Damn Canucks.
I feel a bit behind in the whole “get the heck outta the U.S. of A. for a bit” category, because I’ve never really gotten the heck outta the U.S. of A thus far. Juli’s been to Italy and Mexico, Grub’s been to Puerto Rico and Europe, and chances are, dear reader, that you’ve been somewhere foreign, too. Other than a brief day trip off a cruise ship to see Mayan ruins and a toddler excursion to the Cayman Islands, I’m a sheltered little boy. And ever since watching Borat (what the hell was supposed to be so funny about that fake-ass movie, anyway?), the panic’s set in a bit.
Which partly explains why I was so excited to go to Vancouver a few weeks ago. It’s just a few hours north, and for those not in the geographical know, it’s actually a part of Canada, which counts as foreign! Whoa! The reason for the northern sojourn was to see another gamelan group. Perhaps I should back up a little and say that I’ve joined a gamelan group in the past few months. Perhaps I should back up a little more and explain for those of you not in the musical know that gamelan is an Indonesian style of music, heavily percussive, heavily awesome. Lots of gongs and tuned metal percussion—and since our group is essentially Balinese, it’s LOUD and extremely rock n’ roll. Javanese gamelan (such as the renowned Gamelan Pacifica here in Seattle who we got to play with recently) is much more cyclical and calm, but Balinese gamelan is full of changes and clanging fun stuff. The name of my group is Padma Sari, and you can listen to a track or two at www.myspace.com/padmasari
Anyway, I decide to get in a car w/ three of these nice gamelan fellows, and we head North. The only problem is that I don’t have a passport yet, and I don’t want to be “that guy” (read: the person who prevents everyone else from having a potentially life-changing experience). But after a few panicked interweb searches and a few more “Quit whining” comments from fellow gamelaners, I decide I don’t have too much to worry about. So we’re all in a car, joking around and having a good time, somewhat like this (names are abbreviated to semi-protect the semi-innocent):
Me: “Guys! I don’t have a passport so I brought up all this!”
*holds up creased Social Security card, faxed and unnotarzed copy of birth certificate, voting card, and Washington driver’s license replete w/ scraggly-beard terrorist face mugshot on it*
Me: “You’ll probably have to leave me at the border! Hahahahahaha!!!”
J: “Quit whining.”
D: “Yeah! I have a passport but I also have a mohawk and look like a ne’er-do-well crusty punk rocking drummer! Guess you’ll have to leave me at the border, too! Hahahahahaha!!!”
JN: “Yeah! I have passport but I’m also Indonesian, as in born in Jakarta, as in a foreign place densely populated w/ Muslims! Guess you’ll also have to leave me at border, too! Hahahahahaha!!!”
J: “I really will leave you guys at the border.”
So you can see that we’re having a good time, this motley crew of us. We’re looking forward to seeing this group, who is supposedly the shit and will also supposedly be playing a rare composition by Pak Sinti, the renowned Balinese near-saint who put Padma Sari together when he was the artist-in-residence at UW and basically mentored all the gamelaners before me to near gurudom.
Then JN comes out w/ this whopper:
JN: “Did I tell you guys I got arrested at border last time?”
All: “Hahahahahahaha!!!”
JN: “Serious! They pull me aside and search my car! Then they make me get out and search my pockets! Then the woman takes my wallet and starts looking through, so I say, ‘You want me to pull my pants down next?’
*crickets chirping*
J: “Wait, what?”
JN: “Serious! They make me sign all this paper and then I can’t go in! I get charged with officer assault!”
Me: “Wait, what?”
JN: “Officer assault! It’s OK, I been through twice since then. Don’t worry.”
D: “Wait, what?”
So I’m thinking that I might not be the one who gets us stopped at the border after all. The car is ominously silent until all of the sudden we’re about one-half mile from the border. J asks me to grab his passport from the green bag in his backseat, and when I do reach into the green bag, I pull out rolling papers instead.
Me: “J! You’ve got *expletive* rolling papers in here!”
J: “WHAT?”
Me: “You’ve got *expletive* rolling papers in here!”
J: “Oh, man. When I used to smoke pot, I would keep it all in that bag. Rolling papers are still legal, right?”
So that pretty much sets the mood for our approach to the border. The former stoner, the mohawk guy, the Indonesian, and the just plan weirdo all try to look as straight as possible for the mannequin-like Canuck in the booth. He asks us a ton of questions in rapid succession: how do we know each other, why are we going to Canada, how long are we planning to stay, what the heck is gamelan (seriously), etc. We decide to let J do the talking since he was driving.
Guard: “Alright, eh? Just pull the car over here, then give your keys and this piece of paper to the border guards in that building over there, eh?”
So we pull the car to the side and all the other guys are going, “I’ve never had to do this before,” or some such variant there of. So we keep the straight façade going as we walk into this building.
Truth be told, I’ve never felt more Orwellian in my life. A full-on police-state terror-mentality was in full swing, replete w/ downright ANGRY guards yelling in foreigners’ faces while little kids do their best to entertain themselves in the waiting room.
So we deliver the paperwork at sit down. A particularly stern woman calls us up individually and asks us about prior convictions along w/ all the same questions the booth guy did. I figure we answer straight enough, but then she calls JN up. The other three of us sit and sweat as she gets extremely stern and starts laying into JN. We can see JN getting flustered and animated, which isn’t good. JN is an American citizen and an extremely sweet, genuine person, but English isn’t his first language and we were afraid of some miscommunication. JN comes over to us, frantic and upset.
