PART I

You might remember that Sophie and I returned to the US not only because we were exhausted and had gone just far enough past the edge of sanity that we had named our luggage, cameras, and hairbrush, but also because we needed to facilitate getting visas to India. Just before arriving in Turkey, we discovered that our original plan to apply for visas at the Indian consulate in Istanbul would’ve led to us being denied and redirected to the embassy in Ankara. Which in turn would’ve led us to spend a week in a town the tourist highlight of which is something called the Monument to a Secure and Confident Future. So we opted to go home and get them the good ol’ ‘MERican way.

Despite the fact that India has a track record of changing their visa requirements whenever a tourist misses a waste basket with their empty Fanta can — the government had weeks earlier decided that any visitor who leaves India can’t come back for two months, effectively killing our plans for side trips to Nepal or Sri Lanka — it seemed like the process  would be easy enough. If nothing else, there was plenty of information online, because the Indian embassy in America outsources all of their visa processing to a third-party company called Travisa. Travisa seems to be sort of the Cash4Gold of consular documentation. “Just mail us your passports and bank account numbers and power of attorney documents and in — DON’T READ THEM — and in 7-10 days we’ll mail you a visa! Honest!”1

Even better, Travisa offers a same-day turnaround service. If you make an appointment at their New York office and show up with your passport and completed application and without any sharp objects, suitcases, backpacks, cell phones, iPods, sealed envelopes, food items, or Pakistanis, you can walk out with a visa that evening. This seemed like the perfect strategy. Sophie and I would spend a couple of days in New York, get the visa issues taken care of quickly, then move on to the relaxin’. From our hotel room in Istanbul we booked our flights to New York, reserved our hotels, bought our onward tickets on to Pittsburgh, and made our Travisa appointments on their Web site. Then we finished reading to the bottom of the page.

The page bottom told us, with undisguised smugness, that one of the requirements for a visa is proof of address — a government-issued photo ID or a major utility bill. Unfortunately, we are unemployed, homeless drifters who are using my mother’s address to receive mail. Even worse, we are unemployed, homeless drifters who had not been smart enough to get new drivers licenses after moving out of New York. So we had none of those things.

“Surely a bank statement, cell phone bill, or credit card statement must be accepted,” Sophie said.

“Cell phone bills, credit card statements, and bank statements are not accepted,” the bottom of the page responded, glaring at us over the nose of its reading glasses.

So there went that plan. We had no hope of obtaining proof of address before we arrived in New York. Our only option was to abandon the same-day turnaround and instead get drivers licenses when we arrived in Pittsburgh, and then apply for the visas by mail. The plan was fraught with perils, but there was nothing else to be done. We agreed to give it a shot. The page bottom snorted and fixed itself a martini.

Such perils broke down thusly. We were scheduled to arrive in Pittsburgh late Thursday afternoon 1/14, and then leave again for Turkey early on Wednesday 1/27. Travisa claimed the mail in process took five business days from the date they receive applications. Add to that two days of back-and-forth shipping time. Doing the math:

1. Thursday 1/14: Arrive in Pittsburgh late afternoon
2. Friday 1/15: Get drivers licenses, overnight applications to Travisa
3. Monday 1/18: Applications arrive at Travisa
4. Monday 1/25: Travisa ships passports and visas
5. Tuesday 1/26: Passports and visas arrive to us
6. Wednesday 1/27: Board plane for Istanbul, use new razor-sharp visas to foil underpants bombers

Add to the above the fact that the DMV would be closed 1/16 through 1/18 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, meaning that if we messed up getting the licenses on Friday it would completely kill our chances of getting our passports back in time. Add to THAT the fact that the Indian consulate would be closed Tuesday 1/26 for Republic Day, meaning that even a single day’s delay in shipping or processing would completely kill our chances of getting our passports back in time. We were cutting it close. To use a football metaphor, we needed to perfectly steam that tamale or we’d have giant piles of shit thrown at us by wild monkeys.

