PRE-READING NOTE: This final entry has taken as much overdramatic, literary, morose license as the author saw fit.  However, no hyperbole was involved in the following account, because absolutely none was required.  

So once the swab had circled the inside of both my nostrils and was packed neatly into a plastic baggie with my personal information, the perky nurse just about patted my bum and squeaked, in a tone that indicated she was proud of us both, “You’re done, you can go now!” 

In a sense, as I shambled away with my dignity in tatters and my capacity for endurance now in alarmingly subterranean levels, I wish she had given me that universal, nurturing go-ahead with her palm.  With such an endearing human gesture, a simple light tap of familiarity and innocent jocularity would have provided at least a modicum, a granule of comfort and assurance in this environment of intimidatingly sterile, yet haphazard airport tyranny.  

I walked away semi-dazed and drained, really just wanting a cup of coffee, my stupid 1971 Penthouse magazine with the flat-bottomed Italian chick, and to be back home.  This was absurd.  This was beyond the pale, in fact.  But surely, I thought to myself, as I spotted a Tim Horton’s and decided that a steeped tea could offer me the semblance of hominess and predictability in such a hostile climate, surely, the worst of it was over.

IT’S NEVER OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER.

The howling discourtesy of a random, performative COVID test was jolting enough.  Now they began making things up as they went along.  Who?  The Airport People.  I don’t know their official title, nor do I care what it is, they’re simply The Airport People. The Pearson Goddamn Airport People is who I’m talking about, and it went something like this:

I found one of the fill-your-bottle-up stations that all Canadian airports seem to have, which is where you can actually top up on H20 after going through airport screening.  You can’t go through the frisking process with any water, but when you’re done, sure!  Get on that plane with some hydration!  I also clutched my warm, sweet tea, which was nearly stiff with all the sugar I requested in a sad bid for comfort, half-confident that finally, finally I could just make my way to the correct gate and relax a bit before being stuffed into a 737 the size of a Skytrain car.  I could maybe check up on Foodie Beauty’s hebephiliac roommate Peetz, have a few desperately-needed hyuks, slurp my drink, and continue to stave off the head cold that was creeping up very slowly on me.  

There was still no adequate signage anywhere–I guess in Toronto, people are to simply turn their olfactory sense up to turbo speed and sniff out where they are supposed to go–so I kept asking people where I was supposed to make my connection.  I was told to take an escalator up one floor, and then I’d be in the right place.

At the top of the escalator was the scene of a frantic airport, complete with colossal digital scoreboards, over-it passengers, and several airline desks.  This…did not look like where I was to make my connection.  This looked as though I was starting all over from scratch.  Utterly perplexed and offended, I found my flight on the scoreboard (Westjet 719, which I committed to memory with a lazy mnemonic technique where I pretended my birthday was in July) and saw that I was supposed to go to gate 3-24.  

What the kind of gate was that?  “3-24”?

And how was I supposed to get there?

Above me were three enormous numbers spanning some wall space: 1, 2, and 3.  In my exhaustion, I still somehow managed to deduce that 3 was–it had to be–the only logical place for me to go.  There was the predictable roped-off queue pattern, and some Airport People standing at various intervals throughout it.  Shrugging, I meandered my way through and asked the large man with folded arms where I was to catch my connection; I was on WestJet 719, you see.

“Lemme see your boarding pass!” he grunted.

I showed him my boarding pass, impressed that he was able to memorize all the flights given the chaotic atmosphere and lack of organization surrounding me.

“You’re in the right place,” he said.  “But you have to get rid of the coffee and the water.”

What?

“What?”

“You need to dispose of the coffee and the water in your bottle, ma’am,” he repeated, while other people were flashing their own boarding passes, trying to get past the very sweaty redhead with a still-unread, Portobello-Road-obtained, vintage Penthouse magazine in her backpack.

“I have to go through security screening again?” I yipped.  This was not what I was told would happen at all.  Whatsoever.  When I had been flying to London, at Vancouver airport I had suffered through the routine humiliation of the x-ray and the removal of the shoes and all of that, and had been petrified that I would have to endure it again during my connection in Toronto.  During that flight, I only had 45 minutes to make that transfer (if you recall…and I’m sure you don’t) and if I had to go through security again, why, there was no way I’d make it!

“No, no,” they told me at YVR.  “This is it until you get to London.  As long as you don’t leave the airport–you don’t go out anywhere, but just go straight to your gate–you won’t have to do this again.  It’s a domestic connection, you only have to do this once.”  And that had been the case.  Airplane to gate, flawlessly, and then a landing at Gatwick where I wasn’t even asked how long I was staying or if I’d brought anything suspicious with me.  

