Pamela and I had received a third grant from the Dutch Ministry of Culture to create a new show, and I needed to follow through with my teaching and performing commitments. We'd buried the BAMsisters in an unmarked grave right off the autobahn outside of Bremen, not far from Hamburg. The new show, Missing People, gave birth to new personages.
Parting with my sweetheart was tough. I promised him I'd be back to California for good by his April 8th birthday. As these were pre-internet days and we were both living on a shoestring (albeit a long one, stretching from Los Altos, California to Amsterdam, Holland), long distance telephone calls were a huge luxury. So we corresponded by making cassette tapes for each other, starting with one every fortnight and soon escalating to two or three a week. It was epic.
True to my word, I spent the ensuing seven months tying up 18 years of connectedness, giving everything away, and winging my way back to California by the first week of April. Alva welcomed me with open arms and a fresh strawberry pie. [Bear loves berries.]
It began to feel a bit precarious, living in legal limbo. So I started what turned out to be a ridiculously arduous process of obtaining a Green Card. Remember, the American Consul in Amsterdam had told me way back in 1976 when I obtained Dutch citizenship that I was thereby forfeiting "the most valuable document any person on earth" could have, an American passport. Scoundrels. Not true. But those were the days that I still trusted American officials to speak the truth.
Getting a Green Card, as some of you may know, is a huge hassle. Jumping through hoop after hoop, by Spring Break of 1989 I'd come to the penultimate ring of fire, and that ring was back in Holland. I'd saved my pennies and bought a roundtrip ticket on Northwest, SFO-AMS. I did the rounds in Amsterdam, submitting photos of very specific dimensions, getting a chest x-ray, even submitting dental records. Whew. I had the home team -- my parents and siblings, my darling, and even my cherubs from Harker cheering me on.
Feeling almost victorious, I boarded the flight back to the States that would return me just in time to get me back to the classroom after Spring Break. I found myself seated next to a friendly Dutchman named Hans Paul Verhoef who was on his way to an international AIDS conference in San Francisco. As we winged our way over the Atlantic, we had a lively conversation about his advocacy as social worker in Rotterdam for people with HIV.
The Northwest hub was Minneapolis-St. Paul, so that's where we had to pass through customs and immigration. No big deal, right?
Big deal.
Hans and I were in parallel lines at customs. I saw the uniformed customs official rifling through his carry-on. He started pulling out bottles of a clear liquid. I could just make out the labels. They read "AZT" and that spelled trouble. Hans was forcibly pulled out of the line and led away, under protest. For, dear reader, this good man had AIDS and was, therefore, prohibited from entering the US. In the days that followed I learned that he was promptly sent to a maximum security prison where he languished for five days until at last a federal judge granted him a waiver that he might attend at least the final day of the conference they'd made him miss.
Seeing him being led away like that really riled me. I was about to open my big mouth when, to my surprise, I was pulled out of my line, like he had been minutes earlier. The problem was in my Dutch passport. Why, the smartly uniformed INS lady asked, was I returning to the US so soon after departing? Why was I visiting? Where was I going? Who did I think I was?
I can never forget the next 90 minutes. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, I was nobody. I had no rights, no respect, and no privacy. This INS woman made it very clear that they were ready to put me on the next plane back to Holland. And after that, it would be years before they would even consider giving me another visitor's visa. Before I could even begin to form an answer to the questions now coming from three of them, they took possession of my carry-on and told me to stay put.
The INS lady took my bag into a glass booth. She then proceeded to empty the bag and examine every article closely. Then she began to read my datebook. And then my journal. Did you know, dear reader, that immigrants and visitors have no rights of privacy at the border? No rights at all. There I stood as all the other passengers moved on to their connecting flights. I don't know when I've ever felt so vulnerable. This INS lady and her cohorts had my life in their officious hands.
Telephone calls from their glass isolation booth were followed by page after page being spit out by their fax machine. The three of them huddled around the pages, looking up at me with enough stern, cold glances to have me sweating profusely. Try as I may, now twenty-five years later, I can't even find a chuckle looking back at this bizarre scene. Although I was stock still in place, the dreadful possibility that I truly couldn't come home anymore swirled around me, like a sickening carrousel.
Ms.INS lady finally finished conferring with her colleagues and was about to come deliver her sentence when the muted jangle of the telephone called her back. There she stood, listening to whoever was on the other end while staring at me through the glass, grimly nodding, then hanging up, passing the news on to the other two, and then dumping all my carry-on items unceremoniously back into my bag and marching out to where I stood. All my adrenaline was used up by then.
She stared me down. She said that it was clear I had been working without permission. She told me that by all rights I should be sent packing and not come back. Then, as if it were costing her a lifetime's supply of cornflakes, she instructed me to write and sign a sworn statement that I would not engage in work again until I had obtained a Green Card.
And so I did. It didn't occur to me until several hours later, when I was finally on a flight to SFO, that it was odd she even knew about my Green Card quest. Somewhere over Utah I reread the letter from my Mom I'd carried with me to Holland and back and one passage leapt out at me..."Have a good trip and let's hope that the G.D. INS gets their act together to get you your Green Card."
That slice of welcome-home berry pie never tasted so sweet. Home.
Anticlimactic P.S. A few years after this incident, after I had obtained my Green Card, I paid an immigration lawyer a hefty sum so that she could inform me that all I had to do was go to the post office with a copy of my birth certificate and apply for a passport. I was born here. And I was an American citizen the whole time.