A brief encounter with Joe Biden

The train deep into Queens had been painless but your eyebrow had shot up when realising that the bus was not bringing you where you were meant to be. What followed was a lengthy trek down a highway, walking on what Europeans would definitely not call a pavement.

The cars drive past you at full speed and your head is throbbing, and things do not get better for some time. You reach what you believe is your destination – some random, numbered hangar deep in the bowels of JFK airport – but a kind and confused man tells you that you are wrong. 

It’s even worse than that, actually – he tells you that you’re wrong and, hang on, are you really doing this on foot? You repeat the experience three more times, with similar hangars and similar men refusing to believe that you are in America yet do not drive a car. After what feels like millenia, you come across a jaunty White House staffer who announces that you have reached your destination.

Waiting in the pen with other journalists, you befriend a veteran photographer and ask him what to expect. Not much, he tells you: really, he’s only here in case Biden falls down the stairs while getting off the plane. You both agree that it would be bad for democracy, but good for your working days. You hope the large men in suits with earpieces and sunglasses didn’t hear you say that.

Before going in, the White House staffer hands you a large badge, meant to be put on a lanyard. Everyone has a lanyard. You do not have a lanyard. Instead, you stick it under the Tom of Finland enamel pin you wear on your coat. You worry that someone will ask you what it is, as you would have to explain that Tom of Finland was, for the most part, famous for his gay pornographic art.

Once everyone has arrived, a team escorts the half dozen of you to a seating area outside. The president should land in an hour, you’re told, but another hack who knows these things tells you that it will probably be an hour and a half, maybe two. She is, of course, right.

To pass the time you ask to be taken to the toilet and to refill your bottle of water, and you must be shown around like a child on a school trip. You call the staffer “teacher” as a joke and he doesn’t laugh. You try to read your book in silence but two helicopters land nearby, and you could swear that nothing in this world has ever made this much noise.

At some point, the photographers rise as one, like meerkats, and you have no idea what they’ve seen but you can tell they have sensed that something is about to happen. About a minute later, you and your inferior, regular eyes finally spot it: Air Force One has appeared on the horizon.

The plane lands and, seemingly within seconds, a truly implausible number of advisers begin pouring out of the back door. They remind you of a magician getting endless handkerchiefs out of his sleeve; it never ends.

Centuries pass and eventually the door near the front opens. You and your new friend wonder if he will wave at you. Ten minutes later, Joe Biden, American president, the most powerful person in the world, comes out of the plane, and he doesn’t fall down the stairs, and he doesn’t wave at you.

He gets in the helicopter and it sets off nearly immediately, closely followed by several others. Two and a half hours of anxious waiting followed by a couple of minutes of fun. You nearly point out to the others that it has felt like a bad date, but you stop yourself. 

As the man from the White House escorts you back out, one of the men from earlier gently heckles you and asks if you’re planning to walk the whole way back again. You say that yes, you will, as you haven’t magically learnt to drive over the course of the afternoon. Still, you manage to avoid the highway this time, and you notice that the headache has gone. Big day; small victories.