License to Thrill

Homosexuality once was known as “the love that dare not speak its name.” It took a long time, but eventually society lightened up. Based on what I saw and heard at the recent Pride Parade in DC, that kind of love now can be shouted and even dressed in slutty cowboy outfits with no fear of prudish backlash. And that’s all to the good, I say.

Sadly, however, what I have found in the past couple of days is that, for all the progress we’ve made in becoming a more tolerant and inclusive society, there remains at least one form of love that’s taboo—condemned and mocked, even though it harms no one and sexually speaking, is as chaste as the driven snow. It involves a consenting adult and an inanimate object, but no interaction thereof that could spark a Twitter scandal. It should not by any stretch be a big deal. But clearly it is.

The love to which I refer is that between a man and his driver’s license photo.

Before you, too, jump onto the bandwagon with the other haters—who heartbreakingly include my wife, one of my best friends, and a treasured office-mate —backstory is in order.

In Maryland, one’s driver’s license must be renewed every five years. On a late-spring morning in 2006, I dutifully drove up I-270 to the Montgomery County Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) office in Gaithersburg, took the eye test and had my picture taken in front of a blue screen. But the photo on the license I was handed wasn’t me at all. It was some crabby, apparently toothless old man with washed-out hair who appeared to be on the verge of a rant against high taxes, permissive society and or/or those damn kids who kept straying onto his lawn.

I loathed that license. That it was the official representation to society of my identity depressed me for five very long years. Every time some functionary asked to see a photo ID, it was that frightening picture—taken on the cusp of my 48th birthday but making me look closer to the inverse of that number—that I was forced to produce from my wallet. Repeatedly, people who presumably had no reason to wish me ill or to pile on would look first at the license photo, then at me, hand the license back and send me on my way. Not that I wished to be detained and accused of misrepresentation, exactly, but how was it that I never got, “Whoa!” or “That’s supposed to be you?!” or “I’d sue the state for defamation of face, dude!”

I’m not saying I quite lost sleep over it, but it offended and nicked my sense of self. Yes, it’s true, I’m middle aged. And no, I’m not exactly a stranger to crankiness. Admittedly, in some ways—particularly aversion to social media and even mainstream technologies like Smart Phones and iPods—I’m hopelessly out of date. Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, appearance! Yes, I’m grumpy enough to be a very old man. But the point is, I don’t think of myself as looking grumpy. Or old! Any older than my actual, chronological age, anyway. In fact—I’ll admit it—I fancy that I look younger than the story my birth certificate tells.

I mean, I watch what I eat, and run or otherwise exercise regularly, and don’t have the gut that so many of my male contemporaries lug around with them like an 8-month fetus that never gets birthed. I’ve still got a good head of hair, even if its color isn’t, technically speaking, entirely natural. I’m not particularly wrinkled, I don’t think. My teeth aren’t and never have been straight, but I still have most of them, albeit with a lot of fillings.

For five years, though, there in my wallet was that maddening photo that suggested I seriously was kidding myself. There I’d be, feeling smug as couple of follicle-challenged walruses who I took to be my contemporaries huffed and puffed their way past me on the street, when all of a sudden the license photo would taunt, “Hey gramps! Need any Fixodent from CVS?”

The teeth thing had been my own fault. Back in 2006, I’d first decided not to smile for the photo, then maybe to smile after all. The shot had caught me somewhere in between, mouth slightly open, but not wide enough to show enamel. It was as if a sourpuss down to his dental remnants had reluctantly acceded to the request to say “Cheese” and settled on Limburger.

So. Several weeks ago I received in the mail a notice from the MVA notifying me that I could renew my license by mail. I’d need to get an eye doctor to sign off on my optical acuity, but then I could stick into the pre-addressed envelope that form, along with the renewal notice and a check for $30, and they’d send back my new license, good until 2016. No muss, no fuss, no MVA lines.

Perfect! Except for the fact that under this scenario, my photo would not be retaken. This is something Maryland allows for one renewal cycle only, but as a result there are many men and women driving around the Free State with license photos taken up to nearly a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a problem for a lot of people, who’d just as soon their official representation be a more youthful version of themselves.

