Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  • • •

  Gillian is twenty-six. She is one of those too-rare redheads with rich auburn hair and a flawless ivory complexion. She is tall and slender, full in the breast and hips, almost unnaturally narrow in the waist. When I interviewed her she was living on East 63rd Street between Park and Madison Avenues. She had been operating as a call girl for almost four years and, judging by her clothes and her apartment, she was doing extremely well at it.

  I originally interviewed Gillian in connection with another book, one dealing exclusively with prostitution and the special sexual techniques which prostitutes employ. As things turned out, I was not to use Gillian’s interview in that book. But when I began developing this present volume, I went back to talk with Gillian again, this time focusing not on the practice of her profession but on the way she drifted to it from her earlier job as a stewardess.

  Her own contention, quoted above, was that there was no relationship between the two ways of making a living. I questioned this, suggesting that while one might not have literally led to the other, her approach to one would necessarily relate to her approach to the other. Furthermore, I added, it seemed logical to assume that certain aspects of life as a stew must have prepared her to enter into a profession which she had been schooled to regard as morally and socially reprehensible. After she had given up being defensive, she agreed that this was probably so.

  • • •

  GILLIAN: Of course you’re right about that. I was a very naïve and unsophisticated kid when I left Wichita. Not in a sexual sense, because I had been having the whole catalogue of sex from the time I was fourteen years old. I know that a large percentage of girls come to stew school without much in the way of sexual experience, but believe me, that wasn’t my bag. I started screwing in ninth grade and I was a veteran of gang bangs at a tender age, so I wasn’t one of those stew school virgins by any means.

  But although I had had a lot of sexual experience, I was still surprisingly square. This is something a lot of people have trouble understanding. They think that just because an individual is hip in a certain area, she’s hip in other areas as well. I notice this attitude nowadays on the part of so many Johns. They know that I’m a hooker and as a result they take it for granted that I’m hip to drugs and crime, that I know Mafia people, that I’m generally hip to all sorts of scenes. At one time I was insulted that they would think I was involved in these scenes until I realized that they didn’t mean it as an insult, but simply that they thought hipness cut across all these different areas.

  When I hit stew school, I was still very much caught up in the whole middle-class value system that I grew up in. I thought, you know, that good little girls went to Heaven. But at the time I didn’t know the other side of it: that bad little girls go to Bergdorf’s. To put it another way, I was breaking all the moral standards, but I was still conscious of them and busy hating myself for what I was doing. The whole guilt thing.

  JWW: And being a stewardess broadened your outlook?

  GILLIAN: Yes, I would say so. I was still a lot further out in my own personal sexual behavior than the girls I met, but at the same time I was meeting girls whose values were a good deal less rigid than the attitudes I grew up with in Wichita. These girls might not have done the things I had done, but their minds were more open. They believed in premarital sex, for example, while I grew up doing it like crazy but thinking it was sinful.

  To put it another way, everyone on earth has a gap between the way they behave and the way they think they ought to behave. Everyone, saint or sinner. With me, this gap had been really huge, and that made me eat my heart out. The people I met in stew school and afterward helped me narrow that gap. Some of them actually had their own private gaps turned the other way around. I knew girls, for example, who believed in premarital sex and all the other aspects of sexual freedom but who hadn’t done anything, and it bothered them that they weren’t living up to their ideals.

  JWW: This sort of broadening of standards, and what you could call a narrowing of the gap between normative and existential rules of behavior, I think you might have found this anywhere away from home.

  GILLIAN: I don’t think there’s any question about it.

  JWW: If you had gone away to college, or if you had moved on your own to New York or Los Angeles—

  GILLIAN: I agree with you. I think being a stew may have accentuated all of this, because I’ve found that the whole world of commercial aviation is very fast and very open both at once. By this I mean not only stews and pilots but also the passengers who do a great deal of flying, the commercial travelers and all. The whole scene is one that involves a lot of very fast-moving people. Relationships form in a hurry, both personally and sexually. And along with this general speed, there’s a great deal of honesty. And there, incidentally, is something that I don’t think stews get enough credit for. I think we’re by and large a very honest group of girls. That’s funny—I said we. Did you notice that?

  JWW: Yes.

  GILLIAN: As if I still think of myself as one of the gang. That’s interesting, isn’t it? And here I’ve spent a few years as part of a different group of fast but honest girls.

  Where was I? Honesty. Right. You know, a lot of people think of stews as basically artificial. As phony people. I’ve heard it said that stewardesses look as though they were molded out of plastic according to some master plan, lacking in individuality and all. And stews will be criticized for being polite to passengers all according to company policy, as if a girl who puts people at their ease and makes them comfortable is a phony for what she’s doing.

  But I really think you would have trouble finding a more honest group of girls. Once you get past the automatic in-flight ritual, the average stew is a girl who is more willing than most people to face the truth about herself and to be open and realistic in her personal relationships.

  JWW: Yes, I’ll go along with that. Why do you suppose it is?

