CHRISTMAS MEANT EVERYTHING to Georgia, and it killed her that she wouldn’t be able to spend it with the one she loved. It was bad enough she was already homesick and had approximately 184.2 days until her travel benefits kicked in, but she’d been assigned an undesirable schedule of days off that had her on call Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day! The two of us were completely broke, living with a bunch of freaks in what could only be described as a flophouse, freezing our butts off far, far, away from home, and we were new hires on probation, and on reserve during what should have been the most joyous time of the year. We had been in New York for only fourteen days and life couldn’t get much worse.
But then something miraculous happened. The crew-scheduling gods must have been smiling down on us. Not only did Georgia get assigned an easy, quick trip to Albany, but she also got assigned to work the trip with me! How lucky were we to get to work a two-day trip together over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? If we couldn’t spend it with our families, at least we got to spend it with each other. And we qualified for holiday pay—time and a half! (This disappeared after 9/11.) We couldn’t wait. Well, really, I couldn’t wait. Georgia just wanted to go home. While I practiced my PAs out loud on the bed, Georgia curled up under the covers with the phone. She wanted to see how much a ticket to North Carolina would cost so she could make a surprise visit to see her boyfriend—John, Jack, Jake, whatever his name was—on her days off as soon as we got back. My guy, on the other hand, was way too understanding about my absence, even though I kept hinting around that he’d probably be better off without me. Anyone else would have found that sweet. Me, I was starting to get annoyed. The time had come to move on.
If it hadn’t been Christmas Eve, our flight would have been perfect. Our load was light, the passengers were all very nice, the service went smoothly, and best of all, there were tons of first-class leftovers to eat, so I took it upon myself to set up the dessert cart like a buffet line. Merry Christmas to us! Georgia and I were hanging out in the galley talking about who knows what when the senior flight attendant, who had chosen to work in order to avoid his in-laws, exclaimed, “Oh my God, we’re landing!”
Usually when a flight attendant says “we’re landing” it’s a good thing. It means the flight is almost over, and we’ll soon be on the ground relaxing by a pool at a layover hotel somewhere. But add the words “Oh my God” to the beginning of that phrase, and a good thing instantly becomes bad, very bad, as in “you don’t want to know” bad, as in “FAA personal fine” bad, as in “Linda, my roommate from training’s makeup” bad! It was that bad. Quickly the three of us began cramming food, dishes, glassware, half-full bottles of wine, anything we could get our hands on into inserts that were already full. I glanced out the window and saw rooftops and streetlights.
Folding the dessert cart and shoving it inside its compartment, I asked in a panic, “Did either one of you hear the captain make the prepare-for-landing announcement?” Because I didn’t want to have to take the blame for this!
“He never made it. Just leave the racks inside of the oven!” ordered the senior flight attendant. “Lock the carts and take your seat ASAP. I’ll grab whatever’s left out in first class and then stow it behind the last row.” He pointed at Georgia who stood frozen with eyes open wide, “You pick up trash on your way back to your jump seat—now, go go go! We’re going to be on the ground in a few seconds.”
I didn’t even have time to buckle my seat belt when I felt the wheels grind against the runway. As we rolled down the tarmac, I could see Georgia and her partner in crime still standing in the aisle. Sweating, I made the PA welcoming everyone to Buffalo.
“Albany!” a few passengers yell out. “We’re in Albany!”
“I mean Albany,” I corrected over the PA.
Our layover hotel was a motel, only worse. The rooms smelled musty, the television didn’t come with a remote, and the bed was covered with something someone’s grandmother crocheted twenty years ago. I bravely walked barefoot across the shag carpet, closed the floral curtains, and sneezed. I was just about to call Georgia to see if she wanted to come over and order room service, but I couldn’t find the menu. That’s because there was no menu. The hotel didn’t offer room service. And the restaurant was closed.
“If you’re hungry there’s a vending machine down the hall,” the hotel concierge told me over the phone.
I knew that eating peanut-butter crackers and Cheetos in a musty motel on Christmas Eve would definitely send Georgia over the edge and down the road to quitsville. I had to think of something quick, an alternative plan to take her mind off the situation. Before I could come up with anything, I heard a tap on my window. My heart lurched. There it was again! Tap-tap-tap—so subtle and soft and—whomp! I fell to the floor, crawled to the rotary phone, and dialed 0.
“Send security to my room right away!”
