I thought, “No problem really, those shoes were pretty old, I’d been thinking of getting another pair. Now I’ll just wear those gorgeous new brown knee high boots with that new flutter skirt; it’s all good…”
So in the morning the last part of dressing was to snug the full length zippers up and do a little spin in the flutter skirt, then head out the door feeling slick. I hadn’t flown commercially for a while, and was dreading the whole body scanner or pat down outrage, but the security check out of Midway went just fine.
The trip back was not so good. There was a hulking jerk behind me in line as I approached the luggage conveyor .He wouldn’t keep his distance. There was no one behind him, but he kept walking in to me, ignoring the whole personal space rule that he should know I insist upon. As I propped my roll-on bag upright to reach for the screening bin, he knocked over the roll-on, with the overnight bag on top of it landing right on his feet. I apologized to him about it even though I thought it was his fault. So I am flustered, you’re always trying to hurry through this process, right? So I’m putting my coat in one bin, my briefcase in another, and take a breath to ask myself “What else?” “Oh yeah gotta take the shoes off. Full length zipper. Uh, well, it had not been a problem on the first time through on the trip out, it’s all good.”
Maybe because of the hurry and the fluster, the zippers didn’t want to co-operate this time, and I’m yankin’ at the boots to get them off, kinda hoppin’ around, Lucille O‘Ball style. (Or did I say Chevy Chase?). Seemed to take forever, but finally I’m standing in my stocking feet with boots in hand. “What’s next?” Back track for another bin just for the boots. Ok that’s done, now shove it all through the luggage scanner.
So I’m walking through the regular people scanner, knowing there’s no reason for it to go off, but holding my breath anyway. Thankfully nothing beeps and I think “It’s all good”. Oops, premature. As I look for the signal from the security attendant to go forward, she motions me aside toward the path to the full body scanner. Stupidly I ask “What is this” “Full body scanner ma’am.” Fleeting moment of truth, no rebellious utterance comes forth. I walk forward and stand in the middle of the glass tube and have a weird sensation of being blind behind a solid wall of crimson red. I am running a movie in my head of Woody Allen stepping out of the water-heater-looking-cryonic-youth-machine in Sleeper.
My brain clears and I see in front of me an applied silouhette of a person holding both arms in the air above the shadowy head. I get it, I’m supposed to put my hands in t!he air, so I do. I have never had to do this in my life. My mind races, “I am not a criminal!” (I wish I could make that humorous, but there’s no way to).
I realize someone is talking to me and has said something for a second time. I look in the direction of the voice. I wish I could have taken a picture. A grown man is motioning me to mimic him. He has his thumbs on his temples, his palms facing me and his fingers stretched toward the sky and is repeating, “Moose antlers ma’am, make moose antlers.”
I think, “You poor man! What did you say? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!” Our eyes meet, I discern in them that he is pleading for me to get it, and then I get it. I put my thumbs on my temples and stretch my fingers up and say. “Is this right?”
He nods and I am suppressing a puke. He motions me out of the scanner, and then instructs me to stand in that spot. Then another security attendant, female, motions me forward onto a rubber mat with two pairs of yellow feet stamped on the mat, one set in front of the other set. She says, “Place your feet on the yellow feet on the mat, please.”
I say, “Which one, there’s two.” She doesn’t answer right away, so I say, “Do you want me on the front pair or the back pair?” She responds, in a practiced Joe Friday voice, “Remain calm, ma’am, and step onto the feet.” I conclude that God and the Government are testing my clairvoyance, so I stride over the second pair and stand on the first pair, which puts me nose to nose with the by now rubber gloved female security attendant who I can tell, by her dinner plate sized pupils, is more nervous than I, as hard as that is to believe.
She speaks in an almost whispered monotone. “I will need to pat down the sides of your clothes and to feel the inside of your waistband.” At that point, the stunned sheepishness that had overcome me at the outset of it all, drains out my heels, and I involuntarily brace, and say, in an involuntarily elevated volume “WAIT A MINUTE, NOW!” I think to myself, that sounded a bit like Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, I almost added “ALICE!”
The nervous little woman is herself stunned into silence. She is clearly very afraid. I wonder if it is her first day on the job. I lower my chin, and add, in a quiet tone, and as deep as my female voice can go, as her eyes dart back and forth in her head, “Look, really, I thought it was only a pat down if you opted out of the scanner.”
Her bottom lip starts moving but no sound comes out of her throat. She leans a little over to the side, peers over my shoulder, and makes eye contact with someone behind me. She is looking for guidance to respond to my objection.
She says, “Well sumpin showed up on the scanner.” I say abruptly, but merely firmly, “Not Possible!”
She is still frozen. We are staring into each other’s eyes. Pause, breath, Pause, breath, etc. I shift my weight to stick out one hip and skew my mouth over to the same side. I have thoroughly conveyed my disgust, but I see that it doesn’t count.
With some more prompting from behind, she finds her Joe Friday voice again, and says, “This will not involve any removal of clothes, ma’am, you need only raise your arms, and stand still. I will only put the tips of my fingers inside the waistband of your trousers.” She is done with the procedure by the end of her sentence. Call me sensitive, but again I wretch.
Ok I can move forward to where my luggage is. Another security guy says in his best placating Nurse Ratchett voice, “ I’ll carry that for you ma’am, we’re going to just inspect this briefcase.” I remain silent, while in my head is “Ok you win, if I want to get home today, I’ll shut it.” I look over the guy rummaging in my briefcase. He knows the whole thing is a joke; he unzips the case, but doesn’t take anything out. He shoos me out. I wonder if he was the unseen authority behind my back while I was patted down.
I get myself collected and zip up the boots and go to my gate, and get on my plane. It’s a long, boring flight. because everyone has their head down using an electronic, including me. Nobody makes a new acquaintance. There is little talking as there is no need to talk with the occupation of music in the ears or the paper to write, or the book on the reader. I calm my nerves about the pat down by contemplating what humor I can find in it, but I have no one to share it with. Oh well, it’s all good. 