Cruising Attitude

by Heather Poole

  Chapter 4

  Welcome to New York

  ALL THOSE LIGHTS on the ground! That’s what I remember most about flying over New York City the first time. I’d never seen anything like it. And off in the distance, next to a strip of blinking landing lights, the blackest of black: the Atlantic Ocean. The contrast was intense. I quickly snapped a few photographs from a scratched plastic window.

  “Flight attendants prepare for landing,” announced a man’s deep, no-nonsense voice. The captain, I presumed. Suddenly the cabin lights were turned to bright. I blinked until my eyes adjusted.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” announced a woman’s voice. “It is now time to . . .”

  I knew exactly what time it was! Springing into action, I kicked my tote bag under the seat and pushed the silver button on the armrest. My seat popped back into place just as two attractive female flight attendants, whose skirts had been tailored so short that I could only assume they were single and looking, walked to the front of the aircraft. They sashayed down the aisle on navy blue stilettos, collecting cups, napkins, and newspapers while checking the status of seat belts, seat backs, and luggage. A passenger reached out and tugged the hem of a skirt on the move, simultaneously firing off a battery of questions about a missed flight connection and lost luggage. The flight attendant nodded and, smiling, pointed to a map inside the airline’s magazine located in the angry passenger’s seat back pocket. When she handed it to him, he immediately flung it on the seat beside him, determined to keep complaining for the remaining minutes before landing.

  Georgia leaned across the empty middle seat between us and squeezed my hand. “Can you believe that’s gonna be us in four days?”

  It did seem surreal.

  Four days. That’s all the time we’d been given to find a place to live and settle in before working our first trip assignment as New York–based flight attendants. Talk about stress. There were a dozen of us on the flight, and most of us had no idea where to go, what to do, or just how much it would actually cost once we finally found a place. We certainly didn’t know that tipping the super a few hundred bucks would greatly increase the odds of getting an apartment. The majority of us were from the Midwest where things like this didn’t happen. We had come from cities where housing was, well, almost affordable for a person making less than $18,000 a year. (Of course, deduct $800 for our uniforms and we were left with about $17,000.) And to think I had actually turned down a merchandising job for a well-known men’s line of clothing a few years ago because I didn’t think I could survive in New York on just $30,000 a year! Now I would be making half that. No wonder so many apartment buildings flat out refused to house flight attendants. It took twenty of us living together to afford a one-bedroom.

  In fact, as first-year flight attendants, we qualified for food stamps—that is, if the airline had allowed us to use them, which they didn’t, so we didn’t, which is how so many of us could fit into size 0 uniforms and why we never had to work out to keep our girlish figures. Lord knows we couldn’t afford a membership to the gym those first few years on the job. It also explains why we were willing to accept dinner dates from men we might not have otherwise gone out with. I remember being so hungry at times that working a meal cart became torture! My stomach would rumble in the aisle as I silently prayed for passengers to refuse their meals. I even knew a few flight attendants who regularly hopped flights as passengers in order to eat what was being served on board for free. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Imagine being stuck in New York in the dead of winter and being able to fly to Miami just to get breakfast. We could spend a few hours lounging around the airport hotel pool, working on our tans and taking advantage of a 20 percent airline employee discount at the hotel restaurant bar, before flying back to New York in time for dinner. Hey, a flight attendant’s gotta do what a flight attendant’s gotta do!

  But as our plane was landing in New York that first day, Georgia and I didn’t know any of that. We grabbed our bags out of the bins, deplaned, and headed down to baggage claim, all giddy and full of excitement. Our instructors had told us to check the bulletin board at LaGuardia flight operations, wherever that might be, because that’s where other flight attendants posted notices looking for roommates. Luckily, we wouldn’t have to resort to that. I had a connection to a place in Queens, thanks to an old Sun Jet colleague who had once worked for Pan Am out of New York. We were lucky. We knew it, too. So did our envious classmates, who had already paired off into groups of four in order to save money on hotel rooms for the night. I have to say, for a group of people who were broke, homeless, and had no idea when our first paychecks might arrive, we were handling the situation beautifully. This, I’m sure, is exactly why we were hired.

