by Neil Strauss
I had no idea what was coming next. Why would he want to become an American citizen if it wasn’t for the freedom? Perhaps it was simply because his friends were here.
“I wanted to become a citizen for the opportunities,” he finally continued. “In the Czech Republic, I had no future. In America, anything is possible. Anyone can become whatever he wants. It’s all happening here. There are a million different paths and choices and careers open to everyone who lives in America. And no matter what happens politically, they can’t take that away.”
Everyone at the table fell silent. The truth has a way of doing that to people sometimes.
A few weeks later, as I sat in the airport, waiting for a flight to see my family on the way to St. Kitts, I thought about the words Tomas had spoken. One of the few pieces of advice my father ever gave me as a teenager was “Expect the best but prepare for the worst.” Tomas expected the best. I was preparing for the worst.
For a brief moment in history, the lives of 80 million Americans hung by a thread. On the plane ride to Chicago to see my parents, I read Robert F. Kennedy’s book about it, Thirteen Days.
The book describes the meetings that took place in President John F. Kennedy’s inner circle during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. For thirteen days, from the time the government learned the Russians were building a nuclear missile base some ninety miles off the U.S. coast in Cuba to the moment the Russians agreed to dismantle it, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in the event of an American invasion of Cuba—which many in the White House were advising—the Russians actually planned to fire the nukes at U.S. cities.
“One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, argued that we could use nuclear weapons, on the basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack,” Kennedy writes of proposed plans for a preemptive strike during those days. “I thought, as I listened, of the many times I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.”
As I read the book, I wondered: If I had come of age during the Cold War, attended school assemblies where they showed films about what to do in case of a nuclear attack, been told that Russia had missiles pointed at my home city, watched helplessly while the House Committee on Un-American Activities ruined the lives of innocent Americans by accusing them of being Communists, and been at risk of involuntary service during the Vietnam War, would I have left the country?
I wasn’t completely sure. So I asked my closest genetic match, my father. “Were you ever scared during the Cold War that something bad would happen to you or your family?”
“Not really,” he replied. “I’d say that right now is the scariest time I’ve been alive.”
Considering that my father had lived through World War II and the Cold War, in addition to serving as an army lieutenant in Korea, his answer gave some legitimacy to my concerns. “Why is it scarier now?” I asked him.
“In the Cold War, because of mutually assured destruction, you didn’t think about the Russians sending their nuclear things over. But now, with terrorists, you don’t know what’s going to happen. They’ve killed innocent people everywhere on the planet. So it’s scary at home and it’s scary when you travel. Nothing’s safe anymore.”
I’d stopped in Chicago to have dinner with my parents on the way to St. Kitts not just to tell them about my escape plan, but to see if they wanted to be included.
“If you want,” I offered, “I can look into adding family members to my citizenship application. This way, if anything happens in America, you have somewhere safe to go.”
“We’re fine,” my mom said, dismissing the proposal as quickly as she’d dismissed most of my ideas, jobs, and girlfriends.
“So you don’t want me to even check for you?” I asked, disappointed.
“Ask your father.”
“I don’t see the point,” my dad said. “We’re happy here.”
“Are you sure? I mean, you just said you were scared.” I wanted to give them another chance. Most people mistake comfort and familiarity for safety. Not until the flames are licking their rooftop will they leave—and even then they’ll dawdle, trying to grab every last memento and stuff it into their car, as if their possessions held the very essence of their identity. “I’ll do the work. All you’d need to do is sign the papers.”
“Just leave us out of it,” my mom said. The conversation was over.
“Okay, well, if you’re ever in trouble, you can come stay with me anyway.”
I’d wondered at times why I seemed to be the only one of my friends pursuing safety so voraciously. As I sat with my parents, I realized that it was in part because of my upbringing. My parents were worst-case thinkers, and used to constantly warn me about everything that could go wrong when I grew up and left home.
They also practiced what they preached. When we went on vacation, my brother and I weren’t allowed to tell our friends, so that no one knew our house was empty. And we’d leave for the airport in shifts: my father and I would take a taxi as my mother and brother pretended to say goodbye, and then they’d follow in another cab shortly afterward. While we were gone, the house lights were hooked up to timers so they’d go on and off as if we were still there. In short, I was raised in a world where strangers were enemies and privacy meant protection.
“You know what you might find interesting?” my father said, playing peacemaker. “There’s a book that came out when everyone was scared of the Russians. Someone bought it for me as a joke. It tells you how to build nuclear shelters and radiation suits.”
“I’m not that paranoid,” I told him, then added, “Do you still have it?”
“I’m pretty sure I threw it away. But it was called Life on Doomsday or something like that.”
After dinner, I went online and found the book, which was actually called Life after Doomsday. The author, Bruce Clayton, had written it during the tail end of the Cold War, and it quickly became somewhat of a bible for the burgeoning survivalist movement. He’d also written a sequel in response to 9/11, Life after Terrorism, which I ordered as well. Spencer’s obsession with guns, planes, and his latest and most outlandish escape plan, submarines, kept echoing through my head.
