Low-Risk Flier

On bureaucracy, and confronting my inner fascist

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Photo by Phill Brown on Unsplash

Two months ago, I was pulled aside for “additional screening” in the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I was making a connecting flight on my way back to New York after some fifty days in Mexico. I’d successfully cleared passport check and retrieved my luggage when I felt the tractor beam of authority pulling me from the herd. I kept my eyes down and quickened my pace, but this was in vain. “Sir,” a uniformed man said as I berated myself for having too distinct an aura, “step over here for me.”

I’m entirely accustomed to being singled out in airports. It happens with such frequency that my family cracks jokes about my secret life as a political extremist. Once, in 2017, also on my way back from Mexico, a customs agent outright accused me of stealing my passport—despite my face being on it—which incurred a delay significant enough to make me miss my connection. As an apology, I was awarded a $20 meal voucher, which I spent on slimy sushi. I’ve been given no shortage of explanations re: the “why me?” of it all. I’ve heard it’s because I have a beard, because I’m a man traveling solo, and, per a recent commiseratory conversation with a Nepalese cab driver, because I’m “in one way, Mexican, mister.” Which way he meant, he didn’t say, nor did I ask, but I referred to myself as “Mexican Mister” for a week or so.

Taking this feedback into account, my personal theory is either insane, or it isn’t. I believe I’m a “safe choice” for Customs and Border Protections agents who consider themselves equal-opportunity offenders. I’m just beige enough that they don’t have to feel terribly racist for selecting me, but they can still feel productive for checking some boxes: Male. Solo traveler. Vague descent from a culture with a tradition of poetry about citrus. This theory relies on a host of wild assumptions, but so does, I imagine, “picking someone at random for interrogation,” if indeed it’s random at all, and I’m not on a list of some kind. It could be the case that I’m dreaming up explanatory scenarios such as the above while the reality is a name logged indifferently into a database.

The man who pulled me aside in the Detroit airport was a Black man around my age and half my height. He had tired eyes evoking a strong dependence on lunch-break cigarettes and hot coffees in paper cups and he spoke with a worrying, impersonal coolness. The authority figure you have to watch out for isn’t the cranky one eager to get you out of their hair, but the serious one with the gentle voice that makes you sound hysterical by comparison. This man struck me as the latter; the sort of uniformed agent who’s mastered the subtle art of turning human quirks into evidence (in my case, anxious laughter and a discomfort with long silences), and gifted at making you feel guilty for crimes you’re not aware you’ve committed.

He collected my passport and walked me over to a chair next to one of those barrel-shaped inspection machines for naughty luggage and asked if I could please sit down. He sat opposite me and spoke to me while holding my precious document aloft, a vital organ to be earned back with correct answers. “Where are you traveling from?” he asked, scanning its pages.

“Monterrey, Mexico.”

“You were there for the duration of your trip?”

“No, I spent most of my time in Mexico City.” Self-doubt crept in. What did I mean, most of my time?

“Why were you in Mexico?”

“To escape winter in New York,” I said with a comradely laugh, my first and last attempt at whimsy, for he didn’t react at all. My laugh hung awkwardly in the air until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to shoo it away. “I have friends in Mexico.”

“Why do you have friends in Mexico?”

Questions such as these, in my “additionally screened” experience, are pieces of raw meat, chucked to lure the evil, carnivorous goblin out of your mouth so that it might say, “What the fuck do you mean ‘why do I have friends in Mexico?’ Is being popular against international law? Do you need me to explain friends to you? Is it my fault you don’t have any, you fucking cog?” It’s imperative to kick this goblin in the head and stay the course.

“My family is Mexican,” I said, putting away my giggly idiot persona and brandishing the more serious one that plays online chess and has a Traditional IRA. “I know some people there.”

His eyes swam up from my passport. “You’ve been telling me this whole time that you were in Mexico. Why didn’t you tell me about Colombia?”

