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The roundish, mid-thirties guy I chose coming into Toronto looked like the jolly sort, but he was all business.
"Final destination?"
"Toronto."
"How long."
"Three days."
"Business or pleasure?"
"Business."
"What business?"
"I'm speaking at a conference for the CBC," I said, hoping to pique some local interest. He looked unimpressed.
"Are you getting paid?"
"Yes," I said. It was the real answer, the true answer, the wrong answer.
He picked up a pink highlighter pen and drew a giant slash across my immigration form. It seemed like a pretty drastic thing to do, but I stayed stupidly optimistic. I remember thinking, hey, maybe everybody gets the big pink slash.
He handed me my slashed form and visa and said, "proceed." I wondered if he was really a robot.
So I went to the exit. But where everybody got to walk straight ahead, I was diverted to the right by a guard to a small line of very nervous-looking people.
Everybody does not get the big pink slash.
We all eyed each other suspiciously. I asked the woman behind me if she knew why we'd been diverted and she just shrugged. I steadied myself and kept thinking positive. I mean, really, if there was something special I was supposed to have done, surely the CBC would have taken care of it, or told me, or something.
But my attempt at keeping positive was foiled when a grumpy immigration guy came walking down the line like a soldier. He stopped at the elderly Asian woman who was talking into a cell phone and said: "You can't use that in here. Turn it off." When she looked at him blankly, he said it again louder, which caused her traveling partners to start chirping at her in a machine gun blast of some Asian dialect I didn't understand. She quickly folded up the phone and put it away. I felt sorry for whomever was on the other end. A daughter, perhaps, or a husband.
The grumpy man continued patrolling the line for a few minutes, and then settled in behind the counter, joining another three or so windows that were open, taking us one at a time. I made a small prayer into the universe: Please, please, I can do this, but please, not that guy. Anyone but the grumpy guy.
So, naturally, I got the grumpy guy.
"Next!" he barked. I glanced behind me at the woman I'd spoken to earlier. She looked afraid.
I shuffled up to the counter. Grumpy guy was looking down at something, so I set my slashed form, my passport, and my California driver's license down on the counter. He gave these items a cursory glance and said gruffly: "You can put that license away – it's no good here."
"Well," I said, "I just thought you might like a more recent photo." I decided to get jocular: "Wait 'till you see the photo in my passport. It's kinda old."
This got his attention. He picked up the passport, flipped to the heavy photo page, and held it up, glancing from it to me to it.
What he saw when he looked at that passport photo was me, a few years out of college, with hair down to my butt and a long goatee. The first stamp on the passport was Amsterdam.
The grumpy guy paused for a moment. I wondered if he was considering calling over the nearest cop and having me arrested. Instead, he reached into his own pocket.
"That's nothing," he said. "Check this out."
He flipped open his wallet to his own driver's license. It was him alright, with curly reddish brown hair down to his butt. And this wasn't any hair, this was bigass hair. Hair that could have faught gravity and won.
My eyes ping-ponged between him and his license. He was now a middle-aged guy with graying, buzz-cut hair, slightly balding. For the first time I noticed a small gold earring in one ear. What a difference a few years make.
From that point on, we were buds. I didn't even get worried when he asked me if I'd ever been arrested. He filled out some forms, warned me that if I ever came into the country to do consulting without getting the proper clearances I could be arrested, and then sent me on my way.
"Good luck on your talk, eh?" he called out after me as I was leaving.
I love Canada.
{ 12:05pm }
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