. It's not that I take voting lightly. Quite the opposite. Living down in the United States where the coverage of Canadian politics is
pretty well nonexistent, I never felt well-enough informed to have an opinion. But even if I had made it my business to stay abreast of things—going to the library to read the foreign papers in those pre-Internet years—after a certain point, I no longer felt entitled to have a say in Canada's affairs, having essentially abandoned the place. I suspect this is going to happen for the next little while every time I have to do something unmistakably American, like cast a ballot in a non-parliamentary election or go through customs on my U.S. passport, but standing here on line, I am stricken with such guilt and buyer's remorse, overcome with a feeling of such nostalgia for where I came from, with its socialized medicine and gun control, that it is all I can do not to break ranks and start walking uptown and not stop until I reach the 49th parallel. There is also an equal part of me that is completely thrilled to finally be part of the electoral process. I am not alone in my exuberance this morning. Many people around me also seem filled with a buoyant and tentative excitement that George Bush might very well lose this election, as well. Complete strangers are talking to one another, almost giddy at the prospect. Others emerge from having voted and raise both their hands with crossed fingers, shaking them at us like maracas. “Good luck!” they wish us as they head off to work. It's almost like a party in this crowded dormitory basement that smells like a foot.
I love everything about the booth: the stiff, pleated curtain; the foursquare, early-industrial heaviness of the brass switches; the no-nonsense 1950s primary-school font of the labels; the lever that gives out a satisfying tchnk when I pull it back. It all feels solid and tried and tested. In the very best way, un-Floridian.
For the rest of the day I bound the floor of the apartment like a caged tiger, unable to settle. I make and receive dozens of phone calls. My in-box is full of well over a hundred e-mails from friends, all on precisely the same theme: early numbers and preliminary exit polls, predictions from the pundits, all pointing to a Kerry victory. We are contacting one another the way my immediate family obsessively did in the final days of my sister's first pregnancy leading up to the birth of my oldest nephew. We are trying to bear witness for one another in these last few moments of the never-to-be-returned-to time of Before. It's overblown and starry-eyed, we know. Even if Kerry wins, he's going to inherit some pretty insurmountable messes both here and abroad, but it is a function of what a shitty four years it has been that we still feel we are on the cusp of something potentially miraculous and life-changing.
The city that evening feels like New Year's Eve, without the menace. My neighborhood is full of people walking by with bottles of booze, on their way to watch the returns with friends; restaurants and bars have their doors open and their TVs on. Even I have no fewer than four parties to go to. I plan to skip lightly from venue to venue, until I end up somewhere, standing in a crowd of like-minded albeit younger and more attractive Democrats, just as the final polls close and they announce the new president. It will be one big booty call for justice.
That was before everything turned brown. Before the ever-reddening map rooted me to one spot. Before I parked myself at my friends' apartment, overstaying my welcome and slowly getting drunk. I eventually give up before they declare Ohio, and stagger home sometime after midnight. I turn off the alarm before I go to sleep. I don't want to hear the news in the morning. Daybreak rouses me, anyway. I lie there awake, unable to move. If I put my foot on the floor, it will make it true: four more years. I stay where I am, frozen, my bladder full. I'll have to get up soon, but for a few more minutes, I try not to waste my beautiful mind. Eventually, I turn on the radio and cold reality comes flooding in. I know of a journalist who, when Reagan was reelected, called everyone she knew—friends, acquaintances, everyone—and weepingly screamed “President Shithead! President Shithead!” into the phone. I understand the impulse, but I try to be philosophical as I start my day. He can't be president forever. Besides, I can wait him out. It's not like I'm going anywhere.
WHAT IS THE SOUND OF
ONE HAND SHOPPING?
Our waiter is looking wistful, his eyes cast downward, the merest hint of a smile playing gently upon his lips. He is about to speak. We lean forward, expecting perhaps a treasured but bittersweet memory: heedless young lovers in Paris, the specter of war looming. Instead, he begins, “There's a really lovely story about the calzone . . .”
This is a Temple of Food, a well-known restaurant in northern California whose owner is world famous as an advocate for humane and sustainable agribusiness, as well as being a renowned chef in her own right. I have three of her cookbooks myself. There is a sense of occasion in just being here, an awestruck thrill on the diners' faces, as if we have been chosen for something miraculous, like the people massed in the desert at the end of Close Encounters. Various members of the waitstaff beam at me as I walk through the dining room on my way to pee. They smile the way one might at a twelve-year-old clutching his first copy of Catcher in the Rye, their eyes shining with vicarious, anticipatory excitement at the journey I am about to take.