Nevertheless, we arrived in Pittsburgh borne by the confidence that comes from ignoring the fact that the plan was doomed from the start because we couldn’t actually get Pennsylvania drivers licenses anyway. See, to obtain a license–which we wanted to use as proof of address–we knew we’d be required to provide proof of address. And Pennsylvania wants all the same kinds of proof of address that India wanted and that we didn’t have. Foiled by our own dereliction!

Luckily, previous experience had by now taught me that it could sometimes be useful to continue reading to the bottom of the page. And at the very bottom of the PA drivers license application, I saw the loophole that would save us: unlike the Indian consulate, Pennsylvania accepts a signed lease as proof of address. Ah-ha! I simply had to purchase and download a lease agreement form and have my mother formerly rent me the room in her house that Sophie and I would be sleeping in. Simple and quite possibly legal! This perfect plan became even simpler when my stepbrother, who’s in the real estate business, happened to have a PDF of a lease form that he could give me.2

Armed with our mostly-not-fraudulent lease, I lay in bed in the wee hours of Friday morning going over the details of my perfect plan. I decided to double-check some facts on the Travisa site, so I grabbed my iPhone off of the night stand and surfed over. The dark bedroom was suddenly illuminated with the eerie glow of this message, pasted in an orange rectangle on the Travisa home page:

Update! 5:58pm ET, Thursday 1/17: All visa applicants must now include photocopies of their birth certificate or school diploma.

The wild monkeys started throwing shit.

PART II

Come back with me, dear readers, to a simpler time. A time eight months ago, when Steve Martin had not yet heard of Twitter, when movies about talking owls were just a magical fantasy, and when I had yet to finish living the story about which I would begin writing a month later and then forgot about until today. I resume our tale where I left off, with less than 24 hours remaining for my wife Sophie and I to acquire two forms of proof of address to use to acquire drivers licenses to use to acquire visas to use to gain entrance to India. We have just discovered, to our horror, that the Indian government has capriciously added a requirement that we include copies of our birth certificates with our visa applications. More precisely, I have just discovered that. Sophie would discover it a few minutes later when awoken by the sound of my loudly inventing ethnic slurs.

The addition of birth certificates to the visa requirements wouldn’t seem like such a big deal in an ordinary situation, when one has a permanent address and can send one’s manservant down to the archives to fish around for whatever paperwork the commonwealths might demand. But you have to remember that Sophie and I at that moment were homeless drifters who had packed our vital records, along with everything else we own (minus the items listed here), into a storage locker in Heidelberg, PA. That too wouldn’t seem like such a big deal, since Heidelberg is only a ten-minute drive from the very bed from which we had just been roused by my unexpected racism.

But it was in fact a big deal. See, the storage space containing everything we own was only 10′x15′ large and absolutely packed to walls and ceiling. We’d crammed it so full that on move-in day we literally couldn’t close the door. Rather than risk rearranging anything and triggering a deadly avalanche, we devised a precision technique involving quickly slamming the door shut and running away Three-Stooges-style. On a later spelunking trek into the locker — or as we called it, “The Well of the Souls” — I dropped a borrowed flashlight and watched it roll into the nether regions between a stack of wardrobe boxes and overturned patio furniture. I could still see it shining helplessly, but I had to leave it behind like a wounded marine on Normandy beach.

To help you understand how bad this situation was, please click on the nearby photo of the view through the door of our storage space. I’ve added a helpful arrow pointing to the location of the filing cabinet containing our birth certificates.

You’ll note that you can actually only see a little bit of the arrow, because there’s too much fucking stuff in front of it. Also please note that this photo was taken several months after this story, when the space had been partially emptied. At the time of our adventure the locker contained at least two more chairs and I think most of a disassembled Volkswagen Touareg. Also please note that the filing cabinet was facing the wall. Also please note that our birth certificates were in the bottom drawer. Also please note that at this point it was 9am, and our visa applications needed to be at FedEx by 5pm, and in between we had to go to the DMV to get our drivers licenses before we could even begin filling out our visa applications.