As you might guess, however, my immediate reaction to the renewal-by-mail offer was, “Like hell I’ll keep that picture for another five years!” There’s a line from Woody Allen’s early-1960s standup act that I always think of as synonymous with the phrase “not gonna happen.” He’s bemoaning his spectacular lack of success with women even in that New Frontier age, with JFK in the Oval Office and everything seemingly possible. As Allen tells it, he’s trying to talk some stunner into bed, and she replies, “Not even if it would help the space program.” That was the line that popped into my head regarding license renewal by mail.

This past Friday morning, accordingly, I left the house in plenty of time to be at the MVA office when it opened at 8:30. I’d thought things out pretty thoroughly. I was not wearing my favorite glasses, a tortoise shell-like, thick-framed pair of bifocals, because I had an irrational fear that those graduated lenses might somehow screw up my eye test. But I really like the way I look in those glasses, which I imagine imbue my face with a certain retro, nerdy cool. So, I had them in my briefcase to wear for the picture.

I also took care to don a collared shirt, even though Fridays are casual days at my office, where I’d be headed afterward, and I could’ve worn a T-shirt. Having my face to worry about was quite enough, without adding the fear that my informality of dress would say I’d totally stopped giving a damn—like some grizzled old hobo who’d wandered over from the train tracks that abut the MVA office.

OK, one way that I kind of am an old man is that I have to pee constantly, and I’d made the rookie mistake of drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee from 7-Eleven on the way up 270. At that time of day, everyone in Montgomery County is driving south on that highway, toward Washington, not north as I was. So, I arrived at 8:10. Two lines already had formed—a shorter one for the driver’s license people like me and a longer one for people registering vehicles and doing everything else. I’d have welcomed a bathroom break right then, though I wasn’t in critical need. What I immediately noticed, and why I say “rookie mistake,” was that none of the other 75 or so people standing in the two lines were holding beverages of any sort. Here I was, amongst a representative cross-section of my county—blue collar, white collar, old, young—and everyone but me had the good sense not to come to the MVA (a place synonymous with standing in line), bearing liquids that would heighten the possibility they’d have to flee the queue in order to void their bladder.

“Everything’s cool,” I assured myself. “The doors will open soon. The line will move fast, and as soon as you get a number you’ll have plenty of time to hit the bathroom before you’re called.” The doors did open promptly at 8:30, and the line inside moved pretty fast, although I wished the young Chinese guy in front of me didn’t need to translate for his sister every word of instruction. When I got to the counter, my information was processed quickly. I was given my number and told to proceed to the service area.

“Do I have time to go to the bathroom before I’m called?” I asked.

“You’d be taking a risk,” came the reply.

“Damn,” I thought.

But I wasn’t quite yet at the foot-jiggling, legs-tightly-crossed stage, so I sat down and waited. A good thing, too, as my number was called less than a minute later.

My DMV person was named Shashi and had what sounded like an Indian accent. After taking my paperwork she asked me to read the fourth line on the viewer in front of me. To my slight surprise, it wasn’t a slam-dunk, even with my “good” glasses on. I hesitated on a couple of the letters, and had to kind of close one eye a couple of times. But I got it done. I was really glad I hadn’t tried it with the bifocals.

Speaking of, the photo was next. I asked Shashi if I could switch glasses. She looked a little perplexed, as if to say, “Whatever for?” or maybe, “Are you really that vain?” But as they say in courts of law, she allowed it. I reached into my briefcase and made the switch.

She instructed me to slide my chair in front of the blue screen and look into the camera. Suddenly a discomfiting thought came into my head. Was I even allowed to smile? That’s not permitted for passport photos anymore. Maybe because it makes potential terrorists look too amiable and might facilitate their slipping through security? Anyway, for all I knew, the state of Maryland now was enforcing such humorlessness. Come to think of it, my friend Meghan recently had shown me her Virginia license, on which she wears the cold, emotionless expression of a women’s prison lifer. Had that been intentional, inadvertent or instructed?

“Smiling? Not smiling?” I tentatively asked. By now, Shashi was probably thinking, “Great, it’s only 8:40 and already I’ve got the Narcissist with a Thousand Questions. And fine, you don’t look fat in those pants. Now, will you please shut up and face the camera?”

To my relief, she just sort of shrugged and said, “Smiling’s always good.” So, I did. The camera flashed. A few seconds later, my face popped up on the computer screen in front of me.

“OK?” she asked.

