Fiction from The Literary Review

Fredrick Barton

How the State of Illinois Made Me a Criminal in Louisiana

In January, 2003, six days before my driver’s license expired on the birthday I share with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I went to the New Orleans renewal bureau and promptly began to stand in line with about three dozen other unlucky Capricorns. I had been allowed to renew by mail four years ago, so this time the State of Louisiana required that I be seen as a real live person and not just a signature on a form. Anybody can sign a form. But only real live people can stand in line. And standing in line is why we have bureaucracies. I think that fact is in the Constitution. So being a real live person I stood. And I stood. And I inched. And I stood.
           Finally, six minutes short of an hour after I began standing, I found myself face to ear with Mr. Nameless Functionary, a bespectacled man with gray temples showing out from under his stocking cap, who never, even once, took his eyes off his computer. He was wearing knit gloves with the fingers cut off allowing him to type. It’s true it’s warm in Louisiana, but only outside.
           He stuck his arm and hand toward me, palm up. “License and proof of insurance,” he said, his tone as flat as leftover beer.
           Being the incessantly prepared (not to mention impatient) sort, I already had these items out of their wallet pockets, and I laid them immediately in his blue fuzzy hand. He brought the insurance card briefly in front of his face, then just as quickly handed it back with no comment. The bottom edge of my expiring driver’s license he stuck between the cream-colored plastic frame and the lower-left-hand corner of his terminal screen. Then he began to type. He appeared to be a good typer.
           He typed. Then he paused. And though I never saw his face from the front, I think he squinted, though perhaps he just blinked.
           Then, just as he paused again, he said, and I quote him with great accuracy, he said, though not loudly, he said, “Hmmm.”
           Hmmm? Hmmm!
           I speak from experience when I assure you of this: When you have already waited in line almost exactly an hour, you are not anxious for Mr. Nameless Functionary handling your case to stare at his computer screen and remark, “Hmmm.”
           “What’s the matter?” I asked, still bursting with confidence. It is true that two months earlier I had gotten a speeding ticket for driving forty miles an hour on Claiborne Avenue where the speed limit is thirty-five and most people drive fifty. And it’s true that I was sullen with the police officer who ticketed me, resentful that I got a ticket for driving only forty when most people drive fifty and even sixty. But it’s also true that I gritted my teeth, paid my ticket and went on with my life. I had a current license plate, a valid brake tag, and no outstanding violations, not even a parking citation.
           “Sumpin up here,” Mr. Nameless Functionary said, typing again.
           “Something’s up?” I inquired. “What? What’s up? What could be up?”
           His fingers flurried his keyboard, and I tried unsuccessfully to twist myself over the counter between us so I could see what he was doing.
           His fingers paused, and he said, “Ah, here it is.”
           Add to the list of phrases you don’t want to hear muttered about you: “Ah, here it is.”
           “Here what is?” I asked, concern creeping into my voice.
           As if flicking away an insect that had alit there, Mr. Nameless Functionary brushed his fingers across the top several lines on his computer screen.
           “Can’t renew your license,” he said, his tone registering neither pleasure nor regret.
           “Can’t renew my license?” I responded. “I’ve waited in line over an hour. What do you mean you can’t renew my license?”
           “State of Illinois’s got a block on you,” Mr. Nameless Functionary explained.
           “What??? What does that mean?” I demanded.
           Mr. Nameless Functionary pointed at the lines on his computer screen. “What it says. State of Illinois’s got a block on you.”
           “You said that before. But what does it mean?”
           Mr. Nameless Functionary shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “It means State of Illinois’s got a block on you. That’s why I can’t renew your license.”
           “We’re talking in circles here,” I said to the man’s ear.
           He shrugged again. “All I know,” he offered, perhaps in the way of helpless consolation.
           “All you know is that you can’t renew my license because the State of Illinois has a block on me?”
           “Um hmm,” he said.
           “That makes absolutely no sense whatsover.”
           “All I know,” Mr. Nameless Functionary said. He hit a computer key and his screen blinked to an opening menu, my State-of-Illinois-blocked record blipped into cyberspace. “Next,” he said in a loud voice.
           The sixtyish black lady behind me in line shouldered up against me at the counter.
