01 April 2004

Tower of Babel

I came home for lunch yesterday, an unusual luxury. My little place was almost equidistant from the Agency where I had an early appointment and the office. It was also almost a direct line past the Department of Motor Vehicles on Four Mile Run, so I took advantage of the middle of the working day to attempt to re-title the old Mercedes 350 SL I bought on the internet last week.

What with the budget cuts and all, it is not easy to deal with the State government, and a weekday seemed like the best bet. I found the DMV on a service drive in back of some auto-body places in an industrial park. I parked the car that is legal and walked in and got in line.

In Washington we all live in our individual worlds, safe in our orbits. I mostly interact with people like me, associated with the Government one way or another, and educated. It is only when you must avail yourself of the services of the State that you find out where you really live.

I spent four decades in the security arm of the Government, so there is not a great deal about lines and diversity I do not understand. The people in this line were mostly Spanish, with a smattering of Asians, South Asians and a couple white guys who looked like they might be lost.

I probably looked lost, too, with a tie and my access badges around my neck. Everyone else seemed to have their pants riding down around their butts, men and women alike. Ball caps on backwards and a shared rolling gait. They were young, too, overwhelmingly so, and dark-eyed.

The line fed past an older white woman behind a desk. She had a permanent frown. As we inched forward, she listened to the reason the people were at the DMV. It went slowly, since there were as many languages as people in the line. She would then push an appropriate button on a little console in front of her. It spit out a square piece of paper with a number on it. She handed it over with the paperwork necessary to complete the transaction.

I got number D459 and the form to request issuance of a new title. I took a seat and filled it out, watching the flashing lights of the sign on the wall that announced who was next to be served.

I filled out the paperwork, thinking about the things that could go wrong. The title had the wrong signature on it. I had an out-of-state driver's license. But I had papers to buttress my case, powers of attorney and proof of residence. I was moderately confident I could make this transaction, but it could also just be the first of many trips to the Tower of many languages. E Unim pluribus, I thought.

This particular tower was not constructed to get closer to God.

It is to get closer to Richmond.

Dealing with the State is always a crap shoot. Like number D459. I watched them serve 455, 456, 457 and 458. Then the sign flipped to D460. I watched for a minute and then got back in line to see if I had made some sort of error. The man in front of me was Vietnamese. I got D467 the second time around and it worked. I was served at Position 8 by an pretty African-American woman with full sensual lips and a distant manner. According to the plate on the counter her name was Rita.

But it was not so for everyone. There was a South American guy at the next window who was having a document problem. The Latin man at Position 9 had those high good looks that spoke of good genes from Spain. His English was refined, if rising indecorously through an octave as he protested an injustice.

The public servants of the DMV were patient with him and did not raise their voices. There was a problem with his papers and he did not have the requisite supporting information. He protested bitterly, as if to say that they were asking him to return to Buenes Aires for a counter-signature. The woman behind the counter was adamant and buttressed by two supervisors.

"It isn't right!" he shouted. "It is not legal and it is not fair!"

This was the same DMV that issued identification cards to a couple of the hi-jackers from the 9-11 attacks, and they have tightened up a couple things.

They did not have to answer the man's anger with their own. They didn't have to. All they had to do was give him the fisheye and repeat that his paper was no good. Eventually he went away.

I imagine they laugh about it later, in the break room of the DMV.

At Position 8, Rita challenged me to prove that the social security number I had written on the form was actually my own. It was a potential show-stopper. I do not possess one of the little blue cards that have no picture, thus proving nothing, but I did have some tax papers in my briefcase, and a W2 did the trick.

Rita missed the fact that the wrong person had signed the title over to me- I had amplifying documents that proved the legality of the transaction- but she did not question the paper. It is all just ink anyway. I was mildly intrigued by that, but walked away with clear title and two metal plates that said the car was mine.

Later, I was driving back inbound to the city after a late meeting in the tower at Tyson's Corner. I was at the chaotic junction of the I-66 merge with the Dulles Access Road. Sometimes in the summer you can hear drivers yelling in frustration in other languages.

