How Antonio Banderas Saved Las Vegas... Maybe

My spur of the moment trip to Mexico ended on a very weird note. Mindful of the "no liquids over 3 oz. in carry-on" rule, I refrained from buying any edible (or imbibible, if that's how ou spell it) souvenirs... until I got to the Puerto Vallarta airport heading home.

In the gate area, past security, I found a jar of "wine-flavored goat candy," though in reading the ingredient list I saw there was no wine, only rum. I figured it was carjeta, a sort of dulce de leche made with goat milk and rum, and decided I needed it. It was sealed and wrapped and I had the receipt showing I'd bought it in the "secure" area of the airport, so I figured all would be fine.

I got to Denver and was enroute to my connecting flight to Vegas when my wine-flavored goat candy aroused the suspicions of that crack security force that is TSA. It was almost funny watching them, the very tripwire of American defense, puzzle over the jar o' goaty, rummy goodness, shaking it, holding it up to the light, scrutinizing my receipt and generally looking confused. They kicked it up to their supervisor, a short, weasel-like man with a buzz cut who just reeked of the attitude of "I may have failed the exam for my local police academy six times, but dang it, I done got me a job tellin' people what to do!"

He, of course, disallowed my wine-flavored, rummy, goaty ambrosia on the count of it being a 10 ounce jar, clearly over the 3 ounce limit. When I pointed out it was purchased in a secure area and still sealed, he actually smiled, clearly relishing his power, and said "No way."

Jerk.

I went back out of the security area, grumbling to the nice but clueless TSA drone who escorted me that this whole policy is folly. What's to prevent, say, four different people traveling ostensibly as individuals from each bringing three ounces of whatever chemical toxin they fear aboard and then pooling it once the plane is in midflight? What about the fact that they allow PediaLyte and milk in excess of three ounces for babies? You think someone "committed to the cause" enough to kill him or herself won't mind taking junior along for the ride? Drug mules swallow vast quantities of product or stuff it in various body cavities to sneak it aboard... a terrorist wouldn't do the same? Spare me.

I actually said all this to the TSA drone and she sighed and nodded, agreeing with me. I muttered security was being co-opted by a witless bureaucracy and she said "you have no idea how bad it is."

Oh, that's reassuring.

As an aside, I watched passengers, including myself, dutifully take off our shoes without even being told to do so as we approached the security checkpoint, all because one C-grade would-be terrorist more than five years ago got past the French, those paragons of home defense, with sneakers that were truly the bomb. I know, I know, questioning authority is like so totally unpatriotic, but it vexes me terribly. I'm terribly vexed.

Once back in the "unsecure" area, I took an extra Ziploc bag I happened to have, poured about eight of the ten ounces of rummy goaty goodness into it, put it with the rest of my toiletries and yes, passed through security with no questions asked. Because, you know, an unlabeled, resealable bag of eight ounces of brown goo is so much less suspicious than a sealed, commercially produced and purchase point-verifiable jar of rummy goat candy.

Idiots.

I was, as one might surmise, fairly vexed about my goaty goodness contraband when I boarded the plane. I had an aisle seat, and sat down next to, uh, trouble. The woman in the window seat was 50-ish and a business traveler sort. The guy sitting between us, hunched over and rocking back and forth, lips moving silently as if in prayer, wearing a heavy coat despite the fact that he was sweating, was a 20-something South Asian guy with a beard.

Now, I tried very hard not to be a xenophobic, racist bee-yotch, but this guy made me really nervous. I thought "wow, it must suck to be a south Asian guy who's just a nervous flyer," but I couldn't stop thinking that he might be up to something. I wondered if some people aboard the London Tube a couple years back noticed nervous South Asian guys and thought "oh, I won't raise an alarm, I'm just overreacting" before they were blown to bits.

You may likely think I was overreacting because, after all, he was checked by security, wasn't he? And to that I say "eight ounces of contraband rummy goaty goodness in my carry-on, stuffed in an unmarked bag between my lip gloss and eye moisturizer." Getting past America's Tripwire is not difficult.

I'll admit it. I was scared. When I realized he would have made me nervous, acting the way he was, if he had blond hair and blue eyes and a freakin' Nascar baseball hat on (actually... that might have made me more nervous), I decided I couldn't just sit there. By now, the woman in 15A was looking at him, looking at me, looking at him and then looking back at me like "what should we do?"

I was already thinking "hmm... if he reaches into his coat pocket with his right hand, I can elbow him in the sternum with my left and then tear out his windpipe with my right..." I was also thinking "hmm, terrorist attack on Las Vegas... Now that's a nice big fat target representing the moral turpitude of the Great Satan, isn't it?"

As the plane pushed back from the gate, I couldn't just sit there. So I asked him, very nicely, "Excuse me, are you ok? You look like you're not feeling well."