           “You can’t just take the next person in line,” I protested. “What am I supposed to do now? I need to renew my driver’s license.”
           Mr. Nameless Functionary shrugged. What he lacked in eye contact, he more than made up in shrugging.
           “This is like something out of Kafka,” I said to the black lady, though intended for the bureaucrat’s ear. I instantly regretted the unbidden appearance of a literary allusion. These were not circumstances where literary references were likely to win you any favors, so I hurried on to address Mr. Nameless Functionary directly: “I insist you tell me what I am supposed to do now.”
           “All I can think of: Contact the State of Illinois,” he suggested. And, yes, he shrugged.
           For an instant I imagined myself like a child writing Santa Claus. “Dear State of Illinois: Why you got a block on me?”
           But though I am frequently enough accused of being childish, I am not a child, and so I reached into my adult’s bag of sure-fire demands: “I want to see your superior,” I told him with an appropriate mixture of resolve and hysteria.
           Twenty-five minutes later I was ushered into the office of Mr. Soothing But Alas Powerless Supervisor, a slight, balding, soft-bellyed man in a white shirt, tie and cardigan sweater. Reading glasses dangled around his neck on a black cord.
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor wanted to know the nature of my problem, and I explained that Mr. Nameless Functionary had not renewed my license. Mr. Soothing Supervisor asked to see my current license and used it for the information he typed into his computer terminal. He typed. He paused. He squinted, stabbed his glasses onto his nose, typed some more, paused again, then hit a single key.
           “Ah, here it is,” he said.
           “What?” I demanded. Dare I hope for escape from bureaucratic hell?
           No.
           “Says here, the State of Illinois’s got a block on you.”
           “What’s that mean? This is like something out of Kafka.” A literary allusionist is slow to abandon his worthless habits.
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor made no comment about Kafka one way or the other. But he did say, “Means you did something to make the State of Illinois put a block on you.”
           “I absolutely did not,” I said. A snapshot of my expression will be used in the next American Heritage Dictionary to illustrate the word Indignation. “I don’t live in Illinois. I don’t have an Illinois driver’s license.”
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor looked at me over the top of his glasses. “You ever been in Illinois?” he inquired.
           What was he now, a prosecutor trying to trap me under interrogation? “Of course, I’ve been in Illinois,” I said. “I fly in and out of Chicago at least once a year. Some years several times.”
           “Rent a car when you’re there?”
           “Yes, sometimes.”
           “Get a ticket?”
           “No.”
           “Never?”
           “Never.”
           “A parking ticket perhaps?”
           “Not even a parking ticket. Not that I know of.”
           “Not that you know of?”
           “Look, I haven’t gotten a ticket of any kind. Not even a parking ticket.”
           “Well, you must have done something.”
           “Why?”
           “Because the State of Illinois’s got a block on you.”
           “That’s getting to be the ugly refrain of this disharmonic musical.”
           “Excuse me?”
           “Y’all keep telling me that the State of Illinois has a block on me, but I have no idea what that means however many times you repeat it to me.”
           “It means we can’t renew your license.”
           “Well, I understand that. Or at least I understand that you are persistently telling me that.”
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor shrugged. (Yes he did.) “It’s what the computer says. And that’s all we got to go by.”
           I started to ask if the computer said I was Adolf Hitler, would he go by that even if I didn’t have a mustache or a German accent and didn’t seem particularly dead. But sometimes I have the good sense to restrain myself.
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor looked at me impassively. He reminded me of a cow. I avoided pointing that out to him.
           “I really am trying to be calm, sir,” I said, trying to be calm. “Are you telling me that there’s no way you can renew my driver’s license?”
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor made a sound in his throat that sounded like mooing (I swear it) before finally saying, “I’m afraid not.”
           “But I have a job,” I pointed out. “I have to drive to work. I have bills to pay. My children are relying on me.” I don’t actually have children, but I thought the image of starving innocents might stimulate Mr. Soothing Supervisor to assist me. His face was so still I thought it looked frozen. “Is there nothing you can do?”
           “Not as long as the State of Illinois’s got a block on you,” he explained.
           “What can I do about that? How can I get myself unblocked?”
           “That you’ll have to take up with the State of Illinois.”