The brakes on the Mercedes had a distressing tendency to pull to the right when I touched the pedal. I kept the outsized steering wheel cranked to the left and fished for my cellphone on the clip on my belt.

I called an independent Mercedes mechanic who came highly recommended. He had been in the business since this Mercedes was new. He answered the phone himself, and I explained my issue. I had a marvelous thirty-two year-old convertible with some stopping issues.

"I don't work on cars that old. Every time you touch them something breaks," he said brusquely.

"But where can I go?" I asked.

He said to try The Dealer. "They have to work on them," he said. "I don't," he said curtly and hung up.

It didn't seem fair, I thought. I think I am going to have some attitude problems in getting this old car fixed. Maybe in the German language.
So it is The Dealer for me, I thought. It was 5:30 and I did not go back to the office.

I turned on The Simpsons when I got home. I like to watch the cartoon before I deal with the news, which I already knew was bad.

Four Americans were killed and an angry mob did the Mogadishu Drag with them, dismembering the bodies and hanging them from a bridge. The Americans were reportedly retired soldiers from the Blackwater Security Company of North Carolina who were providing contract services for food distribution in the Sunni Triangle.

The First Marines had just taken over security in the Falluja sector from the 82nd Airborne. The Screaming Eagles had given up patrolling downtown, having served their year and waiting out the rotation. The Marines were being more pugnacious in their approach and elsewhere in town, and five of them were snuffed by a bomb in the road.

There was no reported desecration of their bodies in that incident.

Sometimes watching The Simpsons take the edge off the day. But this episode was an early episode and the characters and voices were not fully developed.

I poured through some old scrap-books looking for cool pictures to populate my web page which a nice lady out west is creating for me. I cannot pass up the opportunity to leverage my appearances on the BBC Morning Update. Yesterday's piece was pretty good, if I do say so myself, and there are seven more episodes in the can.

Carpe diem, after all, or sic transit gloria. I forget which.

Anyhow, dinner was cooking and I was scanning a picture from 1979 in which my hair and beard were brown when I got an instant message from the sixteen-year old son of a friend.

I don't like IMs, as a rule. I am too busy and my attention span is too short to be tied to my computer screen. It is like sitting down to the typewriter to do one thing and have it start talking back to you about something else. The IMs come with the sound of tiny bells to announce their arrival. I glanced at the screen name of the sender and answered.

I like him. His Mom was one of the few who stood with me when my ex was demonizing me to our circle of friends, taking them as hostages in the legal struggle of the demise of the marriage.

We talk about cars, mostly. I give him advice from time to time, if he wants it, since his Mom and Dad split up a year ago. But mostly I just listen to him. He is a computer whiz, wireless connected, and types all over the house, carrying his laptop with him. He is enthusiastic about lacrosse, but completely nuts about cars. The last problem I helped him with was a BMW he saw on the internet.

The seller wanted a wire-transfer to Romania in exchange for delivery, and I told him he was being scammed and to break off the negotiations.

I had heard via an e-mail that he was losing weight, maybe had mono, maybe one of the nagging illnesses of youth. He told me he had been to the Doctor that day, and while nothing was certain, it looked like he had lymphoma.

"Give me the clinical on that," I typed back.

The chimes announced his answer a second later.

"Cancer"

We chatted back and forth for the next couple hours. He told me they were going in on Monday for the formal biopsy, but they were also going to install a line so they could start the chemotherapy. I put on the usual bluff facade, assuring him that it was not going to be easy, but he was going to beat this.

He was too strong not to. We discussed what sort of tattoo he might get on his head if he lost his hair, and I warned him that it might emerge as his hair thinned when he got to be fifty.

I suggested an ear ring so he could look like Mr. Clean. "The girls love that look," I typed.
We went back and forth. His attitude seemed positive and his spirit upbeat. He is a great kid, and I need to factor in some sort of contact with him each day to let him know how much I care. Then something came up at his house and he signed off abruptly. I sat and looked at the screen.

This is awful, I thought. This is just not right. This is not fair.

Then I wondered about the impassive face of fate. Is this how God works it?
What does He do in the break room?

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra