Cruising Attitude (17 page)

Today the minimum age requirement to become a flight attendant is between eighteen and twenty-one. There is no maximum age restriction. As long as flight attendants can pass a yearly recurrent training program, and don’t have any health or physical problems that would prevent them from flying, they can continue to work. Height requirements are for safety reasons only. Typically flight attendants range between five feet, three inches, and six feet, one inch. We must be tall enough to reach safety equipment stored overhead and short enough to avoid bumping our heads against the aircraft ceiling. (For this reason on some regional carriers using smaller aircraft equipment, maximum height requirement is five feet, ten inches.) In the 1990s weight requirements for flight attendants were dropped, but weight must be in proportion to height. If flight attendants cannot sit in the jump seat without an extended seat belt or fit through the emergency
window
exit, they cannot fly. Most foreign carriers still follow strict height, weight, and age requirements.

The benefits of hiring older people who have already had a career is they tend to appreciate what being a flight attendant is all about, and that shows on the job. Younger flight attendants who have never worked a regular 9-to-5 job have no idea how good they have it. Hiring more-experienced people also helps the airlines save money when it comes to paying for benefits and retirement. Once, while I was explaining this to a passenger who couldn’t believe my mother was also a flight attendant, he informed me that he found it unsettling to stare at postmenopausal women pushing beverage carts for three hours. As if buying an airline ticket entitled him to eye candy. Of course, he wasn’t much to look at, either. Another passenger wished the airlines would hire nicer, better-looking flight attendants like Virgin, because the last thing he wanted was to be scolded in flight by someone’s grandmother or gay cousin. What’s amazing is how often passengers complaining about flight attendants being old and ugly are old and ugly themselves.

I don’t know what it is, but whenever it comes to flight attendants, people tend to forget that we have rights regardless of what we do for a living. What I find most unsettling is the number of passengers with ageist and sexist opinions about flight attendants who think it’s okay to not just have these outdated opinions, but to express them to the very group of people they’re talking about! I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but flight attendants are allowed to age and gain weight like the rest of society. One passenger had the nerve to complain about a “fat flight attendant” who ruined his flight because she kept waking him up whenever she passed down the aisle. I wanted to point out that if certain passengers weren’t spilling out into the aisle (cough, cough), “fat” flight attendants wouldn’t be knocking into them. Another passenger whacked me hard on the butt after she accused me of stepping on her toe. For the record, my height and weight are nicely proportional, but even I can’t walk down the aisle in a straight line without swinging my body from side to side because of all the heads, legs and feet hanging out into the aisle.

My mother, like Linda, my old roommate from training, started flying when most people her age begin thinking of retiring. Her life went from turning yet another brunette a beautiful shade of blond with a bowl of bleach and a stack of foils to Vice President Al Gore saying hello to her in passing at JFK Airport outside of security. One day she was repairing another botched-up home cut and the next day a member of the band Air Supply is flirting with her in the first-class galley. On a bus from LaGuardia to Newark she shared family pictures with British reggae vocalist Maxi Priest’s drummer. She was shocked to discover a well-known talk show host had hands that were so shaky she could barely lift her glass of wine. And she couldn’t stop laughing when one of the most famous movie stars from the 1950s told one of her crew members—who had spent the entire flight bending over backward to please the difficult and demanding Hollywood star—“My dog likes you. I don’t know why.”

After a month on the job, my mother said to me, “Whenever you came home and told us about the crazy things that happened to you on the airplane I used to wonder if maybe you were exaggerating a little. Now I know you weren’t.”

With my mother on the line and living in my crash pad, my life went from weird to super weird. One day I walked into the house after a trip and Jane stopped me in the foyer with a nervous look on her face. “I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, because if it were me I don’t think I’d want to know—”

“Spill it!” I demanded, unzipping the back of my dress, eager to get out of my uniform as quickly as possible. After a flight I always smell like a mix of chocolate chip cookies, urine from the lav, and whatever I may have spilled—maybe an exploding bottle of champagne or an entire can of tomato juice. Customs and immigration in Vancouver once told me they could always tell when our flight had arrived because they could smell it as soon as the gate agents opened the aircraft door.