           “How?”
           “You’ll just have to contact them.”
           “This really is like something out of Kafka,” I said, feeling like the whole situation was like something out of Kafka and, like something out of Kafka, failing to have the good sense to stop pointing out how Kafka-like things were. A few years ago I was notified of a tax lien filed against me because of some tax dodging done by a fellow named Fred Barton. I go by Rick, and I always pay my taxes because I don’t want to have a tax lien levied against me. Fred Barton had a different social security number than I and had never lived in the State of Louisiana, but the situation still took about twenty hours of my time to get resolved, and now I wondered if it had returned, if Fred Barton weren’t now in Illinois doing bad things for which I was getting blamed.
           Mr. Soothing Supervisor stared at me and avoided making comment about Kafka or Fred Barton either one.
           “Really, sir,” I said. “Surely you’re not suggesting I just write a letter to the State of Illinois. Surely, you can give me an address or a phone number or something.”
           This suggestion was evidently not a concept which Mr. Soothing Supervisor would have come to on his own. But he spun back to his computer, typed a bit, then gave the Springfield phone number for the office of the Illinois Secretary of State. I wondered if he might be able to contact that office to get to the bottom of this matter, but he assured me he couldn’t. That was just something I’d have to do myself.
           Back in my office, with a pile of work moldering in neglect, I called the number Mr. Soothing Supervisor had provided me. I was greeted by an automaton who listed some options I could select by pushing a number on my touch-tone phone. No option specified what to do if the State of Illinois’s got a block on you. So I pushed the button for Traffic Division where an automaton offered some other options including that of talking to a real live employee of the Illinois Secretary of State. Pushing that button produced an automaton who informed me that all the real live employees were talking to other people. I was encouraged to wait on the line and promised that my call would be answered in the order in which it was received. This item of encouragement and promise was repeated every three minutes for the next half hour. Long distance.
           Then, just as I was about to remark to an automaton that this situation was like something out of Kafka, my call was taken by Mr. Rude Impatience. When I began to explain that I was having trouble renewing my Louisiana driver’s license, he interrupted to ask what that had to do with the State of Illinois. I said, in so many words, protesting my mystification about the entire matter, that the State of Illinois’s got a block on me.
           “License number?” he demanded.
           “My Louisiana driver’s license number?”
           “And why would I care about your Louisiana license?”
           “I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
           He didn’t respond. But I could hear him breathing.
           “Sir?” I inquired mildly, worried that he might hang up on me and I’d have to start over again with the automatons.
           Finally he said, enunciating each word as if he were talking to someone who didn’t speak English as his first language, “I’ll need the number of your Illinois driver’s license.”
           “I don’t have one,” I said.
           “You don’t have one.”
           “No sir.”
           “Did you ever have one?”
           “No sir.”
           “Social,” Mr. Rude Impatience said.
           “Social?”
           “Your social security number,” he said with as much acid in his tone as in the three stomachs of a dyspeptic Holstein.
           I gave him my social security number, and then he said, “Here we go.”
           Yes, “here we go” is still another phrase you can hope to avoid.
           “Fredrick Barton?” he said.
           “Yes,” I replied. I had told him my name at the outset of our conversation, but he was evidently reluctant to believe I was who I said I was until he could read my name on his computer.
           He read out my date of birth, and I agreed that I’d always been told I’d been born on that date, though I had no recollection of it myself. Actually, I just thought of saying such a thing, but since Mr. Rude Impatience didn’t strike me as having a sense of humor, I just confirmed my birth date with an “uh huh.”
           “I got your problem right here,” he informed me, and for the first time I felt a flicker of hope that I was about to get this matter solved.
           “Yes,” I said, hopefully.
           “State of Illinois’s got a block on you.”
           I waited ten exasperated seconds before I said, “Yes. That’s why I called you.”
           Then the thunderbolt.
           “Warrant has been issued for your arrest,” he said as if he were reading ingredients on a cereal box.
           “What!” I said.
           “Warrant has been issued for your arrest. You best turn yourself in.”
           “That’s preposterous,” I said. “I haven’t done anything.”
           “You must have done something.”
           “I most certainly haven’t.”
           “State of Illinois isn’t in the habit of issuing arrest warrants for nothing.”
