Authors: Heather Poole
“Me?” I asked just to make sure, because surely it couldn’t be me. I was a flight attendant! I showed him my crew ID to prove it. We were detained while they checked our luggage with a fine-toothed comb. That was three years ago. There wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t think about him.
The old lady with the Stevie Wonder glasses patted my hand reassuringly. “Oh darling, he wasn’t worth your time. You’re much better off without him.”
I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me—in color. I believed her. “Thank you,” I said, trying to hold back the tears. My mascara wasn’t waterproof and I didn’t want to have to redo my makeup before takeoff.
“You about ready to board?” asked the agent standing between the cockpit and first class.
“Almost!” I called out, wedging myself between the bulkhead wall and the last row of first class and reaching between the seats for the woman’s hand before it was too late. “Tell me more. What about my future? Can you tell me about that?”
“That, my dear, is rather interesting.” Leaning toward me she whispered, “Most people are afraid of the truth. Of what lies ahead. I don’t know why. The truth is all we have.” I could see my distorted reflection in the black frames vigorously nodding back at me. “Now, listen closely. I’ve been fortunate enough to hold the hands of many famous people. The thing that sets them apart from everyone else is their powerful life force. I can honestly say that I feel the same thing when I hold your hand. You’re very creative. You’re going to do great things.” She patted my hand twice. “You have a message. Your name will be well known.”
“I’m going to send them down now!” said the agent, who hadn’t bothered to wait for my reply.
I called back, “Okay!”
Now I was confused. I had no idea what the heck the psychic passenger was talking about. Maybe she really was just a regular old crazy lady dripping in jewels and carrying very expensive luggage. But then it came to me. I could feel my heart beating wildly.
“I’m an actress! Well, really, I’ve only been doing extra work, but—”
“No. That’s not it.”
The first few passengers began walking on board. I tried to squat down so they couldn’t see me. “That’s got to be it. I’ve been taking acting lessons.”
“I said, that’s not it.”
“But I’ve been getting really lucky. Last week I got a line in a movie and—”
“You’re a writer. Tic Tac?” she asked, shaking the little plastic box at me.
A writer? I held my hand out and let a few green mints drop into my palm. “I don’t know about that. I’m not a good writer.”
Pointing a crooked finger at me, she stated, “That is not for you to decide. It is not your business to determine how good you are. That is for the world to decide!”
There was one more thing I needed to know about before the rest of the passengers made it on board. One really important thing. “What about love? Will I ever find it?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
A passenger seated a few rows up turned around in his seat and asked, “Can you take my jacket, miss?”
I smiled at the man and said, “Oh, sure. I’ll be there in just a minute.” When he turned all the way back around, I whispered between the seats, “How soon? This month? This year?”
She took my hand in hers and squeezed. “I predict a proposal three months after the New Year.”
Three months after the New Year? But that was soon! The sooner the better, I told myself. Quickly I did the math in my head and gasped. Eight months! I did the math again, just to make sure I got that right. It was still eight months away. The UN guy. It had to be the guy who worked at the United Nations. I’d just met him online. We’d already had two dates and I really liked him a lot.
“Darling, take a deep breath. All great loves come from friendship. You must remain patient. Let it grow. Your life is about to completely change.” She yawned and closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again until we landed in Seattle.
I didn’t really believe in psychics, or even nonpsychics who just had the gift, but on my layover I could not get our conversation out of my head. I took a brisk walk down to Pike Place Market to wander around and get a little fresh air. I ordered a latte and then found a place to sit outside the coffee shop. Normally I enjoy people watching, but that day, pen over paper, I decided that if I was supposed to be a writer I should probably start writing. Problem was, I didn’t have anything to write about! For a split second I thought about writing about my job, but that would be boring. Who would want to read about that? That’s when the idea hit me: a dark comedy about a serial killer flight attendant. I decided to call it
Stewardeath
.
The last thing the psychic had told me was my life would completely change. Boy, did it ever. Thirty days after she walked on board my flight, something horrible happened. On September 11, 2001, I landed in Zurich early in the morning. I was on vacation. After a short nap, followed by a quick shower, I sat on the end of the hotel bed with wet hair and turned on the television. With a hairbrush resting on my thigh, I watched in horror as the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. I did not move from that spot for hours. Being so far away only made it worse. I didn’t care that at that moment Switzerland was probably the safest place on Earth. All I wanted to do was go home.
