Story For My Sister

When I was sixteen, a gorgeous Nazi stood behind her decrepit computer at the DMV in Los Angeles, California, where she waited for my paperwork. It was 2005. I was getting my license. My antagonist was a beautiful, no-nonsense Latina in her mid-20s, and anxious to go home - she probably wasn't really a Nazi, but by the twitching in my boxers she was something wicked, she was very naughty, I just knew it.

Being (alas!) without experience in older women, I said the only thing I could:

"What does that mean?"

"Do you want," she rolled her dark eyes before reading my application, "to donate your organs?"

I knew what it said. But what did it mean? I was rather fond of my organs (though I'm sure you can guess the joke, about which organ and to whom). But if someone needed them and I was dead, they could have them. But also don't kill me to get them. But also don't just play with them. What did it mean?

I shrugged and left the default answer, No, and she ushered me with heartless skill through the photo flash, the side-door, and out of her life.

There in the parking lot, with Los Angeles closing its summer around me like a giant fist, I fingered the Class E license she had given me.

"I'll never forget you, DMV Nazi," I said.

Ten years later I returned to the DMV, fingers crossed, and the gods of love struck me down in my prime with a balding magician in a droopy white shirt. He was out of Office Space. His name was Hobart. But he was magic - he could ignore your existence while staring into your face, flashing your picture, and grumbling you down the line to renew your license. How could he be so composed? Didn't he know her, the Nazi Latina of starched collars, of a dark efficient pony-tail, who once held in her slender fingers the great phallic symbol of my American manhood, my license to drive?

By this time two things had happened: I had read Richard Thaler's extraordinary book Nudge, and I had filled a little black notebook with everything I knew about Dick Proenneke and other men who lived alone in the wilds.

The first one, Nudge, was behavioral science - when people are confused, they stick with the default answer, they do what Kanye do, they read it on reddit and say "Amen". Since the default is No to the organ donation question in the United States, less than half the population donate; in Austria, where the default answer is Yes, the rate is 99%. I had asked Hobart the magician to change my answer to Yes, in honor of the Nazi before him.

But the second (my Survival Book, I called it) was art - with my little black notebook, I knew how to get up to Alaska and survive. And I wasn't just a dilettante on his way to a Darwin Award either. For five years I had worked in California's fire service, taking notes of our battles against million-acre wildfires; into the forests for weeks at a time like soldiers we went, digging, cutting, shepherding our red enemy to a place on our captain's map marked "Alamo". There, we poured onto the fire from choppers and on foot. We smashed it out. I had seen a 19-year-old kid die when a ten-ton conifer that was burned out from the inside suddenly dropped like a deadfall trap onto his left leg. It crushed him through the femoral artery. He bled dry in ten minutes. Ours was no Paris of an enemy, no, but the ancient Promethean gambit, and I loved it; I loved the forest; I loved the wild; I had won a lottery for free land in Alaska and moved back to Los Angeles for the last couple years to save up the $25,000 required to claim the parcel.

Except it didn't work; I was still $20,000 short.

It's really damn hard to save up money in Los Angeles, and somehow my license had expired in the two-on-one-off-two-on-two-off-what-off-who-off-where-on-mess that had become the Los Angeles Fire Department in the last years. It had been getting worse since the recession in 2008. Half the firefighters now were "floaters" like me, assigned and re-assigned to Station 9, Station 19, Station 68, wherever, whenever, with no thought by the brass that men were climbing five stories up a ladder towards death with total strangers holding it at the bottom. I missed the forest and my friends out there; I shouldn't have left. I was going up to Alaska to be a recluse for good, and the only thing that was stopping me - like most millennials - was about $20,000.

Picking up my renewed license from Hobart the magician, I began walking out of the DMV when I saw her - the gorgeous Nazi who had ushered me like Virgil into an inferno of Los Angeles highways. Once, she had given me a license to drive; now, she was giving me a licentious itch, my Bondgirl forever, my DMV Nazi. Older and plumper, she stood in a starched white shirt behind a counter at the DMV. Her dark Latina eyes were seething upon the clock, waiting, while a desk-tag beside her proclaimed: Voter Registration.

I walked up and asked for the paperwork.

"Are you registering Democrat or Republican?" she asked me.

Thank God for Richard Thaler.

"That's a nudge," I said. "Do I have to choose?"

"No, you can be independent," she rolled her eyes.

Damn right I can, I thought.

I had been fumbling my new license into my old wallet, while trying to pocket it, and my nervous hands somehow threw out my Survival Book onto the counter. (Or was it fate?)

"What's that?"

"It's a fish trap," I told the Nazi, as I tucked a loose paper back into the notebook. "It turns in the river when the salmon come upstream."

"Say what?"

She was looking at me. O God, she was really looking at me, with those dark evil eyes like Lady Macbeth unloosing me from my reason, from my wit, from my, my, what was I doing, dear God, man, don't tell her about Alaska, don't tell her you're down $20,000 against all the American godfathers - Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion - and don't tell her you live in your car and use your sister's address since you spend half your nights at fire stations anyways, have you never seen a pretty girl in all your life, you dolt?

"I bet this could be like $20,000 right here," she said, when I finished whatever insane rant she had used her voodoo to get from me.

I was sweating.

"What?" I asked.

She was fingering through my notebook while I wiped my forehead. There was an old man with a cane and a Raiders jacket who was waiting to register to vote.

"You should just scan all this," she said, "and put it on Kickstarter like a pdf or an ebook or something. And promise you'll keep notes like this for the first year you're up there, and you'll send them to people who donate $10. You could do it every year. I'd do it. Really, I just stand here all day, but I'd pay $10 to look at this and maybe a couple pictures. This is really cool. There's got to be at least 2,000 other people in America standing around bored all day who'd like to see what happens to you. Va pues, hola, Nuria - Nuria..."

Her voice trailed off as she shuffled down the counter, to show my notebook to her co-worker, but I just stood there. My mouth was off its axle. My eyes wouldn't blink. Someone coughed politely, and I looked up to find the old man with the cane inching toward me.

I don't know when I did it, actually, because it was like a dream, but I know at some point in time I managed to pick my jaw up off my chest, go grab my notebook, and kiss that beautiful Nazi like Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind, with everyone at the DMV just frozen because I had jumped the counter to kiss her, and that old man with the cane exploded in a ball of light from the force of it. I swear this is true. Or it's close enough that the details don't matter. I leapt back over the counter and landed in my car, tearing through the Los Angeles highways back to Station 9 - free coffee, free wifi, and a scanner - where in a 48-hour blitz I had launched an annual pdf called Survival Book that raised $20,000 and then some.

I was going to Alaska!