Fasten Your Seat Belts and Eat Your Fucking Nuts

by Joe Thomas

  “Yes I am,” I answered leaning against the back counter, “Listen, I don’t know you. I’ve never even met you before. This might be the way you act with everyone you work with but it’s like you’ve got a problem with me.” She peered at me without fluttering her eyes. I continued without relaxing my stance, “From the moment we’ve met you’ve been very nasty. Do we have a problem?’

  Staring me down like a cat she answered, “Nope. I don’t have a problem with you.”

  She threw me off guard. What the fuck? Was that it? How disappointing. Here I was preparing for World War III3 and she barely shot a bullet at me. I wanted her to argue or at least confirm her feelings towards me. But I got nothing. We glared at each other for a few more seconds and all I was able to muster up was a weak, “Good.”

  Without saying another word she opened her book and went back to reading. My first instinct was to stab her in the eye with my pen but I took the high road and simply walked away. As much as I wanted to shake her like a baby who refused to stop crying, I had to control my temper. She was a challenge that I had to overcome and I’d have to dig mighty deep for the strength not to end up in jail for punching her in the face. I spent time in the front galley creating stories for why she was such a bitch. Maybe she spent her days off rescuing kittens from burning buildings which left her tired and cranky. That would make her a hero in my eyes and give her a pass for being so mean. Perhaps she did know her hair was thinning and decided to punish all bald men. That made perfect sense. I sat down in my jumpseat to eat my dinner but my mind continued to wander about Carol. What was her fucking problem with me? Could her bitchiness be coming from an accidental over crimping situation earlier that day? Jackpot. That was most likely the issue. No white girl’s hair is that frizzy on purpose.

  Amber pulled me back into reality when she walked up to the front galley to do a trash pick up. She reached into the front bin and grabbed a garbage bag, “She just doesn’t like you,” she clarified as she opened the garbage bag and sat next to me on the jumpseat, “so stop trying.”

  “But why? I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t know, Joe. I like you; she doesn’t.” She stood up and started down the aisle collecting trash ending the conversation. I sat there staring at my cup of yogurt realizing I forgot to grab a spoon. Most likely Carol stole it. I'd blame her for everything. My missing spoon. The inconsistent temperature in the airplane. A disastrous mid-air collision. Everything.

  Carol and I didn’t interact for the rest of the trip. I guess that was a good thing. Her body language screamed that she loathed me. Too bad it wasn’t screaming from being thrown into a rotating Pratt & Whitney engine. Too harsh? Not really. I’ll go out on a limb and say we’ve all worked with a Carol at some point. We’ve all dealt with a miserable coworker. And we deal with our Carols in our own special way, mine being to witness her experience a quick death at the hands of an airplane engine. I see nothing wrong with that.

  During the rest of the trip, to make myself feel better, I speculated Carol was a lesbian. A full-blown carpet muncher with an appetite for Birkenstocks and strap ons. How’s that for stereotypes? To be honest, I had no proof of her being a lesbian. It’s not like I witnessed her do a face dive in Amber’s crotch in the hotel lobby. Although, if I had, I’d guess she was just curious about her brand of panties and nothing more. Seriously, my poor gaydar knows no boundaries. I figured Carol to be lesbionic because she constantly ignored me but chatted with Amber every chance available. I know for a fact-or maybe I read it on a Ted Cruz website-that all lesbians hate talking to men. And sucking dick. They hate that even more. Carol and Amber’s laughter and giggling echoed all the way up to row 20. It drove me insane. I felt like the little kid invited to a birthday party but shunned to the corner because the gift I brought was a regift. At least if there was cake on the airplane I could have drowned myself in cake frosting. Who cares about two chicks gossiping when you are knee deep in buttercream frosting? I’d step into the back galley and they’d both go silent. I know how it sounds, but this wasn’t my imagination. I even snuck up on them a few times but the moment my right foot hit the galley floor—they went dark. Noses in their books and purses. What made me feel even worse was that Amber would openly converse with me on the jumpseat during departures and arrivals but she shut down around Carol. Now, I know it’s terrible to go directly to the, “she must be a lesbian because she doesn’t talk to me,” conclusion—but I did. Guilty.

