A Week in Taipei

Part 1. Airport Security

Our business is locks. Gunlocks to be precise. Large stainless steel and cast aluminum hinged and handcuff style locks painted black with internal electrical components and red and blue solenoid wires sticking out of them designed to secure shotguns and automatic rifles in police cars. We are traveling to Taiwan to meet with our current manufacturer as well as many potential manufacturers of a new lock designed for the general public in America. And we are carrying samples of these bulky, ominous, wired devices in our carry on luggage as we cannot take the chance of checking the bags and arriving in Taiwan to discover our luggage has been sent to Kuala Lumpur.

But we’re not going to Taiwan. We’re going to prison. I’m certain of it. We’re what every single one of those narrow-minded, overpaid, and otherwise utterly unemployable idiot airport security screeners has been looking for since nine eleven. My employer, with whom I am traveling, is a balding, gray haired, wild-eyed Eastern European who speaks with a delightful and extremely discernable Hungarian accent. I’m tall, possess a large build, have crew cut hair, and could easily pass for ex-military. If John Woo called down to central casting for villains to duke it out with Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4, they’d send us up.

“Was dat in yo luggage?” The fat Aunt Jemima looking screener hollered at me in Logan Airport.

“A gunlock.” I reply nervously.

“Huh. I been seein’ a lot of those go through lately.” She exclaims while calling over her boss.

Bullpoop you incompetent twit, I think to myself. You just saw the one that was in Laszlo’s luggage that passed through the scanner not thirty seconds ago. You know, the one you just pointed out to your goons before they hauled it away. Nobody is stupid enough to travel on airplanes with these things except us. And we’re not stupid, we just have to travel with them in our carry on bags because your incompetent troglodytic knuckle-dragging baggage handlers would send them to East Timor if we checked them.

The goons get me, too. The look on the poor black fellow’s face when he opens up the packaging of the lock in my luggage is absolutely priceless. His eyes just keep getting wider and wider. He actually starts to hold the lock at arms length as he fiddles with the ratchet arm. Then he sees the red and blue wire leads sticking out of the bottom, and shoots me a look of abject horror. It is all I can do to keep myself from yelling BANG! Fortunately for me, my fear of federal prison overcomes my natural instinct for hilarity, but I’m laughing my bum off on the inside.

After lots of huffing and grunting and mumbling between themselves, and repeated explanations to two security guys and their supervisor, - they confiscate my aftershave, shaving cram, and tooth paste,- you know, so I can’t blow the plane out of the sky in a brilliant burst of Old Spice and sparkling minty freshness, -and send me on my way.
“You’ll wonder where the airplane went when you carry on your Mentodent” jingles through my head as I put the box with the gunlock, screwdrivers, solenoids, circuit boards, and just about everything else you need to really blow up an airplane back in my bag and head over to where Laszlo has just finished doing the same.

“I lost my toothpaste.” I say to him.

“Yeah. Me, too. And shaving cram.” He replies. “ The man actually unroll the tube with only a tiny little bit of tooth paste in it and reed the side that it was too much to take on. Like 4.2 milliliter or something. But they was no 4.2 milliliter in the tube. It was rolled way, way up. Like almost empty.”

I just shake my head. There simply are not words to describe the stupidity that is airline security. Then again, perhaps they thought the plastique was hidden in the shaving cram. We got on with the activating elements of our nefarious explosive plot, but not the C4.

“Oh well. At least we kept the gunlocks.” He shrugs with a grin, and we proceed to boarding.

The plane lumbers across the tarmac of Boston’s Logan International Airport, turns slowly onto the runway, and like a like a startled rhinoceros, roars to life with a thundering surge of energy. It rattles and groans and heaves and rattles some more until just at the very end of the runway, it lets out a heavy sigh, shakes off the cumbersome earth, and rushes upwards into the endless expanse of the evening sky. We speed away from looming twilight of the east coast, across the near-unfathomable expanse of America, up across Canada, on our way towards California all that was audible was the soothing, sleepy hum of the enormous engines, and the occasional clang of the fasten seatbelts sings. Los Angeles is a light shining in the darkness. We race towards the light. Halfway across the country, the darkness overcomes us.

The flight is not crowded, and relatively turbulence free. This surprises me. Of the many times I’ve crossed the country, the westward flights are always turbulent. Turbulent to the point where I clutch the otherwise uncomfortably confining armrests of the airline seat and begin making deals with God in my head along the lines of “ oh please, please, please, please, please pleeeeeeeeaaaaaaase just let this stupid flimsy cylinder packed with soft pink mushy people make it the ground in one piece, and I’ll think of something really nice to do for You after we land. Like maybe kill off a small indigenous population and build a big church where they used to cut each others hearts out and dance around naked worshiping the sun. Or moon. Or whatever it was they happened to be worshiping at that particular point in history.

No deals with the Almighty this time. Just a peaceful, eventless flight. I sleep catnap through most of it.

