Catch Me If You Can (5 page)

I decided it was time to let the nice man go back to his comfortable seat. “Gee, Captain, I sure thank you,” I said. “You’ve been really super.”

“Glad to have helped you, son,” he said. “I hope you get those pilot’s wings, if that’s what you want.”

I already had the wings. What I needed was an ID card and an FAA pilot’s license. I wasn’t too concerned about the ID card. The pilot’s license had me stumped. The FAA was not exactly a mail-order house.

I let my fingers do the walking in my search for a suitable ID card. I looked in the Yellow Pages under identification, picked a firm on Madison Avenue (any ID company with a Madison Avenue address had to have class, I thought) and went to the firm dressed in a business suit.

It was a prestigious office suite with a receptionist to screen the walk-in trade. “Can I help you?” she asked in efficient tones.

“I’d like to see one of your sales representatives, please,” I replied in equally businesslike inflections.

The sales representative had the assured air and manner of a man who would disdain talking about a single ID card, so I hit him with what I thought would best get his attention and win his affection, the prospect of a big account.

“My name is Frank Williams, and I represent Carib Air of Puerto Rico,” I said crisply. “As you probably know, we are expanding service to the continental United States, and we presently have two hundred people in our facilities at Kennedy. Right now we’re using only a temporary ID card made of paper, and we want to go to a formal, laminated, plastic-enclosed card with a color photograph and the company logo, similar to what the other airlines use here. We want a quality card, and I understand you people deal only in quality products.”

If he knew that Carib Air existed and was expanding to the United States, he knew more than I did. But he was not a man to let the facts stand in the way of a juicy sale.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Williams. Let me show you what we have along that line,” he said enthusiastically, leading me to his office. He pulled down a huge, leather-bound sample catalogue from a shelf, leafed through the contents, which ranged from vellum to beautifully watermarked bond, and displayed a whole page of various identification forms.

“Now, most of the airlines we serve use this card here,” he said, pointing out one that seemed a duplicate of Pan Am’s ID cards. “It has employee number, base, position, description, photograph and, if you wish, a company logo. I think it would do very nicely.”

I nodded in complete agreement. “Yes, I think this is the card we want,” I said. It was certainly the card I wanted. He gave me a complete cost rundown, including all the variables.

“Can you give me a sample?” I asked on impulse. “I’d like to show it to our top people, since they’re the ones who’ll have the final say.”

The salesman obliged in a matter of minutes. I studied the card. “This is fine, but it’s blank,” I said. “Tell you what. Why don’t we fix this up, so they’ll have an idea of what the finished product looks like? We can use me as the subject.”

“That’s an excellent suggestion,” said the salesman, and led me to an ID camera that produced ID-sized mug shots within minutes.

He took several photographs, we selected one (he graciously gave me the culls) and he affixed it to the space on the card, trimming it neatly. He then filled in my phony name, adopted rank (co-pilot), fictitious employee number, height, weight, coloring, age and sex in the appropriate blanks. He then sealed it in a clear, tough plastic and handed it to me with his business card.

“I’m sure we can do a good job for you, Mr. Williams,” he said, ushering me out.

He already had done a good job for me, save for one detail. The lovely ID card lacked Pan Am’s distinctive logo and firm name. I was wondering how to resolve the problem when a display in the window of a hobby shop caught my eye. There, poised on gracefully curved mounts, was an array of model planes, among them several commercial airliners. And among them a beautiful Pan Am jet, the firm’s famed logo on its tail, and the company legend, in the copyrighted lettering used by the airline, on the fuselage and wings.

The model came in several sizes. I bought the smallest, for $2.49, in an unassembled state, and hurried back to my room. I threw the plane parts away. Following instructions in the kit, I soaked the decal and lettering in water until they separated from their holding base. Both the logo and the company name were of microscopically thin plastic. I laid the Pan Am logo on the upper left-hand corner of the ID card and carefully arranged the firm legend across the top of the card. The clear decals, when they dried, appeared to have been printed on the card.

