Cruising Attitude (2 page)

After I stowed my bags in the crew-designated area for my position, a bin in the middle of coach on the right hand side, I walked to the very back of the plane to introduce myself to three flight attendants hanging out in the galley. The crazy look in his piercing blue eyes immediately gave him away as the problem colleague. I smiled anyway.

“I think I’ll be working with you today. I’m Heather.”

“Mike.” Mike sat down on his jump seat. He crossed his legs and smoothed his thick black mustache, not once making eye contact. “I’ll be working the beverage cart alone, if you don’t mind.”

Not sure of what to make of this, I looked to my fellow colleagues for support. There was none to be found. They were too busy counting meals and loading the ovens, a job that normally requires one person, not two.

“Umm . . . okay . . . but what am I supposed to do while you’re working the cart alone?”

He shrugged and walked away. My noncrazy colleagues glanced at each other without saying a word as they continued to busy themselves in the galley. I was on my own here.

Looking back, I should have just listened to Crazy-Eyes Mike and let him work the cart alone. Why didn’t I just twiddle my thumbs in the back of the airplane and watch? Instead, when it was time to start the service, I hopped on the other side and practically sprinted backward up the aisle as he pushed the cart with way too much force.

“Whoa, cowboy.” I laughed, hoping he’d get the hint. He didn’t.

Cowboy didn’t stop there. It got worse, much worse. Unfortunately there is nothing in our training manual about what to do when a fellow crew member purposefully rams a cart into a passenger’s seat and yells, “Bitch!”

“Oh my God, are you okay? I’m so sorry,” I stammered to the woman now doubled over in pain. I looked at Mike. “What are you doing?”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, his eyes bugged out of his head and his face turned red. In the middle of the aisle, surrounded by 123 passengers, he screamed out another, worse word. At me. I think.

The rest of the trip was spent frantically trying to calm down a few passengers, reassuring them that yes, something would be done about Mike. One passenger wanted to press charges. Mike had scared them all so much that not one person on the left-hand side of the airplane ordered a drink. Now I was stuck dealing with the mess. After everything calmed down, I began hand-running drinks back and forth alone while the flight attendants working the other aisle calmly maintained the flow of service. Mike sat on his jump seat and read the paper.

Ten minutes after Mike’s outburst, the captain called and asked me to come up for a chat. Behind the comfortingly locked cockpit door, I told him exactly what had occurred. Choosing his words carefully, he asked whether or not
I
felt we should divert. I told him I didn’t feel authorized to make such a decision. Because I was
afraid
to make such a decision! Who was I to take responsibility for an airplane making an unscheduled landing? The pilot should make that call. We did not divert. I spent the rest of the flight in the cock
less
pit.

When we did finally land, authorities met the flight. After all the passengers had deplaned, Crazy Eyes was escorted off by two cops. The crew scattered, all in a hurry to get home, and I slowly followed behind what I assumed would become an ex-coworker, a blue uniform sandwiched between black and white, as I walked alone to baggage claim to catch a courtesy van to my layover hotel.

We met up again later that night, as we would many nights to come, in a now recurring dream. I find myself wearing nothing but a navy blue feather boa, combat boots, and a baton on my hip while boarding a flight back to New York. My heart stops when I come face-to-face with Crazy-Eyes Mike. He grunts. I step out of his way to allow him to pass, and as he does, I notice his hands are locked in silver cuffs behind his back. Of course, I do what any normal naked flight attendant would do: I toss the feather boa over my shoulder and tell a smiling flight attendant I’ve never met before that she’ll be working the beverage cart on the left-hand side of the airplane. Immediately she stops smiling and rams me with her suitcase, causing me to double over in pain. Then, just as I’m about to yell out a word I never use, regardless of how appropriately it might describe the other flight attendants or passengers, the alarm clock wakes me up. It’s 5:00 a.m. and I’m working a flight to Seattle or San Diego or Santa Barbara. Doesn’t matter where I’m going, really. All that matters is it’s time to do it again.

So where’s Crazy?

Or am I crazy?

You tell me.

I
N ORDER TO
be a flight attendant in the 1950s, women were required to be attractive—“just below Hollywood standards.” No wonder many a hopeful starlet became a flight attendant as part of a backup plan.

