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Down in the Dirt v050

Operation LYSISTRATA

Pat Dixon

    1
    None of us women really knows how to make a bomb--at least I am pretty sure--or at least I was sure.
    My best friend, Karen Hirsch--not her real name, of course--flew home with me for Thanksgiving break in 1998, and she got so pissed off at airport security and the FAA and the FBI and the United States Senate and the airlines and the president and--at least it seemed so at the time--nearly everybody who was traveling by plane that day. My twin sister met us at the airport near Atlanta--not my real home city--and in the car Karen ventilated practically non-stop for nearly ten minutes about how security is so lax and how easily some flaming militia group or terrorists or pissed-off nuns could have terminated our young lives along with every other passenger fifty times over, if they’d wanted to.
    “Even real d-u-m-f-u-x . . . excuse my Belgian, Betty . . . could get almost any kind of bomb into any terminal without their stupid balls even breaking a sweat. And then, right there in the waiting area or inside the plane--ka-ploom! Reaper time for yours truly!”
    Betty, my twin--not her real name either--in fact everyone’s name here is made up, and I’m calling myself Babs here--Betty said, “So why don’t you get off your ass, Karen, and actually do something about it? A girl of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds. I hear you pissing and moaning, but is it going to help you or anyone to just tell me and Babs? No way. When I get pissed with a teacher or a clerk or anybody, I don’t just framilate about it--I find a way to make ‘em clean up their act or suffer some major kind of consequence. I get--don’t try to interrupt me--these lips are still moving. I get the names of people that futzed up--or at least their license plate number--and then I send a zinger letter to their bosses or make a phone call--or do both. That’s called ‘Walk, not talk,’ and it feels a lot better than being all talk and no walk--pardon me for being blunt--like what I hear you doing now.”
    “Oh yeah--right!” said Karen. “The whole system is broken from bottom to top, and they’re going to listen to me! Those schmuckolas at the top are happy with the system just the way it is. This isn’t like writing a letter saying ‘You lost my luggage for a week, asshole,’ and getting a hundred dollars’ worth of credit on my next ticket and some extra frequent-flyer miles to calm me down. If they give me a free ticket back to school and a million frequent-flyer miles, their . . . their Fokkers will be just as likely to land prematurely in a million little pieces--with all of us in little pieces, too.”
    “Karen,” I finally said. “Do you know what would make them listen to you?”
    I was sitting in the back seat, and she was in the front--in the death seat beside my sister. She turned around to look back at me coolly.
    “Like of course, stupid,” she said after a long pause. “Do you take me for an airhead? I just walk into the White House and press my loaded Luger against the president’s head and say, ‘Now that I have your attention . . . .’ But then they’d probably just gun me and him both down, and it would be business as usual the next day, so even that wouldn’t work.”
    “It would work if you did it right--and if you had a little help from a team,” I said. Like my twin, I believe in making my point where it counts. There are three bastard teachers who are unemployed right now because they thought their anatomy could touch my anatomy.
    “Like what,” said Karen, suddenly serious because she could see that I was totally focused on the problem and wasn’t just trying to give her some shit.
    I glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw that Betty was looking at me, too, in her steady, calm way.
    “Like teaching them a real object lesson that gives them skivvies brown-outs all the way from the check-in gates to the White House. And like scaring a few hundred thousand passengers. And getting the word of it out to the news media. Ten or twelve of us could shake people up at least as much as that cow-turd bomber did in Oklahoma--and without really hurting a single person--or animal. We plant a dozen bogus bombs on a dozen planes all on the same day.”
    Karen had been complaining that nobody had asked to look inside her carry-on bags with her battery-operated laptop and calculator and travel alarm, her can of hair spray and bottle of shampoo, her electric razor and hair dryer, her portable CD player and phone, her large tin of home-made fudge, and all her costume jewelry. They all just got a quick glance--if that--from some zombie looking at an x-ray machine, and every time the buzzer went off while she was walking through the metal detector, they were satisfied when they found out she was wearing a chain-link belt and checked her no further.