It was perfect. An exact duplicate of a Pan Am identification card. It would have required an examination with a spectroscope to reveal that the decals were actually on the outside of the plastic seal. I could have clipped the ID card on my breast pocket and passed muster at a Pan Am board meeting.

As a fake pilot, however, I was still grounded. I recalled the words of the captain I’d interviewed under false pretenses: “Your license is the most important thing. You’ve got to have it on your person at all times when operating an aircraft. I carry mine in a folder that also contains my ID. You’ll be asked to show your license as often as you’re asked for your ID.”

I mulled the issue over for days, but could think of no solution short of working my way through commercial aviation school. I started frequenting bookstores again, thumbing through the various flying publications. I wasn’t sure of what I was looking for, but I found it.

There it was, a small display ad in the back of one of the books placed by a plaque-making firm in Milwaukee that catered to professional people. The firm offered to duplicate any pilot’s license, engraved in silver and mounted on a handsome eight-by-eleven-inch hardwood plaque, for only $35. The company used the standard, precut license die used by the FAA. All a pilot had to do was supply the pertinent information, including his FAA license number and ratings, and the firm would return a silver replica of his license, suitable for display anywhere. The FAA did have a mail-order branch, it appeared.

I wanted one of the plaques, naturally. I felt there had to be a way, plaque in hand, to reduce it to the proper size on appropriate paper. And I’d have my pilot’s license!

I was feverish with the idea. I didn’t write the firm; I called their offices in Milwaukee. I told the salesman I wanted one of the plaques and asked if the transaction could be handled by telephone.

He expressed no curiosity as to why I was in such a hurry. “Well, you can give me all the necessary information over the telephone, but we’ll have to have a check or money order before we actually make up the plaque,” said the man. “In the meantime, we can start roughing it out and we’ll treat it as a special order. It’ll be $37.50, including postage and special handling.”

I didn’t quibble. I gave him my alias, Frank Williams. I gave him my spurious age and my correct weight, height, color of hair and eyes and social security number. A pilot’s license or certificate number is always the same as his social security number. I gave myself the highest rating a pilot can attain, an air transport rating. I told the man I was checked out on DC-9s, 727s and 707s. I gave him my address in care of general delivery, New York City (not unusual for commercial pilots who spend a lot of time in transit), and told him I’d have a money order in the mail that same day. I had the money order in the mail within an hour, in fact. It was the only valid draft I’d given in several weeks.

The plaque arrived within a week. It was gorgeous. Not only was I certified as a pilot in sterling, but the license replica even boasted the signature of the head of the Fed eral Aviation Agency.

I took the plaque to a hole-in-the-wall print shop in Brooklyn and sought out the head printer. “Look, I’d like to get my license reduced down so I can carry it in my wallet, you know, like you would a diploma. Can it be done?” I asked.

The printer studied the plaque admiringly. “Geez, I didn’t know pilots got this sort of thing when they learned to fly,” he said. “It’s fancier’n a college diploma.”

“Well, an actual license is a certificate, but it’s back at my home in L.A.,” I said. “This is something my girl gave me as a gift. But I’ll be based here for several months and I would like to have a wallet-sized copy of my license. Can you do it with this or will I have to send for the certificate?”

“Nah, I can do it from this,” he said, and, using a special camera, he reduced it to actual size, printed it on heavy white stock, cut it out and handed it to me. The whole process took less than thirty minutes and cost me five bucks. I laminated it with two pieces of plastic myself. I’d never seen a real pilot’s license, but this sure as hell looked like one.

I put on my pilot’s uniform, which I had had altered to a perfect fit, tilted my cap at a rakish angle and caught a bus to La Guardia Airport.

I was ready for flight duty. Provided someone else flew the plane.

There is enchantment in a uniform, especially one that marks the wearer as a person of rare skills, courage or achievement.

A paratrooper’s wings tell of a special breed of soldier. A submariner’s dolphin denotes the unusual sailor. A policeman’s blue symbolizes authority. A forest ranger’s raiment evokes wilderness lore. Even a doorman’s gaudy garb stirs vague thoughts of pomp and royalty.