Jane took a deep breath. “Yakov can’t decide who to ask out—you or your mother.” I froze midzip.

It was bad enough that I’d had to pretend to be Yakov’s wife in an emergency code enforcement situation, but to think he actually believed he had a shot was disturbing to say the least. On top of that he couldn’t decide who he liked more, me or the woman who bore me. My mother, of course, claimed to find the situation to be just as sickening as I did, but based on the number of times she relayed the story to family and friends, blushing and giggling each time she recounted it, I think she may have been a little too flattered.

The dispatchers over at Kew Gardens Car Service weren’t making it any easier. Whenever I’d call for a car, they’d ask in a yeah-baby kind of voice, “Is this the mother or the daughter?”

I’d close my eyes tightly, thinking to myself, gross, gross, gross, and then say, “The daughter,” as matter-of-factly as I could. I didn’t want to egg them on. They liked to tease.

Even worse was making the same distinction to a driver—in person! “Really, you can’t tell?” I asked a new guy who refused to meet my glare in the rearview mirror.

Once a driver asked my mother how her date went the other night. At first she had no idea what he was talking about. When it finally dawned on her that he thought she was me, she made the executive decision to play along. “Great,” she said, before closing her eyes and pretending to sleep.

“Why in the world would you do that?!” I cried over the laughter of my roommates.

“It was a long day. I didn’t feel like talking.”

“The next time I get into a cab I’m going to pretend I’m you and ask the driver out!” Then I one-upped it. “I’ll also tell the lesbian doctor down the street that I’d love to grab a drink with her next time I’m in town.”

My mother swore she wouldn’t do it again. Then she added, “Just because the doctor lady asked me if I’d like to get a drink with her doesn’t mean she wants to go on a date!”

Yeah, okay, whatever, Mom.

At work I couldn’t decide which was stranger: Coming face-to-face with award-winners like Robert Redford or Leonardo DiCaprio or working across the aisle from my mother? Making direct eye contact with Goldie Hawn on one of my very first flights to Los Angeles or the time I needed the merlot from the other cart and accidentally yelled out “Mom!” in the middle of the business-class aisle?

“Don’t call me ‘Mom’!” my mother would demand before each flight we were scheduled to work together, as if I had actually
wanted
to cause a spectacle in flight. The reason my mother—I mean Ellen—didn’t want me to call her ‘Mom’ had nothing to do with being professional and had everything to do with not looking “old.” Ellen looked great for her age and the last thing she wanted was a planeful of passengers knowing she had such “an old child”—her words, not mine.

Although we only worked with each other a handful of times, Ellen was always quick to spill the beans. I could always tell whenever she’d shared our little secret because people would start looking at me with wide eyes and silly grins, their necks elongated to get a better view of the freak walking down the aisle. Whenever I’d confront her, she’d laugh it off and say, “Oh, it’s just one person,” only it was never just one person. One person would tell another person and so on and so on and so on.

“I can tell you told the guy in the last row,” I said, giving my mother the evil eye.

“What was I supposed to do? He kept asking me to fix him up with the pretty flight attendant named Heather. I told him I’d put in a good word for him, but he wouldn’t let it go. He’s driving me crazy! And I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about it all. I thought it best he should know.”

Not me. That’s why my dates never found out the truth about Ellen whenever they’d stop by the crash pad to pick me up. To them she was my older roommate from Texas. There was no need to tell them her husband was also my father. Imagine running into a fetishist harboring both flight attendant and mother-daughter fantasies. Combine the two and you’ve got a serious pervert on your hands. Love was hard enough to find without worrying about that kind of stuff.

But for me, maybe the strangest thing of all was that on the airplane our roles switched and I became the overprotective one. When Ellen accidentally spilled a little water on a passenger’s armrest, and the guy made a face like “What the hell is wrong with you?” I practically flew across the cabin.

I am not a confrontational person. But no one was going to treat my mother like that! It didn’t matter how many frequent-flier miles the guy had or if he’d been an executive on the board of directors, I wasn’t having it. Of course, I would have never reacted the same way if I’d been the one he had yelled at. I would have apologized over and over and then gone into the galley to curse him out with my coworkers. But this was my mother. It was different.