So inward we went. And in a manner not suited to the dramatic retelling of this event, it actually was pretty easy to just shove some of the shit out of the way so that we could get to the filing cabinet. We extracted the birth certificates from our Vital Records file and, assuming that the Indian consulate would ask for them eventually, also grabbed proof of payment of Sophie’s only parking ticket and a copy of my SAT scores (650 math, 590 verbal3). When our cheers roused the coyotes sleeping behind the sideboard, we quickly locked up the door and lit out to complete our next mission.

We arrived shortly thereafter in the cluster of mini-malls that housed the local office of the DMV (or as they call it in Pennsylvania, “PennDOT”). Our job here was pretty simple. We’d show the clerk our New York drivers licenses, passports, and the lease to my mother’s spare bedroom that I’d concocted the night before; take an eye test; and emerge with shiny new Pennsylvania drivers license bearing the needed proof of address to complete our visa applications. We confidently strode into the waiting room and up to a sign reminding us that our $35 processing fee was payable only by check — no credit cards, cash, or bartering hogs accepted. We confidently strode back out of the waiting room. An hour later, after a round-trip back to my mother’s and a frantic search for my checkbook, we only slightly less confidently strode back into the waiting room. It was now well after noon.

This being a Friday, the office was mostly empty. A few teenagers took their first written driving tests accompanied by their parents, all of whom had the look in their eyes of someone who’d just been told the date of their own death. A handful of senior citizens waited to renew their licenses. Otherwise it was just us. As I sat in the molded plastic chair pondering whether India would actually want anyone stupid enough to be in this situation visiting their country in the first place, the most senior of the citizens sidled up to the counter to take his eye test.

“Okay, Mr. Oldman4 the friendly woman at the desk said as she motioned to a device resembling an industrial-size Viewmaster. “Please look into the eyepiece and read the second line.”

“Look into the what?”

“The eyepiece, Mr. Oldman. It’s right in front of you.”

“This thing?” Mr. Oldman asked.

“No, that’s a pen. Just put your eyes right here.” She tapped the eyepiece.

“Oh,” Mr. Oldman said, leaning in to the vision tester.

“Now read the second line.”

“Read which line?”

“The second line, Mr. Oldman.”

“Oh.” He coughed. “G. R. X….”

“The second line. Mr. Oldman.”

“I only see one line.”

“Look down, Mr. Oldman.”

“Oh. Yeah. E….”

“E? Are you sure, Mr. Oldman?”

“I mean F.”

“Good. Keep going.”

“O,” he continued.

“O?”

“Q?”

“Next.”

“I. V. And, uh, um….”

“Did you say ‘J’?”

“Yeah, J.”

“Very good, Mr. Oldman,” she congratulated him in the way one congratulates a dog for getting its head unstuck from a fence. “Now we need to test your peripheral vision. You’ll see small lights blinking to the sides. I need you to tell me if you see the light on the left, on the right, or both. Okay?”

“I don’t see any lights.”

“Not up there, Mr. Oldman. Look back into the eyepiece. They’ll be on the side.”

“The what? There aren’t any lights.”

“They’re on the side, Mr. Oldman. Now do you see them on the left, the right, or both?”

“The left.”

“I said on the left, on the right, or both?”

“Uh — the right?”

“The light could be on the left, or on the right, or maybe there could be lights on both sides.“

“It’s on both.”

“Good job, Mr. Oldman. Head over to the back and they’ll take your picture for your license.”

Sophie leaned over to me and whispered, “We’re never getting out of the parking lot alive.”