    “I could have had a Swiss army knife inside my blouse--or a bandolera with hundreds of bullets,” she had said. “The steel tubes of my suitcase’s handle or the steel rods holding on its wheels could be put together to make a gun--or a small crossbow or a blowgun--sort of a James Bond kind of thing. And if I’d had a wheelchair, a walker, a metal crutch, or a kid’s stroller, I could have all kinds of weapons hidden. My chain belt could be a dangerous weapon. My hair spray could be set on fire and be a flame thrower. I could have had a pint of sulfuric acid or some explosive in my shampoo bottle, and who would know till it was too late? Or a wine bottle full of gasoline with a totally innocent looking corkscrew. Or deodorant bars or suppositories that are really plastic explosives. They say we have to take a few chances in a free society, but it’s the buck that matters. If we slow up the check-in lines to really look at things, there’ll be less bucks!”
    “Or if they hire and train checkers who are smarter or more motivated--and use better equipment to detect lethal shit. Again: more overhead and less bucks,” I had added. “Hell—I’d be willing to pay an extra seventy or eighty dollars just to feel safer!”
    Betty had driven home yesterday from a different university where her boyfriend was majoring in engineering, but she had flown with me and mom to New York last summer and could relate to what Karen was saying. Shortly after Karen had begun complaining to her, Betty had suggested that carry-on, or ninety percent of it, should be forbidden and that most passengers would be happy or at least willing to accept the new rules.
    After I mentioned the possibility of us getting together a team to show up the flaws in the so-called system, Karen and my sister were silent for a minute or two. Then Karen spoke decisively.
    “Let’s try it. I can think of four people I would trust who might be interested--all of them women. I think men would tend to be too macho-minded and want to take extra chances just to see how close they could come to getting caught. They’d look at this as just some kind of game, like cap-gun-totin’ cowboys and stuff. Call me a sexist sow, but I think women would keep their eyes on the road better and would be more careful--’cause not only would there be hell to pay if we get caught but that would also spoil our whole point!”
    By the time we pulled in the driveway of mom’s house, we’d agreed that we would try to pull it off at Christmas, even though that didn’t give us a lot of time for either planning or recruiting. We felt that spring break just wouldn’t have the same kind of impact on people that Christmas would. It would be riskier to go ahead so soon, but the payoff would be far greater, and besides we agreed that the longer we delayed the worse the security would get--and the greater the danger to the public. Besides, who wanted to leave fingerprints all over everything? At Christmas time we could wear gloves all the time without attracting notice. Very easily we began to see ourselves as PVs--Patriotic Vigilantes--pronounced ‘Peeves,’ and at one point Karen even jokingly gave us code names from comic book superheroines. Since she is half African-American, she called herself Storm, and she called me W-2, short for Wonder Woman.
    2
    Using e-mail and the phone, by the time we headed back to school we had recruited another seventeen kindred spirits, all roughly our own ages. Most of them were gals we’d gone to high school with who were now going to other colleges. One of Karen’s recruits, Donna Wright, had a brilliant insight that would help us all breeze right into the gate areas of practically any airport in the country with literally armloads of every material imaginable.
    The weak link that Donna pointed out to us is that people coming from one flight normally do not get reinspected when they land and transfer to another flight. They and all their carry-on crap just bounce on over to the gate of the connecting flight where they are welcomed by harried folks who can barely remember to ask whether any strangers have given them packages to tote on board. She suggested that as many of us as possible should enter the system through various little “boondocks” airports, even if it cost more and meant driving one or two hundred miles to get to them.
    We didn’t have time to rehearse the whole thing, of course, but as a kind of test, when Karen and I flew back to college, we took thirty extra pounds of metal in our carry-on bags--stuff from a local junk shop: steam irons, a horse shoe, pliers, a carpenter’s hatchet with a hammer head on the top, a heavy vise, and three glass jars full of large rusty nails. The person at the x-ray machine asked us what we had, and we told her it was just tools and stuff for a school play. She took our word for it and didn’t ask to see any of it.
    During the next two weeks, we settled on a dozen of us being “couriers” of the materials, with the eight others providing ground transportation for us and our luggage for departures--and, if all went well, arrivals. Men would probably have chosen one main general to be in charge, or perhaps two or three guys who would have competed for leadership. Maybe my sister is right that there’s a difference hard-wired into most women’s genes, but in any case we all worked more like a committee with nobody getting on ego trips about who was smarter or higher ranking or anything.
