Uh oh! Rubber gloves

I have been remiss in not informing you of what was, and remains, far and away the most engaging and scandalous episode of my most recent transatlantic jaunt. It happened upon landing at DFW airport, or rather soon thereafter, at Immigration.

This was like my sixth trip in twelve months - on average I spend one out of three days a year Sateside and two out three mathematically necessary days a year Britside - so the fuckers in the perspex booths should know me by now, those fingerpriting, phot-taking bastards all bulging, sagging, folding black-uniformed officiousness with their guns and badges (giving high school mediocrities the right to humiliate, bully, harangue people - their self-righteous, erroneous jermemiads, all paranoia and disinformation). Let us not forget these quarter wits can shoot people - it happens.

So I am at the booth after the flight lands late; the queue is uncharacteristically slow moving - by now I have been on the go for eighteen hours. The last thing I need at this stage is some atrociously made-up Hispanic woman with a bad attitude; Chica the Clown with a custard pie frown. She is aggressive and suspicious from the outset, making the familiar questions feel like an interrogation. So when she asks my girlfriend's name and whether we are planning to get married I refuse to tell her and suggest that her questions are not pertinent. After an aeon of vocabularian confusion she states that if she asks a question then it needs asking in the interests of nashernull scuriddy, whatever the fuck that means.

Next thing I know I am sharing a side office with a geriatric wheelchair-bound Mexican nonagenarian guy in a full-length fur coat and a Gen X Arabian prince-type, all easy affluence and triple chin. Chica tosses my papers to a colleague through a hole in her glass cage. Some time passes and a guy comes to 'interview' me. This consists of the same questions with one subtle difference, asking if I am planning to get married on this trip. Oh, yeah, US Immigration flatters itself that EVERYONE in the world wants to live in America. This is the kind of displaced logic that led to 9/11 - the notion that America is so great everyone wants a piece of the pie. Get real. That just pisses off everyone else.

I get all the right answers and I am free to collect my prize, a beaming, hot and horny Rose the other side of the sliding doors, right? Of course. I step up to the podium and the Customs guy smiles and informs me that I will be leaving through Door Two today. Cool, a change is as good as a...Only Door Two leads me into a huge hall full of desks and conveyor belts. Only one desk is populated, by the Immigration versions of the bastard sons of Cheech and Chong and Starsky and Hutch. I enquire as to the way out, only to be asked to step forward by Cheesky as Chotch ceremoniously pings on some rubber gloves. Ay carumba! Donde esta mi salida?

I step forward to further accusatory questions, bam! bam! bam! Muy rapido. What am I doing here? Why was I sent to them? When am I going home? How can I afford so many trips to the US? What is Rose's cell phone number? Chotch is playing Good Cop; Bad Cop Cheesky goes in back. My hand luggage is unpacked, my case unpicked - there goes the careful packing method - Chotch forgets which role he is playing and gets all smartmouthed asking if he is going to find needles in my shoes? When did I last go to Mexico? Do drugs? Can I speak Spanish? Which dialect? Cheesky is back and he thinks he is Good Cop. This getting fucking comical! Chotch tells me how it is as he defiles my wallet (he cannot work out why a florist's card would be signed R xxx. or R xoxo. - surely this is some evil code?). Apparently I am working illegally in the States, staying for as long as possible (90 days on a visitor's visa), fiddling money that is due to hard-working, tax-paying Good Americans (lordy, surely there is no other kind of American?), then fucking off back to England to splash out on well-priced British fare like the most expensive cars in the western world, overpriced clothing and drugs that never threaten to be associated with the phrase 'keenly priced'. Obviously he is unaware that I do not need the money nor that every US Dollar is worth only approximately 55 English pence. Wrong, mi amigo nuevo. Bad Chotch does not enjoy being contradicted but we all three know he has fuck all to go on, as there is nothing to go on. He has shot his bolt, like a celebrant Mexican who forgot to go to Walmart to buy extra bullets on NYE.

I am free to go, with a warning that I should be more cooperative next time. I left, smiling at the whole thing. That was until Rose filled me in with further details. Cheesky had called her, refusing to inform why I was being held, stating only that I was being uncooperative, then going on to try to trick her into contradicting my story. Cunt!

My only crime? Having the financial, physical and emotional wherewithal to make multiple transatlantic trips without the visible means of support of a business suit or briefcase.

Land of the Free...