More goblin bait. I’d gone to Colombia in February of 2020. There was no world in which I would have thought to disclose a trip from six years ago. But that’s the point. You’re meant to agree on some level that there’s something suspicious about every move you’ve ever made in your life. Why, indeed, had I gone to Colombia in February of 2020? Some covert international collaboration with the novel coronavirus, perhaps?

“That was six years ago,” I said.

“What do you do for work?”

I squirmed. Were I to trump up charges against myself, I wouldn’t go looking in my travel log, but in my career, which is rife with criticisms of the government and contains jokes about Elon Musk’s misshapen cars and torso. I’d left for Mexico shortly after Trump’s inauguration, but was aware of the political climate back home thanks to a steady trickle of increasingly dire headlines: A French scientist denied entry to the US for an opinion expressed about the administration. German tourists detained at customs. A British cartoonist shackled and held in a detention facility for having the wrong visa. Egad, I’d thought, they’re doing it to white people. This implied to me an underreported and even worse situation for, say, Mexican Misters.

What do you do for work? Hearing this question, I felt I was standing tip-toed on the precipice of becoming a headline, which I very much did not want. I couldn’t imagine myself navigating the situation with grace, and I was certain that the photos of me that would make it to Queerty or whatever would be entirely unflattering, and that both I and my family would be subjected to a deluge of harassment from online trolls who measured skulls as a hobby. I had to tread with care.

“I’m a writer.”

“What do you write about?”

“Food.” This was technically true, and I employed it because I considered it the most neutral answer.

“What kind of food?”

“... Mexican food.”

“I’ll be back,” he said, rising to his feet and walking away with my passport. I stared for some minutes into the middle distance, too anxious to touch my phone, lest I remind some official that I had one. While sitting there, a bespectacled man in a tweed blazer, probably in his fifties, was brought over with a half-opened suitcase. “Please,” he begged, “I apologize.”

“Global Entry is a privilege, not a right,” an agent, the sort of pink-necked fellow one might see patrolling a mall, told him. “You’ve got to declare everything. This is your second strike.”

This dialogue sucked me in, because I had nothing else to listen to, and because it would have sounded like a script in an informational video produced by the government were it not for the man’s trembling, emotional line delivery. “Please,” he said, “I will not make this mistake again.”

Before I could get the conclusion to this saga, my agent returned. “Alright,” he said, holding out my passport. “You can go.”

“Thanks,” I said, retrieving my document and scampering away, somewhat disappointed to miss out on the fate of the man’s Global Entry status. I followed this up with a mad dash to the nearest bathroom, where I guess I made one too many steps toward the women’s room, which prompted an elderly white woman to glare at me and jab her gnarled finger across the way in a clear “nice try, pervert” gesture.

Jesus fucking Christ, I thought at the urinal, this country’s coming off the wheels. I decided to get obliterated at one of the terminal’s few open restaurants, the LongHorn Steakhouse, where I ordered a LongHorn Old Fashioned™ from a kind older waitress who called me “sweetie” and who brought me a drink with “Welcome back to the US of A, bitch”-potency. I got buzzed, as well as embarrassed for imagining myself in headlines for undergoing what was probably a common procedure, and within hours I was back in my Brooklyn apartment, ready to file this incident away in the fat manila folder labeled “Bad Airport Experiences.”

My parents, as it turned out, were less ready to do so. What might have previously been considered yet another semi-comedic misadventure in international travel was a very serious matter in this, our political milieu. We also had a family vacation to Europe on the horizon; my dad had won the trip through his company for the summer, and was graciously bringing me, his 215-pound son. These plans, paired with my mom’s perennial certainty that I will either be disappeared by the state or murdered on the subway, led them to conclude it would be a good idea for me to apply for Global Entry, a program that “allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival to the United States.”

I admit I’m not sure if having Global Entry actually prevents one from being singled out for additional screening in airports. It could be little more than “a shortcut to being additionally screened.” To me, airport logic in general seems made up on the spot. But I did agree with my parents that it couldn’t hurt and, anyway, I was sick of being jealous of the people with TSA PreCheck standing haughtily in their special little queue. I felt ready to abandon my place among the proles to join them, the airport elite.

