Identity Crisis

My Massachusetts driver’s license expired on my birthday, July 4, this year, 2010. I set out with driver’s license and passport to the DMV nearest me in Brooklyn a few days before my birthday. It was the day before the official heat wave but still the air was thick and sultry. People had slowed to a crawl.

I haven’t learned my way around Brooklyn yet, and this was the first time I ventured out by bus. A young pretty Polish woman in a short dress, who was riding the bus with her mother, helped me with the bus route after she saw me studying my foldout plastic Brooklyn map. She didn’t know what the DMV was but we both knew the surrounding clothes stores. I liked her, and her “veh are you goingk?” accent, right away, especially for having the gumption to be the caretaker of me in that moment; she with her heavy accent and non-English speaking mother.

There’s nothing to say about the Atlantic Center DMV. It’s another featureless, soulless, government room where nondescript stations of cheap formica and plastic divide the miserable workers from the miserable patrons. A few bored uniformed guards leaned against counters. One very serious and slight Indian fellow commandeered the line to make sure we didn’t bunch up rather than follow the path of the ropes he set up. I was surrounded by no one like me: No skinny white woman in her 50s sweating in her summer dress trying to read the New York Times standing up and shuffling forward every few moments.

I waited in that snaky line for two hours to be told by a fire-plug of a woman with a sewn-in weave and day–glo nail tips, that I need my social security card. Didn’t matter that it has a different name, was issued when I was 12, and my social security number is on my Massachusetts driver’s license. She crossed her hefty arms over her hefty chest, leaned back in her cubicle chair, and I knew we were done.

A few days later I set out again for the DMV, on the hottest day of the year; a record breaker that made the front page of the New York Times. I had the poodles in tow. After a slow twelve blocks, I sent them on their way with their new groomer -- a young tattooed woman, more people-friendly than most dog groomers, whose own dog, a cockapoo, sports a perfectly coiffed mohawk.

I left the air-conditioned shop quickly, the way you leave a crying toddler at daycare, and stood at a bus stop for a moment before deciding I would walk from bus stop to bus stop until I arrived at the DMV, or the bus came. I turned onto Flatbush Avenue, the original “main drag,” a wide thoroughfare, constructed in the early 1900s, serving as the main artery through every Brooklyn borough. The heat was stultifying but I turned this into a mission, pointless really, to get to the DMV on foot and beat the bus.

The line was longer this time and I waited behind a man who was scolded by the man in front of him for not giving him enough space. In front of that man was a woman dwarf with nice sandals on her rather large well-manicured feet. He was giving her enough space. Because the heat and the boredom and the featureless room can drive a person crazy, the man in front of me stayed a good distance from the scolder and kept a wary eye on him. I could not concentrate on reading or much of anything for the next two hours because the man in front of me would not move up in line the appropriate social distance from the man in front of him who would not move up enough, possibly for fear of falling over the dwarf.

When I reached the front of the line two and a half hours later, I was so anxious, weary, annoyed – I don’t know what I was really -- that I felt dizzy and not at all prepared for the line of bad ass urban mamas that seem to man the place. This time I was told that my social security card was not a social security card at all but a “stub.” A stub? I was speechless. I started to sputter something like, “This is from the 1960s. From California. I’m 53 YEARS OLD. This card has been in a folder for probably 40 years. No one ever wants to see a card….” “Window 28,” was all she said. I wandered off – tired, poor, one of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free -- in search of window 28. I told the next executioner that I already had HAD a NYC driver’s license from 1984 to 2002. That my social security number was on my Massachusetts license, which, incidentally, was issued AFTER 9/11 if that’s the problem. I have a CURRENT PASSPORT. How could I possible get a passport and not a NYC driver’s license? The outcome; I need a new social security card in order to get a NYC driver’s license.

That evening I checked the web site of the social security administration only to find it was hacked. The next morning I called to learn what I could by phone before venturing to another government office. I was told by a woman (since only women seem to work as clerks in government offices), that I had to call a local Brooklyn office.

