Bonnaroo

Part 1: Border Fuzz

Matt ran his fingers through his hair, rocking back and forth and shaking his head
slowly in his hands.
I looked over. “Calm down man. Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”
“Look, there’s nothing you can say that will calm me down right now. I’ll be calm once
we cross the border.”
He continued his finger-combing. “How much do we have? No, wait, I don’t want to
know.”
All together we were carrying less than an ounce of weed in the minivan, keeping us
on the safer side of the line between partially fucked and totally fucked. It was the 25
MDMA pills stashed away in one of Greg’s bags that put us over that line.
I had also packed over a dozen Cake Pops: chocolate-coated balls of cake and cannabis
icing (served on a stick for convenience), prepared by a friend back in Toronto. They were
well-made; you could barely taste the weed. Perhaps I could offer some to the border
guards if they hassled us.
And the guards were going to hassle us a little. I was sure of that. There’s something
about a borrowed minivan filled with bags and boxes driven by four people under 25
heading to a music festival that just screams “random search!” and if the border guards
found anything, that was it — our trip would be over before it began. All we could do was
play it cool and hope we didn’t look like a threat to national security.
We probably should have crossed the border clean. You can get whatever drugs you
need at Bonnaroo, but we still took the risk bringing some from home. Sure, our Canadian
weed was better (and cheaper) than any of the American schwagg we’d find in Tennessee,
but that alone wasn’t enough for me to justify smuggling it. I mostly did it because I was
curious; I wanted to see if we could get away with it. So much of what we do is influenced
and regulated by threat of punishment if we cross some arbitrary line, be it a law or a
border. I wanted to know just how empty the threats really were.
The only one of us with clean bags was Matt, aside from the under-the-counter
Adderall he had on him. The border guards might wonder why he was carrying prescription
amphetamines in a Tic-Tac container, but that was more inconvenience than illegal. Then
again, it didn’t matter whose bags were carrying which drugs; we’d all be equally fucked if
the guards found them.
Traffic at the border was surprisingly light. We didn’t have to wait long before we
pulled up to the booth and Greg handed the guard our documents.
“Citizenship?” the booth guard asked as he flipped through the passports.
“Canadian.”
“What is this?” he held up my enhanced driver’s license, something I picked up
specifically for this trip, since it was now impossible to enter the States with a regular
Ontario driver’s license.
U.S. border guards are among the most serious people in the world. No matter what
you tell them, you’ll always get the same look: like you’re lying and they know it.
But he asked, so I told him. “It’s an enhanced driver’s license.”
“No it’s not,” he snapped, an odd response considering the words “Enhanced Driver’s
License” were printed in bold above my photograph.
The booth guard waved the license in front of the RFID scanner anyway in an attempt
to show me that he was right and I was a lying terrorist. The scanner beeped.
“Oh, so it is,” he grumbled, apparently angry at the license for proving him wrong.
He asked us the standard questions: Where were we going? Why? How long? Were we
bringing any fruits or vegetables with us? Nothing out of the ordinary. He gave us the border
guard look the whole time, but after a while, I thought we were free and clear.
“Pull your car around to the side and park it,” he ordered, pointing around the corner
to where other cars were being dissected trunk by trunk. “You’ll get your documents back
inside.”
Oh shit. Oh shit. Shit shit shit. They were going to search us. What would they find?
Maybe nothing. Probably something. Border guards search vehicles for a living; they know
their way around a minivan filled with contraband.
No one said a word as we parked and headed inside. Straight faces all around. None of
us looked interested in cracking. That might change once they led us into separate rooms
and began the waterboarding, but in the meantime, we were stone-cold pros.
Our interrogator was sitting behind a reception desk, next to the elevators and across
from the vending machines. He didn’t seem like much, and it would be easy to confuse his
workspace with a DMV waiting area. Still, he made us sit and wait for five minutes, just to
let the tension mount. We could no longer see the minivan, so we had no way of knowing
what they had found so far. I’m sure he knew that.
When the reception guard eventually called us up, he started running through more of
the standard questions. It didn’t make any sense — by now they probably had my stash, the
Cake Pops and Greg’s pills. Heather hid her pot with care, but the other stuff gave them
enough of a reason to tear everything apart anyway. They had us by the balls, yet this guard
was still asking us about our borrowed minivan.
“You mean you all have jobs but none of you owns a car?”
What kind of CIA mind games was this guy playing? Perhaps our lack of car ownership
flagged us as terrorists, because only terrorists share things like cars. Genuine freedom-
loving patriots own their own cars and they wouldn’t think about letting another person get
behind the wheel unless a briefcase full of money was involved. That’s the American way,
not our extremist car-sharing fundamentalism.
I began to wonder what would happen to us once they found everything. They would
probably lock us up for a long time. And getting caught smuggling drugs isn’t like being
convicted of massive fraud or political corruption — we’d be sent to real prison, the type
where inmates’ colons get rearranged in the shower on a daily basis.
None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for September 11th. When those planes
hit those towers, America lost its collective shit. While the country was still in shock,
Americans were told the best way to fight the terrorists was to shop, forfeit civil liberties,
and bomb a couple of countries back to the stone age, so they did just that. Once it
became apparent no one felt any safer, they turned to their borders. Slowly but surely, it
became more and more difficult to enter the U.S. legally without a cavity search, and we
were the result — nothing more than collateral damage in the war on terror.
The interrogation ended without any mention of illicit substances or smuggling or
terrorism and the guard gave us back our documents, but we still couldn’t leave. Something
was up.
As we sat back down to await our fate, an armoured truck pulled up just outside the
entrance. Matt nearly shat himself. We were sure it was there to haul us off to Gitmo or
whatever eastern European interment camp the Department of Homeland Security set up to
extract information from Canadian drug smugglers.
The guard at the entrance motioned towards us. This was it. We were about to spend
the rest of our lives being tortured and gang-raped, all because we tried to bring drugs to a
music festival. Counter-terrorism at work.
“Ok, you can go,” he said.
We filed out in stunned silence. They were letting us go? Aside from one or two bags
on the top of the luggage pile in the back of the minivan, everything was as we left it. We
all figured they were going to find something; it never occurred to us that they wouldn’t
even bother searching.
We made it through, drugs and all. We fooled the U.S. government. This must be what
freedom feels like. Eat that, Uncle Sam!
We didn’t say anything to each other for the first couple of blocks, but once we were
absolutely sure we were clear of the border we erupted in a fit of laughing and cheering
and clapping in celebration of our perfect crime. Even Matt was ecstatic.
“I think you all owe me an apology,” he said. “You called me paranoid when I said I
was worried about crossing the border. ‘It’ll be fine,’ you said, ‘we’ll get across no
problem.’”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” I said.
Heather pulled out one of the three joints she was carrying in her pocket. Matt stared
at her in disbelief.
“You had those on you the whole time?”
Heather shrugged. “Yeah. It’s not like I can get at the rest of the pot right now. I
rolled these for the road.”
“What the fuck? What if there had been dogs? Were you trying to get caught?”
I started laughing again. “Who cares man, we made it! Woo! Next stop:
Bonnaroooooooo!”
Matt just shook his head.