Who needed The Boogie Man when you had The Man? The Man was scarier than The Boogie Man. He was real. Sure, an imaginary Boogie Man could send me shrieking into my parents comforting, clothing-optional bed, but it was The Man who could send my parents shrieking into mine. The downside to fighting authority is that authority usually fights back. It didn’t help in our numerous encounters with The Man that my stepfather had questionable legal status in Canada. Nor did it help that he was not technically my stepfather, since the bonds between he and my mother were primarily spiritual, not legal. An American, and one small step away from being a full-blown draft-dodger, he’d flitted back and forth across the border on a mission of love courting my mother throughout the late sixties and early seventies. While Canada, to its great credit, occasionally ignored these transborder peregrinations, the US was far less forgiving of their long-haired sons fleeing north.
It is questionable whether the tale of our border woes went deeper than our long, stringy hair, and our dented, powder blue Volkswagen van. Most likely, that was more than enough to draw the baleful ire of The Man. For all the childhood fun of being part of the counterculture, our merry goodwill rarely softened the hearts of anyone in a uniform. It certainly had done no good years before when my stepfather had attempted to cross into Mexico at Falcon, Texas, only to have his van stripped to the metal in a meticulous search for contraband. The reward for the concerted efforts of a small army of Texas Rangers armed with crowbars and tire thumpers were a few seeds of marijuana wrapped in a cotton ball and stuffed in an ashtray. These seeds of weed, which have grown in the pantheon of family lore, to be known simply as The Seeds, were a left behind artifact from a German hitchhiker who had been using the purported medicinal efficacy of their oil as an earache cure. And though no time was served for this piddling transgression, a permanent note was dutifully inserted on The Man’s naughty-and-nice list.
You might think in the Luddite age before computers, that a minor notation, referencing a verbal warning, for an unprosecutable offense wouldn’t amount to much, but you’d be wrong. Somehow, that little scribble dogged us everywhere we went for years to come. Imagine trying to get excited about a family trip to California with the specter of a full body cavity search hanging over your head. It made concentrating on the Zen-like joy of the alphabet game infinitely more challenging.
Nothing is more frightening for children than seeing their parents afraid. My stepfather was the coolest, hippie rogue either my sister or I had ever known. He’d been in his scrapes, and he recounted them with the joie de vivre of an itinerant bard. From armed bandito roadblocks in Latin America, to hopped-up killer bikers at Altamont, he had seen a lot. Nor was my mother one for taking shit. A runaway at sixteen and a divorced single mother of two by twenty, she could hold her own against the best. Still, on the nights before we crossed over into the United States, the lightness of our little utopian existence dimmed to a bleak foreboding black, and the reek of fear commingled with the scent of sage and incense. On the bright side, it was also the only time I was guaranteed a haircut. It was nice for a change, not to be mistaken for a girl.
Christian children have their church clothes; hippie kids have their border clothes. My remaking into a poor man’s Bobby Brady was almost a metaphysical transformation. It was only as my long blond curls fell before the scissors and my six-year-old fingers fumbled with the buttons on my collared shirt that I honestly caught a glimpse of how the other 98 percent of society lived. Self-aware enough to know that many people despised us simply for our appearance, I imagined during my backseat Rockwellian conversion that I was a spy infiltrating the enemy camp. Even then, I understood a few things with instinctual clarity. I recognized that my parents were not on the path of least resistance. They were tilting at windmills, inspired by a resolute faith that in time the unjust windmills would fall. They understood that if you don’t make a choice about how you live, someone else will make it for you. I also grasped that freedom was no small burden.
So even as I daydreamed secret agent fantasies, another side of my inner child toyed with the notion of being a double agent, joining the other team, for my hippie parents had made it clear, that this, too, was an option. I could eat meat; I could become a born-again Christian, even a stockbroker. All things were theoretically permissible. My role as a child was not to make my parents happy, nor to take them at their word; it was to discover my true nature. Self-determination was my human birthright. This was a great deal for a six-year-old to wrap his head around, especially one who regularly got beat up at school for looking different. Years later it’s still a lot to deal with, even without the beatings.
Though I was a talented little actor, which was no doubt attributable to a parental emphasis on all things artistic, our familial best efforts to appear to be something that we were not invariably ended in failure. Every trip to the border was a self-betrayal for my parents, the fake clothes, the hated haircuts; we even took time to practice smiling and appearing at ease. This was all done because the stakes were so high. The Man could do things. The possibility of my stepfather being arrested or deported was not inconceivable. Worse had happened to people we knew.
Sitting in the idling van, waiting in line at the border crossing near Kingston, we invoked every mantra and blessing available to us for safe passage. Scanning the waiting cars, we even tempted karmic retribution, secretly wishing that other disreputable vehicles might draw attention away from ourselves. But in the sea of American-made, four-door behemoths there were rarely more suspect modes of transportation than our bumper-sticker-adorned, mattress-in-the-backseat, floral-curtained German van. We’d traveled over three hundred miles out of our way on a second-hand rumor that this border station might be more ‘easy going’ than the Peace Bridge or Windsor-Detroit. Looking at the booths manned by crewcut, mirrored-sunglasses-wearing archetypes of authority, we began to consider the intel suspect.