Airline crews take hotel security very seriously. We don’t tell passengers where we’re laying over. When we get to the hotel, we never say our room numbers out loud. We either jot them down on one another’s room key covers or quickly flash the key card. We never know who’s listening. Because hotels are known to issue the same rooms to crew members day after day, month after month, and year after year, hotel personnel are quite familiar with which rooms are ours. Chances are the occupant of one of these rooms, which is always located near an elevator and an ice machine, or at the end of a long hall, is going to be an attractive female. Who better to cut up with a hatchet than a flight attendant?
Think I’m joking? There’s a layover hotel in Los Angeles where a flight attendant was found naked and hanging in her closet. This is why we use our luggage to prop the door to our room open before retiring for the night. While one coworker checks under the bed, inside the closet, and behind the shower curtain another coworker waits outside in the hallway. Then we switch. I heard of a flight attendant who got down on hands and knees, lifted the bed skirt, and spotted a head staring back at her. She ran out of the room screaming bloody murder later to find out it was her own mirrored reflection that scared her so.
Not all flight attendants are quite so lucky. A handful became the victims of the guy who wore a white jogging suit and carried a plastic cup while riding the elevators up and down early in the mornings looking for flight attendants on their way to the crew van for pickup. Once he found his prey, he’d toss a “sticky white substance” on their uniform and then run away. This went on for months.
Fifteen minutes after I called the hotel desk/operator/security guy, I finally heard a knock on my door. Chain still on, I cracked the door open and told him what happened. He promised to go outside and do a walk around the property.
Georgia came to my door about two seconds later, all bundled up with rosy cheeks. “You’ve got to come outside. The snow is absolutely gorgeous!”
I gulped. I didn’t dare tell her about the madman running around outside, knowing how close she’d just come to death.
She tossed my sneakers at me. “I made a snowman. Come see! Hey, didn’t you hear me throwing snowballs at your window?”
Snowballs, killers, whatever, sometimes things aren’t always as they seem.
When Georgia called Jake, Jeff, Jack, whatever his name was, to wish him a Merry Christmas, he thanked her and then asked if he could call her right back, hanging up the phone before she could say good-bye. Half an hour later she called him back, but he didn’t answer. While she waited for him to return her call, we ate dinner out of a vending machine located on the second floor of our three-star motel. Although we would have been much happier with turkey and dressing at home with our family and friends, we made the best of it with a couple packets of peanut-butter crackers and Diet Coke. It wasn’t how I’d ever expected to spend Christmas, but hey—we had wished for a job with a flexible lifestyle, hadn’t we? It was just that in my dreams I saw myself in Zurich, not Buffalo—I mean Albany!
After we returned from our Christmas trip, I decided I wanted to go home, too, and nothing would stop me. Like Georgia, I had a credit card and I was determined to use it. But instead of relaying my credit card numbers to the airline representative over the phone, I hung up.
“Eight hundred dollars! That’s how much it costs for a one-way ticket from New York to Dallas! I can’t believe it!” Actually I could believe it. I just didn’t want to believe it. But free travel was one of the main reasons I’d decided to become a flight attendant in the first place. Lord knows I couldn’t afford to do so otherwise.
“Don’t worry! Your travel benefits will kick in in about… oh, six months!” Mimi, one of the many flight attendants in our house, sat on a twin bed on the far side of the room, intently studying a copy of Glamour magazine that she’d found on her last flight to Los Angeles. Although she’d been in New York only three weeks longer than the rest of us, she seemed so much wiser. None of us wanted to admit it, especially Georgia, but we looked up to the girl with the chic blond bob who had worked a 767 in business class her very first day on the job and lived to tell about it! Oh, how I dreaded getting called out to work a 767 for the first time. My disastrous DC10 flight had scarred me for life. I didn’t want anything to do with another wide-body again.
Georgia shook the hot rollers in her hair. “I’m sorry, but it just ain’t right we can’t travel for six months—six months! I don’t know if I can make it that long.”
“Get used to it, princess,” Mimi said, without looking up.
Glaring at Mimi, Georgia bit into a scrumptious antidepressant: a Twinkie from the box hidden underneath her bed. She purchased the sugary treats, along with the rest of her groceries, from the 7-Eleven located directly behind our house. No way would Georgia schlep two blocks in the freezing cold to the supermarket when she could pay a little extra for convenience.
Mimi stood up, tossed the magazine onto Georgia’s bed, and then slid into a long black coat with a belted waist and a fur hood, wrapping a gray cashmere scarf around her neck, a recent gift from some guy she had met on a plane. She turned side to side in front of a long skinny mirror tacked to the back of our bedroom door, puckered up, and painted her lips a deep dark red.
“Okay, ladies, I’m outta here.” Mimi had yet to learn our names. Instead she used endearments like “honey,” “sweetie,” and “ladies.” I didn’t blame her, considering the high turnover rate in our crash pad. Each week a new group of flight attendants was shipped to New York. Even though we’d only been living there for four weeks, roommates had already come and gone. Sometimes they just moved up, as in upstairs, before officially moving on. The last roommate quit three days after her first trip because a passenger had screamed at her for ruining his vacation when they ran out of eggs in coach.
“Don’t wait up!” Mimi sashayed out the front door.
“Don’t have to worry about that,” mumbled Georgia.
“Do you think she’s going out with 2A?” I smiled mischievously.
“Who cares what she’s doing?” Georgia had little patience for Mimi’s “nonsense.” That’s because Georgia had a serious boyfriend and didn’t take relationships lightly. My ex, on the other hand, was still refusing to let things go. He had yet to realize that a long-distance relationship might be more difficult than he had first imagined, no matter how many times I tried to help him imagine it. Why did he have to be such a nice guy—that got on my nerves?! So when it came to men, all I really had was Mimi’s stories of 2A, a new obsession of mine. He sat in first class on a flight from San Francisco and only ate caviar. He lived in a penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He paid for drinks, lots of them, at trendy upscale hotel bars on the other side of town, not just for Mimi, but for all of her flight attendant friends—the more the merrier. Because she never invited me out to meet him, I had no choice but to take Mimi’s word for it. According to Mimi there was no hanky-panky going on between the two of them. It was a relationship of companions only. Georgia had a hard time believing that! What man bought a woman luxury gifts and expected nothing in return? I had to agree, especially when I peeped out the window to see Mimi climbing into a swanky black town car. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for a first-class “friend” of my own. Only I preferred mine single and under the age of fifty. Life just seemed so much easier that way.
“I’m freezing!” Georgia said, pulling tight a blue terrycloth bathrobe with little white clouds on it. Her bed was so close to mine I could practically reach out and touch her shivering hand. “Should we ask Victor to turn up the heat?”
“You can. He’s still mad at me.”
Victor had been giving me major attitude ever since we saw the first wad of cash lying on the floor in the foyer a few days after we’d moved in. I didn’t think twice about it until Victor introduced me to his twenty-year-old spaced-out girlfriend who was beautiful but could barely form the word “hello.” It didn’t hit me what was really going on until a few days later, late one night, when the wind blew so hard outside something crashed loudly to the ground, causing Victor to come running down the steps paranoid and naked with a shotgun. Our landlord, it turned out, was moonlighting as a drug dealer. Or maybe it was the other way around. Making light of the situation, Georgia and I had joked around about taking the money and going shopping, but when no one laughed, we decided to leave the money by the door and ignore it, like everyone else in the house. But when large sums continued to make regular appearances, I decided to confront Victor. This was the plan: I’d pick up the cash, march right up the rickety old stairs, and hand it over to him face-to-face. Just to see what he might have to say for himself. That’s it. Then I’d come right back down and report the news to Georgia. Based on his reaction, we’d figure out what to do next.
“Come in!” Victor yelled when I knocked on the door. That’s exactly what I did. Then I screamed.
“What?” He said it as if I were the crazy one, not him, a naked old man standing in the middle of a bear-skin rug just staring at me. I looked away and laughed nervously, then apologized, which is what I have a tendency to do in awkward situations. Like, for example, bare-skinned landlords on bear-skin rugs. Turning my face to the door, I extended the arm holding the cash to him. He said something, but I have no idea what it was, since I was out the door and sprinting down the stairs the second he snatched it out of my hand.
