Detailing the Detainment and Refusal of Jamie, the Primary Catalyst for the Cancellation of Brighter Arrows' European Tour
I hadn’t had an address. The form we filled out on the plane asked for the primary address of where we were staying, something I had neglected to get from Jake, who I was to meet at baggage claim before we carried on to Dundee. I told the customs officer that Jake would have the address and be able to explain everything when he landed in an hour, but the officer pushed headlong into a series of interrogations and a lot of paperwork. In a nervous and sleep-deprived blur, I dodged questions, and bore the officer’s sarcastic, condescending responses and name-callings until I arrived at the no longer avoidable decision: to tell him the truth or lie. Lying felt as unproductive as the truth with no address yet, “insufficient proof” of a flight home (a confirmation e-mail on my phone was not enough), and what he somehow deemed insufficient funds (though they easily surpassed what is required on the UK Border Agency’s website) in my wallet and bank accounts. I told the truth, or as much of it as I had to. Before they had taken my phone and all of my other things, I was able to look on the UK Border Agency’s website for visa information, and found hope:
"You do not need to obtain a visa before you come to the UK under Tier 5 (Temporary worker - Creative and sporting), if:
-you are a national of a country that is not on the list of visa national countries - see 'More information' below; and
-you want to come here for less than 3 months."
Both of the conditions were true for us. I brought this point up when I was taken into the first detainment room for further questioning, and he said he was considering it. They went through and took all of my stuff, then kept me in another room for a few hours until the officer returned.
“Well, I’ve paged him several times over my speaker, and the other guys have been paging him over the main speaker. Now what we have—”
An officer knocked on the door and said through the glass, “We found him.”
“—Alright then. I’ll talk to him and see what we can figure out. If he told the truth in London, this should be no problem getting you through. Just hang tight here, and I’ll be back soon.”
My anxiety thickened over the next four hours. I turned the television back on and flipped through the channels. There were still only two. Soap opera or The Queen’s Cup tennis tournament. I tried again to lay across the bench, but my stomach was still a mess from fear and not eating. There was a small bookshelf against the wall, with several religious texts and a stack of pulp novels, each in a different language. I picked up the Gideon Bible and flipped through the epistles, trying to remember which ones were written in prison. I hadn’t slept on the plane and my mind couldn’t focus on anything. I knew the band had probably not told as much truth in London as I had, otherwise they would be in their own detainment rooms there. For all I knew they were.
I turned the tennis off when he came back. He had me sign more papers and said, “I’ve decided not to let you into the country.”
“What?” I asked, partly because of his accent, and partly so he would have to say it again, in hopes it might burn him a little to say that again to my face. He said it more clearly, then told me lies about my bandmates, said they were far worse off than me, crying in desperation in their detainment cells, banned forever from the entire continent.
When he left, it became even more difficult read or sleep or watch the perpetual bouncing back and forth of the tennis ball. My nervousness congealed into guilt, and I could hardly console myself. I considered the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours wasted, I considered how many people this affected. I considered my sense of entitlement – how I had expected to be let in quickly and easily without much thought or preparation. I thought of my old co-workers from Morocco who explained how it was simply impossible for them to visit Europe at all.
A guard came in and asked me if I wanted any tea, and that I would be transported to a different detainment center for the evening – one “much nicer” and with beds. A couple hours later they put me in a van and the middle-aged pair on the other side of the glass tried to cheer me up with the same sweet blend of kindness and sarcastic humour most all the other guards had shown me. We drove through beautiful Scottish countryside, lit by the yellow evening sun and spotted with unshorn herds of sheep. I tried to enjoy it, but it was hard not to think the beauty was taunting me: “Look what you’re missing. Look what you ruined.”
We arrived in the outskirts of Glasgow and changed drivers, this time a younger pair with tattoos who offered me tea.
“Tea?” I asked, confused at the offer as we were already backing out of the parking spot.
“Aye! This is Scotland! I’ll run into the office for you. Mary, stop the van.”
“Thank you, but I’d better not – for the caffeine.”
“I want to try to sleep soon so I’d better not have the caffeine. Is it black tea?”
“Of course not. We put milk and sugar in our tea,” he said and winked. “I’m David by the way. We have to make a couple stops at some police stations, but then we’ll be on our way to Dunvegan castle, is that okay? They’re on the way.”
I nodded and let my head fall against the window as I tried to remember where I had heard of Dunvegan before.
An hour later three men climbed into the back seats of the van. They were loud and laughing and talked quickly in a language I couldn’t quite place – sounding like a mix between Arabic and Portuguese. One coughed nastily every couple minutes, and laughed in a high-pitched voice.
“Are you all hungry?” David asked.
The cougher said, “Yes, no food all day,” and rubbed his stomach.
David handed back four pre-packaged sandwiches, three cheese & tomato, and one tuna. I kept a cheese & tomato and passed back the rest.
