Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (4 page)

T
he year I started training, nobody hired older flight attendants like me (thirty years old). Most of the trainees were twenty-two or twenty-three years old. (Later, hiring women over forty became the vogue, and sometimes we hired people who had already retired from other jobs.)

I survived flight attendant training by telling myself I could do anything a twenty-two-year-old could do. I was wrong. It turns out that the twenty-two-year-olds were better at going without sleep and appearing coherent. I had a double problem with the no-sleep issue. First, I’d get so excited I
couldn’t sleep. Second, I couldn’t function when I didn’t get any sleep. The night before my first international flight, I stayed up all night, packing and repacking. We were allowed one suitcase and one personal bag. The whole day before the first flight, I cleaned my apartment as if I’d never come back.

This would become a habit over the years before each of hundreds of trips. Cleaning—when I had no time for it—would become suddenly urgent. (Someday, in therapy I’ll figure out why.) I didn’t even take a nap before reporting. (I was too excited.)

So I showed up for my first international trip having already been awake for twenty-four hours. Then I worked a twelve-hour flight to Rome, and in those days we had no breaks, not even a comfortable seat to sit in for a minute. Nearing the end of that first flight, when I had been awake for thirty-six hours, the supervisor came up to ask me my “check flight” questions. Check flight questions come on the first flight, after six weeks of classroom training, and they are the last phase in passing the flight attendant course.

She looked at me. At least, I think she was looking at me—exhaustion made her appear in triplicate. She asked me how to open the galley door. I smiled and told her I didn’t remember. Then she asked me where the life rafts were located. I told her I thought they were in the ceiling. Then she asked why I was
leaning to one side. I told her I was so tired I thought I was going to vomit and didn’t want to shower her.

Every other flight attendant on the plane thought I was going to be fired. And I did too, but I was comforted by the fact that at least I’d get to sleep first. My first twenty-four hours in Rome, I saw the walls of my hotel room and ordered room service once so I did actually see the hallway, but nothing else. On the flight home I was so rested that my retake of the check flight went great. I appeared coherent and lucid, and I knew all the answers. Passed with flying colors, as they say.

During the entire flight home, I was exceedingly frustrated about not being able to sightsee on my first trip outside America. And exceedingly excited about the fact that this was the coolest job in the whole world.

I remember thinking after just one flight,
I would pay them to let me do this job
.

O
nce I got out of training, I began to appreciate the glamorous aspect of my job. I remember walking with twelve other flight attendants through San Francisco International Airport. We were all in matching uniforms: dark two-piece suits. All of us wore the same amount of makeup, and we were tall and slender (the weight restrictions were strict). We were all perfectly groomed with straight teeth and the same hairdos, sprayed into perfect puffs. We walked in step and carried the same matching accessories. Crowds parted. Crowds stared. It
was fun. I felt like something other than a poor, formerly homeless wannabe writer.

Soon after getting out of training, I realized another benefit of being a flight attendant. It had to do with my secret desire to be the life of the party—or a stand-up comedian. I could be funny on the plane and the people loved me. So I developed a little comedy routine. I’d use the same jokes over and over, and people would laugh their heads off. My jokes were simple. Like when we were in minor turbulence, I’d pick some slender guy and say, “Sir, you’re going to have to sit still, you’re rocking the entire aircraft.”

Or I’d be picking up trash in the aisle of the aircraft and say, “Trash? Trash?” And then, I’d look right at someone and say, “It’s not a personal comment. Trash?”

People laughed so hard at my jokes, I thought I was ready for Vegas. It was years later, when I tried actual stand-up at The Comedy Club in Los Angeles, that I realized I wasn’t quite as funny as I thought. It turns out, if you take 180 people and strap them into a seat for eight hours, they’ll laugh at anything.

A
lmost every day of my job, as I stand outside the aircraft boarding a flight, a passenger will run up and say to me, “Did my mother get on?”

I don’t know this person’s mother. I don’t know this person. I assume the mother is a woman. And occasionally, I’m correct in assuming she might be older than the passenger. But to determine who this particular mother might be, I have to
ask questions. “What is her name? What does she look like? Is she booked on this flight?”

I have a wing-sister who is a jokester. Whenever she gets asked that question, she pulls out two old photos she keeps in her pocket. She holds them up and says, “Which one is she, sir?”

S
everal flight attendants and I were sitting in the back of the plane waiting for a mechanic to come fix whatever was holding our aircraft on the ground. We began talking about the most embarrassing thing that had happened to us during a trip.

My friend Paula won the prize. This is Paula’s story, as she told it.

“It was the first flight of my career. You know how nervous you are on your first flight. We were doing Mexico City roundtrips”—we call them turns—“out of Los Angeles. We were on our way back and my stomach was killing me. I just didn’t feel well. It was probably nerves.”

“I was serving dinner on a 727 where the passengers sit three-across. When I reached over to serve the ten-year-old boy sitting by the window, he said something to me in Spanish. He was speaking so softly I didn’t hear him, so I leaned in close to him and asked him to repeat what he had just said. He looked at me—and then he threw up. All over my head, shoulders, and my hand, because in those days we wore scoop-necked uniforms, and I was holding the top of my uniform as I leaned over the people in C and D seats.

“I was stunned. For a few seconds, I just looked at the kid with whatever had been in his stomach dripping off me.

“Then—and I have to tell you I’m mortified I did this, but the sound of vomit gets to me, and the smell, and I wasn’t feeling well, anyway—I just…well, threw up back on him.”

At this point, we all screamed,
“No!
That didn’t happen!”

“It did,” she said. “It was so embarrassing, and being my first flight and all, I thought I was going to get fired.”

Paula went on to tell us that she cleaned up the mess as best she could and changed clothes. She helped the little boy
clean up, and she tried to apologize. And she was sweating just having to tell her supervisor about the incident.

“But,” she said, “the supervisor was laughing so hard, I didn’t even get a mark on my folder.”

M
y fellow flight attendants and I soon became pretty relaxed on the airplane. So relaxed that we sometimes played jokes on passengers we knew. One was the overhead bin joke, where we’d climb into an overhead bin before people boarded and then jump out at unsuspecting passengers as they
opened the bin to store their luggage. We played this joke on new-hire flight attendants and pilots stowing luggage for their first-check ride.

One day I had just climbed into the overhead bin at 37C because the brother of my fellow flight attendant would be traveling with us, and she wanted to “surprise” him. The door hadn’t been snapped shut for more than one minute when I heard tapping and a stage whisper, “Marsha, get out of the bin! Get out of the bin now!”

Then the bin door opened and I yelled, “Gotcha!” No one moved. I was facing three Secret Service men—not the flight attendant’s brother—who were now talking furiously into their wrists.

“We’ve got her. Roger. Yes, we see her now. Extra flight attendant found in 37C. No, not
at 37C. In bin 37C
. Exiting bin now. Correct. Flight attendant is climbing down from bin. Roger. Over and out.”

Hey, how could I know that former president Gerald Ford was traveling First Class on our flight that day? Or that his Secret Service agents would do a preflight security sweep, which included accounting for every flight attendant?

I was asked to produce ID and an explanation as to why I appeared to be stowed away in the overhead bin. I wanted to make a joke and say, “Hey, you’re not the only one
checking for bugs,” but no one appeared to be in the right mood.

At any rate, it was a long time before we ever played the overhead bin joke again.