I felt great in my Pan Am pilot’s uniform as I walked into La Guardia Airport. I obviously was commanding respect and esteem. Men looked at me admiringly or enviously. Pretty women and girls smiled at me. Airport policemen nodded courteously. Pilots and stewardesses smiled, spoke to me or lifted a hand in greeting as they passed. Every man, woman and child who noticed me seemed warm and friendly.

It was heady stuff and I loved it. In fact, I became instantly addicted. During the next five years the uniform was my alter ego. I used it in the same manner a junkie shoots up on heroin. Whenever I felt lonely, depressed, rejected or doubtful of my own worth, I’d dress up in my pilot’s uniform and seek out a crowd. The uniform bought me respect and dignity. Without it on, at times, I felt useless and dejected. With it on, during such times, I felt like I was wearing Fortunatus’ cap and walking in seven-league boots.

I milled with the crowd in La Guardia ’s lobby that morning, glorying in my make-believe status. I fully intended to bluff my way aboard a flight to a distant city and start operating my check swindles there, but I delayed implementing my decision. I was having too much fun luxuriating in the attention and deference I was receiving.

I became hungry. I stepped into one of the airport’s many coffee shops, dropped onto a stool at the counter and ordered a sandwich and milk. I was almost finished eating when a TWA co-pilot sat down on a stool eater-cornered from me. He looked at me and nodded. He ordered coffee and a roll, then regarded me with mild curiosity.

“What’s Pan Am doing here at La Guardia?” he asked casually. Apparently, Pan Am did not fly out of La Guardia.

“Oh, I just deadheaded in from Frisco on the first flight I could catch,” I replied. “I’ll catch a chopper to Kennedy.”

“What kind of equipment you on?” he asked, biting into his roll.

My brains turned to ice cubes. I nearly freaked out. Equipment? What did he mean, equipment? Engines? Cockpit instruments? What? I couldn’t recall having heard the word before in connection with commercial airlines. I frantically searched for an answer for it was obviously a normal question for him to ask. I mentally reread the reminiscences of the veteran Pan Am captain, a little book I’d really liked and which I’d virtually adopted as a manual. I couldn’t recall his ever using the word “equipment.”

It had to have some significance, however. The TWA airman was looking at me, awaiting my reply. “General Electric,” I said hopefully. It was definitely not the right answer. His eyes went frosty and a guarded look crossed his features. “Oh,” he said, the friendliness gone from his voice. He busied himself with his coffee and roll. ›

I gulped the rest of my milk and dropped three dollars on the counter, more than ample payment for my snack. I stood up and nodded to the TWA pilot. “So long,” I said, and headed for the door.

“Fruzhumtu,” he growled. I wasn’t sure of his exact words, but they sounded suspiciously like something I couldn’t actually do to myself.

Whatever, I knew I wasn’t sufficiently prepared to attempt a deadheading venture, despite all my prior work and research. It was evident that I needed a better command of airline terminology, among other things. As I was leaving the terminal, I noticed a TWA stewardess struggling with a heavy bag. “Can I help you?” I asked, reaching for the luggage.

She relinquished it readily. “Thanks,” she said with a grin. “That’s our crew bus just outside there.”

“Just get in?” I asked as we walked toward the bus.

She grimaced. “Yes, and I’m pooped. About half the people in our load were whiskey salesmen who’d been to a convention in Scotland, and you can imagine what that scene was like.”

I could, and laughed. “What kind of equipment are you on?” I asked on impulse.

“Seven-o-sevens, and I love ‘em,” she said as I heaved her suitcase aboard the bus. She paused at the bus door and stuck out her hand. “Thanks much, friend. I needed your muscles.”

“Glad I could help,” I said, and meant it. She was slim and elegant, with pixie features and auburn hair. Really attractive. Under other circumstances I would have pressed to know her better. I didn’t even ask her name. She was lovely, but she also knew everything there was to know about flying passengers from this place to that one, and a date with her might prove embarrassing.