Rumor has it Tom Berenger and Richard Gere once worked as flight attendants. I don’t believe it, either, but I
have
dreamt about it. Several times. Richard looked amazing wearing nothing but a navy blue pinstriped apron serving me chocolate chip cookies in bed. Dennis Miller, on the other hand, really did work as a flight attendant for Continental, or so I’ve been told. Still trying to figure out how true that is. But what a snarky flight attendant he must have been! Actress Kate Linder, who has been on
The Young and the Restless
for more than twenty years, is
still
a flight attendant for United Airlines. You’ll only find her behind a cart on the weekends. Kim Kardashian’s mother, Kris, was a flight attendant for American Airlines when she met Robert Kardashian, O. J. Simpson’s attorney. What’s funny about that is Kris’s second husband, Bruce Jenner, an Olympic gold medalist, was married first to a flight attendant who supported him while he trained for the decathlon. Bruce later went on to purchase a private plane, which he learned to pilot in order to make it on time to public appearances.

But flying is not for everyone. Ant, the comedian, was a flight attendant for American Airlines before he became a TV personality. Evangeline Lilly, who starred as a plane crash survivor on the television show
Lost
, hated her brief stint as a flight attendant, calling it the “worst job ever” thanks to short layovers and swollen feet.

Men who don’t have a problem with swollen flight attendant feet include Robert De Niro, George Best, David Caruso, Wayne Newton, Lou Rawls, Montel Williams, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Greece Prime Minister George Papandreou, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and
American Idol
winner Ruben Studdard. They all married flight attendants. And let’s not forget the most recent person to join the flight attendant wife club, Kelsey Grammer, who ditched his wife Camille, from
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
, to wed Kayte Walsh, a Virgin Airlines air hostess. Bill Maher, a self-proclaimed bachelor, dated fly girl Coco Johnsen for a couple of years until they wound up in court. And there are all the famous affairs . . . but I probably shouldn’t go there.

The prime minister of Iceland and the world’s first openly gay female leader, Johanna Sigurdardottir, once worked as a flight attendant for Loftleidir, a predecessor of Icelandair. Wife of rogue trader Nick Leeson (Barings Bank), Lisa Leeson, became a flight attendant for Virgin. Virgin’s very own Richard Branson was actually born to a flight attendant. Prince William’s wife, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was born Catherine Elizabeth Middleton to parents who both worked as airline crew before going into the party supply business.

While times (and requirements) have changed, the job is still a desirable one. Thousands of people apply each year. At my airline, the average age of a flight attendant is now forty years old. For the first time in history, being a flight attendant is considered a profession, not just a job. Fewer are quitting, turnover is not as high as it once was, and competition has gotten fierce. Ninety-six percent of people who apply to become flight attendants do not get a call-back. In December 2010, Delta Airlines received more than one hundred thousand applications after announcing they had openings for one thousand flight attendants. Only the most qualified applicants are hired. Even though a college degree is not a requirement, there are very few flight attendants who do not possess one. Lawyers and doctors have been known to apply. This should tell you a lot about me, and anyone else you encounter in navy polyester. Think about that the next time you’re on a plane.

Of course, the first time I tried to become a flight attendant I wasn’t part of the lucky 4 percent.

In college, I went to my first airline interview in order to get away from a roommate who had more than her fair share of issues. She’d bring guys back to our dorm room and leave them behind. Try studying Japanese culture when your roomie is throwing up all over your clothes, the ones you’d specifically and repeatedly forbidden her to wear! So when my mother, a woman who had
always
dreamed of becoming a flight attendant, mailed me a newspaper clipping with an ad circled four times in red for an open house with a major U.S. carrier, I decided to apply. Not so much because I wanted to become a flight attendant, but because the airline provided a free ticket to a city out of state where the interviews were being conducted. Broke and tired, with a laundry hamper full of vomit and a disheveled man locked in the bathroom using my Q-tips, I just wanted to get away. I also wanted to fly on an airplane, something I’d only done three times before in my life.