    Although we never were all in one place at one time and in fact, in several cases, never even met in person at all, we frankly assessed our own and each other’s strong and weak points in giving or taking job assignments. For instance, because of their special “flirtation devices,” namely pretty faces and abundant cleavages, five of the women were specifically chosen to go to security points and that were run by young men.
    All of us couriers would be wearing one wig and carrying two other wigs with us in case we needed a getaway disguise in a hurry, and we all had reversible jackets and three hats or scarves. We knew that “valid picture I.D.” was essential for each disguise, so those of us who had computer skills, like Betty and me, forged three different out-of-state licenses for each courier. Since these can be placed behind the scratched, cloudy window of a wallet, we knew that even a bad forgery would easily pass--and all the ones we made with our scanners were excellent.
    To allay any suspicion, we agreed on a college-girl “uniform” so that we would easily blend in: casual, comfortable clothes, even slightly sloppy and “slept-in.” Some of us added pet hair from shedding dogs or cats to our coats and jeans, and some saw to it that food stains were visible.
    Inside our bags we had an array of items designed to misdirect the attention of any inspector who chose to peer at their contents. Typically, loose handfuls of tampons or sanitary pads were placed on top; metal items such as heavy brass jewelry boxes, alarm clocks, curling irons, cameras, hair dryers, vibrators, clunky costume jewelry, padlocks, and rolls of pennies and other coins were packed beneath these; frilly bras and panties and some wadded up dirty laundry with noticeable sweaty and pissy odors were next; then explicit drawings and photos razored from sex manuals might form a stratum; finally, a large fruitcake tin and a plastic bag with vitamins, face creams, skin soaps, toothbrushes, razors, combs, toothpaste tubes, and such were packed on the bottom, surrounded by clean clothes of all kinds. In our other carry-on bag we would have eight or ten little packages all wrapped for Christmas--some were normal socks and blouses and stuff, but others were flashlights, VCR tape rewinding machines, cooking timers, coffee pots, tea kettles, and similar heavy-duty things.
    About eighteen inches of duct tape were wrapped around the handles of our curling irons or flashlights. The fruitcake tins were filled with bogus fudge made out of brown clay and wrapped in aluminum foil or some bogus Snickers and Mounds candy bars made of the same substance and carefully sealed in reglued wrappers. This clay, meant to simulate an explosive, would be assembled with various wires, batteries, and timing devices around the body of a flashlight or a jewelry box.
    Originally Karen, Betty, and I had thought that three or four women could be on each plane, all of them with different components, and they could go up to the rest room one by one with their stuff. The first few women to go in would hide things for the last one to assemble into a B-2 or Bogus Bomb, and then the last woman would hide that either in the rest room or in an overhead compartment or whatever. However, Charlene Gardner, another of Karen’s recruits, pointed out that the logistics or the choreography for such an operation would be so complex that we’d be sure to have problems--not the least of which would be getting all the women up to one rest room during a flight that might be turbulent or that had a lot of other passengers suffering from what she called “pee-er pressure.” It would be better to make it less of a male Rube Goldberg thing by having each courier have all she needed--and that’s what we decided to do--’cause it made more sense.
    3
    On B-Day, a.k.a. “C minus One,” Jenine Parker drove me to a small airport in Pennsylvania where I, my long blonde wig, my jade turtleneck pullover, and my padded push-up bra breezed through security an hour before flight time. I set both bags on the conveyor belt to be x-rayed, took off my jacket, and walked under the metal detector arch. Of course, it began to sound in protest immediately, so I backed up and took keys and change out of my pockets and put them into a plastic tray. It sounded a second time, of course, and I showed the gawky looking young man my heavy silver bracelets and large silver belt buckle. Then I picked and brushed a few dozen white angora cat hairs off the front of my turtleneck while he grinned at me. What seemed to interest him the most, though, was the large brass ring with eight antique iron keys that I’d taken from my jacket pocket and put into the tray.
    “Hey, Billy,” he said to the operator of the x-ray machine. “You ever seen keys like these? They must be real old!”
    While Billy and he stared at them in trance-like wonderment, I mentioned that these were my lucky keys that had belonged to my great grandfather and had got him safely through World War One and had protected all my relatives ever since--which was a total lie, of course.
    It was a slightly cloudy day, and I’d confirmed my three flights by phone that morning and now again made sure that this one was still all set--as far as anyone there at the gate knew.
