Cruising Attitude (11 page)

“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!

Y
OU’RE ON A
flight trying to get a little rest when the kid who’s been kicking your seat for the last half hour suddenly begins to scream. Your head spins around like Linda Blair from
The Exorcist
and you give the parents an evil glare. When that doesn’t work you ring your flight attendant call light and ask the attendant if perhaps she can help, all the while counting down the seconds to landing.

The likely culprit? It’s not bad parenting—it’s blocked ears. As the plane lowers, altitude changes increase air pressure, which pushes the eardrum inward. Because children have relatively narrow Eustachian tubes, they’re especially susceptible, particularly if they’re clogged by an inflammation or an ear infection. In the air, blocked ears can cause severe pain and dull hearing, and it can occasionally lead to hearing loss. What can parents do? Don’t allow the child to sleep during descent, find something to suck on—a bottle, pacifier, gum, or hard candy—and postpone air travel if a cold, sinus infection, or allergy attack is present. Oh, and just ignore the jerk seated in front of you.

Blocked ears don’t just affect kids. I’ve seen grown men get teary-eyed in flight. Most people know that chewing gum helps, as does constant swallowing or yawning during descent. This allows the muscles in the Eustachian tube to contract and open, equalizing the pressure. When you hear a clicking sound, you know it’s working. Using a nasal spray or decongestant several hours before a flight is always a good idea when feeling congested. Steam can also help to ease the pain. Many passengers knew this and would ask for wads of hot wet paper towels stuffed inside Styrofoam cups to place over their ears. The steam seeped from the cloth through the cup and into the ear. (Unfortunately, because so many people have been burned using this technique we are no longer allowed to do it. Sorry!) But the best method for clearing ears is to use the Valsalva maneuver as soon as you begin to feel your ears starting to close. Pinch your nose, close your mouth, and gently exhale through your nostrils. Blowing too hard may damage the eardrum. Continue to do this periodically until landing. On the ground, try taking a hot steamy shower and drink plenty of hot tea. If you’re frequently plagued with ear pressurization problems, invest in a pair of disposable ear plugs called EarPlanes. And don’t leave home without them.

Blocked ears can ground a flight attendant for days, even weeks. We may feel okay on the ground, but once up in the air the pain can become excruciating, especially when working a trip that hops from city to city, taking off and landing several times in a day. One flight attendant I knew continued to fly instead of calling in sick, and ended up losing not just her hearing in one ear after her eardrum erupted in flight but also the job she loved. Crews must be able to communicate quickly in dangerous situations. If we can’t hear a passenger calling for help, a coworker screaming for a fire extinguisher, or the captain giving us the secret code over the PA to initiate an evacuation we’re useless. It’s not all about serving drinks—we’re also in charge of saving lives. So, no eardrum, no job.

Despite that risk, and because she was still on probation (with only three months to go), Georgia didn’t want to call in sick for fear of losing her job. So when crew schedule assigned her a turn, a trip that leaves and returns back to base the very same day, she didn’t think twice about accepting it.

“I’ll be fine,” she announced, and then blew her nose. She didn’t sound fine, so I gave her what I had left of a box of extra strength Sudafed and a travel-size packet of Kleenex.

Because Georgia was scheduled to come back to New York later that night, she didn’t bother taking her roll-aboard. She’d been able to pack the essentials inside her tote bag; flight manual, flashlight, makeup, galley gloves, wine opener, wallet, and a pocket mask in case, God forbid, someone needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in flight. In the air Georgia felt fine, all things considered, but thirty minutes before landing, as soon as the airplane began to make its descent into Chicago, that quickly changed. She chewed not one, but three pieces of Dentyne gum at a frantic pace. When that didn’t work she yawned as wide as her mouth would go, a dozen of times, then swallowing hard over and over. As a last resort she took turns chewing, yawning, and swallowing, sometimes doing two of them at the same time, all the while preparing the cabin for landing. When that didn’t work she pinched her nose and tried blowing, gently at first and then more forcefully, ignoring passengers who held up cups, napkins, and newspapers for her to dispose of. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you!” she yelled at a passenger who had a question about a gate connection as she ran to the back and strapped in, doubling over in pain. Once on the ground things improved a little bit. Although Georgia could barely hear because both ears were closed, she wasn’t about to let that stop her. After years of working the pageant circuit she was used to pushing her body to the limit, so if anyone knew pain, it was Georgia, and this was nothing compared to six months of hard-core dieting in preparation for swimsuit competition! Determined to suffer through it, Georgia took more Sudafed and sipped hot tea while waiting for the next flight to board.

