I'm a Stranger Here Myself (23 page)

Sometime in the early 1930s, Richard Hollingshead of New Jersey bolted a motion picture projector to the roof of his car, climbed into the front seat, and began watching movies that he projected onto the door of his garage.

Goodness knows what he was thinking or where the idea came from, but the sight of flickering images on his garage door intrigued people on his street and they came over to have a look. Soon people from all over the neighborhood were dropping in to watch movies on Hollingshead’s garage door.

In 1933, Hollingshead patented the idea and later that year opened America’s first drive-in movie theater in the nearby town of Camden. It was not an immediate success. For years the concept languished, but in the 1950s, as Americans became increasingly mobilized, the idea suddenly took off in a big way. From virtually nothing in 1950, the number of drive-in movie theaters grew to six thousand by late in the decade.

At their peak, they were almost as numerous and popular as conventional movie theaters. Teenagers could do things in cars they could not with propriety do in a normal theater. Parents with young children were spared the expense of engaging a baby-sitter because they could put the kids in the back in their pajamas. Moms could nurse babies. Some drive-ins even offered special services like laundering. You would drop off a bag of dirty clothes as you entered and pick it up washed, dried, and folded when you left.

And then, almost as quickly as they arose, America’s driveins began to fade away. Today they have largely vanished from the American landscape. Drive down almost any two-lane highway in the country and one thing you can almost certainly count on seeing at some point in the day is a derelict drive-in movie theater.

Not far from us, just over the Connecticut River in Vermont, is one of the last remaining drive-ins. It is open just on Friday and Saturday nights in summer, and I daresay that when the current owner retires it will go altogether. Impetuously, a few nights ago I suggested that we go for the evening.

“Why?” said my youngest daughter with great dubiousness.

“Because it will be fun,” I explained.

I was astonished to realize that not only had no one in the family been to a drive-in movie, but they weren’t even clear on the principle behind it.

“It’s simple,” I explained. “You drive into a field with a big screen, park beside a metal post with a speaker on it on a length of wire, and hang the speaker on the inside of your car door for the sound.”

“And then?”

“Then you watch the movie.”

“Is it air-conditioned?” asked my youngest son.

“Of course it’s not air-conditioned. You’re outdoors.”

“Why not just go to a real movie theater where there’s air-conditioning and comfy seats?”

I tried to think of a compelling answer, but the reasons that leapt to mind—because you can smoke and drink beer and smooch extravagantly—didn’t seem to apply here. “Because it will be fun,” I repeated again, but with less conviction.

Our two teenagers excused themselves at once, arguing that they would sooner have a disfiguring skin disease than be seen at a public entertainment with their parents, but my wife, two younger children, and my son’s friend Bradley—a precocious eight-year-old whom I would happily leave at a turnout in the Nevada desert if the opportunity ever presented itself—reluctantly agreed to give it a try.

And so we drove over the river to our venerable drive-in. Almost at once I began to remember why drive-ins went into such a precipitate decline. To begin with, it is not remotely comfortable to sit in a car to watch a movie. If you are in the driver’s seat, you have a steering wheel in your lap the whole time. If you are in the back, you can’t really see at all. Unless you had the foresight to clean the windshield before you set off, you will be watching the picture through a smear of squashed bugs and road dirt. The sound quality from the little speakers is always appalling and tinny and makes every character sound as if he is speaking from the inside of a gym locker. In a place like New England, the evenings invariably turn cool, so you shut the car windows to keep warm and then spend the rest of the evening wiping condensation from the inside of the windshield with the back of your arm. Often it rains. Above all, daylight saving time means that it isn’t dark enough to see the movies until about 10 P.M.

So we sat for ages, one of only about half a dozen cars in a field large enough for 250, and squinted at vague, shadowy images on a distant screen.

“I can’t see the picture,” came a voice from the back.

“That’s because it’s not quite dark yet,” I said.

“Then why are they showing it?”

“Because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to start it until after 10 P.M., and nobody would come.”

“But nobody has come.”

“Who wants a treat?” I said, cannily changing the subject.

I took the children to the refreshment booth and bought enough food to feed a medium-size community for six months. By the time we returned to the car, it was almost dark enough to make out the images on the screen. However, our speaker kept cutting out. So we moved to another position. In the process, Bradley spilled his popcorn, a 24-ounce soda, and a box of malted milk balls.

So I got out and mopped him down with an old blanket I found in the trunk. Then my son announced that he needed to go to the bathroom.

“Would you like to come too, Bradley?” I inquired sweetly.

“Nope.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Yup.”

“You’re not going to tell me you need to go as soon as I get back?”

“Nope.”

I took my son to the toilet. When we returned, Bradley announced that he needed to go now. “Real bad,” he added for emphasis.

So I took Bradley. By the time we completed our toilet rounds, the film was half over and no one knew what was going on. It also turned out that the new speaker was even worse than the previous one had been.

So I started the engine again, instructed the kids to hold tight to their drinks and popcorn, and backed out of our position. There was a horrible wrenching noise.

“You should probably put the speaker back on the post before you drive off,” observed Bradley sagely.

“You’re quite right, Bradley,” I agreed. “Still, this cord might come in handy if I need to garotte anyone.”

