He had yet to realize that a long-distance relationship might be more difficult than he had first imagined, no matter how many times I tried to help him imagine it. Why did he have to be such a nice guy—that got on my nerves?! So when it came to men, all I really had was Mimi’s stories of 2A, a new obsession of mine. He sat in first class on a flight from San Francisco and only ate caviar. He lived in a penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He paid for drinks, lots of them, at trendy upscale hotel bars on the other side of town, not just for Mimi, but for all of her flight attendant friends—the more the merrier. Because she never invited me out to meet him, I had no choice but to take Mimi’s word for it. According to Mimi there was no hanky-panky going on between the two of them. It was a relationship of companions only. Georgia had a hard time believing that! What man bought a woman luxury gifts and expected nothing in return? I had to agree, especially when I peeped out the window to see Mimi climbing into a swanky black town car. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for a first-class “friend” of my own. Only I preferred mine single and under the age of fifty. Life just seemed so much easier that way.
“I’m freezing!” Georgia said, pulling tight a blue terrycloth bathrobe with little white clouds on it. Her bed was so close to mine I could practically reach out and touch her shivering hand. “Should we ask Victor to turn up the heat?”
“You can. He’s still mad at me.”
Victor had been giving me major attitude ever since we saw the first wad of cash lying on the floor in the foyer a few days after we’d moved in. I didn’t think twice about it until Victor introduced me to his twenty-year-old spaced-out girlfriend who was beautiful but could barely form the word “hello.” It didn’t hit me what was really going on until a few days later, late one night, when the wind blew so hard outside something crashed loudly to the ground, causing Victor to come running down the steps paranoid and naked with a shotgun. Our landlord, it turned out, was moonlighting as a drug dealer. Or maybe it was the other way around. Making light of the situation, Georgia and I had joked around about taking the money and going shopping, but when no one laughed, we decided to leave the money by the door and ignore it, like everyone else in the house. But when large sums continued to make regular appearances, I decided to confront Victor. This was the plan: I’d pick up the cash, march right up the rickety old stairs, and hand it over to him face-to-face. Just to see what he might have to say for himself. That’s it. Then I’d come right back down and report the news to Georgia. Based on his reaction, we’d figure out what to do next.
“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