JN: “She say I lied! She say I have conviction but I have no conviction! She say I’m a liar!”
We figure that she must be referring to his previous border incident, but he goes on.
JN: “When I’m 17, I have this stupid friend. I go to Target with him and he says, ‘JN take that tackle.’ And I say, ‘No, you are stupid.’ But he say, ‘JN, how are we supposed to fish, then?’ So I get stupid too and take tackle and get caught. They charge me with shoplifting and I do these things to get it off my record!”
Me: “So now what? What does she want you to do?”
JN: “She want me to think about it.”
Me: “Wait, what?”
JN: “She want me to sit down and think about it. Tell her my answer again when I think about it.”
What else can we do but wait? So we sit in this lobby for an hour, surrounded by tense, anal retentive, pissed-off Canadians in flak jackets. Every five minutes or so, JN says that he doesn’t understand what’s happening, and that he was just a teenager, and that it was literally 19 years ago, and that he’s a U.S. citizen now and he doesn’t understand what’s happening. We tell him that we’re U.S. citizens, too, and that we don’t understand what’s happening, either.
Another guard calls us up again and asks us the exact same questions, rifling through our wallets when we pull them out this time. We all sit back down. They search the car, and at this point, I can see that J is repeatedly looking at the clock and getting progressively more nervous. It’s 1 p.m., and we’ve been sitting for just over an hour.
The same angry woman calls JN back up and the scene repeats itself—she yells, he gets flustered and throws his hands all over the place. She points at us and he comes back over and sits down.
J: “What the hell is going on?”
JN: “She say I’m lying! She want to know address of Target! I tell her it’s in Fresno and it was 19 years ago and I don’t know! I tell her tackle was $0.75 and that my record is clear and she call me a liar! She tell me to sit down and think about my answer!”
J and Me: “What the *expletive*?”
JN: “Should I lie?”
All: “NO!!!!!”
JN: “I think she want me to lie. I should lie about answer.”
All: “NO!!!!”
This goes on for a while, and J is about to tear the place apart. It’s now 1:45, and the concert is supposed to start at 2. I can feel my blood sugar crash and I’m obsessing over the tuna fish sandwich I have in the car. D is ominously silent.
J: “If we miss this show, I’m going to sue.”
Me: “How long does tuna fish last in a hot car?”
J: “Seriously, I’ll sue.”
JN: “I think she want me to lie.”
All: “NO!!!!!”
D: “I wouldn’t eat it.”
Me: “What?”
D: “The tuna fish. I wouldn't eat it.”
By now it’s 2:30 and we’ve been sitting for almost three hours. I’m close to seriously losing it, and I’m daydreaming of kicking my foot through the glass doors and wondering what kind of international laws that would be breaking.
Me: “That’s IT!”
I stride over to Stern Woman #1 and tell her that we’ve missed the show, we’ve been sitting for an unreasonable amount of time, and give me and my friends our passports back because we don’t want in your dumb country now, anyway.
Stern Woman #1: “No.”
Me: “Wait, what?”
Stern Woman #1: “No. You’re not getting anything back until your friend thinks about what he’s done.”
I walk back and sit down, dumbfounded by the entire situation. D is near catatonic, and J is muttering to himself. JN can’t stop apologizing to us, and no matter how many times we tell him it’s not his fault, I can tell that he’s tearing himself apart over it.
I get the tuna fish sandwich from the car and eat it while glaring at all the guards.
Finally, over three hours later, another stern woman calls us over. We have to sign a bunch of paperwork stating that we were denied entry into Canada, and while we rant and rave and demand the badge number of Stern Woman #1, Stern Woman #2 keeps directing us back to our car. Apparently, JN’s little mishap appeared as burglary, so the tackle story seemed a little fishy (hah! Get it? Because you know, tackle, and…and, ow! Stop hitting me!)
We get our stuff back and get in queue to (hopefully) return to the U.S. Canuckers call lines queues, and if I wasn’t still angry, I would find that quaint. After waiting in another line of cars for 45 minutes, we pull up to the U.S. border guard, who literally has a plug of chewing tobacco in his lip (seriously). I pull my hat over my eyes and wait for the worst.
Cowboy: “What’d you get denied entry for?”
JN: “Stealing bait.”
Cowboy: “Wait, what?”
JN: “Steal—ing—BAIT.”
Cowboy: “Stealing BAIT?”
JN: “Stealing bait.”
He shrugs and waves us through and we return to our place of citizenship, leaving dumb Canadians behind us, along w/ a few broken dreams. JN won’t stop apologizing, and we all feel awful for him. He keeps pointing out that the documents we had to sign repeatedly referred to him as “born in Indonesia” as opposed to “U.S. citizen”.
All’s fairly well that ends fairly well, as we stopped at J’s dad’s house in Anacortes on the way home. JN was trained as a chef in both Java and Singapore, and when we stopped at the grocery store, he bought over $100 worth of seafood and beer. We grilled and drank and watched the sun set over a beautiful lake bordered by an Indian reservation, and after a while I didn’t miss Vancouver at all. Here is approximately ¼ of the food we actually prepared:
This is an extremely long post, and so here I’m going to stop, but I will say that my fellow gamelaners are great guys, and when it comes to Canada, who the heck cares?