Bradley announced that he had spilled his drink again and needed to go to the bathroom. So I gave Bradley yet another wipe-down and took the kids for more refreshments. By the time we got back, the movie was finishing. Between us, we had watched seventeen minutes of it, about eight minutes with sound.

“Next time you want to waste twenty-two dollars on some harebrained notion, let me know and I’ll send a check in the post, and then we can stay at home and watch TV,” my wife suggested.

“Excellent idea,” I agreed.

I’m not even going to begin to tell you about the frustration of trying to get a foreign-born spouse or other loved one registered as a legal resident in the United States because I haven’t the space, and anyway it is much too boring. Also, I can’t talk about it without weeping copiously. Also, you would think I was making most of it up.

You would scoff, I am quite sure, if I told you that an acquaintance of ours—an English academic of high standing— sat open-mouthed while his daughter was asked such questions as “Have you ever engaged in any unlawful commercial vice, including, but not limited to, illegal gambling?” and “Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?” and—my particular favorite—“Do you plan to practice polygamy in the U.S.?” His daughter, I should point out, was five years old.

You see, I am weeping already.

There is something seriously wrong with a government that asks such questions of any person, not merely because the questions are intrusive and irrelevant, and not merely because inquiries into one’s political affinities fly in the face of our treasured Constitution, but because they are such a preposterous and monumental waste of everyone’s time. Who, after all, when asked if he intends to engage in genocide, espionage, multiple marriages, or any other of an extremely long and interestingly paranoid list of undesirable activities, is going to say: “I certainly do! Say, will this harm my chances of getting in?”

If all that was involved was answering a list of pointless questions under oath, then I would just sigh and let it be. But it is infinitely more than that. Acquiring legal status in America involves fingerprints, medical examinations, blood tests, letters of affidavit, birth and marriage certificates, employment records, proof of financial standing, and much else—and all of it must be assembled, validated, presented, and paid for in very specific ways. My wife recently had to make a 250-mile round trip to give a blood sample at a clinic recognized by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service even though one of the finest university-affiliated hospitals in America is here in the town in which we live.

There are endless forms to fill out, each with pages of instructions, which often contradict other instructions and almost always lead to the need for more forms. Here, exactly as written, is a typical fragment of instructions regarding the presentation of fingerprints:

If you don’t have form FD-258 (and you don’t) or aren’t sure which is your MNU number (and you aren’t), you can spend days repeatedly dialing a phone number that is forever busy, only to be told by a weary, overworked-sounding voice when you finally do get through that you must call another number, which the person tells you once in a mumble and you don’t quite catch, so that you have to go through the entire process again. After a while you begin to understand why flinty-eyed cowpokes in places like Montana turn their ranches into fortresses and threaten to shoot any government officer fool enough to walk into the crosshairs.

And it’s no good just filling in the forms to the best of your ability, because if anything is even a jot out of order, it is all sent back. My wife had her file returned once because the distance between her chin and hairline on a passport-sized photograph was out by one-eighth of an inch.

This has been going on for two years for us. Understand, my wife does not want to practice brain surgery, engage in espionage, assist or collude in the trafficking of drugs, participate in the overthrow of the American government (though, frankly, I would not stand in her way), or take part in any other proscribed activity. She just wants to do a little shopping and be legally resident with her family. Doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Goodness knows what the holdup is. Occasionally we get a request for some additional document. Every few months I write to ask what is happening, occasionally imploring to be put in touch with a real person, some actual human who will surely see that it is a ridiculous waste of government money and everyone’s time to infinitely prolong a process that ought to be routine, but I never get a response.

Three weeks ago, we received a letter from the INS office in London, which we thought must be the official approval at last. Good joke! It was a computer-generated letter saying that because her application had been inactive for twelve months it was being canceled. Inactive! Canceled! Show me to the gun cabinet, please.

All this is a very roundabout way of getting to a story concerning some British friends of ours here in Hanover. The husband is a professor at Dartmouth. Eighteen months ago, he and his family went back to England for a year’s sabbatical. When they arrived at Heathrow airport, excited to be back home, the immigration officer asked them how long they were staying.

“A year,” my friend answered brightly.

“And what about the American child?” the officer asked with a cocked eyebrow.

Their youngest, you see, had been born in America, and they had never bothered to register him as British. He was only four, so it wasn’t as if he would be looking for work or anything.

They explained the situation. The immigration man listened gravely, then went off to consult a supervisor.

It had been eight years since my friends had left Britain, and they weren’t sure just how much more like America it might have grown in that period. So they waited uneasily. After a minute the immigration man returned, followed by his supervisor, and said to them in a low voice, “My supervisor is going to ask you how long you intend to stay in Britain. Say, ‘Two weeks.’ ”

So the supervisor asked them how long they intended to stay, and they said, “Two weeks.”

“Good,” said the supervisor, then added as if by way of an afterthought, “It might be an idea to register your child as British within the next day or two, in case you should decide to extend your stay.”

“Of course,” said my friend.

And they were in. And that was that. And would that it were one-tenth—nay, one-thousandth—as simple as that here. It is a source of continuing wonder and dismay to me that in a country as devoted to friendliness and helpfulness as America that doesn’t extend to government agencies.

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go off and stock up on ammo.