Retro Reflection: Part 2
(Please see Retro Reflections: Part 1 before jumping into this.)
Richard Branson’s Revenge
It may be true that the term “Montezuma’s Revenge” sounds heartless and prejudiced in the woke 2020s, but thirty years ago, people threw it around as often as chimps throw shit: all the time. Richard Branson, on the other hand, threw planes around the world, and I was supposed to be on one of them, a return flight from London to New York. Ah, but flying requires that one get through the airport.
So there it was, my keychain, The Cat, with it’s knife-like ears. It lay on a Heathrow Airport Security countertop while I stared at — but didn’t read — a newspaper. I was sure the Bobby, who was likely on his way in a police car, would see past my exhaustion and chock this minor blip up to one too many adventures in this city of pheromones and Formaldehyde sharks. Indeed, my Bobby, looking a little like a house cat, strolled over, barely intimidating. He wore the typical Bobby’s helmet-hat with shining emblem, the belted jacket over slacks. Tall, with dark hair and a mustache, he might have been a theater actor playing a clean-cut Bobby Brady from The Brady Bunch if it hadn’t been for his list of questions.
“Do you know what this is?” He asked, holding up The Cat, now free of keys. I told him it was my keychain. “And what else is it?” He asked, giving it a little wag. I told him it looked like a cat. He placed his fingers through The Cat’s eyes and wore its pointed ears in demonstration, saying, “It’s a knuckle duster. Brass knuckles. It’s a weapon. And you tried to enter a plane with it.” This exchange was discouraging. It landed in my gut with a kind of thud.
He and the airport security staff member exchanged a few words, and then he said, “Okay,” and dropped the “knuckle duster” — a term I’d never heard before — into a plastic bag. This I had expected, but what I hadn’t expected was what followed.
Bobby glanced at my red hair, cleared his throat, and ordered me to follow him, indiscreetly pulling me out of the mass of other travelers, an act that would take place many times in the years after 9/11, but which, at the time, seemed ludicrous. There was nothing I could say or do to stop it. All I could do was cooperate.
We walked through some doors to another set, and then we were behind the scenes, in the invisible part of the airport. We stopped in a large room with a conveyer belt, and Bobby — now softening a little — told me he was pulling my luggage off the flight.
“Does this mean I’m not flying home today?” I asked. He said it was unlikely. I told him my sister would wonder where I was. He said she would be alerted of my whereabouts. “But I’m starting a new job next week — “ I said. He didn’t respond to this as he pulled my luggage from the conveyer belt.
And then we were walking through more doors until we were outside of the building on a section of tarmac fenced off from the airplanes. A cop car was waiting there. He told me to get in.
It appeared that free trips with sisters, like so many free things, too easily soured.*
Want to find out what happened? Retro Reflections: Part 3 is on its way.
*In a recent phone conversation, my sister reminded me of another trip we’d taken together when I was in my teens and she in her twenties. Just before the war, we drove down the coast of Yugoslavia with her boyfriend Jan, a depressive from Poland studying architecture. When tensions rose between my sister and Jan, he had no choice but to split in Split. That’s how my sister and I ended up taking a ferry to the Adriatic island of Hvar, where we spent several days.
Back then, photos of Tito still hung on shop walls behind most cash registers, reminding everyone that Tito, not cash, ran the country. But we wanted music and fun, not Tito or cash, so my sister and I ended up at a Hvar nightclub with some young Serbian academics vacationing in Croatia. Their Croatian friends already knew war was coming, but that didn’t deter a young man named Nenad from hitting on me. When I told him I wasn’t interested, he went for my sister.
Outside the nightclub, as she was making out with Nenad behind some bushes, my sister heard a loud cracking and thudding noise in combo with hard breathing. A cluster of men were throwing punches, breaking into some poor soul until he was a bloody mess, just like in so many spaghetti westerns filmed in old Yugoslavia.
Travel, like fights and wars, inevitably bleeds experiences.
