My Misspent Youth (7 page)

Here is a brief, heartbreaking story about carpet. I once loved a great man. He treated me with that rare combination of adoration and decency best known to characters that were once played by Jimmy Stewart and are now played by Kevin Costner. He showed up at my door with flowers. He embarrassed me in front of the mailman by sending me letters addressed “To My Sweetie” on the envelope. He could have been the one were it not for the sad fact that he could never, ever have been the one. For a brief period during our two-year relationship, I fantasized about our wedding: a Wyeth-esque outdoor affair, tents and mosquito netting, and a string quartet playing Bach in a wheat field. I would wear a 1920s-era lace dress with a dropped waist and go barefoot. Friends would toast scintillatingly. The
New York Times
would run a Vows column with a headline like “Passion on the Plains.” But such an event would never come to pass. He was, despite his old-fashioned ways and gentlemanly demeanor, a reception hall and DJ type of man. He listened to Yanni. He enjoyed the television show
Wings.
His house had carpet and he was not bothered by it. He had, in fact, paid to have it installed. Though I believe to this day that his soul, at its core, is as pure and as capable of embracing my required snobberies as is the soul of any man with oak floors, it was shrouded in carpet. It was suffocating in pale-blue shag and our love was eventually subsumed under an expanse of Scotch-guarded fibers.

Carpet is the near miss, the ever-present land mine, the disaster that looms on the horizon. It’s the efficiency apartment you’ll be forced to move into if the business fails, the marriage collapses, the checks stop coming in, and the wolf breaks down the door and scratches up those precious polished floors. Carpet can be there when you least expect it; some of your best friends could have it. It could be the bad news at the end of the third date; sprawling across the bachelor pad from wall to wall, it’s what makes you decide not to go past first base. When I take a risk, what I put on the line are my essential, uncarpeted conditions. To venture into the unknown is to hazard a brush with the carpeted masses. They taunt and threaten from the sides of the road, their split-levels and satellite dishes forming pockmarks on the prairie, their luxury condo units driving up the cost of living.

Where there’s carpet, there’s been a mistake. Where there’s carpet, there’s Mungers. The arrangement is temporary. The clock is ticking. Carpet is a rental car, a borrowed jacket you’d never buy for yourself, the neighbor’s key ring, with some tacky trinket attached, that you keep in case she locks herself out. Carpet makes everybody a stranger. Carpet tells me it’s time to pack up and move on. When there’s carpet, every street gets me lost. Every restaurant is a Denny’s. Every room is a hotel room. My feet can’t quite touch the floor. I am so far away from home.

I
NSIDE THE
T
UBE

They gather in small, blonde clusters at the gate, sipping coffee from the Terminal C Nathan’s Famous, their clean hair swept carefully out of their clean faces. They cannot possibly be real, these uniformed creatures, these girls with matching luggage and matching shoes, these warm-blooded extensions of that hulking, spotless aircraft.

Neither passenger nor pilot, the flight attendant is the liaison between the customer and the machine. She is somehow blonde even when she’s not blonde, a girl even when she’s a guy. Part bimbo and part Red Cross, she is charged with the nearly impossible task of calming the passenger down while evoking enough titillation to suggest that there remains, even in the twenty-first century, something special about air travel.

Flight attendants are fetishized and mocked in equal measure. They are both fantasy and punch line, the players in hackneyed sex jokes and the guides through smoke and fire to the emergency exit. Since the beginning of commercial flying, back in the 1930s when flight attendants were required to be registered nurses, the profession has symbolized an unearthly female glamour. Until the 1960s, flight attendants were not allowed to be married. On many airlines they were required to have a college degree and speak a foreign language. Their skin was periodically checked for blemishes, their hair was not allowed to touch their collars, and if they were, say, 5′4″, they could not weigh more than 115 pounds. Until the 1970s they were called “stewardesses,” real girls who were treated like ladies.