Successfully bullied into applying for Global Entry, I answered some questions on a website, paid the $120 fee, and waited. My application was accepted within a day, and I was offered timeslots for my interview. I selected one three weeks out in the Financial District in Lower Manhattan at 12:10 pm. This interview, I was informed, would be conducted in a room in the National Museum of the American Indian. I was sent a photograph of the museum with a red circle around the entrance I was to use, and implored not to wander from the waiting area.

The morning I was to walk through the red-circled entrance, I went to the nearby UPS store to print out a bank statement for proof of residence. Germane: It was raining heavily, and would continue to do so all day. Two young men hurling playful slurs at each other behind a desk printed my crisp document, which I folded neatly in half and slipped into my backpack before making my way to the museum nearly an hour early, as is my custom.

Security at the museum was stringent, given that it was also a federal building. I had to remove everything from my backpack and pockets and walk through a metal detector. It was during this process that I became aware that the rain had seeped through the fabric of my backpack and soddened my bank statement. Luckily, the top half that contained my name and address was dry, but the bottom half had a “findable clue in a horror video game” vibe. This inspired a great deal of anxiety in me. I like to think of myself as an ace student in the classroom of “being processed” and tend to look down on people who aren’t as prepared. I started mentally composing my apology to my future agent, one that included the words, “I apologize.”

After some light chastisement for not knowing which floor to be on, I found a group of a dozen or so would-be Global Entrants huddled on benches by some museumy columns. The motley crew, to name a few standouts, consisted of a woman with severe bangs yakking loudly on her phone; a tall, lanky young man with a mop of black hair and a beach-bum tan; a middle-aged woman in an oversized pink puffer, a sheepish grin plastered on her face and her shoulders hunched in permanent apology; a silver lady of the “rich New York eccentric” sort wearing a black-and-white checkered coat with a matching fascinator and walking cane; and one of those corporate men of thirty-something years that you see absolutely everywhere in a tight polo tucked into even tighter chinos.

We waited around for fifteen minutes or so before our handler, a bald, fortyish Black man in a blue uniform, announced himself. “When I call your last name, line up over here,” he said, without telling us exactly where “here” was. The first name was called, then called again, and the corporate guy got up with an apologetic little wave of his hand and walked over to a spot so goddamn incorrect that I physically rolled my eyes. I was happy to see him punished with a firm and irritated, “Sir, line up over here.” Yes, I thought. Humiliate him. It turned out “here” was not where I would have gone either, but I certainly wouldn’t have gotten it that wrong, Christ.

The agent called another name, then a third, and already it was driving me nuts that people were so slow to acknowledge that their name had been called, prompting the agent to have to repeat it. Each person seemed incredibly hesitant to claim their name, often only doing so after it had already been called at least twice, and with a humble little raise of their hands, or with nothing at all, and the agent would ask, “Are you so-and-so?” at which point they’d finally acquiesce with an affirmative nod.

This was all beyond my comprehension. Ostensibly, everyone was here to get this over with. I couldn’t wrap my brain around prolonging the operation by even a few seconds. To do what? Stare at the ground? Play Candy Crush? Had these people forgotten the names their mothers had given them? I was busy with this internal diatribe when the agent called a fourth name, and after calling it two more times it was revealed to be the silver lady with the cane, who was seated no more than two feet from him, and who asked if she could keep sitting until she absolutely had to stand up.

“Yes, ma’am. You can sit right there until we’re ready to go.”

“Will I lose my place in line?”

“You won’t.”

“You’ll come get me?”

“Ma’am, just sit there and look pretty for now, alright?”

“But how will I know what to do?”

These questions were fairly reasonable and made me want to bash my head against the nearest marble column until I passed out. Time for me to come clean: While I hate these government-flavored errands for normal reasons like the time-suck and the inconvenience, the thing I hate most about them is that they put me in perilous contact with my inner fascist. In environments such as these, I access a hyper-awareness to nonconformity and an accompanying bloodthirst to see it stomped out that would be the envy of feds everywhere.

