by Paul Carr
I was going to get a visa. And I was going to make San Francisco the place I called home.
1209
My plane from Munich landed back in Gatwick at noon.
It was 27 January 2009, almost exactly a year since I’d given up my flat in London and decided that I never wanted to live in one place again. Now I was determined that by the end of the following month I’d have a US visa.
I’d done hours and hours of research online, and by this point I knew almost everything there was to know about the various classes of visa available for people who want to move to the US, without actually becoming citizens. I also knew from friends who already had visas that February was the perfect month to apply; far enough away from the tourist season, or any other peak travel times, that there wouldn’t be backlog. I should only have to wait a couple of weeks for an appointment at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, which was perfect as it would give me just enough time to fill in the lengthy application forms, get the specific sized passport photos they needed and generally prepare myself psychologically for the interview. At the embassy they’d grill me about my reasons for wanting to be allowed to stay in the US for an extended period, and then they’d carry out various background checks to ensure that I wasn’t likely to overthrow the government or anything like that.
Settling into my hotel – the Grafton on Tottenham Court Road, where I’d checked in for a one-month stay at £70 a night – wiping out all of the budget savings from my twenty-day stay at the Vertigo – I picked up the phone and dialled the US embassy. Calls to the embassy cost £1.20 per minute. God bless America.
After holding for ten minutes – £12 – my call was answered by a man who sounded like he was in Leeds. ‘American embassy,’ he said, unconvincingly.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’d like to arrange an appointment for a US visa.’
He asked me various questions about the class of visa I was applying for, and also reminded me of the standard application fee of $131 which was non-refundable even if they refused my application. Once that was done, he tapped away at his keyboard to arrange a time for the interview.
‘When would you like the appointment?’ he asked.
‘As soon as possible,’ I replied, praying that it would be less than four weeks.
‘How about Friday morning?’ he asked.
‘Uh – this Friday?’ It was Monday.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the computer says we have a spare appointment; maybe someone cancelled. Or I can put you in for three weeks’ time.’
‘Er … no … Friday will be fine,’ I said.
And that was that. I had to report to the embassy at eight o’clock on Friday morning, carrying all my completed forms, my passport photos, my various references. I couldn’t believe it – four days! That was brilliant!
Wait.
No.
It was fucking terrible. I hadn’t even printed out the paperwork, let alone filled it in. I didn’t have my reference letters, I didn’t even have my passport photo. I immediately went into a flat spin of panic. First I fired off emails to my referees – subject line ‘HELP!’– asking if there was any chance of them writing their letters right away. Fortunately they were all based in London but I’d still have to spend a few hours travelling around collecting them.
The passport photo was another challenge. Annoyingly, American passport photos are a different size from those in Europe. Just slightly bigger, as if America is trying to make a point. As a result, you can’t get them from normal photo booths and instead have to go to a special studio off Oxford Street where you join a steady line of would-be visa holders paying £10 a time to get their photographs taken. The wall of the studio is amazing, lined with hundreds, no, thousands, of passport photos of their rich and famous clients. It’s like the photos of celebrated patrons you see in Italian restaurants, except, these being passport photos, special care has been taken to capture each subject in his or her least flattering light. There was Sting, probably taken sometime in the seventies, looking like Carlos the Jackal. There was Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow, also looking like Carlos the Jackal. One day it’ll be my tiny, contorted, terrifying face up there, I thought, as I took my place on the stool and remembered that you’re not allowed to smile.
I arrived back at my hotel, thoroughly pleased with myself. All my referees had managed to adjust to my ridiculous new timetable, I had my photos and now all I had to do was fill in a dozen or so forms. The hotel has a business centre with a printer so I took my laptop down to that and began printing, starting with the embassy’s checklist of things to make sure I have with me for my interview.
As it came out of the printer, I started to glance down the list: referee letters, fine; photos, fine; four billion pages of application form; fine and then …
And then it felt as if every drop of blood had drained from my body. I stood staring at the last item on the list for a few seconds, and then literally collapsed into the business centre’s swivel chair. Had the chair not been there, I would have hit the floor.
There, right at the bottom of the list, apparently less important than anything else, was the one thing I hadn’t thought of. Except now it seemed obvious. Of course they’d need that. Three words.
ACPO police certificate.
That was it. Game over, not just for my visa – but potentially for any further visits to America. The ACPO police certificate is exactly what it sounds like. A piece of paper, produced by ACPO – the Association of Chief Police Officers – showing details of your entire criminal history. Or, rather, showing that you don’t have a criminal history and so are therefore suitable for entry to the US.
The fact that I didn’t have one of these certificates, and had no idea how to obtain one, wasn’t what worried me. What worried me was what mine would certainly show when it arrived: two arrests, including one caution, for crimes that – technically at least – fell under the heading of fraud. There was no way on God’s earth that they’d allow a self-confessed fraudster into the country.
My brain wasn’t capable of processing the implications. If I took the certificate to the embassy and was refused a visa – which now seemed like an absolute certainty – then I’d also no longer be eligible to enter the country under the visa waiver scheme. One of the first boxes you tick on the visa waiver form is to say you’ve never been refused a visa.