There is no small amount of perverted nostalgia in all of this. When people today talk about what’s happened to flying, about why any given transcontinental flight bears a heavy resemblance to a Greyhound bus ride from Memphis to Louisville, they often claim to be talking largely about the absence of ethereal waitresses serving seven-course meals in first class. No longer does the starchy hiss of the uniform sound a note of almost military kinkiness. Back in the old days, flight attendants were as sleek and identical as F-16s flying in formation. Back in the old days, they may as well have all been twin sisters. There was a time when you could pinch their asses and they’d buy you a martini. These days they will stop serving you drinks when you’ve had enough. If you do anything that they feel interferes with their duties, you could be charged with a felony. There are restraints in the cockpit should such an occasion arise. These days you have your fat ones, your ugly ones, and worst of all, your old ones. It used to be they had to quit when they turned thirty. Today, with no retirement age, there are a few as old as seventy-seven.

But even now, perhaps even this morning when you boarded some generic flight to some generic airport, you looked at them in search of some whiff of the past—you looked for a cute one, someone who might like you more than the others, someone to whom you pretended you might give your phone number. You wanted to consider these possibilities but chances are those possibilities simply weren’t there. She’s not in your league. Her sole education requirement is a GED. She’s some bizarre relic. And, like the fact that your flight was oversold and delayed and some used-car salesman in a Wal-Mart suit inexplicably ended up seated next to you in business class, you are more than a little heartbroken about the whole thing. This is because the sex appeal of the flight attendant, like the sex appeal of flying, is gone forever. As much as you act like you have it over her, you somehow still long for an earlier era, back when there was no question that she had it over you.

*   *   *

The sky is a strange place to be. Eustachian tubes are tested up here. The human lung is not designed for the air outside. The food is nuked, the forks are plastic, the dirty words have been edited out of the movie. There’s a good chance that the flight attendants, who may be hamming it up during the oxygen mask announcement and giggling in the rear galley like sauced-up Tri Delts, have not met each other until they boarded the plane.

When I board an evening flight on US Airways from Philadelphia to San Francisco, accompanied by a flight attendant who agreed to participate in a magazine article, no one else on the crew has met me or had any warning that I’d be coming along. I tell them that I am writing a story about flight attendants for a glossy men’s magazine (the story, in the end, was killed by the editor because it lacked the prurient details he’d hoped for). After a few requests that I change their names—“I want to be called Lola!”—we are getting along like old high school pals. They’re connoisseurs of bonding, high skilled socializers. If a reporter showed up to my workplace and announced that she’d be there for the next thirty-six hours I’d duck out for coffee and never come back. But there’s plenty of coffee here already. They can’t leave and their ability to deal with this fact is pretty much Job One.

This is called a turnaround, a day-and-a-half stint during which this crew will fly from their base in Philadelphia to San Francisco and then to Charlotte before returning to Philadelphia. We are on a Boeing 757—a “seven-five,” in airline speak. All of the flight attendants are in their thirties or forties, four are women, three of whom are married, and two are men. All have been flying for at least ten years.

To contemplate what it means to be a flight attendant for ten or more years is to consider, after getting past the initially ludicrous notion of serving drinks at 37,000 feet, the effects of the relatively recent, popular tendency to put flying in a category that also includes walking and driving. To say that flight has become pedestrian is something of a Yogi Berra-ism. But to say that air travel has infused itself into the human experience without leaving marks or building up potentially problematic immunities is to view technology in a Pollyanna-like manner that may have gone out of fashion when applied to phenomena like the Internet and surveillance cameras but continues to thrive in the realm of travel. When it comes to technology’s hold on our quality of life, cyber porn may be insidious, but jetliners are by now almost quaint, older than Peter, Paul, and Mary, as common as the telephone.

