by Mamrie Hart
Once we deplaned, we were told that the storm was so bad there was no way we were getting out till tomorrow morning. And this is where the airline came up with a brilliant plan.* Annie and I were going to stay in a Red Roof Inn, along with all the other stranded passengers that night, and we would be chaperoned by two stewardesses. Annie could hardly contain her fist pumps, while I was fighting back tears. The only person freaking out more than me was my mother.
The airline reassured her that we were in good hands. The stewardesses, let’s call them Tammy and Trish, were our chaperones. Tammy even got on the phone with my mom to let her know that we would be totally safe and on the flight first thing in the morning.
“We know you must be worried sick about your girls, but they will be fine. I practically raised my little sisters,” Tammy told her as Trish comforted me by braiding my hair.
Talking to Tammy calmed my mom’s nerves enough to not make the seven-hour drive in the bad storm. It was official. Our babysitters were stewardesses.
Before we made our way to the Red Roof Inn, we had to get some sustenance for us two growing girls. Luckily, the airline also provided both Annie and me a fifteen-dollar voucher for the airport. If someone gave me that now, I’d be all, “Mothafucka, that’s barely a glass of pinot grigio.” But as a nine-year-old, I thought I was rich. We stopped by the airport store to load up on Cheez-Its and sour cream and onion Ruffles. Things were looking up!
Once we checked in to the hotel, Annie and I sat on one of the full beds eating our snacks as Tammy sat on the other bed. Trish had gone out with some fellow stewardesses to “get some food,” which was weird considering the amount of blue eye shadow she was wearing. And I’m pretty sure I had seen her spritz some Jovan Musk on her cleavage. Tammy flipped through the channels and finally settled on a rerun of MTV’s The Grind. I wanted to speak up and ask her to change it. I wasn’t opposed to the amount of booty popping happening on the screen; I was just bored. Why would you want to watch average, pedestrian dancers dance with each other? This wasn’t like today’s So You Think You Can Dance. This was “So You Think You Can Kind of Keep a Beat and Will Work for $30 a Day and Free Lunch.” I looked to my left to see Annie in heaven.
After The Grind, I finally got sleepy. I was tuckered out after such a big night and was ready for a lil’ shut-eye before our early flight out in the morning. Just as I was closing my peepers to say good night to my lord and savior, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, the door swung open. Trish was back.
And she wasn’t alone. She was there with some rando dude (we’ll call him Randy the Rando) who looked like an extra from Silk Stalkings. I can’t for the life of me remember the conversation that was had (I was busy trying to teleport out of there as Annie literally drooled), but I imagine it went a little something like this:
Taaaammmmy. I’m back from the bar and look who I ran into!
Great, Trish. It’s the random barfly you slept with last time we had a layover in Baltimore. Let me guess, he was at the same bar.
What are the chances, huh?
Annie was watching like it was an episode of Melrose Place. Randy noticed there were kids present and did the pull-a-quarter-out-of-the-ear trick on me, but he pulled out a Budweiser bottle cap instead. That was the final straw for Tammy, who then suggested they leave.
After Randy and Trish left, we all conked out. It had been quite the adventurous evening, and we eventually made it back to NC the next morning—me with a newfound fear of flying, and Annie with a newfound dream of being a stewardess.
2. London
I was headed to London to do a round of #NoFilter shows (a.k.a. Saggy Tits Gate) and chose a red-eye for the eleven-hour flight. As I boarded the Virgin plane, which always feels more like an airplane-themed club than an actual plane, I realized my seat was in the middle. I’m an aisle girl. Yes, windows are great for sleeping, but there is something so comforting about being able to get up whenever I want without having to ask someone. By the eye rolls some people give in those situations, you would think you were asking them to carry a child for you. You know the type. The people who unbuckle the seat belt like it weighs eighty pounds, who have to demonstrate how difficult it is to get up with the person in front of them reclined, finally making it to their feet like they’ve been on a fuckin’ space shuttle for six months and their leg muscles have atrophied. It sucks.