Now I’m not exactly sure what it was that pissed Victor off: the fact that I had delivered the cash personally, thereby acknowledging I knew exactly what he was up to, or the fact that I had screamed bloody murder upon seeing him in the nude (shiver), indicating that I did not find him attractive. I guess it could have been a combination of the two. Whatever it was, I soon found myself paying the price. The evil stares were easy enough to ignore sometimes, but soon my roommates began accusing me of things I hadn’t done, like eating their labeled food out of the fridge even though I hadn’t even stepped into the kitchen! (It was filthier than the bathroom. And why cook when Dani’s House of Pizza and Austin’s Steak & Ale House were within walking distance and Golden Fountain Kitchen delivered the best spareribs and eggrolls in town?) But when a pilot I had just met for the first time confronted me about accusing him of sexual harassment to Victor—something that had never happened!—I knew something had to be done about my lying landlord, and quick!
Georgia and I had been hitting the pavement all month looking for someplace else to live, but other than an illegal basement apartment inside a house that should have been condemned, there was just nothing available that we could afford nearby. After chasing down yet another lead that had already been rented by the time we finally got there, we decided to call it a day and find someplace to eat. The sun was setting. We were hungry. On our way home, we stumbled into the first place we found, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, to grab a bite to eat and study the subway map. That’s when we spotted New York’s finest seated at a tiny table for two against the wall. We had never been happier to see undercover cops in our lives. (Button-down shirts not exactly hiding their guns had given them away.) Right after our waitress had placed a basket of stale chips in front of us, the boys not in blue introduced themselves. It didn’t take long before we were ratting out Victor. The cops agreed it couldn’t be a safe situation for a house full of women and suggested that they stop by the following day to check things out. Well, check things out they did. But instead of investigating Victor, they made themselves comfortable on our beat-up couch nursing the last of Georgia’s Dr. Brown diet cream sodas and gawking at our roommates. So that was a bust.
That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands. I called Kew Gardens.
Eddie answered the phone. “Going to work, sweetie?”
“Not today. But we do need a car to take us to LaGuardia Airport. Georgia’s boyfriend is getting into town.” Then I added innocently, “Think you can send over Kent?” EMT worker by day, cab driver by night, Kent was a nice guy with not-so-nice looks. He could have been Chewbacca’s cousin. “And can you tell him to park the car and ring the bell… in case Georgia isn’t ready. You know how she is!” I gave a fake laugh.
After an emphysema-like coughing fit, Eddie cleared his throat. “What the hell are you two up to now?”
“Nothing!” I’d have to work on my fake laugh.
When we first arrived in New York the significance of Eddie’s job didn’t mean much to us, but soon we discovered that drivers come and go. It’s the dispatcher who sticks around. Much like gate agents, dispatchers have power. They make things happen—like cars come quicker to the airport when a dispatcher likes you! This is a huge deal when it’s snowing outside, you’ve got an early sign-in the next morning, and you’re eager to get home because it’s been a long day and your feet are killing.
Always, always make friends with the dispatcher.
Little did we know that our awkward encounter with Eddie on our first night in town would become a life-changing event! Here’s what happened. After he drove off he went back to base and reported what had happened to the other dispatchers, who got a good laugh at our expense. This is how Georgia and I came to be famous in dispatching circles around Queens. At first the dispatchers were on the lookout for us, wanting to meet us, but after meeting us they actually started to look out for us. If I couldn’t find Georgia, I called Kew Gardens. They could always be counted on to know where she had flown to and how many days she’d be gone. If Kew Gardens wanted a case of beer from, say, Germany, they would call us. If we weren’t flying there we’d find someone else who was and ask them to bring it back so we could pass it on. When we needed to know which subway line to take to the city in order to meet a date at a certain location, we asked Kew Gardens. If they wanted a duty-free bottle of vodka, they called us. When we wanted to know if it was safe to go to a certain place in the city to meet a date, we called them. It’s no wonder they came to know our comings and goings better than we did. And when one of our favorite drivers, also a dispatcher on the weekends, went to prison for robbing a bank after writing a ransom note on the back of a Kew Gardens time sheet, Georgia and I were just as upset as the rest of the guys. For Christmas we gave each of them a pack of smokes and a gift card to Dunkin’ Donuts. They gave us a free ride to the airport. We became one big happy, foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking family, even though Georgia and I didn’t curse, smoke, or drink coffee—yet.