Two weeks after I received a letter from the airline telling me where to go and what to say to the ticket agent to get a seat on the flight (not all airlines cover the travel expense), I stepped off the aircraft, sashayed down the jet bridge in four-inch beige pumps, a little black bag rolling behind, and made my way to a nondescript door clear on the other side of the busy airport terminal. There I found a giant room filled with hundreds of happy, smiling women. I stopped in my tracks. The banquet room was lined with neat little rows of applicants, knees held tightly together, ankles crossed delicately off to the side, dressed head to toe in blue and black. My brand-new canary yellow suit and suntan hose screamed LOOK AT ME! And not in a good way. Right then and there I wanted to die.

The women, all with their hair pulled tightly back, looked me up and down, then quickly turned their attention back to the front of the room. With my blond locks falling halfway down my back, they could see I was zero competition. Nonchalantly I wiped the frosted pink stain off my lips with the back of my hand, twirled my unruly hair into a loose bun, and took a seat in the back of the room. I wanted to hide, but hiding at an airline interview is not an option. Not if you want to get hired. Also not if you’re the only person in sight wearing a shade of the rainbow.

After a brief introduction from the people conducting the interviews, we were divided into what looked like fifty groups of five. While I waited for my turn to be called, I made friends with the girl seated beside me. She had worked for a competitive carrier for five years but quit after she had a baby—the biggest mistake she ever made, she said. Now divorced, she really needed this job. I couldn’t decide if her history with a different airline would be an advantage or a disadvantage over someone like me. When my group was finally called, we were taken to a private room and asked a number of fairly easy questions regarding our past work experience. Playing it safe, I made an effort to raise my hand second or third since I had overheard others talking earlier and knew not to be the last person to answer a question. We had been in the room for about ten minutes when a peppy women with red lips got down to business.

“Besides travel and meeting new people, why do you want to be a flight attendant?”

Silence all around. Finally I spoke up. Glamour! Excitement! Free passes! She smiled real big and said, “If you don’t hear from us in two weeks feel free to apply again” and then dismissed us all.

On my way out I spotted the former flight attendant through the glass of another door as she was stepping onto a giant scale. When we made eye contact, she smiled real big and gave me a thumbs-up. My heart dropped a little as I gave her one back. Turns out, “free passes” wasn’t the right answer.

Three years later I applied again. I had graduated from college and found an exciting job designing watches for a well-known company. But the pay was miserable, and when a promotion didn’t lead to a raise, I quit. Once again my mother cut out an ad in the help wanted section of the
Dallas Morning News.
An airline I’d never heard of was looking for flight attendants. At $14 an hour, why not? I could travel around the world and meet new people while I looked for another job, a good job, the kind that pays well, that people have respect for—maybe something in marketing. And two days later, I was officially a flight attendant for Sun Jet International Airlines!

Sun Jet International, a charter airline based in Dallas, never once flew anywhere you’d call “international.” They didn’t even fly anywhere that might require a layover. It was 100 percent “turns,” which meant I never had to pack underwear. There were only three airplanes, all leased, and Sun Jet flew the ancient birds twice a day to Newark, Fort Lauderdale, and Long Beach for just $69 a flight. At the time, other airlines charged eight times that amount for the same ticket, which should tell you a lot about our passengers. We quickly became known as the “Dancer Express” for all the go-go dancers from Dallas who flew to New York to make money. After their flight, all these bleach blondes could be found at baggage claim teetering on six-inch stripper heels waiting for giant tubs full of costumes to come jingling down the luggage chute.

It didn’t take me long to notice that other flight attendants—
real
flight attendants, the kind who traveled to exciting destinations and had layovers in hotels—rarely returned my greeting whenever we passed each other in the terminal. It might have been the Sun Jet uniforms: white button-down blouses, two silver stripes adorning each shoulder, tucked into pleated, navy blue Bermuda shorts with navy blue hose and heels. I loved the ridiculous getup—after all, it showed I was a flight attendant! That is, until one day, when we landed at the Newark airport and I ran off the airplane to find something quick to eat before heading back to Dallas. As I impatiently waited in line at Nathan’s hot dog stand, I saw it. The woman plopping the sausage into a stale bun wore a navy blue snap-on tie that looked exactly like mine. After that I refused to wear the tie.

