The Rubber Lizard Incident

Some years before 9/11, when life was simple and you could board a plane with your shoes on, I had my worst run-in with airport security. I've read a lot of post-2001 horror stories, but few of them approach the magnitude of what happened to me on a rainy night in 1995 Los Angeles. I wasn't even trying to get on a plane.

Rewind about 16 years: in 1979, I was a freshman in college; the basketball team went to Anaheim, California, for the PCAA tournament, and the band went along. We of course went to Disneyland for a day. While I was there, I bought this absolutely gorgeous rubber lizard, which I still have. It's maybe 18 inches long, has glass eyes, and a charming yet realistic paint job. It looks enough like the real thing to have provoked screams a few times when covertly left on someone's chair. I went back the next year intending to buy several of them, but the quality had sadly declined. Clyde, my lizard, was the last of a breed. He now bears a long strip of velcro on his underside, and has spent some years adhering to the walls of my cubicle at various jobs.

In the spring of '95, I was working at The Film Company That Knows All About Interactive Entertainment (Just Ask Us) and violating Rule #4 of The Code Of The North, which is "you don't shit where you eat." Which is to say, I was dating a young lady who also worked there. This was kept a dark, dark secret from all colleagues except my roommate, who worked there too. I'll call her Ivy (not her real name).

Before coming to L.A., Ivy had lived in Chicago, and on that particular weekend one of her girlfriends was coming to visit. Ivy had something else going on that evening, and couldn't meet the plane. She was talking on the phone with her friend, trying to figure out some way to hook up, when I had an idea about how to score some points and told her I'd meet her friend.

The trick was neither I nor her friend had any idea what the other looked like. The inevitable question came up: "How will she know it's you?" I thought about it for a moment, then my eye lit on Clyde, stuck to the wall of my cube. "Tell her," I said, "that I'll be the one holding the lizard."

Her plane came in at six, as I remember. It was a Friday night in Los Angeles, which means traffic sucked. To top it off, it was raining lightly, which means traffic really sucked. It was only six miles or so down Lincoln from Santa Monica to LAX, which isn't bad except on rainy Friday nights, and I allowed some extra time to get there. Still, it was about time for the plane to land when I finally slammed the two-seater into short-term parking, threw the lizard into my bag, and headed for the concourse.

You of course had to go through security whether you were getting on a plane or not. I breezed through the metal detector and threw my bag onto the x-ray conveyor belt. Headed up to the other end, and waited. The monitors showed the flight as "arrived."

And waited.

And was just starting to wonder why I was waiting so long, when I noticed a crowd of Professional Security Personnel gathered around the x-ray monitor. Oh, my.

One of them, a heavyset sister, called out: "Hey -- you got a pet in deah?" Oh, my.

"No. No, it's a toy! It's rubber! A rubber toy!"

"Ah saw it move!" Situation rapidly deteriorating.

A security type started asking me about what flight I was getting on, and I tried to explain I was just meeting a plane (WHICH WAS ALREADY IN THANK YOU) and not getting on a flight, and he acted like he'd never heard of such a thing. Two huge dudes materialized and stood on either side of my bag, which was now sitting on the conveyor. I was like "Look! Lemme show you! It's just a rubber toy!"

"Sir, just wait here until someone arrives from downstairs."

I'd had enough and lunged between them, unzipped my bag, pulled out the lizard and started waving it at them, wiggling it in a most realistic manner. One of them started to laugh. The other one didn't.

"Sir, you'll have to take that downstairs and check it."

BUT I'M NOT GETTING ON A SILLY AIRPLANE -- I didn't mention that it wasn't radioactive, under pressure, had a blade more than three inches long, flammable, or any of the other things their sign said you couldn't take on a plane because it seemed counterproductive at that point and the ding-dong flight had landed a LONG TIME AGO so I practically threw Clyde at the guy in the kiosk and said "hang on to this!" He looked at me like I was from Mars or something and started to tell me why he wasn't going to, but I told him "just HANG ON TO IT, I'll be right back!" and headed for the gate.

To meet someone I didn't know and had no idea what they looked like, who was looking for someone they didn't know either, holding a rubber lizard, which I wasn't. At least I was moving.

Luckily the gate wasn't far. There was an immense crowd of people streaming off the 747; I looked frantically around the crowd, not knowing what for, but looking frantically seemed like the best option at the time. Then someone said "Repo!" (or rather, she said my real name, but "Repo" will do for purposes of this narrative) -- I had thoughtfully worn my shirt with the logo from The Film Company That Knows All About Interactive Entertainment (Just Ask Us) on the breast, and she'd seen it.

"I thought you were going to be carrying a lizard." Don't ask.

We headed towards the exits, but instead of taking the escalator down to bag claim, I steered her back towards security. She wondered what was going on, but you know, don't ask. We got to the guy at the kiosk and I reclaimed my lizard. When he handed it back to me, I told him, "you know, there's a real problem with these things -- kids play with them, and the cops don't know they're not real, and they shoot the kids." He totally did not get it, but I totally did not care. Down to bag claim and out into the rainy Los Angeles night.