Paradise Delayed

So it is Tuesday, June 20, and I am not in Turkey. At 2:30 PM last Friday, two hours before D—and I had to leave for Newark airport, she discovered that my passport had expired on May 19th of this year. I blanched, began trembling, and almost burst into tears. After many months (years, even—we tried to arrange this trip last Summer, but couldn’t get out of the country due to D’s pending green card status) of meticulous planning, I stood, once again, face to face with the big red hand of Denial. “No,” said the Hand. “You shall not pass.” “Nay, Hand,” said I—“I am Man, and would be master of material things: warden, protector, and landscape designer of the Earth. It is my birthright as the thinking animal—the one with the opposable thumbs. Stand aside.” The hand was silent, immobile, unimpressed.

Well, what you can’t hack through or climb over, you have to walk around. D—flew to Turkey. I came down to Maryland to spend the week with my folks and resolve this passport situation. If all goes as planned, I’ll fly out this Friday from Dulles.
Yesterday I went to a 24 hour Passport Procurer in Silver Spring. The man, whose name was Steve, weighed at least 400 pounds and was in a kind of Humpty Dumpty costume: Red suspenders being the axis about which the outfit revolved. Behind him, to his right, sat a silent business associate with a prosthetic arm that might have been borrowed from a department store mannequin. The two men sat there, hemmed about by stacks of papers and files and strange historical bric-a-brac like traffic lights and an enormous brass motorboat throttle, as if some huge, insane child had placed them there long ago as centerpieces of a mad diorama.

Steve does passports, notarizing, faxes, printing, stamp-making and ID cards. Prominently posted about the office are signs reading:

1) “Only Robinson Crusoe gets his work done by Friday.”

2) “Your carelessness and lack of planning do not constitute my emergency.”

3) “Our credit manager is Helen Waite. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite.”

Let me address the first two: Steve’s Yellow Pages ad says “Passport in 24 hours!” “Emergency Passport service!” So, as I understand it, my carelessness and lack and planning should, by definition, constitute his emergency. Especially since he charges $200 on top of the $120 the government takes for an expedited passport. Also, if I come in on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and pay for 24-hour passport service, won’t Steve have to get this “work done by Friday”?

I sat on the couch awaiting my turn, next to the oxidized copper bas-relief of a lighthouse and an...island(?), my confidence eroding gradually but irrevocably, like the Pacific Coast Highway, as Steve shuffled about looking for lost passport applications…but what choice did I have? I, like all of Steve’s customers, am desperate, helpless. I will pay whatever he asks. I will run the risk of having my passport sold to Azerbaijani arms dealers because Steve has an “in” at the State Department, which will not give Joe Citizen, if he should walk in there, a new passport in less than two weeks. Me, I got to get to Turkey. I have to get it done by Friday. Please, Steve, bury not my papers amid thy towering stacks. Wrap not thy sandwich in it. Use it not to line thy cat box. I am in your swollen, meaty hands…