Alan Quine, Newt “Neutron” Silva and I are getting fucked up every day for Christmas week in Paris. The Sofitel St. Jaques crew room is the scene of this marathon crime.
By 2:00pm we show up, each of us with a couple of bottles of excellent twelve-fifteen franc merlots and cabernets, mutard, fresh baguettes and fromages are pulled from plastic shopping bags.
Flight attendants and pursers come and go, drinking and schmoozing with us, as we sit drinking from our $2 bottles of fine French wine, smoking Cuban cigars, and kibitzzing through the night, every night, until the restaurant opens for petite dejeuner at seven am.
Changing venues, we gorge on Nova Salmon, omelets to order, café au lait, we are wrapped in the aromas of Chocolat chaud and fresh linen. Then its off to bed. At 2:00 P.M. we start the cycle all over again.
This decadent Parisian orgy lasts through Christmas and New Years, broken only by one flight to Al’s Garage (Al Kharj) and back to Paris. Eugene, one of our more popular Pursers, a gay gentleman, has brought his professional dancer live-in of thirteen years, along with him on this trip. They are celebrating not only the Holidays, but the Purser’s 40th birthday.
Miguel, the boyfriend, is a fiery, no-holds-barred Broadway dancer, who we all immediately take to. Miguel arranged for forty bottles of wine and champagne for the birthday party. We pot luck the rest, and by midnight a home-made carburetor of ganja is being passed around a crowded, well lubricated room filled with flight attendants and two crews of pilots.
Alan and I are talking about Vietnam. In the Marine Corps, my job was carrying a double-E-8 radio with a whip antennae sticking up, announcing to all the world that if you shoot in the direction of this antenna, there’s sure to be a lieutenant or captain nearby. The job is usually given to the loudest wise-guy in the rifle platoon.
Al Quine had the same job for the army, with their equivalent radio, the Prick-8.
“Prick-8’s” for two loud-mouthed, wise guy pricks,” we agree. Miguel, working the room, but overhearing this discussion, is suddenly transfixed. “What was it like, what was combat like?” he must know, he must!
Alan leans back, a cigar in one hand gently held, one white eye-brow cocked, says. “…we were flown for hours (it seemed), and the choppers dropped us in tall grass. Then we listened to sounds of the helicopters getting further and further away.”
He makes sounds of receding blades, finally disappearing… “whump, whump, whump, whump, whump….”
“Now we’re out there all alone, in the middle of this stinkin’ jungle. Then a guy says ‘I’ve got to shit!’ Then the next guy says he’s got to shit, and the next…” Looking at me but mesmerized by memory, he smiles, “Is that how you remember it?”
I can only nod. Alan takes a puff of cigar.
We look at Miguel, he is very still, transfixed…he has never been this close.
What’s to say? Underwhelmed, Miguel moves on.
The Purser’s 40th birthday was a major success. Fifty people have crowded into the crew lounge, and the wine and champagne have been flowing liberally. An improvised carburetor, fashioned from an empty cigar tube, is being passed around among the flight attendants, in a moderately discreet fashion. Captain George Bolus, now no longer
drunk and wanting to kill Neutron Silva, is peacefully sleeping on a folding chair though the din.
Asshole-in-chief, Captain Bob Foreskeen has been pinching nipples at random, mine included. Warning him to cut it out, warning him again (what’s that all about?), finally I have to deck him, to the approval of all. Perhaps in cowardly retribution, he orders three hundred dollars of cheese platters up to the party, and when it arrives, he signs the name and room number of some girl flight attendant.
We all find out about this a few days later when the girl is in tears. The hotel management is calling all our rooms to try to find out who actually did it, and Foreskeen is trying to get Al Quine and I to believe that the culprit was Newt Silva.
Thankfully, Miguel, our gay purser’s Caballero, identifies Foreskeen as the culprit; Miguel actually saw that asshole sign the check when the cheese arrived. Almost fucking us out of a very good deal with the Sofitel ( the use of a crewroom, free coffee, fridge, free movies,a and so on ) Foreskeen winds up paying the entire tab with a credit card… hopefully it was one of his own.
The young lady flight attendant, the original butt of the fromage fraud, brought a gentlemen friend along with her for that week in Paris. Apparently, she was no longer enamored by his company, since in honor of her liberation from her credit problems, she removed all her garments in the crew lounge ( so long as we all did the same ), and she allowed Quine, Newtron and Ito study a very interesting mole on her ass. Merry Christmas!