  I happily helped Georgia load several gigantic bags onto a Smarte Carte while our classmates waved good-bye from the Marriott hotel courtesy van. Georgia and I felt bad for them. Their first night in one of the most exciting cities in the world and they would spend it ordering overpriced room service at a chain hotel across the street from an airport.

  Everyone had cleared out of baggage claim except for us and a family of four who seemed to be missing something like a car seat or a stroller—or maybe even a kid, based on the way they were frantically searching the premises. A group of men huddled together at the bottom of the stairs leading down to baggage claim. Dressed in black suits and holding little white signs, they leered at Georgia while they awaited passengers on incoming flights who had yet to recognize their names. We found a pay phone, and I dialed a number given to us by one of the attendants on our flight. I’d asked her about the cheapest way to get to Queens without taking a bus. The phone rang twice.

  “Kew Gardens!” barked a raspy voice.

  I told the man my name, where we were, and where we wanted to go.

  “Fifteen minutes! Last set of doors upstairs!” he snapped and immediately hung up.

  Georgia slowly pushed the rolling metal cart stacked so high with luggage she could barely see over the top, while I pulled two enormous suitcases on wheels, a smaller crew bag balancing across the top of one. Another group of men wearing jeans and bulky winter coats stood near the passenger arrivals exit. Their eyes lit up as soon as they spotted Georgia teetering along in high-heel boots.

  “Need a ride!” they yelled across the room—a statement, not a question, that was repeated several times.

  “No, thank you,” we repeated, a dozen times, at least.

  Normally I would have been freaked out by this aggressive behavior from a group of strange men at the airport, but we were in New York City. This was just how they did things. I knew this because my mother had made it her mission in life to warn me about all the things to avoid in New York. Gypsy cab drivers were one thing. After my mother had found out where I was going to be based, she bought a guide to the city and soon became the expert on all things New York, although she had yet to visit the city herself.

  “Always take a yellow cab,” she had told me out of the blue on several different occasions. “Make sure to look for a medallion,” she’d insist, as if my life depended on it. (Of course, it took ending up in an empty parking lot in Harlem instead of at a theater on Broadway a few months later to actually learn this lesson so that I can in turn share it with you. Listen to my mother.)

  Once Georgia and I had finally dragged our thousand pounds of luggage to the passenger arrival drop-off point, we found the area deserted. We stood there all alone, and cold, in the dark. LaGuardia Airport at night was creepy. Nervously I looked around, wondering if maybe we should go inside and wait. Instead, I put on a pair of black knit gloves. Georgia dug around inside of one of her smaller bags and pulled out a fluffy white muff. I’d never seen one before in real life, only in fairy tales.

  “Ya think it’s safe out here?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I lied. No need for both of us to freak out.

  Just then, what looked like an old beat-up police sedan sped up to the curb, the horn honking nonstop, a
nd came to a screeching halt in front of us. I took a step back. An old man wearing wire-rim glasses and a newsboy cap got out of the sedan and squinted at our bags.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he said.

  “Are you with Kew Gardens Car Service?” I asked, hopeful that he was not, although KEW GARDENS was clearly printed in red-and-white cursive across the back window, the numbers 909 written below it.

  The old guy reached into the car through the opened door and grabbed what looked like a CB radio handset. “Nine oh nine.” He looked at us, looked at our bags again, and shook his head. “Nine oh nine.”

  “Is there a problem, sir?” Georgia popped her cinnamon gum.

  “Is there a problem, she asks!” He laughed. “Where you from, sweetheart?”

  She smiled a pageant queen smile. “Louisiana.”

  From inside the car came the scratchy voice of a man who sounded like he’d spent about twenty years chain-smoking in a coal mine: “Nine oh nine.”

