A few hours after landing, Dee Dee and I met up with some other crew members in the hotel bar, which offered 20 percent off to airline personnel and which therefore was packed with airline personnel. We’d just ordered beers and were snacking on vinegar chips when a handsome pilot I’d never seen before turned his attention on me. He had only one thing on his mind, I’m sure, but I didn’t care. This was a first for me. Flattered, I decided to enjoy it, especially since the last time I’d spoken to Brent he’d made it clear that while he liked me “more than a lot,” he still wanted to date other women. That hurt. This didn’t. Anyway, my mother always wanted me to marry a pilot, not a personal trainer–lead guitarist for a cover band. Not that I had any crazy ideas about walking down the aisle with the adorable first officer who was now whispering something in my ear about taking a stroll outside where it might be a little quieter, but I did visualize us making the most of our flight benefits, heading off on exotic vacations on our days off.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” Dee Dee asked out of nowhere.
All eyes were now on me. The pilot took a step back. Nervously, I laughed, “You mean the boyfriend who didn’t call on my birthday because he was on a date with someone else?” I could have sworn I’d told her this already. Perhaps the booze had gone to her head or maybe the jet lag had made her forgetful, either way her block completely caught me by surprise.
I didn’t go for a stroll with the pilot, but I did continue flirting with him. Dee Dee stood nearby, eavesdropping on our conversation, interjecting things that I’m sure would have been better left unsaid, since the rest of the crew was now cracking up. At one point we were discussing books and I mentioned something about feeling passionately about women’s rights. That’s when Dee Dee laughed and then said loudly enough for everyone in the bar to hear, “Didn’t you used to work at Hooters?” All eyes were back on me. After that I decided to go to bed.
On the flight home I got an earful in the form of silence. Whenever I’d enter a galley, everyone would immediately stop talking and just smile. At first I thought Dee Dee and her friends just disliked pilots, and maybe new hires who were interested in pilots. I must have embarrassed her since I should have known better than to accept the advances of someone who worked on the wrong side of the cockpit door. But then a few weeks later a good-looking captain offered Dee Dee a ride home and she accepted. Excitedly, she rehashed the details of the twenty-minute drive, emphasizing the part where he tried to kiss her and she pushed him away. I realized then and there that she didn’t dislike pilots, maybe only new hires who attracted pilots—in other words, me. Or maybe that’s just me and my insecurities.
Besides the fact that they were both married, commuted to work, and lived in the attic together, Dee Dee and Paula had very little in common. We’d know when Paula was in town because a basket with knitting needles would appear next to the sofa, whether or not she was on a trip. Around the house Paula hung out in acid-washed jeans paired with ribbed turtlenecks in the winter or oversized T-shirts in the summer. Her auburn hair was always worn loose and wavy as she sat on the couch crocheting yet another scarf for another relative’s birthday. Rarely did she wear makeup, which is why it was always a bit of a shock to see her dressed for work in uniform with her dark brown eyes lined in kohl and her lips painted a dark red, emphasized by hair that had been pulled back and held in place with a barrette. Even though Paula and Dee Dee were close in age, Paula seemed a lot older and wiser. But she was fun. Well, that is, when she was around, which tended to be hardly ever. In order to spend as much time at home with her two young sons, she’d fly to New York the morning her flight departed and work a high-time trip to get as many hours as possible in the shortest amount of time. As soon as the trip was over, she’d jump on the first flight home. It seemed exhausting. When I asked about juggling the whole wife, mother, flight attendant thing, she told me that if I could work a line of red-eye flights and act somewhat normal between trips, I could do anything, even run the PTA.
“What about your husband and kids, don’t they mind that you’re gone?” asked Jane who all of a sudden seemed overly worried about how this worked. Things were getting serious with the pilot, I presumed.
Paula laughed. “Of course they mind! But that’s too bad. I need a little me time. Even our worst trip is a vacation from my regular life.”
