Frequent Survivor

In the past few years, as airlines have increasingly cut back on in-flight services and made you pay for snacks and meals, I took to bringing my own food along with me. Now even that possibility has been denied me, as the threat that my tuna fish sandwich might contain a dangerous weapon has grown. Before the prohibitions had been expanded to include anything in a small Tupperware box, I was returning from Italy with a meal of delicious meatballs in my carry-on bag. I ate a couple on the late night leg from Rome to Paris, and then enjoyed a couple more on my layover in a cheesy little airport hotel that smelled of Pinesol and mildew. By the crack of dawn, when I boarded my flight to Los Angeles, I'd completely forgotten about the remaining two or three meatballs. While passing through U.S. customs I was waved aside for a thorough inspection of my luggage, and it was then that I was snagged by the feds. Two friggin' meatballs, and those goons glared and snarled at me like I was carrying ten thousand dollars in small bills stuffed in my shoes, which I'd done once years before after having been paid in cash for a rewrite of an Italian movie. Another time I made it past the authorities with a small aluminum foil-wrapped stash of cocaine in my breast pocket. It had been there, out of sight out of mind, since a movie star slipped it to me as a gift for, as he said, making him seem like an actor when I directed him in the post-synching of his dialogue for a movie he'd shot. Moral: if you're going to get busted, get busted for contraband meatballs.