  The driver pressed a black button and spoke into the handset. “We got a bit of a problem. It seems that Miss Louisiana here needs the wagon.” Without another word, he got back inside the car, slammed the rickety door shut, and took off.

  “Well, that was rude!” exclaimed Georgia. She glared at the two red taillights disappearing into the distance. “I’m in the right mind to report that guy!”

  Georgia never did end up reporting him, and eventually a station wagon in desperate need of a paint job crawled to the curb. Without exiting the car, a long-haired driver popped the hatch, twirling a cigarette between his stained fingers. Georgia and I struggled to load our bags into the back. They barely fit. Once in the backseat, I sat on what looked like a blue blanket taken from an airplane. On further inspection, it was in fact a blue blanket taken from an airplane. It covered a rip in the leather seat.

  “Where you ladies going?” Irish accent. Beady eyes darting back and forth between us in the rearview mirror.

  “Beverly Road. Near Metro and Lefferts?” Shoot. It sounded more like a question, not the statement I had memorized and rehearsed in the bathroom mirror in the days before graduating from the flight academy in an attempt to sound like a real New Yorker. The driver nodded. Half a second later our heads snapped back and off we went to Kew Gardens.

  Thanks to my mother’s newfound knowledge of all things New York, I already knew that Kew Gardens, also known as Crew Gardens, is a residential area in Queens offering, for the most part, one-family homes in the million-dollar-plus range. There are also several apartment complexes and co-ops located in the area around Metropolitan Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard, a.k.a. Metro and Lefferts, two cross streets that run through the heart of the neighborhood. After World War II, a large population of Jewish refugees from Germany settled in the area, along with many Chinese and Russian immigrants. Dense and ethnically diverse, the neighborhood is popular with airline personnel because of its central location between LaGuardia Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport. Because New York is considered a junior base for most airlines, there are a large number of flight attendants who commute to work. This is why so many crash pads are located in Kew Gardens, and why one can often see uniformed airline personnel at all hours of the day and night dragging luggage down cracked sidewalks past synagogues, nail salons, and Chinese food takeout joints on the way to and from the airport.

  From the backseat of the car I stared out the window as neon signs whizzed by, a few of them in need of new lightbulbs. As we passed Jamaica Hospital, my heart sank. I didn’t want to be anywhere near Jamaica, Queens, thanks to the movie Coming to America starring Eddie Murphy, a movie my sister forced me to rent before going to flight attendant training. Any moment now I expected to see dozens of homeless people warming their hands over burning cans of trash. When we exited the highway, there were gigantic black bags of garbage piled at least four bags high on the curb as far as the eye could see. Right before we turned into a neighborhood with tall, skinny houses sitting practically on top of one another, we passed by what looked like an abandoned bowling alley.

  I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Ummm . . . excuse me, Mr. Driver, are we going the right way?”

  I barely heard him say, “Yep.” U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” blared from the speakers behind me.

  When we stopped at a red light, a man bundled up in a ski jacket with a matching ski mask approached the driver’s side of the car holding a stack of magazines. He flashed the driver with whatever was hidden behind a lone copy of the New York Post while smiling at me. The driver didn’t look, but waved him away with a flick of his cigarette.

  “Is this neighborhood safe?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said, and then he cranked up the stereo even louder.

  The houses never did spread out, but eventually the trees grew taller and the restaurants began to look a little more inviting. When we stopped in front of a white wooden three-story house sitting behind a boarded-up fruit stand, the driver didn’t say a word. He just popped the trunk and helped us get our bags out. The front light flicked on and a girl I would never see again opened the front door, told us her name, and invited us to come in.

  Once inside Georgia and I stood on an Oriental rug in the dimly lit foyer, taking things in. Only a few steps away, a dark wooden staircase led up to the second floor. At the very top of the stairs I could see a bathroom. From where I stood below, it looked like the bathroom light was the only light on upstairs. To our right an archway opened up to a living room. A woman sat on the sofa watching television. Fashion, travel, and beauty magazines fanned out across a glass coffee table that now acted as a footrest.