  GILLIAN: Because of the life we lead. I did it again—we. But seriously, I don’t think a stew has time to be phony. Oh, on the one hand it’s very easy to be completely pat and artificial with the sort of people who don’t matter at all—the men you work for a steak dinner on a layover in Omaha and never see again, for instance. A stew knows how to develop a quick and meaningless feeling of rapport with a man like that and be the sort of dinner partner he wants without letting him really reach her at all.

  But that’s with the people who don’t matter. With people who do matter, it’s completely different. Then it’s a case of not having time to waste with conventional crap responses. If you meet a guy and really like him, for example, and you know you may never see him again and certainly won’t see him again for a month or more, you’re more or less forced to get to the heart of the matter right away. I don’t mean that you ball him on the first date. That goes without saying, but then so does an office girl who picks up a young executive on a Friday night on First Avenue. Instant Sex is just part of the American routine. But that office girl will be very careful to come on strong with the guy and create the right impression, while a stew will be apt to be honest about it, because why not?

  It’s an attitude you develop, I guess. The fact that planes crash doesn’t hurt, either. That old life-and-death business does make a person get to the heart of the matter. I used to think that was just an excuse for a lot of things, because nobody thinks about crashes all the time, but it does influence everyone. The same as the bomb influences the way we all live—we may not think about it often, but it’s always there, and it has to have an effect on us . . .

  I just thought of something really weird.

  JWW: What?

  GILLIAN: Actually I suppose it’s odd I never thought of it before. But I was thinking just now of the similarity between hookers and stewardesses. In several ways. What I said about being able to be completely artificial with people who don’t matter, that would be as good a description of the way a call girl is with a John as it is of the way
a stew is with a passenger who doesn’t mean anything to her. Learning how to be just what the man expects you to be but without letting him touch you in any real way. You know, if I had been talking about how to get along with a John I might have put it in exactly the same set of words.

  JWW: That’s very interesting.

  GILLIAN: Isn’t it? And the other part, that we’re more honest with each other and with people who matter to us. I think that holds up, too. Not always, of course, because so many of the girls I know in this business are just absolute phonies in every respect, and so full of neuroses that you can’t get through to them. But even so, we are open and honest some of the time, and for the same kind of a reason. As if the kind of work we do, the lives we live, it’s all so intense and so cut off from the rest of the world that we don’t have any time to be phony and to wear the conventional sort of masks. Do you understand what I’m saying? I never thought of this before, it’s all coming right off the top of my head, and I don’t know if it’s making any sense or not.

  JWW: It makes sense.

  GILLIAN: But at the same time, I wonder if maybe it isn’t partly just a matter of the kind of person I am and the kind of life I lead. I was a certain kind of person when I was a stew, and I’m basically the same kind of person now, in the life I’m leading now.

  JWW: How did you get from one to the other?

  GILLIAN: It was easy enough. We talked about this before, didn’t we? The last time I saw you . . .

  What it amounted to was that I sort of found my way into prostitution gradually. I suppose it grew out of my being basically discontented with my life at that point. Not with my career as a stewardess as such, although I was beginning to feel confined in my job and to realize that I wasn’t particularly good at it, either. But the real problem was my own emotional situation at the time. I had been involved in an affair which I had mistaken for love. I can’t blame the man because it was strictly a case of my misreading things. As far as he was concerned it was a handy little affair and I was someone to sleep with when he happened to be in Los Angeles on business. He thought I saw it the same way. I had had that sort of scene with a lot of fellows up to that point, and that was normally all I was looking for, just a good time and a few laughs, so it wasn’t his fault that I happened to pick him to fall in love with. Except that it wasn’t really love except in my own mind—

  Well, that whole scene had an unhappy ending, and poor little Gillian wound up with her ego in shreds. I went out one night and tried to get drunk but it didn’t work. Did you ever have that happen? The more I drank the more sober I got. And I’ve never been much of a drinker, no capacity to speak of. I get drunk smelling the cork from a wine bottle, and here I had God knows how much to drink and it didn’t have any effect on me.

  JWW: I’ve had that happen. It’s supposed to be medically impossible, but it happens.

  GILLIAN: It certainly did that night. I never did get drunk, but I finally went back to my place and went to sleep, and in the morning I had the first real hangover of my life, which seemed so damned unfair. Here I was with the hangover and I hadn’t even had the drunkenness beforehand. I went and stood under the cold shower for an hour and then got to the airport in time for my flight.

  The flight was depressing, too. The other stew had had a fight with the co-pilot, and they weren’t speaking, and the whole atmosphere up front was really terrible. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed as though there were more than the usual number of cruddy passengers, fanny-pinchers and wise guys and vomiting children and first-time fliers and all the little petty aggravations. I guess it was just that everything got to me.

  I was desperate for a date by the time we landed. I wanted to be wined and dined and sucked and fucked, if you’ll excuse the expression. But I really wanted to lose myself in a happy time followed by some good honest sex. Men like to unwind that way; is it that surprising that a girl wants the same thing for herself?

