beginning of that phrase, and a good thing instantly becomes bad, very bad, as in “you don’t want to know” bad, as in “FAA personal fine” bad, as in “Linda, my roommate from training’s makeup” bad! It was that bad. Quickly the three of us began cramming food, dishes, glassware, half-full bottles of wine, anything we could get our hands on into inserts that were already full. I glanced out the window and saw rooftops and streetlights.
Folding the dessert cart and shoving it inside its compartment, I asked in a panic, “Did either one of you hear the captain make the prepare-for-landing announcement?” Because I didn’t want to have to take the blame for this!
“He never made it. Just leave the racks inside of the oven!” ordered the senior flight attendant. “Lock the carts and take your seat ASAP. I’ll grab whatever’s left out in first class and then stow it behind the last row.” He pointed at Georgia who stood frozen with eyes open wide, “You pick up trash on your way back to your jump seat —now, go go go! We’re going to be on the ground in a few seconds.”
I didn’t even have time to buckle my seat belt when I felt the wheels grind against the runway. As we rolled down the tarmac, I could see Georgia and her partner in crime still standing in the aisle. Sweating, I made the PA welcoming everyone to Buffalo.
“Albany!” a few passengers yell out. “We’re in Albany!”
“I mean Albany,” I corrected over the PA.
Our layover hotel was a motel, only worse. The rooms smelled musty, the television didn’t come with a remote, and the bed was covered with something someone’s grandmother crocheted twenty years ago. I bravely walked barefoot across the shag carpet, closed the floral curtains, and sneezed. I was just about to call Georgia to see if she wanted to come over and order room service, but I couldn’t find the menu. That’s because there was no menu. The hotel didn’t offer room service. And the restaurant was closed.
“If you’re hungry there’s a vending machine down the hall,” the hotel concierge told me over the phone.
I knew that eating peanut-butter crackers and Cheetos in a musty motel on Christmas Eve would definitely send Georgia over the edge and down the road to quitsville. I had to think of something quick, an alternative plan to take her mind off the situation. Before I could come up with anything, I heard a tap on my window. My heart lurched. There it was again!
“Send security to my room right away!”
Airline crews take hotel security very seriously. We don’t tell passengers where we’re laying over. When we get to the hotel, we never say our room numbers out loud. We either jot them down on one another’s room key covers or quickly flash the key card. We never know who’s listening. Because hotels are known to issue the same rooms to crew members day after day, month after month, and year after year, hotel personnel are quite familiar with which rooms are ours. Chances are the occupant of one of these rooms, which is always located near an elevator and an ice machine, or at the end of a long hall, is going to be an attractive female. Who better to cut up with a hatchet than a flight attendant?
Think I’m joking? There’s a layover hotel in Los Angeles where a flight attendant was found naked and hanging in her closet. This is why we use our luggage to prop the door to our room open before retiring for the night. While one coworker checks under the bed, inside the closet, and behind the shower curtain another coworker waits outside in the hallway. Then we switch. I heard of a flight attendant who got down on hands and knees, lifted the bed skirt, and spotted a head staring back at her. She ran out of the room screaming bloody murder later to find out it was her own mirrored reflection that scared her so.
Not all flight attendants are quite so lucky. A handful became the victims of the guy who wore a white jogging suit and carried a plastic cup while riding the elevators up and down early in the mornings looking for flight attendants on their way to the crew van for pickup. Once he found his prey, he’d toss a “sticky white substance” on their uniform and then run away. This went on for months.
Fifteen minutes after I called the hotel desk/operator/security guy, I finally heard a knock on my door. Chain still on, I cracked the door open and told him what happened. He promised to go outside and do a walk around the property.
Georgia came to my door about two seconds later, all bundled up with rosy cheeks. “You’ve got to come outside. The snow is absolutely gorgeous!”
I gulped. I didn’t dare tell her about the madman running around outside, knowing how close she’d just come to death.
She tossed my sneakers at me. “I made a snowman. Come see! Hey, didn’t you hear me throwing snowballs at your window?”
Snowballs, killers, whatever, sometimes things aren’t always as they seem.
When Georgia called Jake, Jeff, Jack, whatever his name was, to wish him a Merry Christmas, he thanked her and then asked if he could call her right back, hanging up the phone before she could say good-bye. Half an hour later she called him back, but he didn’t answer. While she waited for him to return her call, we ate dinner out of a vending machine located on the second floor of our three-star motel. Although we would have been much happier with turkey and dressing at home with our family and friends, we made the best of it with a couple packets of peanut-butter crackers and Diet Coke. It wasn’t how I’d ever expected to spend Christmas, but hey—we had wished for a job with a flexible lifestyle, hadn’t we? It was just that in my dreams I saw myself in Zurich, not Buffalo—I mean Albany!
After we returned from our Christmas trip, I decided I wanted to go home, too, and nothing would stop me. Like Georgia, I had a credit card and I was determined to use it. But instead of relaying my credit card numbers to the airline representative over the phone, I hung up.
“Eight hundred dollars! That’s how much it costs for a one-way ticket from New York to Dallas! I can’t believe it!” Actually I could believe it. I just didn’t want to believe it. But free travel was one of the main reasons I’d decided to become a flight attendant in the first place. Lord knows I couldn’t afford to do so otherwise.
“Don’t worry! Your travel benefits will kick in in about… oh, six months!” Mimi, one of the many flight attendants in our house, sat on a twin bed on the far side of the room, intently studying a copy of
Georgia shook the hot rollers in her hair. “I’m sorry, but it just ain’t right we can’t travel for six months—six months! I don’t know if I can make it that long.”
“Get used to it, princess,” Mimi said, without looking up.
Glaring at Mimi, Georgia bit into a scrumptious antidepressant: a Twinkie from the box hidden underneath her bed. She purchased the sugary treats, along with the rest of her groceries, from the 7-Eleven located directly behind our house. No way would Georgia schlep two blocks in the freezing cold to the supermarket when she could pay a little extra for convenience.
Mimi stood up, tossed the magazine onto Georgia’s bed, and then slid into a long black coat with a belted waist and a fur hood, wrapping a gray cashmere scarf around her neck, a recent gift from some guy she had met on a plane. She turned side to side in front of a long skinny mirror tacked to the back of our bedroom door, puckered up, and painted her lips a deep dark red.
“Okay, ladies, I’m outta here.” Mimi had yet to learn our names. Instead she used endearments like “honey,” “sweetie,” and “ladies.” I didn’t blame her, considering the high turnover rate in our crash pad. Each week a new group of flight attendants was shipped to New York. Even though we’d only been living there for four weeks, roommates had already come and gone. Sometimes they just moved up, as in upstairs, before officially moving on. The last roommate quit three days after her first trip because a passenger had screamed at her for ruining his vacation when they ran out of eggs in coach.
“Don’t wait up!” Mimi sashayed out the front door.
“Don’t have to worry about that,” mumbled Georgia.
“Do you think she’s going out with 2A?” I smiled mischievously.
“Who cares what she’s doing?” Georgia had little patience for Mimi’s “nonsense.” That’s because Georgia had a serious boyfriend and didn’t take relationships lightly. My ex, on the other hand, was still refusing to let things go.