Airline people manifestly loved to talk shop, and at the moment I obviously wasn’t ready to punch in at the factory. So equipment was an airplane, I mused, walking to my own bus. I felt a little stupid, but halfway back to Manhattan I burst out laughing as a thought came to mind. The TWA first officer was probably back in the pilot’s lounge by now, telling other TWA crewmen he’d just met a Pan Am jerk who flew washing machines.

I spent the next few days in the boneyard. In the past I’d found my best sources of information on airlines were airlines themselves, so I started calling the various carriers and pumping their people for information. I represented myself as a college student doing a paper on transportation, as an embryo book author or magazine writer, or as a cub reporter for one of the area’s dailies.

Generally I was referred to the airline’s public relations department. Airline PR people love to talk about their particular airline, I found. I quickly confirmed my suspicions that my aviation education was strictly elementary, but within a week I had zoomed through high school and was working on my bachelor’s degree.

The airline flacks, a lot of whom had been members of aircrews themselves, obligingly filled me in on a wealth of juicy facts and technical tidbits: the types of jets used by both American and foreign carriers, fuel capacities and speeds, altitudes, weight limits, passenger capacities, number of crewmen, weight limits and other such goodies.

I learned, for instance, that a large number of commercial airline pilots are drawn from the military. Those without an air force or naval aviation background had come up from small, bush-league airlines or were graduates of private flying schools such as Embry-Riddle, I was told.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, is the most respected, and probably the largest, commercial flight-training school in the nation, I was informed. It’s the Notre Dame of the air. A kid out of high school, with no knowledge of aeronautics whatsoever, could enter ground school at Embry-Riddle and leave several years later able to fly any current jet liner.

“Those of our pilots who didn’t come to us from the air force or the navy came to us from Embry-Riddle,” said one airline flack pridefully.

I knew nothing about the military. I couldn’t tell a private from a vice admiral. So I awarded myself a scholarship to Embry-Riddle, graduated fantasy cum laude, and then gave myself a few years of mythical experience with Eastern Airlines.

As my knowledge of airlines and airline terminology broadened, my confidence returned. I opened a checking account in the name of Frank Williams, with a post-office box address, and when my order for two hundred personalized checks arrived general delivery, I tried cashing a few checks in my guise as an airline pilot.

It was like going on safari in the Bronx Zoo. Cashiers couldn’t get the money out of the tills fast enough. Most of them didn’t even ask for identification. I shoved my phony ID card and my ersatz pilot’s license in their faces anyway. I didn’t want my handiwork to go unnoticed. The first couple of checks I wrote were good. The others had all the value of bubble-gum wrappers.

I started hanging around La Guardia regularly, not with any intentions of catching a flight, but to meet airline personnel and to eavesdrop on airline talk. Testing my vocabulary, so to speak. I shunned Kennedy, since Pan Am operated out of there. I was afraid that the first Pan Am pilot I encountered at Kennedy would recognize me as a fraud, court-martial me on the spot and strip me of my wings and buttons.

At La Guardia I made out like a possum in a persimmon tree. Some books
are
judged by their covers, it seems, and in my uniform I was an immediate best seller. I’d walk into a coffee shop, where there would usually be a dozen or more pilots or other crewmen taking a break, and invariably someone would invite me to join him or them. More often it was them, for airline people tend to gaggle like geese. It was the same in cocktail lounges around the airport. I never took a drink in the bars, since I had yet to try alcohol and wasn’t sure how it would affect me, but no one questioned my abstinence.

Any pilot, I’d learned, could gracefully decline a drink by pleading the required “twelve hours between the bottle and the throttle.” It apparently never occurred to anyone that I’d never seen a throttle. I was always accepted at par value. I wore the uniform of a Pan Am pilot, therefore I must be a Pan Am pilot. Barnum would have loved airline people.

I didn’t do a lot of talking initially. I usually let the conversations flow around me, monitoring the words and phrases, and within a short time I was speaking airlinese like a native. La Guardia, for me, was the Berlitz of the air.