“Is more cheese and tomato?” one of the men asked.
David said no, so I traded him mine for the tuna.
I tried to hand David the tuna sandwich back through the hole in the glass, but he gave me a small shake of his head and mouthed, “No.”
When we got to the next police station, a man in back asked if he could smoke now. David laughed and said no.
“The police didn’t let me smoke.”
David said, “You should quit.”
“You smoke often?” the voice behind me asked.
“When you did smoke, you smoke often?”
“Yes, and then I had a heart attack so I quit.”
A new man sat in the last open seat, next to me. After a minute he looked at me sidelong and said, “Hello.”
I said hello, and then the men behind me started speaking to him in their language. He laughed. They continued speaking to him, making him laugh. I offered him the sad looking tuna sandwich and he shook his head.
He said to me, “What happened to you?”
He smiled. “Where are you from?”
“Yeah, United States of America.”
“No, not Europe. America.”
He didn’t seem to understand, and turned his head.
He spoke quickly and with a strong accent, the only words I understood were “work,” “I am sick,” and “E. Coli.”
I turned my head back toward the window as he talked to the men behind him. I heard “long story” and “America” jutting out from his fast, beautiful speech.
The road grew thinner and the hills longer as the sun lowered itself, appearing and disappearing as the hills fell and raised up.
Much later, when I arrived in Chicago, I would sit and cry with my girlfriend. She would read to me from Isaiah and I would remember the golden fleeced lamb that shot across the road in front of our van, jumping down from the raised ground and with two quick springs on the pavement, back up to the raised ground on the other side. I would remember Mary braking hard, and us remaining breathless in the middle of the tiny empty road before carrying on in silence to the detainment center.
It was dark when they let us into the detainment center. I shared a small concrete room with a couple dozen more Pakistani men and two Chinese teenagers as they took us one at a time to get a physical after going through all of our belongings. The Pakistanis all seemed as lively and funny and loud as the ones I shared a van with. The man I had talked to in the van explained to them what he knew of me, and they all talked for a long time about me. It seemed they were calling me “Long Story.” I lay down on the bare floor and tried to sleep. I rolled onto my back and looked up and a Pakistani man’s face was hanging over me.
“Hey. Don’t worry, be happy,” he said, and smiled.
“Thanks,” I said, and shut my eyes.
On my flight from Newark to Chicago I sat next to a middle-aged businessman talking loudly on his cell-phone.
He covered the receiver and said to me, “Did they tell us to turn our phones off yet?”
“Yeah, I think so.” I was annoyed by him, but slightly charmed by his British-sounding accent.
He took a couple minutes to finish his conversation, and when he finished he turned to me and said, “Hello. Sorry I didn’t mean to ignore you.”
“Hi. It’s okay,” I said. “Are you from the UK?”
“A bit south of there. South Africa.”
He asked me where I was headed and I explained to him my situation. He empathized and shared his own detainment experiences and those of his friends throughout Africa, all of them making mine seem like a vacation. I listened quietly and attentively as he shared intimate details of his life – watching his father die, fostering children, starting a multi-racial church in the shantytowns of Cape Town, then one in Rogers Park when he moved to the U.S. He told me about falling in love at age 16, then never loving a woman again for 30 years.
“I would pray and ask God every day to let me love another woman, but I never felt anything for anyone. I was miserable. I wanted a wife and kids, but I never met anyone that I felt anything for. When I was forty-two I went to a friend’s party, and he introduced me to this woman. Before I left that night, she took me aside and told me that I was going to be her husband. I thought she was crazy. When someone tells you that, of course I felt strange, but I felt like, okay, maybe, who knows? I agreed to go on a date with her. We dated for two years, and she kept telling me: “God is telling me that you are going to be my husband,” but still I didn’t feel anything for her. We broke up and I moved away. Six months later, I moved back and called her. I don’t know what happened, but from the moment I saw her there, I was completely in love with her. Six months later we got engaged, and in another six we were married. We have three kids now and I still love her very much, and I have never felt anything for another woman.”
I am thankful for the man, and thankful for his stories, and his bravery to be so vulnerable and candid with a stranger. I have often found myself tired of the trend developed over the last few years of emphasizing the power of Story. Obviously I am glad of the appreciation of Story – I paid a lot of money to get a degree in Fiction Writing – but the past few years I’ve grown hesitant of its powers. Maybe it’s the disillusionment that comes after graduation, the fact that I can never finish one of my own dang stories, or perhaps its seeing every other graphic designer or video editor identify themselves as “Storyteller” on their business cards. Regardless, his stories cut through the crap in my head, and took me out of myself. I was tired of replaying the interrogations in my head, and this man brought me to a new place, where I could receive wisdom and encouragement. I don’t know how to explain all the merits and powers of Story – in fact I think much of them are indescribable except by stories themselves. But I know and feel them when I hear a great story. I leave you with two quotes:
“Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.”
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