           “This is like something out of Kafka,” I said.
           Mr. Rude Impatience was no more literary than his New Orleans colleagues and offered no judgment on this issue. He did however say, “They always go easier on you if you turn yourself in.”
           “Turn myself in for what? I haven’t done anything.”
           “You can have your day in court.”
           “Look,” I said. “I live in Louisiana. I have lived in Louisiana for the last twenty-four years. I don’t live in Illinois. Are you telling me I should just fly up to Springfield to turn myself in?”
           “No I am not,” Mr. Rude Impatience said. “I am telling you that you should turn yourself in to authorities in Lincoln, Illinois. That’s where the incident took place.”
           “Incident? What incident?”
           “Record doesn’t contain that information. Just says it took place in Lincoln and there’s a warrant out for your arrest.”
           (And you thought those Kafka references were hyperbolic, didn’t you?)
           Eventually, Mr. Rude Impatience gave me a phone number to the Lincoln County Courthouse. I called it, but an automaton informed me that the courthouse was closed and due to the Martin Luther King national holiday would remain closed until the following Tuesday.
           All that long holiday weekend I kept looking over my shoulder for Illinois State Troopers arriving to take me to justice.
           The following Tuesday, with only two days remaining before my Louisiana driver’s license expired, I dialed the Lincoln County Court-house, and a remarkable thing happened. A human being answered. Betty. I explained my circumstances and protested my innocence, and she pledged to help. She typed my info into her computer and confirmed that Lincoln County Illinois had indeed issued a warrant for my arrest in February of 1971.
           “1971!” I yelped.
           “What it says, here,” Betty informed me but in a tone imbued with sympathy and wonder. “Did you do something in Lincoln in 1971?
           “I most certainly did not! I don’t even know where Lincoln is.”
           “It was a long time ago,” Betty pointed out.
           “What does it say I did? I didn’t do it, whatever it says.”
           “The computer record doesn’t say what you did. It only lists the date the warrant was issued.”
           “It doesn’t say what I’m accused of?”
           “No. Just that you are to be arrested on sight.”
           “Thirty-two years ago?”
           “Yes, sir.”
           Kafka.
           “And now the State of Illinois has a block on me,” I observed.
           “I guess. Have you had a driver’s license since 1971?”
           “Ma’am,” I said, summoning calm and mindful that Betty was the first bureaucrat in this nightmare who didn’t seem actively on Kafka’s side. “Ma’am, like most Americans, I’ve had a driver’s license since I was a teenager. And since 1971, I’ve had one in four different states: Missouri, California, Iowa and Louisiana. And I’ve renewed my Louisiana license every four years since 1979. Until now. Now I’m told I can’t renew my Louisiana license because the State of Illinois has a block on me. And evidently the State of Illinois has a block on me for something the State of Illinois says I did in 1971. But the State of Illinois, nickname: The Slow Block State, Illinois is unable to tell me what it alleges I did.”
           “I guess that’s right,” Betty admitted.
           Kafka.
           “Do you realize how Kafkaesque this is?” I whispered.
           There was a silence at the other end of the phone during which time I concluded that though The Trial ought to be required reading for everyone in government service, no bureaucrat on earth has read it. Then, in alarm, I began to worry that Betty might have thought I’d invoked Spanish slang for dung, that I’d said not Kafkaesque but cacaesque.
           “Miss Betty,” I said, desperately, a form of address Southern children like me were required to use for familiar adults, in short, humbling myself before this unseen woman, a voice in my ear. “Miss Betty, is there anything you think you might be able to do for me?” I did not add, short of advising me to fly to Lincoln wherever in Illinois it is and turning myself in for a crime unnamed.
           “I could talk to my supervisor,” she said.
           “I’ll be glad to hold,” I said.
           Betty went away and when she returned, she explained that records from so long ago were kept “in a paper form” in a storage room in another building. Any details about the warrant for my arrest would be in that warehouse. “If they still exist,” she said. “1971 was a long time ago.”
           “The State of Illinois’s got a block on Methuselah,” I said.
           Yes, I just can’t help myself.
           Betty didn’t comment about Methuselah, and I suddenly began to fear that she thought I was talking about a drug. Hey, wanna snort some Methuselah? Far out stuff, man.
