Entry 17
By Steven Paul Lansky
©2005 All Rights Reserved

"Customs"

It’s the sixth of July and I’m at the U.S. Customs Station in Champlain, NY. I’ve been having a day that has been unbelievable. It’s like ancient history and New World challenges. There are people, officials, who are in my way; they want me to jump through hoops that are insensitive and weird. But, it gives me work to do. I left Burlington this morning early. I got my breakfast at a diner called Henry’s instead of eating at the Lang House. There were several older women breakfasting and I didn’t really want to be around older women this morning. One was dyed blonde, another had a lot of gray, and a third salt and pepper haired woman flashed this big smile at me, and I suddenly got worried that she might fall in love with me and try to control my life. Is that paranoia? I don’t know. Anyway, I left the Lang House through the double set of doors, and walked to Henry’s, had a half a waffle with Vermont Maple, sweet butter, and tomato juice with a wedge of lemon. I didn’t leave a tip. Maybe that’s where my day started to go wrong.

Next I went to the bank where my bank check from Columbia Savings in Cincinnati was refused. I decided to get a cash advance and some Canadian currency. I walked back via the library, checked out nothing, but looked at a biography of Mordecai Richler written during the Trudeau years. Before that I asked the reference librarian if he had any Ed McClanahan books in the Fletcher Free Library Collection. All he had was The Natural Man, Ed’s first book and a best seller. It’s about Hornung, a gangly great Kentucky High School basketball star. The color in it is vivid as hell. I think he got a reputation for being a redneck for this one. They didn’t have Famous People I Have Known, My Vita If You Will, or The Congress of Wonders. I mentioned Counterpoint Press, but didn’t mention the R. Crumb cover edition. The FBI was mentioned in that one. Ed and I talked about that a lot. The night I met Ed in Lexington at the literacy center I read my poem I Sing the Highway and talked about Bryant Street House where he had lived in the sixties and I had lived in the seventies.

There were two young men and a young woman in dark sweats sleeping on three gray wood slatted separate slips off the outdoor café. A couple of proud wooden skiffs sat idle. As it turned out one of the college beefcake like guys was on the ferry with a couple of kids, scamming girls and taking photographs. I ate my remaining dates, spitting the pits into the water over the white painted railing. I figured if I was going to Canada, I didn’t want to have anything at the border that might be a problem. Then at the ferry landing, after a pleasant crossing, with the exception of a near miss with a sailboat that caused the ferry pilot to alter his course for a few seconds, I walked up the hill to the Port Kent train depot. I sat there for a long time and had a wonderful time sitting, watching birds, playing music, taking photos of a young Greek or Italian girl picking wildflowers of all colors. She said there were some wild sunflowers, Daisies, Black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s Lace and several varieties that we couldn’t identify. I hope the camera makes it through this crazy time.

I phoned my mechanic, Charlie, back in Cincinnati, from the payphone al fresco, describing for him the bucolic setting. He said the car was OK sitting at his shop. He would change the timing chain as part of the major maintenance the car needed.

After hours of sitting I had an interesting conversation with a Pastor who was also waiting for a train. His was going south. He was reading. I tried to read. The breeze was cool and intoxicating and I asked him to watch my stuff so I could get an ice cream. I had an ice-cream sandwich at the dock for over a dollar. I spent some quarters. I don’t remember the brand on the ice cream, but it was average. Nothing special. We talked about our families and difficult conversations. He was not the best listener, but I was glad to have the company and I felt he was, too. I didn’t let him into my confidence completely, not mentioning my illness, but that’s the story that I have to keep close to the vest. He agreed that I had to let my brother go. A bus arrived and a couple of men took the Pastor away to the south.

I played more music and a couple of people stopped to listen. I think I’m learning the Giacametti variations. A heavy man who sounded French Canadian asked if it was an oud. His deep nasal voice spoke of the Old World, and I wanted to hear him talk while at the same time I wanted to keep playing. I told him it was a lute. His black Scottie cocked his head, the man seemed to be encouraging me to sing with the sweet strings, but he insisted that he was trying to get the Scottie to whine with the tune. I wondered if he was the father of the flower girl. I felt pangs of growth watching this big dark man with close-cropped hair and a rather V-shaped head. He said he was camping and from Montreal.