    I showed my bogus license with me as a blonde to the man who assigned me to a seat, and then for half an hour I snacked on a bag of potato chips and watched the sky and saw two other flights land and take off. I’ve always hated flying in these little prop jobs that hold about eighteen passengers, but Betty told me to remember that they don’t go as high or as fast as the jets do, so they could be construed as safer.
    I hadn’t checked any bags, but when I was boarding with my little wheeled suitcase and my small duffel bag, one of the ground crew offered to load them in the cargo hold for me.
    “With a plane like this, miss, there ain’t much room even to store your pocketbook in the overhead, let alone bags like these,” he said.
    I was nervous and must have looked startled. This isn’t going according to plan, I thought. I didn’t want to lose control of these bags.
    “It’ll be okay, miss,” he said, smiling. “You can pick them up right outside the plane when you land. They ain’t checked through, so they won’t be going to the baggage area nor nothin’.”
    I smiled back at him, took a deep breath, and boarded the tiny plane.
    Half an hour later we were touching down at Pittsburgh’s airport, and, just as he had said, my two bags were waiting for me under the wing at the bottom of the stairs when I got off. With a knot in my stomach and a slight buzzing in my ears, I slung one over my shoulder and wheeled the other into the terminal.
    My connecting flight to St. Louis was scheduled to depart in ninety minutes, and a TV monitor listing departures showed me that it was, apparently, all set to go. About halfway to my next flight’s gate, I went into a ladies’ room and locked myself and my bags inside one of the far end stalls. There I reversed my jacket and changed to a baggy sweatshirt and dirty jeans and put on some large, tinted glasses and a long mousy-brown wig. I flushed the toilet twice, put some dark circles under my eyes and some phony zits on my chin and nose, and went out to the concourse again.
    At my gate I showed my next license and got my seat assignment. With forty minutes till boarding time, I went to another ladies’ room and assembled my Bogus Bomb in a stall and put it into a beige pillow case which I tucked into my handbag. As an artistic measure, I had poked two dozen large rusty spikes into the brown clay.
    At the sink, I inserted a large greenish bogus booger--made from blotter paper and some dried glue--into one nostril. I wanted to encourage people to avert their gazes from me during this flight. My mouth suddenly felt dry, so I cupped my hand under a faucet and swallowed a couple handfuls of cold water. I noticed that my pulse was running a bit faster, too.
    In the concourse, I made a short check-in call.
    “W-2 at Pitts. All is merry,” I said.
    “Roger, W-2,” said Charlene Gardner. “Nine reindeer are aloft with their goodies. Be well.”
    As I boarded my flight, I wondered how the other couriers were doing. My feet felt a little numb and heavy, and I felt as if a headache were starting--I couldn’t really be sure. Halfway down the aisle of the plane we all had to wait while a short young man tried over and over to force his suitcase into the overhead compartment that was just to small for it. While other passengers impatiently dithered to themselves, to each other, and finally at him, I found myself laughing at his absurdity--and at theirs.
    “Talk about inconsideration and stupidity! He could at least wait till we all got past him,” said a middle-aged woman in front of me.
    “He’s just doing the best he can with the little God gave him,” I giggled, with little tears running down my cheeks. She glanced back at me briefly and made a sour face but said nothing further. After another minute, the young man slid his suitcase under a seat, and we were able to move forward again.
    I had the seat nearest the window, just as I’d requested. I stowed my bags and took down a pillow and a blanket from one of the overheads and wrapped myself up as if to take a nap. My seat companion was an elderly man who, after a couple of brief glances at me, settled down to read a spy novel he had brought with him.
    Half an hour after we were airborne, a slim young man with a black apron asked us if we wanted anything to drink. I took a ginger ale while the old guy beside me had a scotch and soda. Then he tried to be polite and talk with me.
    “Are you coming home from college?”
    “Me? Nah. Goin’ to a rock concert!”
    “Oh, you like music, do you?”
    I took a piece of pre-chewed bubble gum from my jeans pocket and poked it into my mouth and shook my head.
    “Nah. I just wanna find some cool guys an’ smoke some pot an’ get laid. How about yerself?”
    He frowned and turned back to his novel.
    “I’m--I’m just going to have Christmas with my older sister.”
    “Cool, man,” I said and blew and popped a bubble. He turned a page loudly, and we spoke no further.