  Well, at first it looked as though no one was going to ask me out. Just to make the day complete. But I struck up a conversation with this one fellow and practically put the words into his mouth for him, and he took me to dinner.

  He was a monumental drag. In a sense he was the usual square passenger, the kind with the corny jokes and the pictures of his snot-nosed kids, the typical dummy whom the average stew has to know how to handle, and on an ordinary evening I would have done that, I would have handled him without paying any real attention to him. The same way I would handle the average trick today, making him happy without letting him bring me down. But I was in such a bad mood to begin with that this crud got to me. All through dinner I wanted to tell him, Look, let’s skip this shit, let’s just go straight to bed. Because I could stand screwing him a lot better than I could stand listening to him. But no, he was sure he had to treat me like a lady first, and so we not only had dinner but we also went to some dismal little strip club afterward and watched Miss Saggy Tits of 1943 wiggle her behind. I don’t know why men assume it will put a girl in the mood to watch another girl do a strip. It certainly doesn’t have that effect on me. And this particular show—well, a lesbian would have been turned off by this dancer, believe me. She was really bad. And the comic with the revolting dirty jokes, and the cruds in the audience—

  He smuggled me into his hotel room, Mr. Bourgeois Guilt himself, and although I was used to that scene it really sickened me that night. I wasn’t feeling all that good about being me in the first place, and it seemed as though the whole day and night was designed to make me feel cheaper and more inferior.

  In the room, well, let’s just say he was a puritan. Do you know what I mean by that? A puritan is a son of a bitch who thinks you’re disgusting if you do what he wants to do, and twice as disgusting if you like it. The mere fact that I had come to his room with him meant that I was beneath contempt, you understand. Therefore he could stop having any regard for me whatsoever.

  How shall I put it? Well, I didn’t see it this way at the time, but using hindsight I can sum it up perfectly. He behaved exactly like a John. No money changed hands, but otherwise I might as well have been a paid prostitute.

  He touched my body, you know, not to excite me but as if it was just there for his pleasure. He played with me. Like a toy, like a rubber duck in the bathtub, for Christ’s sake. And then he stretched out like King Shit and told me to go down on him. Which is something I had never objected to, but in that room with that guy it became a dirty act to me. An obscene act.

  Then we had intercourse, and I guess he had fun, and I know I didn’t. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I had had sex before without enjoying it but never anything like that, wishing it was over, just wishing it was over and done with. Not that he made it last very long, but it seemed long because it was so impersonal and distasteful and, oh, really disgusting.

  This was a big turning point for me. Really. I mean, it’s not as though I had been hung up before this on the idea that sex had to be loving and beautiful and holy. I was a kid who had taken on a dozen boys one after the other, remember. If you could possibly imagine what that is like, a line-up, a gang bang. I can’t even explain what it’s like because it’s hard to put my mind back into that groove. It was never good sexually, you know. Anybody who ever tells you that a girl, a teenager, gets a sex kick out of a gang bang, that’s a lot of crap. But there was some emotional kick in it. There really was, at the time. A feeling of, I don’t know, being important and wanted. I’m sure this isn’t exactly news to you. Teenage girls who put out like that are such sick messed kids. I guess I was no exception.

  JWW: But this particular night was different. You felt cheap, I imagine, but in a different way.

  GILLIAN: That’s right. A completely different way. And you know, when he got his gun, he rolled off me and fell asleep immediately. And there I was, all alone with myself in that room. I was never so completely alone in my life.

  I sat up smoking a cigarette and wishing for a drink and feeling sober a
nd tired and old, and something strange happened. It was like drowning. My whole life was passing in front of me, one rotten part after another. Just the bad parts. There was no way to keep from thinking of them. They were just always there in my mind. All I could think of was how cheap I was, how small I was, how worthless. And how I seemed to be on this earth so that men could use me for their own pleasure and give me nothing in return. The whole thing was an absolutely terrible trip.

  JWW: I can imagine.

  GILLIAN: I have never felt so completely depressed before or since. Never. To think back on that night, I can only say that it’s a miracle I didn’t commit suicide. I would have done it if I had thought of it. It just never occurred to me, for some reason. But I think if it had ever come into my mind I would have gone to that window—I can see the window in my mind now, right alongside the foot of the bed, and I remember it was the twelfth floor so I could have made a job of it. Just a quick little dive out of that window and no more Gillian, and can you imagine that sanctimonious bastard trying to explain that one to the cops and his wife and all the people back home in the Rotary Club?

  I almost wish I had done it . . .

  But what I did instead was turn my first trick.

  JWW: How soon afterward?

  GILLIAN: The same night.

  JWW: Really?

  GILLIAN: Uh-huh. Well, why not? I felt like a whore, so why not be a whore?

  It almost came down to that. I couldn’t stay there with him and I didn’t want to wake him up, so I got dressed and let myself out. I took a cab back to the hotel where I was staying. I was very close to broke, and when I paid the cab I remember thinking that I should have taken a few dollars for cab fare from his wallet. A man will generally give you cab fare in those circumstances, usually five or ten bucks or even a twenty occasionally.