  The girl who’d let us in whispered, “I’d introduce you to her but I can’t remember her name. I’ve only been here a few weeks myself and we just met today.” As she buttoned up her black peacoat, she nodded at the two French doors to our left. “That’s the room. Take the two beds by the window. Keys are on the dresser. Feel free to take two drawers each in the wooden dresser next to the closet.” Then she was out the door and gone, off to meet a few friends and roommates at the local pizzeria, leaving Georgia and me all alone. Well, almost all alone.

  Georgia peeked back into the living room. “Hi! I’m Georgia and this is Heather! We’re moving in.”

  Staring straight ahead she said, “Marge.” Georgia and I just looked at each other.

  Not one to be easily deterred, Georgia sang, “Nice to meet you, Marge!”

  “Likewise,” she mumbled. That was our cue to go check out our room.

  Twin beds lined the walls, six of them, which meant there would be six of us sharing a closet, one teeny-tiny closet, without a door.

  Georgia sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This just is not going to work!”

  We had no choice but to make it work.

  “Maybe we can purchase some cardboard drawers to place beside our beds,” I suggested, after noting that’s exactly what the others who were not there had done. After further inspection, I added, “What doesn’t fit inside our two drawers we can keep packed away in our suitcases under the bed.”

  After we unpacked as much as we could, which wasn’t much, we decided to take a look around the big, dark, creaky house. The first floor consisted of the large bedroom where Georgia and I now lived, a living room where Marge continued to camp out for the next twelve hours, and a pretty big kitchen. I peeked inside the fridge and noticed that everything had been labeled with different names. Same went for the pantry. Upstairs we found three other bedrooms. These were large rooms that looked more like army barracks than actual bedrooms. Two rows of unmade bunk beds stretched across the floor from one end of the room to the other. The occupants of these rooms were nowhere to be found, but a couple of suitcases were lying on the floor against the wall, unzipped, with clothes eager to escape.

  The bathroom, located on the same floor, was shared by all of us. Each night from that night on I’d march upstairs and scribble my name on the piece of paper that a
llotted ten-minute shower times throughout the day. There were so many of us sharing that one bathroom that no one took responsibility for cleaning it. The black-and-white checkered floor had turned black and gray. A ring of dirt always surrounded the bottom of the tub. The drain was always clogged with hair, so showers consisted of standing ankle deep in water. At first the ten-minute shower rule seemed impossible, but the bathroom was so disgusting I did not dare linger any longer than necessary. Rubber shower shoes soon became my best friend.

  Because so many of us slept in the same room, and because there was more time to shower if we skipped using the mirror in the bathroom, we all wound up using the living room downstairs as a kind of dressing room. Two dressing tables were pushed against the wall between the sofa and the giant TV. Flight attendants with early sign-ins would pack their bags the night before and leave them, along with makeup and curling irons, on the living room floor so as not to bother everyone else in the house while getting ready.

  For all I know, there could have been sixty flight attendants living in that house. It was hard to tell because there was so much coming and going at all hours of the day and night. With so many people in one house, you’d think the place might feel crowded, but it was just the opposite. Many nights I found myself alone. And depressed. In the beginning I tried to introduce myself to each new face that walked through the front door, but then I eventually realized I rarely ever saw the same face twice. I’d just smile and say hello . . . until I finally just stopped smiling or saying hello, like Marge.

  Now for a little Crash Pad 101.

  A flight attendant’s “base” is the city where his or her trips are scheduled to begin and end. “Commute, commuter, commuting” is the process of getting to work, in other words, flying to one’s base city. Some New York–based commuters even live as far away as Europe and Hawaii. For the most part, commuters work “commutable trips,” which are trips that depart late enough or return early enough that the flight attendant can get to work and home again on a single workday instead of wasting a precious “day off” commuting.