The meal is an undeniable pleasure. The food is unfussy and simply prepared, the impeccable ingredients each a Platonic example of itself: the tender micro greens of my composed salad, the piece of line-caught fish in its fragrant herbal bath. And for dessert, one medjoul date and a just-picked local tangerine, both perfect. In the same elegiac calzone tones, our waiter tells us, “We'd like to encourage you to bruise the orange leaf between your fingers.” We nibble our delicious dates. As instructed, we crush the orange leaves and the airborne oils create a lovely perfume that mingles with the steam of our post-supper coffee.
Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass. There's a lot of flamenco going around the room tonight. Smiles of mutual congratulation beam from table to table. Glasses are raised. We celebrate not only our small part in this incremental triumph over factory farming that just being here this evening represents but also our elevated capacities. It takes an exceptionally fine tongue and palate, you must admit, to appreciate a dessert of a single date. One so very different from the cratered, preservative-strafed mouths of the masses. I overhear one bartender say to the other, “I think I'm going to stay in this weekend and roast garlic.” The man of a departing couple leans in and says something to his date. She listens, and gives an almost electric start. Like Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in Reds who, caught up in the joyous throngs of the ten days that shook the world, had no choice after witnessing something so glorious and world-changing but to race home and fuck each other silly, the man and woman share a look of smoldering, unbridled lust. What did he whisper? “I was just told that they hadn't served that vinegar in twenty-four years!”
SUBTLETIES OF FLAVOR previously thought nonexistent or at the very least nonsensical are now the subject of earnest interrogation. It was easy enough to avoid such conversations—once the sole province of stultifying wine talk—by faking a coughing fit or simply bleeding from the eyes whenever your oenophile friends got going. Such discussions now cover just about anything you put into your mouth. In the food section of The New York Times (a newspaper which, in the interest of full disclosure, I read every day and have worked for extensively in the past), Amanda Hesser, a generally very fine journalist, writing about fleur de sel, had this to say about the sea salt that is harvested in France and available in New York City for $36 a kilo: “As I ate them, fine crystals of salt sprinkled on the potatoes crackled under my teeth, releasing tiny bursts that tasted of the sea and its minerals. There was no sting at the back of the mouth, no bitterness, just a silky, salty essence wrapping each bite of potato.” Sting at the back of the mouth? Bitterness? What has poor Amanda Hesser been doing all these years to add some savor to her food? Licking undeveloped Polaroids?
The general New York Times reader enjoys the privileges and plentitude of life in the world's wealthiest country, so articles on rolling cigarettes out of pocket lint or recipes on salvaging that last bit of rotting pork would make no
sense. But is it completely naïve to think that a squib in the same newspaper about ice cubes frozen from a river in the Scottish Highlands and overnighted to your doorstep—the perfect complement to your single malt—necessarily demands, if for no other reason than to preserve some vague notion of karmic balance, either a great big “April Fool's!” scrawled across the top, or a prefatory note of apology that such a service even exists? Surely when we've reached the point where we're fetishizing sodium chloride and water, and subjecting both to the kind of scrutiny we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist, it's time to admit that the relentless questing for that next undetectable gradation of perfection has stopped being about the thing itself and crossed over into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless.
It would be peevish and ungracious after being taken to such a lovely supper in this Temple of Food, I know, but I am desperate to ask the question that begs to be posed: “Just how fucking good can olive oil get?” I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character.
Or at least I used to think so. Since anyone with taste buds will respond to the trans-fat bells and whistles of a hot fudge sundae or super nachos, how better then to show a nobility of spirit than by broadcasting your capacity to discern the gustatory equivalent of a hummingbird's cough as it beats its wings near a blossom that grows by a glassy pond on the other side of a distant mountain? No surer proof that one is meant for better things than an easily bruised delicacy. Such a perfectly tuned instrument can quickly suss out the cheap and nasty. So, the bitterness at the back of the throat; the polite refusal of the glass of whiskey marred by those (shudder) domestic ice cubes; the physical and psychic insult that are sheets of anything short of isotopic density. What is the thread count, Kenneth? We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.