           That’s when Betty said she’d go her own self and look in that warehouse for my records. “I’ll go before work tomorrow, and I’ll call you first thing when I get in.”
           I gave her my number and indulged myself a sweaty shred of hope.
           Betty didn’t call.
           I sat by the phone all day like a teenaged girl hoping the cute guy in geometry will ring up to ask her to the prom. I didn’t get a lick of work done. Finally, at ten till five, Betty called. She was sorry, she had just been swamped all day long. But she had news. She had found my file with all its sordid details.
           “It says here,” Betty said, presumably reading from Kafka’s own script, “that you were issued a citation for running a red light in August of 1970.”
           And then in a flash of recall that seemed to arrive from an alternate existence, the memory came flooding back.
           “Was this for running a red light on Route 66?” I now remembered driving my red VW bug through a yellow light on my trip from Indiana, where I’d gone to college, to St. Louis, where I was moving to teach high school social studies and coach basketball. The back seat of the Beetle was piled to the ceiling with boxes, and I couldn’t see out the back with my rear view mirror. I was driving the speed limit, sixty-five as I remember, but maybe seventy. And not sure who was behind me or how close, when the light turned yellow, I hit the accelerator rather than the brake. Whether I made it through the intersection before the light turned red was a matter of a short debate between me and the officer who pulled me over. But it didn’t matter, he explained, for I had sinned enough for a ticket simply by entering the intersection after the light had turned yellow. I was guilty.
           If I had stopped off in Lincoln, Illinois, in August of 1970 and committed an armed robbery or even a rape, I would be protected by a statute of limitations. But for the crime of entering an intersection on yellow, the State of Illinois had been after me for thirty-two years. And now, it had a block on me.
           Is America a great country, or what?
           I admitted to Betty that I was guilty, but then I also told her an essentially important additional fact. The whole of the ancient memory, now clearly focussed in my middle-aged brain, I told her, “But I paid that ticket.” And I had. As soon as I got the right box unpacked in St. Louis, the one with my checkbook in it, I sat down, wrote and mailed a $30 check to Lincoln County, Illinois. A resentful, perhaps, but nonetheless law-abiding young citizen, I had paid my debt to society, a long ago fact I had no doubt Betty would now dispute.
           But she didn’t. Instead she said, “You sure did, Mr. Barton. I’ve got your check right here.”
           And then the rest of the memory clicked in. The check never cleared. But since I never heard from the State of Illinois about the matter again, I thought I’d cleared the ticket and that the check was lost and never cashed. Lucky me.
           No, unlucky me.
           Betty explained that Lincoln County doesn’t accept personal checks but only cashiers’ checks or money orders.
           “But how was I to know that?” I exclaimed.
           “We sent you a letter,” Betty said. “There’s a copy of it here in the file.”
           But, of course, the letter had been mailed to the address on my driver’s license. They sent it to an apartment building in Valparaiso, Indiana, where it was presumably thrown away by a new resident who had never heard of me.
           And six months later, never having gotten its requested cashier’s check or money order, still refusing to cash my personal check, Lincoln County issued a warrant for my arrest.
           So, though utterly unaware of it, I’ve been on the lam for over three decades, a fugitive from justice thwarting all of Illinois’s futile efforts to apprehend me, until our national security apparatus, beefed up in the aftermath of 9/11, tracked my criminal butt down and put a block on me.
           Betty told me how I could untangle my situation by sending cashiers’ checks or money orders to both Lincoln County and the State of Illinois. And I emerged from this experience having learned two lessons. First, be thankful for the Bettys you may be lucky enough to encounter. Second, be really happy you have a nice Anglo name like Fredrick Barton. For in our post 9/11 world of enhanced homeland security I fear the State of Illinois might put a block on Ahmed Aziz until 2071.
           Even with my lessons learned, the Illinois bureaucracy continued to operate at the forward speed of a melting glacier. My Louisiana license expired. And, having to go to work and attend to the usual errands of life, I was reduced to traffic criminality for five long weeks. And the whole time, spooked by every passing police cruiser, I wondered, were I busted for driving without a Louisiana license, if I could find a judge who might have heard of Kafka.