I sat until he left and then I called Amtrak again from the public phone. While I was talking to the ticket agent making a reservation from Plattsburgh to Montreal for tomorrow, the bus appeared as if it had been cloaked into another dimension. I spoke with two Amtrak officials, a driver and a porter with an Aceola badge. They accepted me as a walk-on. The porter was black with a flip haircut and a rather pear-shaped black girl’s butt. The man had a lot of gray hair, tinted glasses, a square face, but his jaw was more rounded, and his eyes were a little yellow, cloudy, or bloodshot. I never got a clear look. He wanted me to put the instrument case in the luggage locker; I suggested it might shift. He let me take it on the very empty bus. There was an older couple, and two young men speaking French. I was the odd man out. My jeans were torn my long gray hair down, and I think I looked rather conspicuous. The bus skirted past some gated estates. I wondered which politicians kept places here. The service personnel didn’t seem to notice me at all. I took a crap in the toilet of the bus while they were navigating out of Plattsburgh onto Interstate 87.

Plattsburgh looked tricky as hell. I remembered another visit and there are always bridges down and up. It looked from the window as if it might be a war zone. We passed some very impressive complexes and what might have been a fort or a detention center. A lot of red brick buildings. I hope it stays vacant. The Pastor told me earlier that the Air Force Base at Plattsburgh had been shut down.

The driver turned his big red face under a blue hat and said, “Everybody off the bus for customs. Bring all your luggage.”

I walked through the aisle, olive green Squarerigger bag in one hand and deep blue lute case in the other. My brown rucksack hugged my shoulders. There was a queue in the low ceilinged building with a line on the floor marking where I was to stand when it came my turn. Fluorescent lamps blazed. The woman immigration official looked Asian, with black hair and dark eyes. I gave her my passport and she asked me where I was going.

“Montreal. Then I plan to take the train to Toronto and back to Chicago.”

“What is the purpose of your visit to Canada?” I thought of my Siberian girlfriend, Anastasia Romanova, as this woman smiled.

“I’m on vacation, but I’m a freelance writer and plan to write on my trip. I’m hoping to meet the writer, Margaret Atwood, in Toronto.”

“How long do you expect to be in Canada?”
“No more than a couple of weeks, probably nine days or so.”

“Do you have friends in Canada?”

“No.” This was a lie. I know a number of Canadians and Americans who visit Canada in the summer.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a freelance writer.”

“Do you have a return ticket?”

“No, I don’t.”
“How much money do you have with you?”
“I have around three hundred dollars American and two hundred Canadian. I also have several credit cards.”
Then she jumped in with a question I never expected, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime.” Now, she wasn’t smiling, she was tapping my marrow with imploring brown eyes.

I paused for a moment. “I’ve been arrested but the charges were dropped. Once, I was stopped in Arizona for stealing gasoline and I spent the night in jail.”

“What else were you arrested for?”

“I took a car.”

“Have you been to court?”

“I’ve been for psychiatric reasons in the past.”

“Do you know you have an SID number?”

“No. What is that?”

“It indicates you have a criminal record. You are not welcome in Canada. Wait here and someone will take you back to the U.S. Customs Center.”

The walls closed in making the room stuffy and warm. I sweated.

“I’m a schizophrenic, and I take medication, but I’m not crazy.”

“You are being refused entry to Canada.”

“Is there anything I can do to resolve this?”

“I will give you a form to file with Immigration. You will need to list any arrests, court appearances, and convictions.”

I was scared and sure that some of this was because Dad had some tax scheme going with his land on St. Joseph Island, Ontario. I didn’t want to tell this woman that I had a summer cottage, because I was afraid that Dad would get in trouble, or that I would get in worse trouble with Dad.

Here I am at the U.S. border and busloads of immigrants are coming in by the half-hour. The processing is quick. On a Friday night bus charters are leaving Montreal with intensity. I wonder if they are coming from the Montreal Jazz Festival, or what. I’m tempted to start a conversation but they seem to be moving, and of vastly different ethnic and racial and lingual origins, as if God were creating a population for our country in passenger trains by the busload. The U.S. Customs Officials process them quickly and put them back on buses. I wonder how many of them have homes in Canada, or in the U.S.? Or where? Are they tourists? What are they doing here tonight?