This is not an unusual scenario. Flight attendants are reluctant to call in sick for many reasons, the most important being that no one wants to get stuck on a layover far away from home, especially when there are kids involved. Many of us will push it until we get where we need to be before putting our name on the sick list. But once on the list, an employee is not allowed to travel, not even as a passenger on another airline. An employee who does, and gets caught, is no longer employed. Trip trades, drops, and pickups also go on hold when a flight attendant is on the sick list. In trip-trade world, if ya snooze, ya lose. If you’re not able to manipulate your schedule within the first five days after bids have finalized, you can forget about getting time off for all those baby showers, graduations, weddings, vacations, holidays, or whatever important days you need off the following month.

At my airline if we call in sick three times we’re issued a written warning. The only way around the warning, and a trip to the airport on a day off to speak with a manager about why we were sick and what we could have done to avoid it, is to see a doctor, even for a cold that can be managed with over-the-counter medication. With a doctor’s note, a sick call will go from two points to one point. If we apply for a family leave, that point will disappear altogether. If we do not have enough working hours in a rolling twelve-month period to apply for a family leave (420 hours), the point stays. Three points and it’s back to the written warning. Three warnings and it’s buh-bye, airline. But, as a flight attendant, seeing a doctor isn’t simple at all. For one, it’s expensive when you make as little as many of us do. And we have to have the doctor fill out a packet of family leave paperwork so thick you’d think we were asking for a discharge from the military! One doctor, a family practitioner, actually dropped me as a patient when he tired of filling out these tedious forms. Another doctor, an ob-gyn, refused to fill out the forms when I, many years later, became pregnant. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just do another job for the airline, like one on the ground.

“Because I’m a flight attendant,” I told her. “We don’t have other jobs. I can’t just work as a ticket agent while I’m sick. They go through weeks of training too!” No matter how hard I tried to explain, the paperwork remained unsigned and I had to find another doctor.

It’s important that flight attendants find doctors who understand what the job really entails. For instance, we don’t just roll our bags gate to gate—we lift eighty pounds plus into the overhead bin each and every flight. We don’t just serve drinks—we push and pull two-hundred-pound carts on an incline. We can’t just handle the sniffles with a box of tissues—we have to worry about our eardrums exploding. Once I pleaded with a podiatrist not to release me back to work too soon after breaking my pinky toe. “You’ll be fine,” he assured me. I wasn’t fine. Not fine working a ten-hour day at 35,000 feet inside a pressurized cabin. Not fine running gate-to-gate as quickly as possible in order to avoid a delay in some of the biggest and busiest airports in the world. When I went back in to his office to have him fill out a few more forms on top of the ones he’d already signed, because the airline had more questions about the nature of my injury, I told him my toe didn’t just hurt, it throbbed. He suggested I take six Advil and relieve the pressure by cutting a hole in the side of my shoe. I just stared at him.

As per the flight attendant uniform guidebook, footwear may not have holes cut in the sides. Shoes must be conservative in style, plain black or navy blue, and have a covered toe, enclosed heel and enclosed sides. And there’s more. Heels must be a minimum of one inch in height, width of heel should not exceed width of sole, heel and sole should be identical in color. Shoes must be polished and in good repair, and buckles, colored trims, lace-ups, loose straps, ties, bows, or other adornments are not permitted. Heels or flats (loafer style with one-inch heel) may be worn with pants, but heels must always be worn with a dress or skirt while in public view. Obviously the podiatrist had no idea what it was like,
really like
, to work for an airline. Imagine a first-class flight attendant’s panty-hosed toes hanging out of a shoe with a hole cut in the side! There was no point in telling the doctor any of this, since the initial paperwork had already been signed, faxed, and approved by airline medical. I was already back on the line, practically OD’ing on Advil, while hobbling up and down the aisle.