I didn’t hear her though, because during this vaudeville act I’d been examining Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Bureau of Driver Licensing Form DL-180. Having remembered our earlier experiences with the visa application Web site, I realized that it might be a good idea to reacquaint myself with my old nemesis, the bottom of the page. There it sat, lounging in its smoking jacket and overstuffed leather armchair, underneath the list of acceptable forms of proof of residency. It glanced up at me, lighting its pipe. As I read the words “Lease Agreement, Mortgage Documents, W-2 Forms, and Current Utility Bills,” the bottom of the page picked up its copy of the New York Review of Books and said, “Any TWO of these items must be presented.”

PART III

Just over four hours remained for Sophie and I to procure Pennsylvania’s drivers licenses with which to complete our applications for visas to India, and I’d again been foiled by my own personal Officer Dibble, the Bottom of the Page. It chortled in my face as I sat in the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation waiting room and through a mouthful of Brazil nuts explained that to get licenses Sophie and would I need a second, and completely unobtainable, proof of address. Then it toddled off to the conservatory, humming the overture to The Yeoman of the Guard. Moments later, Sophie gently took the application form from my quivering hand to see what had led to my sudden urination on the portrait of Governor Rendell. She looked it over and with a whistling whoosh deflated and flew in loops across the room, eventually snagging on the bus schedule rack.

In truth, my anger at this new development wasn’t because our situation was hopeless. In fact, I’d known for several days that we had a perfectly viable alternative for getting our licenses–one that was legal, required no complex machinations, and could probably be finished in under an hour. But it was an option so utterly distasteful to me that I’d sworn to under no circumstances, with the possible exception of having my head locked in the jaws of an alligator who demanded I buy him a pack of Camels and a bottle of Yellowtail, ever resort to it.

Let me take a minute here to explain some things about me. I’m not someone who likes being told what to do or how to do it.5 I, for as long as I can remember, have always hated being coached or given unsolicited advice. That might explain why, in pee-wee soccer, my designated position was the player the coach gave to the other team when they were short a man. I’ve lately come to suspect that this attitude of mine might stem from the fact that my mother has always spent a lot of time telling me what to do and how to do it. I’m not blaming her; it’s what mothers do, especially Jewish mothers, and especially Jewish mothers who are daughters of Jewish mothers who spent a lot of time telling them what to do and how to do it.

Add to this fact that my mother is the type who, when I was in kindergarten, arranged to come into school and show the students how to make bagel pizzas. For my fifth grade class she organized an in-office demonstration of fax machine technology. And one day in high school, I sat in homeroom when the vice-principal’s voice came over the PA system. “Seth Madej,” it said, “please come to the office.” Then there was a pause.

In his desk chair, the vice-principal stared at the microphone. His finger hovered over the Off switch. He thought, “I could end this announcement now. And if I did, the other students in the school might think of Seth as trouble-making bad boy who’s being called to the office to account for his audacious misdemeanors, which would cement his reputation as someone who has kissed many girls, a few with tongue, and who would never wear a Bugle Boy pullover to a Queensrÿche concert. If I simply turned off the mic and went back to work, it would drastically increase Seth’s chances of being liked by other students. He might even end up enjoying a significant period of high school. I can’t take that chance.”

He leaned in and added, “Your mother has your lunch.”6

I’m telling you this because it explains why I’d discounted the simplest solution to our drivers license problem when I’d first discovered it, all the way back in Istanbul. See, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Form DL-180 clearly states:

If you reside with someone, and have no bills in your name, you will still need to provide two proofs of residency. One proof is to bring the person with whom you reside to the Driver License Center.

In other words, I had to bring my mother to the office so she could tell them it was okay for me to have a driver’s license.

Sophie had known of this option all along, but she also knew me well enough not to suggest that we do it. But here we sat, slumped on the official state linoleum, all of our other options clearly depleted.

“Let’s go to lunch so I can think about this,” I said.

Up the hill at Eat’n Park, a crinkled pickle slice lounged on top of my Superburger and mocked me silently. I brooded under the guise of devising some miracle solution. Because major utility bills were considered proof of address, I contemplated having a second water line installed in my parents’ house. That seemed reasonable compared to the other option. As a 35-year-old man, I refused to accept that I required my mother’s permission to get a driver’s license. Because, by extension, it meant that I needed her permission to go to India, and, by further extension, to complete my dream of traveling around the world. I wouldn’t admit to that.