After waiting on hold forever which is nothing like waiting in line and I will never complain about being put on hold again, the second woman – obviously a Brooklynite by accent -- asked me if I could bring a marriage license to show my name change from my maiden to married name. Argh! I did not have a marriage license because it was destroyed along with many other things in the back of an open truck belonging to the flea market, “estate mover,” couple I hired cheaply to move all my things, Beverly Hills Hillbilly-style as it turned out, to Brooklyn and the truck got caught in a downpour on I95. But that sounded too insane so I said that my papers were ruined in a flood. I even embellished to say that a river jumped its banks. I told her the only document I had pertaining to my marriage or divorce was a “Get,” which, I started to explain, was a Jewish divorce … when she interrupted with a droll “I know what a Get is.” She said it would only be useful if it had my maiden name, which it did not, although it is an otherwise fascinating document that includes the entire conversation I had with the firing squad of three rabbis about why I was getting a divorce.

She then paused and a moment later informed me I already had a social security card in my married name. I applied for it in 1988. It all came back to me! One year after I was married, when my daughter was born, I figured, what the heck, all last names are men’s names so I might as well take the name of the man I like best. From that day on I became Robin Maltz. I was told to call another number for a replacement card. That woman told me I only needed my passport and driver’s license and to go to the office on Fulton Avenue which is off Flatbush Avenue.

This time I took the subway. It was now the hottest day possibly in all of recorded history. So hot, the New York Times didn’t even mess around with a front-page iconic photo of kids playing in an opened fire hydrant, but ran a story about Con Ed being overloaded and blackouts predicted. Deeper in the paper was a story about a couple of guys who successfully fried eggs on the sidewalk in Times Square.

When I got out several stations later in the blazing heat, I was in one of those awful consumerist-sprawl areas of downtown Brooklyn. As I turned the corner, I came upon a big dead fake-but-very-real-looking orange orangutan lying in front of a Burger King next to young women in Greenpeace t-shirts holding signs that read, “Cutter King, Flame Roasted Rain Forests.” I was moved close to tears that these young women cared so much that they stood there on a boiling hot day. (After searching on the web for this particular action I saw that every other orangutan was upright handing out pamphlets, so our Brooklyn friend was either an empty suit or a dead man from the heat.)

Brooklyn Social Security is not the DMV. Yes, there are hundreds of people waiting in one long winding snaky line filling out forms. But this crowd could be waiting for Space Mountain or the Matterhorn. Hardly anyone was over 30 and everyone is from not-USA and they all look highly spirited and cutely dressed and like they’re hoping for summer jobs. One older woman behind me spoke to me in Russian, (I learned a moment later when young men in front of me responded to her and I could see “Moscow” and “St. Petersburg” on their forms). She was not the only person who spoke to me in Russian over the next 3 hours. I was maybe a little overly pleased by that since I am of Russian Jewish decent on my mother’s side, and in my imagination, they could see this in me.

By the time I reached the front of the line, I had helped soothe an African baby, wondered what was the incentive behind many a tattoo, blockaded the Russian woman from taking cuts to get closer to the young Russian men for a chat, was hallucinated from staring at the Asian characters the guy in front of me was texting, couldn’t stop looking at how high the Serbian guy wore his pants, and listened to a not bad-looking well-built Italian guy argue to a clerk that no he did not have a utility bill with his full name on it because he just got out of prison.

This time my clerk was a white woman with a strawberry birthmark bifurcating one entire half of her face. The set up was such that when she turned to find my information on her computer, the strawberry side was presented to the patron. I would normally stare intently at the person who, in a matter of moments, would determine my legitimacy; I would be looking for clues as she read on a computer screen what I could not see. But this being an unusual situation, I politely did not stare, but looked around at her desk area through the glass window divider. She had three children. They were blonde and cute and young and all wore t-shirts and caps from a sports team. She too was wearing a t-shirt from a sports team. I want to say she was also wearing a baseball cap, but that couldn’t be so, even though, come to think of it, it was probably dress-down Friday.

“Your first name is spelled differently on your social security card from 1988 than it is on your current driver’s license and passport,” she said, as she turned to me with a concerned look in her very different eyes. “It is?” She then handed me a print-out with several variations of my name: my maiden and married names with and without my middle name; my middle name, Ann, spelling with and without an “e” on the end; a creative spelling of my first name that I used in high school; and a complete misspelling of my last name that I didn’t recognize at all and she said must have been a typo by social security. The creative high school spelling was the issue.

Thinking, “what’s the big deal?” I said that my name was R-o-b-i-n A M-a-l-t-z, the name on my Massachusetts driver’s license and passport. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ll need your birth certificate.”

I don’t usually cry in public except at the movies. I especially don’t cry if someone gets the better of me or if I am in a position where being a woman is at a disadvantage, like at a car dealership. But without even that moment before you cry when your lip does its own thing and you hope maybe breathing deeply and thinking you’ve been through worse will make you not cry -- tears sprang from my eyes; big copious gasping breath tears.

