Gimme Shelter: Flying away
Do we travel just so we can go home again?
My traveling companion (MTC) and I are heading out today and that old question usually seems to be answered in the affirmative by the faces I look into when we fly away. They are the faces of the doomed, shipwrecked before they set sail.
Who wouldn’t want to be home instead of being in an airport? The foul air, the penitentiary lighting, herded here and there, trying to buy some food from people working too many hours for minimum wage who could really care less where the gate for the flight to Oslo is located.
Food? It’s poison, everything is criminally expensive and then they go it one better by shuttling you into a metal tube, strap you down for five, six, seven hours, hurtle you across a bleak ocean while the video selection is broken and only shows an Adam Sandler movie.
Return home? Hell, just let the plane crash in the freezing sea and end this whole damned thing now.
That’s the way MTC and our fellow voyagers look at it. But not me. I don’t care about the pains of getting from here to there (although Mr. Sandler must be stopped). I don’t care where we’re going, I’m going with a smile on my face. Anywhere. Show me a sign. Give me the key to the highway. I am, as the great Gary Cohen’s home run call says: Outahere!
What does this say about me, refusing to complain? I’m sure something pathologically dark. MTC thinks I’m just being perverse, you know, trying to come off as a superior person, an above-it-all aristocrat, a stoic who will never let them see me sweat, while she stakes out a position of outrage at being treated as less than human cargo.
I don’t even mind the Transportation Security Administration, which gets an unfair rap from most travelers. I’ve always found them to be efficient and serious. Which is what you want from people protecting you.
Once at LaGuardia, catching an early morning flight, I handed my ticket and ID to the TSA man and, half asleep, was looking away, when I realized there had been silence between us for more than a few moments. I looked back into his eyes and he said, as somber as his expression, “You all right, sir?”
I realized what had happened. Joanne Sherman said she saw me on line at the store once and was going to say hello but didn’t because I looked angry. I wasn’t, though, and we decided I had a “resting bastard face,” often attributed to women with another word, meaning you could be happy, but appear to be contemplating something really bad.
“Oh,” I said, to the observant TSA man, “I just need another cup of coffee.” He nodded, gave me the once over again, and let me through.
Here’s a lesson for someone accompanying a person who is cranky about the two-year-old screaming in the seat behind her — think banshees, amputations without anesthetic — as he deliriously throws his toys up over her seatback and onto her head. The lesson: Never tell a loved one in this situation to “relax.”
That adorable little boy, by the way, caused MTC to move to an empty seat in the rear of the cabin where she started to fall asleep. But she woke to the boy and his smiling mother in the empty seats next to her and a cloth doll flung at her followed by open-mouthed cacophony. (Refrain also from saying “boys will be boys.”) MTC said later she stopped herself from going for the boy’s throat only because an air marshal might shoot her dead.
But I almost did lose it when I was picked out of the line at a European airport last year and taken to a little room. This is not an unusual occurrence. I’m usually asked to accompany officials to the little room. It might have to do with the fact that in another lifetime I spent time in the North of Ireland and was also traveling a lot, so perhaps British, Republic of Ireland and American authorities profiled me as some sort of bad lad.
The searches and questioning stopped for a short while, but then, after 9/11, I was back in the little rooms. Someone — who should know — said that security forces dusted off the old lists and it was ”Would you come this way, sir?” all over again.
Anyway, last year, an official took me to the little room, frisked me — “frisk” is the wrong word, I mean this guy laid his hands on every inch of me like he was waxing his car — and then asked me to remove my pants and shirt.
“But I barely know you,” I said to him. A travel tip of what not to say.
When I was released about 90 minutes later, MTC was waiting right outside the door. Her expression was what every traveller wants from a companion: outrage at what has been done to you, scorn for the powers-that-be. But I thought she might be taking it a little bit too far and we both would be in the little room.
I was all set to say “relax,” but she quickly put her hand to the small of my back and escorted me to the waiting room without a word.
We were on our way.