But I’d known for days that it would come down to this, and in the back of my head I think I’d been preparing myself. I just needed the few minutes of that one quiet lunch to steel myself, to convince myself that this was all just one formality that had nothing to do with pride. That this wasn’t a metaphor for my whole life. Sophie ate her salad and waited for patiently for me to get to that point. After 18 Pepsis, I was close enough.

And from there it was easy. My mother works from a home office, so we drove over and filled her in on the situation. She came with us to PennDOT right away, no questions asked, no nagging, no triple-checking that we hadn’t missed something the first time. She’s my mom, and as much as I like to get angry at her momness and write blog entries that make fun of it, she’s always done the right thing for me, every time, my entire life. And that afternoon she knew that the right thing was to understand how hard this all was for me and to just say, “sure” and get in the car and go to the DMV. Less than half an hour after Sophie and I’d finished lunch, we were licensed and had everything we needed for our visa applications.7

Of course, that wasn’t true. See, I didn’t know that, due to the federal government’s new Ain’t Nobody Gonna Blow Us Up Now That We Done Standardized Our Driver’s Licenses regulations, Pennsylvania no longer issues official, honest-for-reals licenses at the PennDOT offices. Instead they hand you a license that looks exactly like a regular driver’s license, except for the word “TEMPORARY” stamped in large, red, block-capital letters across all of the vital information.

Heated dialogue ensued as Sophie and I debated our precise level of fucked-overness. There seemed to be little point in sending the Indian government documents from the state of Pennsylvania certifying our status as unstable transients. I considered offering to bring my mother to the immigration office in Mumbai. But after careful weighing of our nonexistent alternatives, we opted to tell the Indian consulate to suck it if our temp licenses weren’t good enough for them. I finished explaining that to the chargé d’affaires, hung up the phone, and we set out to complete our applications with two hours to spare.

Filling out an Indian visa application takes approximately three hours and 16 minutes. The application form itself is pretty simple, maybe 15 minutes of online time per traveler. That’s until you get to question number 37, which demands the name and address of a reference in India. Despite there being 1.2 billion people in India, neither Sophie nor I know any of them. We called most of them just to make sure. So for us that meant booking a refundable hotel room for a few days that we guessed we might possibly be in the country, if we got the visas. That hotel–despite their staff having no idea whether or not we actually existed nor how many severed heads we might be arriving with–became our reference.

After you fill out your application form online, India’s third-party visa processing service emails you a copy of the completed form for you to sign and mail, a scannable cover page to include with it, and, tucked away at the end, a checklist of required items that I’d already read multiple times on their web site. I printed out the applications and started through the checklist.

1. Application form: check
2. Passports: check8
3. Copy of birth certificates: check
4. Copy of newly obtained, worthless driver’s licenses: check.
5. Two identical, passport-sized photos of each of us: Ha! India thought they had us on that one. Nice try, India! We had to take all the stuff to FedEx Kinko’s to send it anyway, so we knew we could get passport photos taken there.
6. Completed form AdditionalInformation.pdf: chec–WTF? Nowhere up to this point was there any mention of form AdditionalInformation.pdf. I even went and fetched the Bottom of the Page out of his bath to make sure. He confirmed, sudsy, that not only had there been no mention of it, but also that it was buried at number six on a checklist that no one actually reads. The forms the visa service had emailed me didn’t even include AdditionalInformation.pdf. I had to go back to the Internet and type in a long web address from the checklist to download it.

