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.
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.
When I packed and left the flat, there was no trail to follow. The best bell-mouthed hound in the Blue Ridge Mountains couldn’t have picked up my spoor.
I took a bus to La Guardia and went to Eastern’s operations office. There were three young men working behind the enclosure’s counter. “Yes, sir, can I help you?” one of them asked.
“I need to deadhead to Miami on your next flight, if you’ve got room,” I said, producing my sham Pan Am ID.
“We’ve got one going out in fifteen minutes, Mr. Williams,” he said. “Would you like to make that one, or wait until our afternoon flight? The jump seat’s open on either one.”
I didn’t want to tarry. “I’ll take this flight,” I said. “It’ll give me more time on the beach.”
He slid a pink form toward me. I’d never seen one before, but it was familiar because of my interview with the helpful Pan Am captain. The information elicited was minimal: name, company, employee number and position. I filled it out, handed it back to him and he popped off the top copy and handed it to me. I knew that was my boarding pass.
Then he picked up the telephone and asked for the FAA tower, and my stomach was suddenly full of yellow butterflies.
“This is Eastern,” he said. “We’ve got a jump on Flight 602 to Miami. Frank Williams, co-pilot, Pan Am… Okay, thanks.” He hung up the telephone and nodded toward a door outside the glass window. “You can go through there, Mr. Williams. The aircraft is boarding at the gate to your left.”
It was a 727. Most of the passengers had already boarded. I handed my pink slip to the stewardess at the door to the aircraft and turned toward the cockpit like I’d been doing this for years. I felt cocky and debonair as I stowed my bag in the compartment indicated by the stewardess and squeezed through the small hatch into the cabin.
“Hi, I’m Frank Williams,” I said to the three men seated inside. They were busy with what I later learned was a check-off list, and ignored me except for nods of acceptance.
I looked around the instrument-crammed cabin and the butterflies started flying again. I didn’t see a jump seat, whatever a jump seat looked like. There were only three seats in the cockpit and all of them were occupied.
Then the flight engineer looked up and grinned. “Oh, sorry,” he said, reaching behind me and closing the cabin door. “Have a seat.”
As the door closed, a tiny seat attached to the floor clicked down. I eased down into the small perch, feeling the need for a cigarette. And I didn’t smoke.
No one said anything else to me until we were airborne. Then the captain, a ruddy-faced man with tints of silver in his brown hair, introduced himself, the-co-pilot and the flight engineer. “How long you been with Pan Am?” asked the captain, and I was aware from his tone that he was just making conversation.
“This is my eighth year,” I said, and wished immediately I’d said six.
None of the three evinced any surprise, however. It apparently was a tenure compatible with my rank. “What kind of equipment are you on?” queried the co-pilot.
“Seven-o-sevens,” I said. “I was on DC-8s until a couple of months ago.”