But then it got even worse. As I started to Google for the immigration authorities’ attitude towards admitting fraudsters, I discovered to my horror that the fact that I had been arrested for a crime involving fraud – a so-called crime of ‘moral turpitude’ – meant I almost certainly shouldn’t have even been using the visa waiver at all. Had the Americans randomly stopped me at the airport and asked permission to check my UK police record* I would have been deported for a visa violation and possibly banned from travelling to the US for anything up to ten years.
Without realising it, I’d been taking a huge risk every time I arrived on American soil – a risk that I couldn’t possibly continue to take. Whatever happened I had either to get a visa, or stay out of America for ever. The only glimmer of sunshine was that ACPO offered a forty-eight-hour delivery service for emergency certificates, at a cost of £90. I could still get it in time for my Friday appointment. At least I’d know my fate sooner rather than later.
1210
The two days between applying for my ACPO certificate and it arriving were the longest, most terrifying of my life. Much of that comparison, of course, is tied to the fact that I’ve never been kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq, or been in a plane crash in the Andes. Only a simpering middle-class Guardian columnist would describe waiting for paperwork as ‘terrifying’.
But it was terrifying, so, to calm my nerves, I scoured online immigration advice forums for any information that might give me a reason to be hopeful. What I was looking for was just one example of someone who had a criminal record subsequently being approved for my type of visa. Unbelievably, there didn’t seem to b
e a single person who fit those criteria.
What I did find, though, was lots of advice for non-criminals as to how they should behave in a visa interview.
The most important factor is preparedness – if you didn’t have all your paperwork in order, you ran the risk of being sent home and having to book a new appointment. As I would be able to confirm a few days later, the US visa system is shockingly efficient. They process thousands of people every day and still don’t have much of a backlog. Much of this is down to their lack of tolerance of people who can’t read simple instructions: there just isn’t the demand in America for idiots who can’t read checklists.
Being calm and confident is also critical; for many people a visa is the most important document they’ll ever apply for – it can make or break careers, marriages and families. Tensions run high, but if you raise your voice at the interviewer, or give the impression that you’re lying, you’re done for.
The most important advice, though, was to be completely honest. Every single site repeated that advice: answer every question you’re asked by the interviewer with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There was no way of knowing how much background information the embassy could access on you – by applying for the visa you were agreeing to let them dig into your past as much as they liked – and, if you were caught in a lie, that would put paid to your chances of ever entering the US again, perhaps for life.
Until I’d read that, I was allowing myself one tiny hope: that somehow the same administrative cock-up that had meant the police outside Karen’s flat had no record of me would mean that my ACPO certificate would come blank. But now I realised that, even if it did, I still had to admit to the arrests or risk the end of my American dream. Lying to blag my way into a nightclub is one thing; lying to blag my way into a country is just idiotic.
I’d asked for the certificate to be sent to my hotel and I was expecting delivery by the end of Wednesday. Wednesday came and went, as did Thursday morning. ‘No, sir, as I’ve told you, we’ll deliver any mail directly to your room.’ I think I was starting to irritate the concierge. Finally, at just after five o’clock on Thursday evening – less than fifteen hours before my appointment – came a knock on the door and a man in a porter’s uniform clutching an A4-sized white envelope with an ACPO franking stamp.
I couldn’t bear to open it.
Since I’d left London – really since I’d decided to stop trying to be an entrepreneur and go back to writing – I’d been the author of my own destiny. Literally. I’d been able to travel where I liked, do what I liked, drink as much as I liked, and – barring the odd night behind bars – my behaviour had had zero consequences. So what if I woke up naked in a hotel corridor, or shattered the peace of an entire Spanish village, or turned up outside my ex’s house and nearly got arrested for the second time in a week? I could just check out of my hotel, get on a plane and head somewhere else. It was the perfect life without consequences. And it went further than that – I was paid, by the Guardian and by my publisher, to write about those travels, which meant I could choose which ones would be remembered, and how I’d like to remember them. The night at Karen’s house, or a week staying in a renovated halls of residence? Struck from the public record. Never happened. The hairdressers and the Icelandic rock star and the glamorous book launch party? All there in black and white, tweaked and packed and edited to present me in my best light.
The contents of the envelope were the precise opposite of all of that. Inside was a single piece of paper, written by a computer, and detailing only things I’d like to forget. I couldn’t edit it, tweak it or spin it in a positive way. And, unlike an inconsequential newspaper column, the consequences of the information this one piece of paper held couldn’t be more serious, for me at least. It had the power to ban me from the country and the city that I’d fallen in love with.
I sat on my hotel bed, holding the envelope, my hands shaking.
I knew what it was going to say, and I knew the next morning that I was going to have to hand it to a man in a uniform at the American embassy who would use it to decide my future.
I finally pulled myself together enough, and stopped my hands shaking enough, to tear open the envelope.