As the lineup inched forward, we scrutinized our possible interrogators from a distance, searching for any hint of latent humanity, a friendly nod, a smile, anything. We watched and analyzed, each picking our favorite, the one we hoped we would get, the one we prayed we would not. From the backseat, I watched my father’s knuckles turn white from gripping the steering wheel. The hooked thumb of an exasperated border agent jerked into our consciousness, summoning us to our fate. Attached to the thumb, was a man who looked uncannily like the road boss in Cool Hand Luke. Our nerve browned and wilted as quickly as sprouts out of water.
Seconds into the interview between our hippie clan and The Man it was clear that what we had between us was a failure to communicate. He gave us a look of mild disgust and his jaw churned as if he were attempting to dislodge a piece of fatty gristle from between his teeth. Only when we stumbled over the answers to his most basic questions did his face register any hint of personal satisfaction. The agonizing encounter seemed to last forever, even though it was probably less than a minute before he gave us the fateful utterance: “Pull it over.”
Making the crawl of shame, we cut across the lanes of free-flowing traffic and headed towards the inspection station. We didn’t say a word; partly because of a hippie urban legend that claimed border stations had high power dishes that could pick up conversation in cars, mostly because we felt so defeated.
From the backseat floor, to the roof rack on top, our van was loaded to the gills. Most families don’t give notice on their apartments before going on vacation. Mine always did. Though in theory our excursion to California was simply a pleasure trip, in actuality, our travels were generally open-ended, with the possibility of an impromptu move never far beyond the fringe. With this potentiality in mind, the van was filled with everything not haggled away at our most recent garage sale. The remaining contents of our lives rolled along with us on four bald tires and three functioning forward gears.
As a pair of eager inspectors rifled through our belongings looking for any reason to justify digging deeper, we sat on the hard curb watching nervously. With a noticeable smirk, one of the border agents approached us holding a backpack and a purse pulled from the van. The purse belonged to an occasional traveling companion and family friend named Mary Ellen. Why, exactly, we had Mary Ellen’s backpack and purse remains somewhat of a head-scratching mystery to my entire family. But people came and went. Friends would travel with us for a time, part ways to pursue their own quests, and then find us again in some far off city with the uncanny skill of homing pigeons. Not surprisingly, this ethereal explanation failed to satisfy the border agents. They promptly hauled my mother and stepfather into separate interrogation rooms, leaving my sister and I to sit in the noonday sun and watch the dismantling of our van.
Two years older than me, my sister held my hand protectively as we watched them toss all of our belongings out of the van and onto the concrete. It felt like a garage sale in hell as the uniformed agents pawed through our clothes and personal items. As morbidly interesting as it was, after a few hours we grew bored. With naïve pluck, my sister approached one of the agents and asked if we could have a couple of our dolls to play with. This prompted an invasive and grueling strip search of Barbie and Captain Kirk before they could be released into our protective custody.
Things livened up somewhat with the arrival of the drug-sniffing dog, a gimpy German shepherd clearly counting the days until retirement. The dog took a few lackadaisical turns around the van before plunking himself down in a convenient patch of shade. Showing uncharacteristic concern, the agents gathered around the old dog. After an intense debate, it was agreed that the dog had a cold and was incapable of smelling anything whatsoever. This only goaded the agents to redouble their efforts. As they broke out the screwdrivers and crowbars, the sweet old dog watched with mild disinterest.
As the day wore on and nothing was discovered, it dawned on one of the agents that my sister or I might be a valuable source of information. After hours of sitting alone without our parents watching armed men tear through our stuff, we were offered juice and cookies. This was a dilemma. The prohibition against accepting candy from strangers was weighed against hunger, and the fact that these were real cookies. Not homemade carob-sawdust cookies, but genuine store bought Oreo’s, with that heavenly white lickable center. We never stood a chance. As we scarfed them down, a smiling man in uniform knelt before us.
“Do your parents have any drugs in the van?” he asked, focusing his attention on me.
I looked to my older sister for guidance. She gave me her patented bug-eyed evil-death stare that unmistakably compelled me to remain silent. The agent dangled another Oreo towards me.
“Yes,” I said tentatively, inching towards the Oreo.
“Really?” said the agent. “What kind of drugs?”
For a moment I wavered, unsure whether or not to divulge more. Finally, I crumbled.
“My mother’s birth control pills,” I confessed, snatching the cookie from his outstretched hand and stuffing it into my mouth. At six, I was already well aware of the relative merits of the pill, diaphragms, and rubbers, even if only in a theoretical sense.
Laughing, the agents lost their professional zeal, and with it, their desire to continue the search. My mother and stepfather, who had somehow cobbled together identical explanations for the purse and pack while in separate detention rooms, were released with a stern warning.
As we picked our lives up off the ground and put the van back together, the man who had bribed me to squeal spoke to my father.
“Well,” he said, “if you got something hid in there, you sure got it hid good. Better not let me see you again.”
We never did see him again, though we saw plenty of others like him as we continued our travels.
I married my wife almost a decade ago. It wasn’t a church wedding, but it was legal. The daughter of a Republican stockbroker from Pittsburgh, somehow she’s grown up to be a vegetarian, yoga-practicing, semi-Buddhist. I’m an occasional meat eater, who still gets stressed, cuts his hair, and buttons up his best shirt before crossing the border. My wife laughs at this phantom fear of authority, this hangover from my crazy hippie childhood. With family and friends in both Canada and the United States, we regularly make the trip across the Peace Bridge in our little fuel-efficient Honda Civic. She always drives, laughing and joking with the border agents, while in the passenger seat I keep my mouth shut and try not to appear nervous and nauseous. We never get stopped.
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