Like most flight attendants with children, Paula was a “slam clicker” on trips. As soon as she’d get to the hotel room she’d let the door slam-click shut behind her, never to reappear until pick-up the following morning. The next twenty-four hours were filled with bubble baths and room service, soap operas and books in bed, peace and quiet and waking up to the morning light instead of a husband who needed help finding his socks or the kids crying for breakfast early in the morning. Because of her job her husband couldn’t take her for granted and the kids got to know their father in a way most never do.
“Trust me, Jane, they’ll be grateful I have this job when they’re older and we’re flying around the world for free,” added Paula.
When Jane wondered out loud if her boyfriend could be as patient as Paula’s husband, Paula, the nerdiest of us all, had this to say: “It’s pretty amazing what men will put up with for a blow job.” All of us laughed, even though Jane and I would later admit that neither one of us could imagine Paula doing something like that.
“It’s the quiet ones you have to worry about,” I told Jane when Paula was out of earshot. Before, I never really believed the saying, but now I knew it to be true.
The following day Jane looked at me mischievously. “She must do it a lot.”
I didn’t have to ask who she was talking about or what “it” meant. We’d both been traumatized by the revelation.
Like Paula, Grace was another roommate who was rarely around, not because she commuted or had kids, but because her boyfriend was in the military and stationed in Japan. Holed up in her room, she spent hours talking to him over the phone using discounted calling cards that seemed way too good to be true, even though she purchased packs of them at Costco. Grace began Skyping before I’d even heard of the word. She was on top of the latest means of communications and always trying to educate the rest of us in the house about things that seemed a little shady at the time, like using the computer as a phone. Grace had been dating her boyfriend for years. Sadly, they rarely saw each other. That was okay because she was strong, and whenever she began to feel weak, she read the Bible or distracted herself by taking the train to Koreatown to pick up treats she grew up on as a child that she would later force upon us.
“Don’t knock it before you try it!” Grace once said, holding up a jar of something pink swimming in red liquid. None of us were up to trying it.
As much as Jane would have loved to have thrown away whatever it was Grace always brought home from her excursions into the city, she never did, not even when Tricia complained about needing extra room to house twenty Tupperware containers of vegetable soup. Paula, always the peacemaker, offered to reorganize the fridge to make it all fit after Dee Dee decided to get rid of the tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos she’d brought from Arizona by whipping up fresh pico de gallo for all of us to share. Whatever was left over she’d take to the crew working her trip later that night.
The most interesting thing about Grace was not that her childhood reminded me of the Broadway show Miss Saigon, but that that she worked for a different airline, one of our main competitors. After hours of comparing the two airlines, it soon became clear that, besides the fact that her airline served better snacks (cookies instead of pretzels, which she was kind enough to bring home by the case), everything was pretty much the same. Her passengers were always threatening to fly our airline, while our passengers wondered why they weren’t flying hers. After one of my flights diverted to another airport because of bad weather in New York, one such passenger yelled out that next time he was going to fly my roommate’s airline. A coworker walked over to his seat, opened his window s
hade, pointed to one of several airplanes parked on the tarmac beside us, and said, “Go ahead. There they are. Looks like they diverted, too.” The man didn’t say another word. That’s when I realized it didn’t matter who we worked for, we all had the same passengers. As well as the same cheaply made uniforms. Although I did find Grace’s coat dress to be a little more flattering than ours. At one point I even considered offering to buy it from her, and then taking it to our favorite seamstress, who could switch out the buttons with ones that had my airline’s logo on them. Besides the seamstress—“Uniform, wrong buttons!”—who would notice?
