checking the status of seat belts, seat backs, and luggage. A passenger reached out and tugged the hem of a skirt on the move, simultaneously firing off a battery of questions about a missed flight connection and lost luggage. The flight attendant nodded and, smiling, pointed to a map inside the airline’s magazine located in the angry passenger’s seat back pocket. When she handed it to him, he immediately flung it on the seat beside him, determined to keep complaining for the remaining minutes before landing.
Georgia leaned across the empty middle seat between us and squeezed my hand. “Can you believe
It did seem surreal.
Four days. That’s all the time we’d been given to find a place to live and settle in before working our first trip assignment as New York–based flight attendants. Talk about stress. There were a dozen of us on the flight, and most of us had no idea where to go, what to do, or just how much it would actually cost once we finally found a place. We certainly didn’t know that tipping the super a few hundred bucks would greatly increase the odds of getting an apartment. The majority of us were from the Midwest where things like this didn’t happen. We had come from cities where housing was, well, almost affordable for a person making less than $18,000 a year. (Of course, deduct $800 for our uniforms and we were left with about $17,000.) And to think I had actually turned down a merchandising job for a well-known men’s line of clothing a few years ago because I didn’t think I could survive in New York on just $30,000 a year! Now I would be making half that. No wonder so many apartment buildings flat out refused to house flight attendants. It took twenty of us living together to afford a one-bedroom.
In fact, as first-year flight attendants, we qualified for food stamps—that is, if the airline had allowed us to use them, which they didn’t, so we didn’t, which is how so many of us could fit into size 0 uniforms and why we never had to work out to keep our girlish figures. Lord knows we couldn’t afford a membership to the gym those first few years on the job. It also explains why we were willing to accept dinner dates from men we might not have otherwise gone out with. I remember being so hungry at times that working a meal cart became torture! My stomach would rumble in the aisle as I silently prayed for passengers to refuse their meals. I even knew a few flight attendants who regularly hopped flights as passengers in order to eat what was being served on board for free. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Imagine being stuck in New York in the dead of winter and being able to fly to Miami just to get breakfast. We could spend a few hours lounging around the airport hotel pool, working on our tans and taking advantage of a 20 percent airline employee discount at the hotel restaurant bar, before flying back to New York in time for dinner. Hey, a flight attendant’s gotta do what a flight attendant’s gotta do!
But as our plane was landing in New York that first day, Georgia and I didn’t know any of that. We grabbed our bags out of the bins, deplaned, and headed down to baggage claim, all giddy and full of excitement. Our instructors had told us to check the bulletin board at LaGuardia flight operations, wherever that might be, because that’s where other flight attendants posted notices looking for roommates. Luckily, we wouldn’t have to resort to that. I had a connection to a place in Queens, thanks to an old Sun Jet colleague who had once worked for Pan Am out of New York. We were lucky. We knew it, too. So did our envious classmates, who had already paired off into groups of four in order to save money on hotel rooms for the night. I have to say, for a group of people who were broke, homeless, and had no idea when our first paychecks might arrive, we were handling the situation beautifully. This, I’m sure, is exactly why we were hired.
I happily helped Georgia load several gigantic bags onto a Smarte Carte while our classmates waved good- bye from the Marriott hotel courtesy van. Georgia and I felt bad for them. Their first night in one of the most exciting cities in the world and they would spend it ordering overpriced room service at a chain hotel across the street from an airport.
Everyone had cleared out of baggage claim except for us and a family of four who seemed to be missing something like a car seat or a stroller—or maybe even a kid, based on the way they were frantically searching the premises. A group of men huddled together at the bottom of the stairs leading down to baggage claim. Dressed in black suits and holding little white signs, they leered at Georgia while they awaited passengers on incoming flights who had yet to recognize their names. We found a pay phone, and I dialed a number given to us by one of the attendants on our flight. I’d asked her about the cheapest way to get to Queens without taking a bus. The phone rang twice.
“Kew Gardens!” barked a raspy voice.
I told the man my name, where we were, and where we wanted to go.
“Fifteen minutes! Last set of doors upstairs!” he snapped and immediately hung up.
Georgia slowly pushed the rolling metal cart stacked so high with luggage she could barely see over the top, while I pulled two enormous suitcases on wheels, a smaller crew bag balancing across the top of one. Another group of men wearing jeans and bulky winter coats stood near the passenger arrivals exit. Their eyes lit up as soon as they spotted Georgia teetering along in high-heel boots.
“Need a ride!” they yelled across the room—a statement, not a question, that was repeated several times.
“No, thank you,” we repeated, a dozen times, at least.
Normally I would have been freaked out by this aggressive behavior from a group of strange men at the airport, but we were in New York City. This was just how they did things. I knew this because my mother had made it her mission in life to warn me about all the things to avoid in New York. Gypsy cab drivers were one thing. After my mother had found out where I was going to be based, she bought a guide to the city and soon became the expert on all things New York, although she had yet to visit the city herself.
“Always take a yellow cab,” she had told me out of the blue on several different occasions. “Make sure to look for a medallion,” she’d insist, as if my life depended on it. (Of course, it took ending up in an empty parking lot in Harlem instead of at a theater on Broadway a few months later to actually learn this lesson so that I can in turn share it with you. Listen to my mother.)
Once Georgia and I had finally dragged our thousand pounds of luggage to the passenger arrival drop-off point, we found the area deserted. We stood there all alone, and cold, in the dark. LaGuardia Airport at night was creepy. Nervously I looked around, wondering if maybe we should go inside and wait. Instead, I put on a pair of black knit gloves. Georgia dug around inside of one of her smaller bags and pulled out a fluffy white muff. I’d never seen one before in real life, only in fairy tales.
“Ya think it’s safe out here?” she asked.
“Sure,” I lied. No need for both of us to freak out.
Just then, what looked like an old beat-up police sedan sped up to the curb, the horn honking nonstop, and came to a screeching halt in front of us. I took a step back. An old man wearing wire-rim glasses and a newsboy cap got out of the sedan and squinted at our bags.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said.
“Are you with Kew Gardens Car Service?” I asked, hopeful that he was not, although KEW GARDENS was clearly printed in red-and-white cursive across the back window, the numbers 909 written below it.
The old guy reached into the car through the opened door and grabbed what looked like a CB radio handset. “Nine oh nine.” He looked at us, looked at our bags again, and shook his head. “Nine oh nine.”
“Is there a problem, sir?” Georgia popped her cinnamon gum.
“Is there a problem, she asks!” He laughed. “Where you from, sweetheart?”
She smiled a pageant queen smile. “Louisiana.”
From inside the car came the scratchy voice of a man who sounded like he’d spent about twenty years chain-smoking in a coal mine: “Nine oh nine.”
The driver pressed a black button and spoke into the handset. “We got a bit of a problem. It seems that Miss Louisiana here needs the wagon.” Without another word, he got back inside the car, slammed the rickety door shut, and took off.
“Well, that was rude!” exclaimed Georgia. She glared at the two red taillights disappearing into the distance. “I’m in the right mind to report that guy!”
Georgia never did end up reporting him, and eventually a station wagon in desperate need of a paint job crawled to the curb. Without exiting the car, a long-haired driver popped the hatch, twirling a cigarette between his stained fingers. Georgia and I struggled to load our bags into the back. They barely fit. Once in the backseat, I sat on what looked like a blue blanket taken from an airplane. On further inspection, it was in fact a blue blanket taken from an airplane. It covered a rip in the leather seat.
“Where you ladies going?” Irish accent. Beady eyes darting back and forth between us in the rearview