I was turned back from the border. There was this young immigration official, a black-haired woman from Montreal. I didn’t write down her name, because I don’t want to fight her directly. I think she was the boss of my bus today. It seemed like she wanted to marry me, or push my buttons. The thought I had right away was that it had something to do with my earthly father and some shenanigans that she thinks I’m responsible for. I asked permission to use this laptop at the Customs Service. I am waiting for a bus to Plattsburgh. I have no idea what I’ll do next, but I’m planning and waiting, and writing, and looking at the brownish red tile floor. I showed one of the Treasury Officials some of my best currency, old two dollar bills with Monticello on the back. She claimed it was the first time she had seen such a thing. The young lady at the Canadian border gave me a stupid form to fill out, I took it back to the U.S. side and filled it out, returned it to her, and she still said no to me. I left her the form, and I got a ride in caged van back here.

I’d like to re-create the interview. Maybe it was the way I walked, or that I was honest about all my criminal history. I have no record. There may be a ten or twenty year old dropped charge, or a misdemeanor somewhere on a computer. She said I had an SID number. What does that mean? I have long hair and torn jeans, I want to meet Margaret Atwood, and I’m honest to anyone who asks, so what is the real problem? Maybe she is protecting someone. I don’t care. I want to go to Canada. I don’t know why I want to go to Canada today, just that I do. I asked a U.S. Immigration Official if I could get Diplomatic Immunity, or some kind of State Department Temporary Appointment. He said he couldn’t help. He was very respectful. I’d describe him, but I want to protect his anonymity. The U.S. Officials have all been kind, and seem competent. They say they cannot affect anything on the Canadian side. I took a leak and changed shirts here. My beard is a bit scraggly. Can a man be refused entry into another country for his appearance? What is a SID number and who assigns it? Does it hurt or help a person? My name is in some kind of computer that gives Tony Blair’s dog a justification to reject me from entering royal territory. I find that kind of restrictive. But, it answers certain questions. Someone doesn’t want me in Montreal tonight. I’m thinking it might be for my own protection. Which scares me more than anything does. One of the feelings I was getting from the young lady was that if I had the proper papers on me at all times, I could come and go, and also carry a loaded gun. I don’t want a gun, and I don’t want have to carry special papers. The guidebook says that America is an open border between the Queen’s territory and the Democracy to the South. A passport or a driver’s license from the U.S., an honest reply to a few questions about firearms and tobacco and alcohol are all that are fair to ask. All this stuff about a criminal past seems like ferreting crime. In America past is past. A man’s history cannot be held against him or her, and rehabilitation is not a condition for travel. I’m a little peeved. I’ve been here at the station over four hours waiting for a bus and I don’t have any reservation to stay in Plattsburgh. It’s a shitty day when you can’t get a shower or something decent to eat before one a.m. It seems like I’m in New York.

I finally got onto the bus in Champlain. From Champlain, into Plattsburgh was a quick, safe and easy bus ride. The driver dropped me at a mall in the wee hours. I flagged down a taxi and for four dollars I got a ride into town. She also picked up two stinking drunken teenagers. I walked around the town center and nothing was open. It was two-thirty on Sunday morning and I was worn as a dishrag. And still I was unflagged. Determined to get into Canada, I decided to walk into a war memorial. Instinct took me to the lakeside. I remembered this spot so well. There were brick steps, and a dewy lawn. I found a large pyramidal stone marker with rough edges, and laid my gear around me, put on all my shirts, jackets, vest, and the Nat Wednesday jacket again. I slept outdoors for the first time in years. The moon was just beginning to wane as the night passed growing mistier. The lake was calm. A gaggle of gray geese, not Canada Geese woke me climbing, squalling, and parading past me onto the memorial. A couple of men were waiting for the geese. I got up, picked up my gear, a bit embarrassed, and walked up the memorial. There were no signs anywhere saying that the park was closed or listing any hours. Thank God for American War Heroes and memorials that never close.

I hiked into the town and found one big neon blue “open” sign on a sweeping corner. It was a taxi dispatch. I asked if there was a public restroom. I went in and took a shit the Krishna way. A little loose. I felt a bit grungy, but no blood. The rest of the morning was a struggle. Sleepy, dehydrated, scared, and fighting to stay calm and cool, I asked at the taxi dispatch for a B & B when I returned there a few hours later after watching the town wake up. There was this weird little woman, with a cap, and close-cropped hair. She had a walk-man pinned to her ears, and her eyes were beady and brown. She spoke in a voice that sounded damaged, like her voice box had been squeaked or something weird. Was her voice mechanical because she was hearing what to say in her earpiece? She paced me across a bridge and up a street whose name escapes me. The neighborhood got cleaner and the houses larger and more manicured.