Perhaps most important of all, Kew Gardens Car Service turned out to be all that stood between us and the Q10 bus stop. In our opinion, the Q10 was a nightmare. It was bad enough just trying to have exact change in quarters on hand at all times to ride the bus, let alone dealing with bus drivers who screamed at us to move our bags out of the way before we even had a chance to actually sit down and do so. To make matters worse, the driver with the bouffant hair would glare at us in the rearview mirror as she pressed the pedal to the metal, sending us stumbling down the aisle trying not to land on anyone. It didn’t take us long to realize that work was stressful enough without the added stress of the Q10. So while the majority of our colleagues chose to take the bus in order to save money for more important things like manicures and alcohol, Georgia and I learned to paint our own nails and take advantage of places like Brother Jimmy’s BBQ, a place in Manhattan that offered airline personnel with crew ID buy-one get-one-free drinks, so that we could afford the $8 Kew Gardens Car Service ride to the airport.
When Kent the driver knocked on the door, I quickly let him inside. We stood in the foyer making small talk while Georgia finished “fixin’ ” her hair. My plan was for Victor to see the kind of posse I ran with. That way he’d think twice before playing dirty with me. Two seconds later, a pair of gold silk slippers came padding down the stairs. Victor took one look at my friend and kept on walking.
By the time Georgia and I arrived at baggage claim, suitcases were already circling the carousel. I wouldn’t normally have tagged along, but Georgia had demanded I meet the future father of her children before they checked into a hotel in the city. Jake, John, Jack, whatever his name was, was the manager of a bar—or maybe he owned a restaurant?—but, either way, as soon as he heard Georgia sobbing over the phone about how much she missed home he immediately decided to book a flight to New York and arrived the following day.
“Oh my gawd, I’m so nervous,” purred Georgia as she eagerly scanned the lingering crowd. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she let out a shriek and ran toward the baggage carousel. I craned my neck to see, but a skinny guy with long greasy hair was blocking my view of Mr. Wonderful. Only because he smiled at me, I smiled back at him, but I stopped smiling when Georgia jumped into his long, skinny arms.
I was doing a little better in the man department. My boyfriend finally got the hint and broke up with me. Thank God! It took him long enough to realize that we wouldn’t see each other any time soon. I really had to emphasize the “any time soon” part quite a few times before he actually understood that it was me, not the airline, keeping us apart. Men!
A relationship with a flight attendant can be tricky, because being a flight attendant isn’t just a job, it’s a lifestyle. No matter how many times we try to explain it, most people have a hard time really grasping that the only thing consistent about our lifestyle is just how inconsistent it truly is. Our schedules are always changing, making it difficult to create long-term plans with loved ones. We work odd hours and rarely get holidays and weekends off. We’re away from home for days at a time, and a lot of that time is spent at hotels with colleagues of the opposite sex. There aren’t a lot of people who can handle that. This is especially true for those involved before their flight attendant career began. It’s just too different for most men to deal with. Nine times out of ten, imaginations get the best of those left on the ground. They think all pilots look like Hugh Jackman instead of Danny DeVito, and that all the passengers seated in first class are trying to lure us onto their private islands with promises of champagne and caviar. Soon loneliness turns to jealousy and jealousy leads to frustration or anger. In the end, a person can only take so much and eventually someone will break up. It’s either break up or quit flying.
This is why the people flight attendants get serious with must be confident, independent, and capable of making do for days at a time without their loved one. No one wants to spend an entire layover dealing with an insecure partner. What we really want is to be left alone—we’ve just spent the whole day taking care of needy passengers. A flight attendant also needs a partner who can make spur-of-the-moment plans, as well as deal with last-minute changes that involve backup plans A, B, and C, because when you work for an airline something is bound to go wrong. Jake, Jack, Jeff, whatever his name was, promised Georgia that he could do just that. He swore he’d be there for her through whatever tough times came their way. That he was in it for the long haul and that she had nothing to worry about, at least not when it came to him.
But she did worry—she wanted him to know he was still a priority.
A few weeks later, she walked through the front door of his apartment and yelled “Surprise!” Only it was Georgia who got the surprise of her life when a naked lady hiding in the closet sneezed. Jeff tried to distract her, but a woman knows another woman’s sneeze! Devastated, Georgia flew right back to New York and cried on her twin bed for three days. I bought her endless pints of cookies-and-cream ice cream from 7-Eleven, and rented movies like When Harry Met Sally and Thelma & Louise. The last thing I wanted Georgia to do was quit. Not over a guy. A shitty flight, maybe I’d understand. But a dick, no way, not going to happen. I’d make sure it wouldn’t happen. Especially because I didn’t want to get stuck in New York by myself!