  I am no lesbian hater so please delete all those angry emails you are preparing to send off to Rosie and Ellen. Stop it right there. I am gay. How could I possibly hate lesbians? That’s like being a cop and hating donuts. It’s not conceivable. The last thing I hate are lesbians. I love them. I just don’t understand why they hate dick, but I love them. My first conversation with a lesbian was when I was 16 years old and worked at McDonald’s.

  It went something like this:

  Me:“How do you have sex without a dick?”

  Big Butch Lesbian: “It’s easy. Use your imagination.”

  Me: “Is it like eating sushi?”

  BBL: “We have ten perfectly good fingers and a strong tongue.”

  Me: “Oh. Ok. Excuse me while I go throw up my Big Mac and cry myself to sleep.”

  But there’s a twist in this story. Not the story about the lesbian giving a young 16 year old Joe life lessons on lesbian sex. The only twist happening there was from my stomach in the nasty bathroom of a dirty McDonald’s. I am referring to the story about Carol and Amber. Carol was no lesbian (Carol, if you are reading this right now please go ahead and cancel the lawsuit. I’ve delesbianized you). She was just a bitch who despised the fact that I was alive and taking up valuable air. She also dated a pilot at my airline. That surprised me. Well, not really. I presumed he was an undercover dick pilot and then it all made sense.

  Drumroll… the lesbian was Amber. Did you get that? She was a lipstick lesbian who’d trade in a pair of Birkenstocks for a pair of Manolo Blahniks anyday. I told you my gaydar was useless. Here I created an entire story in my head about Carol being some man-hating lesbian and she was the straightest person on the flight. She was still a bitch though. Let’s not forget that.

  See what happens when you allow your emotions to control your thoughts? Your brain makes you out to be a bigger asshole than the asshole making your life miserable.

  All this negativity towards Carol made me question myself and how I interact with others. Even though she was a super bitch towards me, I should have handled myself better.

  I will confess something to you at this very moment. Are you ready? If you didn’t pick up on this, I am not perfect. I can be an asshole just like Carol. Take it all in and just accept it. I had to. I have been told multiple times by close friends that I have a difficult time getting along with strangers and that I find fault in almost every new person who crosses my path. How dare someone say that? It’s slightly true, but how dare they? Sometimes it’s just best to keep shit like that to yourself.

  Once a good friend and I were at the bar and he confessed, “I get nervous introducing you to new people. You just don’t like anyone.”

  “Is that true?” I turned my head, “That’s not true.”

  “Yes it is.” At that exact second he looked over to the other side of the bar, “Oh look. I met that guy last week. You wanna meet him?”

  “Ugh. No thanks. I’ll be in the bathroom.”

  Maybe I am a first impressions kind of guy and if you fuck it up within the first five seconds you might as well just pack up and go home. But only after you’ve bought a round of drinks and told me I was funny. Seriously, I don’t dislike everyone. Just most people. I enjoy meeting a new group of fans (did I say fans? I meant friends) so they can spend the evening fawning over me while I narrate ridiculous and obscene airplane stories. I live for that. Who doesn’t? Well introverts probably don’t but thankfully, my pendulum swings off the extrovert chart. If I dig deep enough I can muster up enough faken
ess with people I don’t find amusing to get through a short introduction, but it’s difficult. I usually have to spend the next day in bed recovering. It’s a price I am willing to pay.

  Is that a defense? Sounds like a crock of bullshit to me. Wow! I really am a dick. But wait, there’s more. I only struggle getting along with people if they are assholes to me, or they talk a lot of shit that makes me roll my eyes and wish I was losing consciousness in the cargo hold of the airplane. You know it’s bad when you’d rather have no oxygen than listen to people talk.