It’s not unusual to be irritated with your fellow man at the DMV, or in the doctor’s office, or when deboarding a plane, or any such place with brown-gray carpets and monotone instructions administered to a zombified citizenry over an intercom. What I feel, though, goes beyond irritation and approaches utter contempt. A side of me comes out whose views and politics I cannot condone. I recognize that, in my line of work, there’s some risk in “publicly disclosing the specific ways in which I’m evil,” and I confess I do so with reluctance, but this reluctance is itself adjacent to what I’m talking about: I am in a state of constant, vigilant self-surveillance, an instinct I developed early in life while attending a Catholic elementary school and then while being a latent homosexual in a rural middle school, and I have nothing but acrimony for those who don’t share in this behavior.

My early education at St. Mary’s, where uniforms were mandatory, taught me aberrations in the system were not to be tolerated. I once wore a white shirt of rayon fabric, which was the wrong kind, to school. The entirety of Mrs. Furr’s third-grade classroom was alerted to this fact to make a public example of me, so that I could henceforth serve as a cautionary tale of the evils of viscose: “This is not how we come to school.” My understanding was that I would’ve been better off wearing a bright-green Ninja Turtles tee, as it would have been a more childish mistake. My attempt to wear something I could almost get away with made me a significantly worse, “criminal mastermind” type. Then, of course, there were God’s rules, enforced by a supreme being that could hear my thoughts, an arrangement that certainly impacted my developing psyche, and which inspired vivid nightmares of Jesus chasing me around the house.

Catholic school would turn out to be but the tutorial level of “Fitting In” compared to middle school, where I, a duck-footed, bookish pansy who’d been sheltered from curse words found myself in hallways with rowdy rednecks who considered it a point of pride to not give a shit how they dressed or how they smelled, and who categorized any boy with a GPA above 3.0 as a faggot. I could only look back with fondness on the days when we were all forced to wear the same thing. This school had a uniform of a different sort; a mandatory, masculine attitude, proven by hocking loogies on sidewalks and breaking the occasional bone. I’ll not go into great detail, but suffice it to say that a little gay boy had two options in this environment: become a harrowing statistic on a nonprofit’s website, or become a young man.

The point is, my hostile environment taught me the virtues of stealth, and to adapt I became a human tuning fork capable of detecting threats that most people wouldn’t register. This paranoia over my every little action kept me from slipping up, and thus, from the hammer coming down on me as it had in the past. A similar defense mechanism can be found in incredibly skittish prey animals, such as rabbits and deer, and in recently abused dogs.

One might imagine such negative experiences with authority would engender nothing but antagonism toward it, that the lesson learned would be to say, Fuck what other people think, I’m going to be myself! / rainbow flag emoji. I don’t want to discount my multitudes. I do sometimes feel this way, and my political views trend in that direction. But whenever I find myself in situations like “getting Global Entry,” my deep programming kicks in and I find myself firmly on the side of the machine, such to the extent that I will root against an elderly woman with a walking cane for the crime of “asking questions.”

After many years of obsessive self-censorship, there’s a significant part of me that loathes people who don’t share my extreme sensitivity to the space around me; people who stick out, people who are slow to react, people who mess up. As is often the case with authoritarian impulses, there’s a petulant “how come?” at the root. How come you get to step out of line? How come I have to be on my best behavior while you get to make a fuss? Do you think you’re exempt? Think you’re special? Why can’t you just fucking conform?

This knee-jerk ire for (perceived) entitled rule breakers could be considered harmless since it doesn’t actually affect how I treat people, but it’s also the bedrock of our current era of gleeful vindictiveness; the reign of cruelty delighting in itself. The Trump 2.0 Age of Vengeance is characterized by a palpable, unbuttoned ah, finally, sentiment of no longer having to disguise contempt as something more palatable. Slurs once contained in Woke Tartarus have slipped back into common usage. Official White House social media accounts are posting AI cartoons of deportees. This ugly behavior is justified as comeuppance for prior excesses: too much tolerance for the queers, for the nonwhites, for the illegals, for those people who took advantage of the system and were, can you believe, rewarded for it at our expense.