While I loved hanging out with Grace, Jane got on better with Agnes, which I couldn’t understand because Agnes and I didn’t exactly click. Then again, maybe I didn’t try hard enough to make things click. When she spoke I could barely hear her. And when I did hear her I didn’t always understand what she was saying. Jane found her to be deep. I found her to be a little . . . well, different, considering she couldn’t remember how to work the microwave and coffeepot no matter how many times I showed her. I don’t think she knew how to work the oven or the fridge, either, because Agnes couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds. The girl rarely ate. At five-feet-nine, she looked like a model, that’s how willowy and pretty she was. Like Grace, Agnes had a strong connection to God, but unlike Grace she was quiet and pretty much only spoke when spoken to. With long strawberry-blond hair, light blue eyes, and fair skin, Agnes looked as angelic as she acted. On her days off she, too, would hole up in her bedroom, only she preferred the company of a good book to a phone or a computer. Rarely did she hang out with us, and when she did it never lasted long, because if we weren’t bickering and gossiping, we were sharing things unfit for virginal ears.
Grace was the first one who noticed Agnes might be up to something. We were all sitting on the couch when Agnes tiptoed through the living room and into the kitchen, grabbed a loaf of bread, a container of mayo, and a couple of wrapped-up packages of deli meat, and without saying a word started for the stairs. Jane had seen her do this once before and wondered if there might be a connection between the sneaky sandwiches and the late-night hang-up calls we’d been getting for the last month. I thought the calls probably had more to do with Tricia’s stalker, but Dee Dee wasn’t so sure since the stalker and Tricia had recently made up and were trying to rekindle what they once had. Jane rolled her eyes. Paula brought up the empty baby stroller she’d noticed outside our front door the previous week. Dee Dee had seen it too, but figured it belonged to the neighbors who had young kids. Jane didn’t think so—both boys were too old for a stroller. Anyway, she’d seen it behind the house next to the recycling bin and figured someone must have left it inside Yakov’s cab. She was just happy to see he’d placed it near the right bin. Then she wondered why Yakov didn’t use it to repair the broken washer since he had a tendency to do weird things like that. That’s when Tricia ran through the front door and yelled out she had to get ready for a date, she was late. Paula worried about Tricia dating the stalker again, but Grace reminded Paula that Tricia had asked us to stop calling him the stalker, since his name was Steven. Jane made a face and Dee Dee started laughing. Paula offered to open another bottle of wine. When Agnes reappeared to put the secret sandwich ingredients back in the kitchen where it all belonged, Grace asked her what was up.
“Oh, uh . . . I was just hungry,” she said, and disappeared back up the stairs.
It was an unwritten rule that in our crash pad no men were allowed to spend the night—well, no local guys. This rule was established by Jane after Grace ran into one Tricia’s boyfriends in the kitchen early one morning. Grace didn’t find it amusing to see him standing there in his tighty-whities. Jane was appalled to learn he had eaten her banana. Paula couldn’t believe we were making a big fuss. Dee Dee was too tired from the red-eye from Buenos Aires to care. If anyone was involved in a long-distance relationship, it was perfectly fine to have the person over, even for a few nights. In that type of situation, it was safe to assume we probably knew him well (or at least, a lot about him) and there was little chance of his being a frequent visitor. Otherwise, no boys allowed. Not only because it wasn’t safe to have strange men spending the night in a house full of women, but because the last thing we wanted to do was hear or see Tricia—I mean a roommate—having sex. So imagine our surprise when it turned out to be Agnes and not Tricia breaking the rules.
None of us knew how long it’d been going on, and we didn’t want to know, either, because Agnes’s stowaway boyfriend was creepy. And old. Twice her age, at least. Jane was the first one who saw him in person. She came home early from a trip that had been canceled and found him sitting on the sofa with his shoes on the table, watching a horse race and drinking Dee Dee’s Diet Coke as if he owned the place. The worst part: he was there alone and unsupervised. Well, we thought that was the worst part until we found out more about him. When we confronted Agnes, we learned he was a single father with a gambling addiction who unofficially moved in with us after he lost his house. Agnes took care of his little girl, a precious child who called her Mommy, while he blew money she’d lent him at the racetrack. The dirty stroller, we realized, belonged to him. We were horrified to know how long he’d been around and not one of us had a clue. Agnes had wanted to have children for so long. When pressed as to why she would allow someone like him run her life, she admitted it had everything to do with the child. A few days after we banned him from the house, I spotted the stroller in a park two blocks away. I scanned the playground but never found him, and went straight home to warn my roommates to be on the lookout. Soon he started popping up on every trip Agnes worked. This went on for months, even though we’re only allotted so many buddy passes for family and friends, until finally Agnes got suspended for abusing her flight privileges.
