The Potty Mouth at the Table (11 page)

I
t was clear that things hadn’t changed—the Eugene TSA was still taking things very, very seriously, even more so with the new naked machine. I had been in line for at least twenty minutes and had barely moved, and once I paid attention to what was going on in front of me, I understood why.

There were children lined up at the naked machine; many, many children. Most of them looked to be middle-school aged, about fifteen to twenty of them, accompanied by three chaperones. All of them were deaf, or had hearing aids that were setting off the machine, and the TSA was in something of a tizzy. They were shouting to the kids to step into the machine and put their hands up for the imaging to take place, but it was all going horribly wrong. As a result, some of the kids were getting frisked and others stood confused in front of the machine as the TSA haplessly shouted directions. It was a mess. And time was ticking.

The security line was now incredibly long, and by the time I got even close to the machine, I had only twenty minutes until takeoff. I tossed my suitcase on the conveyor belt,
and this time (I had learned my lesson), as the fiber packets were resting in my purse. I took off my shoes and waited next in line to be blasted by naked rays.

The guy in front of me passed through without a hitch, and I was glad; I barely had enough time to run to the gate and catch my flight. When the TSA agent called “Next!” I stepped into the machine and put my feet in the designated space and held my hands up when I was instructed to. I did not even breathe, not wanting to cause the least bit of delay.

When I exited the machine, I began to walk over to fetch my suitcase, but the agent stopped me.

“Female!” he yelled, and in a minute, a woman in a ponytail and wearing polyester pants came up to me and asked me to spread my arms.

Shit
, I thought.

“Do you have any metal in your body?” she asked me, to which I answered no.

“Are you sure, ma’am?” she said sternly, clearly not believing me. “There seems to be some metal in your torso.”

“Um, no,” I said, shaking my head. “My underwire bra, maybe?”

“This appears to be in the rib area,” she informed me as she started patting me around my midsection.

“I don’t have a metal rib,” I assured her.

“And in the left hip? What do you have there?”

“Pardon me?” I asked as she continued to pat. “Nothing. I have a real hip. I have no metal in my body.”

“That’s not what the scan says,” the agent replied, patting down my boobs with the backs of her hands.

“I don’t have metal in my body,” I reiterated. “I have real ribs and an arthritic hip.”

“Stand with your feet apart, please,” the woman said.

I just wanted this to move along. I positioned my feet on the yellow footprints on the rubber mat.

And then it happened. Her hand was patting my ass, and then, suddenly, it was in my crotch.

I turned my head suddenly, trying to determine if that had really happened. IN my crotch, like I need to be married to you
in my crotch
. Or like you’d better have a degree from a medical school in the United States
in my crotch
. Like I’m having a baby in the back of a cab, I didn’t even know I was pregnant and you’re the only one who can help me, mister,
in my crotch
. But not like you’re a lady with two semesters of community college, you have a scrunchie in your hair and you think I am lying about having a metal rib
in my crotch
. Because that kind of
in my crotch
is not cool. It is not cool with me. I’ve been frisked before, the full pat down, several times, in fact, and this was different. This was . . . extensive. Now, sure, I was naturally wearing the tightest spandex sausage casing known to the female gender,
and I was as taut as a full helium balloon or a vacuum-sealed ball of mozzarella. But believe me, if I had a cookie bomb shoved into my girdle, you could not spell yeast infection fast enough, and that’s enough of a deterrent for me to reject being a terrorist.

“Um,” I started to say.

“Ma’am,” the agent said again as she came around to my side. “Is there metal in your hip?”

“No, there is not,” I said, as firm as I dared. “I don’t know what scan you are reading, but it’s not mine.”

“It’s yours,” she said, running her hand down the outside of my leg, and then back up the inside of my leg and right back to ground zero. Where she had clearly just been.

“Okay,” I said, without a thought, and then added, “That’s enough. That is enough.”

She went back down the other leg and then back up again.