Now, on my way back home, despite having my stuff scanned at Gatwick, and after a completely prepopsterous COVID procedure forced upon me, I was now being made to do this again.  In Canada.  My home and native land.  Glorious Undistinguished and free.totalitarian.  

Why me, lord?  

Snippily and bitchily, I said, “I’m not going to dump out my drink.  And it’s tea, not coffee.  I’m going to sit down and enjoy my drink and then come back.”  Haughtily, I reversed course and nudged past the passengers trying to get through, and found a spot on the floor somewhere beside a bin, where I removed my mask for the first time in many, many hours, and drank my drink.  Then I was ready to go back to the burly man, and to go through yet another security tribulation.  

And this time, given the “Mad Max”-like climate of Pearson airport I had already experienced in the last hour, I knew that they would do anything they wanted.  Anything at all.    

And they did.  

…I’m starting to get flustered just thinking about this.  I’m not sure I can go on!  Do I have to relive the security screening at Pearson airport?  My heart rate is starting to increase!  This might have to wait.  It’s still too new, too real!

The final, determined, exhausting / exhaustive chapter in the saga of aeronautic and autocratic tyranny, wherein our heroine concedes defeat to both the unlawful seizure of a critical hygiene product and the inability to ogle naked late-60s female bodies in preparation for the final leg of her interminable transcontinental journey.

“PUT YOUR BACKPACK IN THE TUB, MA’AM.”

Yeah, I know how to do this, thanks.  I can’t quite believe that I actually have to do it–here, during my domestic flight transfer, something I didn’t choose but was part of my el cheapo flight–however, I know exactly what the drill is, you cockamamie Airport Person.

…and since when did I become a “ma’am”?  I noticed that every time instructions had been given to me by airport personnel, mainly in Canada (in the UK there was much more usage of the terms “love” and “dear,” which was far preferable), it was accompanied by this schoolmarm formality.  I don’t like it, and I mean not one bit.  I’ve already been working on total acceptance of the fact that the face staring back at me from my mirror is that of a 46-and-1/3-year-old woman (well-preserved, natch, but still halfway to 92).  And I’ve only recently thrown my hands up in the air and rolled with the harsh reality of my knockers refusing to conform to any size except “huge,”  but I will not embrace having a matronly bosom.  And those two things–hag face and massive, shapeless breasts–are what “ma’am” smacks of.  I will undergo the scalpel, yoink my face up to the skies, and lop my mammaries off again before I ease into a world where I’m wearing floor-length dresses buttoned up to my chin, fabric straining against the swollen boulders on my chest, malodorous face powder and greasy daubs of rouge crusting into the lines and slashes on my withered visage.  I’m no “ma’am.”  I’d far, far prefer to  be called “miss,” even though I’ve long since outgrown such an address: I could technically be someone’s grandmother, and the concept of bashful pre-wedding jitters is about as foreign to my mind as playing with toy guns. 

I sighed a sigh and plonked my backpack in the big plastic tub, fairly convinced by this point that the ol’ Penthouse magazine shoved in there would simply turn into dust before I ever got a chance to properly flip through it.  Airports are absolutely without peer when it comes to doing whatever the female equivalent of cock-blocking might be.  

“Any electronics?”

“Er…yes.”

“Take them out please.”

What?  We no longer had to do this.  In fact, at YVR, I had specifically asked about removing my tablet and laptop from my backpack–they had been eased and fitted in there with great precision at home, and I didn’t want to attempt it again–and they had said, “No, you don’t have to do that anymore.”  So why here?  Suddenly, without explanation, I now had to do this needless activity at Pearson Airport, where the staff training manual must surely have been nothing more than a leaflet containing the phrase Er, just improvise.

“I have to take out my laptop and Kindle?”

“Yes ma’am”–oh, fuck you–“and place them in a separate bucket, please.”

I also was aware that slip-on shoes didn’t have to be removed, but considering everything up to this point in this gulag of despotism had been entirely contrary to established norms and logic, I skipped the middle-ma’am and kicked off my Vans.  

My two tubs went sailing down the conveyor belt and through the x-ray machine, as I stood in the plastic cell with my bare feet placed just so on the yellow foot marks on the ground, my arms up in the air (but not too up, you see…I’d been admonished for their height at YVR) and bent at the elbows like the diagram before me.  It also goes without saying that padding through this area in bare feet–where countless people had trod dirt, shit, piss, filth, wadded-up gum, rotten food, animal waste, vomit, and like that–was very much perpendicular to the hygiene theatre that the airport was putting on (why no disposable booties provided?), but in order to preserve the few thin strands of sanity that I was gripping onto, I just carried on and through to the other side.