Later that night, I asked my brother if he wanted to get a second passport with me. At first he declined, saying he was worried there’d be negative consequences. After I reassured him, he said he didn’t have the money for the citizenship. So I told him I’d take out a loan and pay it off for him. Then he flatly declined.
I was alone.
There is a phenomenon known as social proof. It’s the idea that if everyone is doing something—whether it’s buying a certain pair of shoes, seeing a particular movie, or criticizing some unfortunate individual—it must be right. So if no one else was trying to escape the country besides me, then it must be wrong.
The problem with that logic is that by the time everyone is doing it—after the next terrorist attack or economic depression or political clampdown or epidemic disease—it will be too late. And those who want to escape will be left trying to barter money, sex, connections, and everything else they have just for the privilege of living.
It was here, in the streets of Basseterre, where the debris of carnival rotted in the sun and teenage boys leaned against the same peeled-paint walls their fathers once did, that I would make my stand.
In the center of Market Street sat the office of Maxwell Webb and Partners. My entire plan rested solely on his shoulders—and, until just two hours earlier, I’d never even heard his name.
Maxwell greeted me at the door, alone in the office. He shouldn’t even have been there during carnival. He made sure to remind me of that. Several times.
I wanted to trust him, because I had to. But the diamond-encrusted ring on his middle finger, emblazoned with the initials MW, told me not to. It told me that he wanted to be respected, to be considered a player, to chase st
atus and women. And in a poor town of fifteen thousand people, that wasn’t difficult. A ring like that was probably all it took.
And I was about to contribute $2,500 toward his next ring.
He sat down heavily in front of a large walnut desk covered with thick file folders. I tried to memorize the names on them—Bernard Hellick, Thomas Murgic—so I could do some independent research and see what kind of clients he dealt with.
He stared quietly at me, his egg-shaped face bearing the first signs of growing jowls, sweat stains materializing in his white button-down shirt. He knew why I was there. But it appeared I must tell him anyway.
“So how does the process work?” I asked.
When I’d first arrived in St. Kitts, Wendell had told me what needed to be done. But he’d sent me here, to this office, to this stranger with the expensive ring, to get it done. And I needed reassurance. I had no idea if this move was smart and prescient, ultimately saving my life and hopefully that of my family—or if it was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, a testament to paranoia that would end in my own bankruptcy.
“You’ll need some property,” Maxwell said. “You can call Victor Doche at St. Christopher Club, Ron Fish at Half Moon Bay, or Nicholas Brisbane at Calypso Bay.”
The office fan spun uselessly above his head, circulating heat, as he read their numbers to me from the local telephone directory. I asked about other options. I wanted to think carefully about this. But he told me I had no other options. He was right.
“Once you pay the twenty-five-hundred-dollar retainer fee, I’ll give you the papers you need to fill out.”
I didn’t like him. I wanted someone to hold my hand, to explain things rather than just tell me what to do. I like to understand something before committing to it. I don’t think that’s wrong.
But either Maxwell wasn’t the talkative type, or he saw that I was by no means the kind of person he’d want to align with. His walls were filled with framed letters, photographs, and certificates testifying to the high opinion he wanted others to have of him. But I didn’t smell like money and power and a thick file folder and a photograph to put boastfully on the wall. I smelled like the inside of an airplane, economy class, middle seat.
“How many of these cases do you take a year?” I asked him, looking for some reason—any reason—to have faith in him.
“Ten,” he said.
“And how many applications does the government take each year?”
“About a hundred. Ninety-nine percent of them get approved.”
So Maxwell handled 10 percent of the traffic. That was reason enough for me.
I wrote him a check for $2,500. He handed me a sheaf of papers. One was an application for citizenship. The other was an application for a passport. In six months, Maxwell told me, if all went well, I would officially be a citizen of the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean Commonwealth.
Spencer’s words burned in my ears. I was buying insurance. Insurance against America, the country I was born in, the country my friends and family live in, the country I love.
This wasn’t supposed to happen in my lifetime.
The next day, I woke up early, found a taxi, and went house shopping.
The driver’s name was Chiefy. He was a short, jolly Kittitian with a smile designed to win the trust of tourists.
“Most of the land in this spot was owned by a Russian gangster who couldn’t get citizenship anywhere in Europe,” he informed me as we swerved around a large green hill. Every time he spoke, he turned around to make eye contact, which would have been polite if it weren’t for the narrow lanes and tight turns of the coastal road.
“Except that hill right there,” he went on. “That’s owned by a Saudi Arabian criminal who stole his son from his ex-wife and brought him to America. He bought the property in exchange for a diplomatic passport, so he could safely get to the States and back to see his son.”
And so began a tour of the checkered past, promising future, and eccentric characters of the island that might one day be my home. Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493, St. Kitts was united with a neighboring island, Nevis, four centuries later to become the smallest country in the Americas and one of the best-kept secrets in the Caribbean.