We were looking for number twenty-nine but there was no number twenty-nine. I smelled a con. After leaving my gear on the sidewalk, I hiked to the lakeshore. She shouted to me that she had found the B & B. It was almost seven in the morning. I walked to the door and she carried my gear across the street for me. I heard a little voice in my head say, tip her two. So, I gave her a two-dollar bill and she told me to have a good day, or something suspiciously gratuitous. Then, as I stood at the door waiting, a very wicked looking woman appeared. She had the thin face of a German witch. She could have been the actress who Dorothy shrank in the Emerald City back in Oz for the Wizard. Her teeth looked dirty and mean. With a haughty look she claimed not to have a room and offered to call a taxi.

I thanked her and waited a minute before walking to the train station. The train station where the bus had turned around on the way from Port Kent to the border. This whole area was beginning to smell like bad fish. The sky was perfect blue, the clouds were walking with me, and the breeze had that intoxicating sense of impending doom. I sensed I was in a horror film many times as the day unfolded. But there were moments, when I felt safe.

I think this occurred to me much later but it is important to place it here. Perhaps some power was guiding me to the key locations for my study of Alias Grace. Maybe the B & B in Plattsburgh was the place where the title character that was a celebrated murderess had relocated from Canada after serving her time. In the novel, Atwood had to alter facts to make the book safe from legal action by descendants who wanted to protect anonymity. And perhaps my efforts were updating the novel with the real facts. When I mentioned Margaret Atwood at the border, perhaps I was overheard and people actually conspired to show me the truth about the history of Grace. Then, I again wonder if I might be in a film about the novel, or a sequel, or some frightening update. The elements of my adventure, the risks I kept taking might be guided by observations. Was there a director? A team of psychologists who put me on the right trail? How much of what I was discovering was guided? Do I have free will? I needed a train ride through the wilderness where I had ridden the bus the day before. I don’t think I thought it at the time, but now, if I were clever, I would imagine that what the film needs is some more footage on a passenger train. I wanted to ride the train across all of Canada. Perhaps now I will be allowed.

As I sat on a bench watching the Campus Corner Breakfast Nook, the squeaky-voiced woman with the freckles walked with her strange mechanical gait over to me. She asked some vacuous question. I stunned her by calling her a grifter. One part of me imagines that there is a higher power that makes films out of my life. Eyes can be used like cameras recording images for others. I told her she owed an apology to her partner and to me. I told her she wasn’t working but she was a con artist. “I own a business in town,” she said. She gave me my two dollars back. Her purse opened, her hand moved quickly, furtively, and there was no look of shame on her face. She seemed proud to have been caught. I never saw her again in Plattsburgh.

sky blue open

train tracks

stone in stream

gurgling chuckling chattering

chestnut rail ties

creosote odor

slept on covered stage

set up for later event

tent over eyes

hat helped

planning

walked out and

young women in

Italian trattoria

calzone!

no Pellegrino

drank something else

deserted morning street

instrument store

listened to elder’s voice

teaching talking

student with mother

want to know?

on the knoll

light brown wooden

lute cradled on knees instrument

back well to round flab belly

neck angled left

hand tests

sounds of the wind

if I could tell

resonance how like

Homerian sirens

I do not know?

wooden rods spun

against glass vessels

haunting keening

but a lute plucked

I walked back into town and climbed carefully down a wide stair to a stage covered by a sun tent. I put my gear on the platform and slept on the stage for a few hours. Before that I had picked up a copy of the Press Republican and found my own story on the Tour de France with someone else’s byline. Interesting. Later the Press Republican disappeared from my gear.

I’m in Pennsylvania on the railroad again. I’ll give an update on my position in a bit, but first I want to keep tracking the past. In the late morning I checked out a music store in Plattsburgh. Nothing I needed. I overheard a man telling a girl that if she practiced, blah blah blah. I went to a coffee house where there was a little hand written note tacked to the bulletin board looking for articles or local poetry, with a card from the Press Republican. A shifty little town. The deep-dish oven baked apple pie was a helluva big slice and sweet as the cinnamon song of noon. I had a strawberry smoothie with ginseng, which goosed me later. After reading the paper, browsing a New Yorker checking poetry, and doing a little shopping in a bookstore, going over the latest in these files, I walked to the best overlook of the headwaters of Lake Champlain. I pulled out my best instrument and plucked and played. The strings seemed to magically bend with the wind and intoxicate the air with melancholy melodies. Exhausted from the effort, I bounded into the village, looking for lunch. I had a fine veggie calzone at the same pizza place I had dined in that winter of the trip when I drove to Montreal from Cambridge after I left Memphis in the snowy winter of 1998. They didn’t have Pellegrino anymore. I told the waitress that I still had a large empty from her restaurant in the trunk of my Toyota back in Cincinnati. Then I called a poet and talked to him about the Montreal turn back. We discussed strategy and agreed that I should try again that afternoon. I went to the train station after a few hours, but not before taking a photograph of the railroad bridge over the river.

