Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (2 page)

G
etting evicted from your apartment, for anyone who is not familiar with it, is quite embarrassing. One day you come home confident that the late-night talk shows are fighting over you. And as soon as their guest coordinators battle it out, you’re in. I mean, after all, you are the number one freelance writer in the nation for the Charles Schulz
Peanuts
line for Hallmark! Sure, your name isn’t on the cards, but you couldn’t be more honored if the people who represent Disney said your mouse drawings look like Mickey.

And that very day over lunch, Charles Schulz himself said,
“Marsha, you have a voice. You need to design characters to go with your voice.”

You are so bolstered by what good could come from this encouragement that you tell everyone who will listen that “Charles Schulz said I have a voice.” You even call your landlord (collect) and relay this information.

“Good,” your landlord says. “Did you use that voice to ask him for the rent money?”

“No,” you smile at her innocence. “That would not be acting cool.”

She huffs and says, “Acting cool doesn’t pay the bills.”

You tell her not to worry, that you are destined for “the lists.” (You mean
The New York Times
Best Sellers lists.)

Then your landlord says something very encouraging. She says, “Oh, I believe that. And the sheriff does too.”

You have no idea what she is talking about because you have never known anyone who was evicted. You are, in fact, encouraged that she is being so supportive and has obviously been speaking well of you to her friends in law enforcement.

After the phone call to the landlord, you drive to your grandmother’s place and hide your car behind a fence. (Your tags are a couple of years past due, and you have no insurance.)

Then, although you are twenty-nine years old, you catch the (free) old folks’ shuttle to your apartment. On the shuttle, you stand up as if you are the tour guide and point out monuments
and malls along the way. You don’t charge for the ride, but many of the riders do tip you as they leave the bus.

As you trudge up the hill to the apartment complex where you’ve lived for three years, you contemplate dedicating your first book to your landlord:
To Lilly, who kept understanding and waited months to get paid
.

You reach your front door and realize some confused person has posted an ugly sign on your door. It says basically, “By Order of the Sheriff, Get Out.” You absolutely cannot believe it. You won’t sue anyone over this mistake, but it is the type of thing that could be embarrassing if someone saw it.

Then, as you read the fine print on the notice, you see your name, and it is spelled correctly. Your stomach tightens. You rip the sign off the door and go inside your apartment where you read the whole warning. You have twenty-four hours. Your things will all be placed on the front lawn of the apartment complex in twenty-four hours.

For one last second of denial, you think of some story. You were in Europe accepting the French prize for literature. (In this case it would be for literature not yet released from the mind of the writer.) Or drinking tea with a distant relative of Mark Twain and the tea went long. The bills must have arrived while you were out.

But then, numbingly, you realize this is no time for jokes.

And somehow, in the next twenty-four hours, you must
deal with your problem, which seems big. You have no family, no money, and no place to live.

You frantically gather all your belongings, except clothes, and move them into a storage unit you know you can’t afford. You load your clothes in the backseat of your car. There are three cans of tomato soup rolling around in your trunk. (You would have put your clothes in the trunk, but it’s raining and the trunk leaks badly.)

You drive to the front yard of the brother of your best friend, and as you get out of your car, your best friend gets out of her car too and tries to cheer you up.

“Well, look at that,” she says.

You are looking. And like someone who has just been in a collision with life, you are in shock.

“I can’t live in this!” you say, staring at a tin can disguised as a camper.

W
ell, at least you don’t have to worry about a roommate,” said Janie, looking on the bright side. We stared at the camper before moving me in.

Janie had been my closest confidante for ten years, and as we stood side by side at what seemed more like a collision than a crossroad in my life, I glanced at her and thought about how she already had everything I wanted. She was married to the love of her life, had a beautiful baby, and was even the same
kind of writer I dreamed of being—the kind that was supported by someone else.

She understood I was too stressed to accept her offer of moving into her tiny home with her family. Or of moving in with her brother’s family, in front of whose home the camper sat.

“I’d rather live alone in my cardboard box,” I said. Of course, I didn’t mean it. I wanted to live alone, but not in a cardboard box. I wanted to live alone in my lovely apartment where I had lived for a long time. I wanted class, beauty, and a pool. I didn’t want to be homeless.

“I can’t believe I’m homeless!” (I had to yell to be heard over the sound of cars driving up and down the street.)

“Oh, come on,” Janie yelled back, “you’re not homeless. You’re living in a camper…with a lawn and everything.”

“I’m on the street,” I screamed, but the traffic had stopped at that moment. The scream sounded like some kind of call for help—which maybe it was.

“No!” said Janie. “You’re a full six inches off the street. Look, measure from the street to the first step to the camper. That’s almost six inches. You can’t say you’re on the street.”

“This camper has no electricity. And no running water.” I moaned.

“Not true,” said Janie. “What do you call this?” She pointed to the naked bulb stuck in the front window powered by an
orange extension cord. The cord, fifty-five feet in length, stretched from the camper window to a bedroom window in the small bungalow that housed Janie’s brother, his wife, their two boys, a three-legged dog, a psychotic cat, fish that were carnivores, and a hamster sitting in a wheelchair on the front porch. I preferred privacy to chaos.

“But no running water,” I said.