I made it to my row and did the “that’s me” point to the Larry Bird look-alike in the aisle seat. His eyes lit up. And then his wife stood up across the aisle.
“Would you rather have my aisle seat? That’s my husband. I’d rather sit with him.”
Oh, thank God.
“That would be amazing. Thank you so much.”
“Dammit,” Larry Bird chimed in. “You sure you want to switch, dear?”
Lovely, he was flirting with me in front of his wife, who quickly elbowed the Bird harder than Magic Johnson during the 1986 NBA Finals.* I really dodged a bullet on that one.
I settled into my new aisle seat beside a man who was already passed the fuck out. Things were looking up. The flight itself was painless—no turbulence; Captain Zzz beside me literally did not open his eyes once. We started descending into London, and I was shocked that I’d made it the whole flight without one thing annoying me. The screen on the back of my seat was broken and not even that had brought me down. I drank wine. I worked on my laptop. I napped. The only tiny moment of panic I had was when I thought the guy beside me might actually be dead. I’m not gonna lie, I got real close to that random man’s face to make sure he was still breathing.
This glee was fleeting, though. ’Cause the second our plane’s wheels hit the runway, something hit me. I was a little disoriented but could only assume from the texture that someone had thrown their bag of overpriced Munchies Snack Mix from the force of the landing.
“What was that?” I said as I noticed that some got in my hair.
“Some guy just threw up on us,” Larry Bird said in a super-pissed-off tone.
I smiled at him, still not processing what he’d said, and then it hit me. I was picking vomit out of my hair. I sat there frozen. What could I do? I didn’t have anything to wipe it off with. I couldn’t get out of my seat. I just sat there covered in this man’s regurgitated dinner as the plane slowly taxied toward the gate.
The only good thing to come out of it was the possible corpse lifting his head to say, “Oh, that sucks,” then go back to sleep. It made me laugh out loud. Very hard. I was the girl covered in vomit, laughing hysterically to herself.
3. Kuala Lumpur
I am notoriously cheap when it comes to flights. If a layover in Kazakhstan on a plane full of goats means saving two hundred dollars on a trip, sign me up! This has gotten me into some layovers from hell. Let me regale you with the tale of the worst one, which happened in Malaysia.
I was flying home from visiting my brother and his family in Australia, and I was totally exhausted. Like all good flights, we were going the long way around the entire earth back to NYC. My first layover was a ten-hour stop in Kuala Lumpur. This probably sounds like hell to most sane people, but I was still a scrappy twenty-five-year old. I’d done Greyhound bus rides longer than that, and everyone knows that Greyhound buses are more dangerous than inmate buses. I could do anything for ten hours.
I figured I’d hit up a restaurant, drink my face off till it closed at midnight, and then sleep on the floor the rest of the night. Because I, for one, have zero shame in sleeping on an airport floor, especially if it’s a morning flight. I distinctly remember sleeping on the floor of LaGuardia once and hearing a woman say, “Poor thing. She’s probably been stranded here for days because of the blizzard.” My flight had been delayed ten minutes. That is how quickly I will hit the deck. In fact, I make sure to pack my carry-on backpack specifically so that it will serve as a makeshift pillow. Ten hours was going to be a breeze.
When
I landed in Kuala Lumpur at ten p.m., I knew my plan was kaput. The airport looked like a tomb. There wasn’t a soul in sight who hadn’t just exited my flight. Once the deplaning passengers had scattered, I realized that the airport was not only pretty much empty, but I was the only person left in the terminal. Sure, this sounds like the premise for an amazing ’80s movie, but it caught me a little off guard. The place looked postapocalyptic except for the one old man vacuuming.
This was going to be creepy, but I was sticking to the plan. First order of business: Get drunk!
Visions of rum with pineapple and mango juice danced in my head as I strutted toward the dining area of the terminal. I couldn’t wait to get a drink with a tiny umbrella in it. I would hold that tiny umbrella over my head like it was raining and say, “What recession?” as the patrons of the bar would laugh and laugh. I was already working on my encore joke when I rounded the corner to see all the bars were closed. Undeterred, I went in search of food. I found a vending machine. Lemongrass Bugles-type chips for dinner it was!