Then at the train station I met Paul Marie, the host of the Amtrak, a fat, toothless man who insisted that the train would take me to Montreal. I made it clear to him that I did not believe the train would take me to Montreal. My insight was correct. I got his boss’s card and photographed the station. I had a long chat with a woman who has two daughters in college, or so, who was holding a bunch of store bought daisies, waiting for her mother. When the train came the men working it were the same men who had been on the bus going south that picked up the Pastor and another guy the day before. Paul Marie had told me that the other crew were phantoms and sometimes would disappear for as long as an hour and forty-five minutes. I tried to get as much information as I could about the unit, the cars, the track, everything. Paul Marie seemed to kid with me; I even talked to the conductor on the phone before the train arrived. There were two yellow painted steel stools by the tracks for passengers to step aboard or disembark.

Once on the train, I changed clothes again, pulled down my hair, and tried to think in French. The wilderness outside the train was green, lush and northern. Foliage flew by close up, but at a distance old farmhouses stood still while we moved past. I knew the customs officials would board, and I suspected I might be turned back again. I’d like to describe the crew of this train, but I don’t care to embarrass them any further. It seemed that they genuinely weren’t against me. One of them had eyes that were right out of a passage from Lolita, furtive and restless. They never settled on me, it was as if he was afraid to take in my fullness, and could only sweep a gaze around what was there. There were three of these creepy men. One had commented on the flower children, daisy pickers, he called them, the day before. I had wisely taken the girl’s picture, after he made these chauvinist and suggestive comments, trying to egg me into temptation or lust. I wanted to be circumspect. It was as if they were working together. The swarthy one, with close cropped dark hair, talked with a mean authority, looked kind of at me, and the thin one with the mustache smoked and both of them had radios or one had a radio and the other a cell phone. They moved fast, clustering like the policemen on the bicycles back in Burlington, but they seemed dishonest, like they shared a confidence that was not well placed. I never trusted them.

When the train stopped at Rouses Station for the border check at least four inspectors came aboard. I think the man with the furtive eyes was with the inspectors, and maybe the conductors, too. I was trying so hard to keep track. There were two women, at least, as well. One seemed German and rather brutish. She came on first and I watched her pace by. I didn’t want to deal with her. There was a thin one with severely pulled back golden hair, and then the man who pushed me. He had a gray mop; sort of an early Beatle cut. They all spoke rapid French as well as English. I understood some of the French, at times I think my French scared them. This bilingual game is a tricky one. He said I was getting off the train. I lied to him a couple of times, telling him that I hadn’t been turned away from the border. They were decent lies. The day before the woman had never asked if I had ever been turned back.

As the immigration official walked me through the train cars to the club car, I asked him, “Would you mind if I took your picture? I’d like to have a keepsake for my scrapbook of the man who threw me off the train.”

“No, that will not be possible,” he said with a French accent.

There was a small group taken off the train. We stood outside in a gravel driveway next to a small brown building with heavily shaded windows. Once we were off the train I asked the man, “Do you think we could ask someone to take a photo with my camera of the two of us shaking hands? I’d like to have a record for my scrapbook of the man who kept me from entering Canada.”

“Not possible,” he said.

He and two women officials ushered me into the building. They put on latex gloves. They opened my luggage and searched everything. They asked me to open the lute case. I did. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I thought I saw them take a sheet of paper from one of my folders, but I don’t know what it was. The man took me to a car, put me in the back seat, got in the passenger side, a driver entered and they chatted in French all the way back to the highway where the U.S. Customs station was, in Champlain. I would soon be right back where I had been a day and a half ago. As the car pulled up, first at the Canadian side, the immigration man said, “I wouldn’t show up at the border again. Next time someone might rough you up.” Then he released me to an Amish cab driver with a broad straw hat and a shaved upper lip, long light brown beard and wire glasses. He took me back to America.

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