By Ed Staskus

   The law office’s front door was meant to be a ten-thousand-dollar door, but I got lucky, and got in and out for only two hundred fifty dollars. I never went back. One shake down is more than enough. I found out the door was the entrance to a dog and pony show. There weren’t that many apples on my tree that I could afford to give bushels of them away for flimflam in return. 

   I was at the law office to make sure, even though I had lived in the United States for decades, that I was a citizen. My immigrant parents had naturalized in the 1960s, but it was unclear, at least to me, whether their citizenship extended to me. My father, who knew how to read contracts like the back of his hand, said I was a full-fledged citizen, but I wanted to make sure.

   When I first started going to Toronto by myself in my late teens it was by Greyhound. I rode the bus to Buffalo and walked across the Peace Bridge. When I got to the Canadian side, the border police asked me where I was from and for identification. I showed them my driver’s license. They waved me through. When I went home I did the same thing. The American border police waved me through. The same as the Canadians.

   After I got married my wife and I often went to Canada, to Wasaga Beach, to Penetanguishene, to Nova Scotia, and finally to Prince Edward Island, which we liked and made a habit of returning to. We did, at least, until a band of towelheads went fanatical and flew jetliners into NYC’s Twin Towers. We had just gotten back from Prince Edward  Island a few days earlier. I was standing in line in a drug store when I saw it happening on a TV above the cash register. After that, crossing borders slowly but surely became more officious. We found out soon enough we would need passports to get into Canada and back into the USA.

   My wife applied for and got her passport in five weeks. I didn’t apply at first because I wasn’t certain of my citizenship status. I had never been sure, no matter how sure I sounded at the border, asserting I was an American citizen. My parents grew up in Lithuania, fled the Red Army to Germany in 1944, emigrated to Canada after the war, and finally settled in the United States in the late 1950s. They were naturalized in the mid-1960s. I knew my brother and sister were citizens, but I felt on the fence because of my age when my parents became citizens.

   When we decided the red sand and blue water of Prince Edward Island was the place to go in the summer, I resolved to settle my body politic issue. Push came to shove and I asked one of our Lithuanian American community’s bigwigs if she knew anybody she could recommend to help me out. She told me about a friend of hers who was a lawyer. The lawyer had been in the resettlement business for more than 30 years and was herself an immigrant, she said.

   I made an appointment and went to the lawyer’s office. The lobby was sizable and almost full, full of worried-looking people sitting and waiting their turn. Most of them looked like they were from Asia or the Indian sub-continent. The citizenship business seemed to be booming. When my number was called I was shown into the boss’s office. That was my first surprise. I had not thought I would be talking to the main man, even though she was a woman. 

   The boss was round with a round face. Her lips were dolled up in red. She glanced at the paperwork and documentation I had brought with me and said, “I will be your helping hand.” She shot me a cherry bomb smile. “All right,” I said. I thought she would be working on my behalf going forward. I found out later she was trying to work me over.

   She told me I had a big problem with my citizenship and might be deported at any minute. She said she wanted to get started right away. She explained the initial consultation fee was going to be $250.00 and the balance to resolve my problem was going to be $9,750.00. 

   “This is going to cost me ten thousand dollars?” I asked, incredulous. It was my second surprise. It was an unwelcome bombshell. Back in the day highwaymen stuck a gun in your back and hissed, “Stand and deliver, your money, or else.” Nowadays they tell you to sit down and stick a fountain pen in your face.

   I was in her office for five minutes before she ushered me out. “Time is money,” her round face said. It took me fifteen minutes to drive home, where I mulled over the problem of finding ten thousand dollars. It was winter and we weren’t planning on going back to Canada until the next summer, so there was no rush on that account. But what she had said about being deported was worrisome. I had fond memories of my hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, but being uprooted was not what I wanted to happen. We had bought a house which we were renovatin, and I had both full-time and part-time jobs. We had a mortgage and friends and family in town. We had a cat who would miss chasing birds in the backyard.

   I went back to the law office the next month. I was introduced to a young associate and escorted to a small room in the back. A table and two chairs were in the room. I sat in one of the chairs and the associate sat in the other chair. He handed me a contract for the work they were going to be doing. I handed him the same paperwork and documentation I had shown to the top dog. He started to peruse the contract. After a few minutes he looked up, cleared his throat, and said, “I don’t exactly know why you’re here. According to what I’m looking at, you already are a citizen.” That was my third surprise.

   “Are you sure?” I asked.

   “I think so, but I better doublecheck with my boss,” he said, quickly backtracking, but the cat was out of the bag.

   “All right,” I said, and as soon as I said it I wanted to be gone.

   “I can’t stay,” I said, lying and standing up. “I’ve got to get to work. Let me know what you find out and in the meantime I will read this contract.” We shook hands, I gave him a cold smile, got into my car, and drove the other way..

   The next day I drove to the Rocky River post office where I knew they processed passport applications. When the line in front of me thinned out and I found myself at the counter, I said I wanted to apply for a passport. A middle-aged woman in a drab uniform walked up from the back and motioned me towards a chair and a camera. She handed me an application and told me how much applying for safe conduct was going to cost. It was ninety-seven dollars.

   “All right, but would you look at my birth certificate and this other paper work first. I was born in Canada and I’m not sure I am actually an American citizen.” She spread everything out on the counter and looked it over. It didn’t take her long. Less than five minutes into it she said, “Sure, honey, you’re a citizen, no doubt about it.”

   I filled out the application, got my picture taken, paid the fee, and thanked the post office woman for her help. ”You’re welcome,” she said. I got my passport in the mail about a month and a half later. The passport had my stone-faced picture in it and was good for ten years. I could go anywhere in the world with it.

   A week later the associate I had talked to called. He wanted to know if I had read the contract and was ready to go ahead with it. “No, I am going to pass on that,” I said I had thrown the contract in the trash long since.

   “That could mean a lot of problems for you,” he cautioned. “The State Department is cracking down, what with all this terrorism.”

   “I don’t think so,” I said. He kept up his patter. I hung up.

   Somebody else from the law office called me the following week. I hung up the minute she started into her song and dance. After that the phone calls stopped. We went to Prince Edward Island for two weeks the following June. Except for the long lines at the border, everything went off without a hitch. The Canadian border police said, “Welcome to Canada.” Two weeks later the American border police said, “Welcome to the United States.”

   My wife and I bumped into our Lithuanian American bigwig at a get together a few years later. I mentioned my immigration lawyer travail. My wife tugged on my sleeve. I told my tipster how her legal beagle had tried to pull the wool over my eyes. I told her about getting my passport in the end with no run around. I told her ten grand was hard cash and how fortunate it was I hadn’t lost more than the consultation fee, never mind the lawyer’s vexing trickery. Most of the time the only way to beat an attorney is to die with nothing.

   “I know her well, she’s a friend, and she would never do anything like that,” the bigwig said, huffing and puffing. She might as well have called me a liar. “She’s nationally known for helping immigrants. She’s helped thousands of people and is one of our city’s leading citizens. Who do you think you are? Don’t say bad things about her.”

   She wasn’t somebody who ever listened to anything I said, so I didn’t argue. What would have been the point? It would have been in one ear and out the other. It was her way of letting you know you didn’t matter all that much. After that, though, I never took anything she said at face value, the same as I never took anything any lawyer ever said at face value.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

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