I also know that I had removed everything from my pants pockets, which had consisted of nothing except a Travelodge card to write a Tripadvisor review and a lip balm, both of which I clutched in my hand.  I wore no belt, no barrettes in my hair, no bobby pins, and had no piercings.  Yet as I walked out of the human-sized tube after posing correctly, a woman insisted on frisking me.

She didn’t wave a wand over me, she didn’t hear any strange noise coming from the machine, she just made me stand there with my arms again in the air (bent at the elbow, not too high, remember!) and patted me down on both sides of my body.  This had not happened at YVR.  

It was nothing more and nothing less than a grotesque act of power abuse…without even the quick courtesy of a gentle reach-around, to quote Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.  But we were still not done.  In fact, the screening monstrosity had only just begun.  

The atmosphere was frenzied, frenetic, disorganized, and confusing.  There didn’t appear to be designated tasks for the many Airport People working in this particular coal mine; they were milling around, moving about, occasionally chatting with each other, and sometimes speaking in clipped sentences and commands to the agitated passengers who just wanted their stuff.  I noticed that the plastic buckets were, oddly enough, now going down two separate paths: After being placed on the conveyor belt, the belt pathway split into a fork.  Some went down the left side of the fork, where people were standing and could simply grab their stuff.  The tubs that went down the right side of the fork were behind a short plastic barrier and close to the workers, jamming up and not really moving.  We couldn’t grab or access them, and nobody at all was explaining what was happening.

For instance, the one tub I had with my laptop and tablet ended up on the left side of the fork, so I could reach over and take them and deposit the tub along with several others on the racks below.  The other tub with my backpack (and hoodie tied to its grab handle) was now stuck in a logjam on the right side of this fork, and I wasn’t able to or allowed to access it at all.  It was there, within sight, but obviously had been sent over in that direction deliberately.

What was the issue?  Everything in there was virtually identical to what I had brought over to England.  I couldn’t think of a solitary thing that had shown up on the x-ray system which might be considered verboten, unless it was the last soggy few bites of my nine-hours-old Pret a Manger sandwich, purchased in London before departing and stuffed into a side pocket.   

I milled about at the end of this conveyer belt clusterfuck, where there were some tables set up and the crushing sight of a few of these employees slowly, deliberately, and dumbly rifling through various carryon items.  There was no sense of urgency or purpose, and certainly no outward concern for the travel time or obligations of the unfortunate passengers whose bags were selected for more in-depth scrutiny.  

Again, I have seen this fairly-standard process at play in several airports around the world, but I’d never seen anything quite so shambolic and without rhyme or reason as this.  None of us had any idea where to stand, where we were supposed to go, how long this would take, or what actually was happening.  There was, again, no signage, and out of the several uniformed dingbats pretending to be important, not a single one bothered to at least bark out a “IF YOU WEREN’T ABLE TO GRAB YOUR TUB, PLEASE STAND OFF TO THE SIDE” or something to that effect.  We just helplessly looked at our stuff not moving and not within reach.

I scooted around to the left side of this setup, where some workers were busy looking busy, but not really doing much.  Along the front, a couple of workers were unzipping backpacks and pretending to care about the contents, much to the agitation of the people to whom these bags belonged.  To the right, where the “acceptable” carryons were being passed down the line, many passengers were still crowded together, not sure of why they couldn’t get their stuff from behind the plastic partition and why it hadn’t gone through.  

Because nobody was saying anything about anything, I started huffing and panting (much like Marvin the Martian when he gets mad, actually) and wailing to someone behind the conveyer belt about my backpack and how I needed it and that I had to make a flight transfer!

“Ma’am–” oh, get fucked  “–please stand over there and wait.  We are processing what we can.  You have to wait.”  

Well, at least that was something resembling instructions or an explanation of this hyperreal scenario.  Powerless yet again for the third or fourth time in less than two hours, I found a place to lean against (not even any chairs provided for this indignity!) and, by this point very damp and not-so-fresh and covered in the perspiration of both despair and a claustrophobic environment, I removed my outer layer of clothing and was pleased that I had remembered to wear my new second-hand Union Jack T-shirt beneath everything.  

After about ten or fifteen minutes of more Marvin-influenced puffing noises on my end, I at last saw an Airport Person take my tub with my honest little backpack in it and bring it to the front table.  

