The Passport Office

Posted on January 10, 2003 in Citizenship

The Los Angeles Federal Building rises like an enormous white tombstone that had strayed out of the Los Angeles National Cemetery across the street. If it hadn’t been built before Timothy McVeigh’s ugly nitrate fertilizer experiments in front of its sister building in Oklahoma City, I might have suspected an allusion by the architect to this disaster. It stands taller than any of the smoke glass-walled office buildings to the east and much higher than the VA hospital on the other side of the 405 freeway.

Its form led me to suspect a sanctuary more stupendous than that superintended by the Great White Throne in Zion National Park and more closely guarded than the Great Mosque in Mecca.

Entering the secular holy of holies required that we wait in line. They brought people in, two by two, like the animals saved from the Biblical flood. When we got to the door after about a ten minute wait, the guard just told me to place my cell phone and my PDA case on a conveyor belt and my keys in a plastic bucket. In ten seconds, I was inside the glass walled annex that stuck out like a phallus. There was no ID check or questions about our destination. They accepted that we had somewhere to go that wasn’t the Social Security Office, for which they had a separate line.

I was also underwhelmed by our reception at the Passport Office. A guard checked to see that we had an appointment and marked us “present” in lemon highlighter. As a well-shaved man in pale green showed off his skills in ASL to a girl behind Window Number 3, we filled out “the pink form” (which was for those who were renewing their passports) and then interrupted the silent conversation to present our papers, photos, and old passports.

Then we entered Government Time — “hurry up and wait” on plastic black chairs arranged over a floor that was mostly coal-colored linoleum with a few beige tiles punched through the darkness here and there. The effect was something like the negative image of an IBM punch card.

Some people watched the only television set at the end near the windows where people lined up to pick up their passports. I overheard one smirking Gen-Xer refer to the line at Window #18 as “a cattle call — the Southwest Way of doing things.” He had a sharp edged flat top and addressed his comments to another fellow of about the same age who felt the need to wear indigo sun glasses to shade his eyes from the flourescent lights. Every five minutes, someone called out a list of names that included those from the last call who hadn’t made it to the window yet. A crowd congealed around the presumably bullet-proof glass front, carefully bending its plump caterpillar line so as not to block the television audience.

Most of the rest of us just sat around, waiting for our numbers to be called. We were A1673. The ticket promised us an eighteen minute wait. Just as soon as I got bored and called my optometrist to arrange to pick up some new lenses, the rate of invitations to the processing windows increased and we were called. I hung up at the request of the clerk who served us. She flipped through my book and took a long look at the fancy sticker the guards from the Republic of Croatia had pasted in two places. Most of it was in either Cyrillic or Greek: and there were the strange stamps I received when I entered Hungary: just some dials whose arrows pointed to the date and time of my arrival in that country more than ten years ago.

I wondered what skin condition afflicted the woman: she was a pale African American with dark blotches no larger than puka shells. She finished with us in under five minutes, wrote out a couple of green passes, pushed them back through the slot, and told us that our passports would be available on Tuesday. “That’s your ticket,” she told us. “That’s all you need to come back.”

As we walked out to the parking lot, I chuckled at the thought of the clerks puzzling over where those stamps camp from. “Well, none of them says ‘Cuba’,” I laughed. “Or in Arabic script,” Lynn added. We shook our heads and made our way to the Tercel to drive back home.