“This is unnecessary,” I said, louder, and without any control over my mouth, because once, twice, three visits to the same region was enough to flip the switch, and the only reason the switch didn’t get flipped on the first visit was because, yes, I was on Ativan and my delay times were appropriately slow. Normally, if you stick your gloved hand into my high-rent parts without proper authorization once, you’d get a tooth knocked out. Three times and I’d be sucking
the eyeballs out of your face and spitting them back at you.

From behind me, she went back a fourth time, and that was when I, knowing better, knowing that I could be detained and cuffed and held by the authorities for standing up for myself, began to yell, “I demand that you stop. This is unnecessary! You are violating my civil rights!
You are violating my civil rights!
”

But I couldn’t stop myself. It was impossible. And that’s when people stopped and stared. But I said it again, and again, and again, until she finally dropped her hand and walked away.

“That was bullshit,” I said loud enough for the people now watching me to hear. “She did not need to touch me like that. It was bullshit.”

And then I waited. I waited to be led away to some windowless al-Qaeda room where I would not be read my rights because in an airport security line, you simply don’t have any.
Oh well
, I thought,
it might not be so bad
. I could start a knitting club at Gitmo; I mean, everyone needs a prayer rug and a beanie, right? That could be fun. Or maybe a book club, or, more accurately, the Quran Club, that might be enlightening—it’s probably better than
The Help
. Just trying to look on the bright side here, because man, I really friggin’ hate hummus. And falafel. Oh, falafel.

But no one came. No one took my arm. No one said, “This way, please, Metal Rib Bomber.” I was just there by myself, with my arms outstretched, standing on a mat with my feet spread. The people in the security line went back to gathering their shoes, suitcases, laptops. I found my boots at the end of the conveyor belt, along with my purse that had five packets of fiber powder in it, and my artfully packed suitcase. I gathered everything up, and pulled on my boots.

I got to my gate just as my plane was shooting down the runway, then tilted upward and lifted off into the sky.

Dear Municipal County Clerk:

Let me start by saying I am sure you don’t have an easy job. I suppose that’s apparent by the fact that you have to sit behind shatterproof glass, which says to me that you have your share of irate customers on a daily basis, and you probably see crazier things and touch dirtier objects than the girl who works the return counter at Walmart.

However, just because you deal with people paying their fines and court fees as a result of lawlessness does not entitle you to jump to conclusions about every formerly law-abiding citizen who steps up to your window. Lawbreaking is a spectrum, you know, with all sorts of colors in between.
Not every color is jumpsuit orange.
So when you look at my citation with a clearly disparaging look and
say, “Whoa!” I take issue with that response for a variety of reasons:

1.
Reserve your disdain, sir, for those who actually take the law into their own hands and who were not really speeding but, more accurately, going downhill and submitting to the forces of physics. I didn’t invent physics; I didn’t vote for physics; I don’t even
understand
physics. I was simply going downhill on a road made by
your employer,
the city, and I can hardly be held responsible for the grade it deemed appropriate. Apparently they signed off on a perfect physics-fed speed trap that I believe was solely created as a moneymaking venture for the city, like a police-staffed lemonade stand.

2.
Doing 43 miles per hour in a 35-miles-per-hour zone is not breaking the sound barrier, m’ lord. It’s not like I was all gassed up and making my way to Mars in a Prius that in certain moments gets 99 MPG.
Ninety-nine miles per gallon
sometimes, even if it’s just for a fraction of a second. If that doesn’t demonstrate how seriously I take my responsibility to humanity, including people overseas who I do not understand when they call me to tell me my credit card payment is late, then frankly, I don’t know what does. I had a V6 Camry before I decided to provide a future for children I don’t even
have, so it’s clear that I traded speed and power for a car that everyone who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity drives, and even some Doctors Who Don’t Have Borders.

a.
I was not drunk. Nor was I cited for that, but I could see the look of speculation that crossed your face when you saw my speed of eight miles above the posted limit. “What sort of madwoman
is this
?” it said.
Stand down, sir.
Stand down.