“Does this belong to someone?” he asked, holding it up.  Well, what do you think, you absolutely incomparable web-toed mong?  

…this is where I must zip through the rest.  Dialogue and minimal exposition is the only way to document the following experience:

He started slowly, casually removing my stuff and placing it on the table.  One of the most prominent items–and the only thing to which I was paying attention–was the big Ziplock bag full of the travel-sized liquid items I had been very careful about.  After all, the threat of holding a 767 Boeing jet hostage with a full bottle of Mario Badescu lavender facial mist was a looming threat that all airlines were perpetually on-guard about, and I was well aware of its potential.  

All of the little bottles were the exact same ones I had brought into the UK without issue, and I wasn’t sure what had shown up on the x-ray screen unless someone unbeknownst to me had planted a grenade or a handsaw in there without my knowledge.  

“That’s my hairspray.  That’s my Avene hydration mist.  That’s my toothpaste.  That’s my hand cream.  That’s my dry shampoo.”  For some reason, I was robotically reciting the name of each item as he removed it, possibly as some kind of subconscious certainty that it would either expedite this nonsense, or make clear to this double-digit-IQ individual what everything actually was, in case the YYZ training leaflet had also included the phrase If you don’t recognize it, it’s terrorism.  Not only was he doing this, but he was now re-packing everything into a smaller, tighter, more ridiculous see-through resealable plastic bag, at an intolerably glacial pace.  

“How come you’re repacking my stuff?”

“Because this is the size bag you have to use.”

“But it was fine leaving Vancouver and coming into the UK and leaving the UK.”

“That’s…the rule at this airport.”

Huh.  I guess Toronto really is the centre of the universe after all.  

He pulled out a regular-sized aerosol spray bottle of Nivea Black & White Invisible 48H Protection Antiperspirant Dry Spray Water Lily Scent (wonderful stuff!) and held it up with the oddest combination of triumph and guilt on his face.

“That’s…yes, that’s deodorant,” I said, not sure of what was going on.

“Ma’am–”  oh, eat a dick “–you can’t have this.”

“Why not?”

“This size isn’t permitted here.  This is–” He checked the label “–150 milliliters.  You can only have 100.”

“But I brought it over with me.  There wasn’t a problem.”

“You can’t have this size at this airport.”  I had been entirely correct about the one phrase in the training leaflet.  “I’m sorry about that.”

“Well…okay.”

“If you insist on keeping it, you can go back out, purchase a separate bag, appeal to security, pay for some extra–“

“That’s…that’s a five-dollar can of deodorant.  I’m not going to do that.”

“So are you prepared to forfeit this item?”

For Christ’s sake.  “YES.  Go ahead.  Keep it.  I just need to get going.”  Something occurred to me, though.  “Would you mind if I gave myself one last spritz with it?  I’m really gross after travelling over here from England, and I still have a ways to go.”

He looked right into my eyes, unamused.  “Ha. Ha.  NO.”

A reasonable request for some freshening-up, denied.  What sort of gentleman says no to a lady who simply wants to smell her best?  The answer: Someone who is as far removed from being a gentleman as this ogre was.

FINALLY WRAPPING IT THE FUCK UP…I made it to my gate as people were starting to board.  I had glanced at two airport bars during my half-sprint there, spotting some people guzzling pints of amber liquid and shelves full of bottles that promised oblivion.  I’m an almost giddily sober human being and would never invite the escapist nightmare of substance use or abuse into my life ever again, but I would be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind for a second how much a drink would lower my blood pressure.  

After countless lineups, an unlawful mandatory picture-taking machine, a forced COVID test that amounted to my still being able to board the plane, masks on flights, unlawful groping / frisking, the seizure of my antiperspirant, and–I would discover only when I got home–the omission of my laptop charger from the contents replaced into my searched backpack–a stiff shot or two would have done wonders.  But I can’t drink like a normal person, I don’t want to drink like a normal person, and the mindset of using something to find chemical relief instead of confronting life’s debacles with a lucid mind and fearless heart is not something I respect or want to accept as normal.  The moral of the story?  I’m a tougher chickie than I thought, and not even the dehumanizing two-hour dictatorial Orwellian processes of Pearson Airport are going to break this broad.

…also, the cab driver from YVR back to my apartment just had to be the world’s biggest dink, to the point where I had to Karen out and phone Yellow Cab to complain, but that’s for another time.  A time when I’m in prison and have nothing better to do than write stories about being a passenger in a taxi.  

FIN.

(Reach me at nadya@nadzvera.com)