  That entire three day trip was an odd turn of events for me. Granted, I did not like Carol, and for good fucking reason, but she didn’t like me first. That was a struggle. I was fine with me not liking her but the second she showed signs of resentment towards me—I fell apart. Did my five second first impression turn her off like a plate of liver and onions? What could I have done differently? If Amber hadn’t laid it out for me in black and white I might have spent the entire trip wrecking my brain about what I did. Why didn’t she like me? Was it because I asked to see her flight attendant manual? Damn, if that was the case, I can only imagine how she treated her OB/GYN on pap smear day.

  For years I worried about what people thought of me, while running around judging and disliking everyone I met. You can burn up a lot of energy worrying about why people like or dislike you. It’s tiresome. It’s unnecessary. To think of what I might have accomplished in my life if I didn’t give a fuck what others thought of me. I could have gone to medical school and became a world-renowned proctologist. Who wouldn’t want to spend the day fingering middle-aged manholes all day? That’s a normal Saturday night for most of my friends. If I didn’t care about what others thought of me maybe, just maybe, I could have lost my virginity at a decent age. Nobody should be a virgin at 28 years old. Nobody.

  Does it really matter what people think? Does it matter if persons A and B hate you but persons C and D think you are amazing? I learned a valuable life lesson watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, the lesson being: it’s none of your business what other people think of you. If someone doesn’t like you, that’s their problem, not yours. Can we get RuPaul to tour the country presenting that message to our youth? It should be the motto of every elementary school in the world. Think of the confidence and self-esteem kids would have with that message pumped into their ears. It did me wonders and I am an old fart.

  RuPaul’s advice came in handy a few months later on another flight when I found myself caught in the middle of two flight attendants and their verbal altercation on the airplane.

  Keegan, Wendy, and I were working an easy four day transcontinental trip. I say easy because on the second night there was a San Francisco layover which allowed me to sleep in my own bed. That’s always a treat. Our trip included only three legs: Cleveland to Dallas, with a short overnight layover; Dallas to San Francisco, with a 24 hour layover; and finally the red eye flight back to Cleveland.

  Keegan was the lead flight attendant and from the beginning complained about working this position. He was so adamant about not working the front of the airplane that he texted me the day our schedules came out requesting I swap positions with him.

  My text read: “No.”

  A few hours later, as if his cell phone died and he never received my response, he sent me a position swap request from our airline scheduling software. He obviously doesn’t know me. The only position swap I’ll entertain will revolve around gay sex in a bed, not on an airplane. Well, unless the gay sex happens on the airplane and then I guess I’d accept. Who wouldn’t? Everyone wants to have sex on the airplane. I declined his non-gay sex position swap request. Two days later, I received another one. It was apparent that Keegan was more aggressive than a bisexual threesome about this position swap.

  Again, I declined.

  Without trying to sound like a total bitch, I sent him another text message reminding him that if I wanted to work the front of the airplane on this trip, I would have bid for it myself. Unfortunately, the message emphasized how big of a bitch I actually am. Oops. Some messages just come across how they come across. I was the senior flight attendant on this trip and even though I had plenty of weight, I didn’t want to push it around. He finally got the message.

  What can I say about Keegan and Wendy? They were friends on Facebook and possibly liked each other’s photos on Instagram. Whether or not they were friends outside of work, I have no idea. I doubt it, but that’s just my theory. In my opinion, Wendy wasn’t the type to socialize in public with the likes of Keegan. For all intents and purposes, let’s say they were only Facebook friends. Which I define as not being friends at all. Just because you click that little friend icon with someone on social media does not mean you are friends. I don’t care what Mark Zuckerberg tells you. There’s a word for that, it’s called acquaintance. The online Google definition (trust me, I looked it up) for acquaintance is: a person one knows slightly, but who is not a close friend.

  And that’s if you have physically met the person. If you have never laid eyes on your Facebook “friend” then that’s an entirely different word. That word is stranger. You can’t argue black and white print, especially when it’s delivered by Google. That’s equivalent to receiving a message from L. Ron Hubbard if you happen to be a Scientologist.

