Warday

The Prison Bus

Jim had noticed that San Francisco International had flights by the dozens to every imaginable destination. The idea of getting a closer look at that airport fascinated us. Quinn objected so strenuously that we had to give her the slip. But we couldn’t very well visit the West Coast without obtaining a first-hand report of the condition of air travel in the area.

To make a long story short, if an illegal goes to the airport, said illegal is going to be caught.

The Immigration Police are a fearsome crew, especially when they appear out of nowhere, their dark glasses glittering, their scorpion faces expressionless, and say, “ID, please… We were on the concourse, passing an exhibit of new Ford Americars when it happened. We hardly even had our wallets out before there were two military police trotting over, and another three cops.

The reason? We didn’t have stamped airline tickets “visible on our persons at all times,” to quote the regulation.

The cop put our cards into a processor about the size of a recorder. The alarm flashed green (no doubt to con the criminal into thinking he’d passed the test and thus prevent a struggle). We were made to stand against the wall and searched. Jim’s recorder and his precious box of diskettes were left alone. California actually wanted us to keep our possessions. They don’t want potential deportees to leave so much as a used toothpick behind to give them a possible reason to return to the state after they have served their sentences and been ejected.

We were marched out of the airport, past the long rows of ticket counters. Japan AirLines, All-Nippon Airways, Singapore Airlines, Cathay-Pacific, Philippine Airlines, Thai Airlines, British Airways, Caledonian, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Aer Lingus, Air Prance, South African Airways, Pan Am, TWA, Delta.

You can fly from San Francisco to Tokyo ten times a week, to London, Singapore, or Paris eight times, to Bonn five times, to Taiwan four times, to Milan twice.

There is no American city except L.A. with near the service.

New York, Washington, and San Antonio are not on the schedules, of course, and most other American cities are barely there.

You cannot fly from San Francisco to Minneapolis at all, but you can go nonstop to Buenos Aires on British Airways or Pan Am, twice a week.

Just being in that airport—despite the cops and the handcuffs—made me long for the magnificent ease of jet travel as I remember it. I even have dim recollections of flying in pre-jet days from San Antonio to Corpus Christi with my father, and the hostess handing out mint Chiclets in cellophane packets. I remember my amazement on learning we were a mile high. I feel equally amazed now that I am earthbound.

Things one took for granted never quite seem lost. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism, but somewhere in the back of my mind I always assume that things will one day return to normal, which means life as it was in about 1984.

I remember when Hershey bars got bigger.

And the Ford Tempo, and Chinese restaurants with menus ten pages long, and they had it all.

I remember inflation, and how happy everybody was when it ended—and how unhappy when it started up again, right after the ’84 election.

And OPEC. I wonder if it still meets, and if the Israelis send representatives or allow their Arab client-states to continue the pretense of independent participation.

Walking along in that spit-and-polish gaggle of officers, I considered the idea of just breaking and running.

But I want to live. Badly.

Ticket clerks glanced curiously at us as we passed, and I thought of light on wings and how small the ocean seems from a jet.

I thought of the magical land of Somewhere Else.

They don’t have Immigration Police Somewhere Else.

They don’t have Red Zones and Dead Zones and British civil servants.

Somewhere Else the corn is always safe to eat and you don’t see cattle vomiting in their pens.

They never triage Somewhere Else, and they don’t write Bluegrams.

They don’t love each other as Anne and I do, either, not Somewhere Else, where the sky is clean and death is a hobby of the old.

Somewhere Else they assume that they have a right to exist and do not stop to consider that it may be a privilege.

California needs the rest of America. It must not be allowed to become a separate nation. If there is such a thing as a geopolitical imperative in our present society, it is to prevent this from happening. The current California immigration laws are an affront to the very memory of the Bill of Rights—and in most parts of this country it is much more than a memory.

We were taken to a holding pen right in the airport, an airless, windowless room jammed with miserable people and booming with fluorescent light.

We remained there, without food or water or access to counsel, for fifty hours. We slept as best we could on the black linoleum floor, entwined with the other captured.