At LAX we deplane and walk nearly half a mile to Terminal Three for International departures. It’s unusually chilly, and we move quickly, stopping only to peer into the windows of the empty police cars parked against the curb, to see who’s gunlock they’ve deployed.
“Not ours.” Says Laszlo as we pass the first cruiser.

“That’s ours! Ha!” He exclaims triumphantly as we pause to peer into the second cruiser.

We smoke a few cigarettes, then enter the terminal and make our way towards Malaysian Airlines. They took away our lighters at Logan, but Laszlo has a pocket full of matches. I guess you can't light shoe-bombs with matches. There are throngs of Asians, Indians, Japanese, Koreans, Mexicans, Taiwanese, and foreigners or every exotic size, shape, and color except European jockeying for position in the serpentine lines that wind there way to Continental, China Airlines, Malaysia Air, Air Mexico, Angkor Airways, Airways International, etc. It’s hot in the terminal. Midsummer in New Hampshire hot. I’m already a foot taller and much whiter than anyone else in the terminal. I check the board. Five flights to Taiwan all departing within forty minutes of each other. We’re still nearly seven thousand miles away, and already I can feel the vibrant economic life of the island acting like some gargantuan magnet pulling us across the Pacific.

Security is relatively hassle free. The black fellow running the scanner has a sense of humor.

“What’s this in your bag?”

“ A gunlock for police cruisers. We have them manufactured in Taiwan, and we’re going over to meet with our supplier.” I reply as nonchalantly as possible.

“Where’s the gun?” He smiles.

“In the LAPD cruiser parked out front.” I reply with a grin.

He lets me through.

We have several hours to kill before the flight leaves, and we take turns watching the luggage, reading, and sleeping on the floor of the terminal. As boarding time approaches, we are immersed in a veritable ocean of Asians. No one speaks English. Even the security personal address us in what I can only assume is Chinese. Across the narrow hallway from me squats a Muslim. Not just your ordinary run of the mill normal American kind of Muslim who just happens to be Muslim, but a certifiable died in the wool right out of down town Saudi Muslim. He is dressed in the flowing white robes that you see on television, and has one of those small skullcaps on his head. He alternates between the prayer beads on his right wrist, and reading from the Koran. I have a decent vantage point, and can see that it’s in Arabic. I let my prejudice get the better of me, and think: lovely, blown up on the way to Taiwan. And the gallows humor of an NTS investigation that reveals me to be the bomber with all my solenoids, wires, screw drivers, printed circuit board, etc., hits me, and a chuckle a little.
747’s are an absolute triumph of engineering. It’s been over a decade since I last flew on one, and the sheer size of the craft itself delights me. How on earth something this large manages to fly is utterly astounding. Actually, the fact that anything manages to fly astounds me. It’s magic. Just like electricity. Sure, I understand the scientific principles of both flight and electricity, and can probably do a half-decent job of explaining them to schoolchildren if necessary. I can even wire an outlet, and have flown probably a hundred thousand miles over the last fifteen years. But despite all of my globetrotting, deep down inside where things matter most, I’m a simple peasant.

In my heart of hearts I know that it’s witchcraft that makes electrical devices work. Or maybe lighting hits the ground, is collected in a big pool, and travels through the power lines into our homes. Just like indoor plumbing. Probably the government is involved in some great conspiracy to keep us simple peasants from discovering their treasured lighting pools. It’s really the only that makes any sense out of the American public school system. They devised it to indoctrinate children with the belief that there’s actually science behind electricity, not the secret lighting lakes.

Actually, I might be a little flexible on the electricity theory. Being a product of the American public schools myself, I’ve not entirely freed myself from years and years of indoctrination.

Flying, however, is witchcraft. Try as you might, there’s not arguing me out of that one. Every time I get on an airplane, I know that deep down in the bellow of that lumbering air bound beast lurks some hideous hook nosed hag constantly sacrificing a chickens and offering up whole burnt offerings to propitiate the gods of the sky.

We depart Los Angeles at 1:20 AM. 4:20 New Hampshire time. The flight will last 16 approximately 16 hours, and we will travel on the cusp of night itself as the planet rotates. Rosy fingered dawn will chase us five thousand miles, and not catch up with us until we are more than halfway across the Pacific Ocean. When we land in Taipei it will be 7:20 in the morning of the next day. I explain to my children that I am traveling into the future. That I will be twelve hours ahead of them when I arrive in Taipei, and not only will I travel through the air, but the time itself. How’s that for witchcraft, huh? They shrug it off as just another fairy tale made up by dad. Oh well, I’ve earned they incredulousness with tales of swamp beasts that devour bad children, and flying snow monkeys that will carry them away if they ever wander into the forest in winter.