Ellen pushed me aside and whispered, “I can handle this!”

Of course she could. I didn’t doubt it for a second. But I stood right there to make sure the guy didn’t say anything disrespectful. Because that’s my mama, dude!

Besides being overprotective, I wasn’t always as patient with Ellen as I would have been with another coworker, and this always confused passengers who were unaware of the
Grey Gardens
situation happening on the airplane.

“Just pull on it!” I once demanded when my mother couldn’t open one of the stuck business-class closets, before walking away to hand out mints in the cabin.

“That wasn’t very nice,” said a passenger waiting in line nearby for the lavatory.

“I don’t like her very much,” Ellen playfully growled. When the passenger looked concerned, my mother fessed up, “I can say things like that. She’s my daughter.”

Of course the look of concern immediately turned into one of freakish wonder.

Passengers weren’t the only ones reacting oddly. We once had a captain make a silly announcement about it right after takeoff, and a ticket agent, who put two and two together when she noticed we looked a lot alike and had the same last name, made an announcement in the airport terminal. I’ll never forget opening the jet bridge door and hearing over the PA: “Ladies and gentleman, I have some exciting news to share with you. Today on your flight . . .” No, no, no—she wouldn’t! I thought to myself, but she did. She informed everyone in the gate area that a mother-daughter flight attendant team would be serving them on board their flight today. The response can only be compared to that of telling a bunch of kids that Mickey Mouse and Goofy will be on board handing out snacks. Don’t get me wrong, working next to me in uniform made my mother proud. (And there were some perks, like the fact that I could always count on her to take a trip for me if I had a hot date.) But listening to the applause in the terminal that day, I wanted to bolt. It’s just not cool to live and work with your mom!

What is cool is spotting someone you’ve had a crush on for a very long time on the airplane. For my mother that person was Keanu Reeves. She’d been in love with the movie star since he’d starred in the movie
Something
’
s Gotta Give
as Diane Keaton’s much younger doctor boyfriend. Imagine her surprise when he sat down across the aisle from her in business class on a six-hour flight she had been scheduled to deadhead on. She never spoke to him. She couldn’t even look at him. But if she had wanted to she could have reached across the aisle and touched him. “Okay, I can retire now,” she said after the flight.

My Keanu Reeves moment happened when I spotted the CEO at the watch company I used to work for, walking through the airport at LaGuardia. I had just gotten off a flight and made a beeline straight for him.

“Hi! Remember me? I used to work for you!” I said excitedly. I’d been waiting for this day for three years. He looked nervous. “I’m Heather Poole.”

I could tell he had no idea who I was, and he confirmed this when he said, “I . . . uh . . . have to catch a flight.”

“Okay, well, here’s my number,” I said, scribbling it on the back of a passenger’s business card. “Maybe after you have a chance to relax you’ll remember me.”

Or maybe not. He never called. So I took matters into my own hands and called him. Being a flight attendant had given me confidence. I’d grown so accustomed to dealing with “important” people, or at least those who thought they were important, so I could handle myself in pretty much any situation, including dating the old boss. Anyway, I had nothing to lose.

I left the CEO a message, telling him I’d show him around New York City next time he came to town, even though he probably knew the city better than I did since his company had a showroom here. One year later, he returned my call. There was never any intimacy other than a little hand-holding and a kiss at the end of the night. But there were black town cars and first-row tickets to Broadway shows, nice dinners at the best restaurants, and plenty of good conversation that revolved mostly around where I’d been, where I was going next, and all the people I’d met in between. Basically I did the majority of the talking, which was fine by me because I like to talk. When he’d leave I wouldn’t hear from him again for weeks, even months until he’d board a flight to New York, pull out his BlackBerry while sitting in first class waiting for the plane to depart and type, “What are you doing tonight?” Four hours later a black car would pick me up and whisk me into the city. He was a successful businessman who was fifteen years older than me, so we didn’t have a lot in common, but what we did share was enough. We were living the dream. We were two lonely people who traveled.