If we choose not to see a doctor for something as minor as a cold, a manager will lecture us about what we’re eating and whether or not we’re taking our vitamins and working out. As if that’s going to help when a passenger comes running up to first class from coach and, like a rotating sprinkler, barfs in a semicircle from the jump seat, all over a couple of commuting flight attendants, across the cockpit door and galley ovens and all over the galley floor. Think that’s bad? Try watching a colleague bend over to clean it up with a shovel and a gel-like substance that turns vomit into a big foamy goop, his crew ID and cell phone falling out of his shirt pocket smack-dab into the mess. Seriously, what can one really do to avoid getting sick when a very large man traveling from an international destination walks out of the lav, looks at you funny, pats you on the head, and then yaks all over your tote bag on day one of a three-day trip and all you have to clean it up with is a wad of stiff paper towels and harsh generic soap from the bathroom?

No longer able to pretend she felt fine, tears streamed down Georgia’s face as the plane descended into Detroit. It was the second leg of the day. There were two more to go. As the airplane taxied to the gate, Georgia noticed a little girl in the last row of coach peeking between the seats at her, giving her parents the play-by-play of what the sad flight attendant was doing.

“I didn’t even try to hide it. I thought my head was going to explode. That’s how bad it was!” Georgia would later cry to me over the phone.

After everyone deplaned, the flight attendant working with Georgia in coach told the first-class flight attendant what was going on. She in turn relayed the information to the captain. Without a word he went into action, sidestepping around cabin cleaners busy discarding trash from the seat back pockets, fluffing pillows, straightening seat belts, and lowering armrests. Georgia stood in the back folding a pile of wadded-up blue blankets she would stack neatly inside a bin for the next flight when the pilot called out from midcabin, “You’re calling in sick!”

Wide-eyed, Georgia sat down on the armrest and nodded. Afraid to abandon her sequence, which would leave the crew in need of another flight attendant in a city that didn’t have a crew base to pool from, she was just as nervous about disobeying the captain’s orders. It’s his plane. Everyone must do as he’s told. Either that or walk off and suffer the consequences later.

One look into Georgia’s big blue watery eyes and the captain added, “If the company gives you any grief, tell them I made you do it. Better yet, tell them to call me!” He handed her his business card. On thin white card stock a phone number was printed underneath his name. A cartoon drawing of an airplane decorated the bottom right-hand corner.

“Thank you, Captain,” Georgia mumbled, tucking the card inside her pocket. Reluctantly she collected her things and walked off the plane, never to see or hear from the pilot again, even though he was cute and she would have been interested if she hadn’t already sworn off all men. Georgia wasn’t just down on men, she was down on love, down on life, and stuck on the ground in Detroit. Little did she know life was about to get even more stressful.

Never in her wildest dreams did Georgia think she’d ever spend a week in a hotel room with only a single pair of underwear and a hotel bathrobe and
not
be on her honeymoon. But an hour later that’s exactly where she was, washing out undies in the bathroom sink and at the mercy of overpriced room service. The hotel did offer free shuttle bus rides to and from the airport, but that’s it, so unless she wanted to fork over even more cash she didn’t have in order to take a cab somewhere in her uniform, she was stuck. Oh, to be young, broke, and pantyless for seven days. She spent her time catching up on favorite soaps and racking up a phone bill so high it would make her teary-eyed come checkout time. Initially, Georgia and I spent our daily calls laughing about her predicament. How naïve we were.

“I don’t know about this job,” said Georgia over a pay phone late one night at a bus stop in a strange town neither one of us had ever heard of. Georgia was bound for Chicago in six-inch heels. When her ears still hadn’t cleared up after a few days, she’d been instructed, as per company orders, to get to the nearest airline medical center located at a major airport to have her ears checked ASAP. “Things are gonna get better, right?”