Penang to Mexico City
April 30th 1995
New Moon
At Los Angeles airport, we had to fill in half a dozen stupid customs and immigration forms and carry all our baggage off the plane - just to be in transit while they refuelled!
In the departure lounge, two ugly uniformed customs officers, one male, one female, checked our passports and proceeded to hassle us in their usual braindead manner. Seeing my tattoos and generally scruffy appearance as a threat to u.s. world domination, they dragged me off downstairs to be thoroughly searched, harrassed and interrogated.
They asked me a lot of really stupid quesions such as "If you're on your way from Australia to Britain, why are you going in such a roundabout way? People normally go by the shortest route from one place to another!"
What???!!! Had this dropkick ever looked around him? There he was, working in an airport, surrounded all day and every day by thousands of people, all travelling... Did he really think they were all just going from A to B by the shortest route and that travelling's just a means of geting there? Come to that, did he really think at all? I doubted it.
Then they hassled me about where i got my money from. It would really be an insult to my intelligence (or theirs, i'm not sure which!), if they actually did think i'd be stupid enough to smuggle drugs looking like that! But of course they didn't think that at all. They were just harrassing me because i looked different - even if they weren't fully conscious of it themselves. The other person who got similar treatment was being harrassed because he was mexican. They have to do it, it's part of their job description:
s.17(A) Systematic harrassment of weirdoes and Mexicans.
So they wanted to x-ray me, as part of the game, of course. "We want to subject you to proven cancer-causing radiation. Naturally, you can refuse, but then we'll take that as an indication of your guilt and keep you here for a couple of days till you don't shit out what you obviously haven't got inside you!" The old witch hunters are alive and well and living in L.A. airport! If you drown you were innocent, if you don't drown you were guilty and we'll kill you!
Of course i agreed in the end, i had to - anything to get out of their poxy country as quickly as possible. Not that i was even technically in it, really. So they decided against x-ray treatment and let me get back on the plane, which they'd delayed for at least half an hour with their pathetic games.
All this because we had to get off while the plane refuelled!
I decided i'd never catch a flight that goes via the United States again if i can possibly avoid it. Apart from the harrassment, some of the cost of the ticket goes to paying for the landing there and i refuse to pay those bastards for the privilege of being harrassed by them.
Anyway, i eventually escaped from the clutches of the evil empire and we were soon speeding down the runway to complete the long flight from Malaysia to Mexico city. It was the day before my thirty seventh birthday.