May and I went to downtown Brooklyn, headed to the clerks office for to get us a license to marry. In Jersey, I'm told, they make you swear to the fact that you and your would be spouse are not first cousins, drunkards, or imbeciles. Mercifully, New York doesn't hold you to any such high standards. While May is not my first cousin, I'm not sure I could swear that I'm not a drunkard and the jury is still out on the imbecile issue.

    We got to the County Clerks office, on the first floor of the Brooklyn Supreme Court building, around 8:30. The office opens at 9:00. After waiting for half an hour, we got to the information desk and were informed that we were in the wrong building.
    "You started at the wrong end," the lady told us. "We only handle divorces. You want the City Clerk. You can come back here later if you change your mind."

City Clerk

    The City Clerk's offices are only a few blocks away. The room for couples hankering to hitched has all the homey feeling of a Stasi interrogation center. Painted in two tones of off-white, the sole decorations on the walls are red plastic signs telling you not to use your cell phones, not to eat in the office, and not to write on the walls. Clerks sit or stand behind a row of glass panels running the length of one wall. All your forms are handed to them through small slots cut into the base of their plexiglass shields. It gives the whole transaction the feel of a purchase at a down-market liquor store in a particularly rough part of town.

    The center of the room is dominated by a few long school-cafeteria style tables. The tables are irregularly studded with the anti-theft pen fixtures one finds in banks. Couples gather around the handful of pen fixtures, working their way through the application form. Despite signs informing Brooklynites that translators are available (regularly posted signs, in something like seven different languages, throughout the building), many non-native speaking couples seemed determined to go it alone. The results of this fierce independence were decidedly mixed. One woman, a young blonde Russian in pink a low-cut brown top and jeans, began crying quietly at her table while her husband to be, a bulked up young man with a dark buzz cut and Utah Jazz tank top, kept turning the form over and over again, as if hoping to find some key to unlocking the opaque sheet of foreign lettering, as if there was one tiny bit of Russian he might have missed that would make the whole thing clear.

    Along one wall is a row of bus-station style plastic seating. When I had jury duty, I sat two days in seats exactly like the ones in the marriage license office. Couples waiting to get married in the clerk's office – in a series of small "chapels" in a side room – wait their turns in the bus-station chairs. Most of the couples getting hitched that day came in small groups of four or six, dressed in business causal. Only one couple, a Hispanic gent and his Asian wife, showed in formal wear. She was wearing a shiny, peach-colored, shoulder-less dealie and he was in a tux with tails.
    I took a peek at the chapels. Only got a good look at one of them: a small cube-like room wallpapered with a design that resembled giant day-glo fish scales. Getting married in such a room would be sort of like sharing your vows as you both tripped on acid. I certain there are many couples who find that the very definition of romance, but I feel the potential for long term psycho-trauma outweighs the benefit of any groovy vibe one might catch from prolonged exposure to the room.

    We were in line for quite awhile. As I stood there, I noticed that - in strictest accordance with the regularly posted injunctions against writing on the walls - hundreds of couples had scratched their names, initials, and the date, into the walls next to the queue. Anthony and Sara 4-Ever, F.G. + V.R 2005, and so on. One classicist had even enclosed their initials in a heart and scratched in a piercing arrow. The arrow entered the bottom, left-hand corner of the heart and poked out the opposite side, suggesting the couple was shot by a grounded cherub at close range.

    If you've filled out the form correctly, the process of submitting to the clerk is fairly simple. We did end up behind two Russian couples who were debating the English equivalents of their mother's maiden names. Whether these names should be spelled with y's or i's took a good ten minutes to resolve. Another couple, a chatty Hispanic woman is her 50s and a young, silent Hispanic man I guessed to be in his late 20s, had to ask for multiple forms as she'd used up the spaces reserved for recording all her previous marriages and still had a few she needed to document. "I've been married nine times. Four times to the same man."