Chiefy’s first stop was the Rawlins Plantation, where he introduced me to Kevin, the owner, a short Welsh man with buck teeth and shifty eyes. From there, Chiefy and I moved on to Calypso Bay, Half Moon Bay, a row of what looked like concrete railway containers in the infancy of their construction, and half a dozen other places—each owned by a character more peculiar than the last, most of them small-time operators with big dreams of striking it rich in real estate on the developing island. It was the Wild West, but with an ocean view.
The last place I looked at was St. Christopher Club, a small enclave of three-story white buildings on a narrow strip of land separating the Atlantic and Caribbean beaches.
“You know, of the last twenty-five units, sixteen sold to Americans and every one of them was in the citizenship program,” the co-owner, Victor Doche, a short, garrulous man with a Charlie Brown smile, said as he walked me through a newly built apartment.
“Is that normal?”
“No, it’s new.”
“Who bought them before?”
“Originally, it was because of Idi Amin.” I wasn’t sure what this meant—though I later learned he was referring to Amin’s expulsion of the entire Asian population of Uganda following a dream in which God told him to banish them. “Then it was Russians. A lot were very powerful people. Not all of them were in the Mafia, though. I bought my apartment back from a guy who was a general in the KGB.
“Now it’s all Americans,” he continued. “One family is here because they fear war with Iran. Another because they don’t want their children drafted. And another is here because they make money offshore and don’t want to bring it back through the U.S. and have it taxed.”
“Interesting.” So I wasn’t alone. I was part of a movement, an awakening, a disillusionment. The great American leaking pot. We were running away from war and death and taxes. If our instincts were right, we’d be rewarded with life. If they were wrong, we’d be stuck on one of the most beautiful islands I’d seen. There was no downside. Or so I thought at the time.
Victor was a similar seeker. He was born in Egypt, but, he explained, “as a Christian, I saw that things were getting bad for my people in the seventies and left.” He fled to Montreal, where he helped bring aerobics to the country with help from Jane Fonda. As he told his story, I was reminded of my silent pledge in Mrs. Kaufman’s class, and I realized that running doesn’t always mean hiding. Sometimes it means growing.
“The St. Kitts and Nevis passport is very good,” he continued. “Because the islands are part of the British Commonwealth, people use them as a backdoor entrance to Great Britain. I’m told that if you lose the passport in a foreign country and go to the British embassy, they’ll replace it with a British passport.”
So not only was I going to become a Kittitian, I was going to become a member of the British Commonwealth. Maybe I could get my coveted EU passport after all.
After looking at one of the apartments, a tranquil duplex with views of both coasts, I walked to the Atlantic beach a few yards away. The weather was warm, but not hot, with a mild breeze. It felt as if this were the temperature at which the human body was designed to live. The waves crashed white and warm against the shore. There wasn’t another person in sight. It was the antithesis of my life in cities up to that point.
I recalled the five criteria Spencer and I had selected as requirements for a second citizenship: credible passport, stable government, minimal tax liability, maximum two-year wait for a citizenship, and warm climate with beaches.
St. Kitts met every criterion.
I crossed the property, walked two hundred yards to the Caribbean coast, and ordered a rum punch at an open-air bar on the beach. The bar’s co-owner, it turned out, also lived at St. C
hristopher Club.
His name was Regan, and he told me that the prime minister of the island had a spare apartment in the complex. He also said there were plans to build a Ritz-Carlton next door, which would be good for property values.
A new life seemed to await me here, free of petty concerns and complications. The slow, laid-back pace alone would probably prolong my life. And if I ever got caught in the system, all I had to do was knock on the prime minister’s door with a bottle of wine and ask for advice. I couldn’t imagine a better oasis for a technological nomad.
When I took a cab to the island’s capital, Basseterre, at five A.M. the day after Christmas, the J’ouvert street party—the climax of the island’s two-week-long carnival celebration—was in full swing. Bands lined the sides of floats and trucks, hammering away on steel drums as hundreds of drunk revelers danced ecstatically behind them. It was not a show for tourists, but an age-old rite occurring despite my presence. It seemed hypocritical to call this place my home when these were not my people and this was not in my blood.
I didn’t belong here. Kevin didn’t belong here. Victor didn’t belong here. Regan didn’t belong here. The Russians, Ugandans, and all the eccentric real-estate developers with their big dreams didn’t belong here.
Then again, there was a time when these revelers didn’t belong here either. The Kalinago tribe fought the Igneri tribe for the island. The French and the Spanish fought first the Kalinago, then each other. The French and the British then fought, uniting briefly to massacre nearly the entire native population at a site now known as Bloody Point.
Yet still the island belongs to no one. It’s just a neutral witness to human nature. And all that blood—like most of the blood spilled over man’s inability to cohabitate and share—has been shed for nothing. So until the battle resumes one day, the island’s guests will spend their time exchanging pieces of paper that represent value for other pieces of paper that represent land, just as we do everywhere else in the world. More than warfare, this symbolic paper, a single sheet of which can make a man a slave or a king, is the pinnacle of human civilization.