1211
Eight a.m., and the queue at the embassy already snaked along one side of Grosvenor Square. There were people of all nationalities: I heard French and German and Arabic and what I’m pretty sure was Russian. I heard British accents, too, and Australian and Canadian. All of us were there for the same reason, though: we all wanted to go to America.
The instructions from the embassy had been explicit and underlined, in bold. All I was allowed to bring with me was my paperwork, and a book or magazine for the inevitable five-hour wait inside. I’d heard stories of people being there for twelve hours or more. I was in the middle of reading Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – a satirical indictment of the Bush administration – but on my way to the embassy I’d decided to throw it away lest it prejudice my case. Which was ridiculous, really, but that’s how paranoid I was about upsetting the Americans. Instead I’d stopped at Borders on Oxford Street and bought a copy of Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country. Everyone loves Bill Bryson, the man who does for modern-day Anglo-American relations what Roosevelt did in the 1940s. He’s like a bearded Lend-Lease.
Apart from my book, I was allowed to bring no other entertainment devices, and certainly nothing electronic. No iPod, or phone, or laptop – the embassy even bans electronic car key fobs. The man in front of me in the queue apparently hadn’t got the memo; not only was he listening to an iPod, with the earbud tucked into just one ear, but he was also managing to talk loudly on his mobile, which was pressed against his other ear. He must have felt like he was permanently on hold.
‘Yeah, mate, I’m just at the embassy, innit?’ he said – or maybe asked – at the top of his voice.
‘Nah, should be done soon. Just got to get this fucking visa for Florida, innit?’ The poor fellow was crippled by uncertainty.
I weighed up whether or not to say something. Part of me wanted to do the decent human thing and tell him about the no-electronicdevices rule. He was still far enough back in the queue that he could run to one of the nearby cafés that offers property lockers for embassy visitors and make it back without missing his appointment time. If he got all the way to the front and then was turned away, he’d have wasted his whole day. Another part of me, though, couldn’t help but think ‘this guy sounds like a total twat’. And, anyway, why should the rest of us have taken the time to read the instructions and spent a whole week panicking about our visas when he clearly couldn’t give a toss?
No, I decided: him being a twat shouldn’t stop me being a good Samaritan. Moral high ground and all that. Frankly, I needed all the karmic help I could get. ‘Excuse me,’ I said once he got off his phone. He turned around a little too quickly, as if I’d punched him in the back of the neck. He was obviously someone for whom the words ‘excuse me’ were usually followed by ‘can you stop shouting into your phone, you twat’.
‘What?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, because I’m British, ‘just thought you should know that you’re not supposed to bring electronic items into the…’
‘Yeah, they don’t mean phones, innit,’ he said, with far more aggression than I’d anticipated. ‘Mind your own business, mate.’
He turned around and put the other iPod earbud into his other ear.
I was about to tap him on the shoulder, and point out that, not only do they explicitly say that they do mean phones, but that the iPod he was now listening to wasn’t a fucking phone. But he’d had his chance; and, anyway, he was a twat.
‘Ignorant twat,’ I said to his back.
He spun around again.
‘What did you say?’
Now, I have to say, ordinarily I wouldn’t have been so belligerent. He was a big guy, and could almost certainly have killed me, like those people you read
about being stabbed on London buses because they asked a teenager to stop throwing chips. But on this occasion I was emboldened by my environment: the outside of the American embassy is one of the most highly policed areas in London. No more than two feet away from us was a policeman carrying a machine gun. A few feet away from him were five more policemen, all heavily armed. Sure, iPod man might get the first punch in, but at least I’d have the satisfaction of watching him being brought down in a hail of automatic gunfire. He looked at me, then he looked at the policeman, and at the gun. He knew it, I knew it.
‘I said you’re an ignorant twaaat.’ Slowly and with relish this time.
One more glance at the policeman: he was looking back at us now. The twat turned back around. I felt a small jolt of victory – despite being the equivalent of the kid who pulls faces at the bully from behind teacher’s back. Still, for the next half-hour, as the queue slowly shuffled towards the first of several security checkpoints, I was at least distracted from my visa panic by the impending joy of watching him be turned away. When the moment came it was even more satisfying than I’d expected.
‘You what, mate?’ he shouted at the security guard. ‘That’s fucking well out of order, innit.’ A policeman edged closer. ‘Fuck this,’ said the man, eventually, and stormed off across the square.
I handed the security guard my paperwork, he glanced at it casually and, satisfied that everything was in order, ushered me towards the metal detectors.
Here we go.
1212
The ACPO certificate had indeed contained the truth about my laughably unsordid criminal past – my recent caution was listed, along with the arrest date and police station – but not the whole truth; my first arrest was missing. According to the ACPO website, that was because the certificate only shows convictions and cautions, and the previous arrest had resulted in neither. The difference between convictions and cautions was my only possible saviour; by accepting the caution I’d been forced to admit guilt, but because I hadn’t gone to court it wasn’t a conviction. Most of the advice I’d found online suggested that the Americans only cared about convictions, not things you’d been cautioned over, but some selfstyled legal experts still insisted that cautions were ‘taken into account’. I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.