  During the hours we spent at 38,000 feet, Keegan provided Wendy and I with a pointless Christian sermon. It went on for hours, just like the headache his voice gave me. Keegan was a big gay Christian. How big? Picture Big Gay Al from South Park big, but skinnier and with a higher pitch voice. Keegan definitely had gay voice. It was so awful he made an 11 year-old girl sound like she smoked two packs of Camels a day. Not only was he a big gay Christian, he hated being gay. As you can imagine, I couldn’t relate to him at all. He was a gay-bashing Christian who spent countless hours of his life bashing his own lifestyle. I might as well been working a trip with Ted Haggard. At least Ted got dick. All Keegan got were calluses on his right hand.

  Listening to Keegan would frighten gay teens into suicide. Thankfully, we were flying to Dallas and as we all know, there are more steers in Texas than queers. His entire dialogue was focused on God, Jesus, being gay, and Christians. He was relentless. Flying with Keegan should require a pair of earbuds and a roofie pill to block out all his evangelizing. I felt violated. It was as if my ears were being raped by the Holy Ghost. Preaching was his favorite mid-flight past time, “Gay people are such whores. They are sluts,” he looked up from the book he was reading while the three of us sat in the back galley. I ignored him but he continued, “Jesus still loves us though. But why are all gay people whores?”

  I looked at him to watch his facial expression, “I blew a Hispanic Jesus once. It was hot. He talked about his girlfriend while I sucked his dick in a seedy motel.”

  Keegan glared at me like he witnessed a school shooting, so naturally I continued, “Oh to be young again.”

  He slammed his book shut, “Joe! That’s just terrible.”

  I didn’t think it was all that bad. “No. It was actually quite good.”

  That was enough for him. He stood up, lifted up the silver snack bin he was using as a chair, placed it back in the holder and stared at me, waiting for an apology. It would be a long wait.

  Keegan was the worst kind of gay and the worst kind of Christian. Two behaviors that should never find themselves in a marriage. He spent hours discussing his internal battle with religion and being a gay man while trolling Grindr for the cutest guys 10 feet away. I was embarrassed for him. What was he going to do? Find the guy with the biggest dick but not exercise his demon? (And by demon I mean dick.) As big of an atheist as I am, I found myself thanking baby Jesus that we were working a four to five hour flight and not on our way to Sydney.

  Throughout the entire trip he obsessively read a book written by some God fearing gay man. I couldn’t begin to remember who the author was or the title of the book. To be honest, I didn’t care. All I remember was that it was written by s
ome gay Christian guy who spent an abundant amount of time arguing Bible scriptures to relieve gay men of their religious guilt. I am not in favor of censorship or book burning, but this garbage that Keegan was reading belonged doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze inside a tin drum under some overpass in Los Angeles. Keeping the homeless warm was about all this book was good for.

  You may think I am a barbarian—and you are right. Actually, I felt bad for Keegan and his struggles. He walked around reminding me of someone carrying the weight of the world on his bony shoulders. Or at least the weight of a large wooden crucifix. His scars ran deep and spilled over with years of religious bullshit. In Keegan’s defense, he never admitted to any of that but I saw right through him like a pair of nude mesh panties. Being a 40 year old gay man, and a recovering Catholic, I pick up self loathing quickly. Talk about having low self esteem. His conversations tended to be so heavy I was afraid we’d have to remove the liquor cart from the flight because of weight restrictions.

  Even with his aversion towards being gay, and the holy roller mumbo jumbo he spewed out like acid rain, the three of us seemed to work well together. How was that possible? It’s simple, I am a master at being a fake son of a bitch. That’s an hijo de puta for you Spanish readers. Pulling off the fake card is a gift from the Universe. Or God. Or Xenu. It doesn’t matter who you choose, just go with whoever you thank after a fantastic orgasm. The second Keegan was out of earshot and on his way to the front of the airplane, I’d shake my head at Wendy, “That boy is fucked up.”