Of course, it’s possible the other flight attendants weren’t snickering at our ties—it might have had something to do with our passengers. They were a class act, notorious for causing disturbances in airports. But why wouldn’t they? I worked for an airline that made no qualms about using duct tape to repair broken armrests, seat backs, and overhead bins. No apologies were made to passengers forced to sit on soiled seat cushions that had been covered with a black trash bag in order to hide the vomit or pee from one of the dozens of unaccompanied minors who traveled with us regularly. Other airlines had limits on the number of unaccompanied minors. Not us. We were the airline of broken homes. Once I counted twelve UMs on a single flight. (This is unheard of with larger airlines.) Weight and balance issues were simply solved by removing luggage—
all of the luggage
, not just passengers with luggage—without informing anyone what had been done until the aircraft had landed. Passengers were often greeted by an announcement stating they could pick up their bags the following day. Of course, chaos always ensued, which meant security would have to escort the crew off the airplane. Once we were safe and sound behind a locked metal door emblazoned with an
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign, we’d sneak out a back door and take the sky train to the employee parking lot, knowing full well we’d be dodging spit balls and loogies all over again in less than twenty-four hours.

Late one night on the sky train, I noticed a homeless-looking gentleman sitting in the corner and squinting at me. He looked me up and down and hissed, “Something wicked this way comes.” I sat there in silence clutching the handle of my bag, too afraid to speak or even move, when it dawned on me. He must have flown Sun Jet before.

Our mechanical delays were legendary. We never canceled flights—ever! Why would we, when under the charter system, we could not collect revenue until a flight had flown? We were allowed to delay a flight up to forty-eight hours. It was printed on the back of the ticket in small print that no one ever read. Once, in the middle of a long, creeping delay that would eventually result in the nonunionized crew “laying over” on the airplane, each of us sleeping three seats across, an angry male passenger followed me into the ladies’ room in the terminal. I had no idea he’d done so until I’d already sat down, which is the moment he chose to lay into me. The man gave me a piece of his mind through the stall door! I was too afraid to exit, let alone flush, so I just stayed there—literally, not going—until he disappeared. To this day, fifteen years later, I am reluctant to get off an airplane to use a public restroom during a ground delay.

But it’s not like we hadn’t been warned. During two weeks of training at a three-star hotel that the airline didn’t pay for but required us to stay at, our one and only instructor informed our class of twenty: “Our passengers do not always communicate the same way you and I might in the same situation.” There was a pause, a really long pause, before she added, “You’re going to hear a lot of words you probably don’t hear throughout the course of a regular day.” A pilot who was sitting in to answer questions about how airplanes fly began to laugh so long and hard that the instructor ordered him out. Immediately she moved on to the next subject.

But I don’t mean to make it sound all bad! At the time I found myself on the line, Sun Jet was a small airline with only sixty flight attendants. Because of that, we got to know each other well and formed a tight bond that flight attendants at larger airlines rarely experience. We were there for one another, all of us, including the pilots. Every day it was us against them—the passengers, the company, you name it, we fought it.

Despite everything, we had a great time. The rules were simple. Last crew back to base had to buy the other two crews a round of drinks after work. Each afternoon three crews would fly out of the Dallas–Fort Worth airport between the hours of four and five o’clock. Newark, then Long Beach, then Fort Lauderdale, all scheduled to land at midnight back in Dallas. As soon as we touched ground at our destination, we’d rush the passengers off as politely as possible, pray the cleaners would be quick (they always were, which explained why the aircraft was never quite clean), reboard another full flight as quickly as we could, and race back to base, keeping tabs on each other through an air traffic controller in on the joke. At the end of the night we’d all meet up, pilots included, at a restaurant bar a few miles away to share stories about passengers who had been taken off in handcuffs. Until one night, a passenger who’d been escorted off by police—and who I assumed had been arrested—actually beat us to the bar and ended up sitting in a neighboring booth. Talk about an eye-opener. I learned a lot about how airlines work that night. Kick ’em off one flight, throw ’em on the very next flight. Depending on the airline, they might even get an upgrade.