Many months ago back in part one of this much-longer-than-it-deserves story, I mentioned that India’s consulate is notoriously capricious with its visa requirements. Clearly AdditionalInformation.pdf was their most recent whim, invented solely to be tucked away at the bottom of a checklist as inconspicuously as possible so that applicants wouldn’t notice that its existence and therefore could have their applications immediately shredded by the paralegal. This suspicion was confirmed when I saw the form itself (which you can download here, if you want). It looked like the entry form for a middle-school Magic: The Gathering tournament. It included no header, title, attributions, page numbers, formatting, or any other evidence whatsoever that it wasn’t printed by a pantsless man in a public library. After an inch and a half of blank space and an inexplicable horizontal line, it just started right in with:

a) Whether the applicant or his parents or grandparents (both paternal and maternal) were holding the nationality of Pakistan at any time:

It continued with similar questions/clauses:

b) Whether the applicant has ever been within Pakistan.
c) Whether his parents or grandparents (both paternal and maternal) had ever been within Pakistan.
d) Whether the applicant had enjoyed the episode of Seinfeld where the man had a Pakistani restaurant.
e) Why does the applicant keep talking about Pakistan so much, anyway? Seems suspicious to us.
f) etc.

I should mention that, since this form was a PDF, Sophie and I each had to print a copy and fill it out by hand. I should also mention that it required us to list all of the countries we’d been to in the last 10 years. I’ll also throw in there that we’d just finished four months of traveling in which we’d visited 25 countries. Nevertheless, we dutifully completed AdditionalInformation.pdf, splinted our wrists, assembled all of the materials, and somewhere around 4pm took off for FedEx. There we had our passport photos taken, bundled everything up and sent it off for Saturday delivery. We’d done it.

And so this is where the story skips over any climax and becomes all denouement. Our lack of Pakistaniness was so readily apparent that our applications flew through the consulate at remarkable speed, and we had our visas in hand by 10am Tuesday morning, almost 36 hours before our flight out of Pittsburgh.

That’s a flight we never actually boarded, because I spent the next several weeks literally thinking that I wanted to kill myself. That was followed by several weeks learning that my brain was tricking me into thinking I wanted to kill myself thanks to the undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder I’ve had most of my life. That was followed by several weeks of life-changing mental revamping. That was followed by my finally having the courage to move to Los Angeles to become a teevee writer like I’d always wanted.

I suppose I could’ve used these past 5000 words to write that story, instead of spending them on an ultimately pointless anecdote about a few hours of inconvenience. But that story isn’t finished yet. And this one ends with a picture of an expired visa photoshopped into the beak of a pelican:

1. This reminds me that Cash4Gold once inspired a fit of extreme didacticism in me and my friend Chris P. during which we devised a plan involving a series of TV ads telling people to send us a their gold for cash. We would then mail anyone who responded a dollar and a map to a spot in the Nevada desert where we had buried their jewelry. [↩]
2. Honestly I only include that detail because I want to mention that my stepbrother, having been a landlord, has fantastic stories about the incredible lengths tenants will go to to avoid paying rent, including one particular freeloader who claimed that he left the rent money sitting on the kitchen table only to have it suddenly eaten by a passing turtle. [↩]
3. Those were from 1992, when the average score was lower because people hadn’t yet bothered to learn to count above 2000. [↩]
4. Name changed for hilarious effect. [↩]
5. Note to potential employers: I’m perfectly fine with being told what to do and how to do it. [↩]
6. I had another run in with the same vice principal my senior year. I was late for school, and the student parking lot was full, so out of desperation I parked in the public “Hilltop Lot” nearby. As I climbed out of my orange Ford Fiesta, a voice from another car said, “Excuse me. Come here, please.” The V-P was sitting in his car, waiting for scofflaws. I walked over, and he said, “There is no student parking in the Hilltop Lot during school hours.” Then he handed me a typewritten slip of paper that read, “There is no student parking in the Hilltop Lot during school hours.” [↩]
7. We’re only about halfway through part three. Normally I’d break the story here and save the rest for another entry, but 10 months is enough already. Plus I just bought Fallout 3. [↩]
8. You have to send in your actual passports when you apply for most visas. The consulate affixes the visa right to the page. [↩]