Worst. Person. Ever(28)

“Why call security?”

“Between you and me, it’s because you didn’t tip me last time. This is my revenge.” I was speechless.

“And as there are no microphones recording this conversation, and we’re the only two people in the lounge, Garcia bangs me twice a week in the men’s room. So he’s in my palm. He won’t listen to a word you say.”

I remained mute.

“Would you like some corn nuts? The airline catering company grows half the corn in Nebraska, so I’m allowed to offer them even to people who enter this lounge without authorization. There are some napkins here, and if you feel like cutlery, please enjoy a complimentary spork from the cutlery bin. Oh, look—here’s Garcia now.”

A swarthy hobbit entered the lounge. “LACEY, do we have an incident here?”

“I’m not sure, Garcia. This gentleman arrived through the VIP doors without a boarding pass or passport. You know, with the war on terror, you can never be too careful.”

Garcia stared at me. “Do you have any form of documentation on you, sir?”

“No. It’s all in the fucking limo.”

“Watch your language, sir. You’re in the United States. People here don’t appreciate profanity.”

“This man here swore quite a bit at me, too, Garcia. Does that count as terror in your terror handbook?”

Garcia gave me the steely eye. “You were swearing at LACEY?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you people?” I said.

“This is the last warning I’m giving you sir. No profanity.”

Trying to configure sentences without swearing caused my brain to seize up. I knew there and then exactly how a stroke feels when it strips you of the ability to speak. I began to make sound effects instead: “… #$((>@ * * *…”

“Garcia, listen to his speech patterns. I bet you anything he’s high on some form of illegal drug.”

“What flight did you come here on today, sir?”

“In a private ffff … In a private jet, thank you.”

“From where?”

“Hawaii.”

“We’re going to have to do a sweep of that jet, pronto.” He removed a walkie-talkie from his breast pocket and made a show of finding the plane on the tarmac. While he did this, LACEY offered me more corn nuts.

“Sir,” said the hobbit, “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

“What the fuck?”

“That’s it, sir.” Garcia ran towards me with a pair of zap-strap handcuffs he produced as if from nowhere.

LACEY smiled.

Zzzzzzap! Thirty seconds later I was being frogmarched down the concourse, which looked even more like Mexico than on my first stop. I’d hoped to make a friendly joke about Garcia’s mother fellating bored donkeys out behind the Cinnabon, but the cuffs stung too much and made it difficult to be witty.

Cinnabon is a chain of American baked-goods stores and kiosks normally found in high-traffic areas such as malls and airports. The company’s signature item is a large cinnamon roll. As of July 2009, over 750 Cinnabon bakeries are in operation in over thirty countries around the world. Its headquarters are in Sandy Springs, Georgia. For many people, the odour of a Cinnabon quickly alerts the reptile cortex that one is in the middle of an unpleasant travel experience. Curiously, scent scientists have done multiple analyses of airport environments and came up with an interesting observation, published in the March 2013 issue of Boarding Pass magazine: if one were to take one bottle of all the perfumes and colognes on earth and mix them together, the resulting odour would be exactly that of a duty-free shop.

Garcia marched me through a door emblazoned with a janitor’s icon, which, in fact, opened into a corridor in LAX’s massive underground security system. Were Neal there with me, he’d have said something charmingly childish along the lines of, “Oi! It’s like entering the Matrix! I wonder if we’ll meet enchanted animals who speak Jacobean English!”

Not me, however. My extensive life experience had prepared me for being hurled into a room filled with innocent middle-class people, all of them face down on rectal probe tables while burka-clad TSA agents used hot-dog forks to dig in deeper and deeper, ferreting out smuggled nail clippers, Bic lighters and containers of shampoo larger than 1.5 ounces.

I was partially correct. I ended up in a cell with old-fashioned steel bars and a chrome toilet, like in a seventies cop show. My cellmates were two cold-sored Venezuelans detained, they told me, for smuggling fertilized parakeet eggs, along with a Mrs. Peggy Nielson of Kendallville, Indiana, who, through some form of accidental keystroke in a system somewhere on the planet, had landed on the no-fly list with a level red warning attached to her.