It was so much better than OK. Again, there’s context to consider here, as my old picture had been so thoroughly dreadful. But, this guy I was looking at? Sure, he was still a little dorky looking—this was the MVA, after all, not PhotoShop. But, the hair was good. The glasses suited. The collar looked right. Most important, my teeth were visible and my smile warm. You know what? Had I been more than just a spectator to the Pride Parade, I might want to date this guy.

Shashi asked me to sit in the waiting area while the license was being printed, and five minutes later I had it in my hand. The lamination process had in no way sullied the photo. I was thrilled. How thrilled? When I was experiencing sweet relief at an MVA urinal a couple of minutes later and the photo was in my wallet, I felt a tinge of separation anxiety. As soon as I got in the car I took out my renewed license to stare at some more before hitting the road.

When I got to the office, my best efforts to be nonchalant proved not very convincing. I said something to Meghan like, “Not bad, huh?” in what I hoped was a neutral tone, but my beaming smile betrayed me. She agreed that it was a good photo, although she’d never seen its predecessor and clearly thought it odd that I was grinning like a madman. Then a light came on in her eyes, and her amused smile said, even if her lips did not, “Oh my God! You’re in love with yourself, aren’t you?!” I fled her office before she got the chance to say it out loud.

A short time later, I caught my friend Maryann as she walked past my office door. Again, I tried to be cool, but she could see I was pretty enthralled with myself. She’d picked up on the fact that the glasses I was wearing—the ones I’d had on for the eye test—were not the ones in the photo. Sheepishly I conceded that I thought I would look better for the picture in my bifocals.

“That’s not too vain,” she remarked with a smirk before departing.

When I arrived home that evening and excitedly showed Lynn the photo—which she knew to be about a million times better than the old one—she was happy for me. But more in the way that she’s happy for me when the Pittsburgh Pirates win a baseball game, or when I proudly tell her I just got back from a 90-minute run. The voice says “good,” but the tone and facial expression say, “And this is a big deal … why?” Because her supportiveness does not equate to finding any less stupid and unnecessary things like obsessing over baseball results, or running when one's life doesn't depend on it, or caring any more than the tiniest bit how one’s driver’s license photo turned out.

Lynn put a fine point on it a little later in the evening, when she caught me making googly eyes at my new ID and commented, “I guess I just don’t understand what difference it makes. It’s only a driver’s license photo.”

“Yeah, but isn’t it better to have a good one than a bad one, especially since you’re saddled with it for five years?” I parried. I found my own logic unassailable and wondered what she could say to that.

“Sure,” she replied. “But … .” That was all she said. But we’ve been married for almost 20 years, and I knew the rest of that unspoken sentence, which would feature one of our favorite two-word action phrases—one we often use for exaggerated comic effect.

This was what Lynn was thinking: "Sure it’s better to have a decent driver’s license photo than a crappy one. But that’s no reason to furiously masturbate over it.”

See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. I wrote at the outset that my love for my driver’s license photo is chaste, and it is. I have not and will not ever use it as a prop for self-pleasure, whether tender or roughly vigorous. Frankly, as much as this particular photo thrills me, I’m just not that attracted to myself. Not in that way.

But I think it’s sad that my relationship is being mocked—particularly by those close to me—in an age in which so many other loves not only dare speak their name, but can do so proudly and without fear of condemnation.

Is my love really so wrong? Will I ever be able to make my (other) loved ones see? Will they ever be able to witness a tender moment between my license and me without rolling their eyes?

Not even, I’ve resignedly concluded, were it to help the space program.

Dr Death Takes a Permanent Holiday

I suspect Jack Kevorkian might’ve been a more effective advocate for physician-assisted suicide had he not himself kind of looked and sounded like Death.

He had a timeless cragginess, as if he’d never been young. Had he chosen to wear a hooded black robe and carry a scythe, he could’ve taken home best costume at any Halloween party. When I heard last week that he’d died at 83, it seemed impossible he'd only been my dad's age.

When you saw and heard Kevorkian in interviews, even if you agreed with his message—as I did—you had to concede that, like the caricature of the Grim Reaper with his bony finger always pointed toward the grave, Kevorkian typically came across as humorless and grim and terribly one-note. It’s one thing to be known as “Dr Death,” the earnest crusader for humane euthanasia, but quite another to suggest by your appearance and manner that you’re on some frenzied recruiting tour for Big Sleep University.

