This past Monday was my birthday and as a gift from the State of Texas I no longer can have a driver's license. Mine expired after seven years and with my visa. And thanks to the Muslim terrorists that highjacked the twin towers in New York, now only citizens and permanent residents who have a green card can have a driver's license or a state ID card. (Yes, all the Mexicans came to the US to become car-bombing terrorists.)

I got my Visa to the US before 9/11, when they were valid for 10 years. I had the illusion that one day I would be a professor and would come to literature conferences in the US, and visit the major cities, which for me at that time meant New York and San Francisco. I applied for and received the visa in 1999, but I didn't come here until 2002. 

The first year and a half, I didn't have a drivers license. I had just a Texas ID. I walked everywhere because to my surprise, there is no good public transportation system. The state seems to be in some secret confabulation with oil companies and big highways contractors to make people spend money on gas, cars, and the state to spend on roads. Of course it's very nice to be able to drive your own individualistic life, in your own individualistic car everywhere you go, but people should have the option of not doing so.

In Brazil I didn't have a car, because I didn't have the money to buy one and because I didn't really needed one.  In most cities buses run every 5 to 10 minutes during the day, 20 in the evening. People don't even carry bus schedules with them, because they know a bus will pass by soon. When a new neighborhood is developed, the first thing most people want to know is: which bus line goes there, and the second, where are the nearby schools.

Knowing that in Austin things were different, soon after I got here I bought a used car, and I went to the Texas Department of Public Safety and got a permit to learn to drive. A Brazilian pizza-delivery-friend named Victor taught me to drive in the HEB parking lot late at night, and my boyfriend taught me to drive in his car on his free nights during the week in an empty bus transfer center. 

Going to a state or federal building for a person without legal residence is always stressful because you always have the worry that they would somehow check your ID on the computer system and deport you, but not without first arresting you and sending you to some prison on the border of Mexico where you can stay in a cage like a criminal, with people of all kinds and behaviors for countless months. 

At that time, anyone with a valid passport and visa could get a driver's license, because tourists can rent cars, people traveling for a longer time can buy a car for a road trip through the country, and students visiting can have a car, right?  In one or two months I passed the test for a driver's license. But months passed and I didn't actually get the license in the mail. I thought that somehow, someone in the Department of Public Safety decided it was too risky to give a driver's license to a non-Hispanic Latino immigrant. So I didn't go there to complain, because I was afraid I could get arrested and deported.

During  this first year here, I was taking the bus to some of the houses  I was cleaning, and I was walking to most places, since it seems to me that buses in Austin run all on the same route. Instead of putting the buses to run through the neighborhoods, the buses run only through some of the major streets. Where the nice houses are, in the suburbs, everybody has cars, so buses don't go there. The workers, students, people that don't have cars or don't have driver's licenses for some reason -- lack of coordination, insecurity, old age, too many sleeping pills, bad luck to get a guy with a bad mood during the test for a driver's license, or are affected by a flash of dumbness in a very inappropriate moment, or are alcoholics or drug addicts -- cannot go to those areas or are dependent on someone else.

Sometimes the blame is not the city's but the neighborhoods' that don't want any bus lines running through its streets, because it would bring poor people, panhandlers, solicitors, violence and crime. For the hysterics and people low on Prozac all these things go together.

I would finish my work and walk on the side of the highway where there is no sidewalk from Riverplace -- one neighborhood in Austin near highway 2222 -- to a Starbucks coffeshop, and wait there for a ride from my boyfriend after he finished his work. Sometimes people would give me rides from Steiner Ranch -- another neighborhood in Austin near highway 620 -- to the same Starbucks. I would bring books and music in my backpack and buy coffees. That Starbucks was my shelter for the 100F summers of 2002 and 2003 and the freezing winter of 2003. At first the workers at Starbucks would keep an eye on me, like "Who is this dirty looking (after work), suspicious Latino with a backpack that stays here for hours?" (This Starbucks is situated in an upper-class white area of Austin). With time, they would recognize me from seeing me there at least three times a week and they knew already what I was ordering.

Something happened though that changed it. I knew an old Brazilian lady called Irene who told me she knew another Brazilian woman who was married to a state police officer who worked at the Texas Department of Public Safety. She was going to ask him to check what had happened to my driver's license.

One week later she called to tell me that my driver's license was returned to the TDPS by the post office. Thanks perhaps to my grumpy mailman, I didn't get my driver's license in 2002.   

 Yes, in the US you really don't want to have the mail delivery person as your enemy. They can make a mess of your life. 

 My friend Irene told me that I could go to the Texas Department of Public Safety and get a second driver's license. I went there, took another picture, signed the electronic pad, and a few days later voila: my new first driver's license.

It made my life easier here, and allowed me to stay longer. But now I'm back on the road. And it doesn't feel like a Willie Nelson hit. I'm walking and without any valid US document.