“Look,” said Janie. “You can just step out on the front step here and pour this bottled water over your hands, giving you running water. And it’s a short walk to use the toilet in their home. They’ve provided you with an umbrella for when it rains.”

I must have looked morose. “Janie,” I said, “I feel like someone from the Beverly Hillbillies without the Beverly.”

“No, you’ve got the Beverly. Look at you! How many homeless people are dressed in designer suits?”

It was true. I still had my wardrobe from when I had money and a secretary and a company expense account. The next day, I took the free shuttle to get my car and started applying for jobs. Any job. Every job. But I was turned down for being overqualified for low-paying jobs and undereducated for high-paying jobs. The fact that I had attended college for five years and never graduated was an obstacle to getting any other great job like the one I had left months before.

I had been hired for that job after I pitched my positive
points on the phone and showed up for the interview without ever sending in my résumé. I’d worked there a year and a half, making great money and feeling confident that working nine to five was only a temporary thing. My fiancé, Jeff, was going to rescue me (via marriage) from the corporate world. Then I would stay at home with a cup of tea and my typewriter and become America’s answer to Tolstoy—but with more humor.

When Jeff left me for a younger (and more toned) woman, I lost it. In what can only be described as a moment of mental flatulence, I quit my day job and hibernated to begin writing. I don’t think I had given quite enough consideration to the one benefit of being employed that I’d miss most: paychecks. It turns out they stop paying you after you quit.

“Not to fear,” I told everyone. “I’m focused here. I’ll just stay home and write. I have enough savings for six months!” (How long could it take to win a Pulitzer anyway?)

I ran out of money in three months, and you know the rest.

My getting evicted from the apartment caused me to rethink everything I had previously considered. For example, that dedication to Lily the Landlord was out.

We used to have a saying in personnel: “It’s easier to get a job when you have a job.” Meaning, when other companies want you, you’re more marketable. Out of a job, you reek unemployment. Personnel managers are repelled by the smallest whiff of that.

At least I didn’t
appear
homeless when I applied for work. I had an actual physical address. I simply used the home address of the people who owned the yard where the camper sat. My mail would come to the home of Janie’s brother. In an effort to cheer me up, they would send the mail to my camper by tucking it under the collar of the dog and having him walk to the camper and scrape the door. Once they wheeled the mail over with the hamster sitting on it.

My third week in the camper was my point of deepest despair. The résumé thing was still holding me back. I’d make it to the third round of interviews for a job, and then someone would look at my résumé and realize I had no actual degree.

I needed a job that hired on first impressions. And I needed to make a first impression that would override any need to view my résumé.

Finally, sensing I was on the edge of running away to a warmer climate where living on the street would be easier, Janie took me out to eat and tried a psychological exercise she had just learned.

“Marsha, let’s pretend. Let’s say you could choose any job you want. Not the ones you’ve been applying for, but any job. Any job in the world. Describe to me what that job would be like.”

“Travel and lots of it,” I said immediately. I love pretending.

Janie was writing down everything I said, so I continued, “And I wouldn’t have to pay for the tickets or the hotel or the food.” I was on a roll. “And I’d have no responsibilities once I got to the destination. I mean, this would not be traveling to corporate meetings. I’d be on my own to be a tourist when I got to the destinations.”

“Where do you want to travel?” said Janie.

“Everywhere. London, Madrid, Rome, New York, San Diego.”

“And,” Janie prompted, “what else? Come on, we’re dreaming here.”

“I wouldn’t be forced to do any paper-type work: no reports to write, no résumés to review, just a job I would never take home with me, like being a waitress—only for more money. And it needs to have some glamour. And I don’t want to work more than fifteen days a month and still make enough to live on.

“I’d have tons of time off to write the great American novel. And I’d get to meet lots of interesting people, and I’d never have to work with the same people over and over, and—”

Janie interrupted me. “It’s what I thought,” she said. “You need to be a flight attendant. It’s the only job for you.”

“But I have no idea how to get hired for that job!” I said. And I didn’t.

“Pray about it,” said Janie, and then she quoted what has to be the most famous verse in the history of war and peace. “‘The Lord is my shepherd…’ Shep herd. Let him herd you.”

“I’m not a shep,” I said. “He herds shep.”

“Sheep, he herds sheep.”

“Shep is the singular of sheep…in my mind, anyway.”

“We are ‘the sheep of his pasture.’ Try it,” said Janie. “Ask for herding in the right direction.”

So I did. And nobody believes this part, but it’s true. A few days later, I was up at three on a Wednesday morning sitting in the depressing camper with the naked light bulb burning through the dark around me, and I saw an ad for the job of my dreams. It read: “Tour the world. Fly around in style. Be an international flight attendant. Applications accepted on Monday and Tuesday only.
No one
considered after that day.”

It was a Sunday paper; I was reading it on Wednesday. I was a day late and a dollar short, as my grandfather used to say. (But this was the same grandfather who told me to learn Morse code so I’d never be out of a job.)

I studied the ad and realized that all I had to do was find a way to make showing up a day late for the interview of my life…an advantage instead of a disadvantage.

There were still several hours until the place opened for business and I could call them, so I decided to drink a little tea
and then take a nap. I adjusted my light bulb and used a candle to boil a cup of water to make tea, which I drank with a lot of sugar. I went back to sleep until about nine, when it would be safe to call about the job.