Some of my language books were absolutely gorgeous. I guess the stewardesses just weren’t that used to seeing a really young pilot, one that appeared to be an age peer.
“Hel-looo!”
one would say in passing, putting a pretty move on me, and the invitation in her voice would be unmistakable. I felt I could turn down only so many invitations without seeming to be rude, and I was soon dating several of the girls. I took them to dinner, to the theater, to the ballet, to the symphony, to night clubs and to movies. Also to my place or their place.

I loved them for their minds.

The rest of them was wonderful, too. But for the first time I was more interested in a girl’s knowledge of her work than in her body. I didn’t object, of course, if the one came with the other. A bedroom can be an excellent classroom.

I was an apt student. I mean, it takes a certain degree of academic concentration to learn all about airline travel-expense procedures, say, when someone is biting you on the shoulder and digging her fingernails into your back. It takes a dedicated pupil to say to a naked lady, “Gee, is this your flight manual? It’s a little different from the ones our stewardesses use.”

I picked their brains discreetly. I even spent a week in a Massachusetts mountain resort with three stewardesses, and not one of them was skeptical of my pilot’s status, although there were some doubts expressed concerning my stamina.

Don’t get the impression that stewardesses, as a group, are promiscuous. They aren’t. The myth that all stewardesses are passionate nymphs is just that, a myth. If anything, “stews” are more circumspect and discriminating in their sexual lives than women in other fields. The ones I knew were all intelligent, sophisticated and responsible young women, good in their jobs, and I didn’t make out en masse. The ones who were playmates would have hopped into bed with me had they been secretaries, nurses, bookkeepers or whatever. Stews are good people. I have very pleasant memories of the ones I met, and if some of the memories are more pleasant than others, they’re not necessarily sexually oriented.

I didn’t score at all with one I recall vividly. She was a Delta flight attendant whom I’d met during my initial studies of airline jargon. She had a car at the airport and offered to drive me back to Manhattan one afternoon.

“Would you drop me at the Plaza?” I requested as we walked through the lobby of the terminal. “I need to cash a check and I’m known there.” I wasn’t known there, but I intended to be.

The stewardess stopped and gestured at the dozens of airline ticket counters that lined every side of the huge lobby. There must be more than a hundred airlines that have ticket facilities at La Guardia. “Cash your check at one of those counters. Any one of them will take your check.”

“They will?” I said, somewhat surprised but managing to conceal the fact. “It’s a personal check and we don’t operate out of here, you know.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re a Pan Am pilot in uniform, and any airline here will take your personal check as a courtesy. They do that at Kennedy, don’t they?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had occasion to cash a check at a ticket counter before,” I said truthfully.

American’s counter was the nearest. I walked over and confronted a ticket clerk who wasn’t busy. “Can you cash a $100 personal check for me?” I asked, checkbook in hand.

“Sure, be glad to,” he said, smiling, and took the bouncing beauty with barely a glance at it. He didn’t even ask me for identification.

I had occasion to cash checks at airline counters frequently thereafter. I worked La Guardia like a fox on a turkey ranch. The air facility was so immense that the risk of my being caught was minimal. I’d cash a check at the Eastern counter, for instance, then go to another section of the terminal and tap some other airline’s till. I was cautious. I never went back to the same counter twice. I worked a condensed version of the scam at Newark, and hit Teterboro a few elastic licks. I was producing rubber faster than a Ceylon planter.

Every gambler has a road game. Mine was hitting the hotels and motels where airline crews put up in transit. I even bought a round-trip airline ticket to Boston, an honest ticket paid for with dishonest money, and papered Logan Airport and its surrounding crew hostelries with scenic chits before scurrying back to New York.

Flushed with success, emboldened by the ease with which I passed myself off as a pilot, I decided I was finally ready for “Operation Deadhead.”

I’d been living in a walk-up flat on the West Side. I’d rented the small apartment under the name Frank Williams and I’d paid my rent punctually and in cash. The landlady, whom I saw only to tender the rent money, thought I worked in a stationery store. None of the other tenants knew me and I’d never appeared around the building in my pilot’s uniform. I had no telephone and I’d never received mail at the address.