Cruising Attitude

“I wanted to sit there! Why does she get to sit there? She’s an employee!” whined a voice a few rows behind me.

“I’m so sorry,” said a working flight attendant leaning in close to me, “But a passenger is really upset that you’re sitting here. Would you mind switching seats?”

I had no problem switching seats. But it had been a really long day, I was exhausted after working a ten-hour shift, and he was still complaining in that annoying voice about why the airline would treat an employee better than a passenger. As I bent over to collect my things for a second time, I might have mumbled, “What a jerk.”

“What did you say?!” said the voice. Oh God. I stayed low, pretending to be still collecting my things. “Did you just call me a jerk?”

I didn’t know how he had heard it or why he seemed to think that the other flight attendant had said it. Slumping down in my seat, I stayed that way while the flight attendant tried to calm him down. When that didn’t work, the flight attendant went to get the captain who came back and tried to rationalize with the guy, who then made the major mistake of calling the captain a fucking idiot. This is a great way to get kicked off a plane, and that is exactly what happened. Five days later, I kid you not, the exact same passenger wound up sitting in the row directly behind mine on a flight from Chicago. I kept my head down and didn’t dare ask if he’d written a letter yet. I never wanted to have to fly back through Newark again! As I said, lesson learned. Confrontation avoided for a turbulent-free flight.

Chapter 14 THERE’S NO RESPECT FLYING DOMESTIC

Working to Seattle today. When I get back tomorrow night I’m taking you out to celebrate. Happy Birthday!

Love, Jane

P.S. Enjoy your day off with Yakov!

P.S.S. I’m evil, I know. Sorry.

I FOUND THE YELLOW Post-it note stuck to the mirror in the bathroom. It was noon. I had just woken up. Based on the deafening silence, I had the house all to myself. Normally I would have been thrilled, but today wasn’t just any day. It was my birthday. I wanted to cry. I’d been doing a lot of reflecting and analyzing in the weeks leading up to the big cake-eating event, and I’d come to the conclusion that life sucked. I had no life. No friends. Not even a steady boyfriend! I was spending my twenty-sixth birthday all alone in Queens, New York, with my cab driver landlord and his border collie who didn’t want anything to do with me regardless of how many of Jane’s organic dog treats I offered her.

By the way, did I mention Yakov had moved in? As in into the house with us. Oh yeah, out of the dungeon and into the front room where Jane used to live before Tricia got engaged and moved out to be with the man she always dreamed of. We were in the process of reshuffling bedrooms so those with the most crash pad seniority could occupy the best rooms when we discovered that Yakov had installed not one, but three deadbolt locks on the bedroom door, not so quietly claiming the tiny space for himself. It happened so quickly Jane didn’t even have time to post the roommate wanted—no drama please! sign up on the bulletin board in flight operations at LaGuardia Airport. If that wasn’t bizarre enough, Yakov then hung white paper over the front window so we couldn’t see in. More disturbing than that was the XL brown terry cloth robe I found hanging in the coat closet right next to my wool work coat.

“Whose is this?” I asked, holding up the ratty thing. Jane covered her mouth with both hands and that’s when I knew. Immediately I dropped it on the floor.

“I’ll get the Lysol,” offered Jane. That’s what friends are for.

So while my ex-roommate Tricia spent her days planning a lavish wedding in the Hamptons to a pint-sized bazillionaire she’d met on a flight, I spent my birthday doing laundry and eating a can of chicken noodle soup. All alone. In a house I shared living space with five other women and a plus-sized Russian Hugh Hefner wannabe in Queens. Why didn’t I pick up a trip? That way I could have been miserable and angry about having to fly on my birthday instead of feeling lonely and depressed while not working on my birthday. Feeling down in the dumps, I did what any other single girl in her midtwenties would do. I called my mother.

“What do you mean you have no life?” my mother exclaimed over the phone from Dallas. I could hear my sister laughing in the background. “Didn’t you just fly in from Paris this morning?!”

She had a point. Which reminded me I had a jar of Nutella chocolate and a day-old flakey croissant from Paris still inside my unpacked bag. As well as a forgotten bottle of El Yucateco hot sauce and six packages of $5 birth control pills I had bought on a whim the week before during a three-hour sit in Mexico City. Happy birthday to me.

People with regular jobs aren’t very understanding when flight attendants complain about their lives. Our bad days automatically sound good if we’re able to toss in words like Paris, Buenos Aires, Rome, and Madrid into random sentences on a regular basis. Even if we don’t fly to those kinds of places, people automatically assume that we do. Sadly the majority of flight attendants get stuck working cities like Dallas, Dulles, and Denver instead. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dallas, Dulles, or Denver. It’s just that when we’re flying to one of the three Ds, we won’t have to advise passengers how to inflate the life vest because those cities, like most domestic cities, aren’t located over or near water.

Seniority is everything at an airline and those who have it take full advantage of it by flying international routes, making the rest of us suffer in their glamorous wake. I don’t blame them. One day I, too, hope to have enough years under my thin blue belt to work all the best trips and make junior flight attendants (and some passengers) cry by not retiring when they think I should. Why retire when all I’ll have to do is work two five-day trips to Narita each month? Gardening is nice, but so is eating sushi with real wasabi and shopping in the Ginza district! Until then you’ll find me laying over in St. Louis with nothing to do except browse the Hustler store or go to Denny’s for the early-bird, super-bird special. Both establishments are located directly across the street from our airport layover hotel, right next to a cemetery that, if I’m desperate enough, doubles as a running path.

Whenever I tell anyone where I’m going or where I’ve been, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. There’s no respect flying domestic! It’s like comparing Walmart to Barneys. My friend Melanie can tell international flight attendants from domestic ones based on the shopping bag hanging off the back of their roll-aboard alone— Harrods versus Trader Joe’s. No one wants to hear about my layover in Orange County spent eating fish tacos and wandering around a high-end mall when my roommate Dee Dee is talking about lying on a beach that has its own Barry Manilow song.

Hey, I get it, because I feel the same way about foreign-based flight attendants. Their lives can’t be all that much different from mine, yet they seem so much more exciting and glamorous, even when they end up on the opposite side of the same hotel pool. Perhaps it’s the accent that makes the grass seem so much greener. Maybe it’s the uniform. Because something tells me the Air France flight attendants aren’t wearing skirts made in China or pants made in Poland with blazers made in Guatemala, which explains why my navy blues don’t always match up and why I look like one of the Bad News Bears whenever I’m surrounded by my stylish foreign counterparts. For a while I wondered if the airline I work for, an equal-opportunity employer, wanted our uniform pieces designed by every country we flew to.

The first time I came into contact with a foreign-based crew was at the Milford Plaza Hotel in New York City. Located in the heart of Times Square, it’s the kind of place tourists stay when they’re on a budget. Today the going rate is $109 a night, but something tells me it wasn’t all that much more than that when I first started flying and my airline housed crews with layovers more than twelve hours there. Crews with less time stayed closer to the airport on the wrong side of town. The Milford had tiny rooms, dark hallways, and a restaurant located on the street level that served up a very questionable pastrami on rye. Basically, it wasn’t the kind of hotel I would have ever imagined