The undergirding of all this is not evidence or logic, but emotion; outrage sublimated as cool, indifferent authority by uniforms, by badges, by the drab pageantry of federal bureaucracy that plays out in rooms so oppressively banal that they can pull off presenting the absurd as the mundane, rooms like customs in an airport, or in the federal building I found myself in with a soggy bank statement in my backpack, a building where there wasn’t a single question that could have been asked of me that my feeble, generic “citizen brain” wouldn’t have been able to, somehow, construe as logical.

Once we were all lined up, our handler, who’d collected our passports, walked us over to the elevator and crammed us in like dirty laundry. I mentally troubled myself with trying to recall the exact order of the line so as to remake it once we were out, but this ended up being unnecessary as we were allowed to free-for-all it down a hallway toward the office. Walking down this hallway, I was mildly annoyed with the capital-W “Writer” in my brain for insisting on noticing things. A federal office is a veritable jungle gym for a writer’s eye, as every room and detail is telegraphing DO NOT NOTICE. Acquiescing to this urge made me feel like a rat lunging artlessly at a hunk of cheese, but I nonetheless found myself taking note of cubicles with miniature basketball hoops and family photos suspended by magnets and the other small flashes of personality that spring up like weeds through concrete in gray offices such as these. It was difficult to imagine federal agents with private lives, vulnerabilities.

We walked past the front desks of our soon-to-be interrogators who wore blue uniforms and sat behind plexiglass and were led into a small room with a mounted widescreen TV and chairs pushed up against the walls. Another group was already seated there (always funny to notice the vague hostilities between two recently formed groups of people: excuse me, we’re here to replace you) waiting, I supposed, to be formally dismissed. “We got a movie for y’all to watch,” our handler beamed. “Sit back, and enjoy!” He oscillated between robotic severity and forays into comedy that highlighted a sadistic streak.

There were multiple signs telling us not to so much as think about touching our phones, an instruction I feared I would thoughtlessly ignore, thus disqualifying me as the best and most efficient among us, so I decided to watch the video with an absurd degree of attentiveness. The first thing I noticed about the video was that it was dated. Judging by the outfits, I’d guess it was the 90s, which was impossible. The Global Entry program was introduced in 2008, and is itself the product of a post-9/11 world, so the video must have been shot right around the time the program came about. The video opens with footage of travelers with high-watt smiles in an airport with narration that says something along the lines of, “Welcome! You’re here today because you’ve been identified as low-risk fliers,” which made me feel underestimated.

One by one, names were called from the other room. The sheepish woman in the pink puffer heard hers and rose to her feet, but her jacket got caught on her chair, causing it to lurch forward. She clumsily attempted to free herself from the chair and keep it from falling while her name was called a second, then a third time. I thought her face might actually break from the distressed, apologetic grin she flashed at each and every one of us individually. Some, including myself, gave her sympathetic little gestures as if to say, Don’t be silly! You’re fine! Privately, I considered her reaction to be an altogether appropriate level of prostration given the situation, and approved. (Reminder: I was making such judgment calls while sitting there with a soggy bank statement in my backpack.)

She finally made her way out. Our handler popped his head in through the door. “How many of y’all got your passports back?” he asked the previous group. No one responded. “Shit,” he said with sitcom-esque timing, then disappeared.

Back to my new favorite show, which was airing reruns: On my third viewing of the informational video, which is maybe a minute or two long, the characters gained texture. Of particular interest was the Asian man who gets pulled aside and has his luggage inspected. The agent digs out a large plastic bag of apples, I assume because the director of this video was forbidden from showing cocaine or a gun. The man folds his arms and assumes a “well, I never” kind of pose, preparing to mount a doomed, in-universe defense of his contraband apples. I remembered, then, the man at the airport in Detroit. I wondered if he ended up having his Global Entry revoked.