He said he was fine, thank you for asking, but seemed uneasy. I just kept asking him questions, hoping that, if he was a bad guy, he'd been, uhm, classically trained, and would recognize that I might just be the sort of person capable of pulling out his windpipe at will.

He was a native Pakistani studying medicine here in Vegas and had been visiting a friend in New Mexico. First he didn't want to tell me who or where, but eventually, probably in hopes of just shutting me up, he said it was a friend in Albuquerque who did a lot of gemstone trading in Peshawar. I thought hmm, there's a nice cash industry that often funds terrorists, but said nothing. When I asked if he went back to Pakistan he said yes, often, and I had to restrain myself from also asking "been on any monkeybars lately?" (why is it that those terrorist training camp videos always have guys on monkeybars?)

He swung wierdly between wanting very badly to tell me about Islam (which was actually interesting and I learned a lot) and distractedly not wanting me to talk to him, but I pressed on, because it was the only thing I could think to do to calm myself at this point, other than the whole windpipe thing, which would have had other consequences.

I told him a little of my travels in the Middle East and Central Asia and how I sympathized with the media's gross generalizations about the Muslim world (see? Don't kill this infidel! I can be of value to your cause! Sort of!). He seemed very pleased with this and started to talk about history, including how he was fascinated by Central Asia and the legacy of the Mongols. Hey, he brought up the Mongols, not me. I figure he couldn't be all bad.

We talked a little about how the schism between Shi'ite and Sunni is being exploited purely for political purposes. He was willing to talk about Iraq, but not Musharraf or Pakistan, or Afghanistan for that matter, and when I asked if resentment for Musharraf's loyalty to the US was fomenting increased radicalism among Pakistani youth, he paused for a long moment and then said "that's an interesting question" but wouldn't answer it.

Then out of nowhere he said that if he wasn't studying to be a doctor, he would be a historian, and that his favorite period was the Middle Ages and "the Dark Ages, only they weren't really dark in the Muslim world." Preaching to the choir, my brother. I agreed and remarked on how so many of the things we enjoy or use in the West, from math to sherbet, came out of the Middle East, brought back by those rapacious, pig-eating Crusaders. This excited him very much and he nearly bounced up and down in his seat, saying "Thank you! I can never say things like that because I am a Muslim so no one believes me, but it's true!"

Then he added that he got frustrated no one, not even his parents, seemed interested in that period, and that he'd even given them the book "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton, hoping they'd read it, but they had no interest. Now it was my turn to bounce up and down in my seat as I told him I'd not only read the book, but also loved the flawed yet wonderful movie made from it, "The 13th Warrior."

He professed his love for the movie as well, and we had a weird, gooey, mooney-eyed moment basking in the shared glow of thoughts of Antonio Banderas as an Arab poet who gets essentially kidnapped by a bunch of burly Vikings tromping off to kill stuff.

All I could think was: I finally find someone who loves that movie as much as me and it's a guy who's probably going to blow me up or shoot aerosolized anthrax up my nose.

Actually, I was also thinking: how cool that I finally found someone who loves that movie as much as I do. But one false move and I'm still tearing out his windpipe.

Anyway, after bonding over "13th Warrior," we had a pretty easy conversation until the plane began its final descent. He got all sweaty and nervous and distracted again, even though he said he wasn't afraid of flying (I asked). I started asking him about the Hajj, and if he'd been, and he said no, but that he hoped to go in January. I replied: "Oh, I hope you do! That's something to really look forward to!"

Shameless, I know.

The plane landed, and they made the announcement that people could use their cell phones. He got his out and inputted I swear like 20 digits, but didn't press "send" or "call" or anything. This freaked me out. He sat there with his thumb hovering over the "call" button, watching as the plane drew nearer to the gate. I thought, is it the detonation code? I leaned over to look at the screen (if it was some binary code, that was going to be it. It was going to be windpipe time) but he covered it with his hand. Ok, so I'm nosy, but I'd rather offend him than get vaporized.

I yammered on and on about how excited I was for him to go on the Hajj and how much I'd learned from him and how wonderful it was talking to him and yadda yadda yah until we got off the plane and went our separate ways, me as quickly as possible to the bus stop just in case, well, you know.

He never pressed the "call" button, at least not that I saw. It was all very unsettling. Maybe he was really poised to do something bad, and didn't because I wouldn't stop yapping. Maybe he was heading down that path, and maybe something I said made him rethink his motives. Maybe by reminding him that Vikings and Arabs learn to get along in "13th Warrior," I gave him hope for a similar reconciliation between our cultures. (Hey, it could happen.)

Or maybe he's blogging right now at JustANervousSouthAsianFlyer,Ok? about yet another run-in with some crazy paranoid American chick. I can imagine his post:

"This paranoid, xenophobic infidel tart would not leave me alone, and I feared she would go all Tae Bo on my innocent ass and try to tear out my windpipe or something, so I brought up the Mongols and '13th Warrior.' That always seems to calm the would-be heroic spinster types. Why won't they just leave me alone?"