A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Codes

One of the carousels in the baggage collection area of Calgary’s international airport revolves around a diorama depicting a pack of velociraptors shredding suitcases and their contents. It never failed to make me smile. I was always reminded of the old Samsonite television commercial which cast gorillas as airline baggage handlers. Luggage takes a beating.

Before the pandemic hit Ann and I always flew with minimal carry-on. Our go-to was a maroon canvas shoulder bag which fit our books, the sandwiches we’d made the night before and incidental sundries. The sports bags we checked weren’t much larger, but neither one of us had the stomach to fight for overhead bin space. Who needs High Noon on a narrow cabin aisle – and, my God, what some people drag aboard: ratdogs on ropes. My delusional rationale was that our soft sports bags would be the last ones laded into the cargo bay and ergo, the first ones off.

I’ve always maintained a fee should be charged for carry-on and checked baggage should be gratis. Boarding a narrow tube missing a few critical bolts unencumbered sure would speed up the herding process. I suspect that day will come – or at least the additional charge segment, be it morning, afternoon or night; there will be no happy hour.

Ann and I have changed our air travel habits post-pandemic. We are strictly carry-on only minimalists. Not because we’re avoiding the checked bag cash grab, but because our perception is that our checked bags and our destination are analogous to a fool and his money: parted like a Gillette “dry look” haircut.

Luggage is expensive. But provided you’re not forced to buy it in an airport, you should never have to pay full freight (let alone a premium). Ann and I recently booked late spring return flights to Amsterdam. We intend to ride the rails through the Low Countries and perhaps even venture into parts of France or Germany (Note to self: don’t mention the war). We agreed our carry-on totes required an upgrade. We needed sleeker, lighter, sturdier bags, more forgiving of sidewalks, curbs and escalators. So, we got a bargain on a couple of Samsonites, one burgundy one and one navy one. We were all set, but …

As we pulled our bags from their boxes (very different from squaring a circle), my imagination embraced the Temptations, running away with me: Ann and I had purchased a pair of MacGuffins; the three-digit combination locks by the latches tripped my love of intrigue. A MacGuffin is a thriller device, a plot driver. It could be anything although I always picture it as a briefcase, suitcase or gym bag. The reader or viewer need never know its contents; all that matters is that most every character in the story wants it desperately and will torture and kill for it. The classic stories involve an innocent protagonist, a guileless hero who somehow and inadvertently becomes involved in some very nasty business. The literary masters are Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. In film, the profile of Alfred Hitchcock shades everything backward and forward.

I began to consider three-digit sequences I hoped I could remember without having to write them down because, well, nobody locks the combination number inside the safe. Phone numbers before the introduction of local area codes might do. I can still recite a couple of primary exchange groupings from my days growing up in Montreal, 739 and 288. There is the Crooked 9’s landline of course, though Ann’s cell number is written on a folded piece of paper in my wallet because I always transpose two digits but never the same pair. The only other number I know by heart is my friend Stats Guy’s, he of the Tuesday Night Beer Club, because I’ve been telephoning him for more than thirty years and he has remained as stationary as a parking meter - I had to look it up in my address book the other day, drew a complete blank – luckily, I remembered his real name. Then the easy rhyming nines began playing in my head, telephone number songs: “Beechwood 4-5789” (Marvelettes), “634-5789” (Wilson Pickett) and “867-5309/Jenny” (Tommy Tutone). I cannot remember AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” number. 46201 is an Indianapolis zip code in Burton Cummings’s lovely “Sour Suite”, but I forever confuse it with the Spiegel Catalog’s Chicago 60609. Spiegel was a Truth or Consequences prize sponsor; there wasn’t much on television after school in the late sixties and early seventies, a two-channel, black and white universe.

For simplicity’s sake and because my doddering days aren’t too far up the road, I narrowed the field to four songs with three digits in their titles. The first one I thought of (naturally) was “Flight 505” by the Stones, from Aftermath – the first of the five or six nearly flawless albums in their catalogue. I ain’t superstitious, but the trouble with airline flight numbers is that when they make the news it’s because said flight did not touchdown intact. Sort of what SpaceX might gloss over as “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

“One After 909” is a throwaway on Let It Be (do I even have to type their name?). I can imagine Ann and I at the kitchen counter discussing the merit of this selection:

“909. We’ll both remember that one, right? It’s in the title.”

“So is 910.”

“But, 909 is spelled out in digits only.”

“Yes, but if you do the arithmetic, you get 910. Not your strong point, I know. So, which one?”

“There’s no need to overly complicate this. Shall we move on to The Who?”

Pete Townshend’s writing returns to the same theme again and again, the nature of tribes (“Uniforms Corp d’esprit”). You can opt in like the disciples at the holiday camp in the parable of Tommy or opt out like the migrants going mobile through the wasteland in Lifehouse (released unrealized as Who’s Next and now known as Life House). Quadrophenia was much more down to earth, a story about teen gangs and their costumes and kit in post-war Britain, the mods and the rockers. Like Kinks music before they embarked on their American stadium era beginning with the release of Sleepwalker, Quadrophenia is veddy, veddy British. Very niche, an excessively loud addendum to the rousing Angry Young Movement in British literature, although maybe more new journalism than fiction: compare Ken Russell’s bombastic Tommy movie to Quadrophenia, one of those fantastic, low budget films cloaked in anonymity (Sting’s minor role as Ace Face aside) we’ve come to expect from British filmmakers. Suffice to say, “5:15”, recounting a stream-of-consciousness amphetamine-hyped train ride to join the rioting on the beach under the Brighton’s famous pier in the spring of 1964, rocks like a bastard son’s testosterone.

Mother was an incubator and father was the contents/of a test tube in an icebox/in the factory of birth. “905” is the titular, fully grown, fully thawed hatchling in John Entwistle’s impossibly catchy, dys(co)topian sci-fi contribution to Who Are You. “The Ox” was writing about cloning, the AI of its day. Writers are of their time and it’s a fraught exercise to impose contemporary interpretations and mores on old words, but some forty years on, I can’t help but to hear a chatbot’s existential lament: Every sentence in my head/someone else has said/and the end of my life is an open door.

Ann and I will eventually arrive at some mutually acceptable code for our new carry-ons. I know this. And I know too if I’m asked to open our suitcases at a security check, I’m going to freeze because I’ve forgotten three simple digits. Those youthful popinjays in their uniforms with their epaulettes, flag badges and emblems will have to wait while I run the numbers from an old reel, the mixtape in my ever softening head.   

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.