BETWEEN THE LINES : Looking for the Melting Pot? You Can Join the Crowd and Wait Your Turn

Rounding the corner, we spot them immediately. At 7:45 in the morning, there are dozens of people outside the building. The line is a block long. We look for parking within a reasonable hike. A visit to the county Department of Social Services was horror enough in the old days, but this is ridiculous. Things were supposed to be better in the ‘90s.

“What’s going on?” I ask my girlfriend.

“Something about fire regulations, I think.”

Anger washes over me, accompanied by disgust. My mouth is suddenly dry. We park four blocks up the boulevard and walk back slowly. No reason to hurry. My day full of urgencies is evaporating right before my eyes. I thank the shoe god I’ve worn flats.

We wade to the end of the line that has snaked along the block and twisted around the corner as if it’s opening night at the Cinerama Dome. I’m rudely reminded of the 6 o’clock news and hungry, fur-clad ex-Soviets anxiously waiting their turns, outside in the cold.

Here, the cold part is that these people all have “appointments.” (Doesn’t that mean you don’t have to wait?)

My girlfriend spies a pay phone up the street. “Wait for me; I’ll be right back!” She leaves me to hold the fort. I survey the crowd, people of every size and color assembled for a New Age ark. In my day, welfare recipients were mainly us Afro-Americans, with a smattering of Latinos.

Today, there are Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, Jewish-Americans and more white folk than before. I study faces. Some have sleep gathered in the corners of unwashed eyes. A couple are bruised and bandaged. All mouths are down-turned. I spot a homeless man gathering up his belongings from a doorway. Comparatively, he looks prosperous.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sick or disabled, you stand and wait. I wonder if any of these people are dying of some misery other than financial embarrassment? How many have full-blown AIDS? I imagine the outrageous indignity of getting out of my deathbed to zombie down here so that I can fight about getting my Medi-Cal stickers, cut off because of some bureaucratic clerical glitch.

A horn honk interrupts my thoughts, and I’m seized by a sudden dread: Suppose somebody I know sees me standing here?

The line has turned the corner, and I see the front of it. I try hard not to overhear the conversations around me through the screams of crying infants. I try to pretend I’m not here. I’m acutely aware of coughers spitting phlegm, of the oppressive odors of overchewed fruity gum and cigarette smoke.

Mercifully, the women in front of me speak Spanish, so it’s easy to tune them out. Behind me, a tall, lanky, white-haired white guy, in T-shirt and baggy shorts, emotes loudly. “Yeah--like, man it went all the way up there and around,” he points. “I showed up at 7 in the morning, man. Time I got to the front, it was closing. Hadta come back the next day. Ain’t that a bitch?”

When my friend returns, I find out that all she has to do is deliver some papers.

“Sounds easy. Why can’t you simply drop them off?” I ask.

“I have to take them to Window 5. I can’t do that unless I can get inside.”

“This is ridiculous!” I complain.

“What choice do I have?”

An officious-looking Armenian-American man walks the line, handing out numbers. After several people have left the building, a new batch filters through the metal detector. A Chinese-American man moves along the line with slates on which names have been scrawled. He pulls the recipients out of line and escorts them inside.

A Mexican-American man also moves along the line. He’s expensively dressed, with a clipboard and a seductive smile. He stops at the two Spanish-speaking women. It doesn’t take a translator to figure out that he’s hustling clients for a school that teaches English to new arrivals. He sees me listening, turns toward me, and asks me what country I’m from, en espanol .

“These colorblind United States of America,” I say, bursting into laughter.