8 Million Stories: Picture Perfect at the DMV
CONAN O'BRIEN HAS been comparing L.A. favorably to New York since he landed, way before his recent swipe at nearby Newark's crime rate. Watching a clip from The Tonight Show in a cab, I saw O'Brien riffing on his new L.A. driver's license photo. "They are so image conscious here," he said. "The woman told me to smile and kept saying 'You can do better than that!'" He contrasted his beamingly vapid California image with his old New York driver's license, where he is caught mid-blink, his mouth hanging open, really impressed that the woman gave him three tries.
OK, so New Yorkers on both sides of the DMV counter never look like they are at the top of their game. As with McDonald's or rest stops on the highway, if invading Martians landed there and had to decide whether humanity was worth saving, we wouldn't have much of a chance. The dark crowded office next to a Sizzler on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, where I went to renew my license a few years ago, was no exception. It smelled, the benches were littered with take-out food wrappers, the lines were long and children cried and were threatened into silence.
The hatchet-faced woman staffing the camera station must have seen a hundred people that day. She seemed to have only two phrases: "Stand there" and "Next," each uttered with curt disdain and a spasmodic jerk of her head. I heard her say these words the same way at least 20 times before my turn came. Finally, I stood in front of the gray backing, now facing the long, surly line behind me.
I took a deep breath to neutralize the grin that habitually seizes my face the minute I am in front of a camera. Since turning 50, I have come to accept that I am not a bad-looking person; I am just not photogenic. I heard the camera's click. The Sphinx of the DMV apparently had a third phrase: "Oh, no." Silently, she spun the screen around so I could see the captured image—no words were necessary. In a lifetime of bad pictures, this might have been the worst.
I would have lived with it just to get out of there. Not the DMV lady. She sucked her teeth and waved her hand, ordering me back to the taped-off square. People in the line muttered and cursed, faces strained over shoulders to see what the hold up could possibly be. Oh yeah, it's the white girl. In my WASP family, there is a strong cultural imperative against complaining and making a spectacle of yourself. This felt like both, but she was undeterred. As though time had stopped and she was suddenly Richard Avedon, she shot again and again, looked at the new images; shaking her head and waving me back to the square.This took five or six tries as I smiled, fidgeted, tried to bolt and looked apologetically at the increasingly hostile crowd. Finally, she nod ded and jerked her chin toward the laminator's station.
I didn't dare look until I got to the parking lot, but I have to say I was pleased. It is an image I am OK with until 2013, when my license next expires. As with everything else, New York has its own brand of "the kindness of strangers." While she never smiled, or was nice in the way most public servants are in my home state of New Hampshire, she'd taken on this practical challenge with energy and determination, giving me this useful unmerited gift before I merged back into New York's anonymous sea of millions. I hope Conan's happy in his new life in Los Angeles, but he can keep it. I love it here.