    When he got up to go to the rest room, I tucked my Bogus Bomb inside the airline’s pillow case, behind their pillow. All was going well so far, and I was beginning to feel pretty good. I was tense and alert, but I almost felt like laughing.
    When we landed in St. Louis, I remained seated until ninety-eight percent of the other passengers had pushed and shoved their way off the plane. Then I got up and stretched and put the pillow with B-2, my Bogus Bomb, into the overhead compartment across the aisle from my seat and put the blanket on top of it.
    As I trundled off the plane with my bags, I wished the slim young man with the apron a merry Christmas. He smiled mechanically and wished me the same.
    Once I was in the terminal, I checked a nearby monitor for information about my flight that would take me back home. It was delayed for twenty minutes, but that was fairly normal. I went to a ladies’ room at the far end of the terminal where I stowed my jacket in my duffel bag, washed my face. Then I changed into a burgundy dress, an auburn wig, and a different pair of gloves.
    I stood up on the toilet seat to peer over the stall and make sure that nobody was there who’d been there when I went in. After another five minutes I left the rest room and went to a pay phone to check in.
    “W-2 at St. Louis. Goody is at 19C.”
    “Roger, W-2. Nineteen Chuckwagon, in your sleigh. Seven other reindeer deliveries completed, four others still airborne. Best of luck on final approach.”
    As each of us notified Charlene of the location of our B-2, she typed it into her computer, compiling a list that would be attached to our Letter of Concerned Citizens which would be distributed to about two hundred locations as soon as the twelfth reindeer had reported in. Fifty senators, thirty-five airline executives, the president, the FBI, the FAA, twelve city police departments, seven TV networks, and over a hundred newspapers would get a summary of what we had done and what we had meant it to prove. If this didn’t make somebody take notice, we didn’t know what else would.
    4
    When I arrived at my last destination, my twin sister was there to pick me up and take me home for Christmas. Betty had checked with Charlene while I was aloft: eleven of the reindeer had delivered their goodies and had either arrived at their final destination or were on the last leg to it. The twelfth, whose connecting flight had been canceled because of equipment problems, had had to scrub her primary mission and go to Plan-B: hide her Bogus Bomb inside one of the lecterns where ticket takers stand when people board. Two hundred copies of our letter, which Charlene had altered slightly to call our mission “Operation Lysistrata,” were being express-mailed from four major post offices even as we drove home.
    “I feel kind o’ warm and good inside, Babs,” said Betty. “Maybe we can make a difference after all with our lives.”
    “What’ll we do for an encore, Sis? Take down the tobacco giants?”
    “Yeah--and about thirty senators who cater to those merchants of death.”
    5
    Mom went out on a “date” with one of her new friends on Christmas Eve and didn’t return until mid-afternoon of Christmas Day. As for Betty and me, we didn’t sleep that night. At intervals, e-mail came in from Karen and the rest of the couriers and drivers, detailing their experiences, and we sent out the details of ours. In between messages, we snacked and giggled a lot together and fantasied about the headlines and the newscasts that would come in the morning. We kept Betty’s TV set on all night with the volume set low.
    At 4:18 a.m. there was a special bulletin about an aircraft. It had exploded en route to Hawaii, presumably killing 347 passengers and a dozen crew members.
    Around noon, the FBI announced that a massive team of presumably foreign terrorists had placed several dozen simulated bombs on domestic airplanes and in terminals and, in an effort to conceal the real danger, had sent a manifesto that listed the locations of some of the dud devices.
    We were stunned. Our first inclination was to call Karen or e-mail her. Then we feared that somehow the lines might be tapped. We were afraid to answer the phone when it rang.
    Could it be that one of our women had been playing for keeps? Was it just a coincidence?
    Months have gone by, and the only impact seems to be that security on flights to Hawaii was temporarily improved. Pieces of the plane that went down in the Pacific on Christmas morning have not yet been found. As of summer 1999, terrorist sabotage is still the only working hypothesis put out by the FBI that reaches the news.
    During spring break I flew with Karen to her home to try and sort out what our next move ought to be. Should we come forward and confess and clarify who really did what? She and the majority of the Patriotic Vigilantes are against it and feel we should lie low for the rest of our lives. They’re of the opinion that we’d be lynched if not crucified.



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