I swiped my card. Nothing. Again. Nada. I looked around to make sure there was still no one near me, then licked the stripe on the back of the card and swiped again. Still nothing. No worries, I thought to myself, I’ll just have to go to an ATM and take out some currency that I will never exchange back to dollars.*
But when I typed in my PIN at the ATM machine, my card was declined. It took me a minute to realize what was going on. I had warned my bank that I was going to be in Australia for a month, but I didn’t say shit about Malaysia. This was bad. Not only was I stranded in a deserted airport for the next ten hours, but now I didn’t have a dollar to my name. The next meal I was getting was the flaccid egg sandwich on the flight.
I sprawled out on the floor, stomach growling. The sooner I could sleep, the sooner that egg sandwich would be in my face. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t fall asleep. Normally after five minutes of lying horizontal, I’d already be dry-humping the floor and drooling, but it just wasn’t happening for me. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined waking up to the old vacuuming man spooning me with his hands up my shirt. And no one would be there to tell him otherwise! I’m sure he was a great guy who would never do that, but the thought kept me tossing and turning. I sat up and noticed a cluster of computers a few gates down. I made a beeline to the lit-up screens like a moth to a lightbulb.
Oh my Gilbert Gottfried, there was Internet! I threw my arms up in victory. I felt like Tom Hanks in Cast Away when he learns how to crack open coconuts. Sure, he’s still stuck on a desert island, but there’s hope. These crappy old desktops were my coconuts.
I logged on and immediately checked my e-mail. I saw that Maegan was on G-chat and figured with the time difference, she was at work. We started chatting. She bitched about work and I bitched about feeling stranded with no money or food in Kuala Lumpur. Just take a second to visualize an empty airport and a girl lying on the floor, popping up every few minutes to type something into the free computers, occasionally laughing to herself. I was slowly going mad.
MAEGAN
I’m gonna go take my lunch. . . .
ME
Oh my god, what are you going to eat? I want to imagine it. I am so hungry that this is like dirty talk to my taste buds.
MAEGAN
I’m thinking about going to get a big veggie dumpling soup from Republic but I might just grab a falafel sandwich from the cart. . . .
ME
BOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOING!
MAEGAN
Will you still be on in thirty?
ME
This is my life now. This is all I have.
MAEGAN
Hang in there. I’ll be back.
I looked up the menu to Republic and read it to myself like it was Fifty Shades of Grey. By the time I got to “A tamarind-infused broth,” I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt like Sting must feel after a tantric sex session—my whole body was buzzing just imagining the broth in my mouth. Why oh why couldn’t reality be like the movie Hook and all you had to do was imagine food and it would appear?*
Stomach roaring, I peeled myself off that hard tile floor and strolled through the terminal in my pink cowboy boots. (Could I be more American?) The clicking of my boots was the only sound. I found a row of fast-food places and thought about trying to convince the poor bastard on the third shift to give me a snack for free, but then I got a weird, foreign feeling in my stomach. It was pride. I couldn’t be this American who was clearly flying around the world, wearing bubble-gum-colored cowboy boots, begging for yesterday’s fried rice.
As I made my final turn, I spotted a Western Union in the distance. Random. I didn’t even know they had Western Union in Asia. Shouldn’t it be called Eastern Union? And that’s when it struck me!
I took off like airport security was chasing me for stealing Corn Nuts. I got to the computers and slid to a halt à la Risky Business. Please let her be back online. Please let her be online. Please let— oh thank Bejeezus, she’s still online. I started typing. . . .
ME
MAEGAN!!!!! ARE YOU THERE? HOLY FUCKBALLS!*^&%#$! Can you do me a huge favor??
MAEGAN
As long as you never say “fuckballs” again. What’s wrong? Did you accidentally “The Secret” the vacuum guy to touch your boobs?