It was then that I overheard something unusual in the next room: laughter. The tall, tan man’s name had been called just prior, and he was making small talk with his agent, who was asking him what it was like to be from the West Coast but to have recently moved to the East Coast. “It’s a funny story, actually,” he said, which couldn’t possibly have been true, “so, on my mom’s side…”

I was considering the ethics of making the one Asian man in the informational video a smuggler to distract myself from this incredibly irritating conversation when I heard “John Paul!” from the next room. Showtime. On my way, I passed the tall tan man and his agent, who looked like a generic US president on a TV show about an alien invasion. This agent, I shit you not, said, “We better get back to business, people will think we’re having too much fun.”

My agent was a handsome Black man in his late twenties or early thirties who was all business. “Just have a seat for me right there, sir, and I’ll take your photo real quick,” he said, his eyes firmly fixed on his computer. I immediately felt a kinship to this man. He and I were here to get things done. We were nothing like the chatty, unserious duo beclowning the Global Entry program right next to us. My photo was taken, a photo that would all but certainly inflict psychological damage on me whenever I saw it as my hair was wet and I was wearing a schlubby hoodie, and the agent looked at my passport.

“It says here that you’re John Paul,” he said in a deep, audiobook-friendly voice.

“Yes.”

“Remember, whenever it comes up, it’s John and Paul.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly. Both of them.”

“That’s right.”

He took my fingerprints, did not ask for my rapidly deteriorating bank statement that I suppose I ultimately printed for my own benefit, and told me that my Global Entry card featuring a photograph of me on the wettest day of my life would arrive in my mailbox within two weeks or so. “And you are good to go,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied, standing and returning to our little room, past the tall tan man who was still, still chatting with his agent. All in all, this was incredibly anticlimactic, and as I sat around in the waiting room that had halved in population size I had little else to do but wonder if the situation I was in would be considered Kafkaesque, or not.

A completely different agent, short, freckled, her hair in a bun, bopped her head in through the door like a cuckoo clock. “Time for the great escape!” she said in, I thought, a daring acknowledgment of the carceral vibes. She lined up our group and walked us to the elevator, and in the elevator it seemed everyone was unwilling to trust that she was a friendlier, more buoyant sort of federal employee and were reluctant to speak to her. Everyone except the tall beachy man, who I guess was having a rather spectacular afternoon.

“So, this place is a museum?” he said, all breezy.

“It is!” the agent beamed. “And it’s free! It’s part of the Smithsonian.”

“What’s the museum?” the woman with the errant pink jacket asked politely.

“The National Museum of the American Indian,” the agent said, which inspired respectful oohs, but no visits. We were let out of the elevator and returned to the wild, taking staggered approaches toward the exit so as not to give the impression to one another that we were still a group in any way. After a few seconds of loitering and pretending to entertain a trip to the museum, I headed out, and was jumpscared by the framed portraits of Donald Trump and JD Vance in the lobby: Trump, ominously lit, head slightly tilted downward, one eyebrow arched in an eerie echo of his mugshot; I see you. Vance looking, as always, like a pampered fourth-grader on Picture Day.

Yeesh, I thought.

I was halfway out the door when, for reasons unclear to me, I backed up, took out my phone, and snapped a photo. In the middle of taking it, the door opened, which made me panic and shove my phone back in my pocket. It was the tall tan man with floppy hair (and new bestie of the federal agent upstairs). Brain ringing with embarrassment, I felt as though I’d exposed myself, revealed something I shouldn’t have. But what?

We walked side by side for an awkward few moments without acknowledging each other, sailed past the window of time it would have been natural to do so, and then, upon finally making it outside, eagerly went our separate ways. Or maybe that was just me. I quickened my pace to put as much distance between myself and him as I could, anxious that I’d been caught.