Chapter 14 – The Immigration Blues

Well I’m a long, long way from that little girl of mine

She’s a living in the Fatherland down by the River Rhine

And she swore she’d wait for the day when I return

I got a long distance love and I’ve got a lot to learn

Oh, long distance, long distance, long distance love

And she’s the only woman I’ve been thinking of

I feel the pain from my head to my shoes

I’ve got a bad, bad case of the Immigration Blues

Immigration Blues – J.W. Haymer

On March 1, 1985, I woke up at four o’clock in the morning to get to the immigration office in downtown LA so I could take my place in the line. I knew there was going to a crowd of people from every imaginable ethnicity there, but I had no idea the line would extend from Olive Street north practically all the way to Dodger Stadium. I parked the car in the underground parking lot and found my place in line behind two women from Guatemala. I had come to apply for a fiancé petition which would enable Maria and me to get married. Janelle, thank God, was born in the US and was already an American citizen so that was one less problem we were going to have to deal with. You may ask what a nice Jewish patrician from Beverly Hills, a guy who would have found it a lot simpler to hire an attorney or an immigration service to stand in line for me by proxy was doing with the other common proletariat. Answer: I had used up all my financial resources on my trip to Europe so my bank account was Death Valley bone dry and I had no choice but to hang with the plebius populi.

I finally got into the building around two in the afternoon and was sitting behind the desk of an immigration official by three-thirty. I was handed all the paperwork and then dismissed for the next victim to be unsympathetically and inhumanly attended. She did tell me that it I would most likely hear back from them in three to six months. Welcome back to the red taped, clandestine world of bureaucracy, Mr. Haymer.

When I got back to Oakhurst Drive, (yes, I was back in my parent’s house again) I called Germany. Mrs. Bornemann told me that Maria was out on a modeling interview and that she would have her call back as soon as she could. After a week of without a returned call I began to get a little worried so I called again. This time she answered but she sounded a little strange and aloof. My imagination was working overtime. Did she find another love? Was she changing her mind about getting married and didn’t have the heart to tell me? Maybe she was just too busy with her new modeling career, or maybe was it the time difference? A myriad of morbid images would manifest in my mind and would continue like that for weeks. The phone calls were getting fewer and farther in between. I was beginning to drink more and more which I knew was not helping matters but I needed to turn off my mind and just sleep. If I could have gone to sleep for the three to six months until the petition was approved, if it was approved, I would have been pleased as punch (laced with Bacardi 151).

In May, I moved out of Oakhurst and found a one bedroom apartment on Camrose Drive just off Highland Avenue above Franklin, two blocks down from the Hollywood Bowl—Chas lived right across the street on Milner, so I at least had a friend nearby. I packed up my meager belongings into Mom’s Mercedes with Bridget Bardog and said goodbye to Beverly Hills, again. I gave my dad a big hug and thanked him for helping me move. The landlord was a four hundred pound packrat named Big Al Fohrman who always sarcastically called me Happy Haymer. When I knocked on his door to pay my first and last month’s rent, I looked over his mammoth shoulders and could see piles and piles of junk—boxes, stacks of papers so dense I wondered how anyone could move around much less be comfortable in a place in that condition.

A week later I saw a reddish miniature Golden retriever huddled behind a shrub outside one of the apartments in my building. I rescued her from her trench, (I found out later she was experiencing a false pregnancy) and knocked on a few doors to see if she belonged to anyone in the neighborhood. I even put up signs, but nobody responded. I ended up keeping her and named her Ginger. She was a sweet little dog and was great company for Bridget. I would take them on long walks in the park across the street and have stimulating conversations with the local resident of the park, a toothless and unkempt and emaciated guy named Blue. Every morning Blue would venture out to Hughes Market and procure a twenty-four pack of Old Milwaukee and by nine in the evening would pass out on the park bench and the next morning the same routine would start all over again. I never saw him eat—I guess beer has plenty of nutritional value—all that hops grains and whatnot. I soon found out he was from Tennessee where I would end up moving to nine years later.

On June 5, 1985 (my sister Susan’s birthday) a letter had arrived stating that the petition was approved. Yes! I called Germany to tell Maria the news but what I found out that night was beyond my comprehension—I was dumbfounded.

Yes, the very day the petition was approved I found out that Maria had taken Janelle to Frankfurt and was having a really bad day to put it mildly. She had gotten into a fender bender on a bridge and couldn’t deal with it or any other of the emotions she was going through. I’m not making any excuses for her but she was eighteen and a mother living with a stepmother that she more than detested. There she was perched upon a bridge waiting for the police to come. What she did next was probably the most irrational thing I could imagine. I guess it could have been worse but she had abandoned her child in her VW Jetta and hitchhiked to Berlin. Thank God someone came along and found the ninth month old girl crying her eyes out and there was identification in the glove box so the police knew where to deliver the child and where to tow the car.

I didn’t find out where she went until Maria had telephoned her stepmother the week after. She told her she couldn’t take it anymore and would hope that she would take care of the baby until she had time to sort things out in her life. Talk about things going full circle. Maria was abandoned when she was three by her birth mother who ran off with an American soldier in 1969 Now Maria was doing the same thing sixteen years later. When I called Suzanne Bornemann a few weeks later to get an update she told me Janelle was put up for adoption and was now living with a lovely family in Dusseldorf. I was beside myself with anger, pity and frustration. I knew now the marriage was off even though I still had strong feelings for Maria. There was no way I was going to marry a girl who would give up so easily on her family. How secure would my life be with her? I wanted to escape my feelings and the only way I knew was to get drunk. I was a wreck for months. I wasn’t eating, sleeping or getting any exercise. I was on a downward spiral that was going to end badly unless I pulled myself by my bootstraps and decided I wanted to live. At this point though—I didn’t.  Like the Bee Gee song, How can you Mend a Broken Heart, I was singing: How can you mend a broken heart, how can a loser ever win? Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again. Please Clarence. I want to live again, I want to live. But I didn’t have Zuzu’s petals or a cut lip. It was going to take time, and I thought if I could only talk to Maria and find out why she did what she did I would be on the mend, but I had no idea where she was, who she was staying with or if she was even alive or dead. I wish now I would have relied on my friends and family at that time but I rejected any help. Plus, I had completely shut myself off from all of them since they had all warned me about Maria.

Somehow they knew she was going to do something like this and I felt stupid and too proud to admit they were all right. I had painted myself in a corner and I needed to suffer through it completely alone, except for my two dogs, Bridget and Ginger, their love was unconditional and unwavering. If it weren’t for them I don’t think I would have made it. But I did. It was one of the darkest periods of my life—but I did have a lot of things to write about. Music, my music—it was another thing that kept me going through these sorrowful, sorrowful times. I think God, or my higher power or whatever you want to call it helped, too. He, or she or it was not ready to give up on me yet. Praise be thy name. Can I get another Amen?