She apologized and told me, in a reassuring voice, that she’d call a supervisor. I heard her say, “crying,” into the phone. A tense young Asian man came over at a clip, as if I interrupted him from his otherwise important business. He was buttoned up with a tie on the hottest dress-down Friday in history and did not even glance at me before he handed me a piece of paper with the New Jersey registry phone number and walked away.

I appealed to the kindly clerk again. I told her about my trips to the DMV … about the flood. I said I changed my first name in high school to be cool, like lots of other kids in the early 70s, and had no idea how it got on my record. She said, with a wink in the not-strawberry eye, that she would call another supervisor. A schlubby guy meandered over. The nice guy. He listened to my sob (literally) story, looked at the computer, asked me a few questions, and said I had to get my birth certificate. At that point I was trying not to break into hysterics, hang myself, or faint, so I didn’t bother to tell any of them that my birth certificate is in yet another name, Robin Rochelle, but my mother changed that name when I entered first grade and she married her next husband. Those were the pre-George W. Bush, age of innocence years, when you can declare your name is Tree Silverwomyn, and so be it. The name on my birth certificate appears nowhere. I was not working or married before the age of 6.

I left and walked toward Flatbush in a stupor in the heat. I don’t remember getting on the subway or coming home. I put my Jackie O sunglasses over my swollen eyes and took the dogs for a walk. I encountered a friend at the park who found my experience Kafkaesque and said, “a social security card!? They’re not even laminated; forge one.” I considered it.

The next day I spoke to an immigration lawyer friend-of-a-friend. He told me to get together a string of evidence of my names. I opened the bins I carefully packed before moving from Massachusetts to Brooklyn the month before. I found the following:

• My kindergarten report card with my birth name
• The legal will of my grandfather, who died when I was 11, listing me by birth name and the last name of my mother’s husband (which later I used as my maiden name).
• An expired passport with my cool high-school spelled first name and maiden name
• An expired passport with my currently spelled first name and maiden name
• High school transcripts with my currently spelled first name and maiden name that were, however, sent to me in NYC at my cool high-school spelled first name and my now married name
• My high school yearbook in which my dorky picture is under my currently spelled first name and maiden name but friends wrote comments using my cool high-school spelled first name
• My ketuba, or Jewish marriage certificate, that is all in Hebrew except the part that says my maiden name and that I’m marrying someone with what became my current name although I’m no longer married.

And I have my current passport with Robin A. Maltz and my Massachusetts driver’s license in Robin A. Maltz that has my social security number as my driver’s license number … but nevermind.

This morning I intended to go back to the social security office when it opened at 7am. I didn’t. By mid-afternoon, the bad idea part of me won out over the logic part and I got on my bicycle to head down Flatbush, on another hot day but not the hottest, to go back to the DMV. The two-and-a-half-hour line moved much more quickly because this time, the DMV was only an hour away from closing, and these woman do not want to work overtime for the Man. It’s written all over the rushed way they got us moving. This time I was behind a short Latino guy with a fake bulletproof vest. I almost asked him about it but changed my mind. I knew it was fake by the graphic of a bullet on the back with a little faux-blood next to that, otherwise, what do I know about bulletproof vests. In front of him was a tall pasty white hipster in a porkpie hat. He asked me twice to borrow a pen but I had loaned it to the guy behind me whose daughter kept inching up the rope so that for most of the line it appeared that I was the mother of a small black child.

My first clerk was a nice elderly woman who talked to me and every worker behind her, at the same time. She was laughing about a woman who couldn’t figure out their (insane) number system and missed her turn when her number was called. She gave my ancient social security card, my passports current and expired, and my Massachusetts driver’s license a quizzical look and then sent me to the section to wait for my number to be called. Yes! The first hurdle jumped!

As I waited for my number to be called I realized that they would take my photo if this works and I have NO LIPSTICK in my purse. I read the New York Times magazine. An interview with Hugh Hefner made me even more irritated than the wait, the lack of lipstick, and the possibility that I would once more not get a card. This time, an insipid little worm of a clerk yawned in my face, looked at what I presented to him and left to get the supervisor. She was another member of the hand-on-the-hips, nail tips, deadly stare brigade. When she told me I needed a new social security card, I didn’t cry.

Tomorrow, social security.