Agnes is the only person I’d ever met who could treat past abuse like an addiction and get away with it. A few therapy sessions later Agnes was back on the line and soon the boyfriend was trying to get back in her life, using his child to do so. When she realized the only way to make a change was to make a change, a big one, she transferred all the way to San Francisco (and, to my surprise, once she moved out we became good friends). We were all proud of her for finding herself and standing strong. We encouraged her not to regret what went down. To this day she will admit she’s still trying to learn from that experience so that it wasn’t a waste in her life.
We didn’t have to look far to find another roommate to replace Agnes in the house. My mother moved in.
Chapter 10
Flying Freak Show
DREAMS REALLY DO come true, I thought to myself after a male flight attendant walked on board and announced that the agent had told him Brad Pitt would be on our flight. (This was pre-Angelina.) I snuck into the lav to fluff my hair and refresh my makeup, just in case we made eye contact, not that I actually thought it would go anywhere from there. Then again, I had met a flight attendant who went on a date with Billy Idol and another who went out with Rod Stewart after becoming acquainted in flight. When I came out of the bathroom I noticed I wasn’t alone, as all the other flight attendants looked ten times better than they did five minutes ago. The flight attendant who had made the exciting announcement now sat in a first-class seat cracking up and pointing at us, “Oh my God, look at you guys! I can’t believe you fell for it!”
I wish I had fallen for it on another flight. During boarding I handed a grungy-looking guy in first class a glass of water. “Are you in a band?” I asked. There was no other way to explain the homeless attire. Turns out he was in a rock band, but not just any band: he was in my favorite band!
I looked at him funny. I’d never seen this guy before. “You must be new to the band.”
“I’m the lead singer.”
What he was, was a liar! Because the lead singer of the band I loved was hot. This guy with his scarecrow arms was not. At five-feet-seven I towered over the man. On television the lead singer looked tall and bu
ff, always taking the stage shirtless, showing off a sexy six-pack. I highly doubted this guy on the plane had a two-pack under his thin hole-y T-shirt.
Back in the galley I decided to check the paperwork for his name. In a way I wish I hadn’t. Because there it was, his name, printed on the thin paper that had been clipped to a compartment door housing all our glassware. I couldn’t believe that was him! My rock ’n’ roll fantasy.
Before I became a flight attendant, I didn’t actually believe that dreams came true. Growing up in Dallas, a pretty big city with plenty of opportunities for a girl like me, never inspired me to think I could do anything extraordinary with my life. But once I moved to New York all that changed. I was living in one of the most exciting cities in the world and seeing things with my very own eyes that before only existed on television. Places like the Plaza Hotel, Central Park, the Empire State Building, Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy, which had always just seemed like movie backdrops. The world was at my fingertips and I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t believe this was my life.
The celebrities were just the beginning of this realization. They were sitting in the same seat I had just sat in to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d brought from home while waiting for the flight to board. My regular butt had touched the same fabric as many celebrity butts. I’ll never forget the time I was deadheading on a flight home and the first-class flight attendant told me one of my favorite actresses had sat in my very seat after she won the Oscar last night. For whatever reason, that’s the moment I believed I really could do anything with my life. Like, for example, become a photographer. So when I found out what the cute guy in the last row of business did for a living, I no longer wanted to date him. I wanted to work for him!
Cruising Attitude Page 15