ME
LOLZ! No, seriously. I am desperate. Is there any chance you can sneak out of the office and Western Union me some $$$$? It would be to the Kuala Lumpur airport branch under my name. . . .
MAEGAN
That’s a sentence I never thought I’d read. Of course I will! Leaving now.
Sure enough, after an hour and a lot of broken English and sad rounds of charades trying to explain myself to the night-shift worker at Western Union, I had a crisp hundred dollars’ worth of Malaysian ringgits in my hand. There were only three hours left before my flight started boarding, but I was going to treat myself. This meant buying way more snacks than I could possibly consume and then going straight to the rent-by-the-hour hotel in the terminal. I was essentially paying sixty bucks to take a three-hour nap, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I was in a strange room in an airport terminal, covered in a confetti of snack crumbs, but I didn’t care. I felt like Eloise at the Plaza.
And that is the last time I ever booked a layover longer than two cocktails’ worth.
In the End
I still have some bad luck when it comes to flying. That’s out of my control. But I did decide to take matters into my own hands when it came to my fear of flying. I needed to face it head-on. So, I bought myself a flying lesson for my thirtieth birthday.
Turns out, flying is a lot less scary once you know how to land a plane. Although I’d still much rather be back in coach taking down tiny vodkas and watching Netflix on my laptop, so please don’t count on me.
Tannin Bed
A shit-ton of fresh blueberries, raspberries, and pitted cherries
Bottle red wine
1 cup simple syrup
Juice of 2 lemons and 1 orange
Throw everything into a punch bowl or novelty-size wineglass. Stir together, add ice, and sippity-sip. These fruits are known to help reduce anxiety. Grapes are good for it too, but I’d rather drink my grapes than eat them. If you don’t have or don’t like red wine, sub white or rosé or sparkling or whatever the fuck! Just don’t let it stress you out. That defeats the entire purpose, ya dumbs.
This chapter is about one of the banes of my existence: panic attacks. If you’ve never had a panic attack, it’s very hard to understand and almost impossible to explain. Kind of like when someone is visiting you and you want to watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta, but they don’t watch it, and you try to catch them up on the details. It doesn’t work. You end up getting so frustrated that you just change it to Friends. Everyone gets Friends. An imprisoned Taliban member could wat
ch one episode and agree that Chandler is underrated.
All that said, in this chapter I’ll try to explain panic attacks to you from my personal experience. Allow me to set the scene. It was winter in New York City. I had been living there for a handful of months and was pretty comfortable in my routine of working ten a.m. to six p.m. as a receptionist at a recording studio, living on a supertight budget, and going out for cheap drinks on the weekend. When I say cheap drinks, I mean the bar I frequented was actually named Cheap Shots. Our other haunt was a spot on St. Mark’s called the Continental. Their deal was ten shots (of total shit liquor) for ten dollars. I lived there my first year in NYC.*
It was a Friday night and Maegan and I were strolling toward the East Village doing what any two fabulous twentysomething gals do on a night off from work: bitching about coworkers.
“I swear to God, if I hear Fred from accounting do his Borat impression one more time, I am going to eat staples,” Maegan complained. Normally I would do my impression of Fred doing his impression, but I was preoccupied. Something weird was happening.
Suddenly, I became very conscious of my legs. And not in that “Damn, my legs look goooood” way I am usually conscious of them. Specifically, I was aware of how I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t feel them, but somehow they were still working. Left. Right. Left. Right. How did they know how to keep working? Maegan kept talking but it just sounded like the adults in Charlie Brown—totally nonsensical noise.
Maybe my legs were just cold. Winter in Manhattan is colder than a popular girl at a “Magic: The Gathering” party. We continued walking and I bent over and hit my legs with my hands a few times. Yep, still there. And somehow still working.
Not only are my legs being weird, I thought to myself, but why is my mouth so dry? It felt like I had just slept all night with my mouth open in front of a fan in the Mojave Desert. I hope I don’t have to talk, and oh shit. My hands have stopped working. I need to shake my hands and slap them to make sure they still work. And Mame? Mame?