“We hava cheekun wit a pasta and Ahfredo sauce or a vegahtahrian curry.” The lilting sing-song of the stewardesses accent is a wonderful treat. We’re flying Malaysian Airlines, and the stewardesses are all delightful Asian beauties wearing a most intriguing uniform. It’s an exotically colored cross between a kimono and a dress. Short-sleeved with a full length skirt, it projects both refinement and utility.

“Chicken, please.” I ask while discarding the hot wet paper towels the flight crew has distributed to all of the passengers. This is new to me. At first I am not sure what to do with the hot wet towel, as the idea of distributing them on an airplane has never crossed my mind.

The meal is actually good, and they serve drinks free of charge. I stick with 7up, but even the whiskey, wine, and beer is free. Unlike American carriers that charge upwards of five dollars for a drink.

I settle in for a long flight after the meal and burn through Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army,- a wonderfully written account of his tour of duty in the terrifying poopty mudhole that was south Vietnam before and during Tet . I watch Letters From Iwo Jima, - an equally powerful film about the trials and tribulations of the Japanese soldiers abandoned by their government to fight to the very last man despite the fact that an American victory was all but inevitable. Two hours from Taipei airport the first land we see on the horizon is the tiny speck of Okinawa, and I mull over my recollections of William Manchester’s book Goodbye Darkness.

As a man in his early twenties, Manchester fought his way across the Pacific until finally exiting the war on that tiny speck of land, so horribly injured words cannot do justice to his sufferings. As his plane lifted off from the ravaged landscape of Okinawa to return him to the States, the shin bone of the man standing beside him was still imbedded in his back. All that remained of the young American friend who took the full brunt of the shell that finally freed them both from war's iron grip. There are very few books like it. It's the kind of war memoir so laden with raw emotion and vivid imagery that you actually feel the boot-trampled dust gritting between your teeth, and the sickly sweet smell of decay lingers in your nostrils when you finally finish reading. A book so magnificent, you don't set it down, — as your eyes scan the final sentence on the final page, it burns itself into a tiny pile of ash in your open hands, and disappears into the winds of time, leaving you with an empty, aching hole where your heart used to be.

It strikes me that on my first trip to Asia, I've spent most of my time immersed in texts and videos in which Americans slaughter Asians, are slaughtered by Asians. I am superstitious, and this cannot be a good thing. There's a design in everything. Fine, fine... deny your inner God-fearing savage, convince yourself there is no Creator, I don't really care. But we all catch occasional glimpses of the master plan, despite our intellectual convictions. Perhaps not in every meaningless decision, but the design often becomes perfectly evident, — if not perfectly clear—, during those sparse mind-opening, transitional moments in our lives. I'm hoping this isn't one of those revelations.

I have to piss.

My teeth are getting fuzzy.

We've been traveling for over 20 hrs now, and I figure a dry-brush is better than nothing. I'll score some toothpaste in Taipei. I grab my tooth brush, and walk carefully through the darkened belly of the beast towards the lavatory. The witch downstairs is a good witch, not a bad witch. No turbulence. No embarrassed landing in the lap of some unsuspecting fellow traveler when the floor drops from beneath your feet. I reach the head, and look around. The Certifiable Died in the Wool Right Out of Down Town Saudi Muslim is standing directly behind me. "Great." I think. He's chosen this moment to begin his Jihad. He's mistaken me for the Air-Marshall. Makes sense. Tall, white, Khaki pants, baggy jacket, ball cap. If I were to pick the guy with the concealed, legal firearm, I'd pick me, too. At any moment he will retrieve a box-cutter concealed in his naughty places, slit my throat, and begin his one man Jihad.

I muster up my inner Ninja and turn to face the inevitable.

"Dude," he blurts out, " do you think they'll let us walk around in Taiwan? My legs are damning killing me."

"Probably." My reply reveals no emotion, no sign of wariness.

"Cool." He says.

"Got any toothpaste?" I inquire.

He retrieves minuscule tube from one of his billowing pockets. It's a flight legal tube. Not enough in it to take down the plane, but certainly enough for my purposes. The tables have turned now. Stupid Muslim. You have just given me the last element I needed. You may have a better beard and a Koran, but now I'm the guy with the bomb.

"Viva el Christo Rey!" I shriek while gripping him in a right handed bear hug. My left hand jams the tiny tube into my pocket, contacts the gunlock solenoid, and with a hollow thump and an effervescent spray of minty freshness, I send us both into virginless ethereal, Christian paradise, where we sing praise to the Almighty Christian Creator for all time.

Ok, not really. But it's fun to imagine that we nominally practicing Christians could totally surprise the hell out of our fundamentalist Muslim rivals that way. And this is just some dumbass 19 year old kid from Berkley with extraordinary facial hair heading off to Kuala Lumpur. He'll no doubt be back in the States in three months with dysentery or cholera. Or maybe he's the next John Walker Lindh.
Oh well. Screw him.
Not my problem, and he's not worth wasting a Crest bomb on.

I give the toothpaste back, thank him, and settle in for the remainder of the flight.