The truth is, there always was something a little unnerving about Jack Kevorkian. Although he billed himself as an advocate for the terminally ill—people who suffered horribly from conditions such as MS, malignant brain tumors and Lou Gehrig’s disease and needed his help to end their misery—investigative reporters from the Detroit Free Press in Kevorkian’s home state of Michigan found that more the half of the 100-plus people who’d committed suicide with Kevorkian’s assistance hadn’t actually been considered terminally ill, and that many of those individuals might have benefited from medical and mental-health options that Kevorkian had been loath to explore in his zeal to render more permanent assistance.

Kevorkian disputed those findings, of course. And at any rate, he lived by (and went to jail for) the principle that the customer’s always right—at least when the customer is suffering from illness and sees death as a blessing. Still, fairly or not, there always was the suspicion that Kevorkian whistled while he worked. And that struck people as more than a little bit creepy.

Maybe that’s why, for all his notoriety, he never came close to provoking the groundswell of fury needed to further his goals. He sought to make it legal for a doctor (which he no longer was after Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991) to actively help a patient commit suicide. But that remains to this day illegal in every US state, and in only three—Oregon, Washington and Montana—is any form of physician-assisted suicide permitted. In Michigan, in fact, Kevorkian’s efforts succeeded only in getting the legal haziness he’d exploited at first hardened into an explicit ban on such assistance.

Whatever else he might have been, Jack Kevorkian, it must be said, was a manifestly strange dude. Never mind Gomez and Morticia—he seemed the real-life embodiment of Addams Family values. Death, in a real sense, was Kevorkian’s life. He never married, and devoted his lifelong bachelorhood to all manner of death-related pursuits. He invented suicide devices he fancifully dubbed the Thanatron (Thanatos being the Greek god of non-violent death) and the Mercitron. A jazz musician and composer, he dryly named his CD A Very Still Life and his band (for which he played flute and organ) the Morpheus Quintet. Kevorkian was a painter who favored oil when he wasn’t using his own blood, which he sometimes did. One of his images, I read this past week, was of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse.

After Kevorkian died, I remembered a segment Michael Moore had done with him for his 1990s Fox show TV Nation. I recalled that the gag involved Kevorkian playing against type, and that in one scene the gaunt, disaffected ex-doctor and the portly, dyspeptic director were shown giddily flying kites on a bright, sunshiny day. I found the clip on YouTube the other day, and it’s hilarious. Clocking in at about six minutes and called “A Day with Dr Death,” it purports to show what Kevorkian does on his “day off”—you know, when he’s not administering lethal drugs to people. Kevorkian and Moore were filmed not just flying kites, but also swinging on swings, tooling around town in a vintage convertible, enjoying a picnic, and discussing such inanities as the hokey pokey and the Michigan state bird and tree. At one point Moore confides that his parents had asked him not to tell Kevorkian their ages, lest that should prompt him to pay them a visit. Kevorkian laughs good-naturedly at his tubby pal’s ribbing.

Maybe if TV Nation had been more of a hit, and the American public and our lawmakers had noted Kevorkian’s ability to poke fun at his own image, I sat there thinking for a brief second, his assisted-suicide campaign might have yielded better results. But then I dwelled on another image that had been played for laughs on TV Nation: Moore posing with an apple in his mouth for a painting to which Kevorkian was applying the finishing brushstrokes. It depicted a man holding in his arms his own bloody, severed head. Which had an apple in its mouth. Funny, yes—unless you know such a painting was right up the artist’s real-life alley.

Anyway, for all his morbid eccentricities—and for, OK, maybe having been a tad overzealous at times with the old Thanatron—I do think Jack Kevorkian’s stance on physician-assisted suicide was the correct one, and I’m sure all the people he helped exit this world felt content that his was the last face they saw. All in all, I admired the man, and I hope a combination of renewed advocacy and continuing medical advances one day will bring his vision of physician-assisted suicide to fruition. It may be, however, that the next public face of the issue will need to look a bit younger, kinder and less personally invested.

I read on Biography.com the other day that Kevorkian, the son of Armenian immigrants, rejected at an early age the existence of God because much of his extended family had been slaughtered by the Turks. Still, I like to think that if there is an afterlife, Jack Kevorkian made it to the good place, and that he and Charles Addams are sharing afternoon tea together. Sipping from toxically smoking cups, with Lurch doing the pouring.