I will have you know that for most of the summer, we have had our teenage nephew staying with us, and whenever I got a little too happy at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, all I had to do was toss him the keys and my chances of walking the line dropped dramatically. Sure, sure, it was my plan to wait a week before I drank “magic grape juice” in front of the Mormon side of the family, but happy hour is happy hour and if there’s a three-dollar glass of chilled rosé calling my name on a summer afternoon, you can hardly expect me to ignore that sort of value. Alcohol rarely goes on sale. But I can usually find it when it does.

b.
Yes, it’s true that I did not have my proof of insurance with me at the time of the bust, but that was only because State Farm sends me a letter every other day describing what horrors and lawsuits could befall
my household, and I simply cannot live in a world of fear like that. That is too much stimuli, and I can’t keep worrying about wiping spilled orange juice off my floor every time I leave my house in case a crackhead breaks in, slips in the kitchen, and hurts himself. Or if a hobo sidles into my backyard, goes to take a poop in my vegetable bed, a rusty trellis scrapes his ass, and he needs a tetanus shot.

Straight into the shredder the anxious State Farm envelopes go, so I can’t keep track of when the new cards come! I had more expired State Farm cards in my wallet than I did receipts from Cinnabon, and that became clear when I scraped a little bit of paint off my car while I was trying to parallel park last week.

Normally, I am an excellent parallel parker, but there was a man standing next to my car who was watching me intently (yes, I would use the word “staring”—he was staring) and it threw my concentration entirely off until he yelled at me, “Hey! You just hit my car!” which really derailed any sort of focus I had left.

c.
Look at me.
Really.
Look at me.
I was the only one in the entire court, including some of your coworkers, who did not have a neck or facial tattoo, or who was
not wearing a tank top and flip-flops. I was wearing a full slip and a body shaper, for your information, proof that I was the only one in that entire building who was adhering to the full rules of society!

I even had lip liner on; how many times have you seen that in a mug shot, unless it’s of a tranny or someone who just stabbed her pimp?
Hardly ever.
And you know what? Don’t keep turning over my credit card like it was a cantaloupe to see if it’s bad. It’s perfectly fine. It is. It’s not like you’re going to find a soft spot if you palm it enough. It is fine. The lady from India called just yesterday and we got my payment all taken care of. Run that thing, buddy. You just run it.

So those are the things that I felt needed some clarifying. I hope you see a broader picture now and aren’t so quick to judge a person just because she was driving eight miles an hour faster than the Volkswagen bus next to her covered in a cloud of toxic fumes and missing a muffler. Yeah.
That guy
didn’t get a ticket. That guy isn’t having his credit card fondled, because that guy would never show up in court. He’s too busy breaking all the other boundaries of society, like not wearing a shirt while driving on a public road and turning the sky black with cancerous exhaust, to even know
there was a speed limit and that he was traveling twenty miles an hour miles under it.

Awesomely,

Laurie Notaro

PS: Working behind glass doesn’t make you more brave, you know. It doesn’t. It just makes me want to ask you for one adult ticket to the matinee.

L
ast year when my neighbor Louise asked us whether we’d like to join her family for Thanksgiving, I almost kissed her on the lips. But I had to get some vital information before I puckered up.

“Is butter allowed?” I asked.

“Yes . . . ?” she replied, looking a little puzzled.

“Are the rolls made out of rice flour?” I queried.

“Eww! God, no!” she answered.

“Any other carnivores coming?”

“Of course!” She laughed. “Me!”

It was a huge relief, mainly because I was still a little shell-shocked from the previous Thanksgiving. Actually, that was putting it mildly. I was so wounded that I couldn’t pass sliced turkey at the deli counter at Safeway
without wanting to use a carving knife for very bad things.

The previous year wasn’t the first Thanksgiving I had hosted; I was a veteran at getting a huge dinner together for the orphaned and lonely graduate students and colleagues of my husband’s who made up our circle of friends in Oregon. But as we all counted down the years we had lived in Eugene, strange things began to happen. Things began to change.