This is true and not true, a dilemma that often emerges when, as is the case in air travel, the glorious evolves into the stultifying and we are forced to come up with ways to re-experience, if not the original novelty, some form of entertainment. This is where the flight attendant appears onstage. When flying began, she was part of the show, as slick as the aircraft itself. Even through the 1970s, passengers were moneyed and expensively outfitted; ladies wore gloves on DC-4s. To deplane using a movable staircase was, for a moment, to do as rock stars and presidents did, and respect was paid accordingly. The idea has always been that the persona of the flight attendants should reflect that of the flying public. In that respect, little has changed. The only difference is that today the flying classes seem a little more public than in the past. The flight attendant, too, is given to the bad manicures and bad perms of any girl next door. She’s still part of the entertainment, it’s just that this is a lower-budget production. This may gnaw at passengers, but those holding $99 tickets to Miami may do well to look at the larger picture. Perhaps the flight attendant wouldn’t remind us so glumly of the girl next-door if so many of us didn’t live close to the airport.

Still, passengers pay attention to flight attendants, not during the safety announcements, when they’re supposed to, but later, while flight attendants are eating dinner or reading
Cosmo
or doing normal things that are somehow rendered out of sync because of the uniform. During our five hours and twenty-six minutes to San Francisco, we hit some “light chop” twice—airlines discourage pilots from using the word “turbulence,” which frightens passengers—and the seat belt sign goes on. Passengers get up anyway. They visit the flight attendants in the galleys. They ask for playing cards and more drinks and hand over their garbage to be thrown out. Wayward business travelers amble around the first-class galley and take stabs at the same kinds of conversations they impose on people sitting next to them. “Where do you live? Do you like it there?” and then “Could you get me another drink?”

Even as he accepts an empty pretzel bag from an unshaven, Reebok-wearing passenger, Carl, who is working in the main cabin tonight, manages to put a spin on his role as service provider. “We’re a few notches below celebrity status,” he says. “The moment people see a crew member, their eyes are on you constantly. People will come into the galley and just stare while you eat dinner. You have to watch everything do you and say.”

Carl is thirty-six and has been a flight attendant with US Airways for twelve years. I am asking him questions in the aft galley (“aft” is used to describe anything located behind the wings) where he and Jim, his friend and colleague, have fashioned a seat for me out of a stack of plastic crates because I’m not allowed to sit in the flight attendant-reserved jump seat. They have poured salad dressing left over from first class into a plastic cup and are eating it off of their fingers. “We have a needy bunch tonight,” Carl says. “But not as bad as if we were going to L.A. Certainly nothing like Florida.”

A lot of call buttons have been ringing tonight. A lot of people cannot seem to figure out how to use their headsets to watch the in-flight screening of
Tomorrow Never Dies.
A fleshy, spacy eleven-year-old boy repeatedly visits the aft galley asking for more soda, more peanuts, some ice cream. “You’re a pretty demanding kid,” Carl says with just enough smirk so that I notice but the kid does not. Carl and Jim disagree as to whether the boy qualifies for the unofficial passenger shit list that is compiled on every flight.

“He’s a pain in the ass,” says Carl.

“No, he’s obviously slow,” says Jim. “I feel sorry for him.”

Still, no one is punching anyone in the nose tonight. No one has threatened a flight attendant with bodily harm or become obstreperously drunk or engaged in the sort of activity that would merit a presentation of those restraints stored in the cockpit. The fact that these sorts of incidents are ascending at an alarmingly steep angle, mostly for those pesky reasons having to do with the invasion of a public mentality into what was once perceived as a private space, dominates much of what is written and discussed about flight attendants these days. It is part of the reason that I am here in the aft galley dipping my finger in salad dressing tonight, the other part having to do with discerning whether the deglamorization of the job is the cause or the symptom of all that aggression.

What is at first most noticeable about flight attendants is the chronic disorientation that follows them both on and off the job. With work space measured by aisle widths and hours either stolen or protracted by virtue of time changes and date lines, flight attendants occupy a personal space that must prove stronger than the artificial and ever-changing scope of “real” time and geography. Flight attendants are always tired and usually bored and, though they are required to wear a working watch at all times, understand distinctly the difference between knowing what time it is and feeling what time it is. A forty-five minute break on a transatlantic flight demands the ability to fall asleep instantly on the jump seat. They must learn to literally sleep on cue.