Even though I’d been told by an airline representative not to bother going to the airport as a standby passenger, I went anyway so I could get my name on the list. I guess others had the same idea because I wound up being number nine-hundred-and-something on the list. I could have bought a full-fare ticket in coach for $8,000 that would have guaranteed a departure on the twenty-first if I weren’t broke from having to pay a hotel every night and an overpriced espresso and croissant at the airport each morning. After two weeks of checking in and out of a Swiss hotel and lugging my bags on and off a train to get to the airport and then back to the hotel every day, I finally made it back to the United States. I landed at an airport in Texas because my flight to Chicago had been canceled. Instead of continuing on to New York, I decided to stay with my parents for a while. I had the time off because my route, the flight I’d flown for almost two years, New York–Vancouver, had been wiped off my schedule for the month, never to return again because it was an unprofitable route that catered to cruise lines. I was lucky because I got a little time off that most of my colleagues did not. They had to go right back to work. Of course, there were a few that quit, like my friend and ex-roommate Jane, who was now married and pregnant, but the majority of flight attendants I knew soldiered on. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to fly in the days right after.
I returned to work less than a month after so many people lost their lives. As I stepped out of the Kew Gardens cab in front of my apartment building in Queens, the smell in the air was strange and unexplainable. It lingered for months. The black soot that accumulated on our windowsill in the apartment had to be cleaned off every day. A pile of cardboard moving boxes sat on the curb, waiting to be loaded into a truck. Every morning they were there, the same boxes with different shipping addresses written on the label, different neighbors dispersing to different faraway cities. When I noticed a few of them were headed for Japan, I felt sad knowing the opera singer I’d never met other than a quick hello in the elevator would no longer be filling our hallway with beautiful music. As people left New York in droves and the odd smell refused to dissipate, my colleagues and I went back to work, back on the airplanes. And while we did so, memorials for coworkers who had lost their lives were set up in Operations.
During one memorable flight into New York, we were low over the city, and all the passengers were glued to the windows on one side of the aircraft to get a good look out the window at where the World Trade Center had once been. A dark hole on the ground was the only thing left. It smoldered for far too long. I wondered if the pilots were tipping the wing of the airplane in its direction in respect to what had happened.
Flying had changed. We were all scared. Conversation on the jump seat only seemed to be about one thing. During takeoff, one flight attendant sitting beside me asked, “What are you going to do if something happens?”
I had a few ideas of what I
could
do, but I didn’t know exactly what I
would
do
,
if, in fact, it came to that. God, how many times did I pray sitting on the jump seat during takeoff that it wouldn’t come to that? And if it did, I prayed it would happen before we finished the service because I didn’t want to have to do all that work and then die.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” said the voice beside me. I was so busy thinking about dying that I had forgotten he was there. He motioned to the insert of soda sitting on the linoleum floor beside the jump seat, an FAA no-no. Grabbing a can of Pepsi, he made quick and aggressive throwing motions. “Bam! Bam! Bam!”
“You’re going to kill them with Pepsi?” I asked.
“It’s better than nothing!”
Every flight attendant I met had some sort of plan, and each plan was more original and ingenious than the next. Broken wine bottles, hot coffee, and seat cushions became some of the weapons we could use. One flight attendant carried packets of salt and pepper to rub in their eyes. My weapon of choice also became a can of soda. But I wouldn’t be throwing it. I would place it inside a long sock that I would swing over my head like a lasso if anyone tried any funny business on one of my flights. I kept the sock and a can of soda hidden in the seat back pocket behind the last row of seats in whichever cabin I happened to be working that day.
Meanwhile, flight attendants and passengers came together like the rest of the world did. We were a team and everyone offered their support. There were times, only a few, when questionable things would happen. Like the time the dark-skinned man kept going in and out of the bathroom with a McDonald’s bag. It felt like he might be doing a “test run” to let others know how we would react if someone decided later on to hide a bomb housed in a McDonald’s bag in the bathroom. After we reported the guy, every suit from every agency on Earth met our flight at the gate in Los Angeles. After speaking to him for an hour, they didn’t arrest him, but we later learned that he had purchased a one-way ticket with cash. His passport had also just been issued to him. Was it also a coincidence that he would soon be going to school in Florida? Maybe. Maybe not. On that same flight there were three other Middle Eastern men, musicians who walked on board with three guitars. They kept switching seats in flight. We moved their instruments from the first-class closet behind the cockpit to the one located nearest the rear of the plane. Just to be safe. There were other times when passengers did things to obviously take advantage of the situation. An elderly gentleman from the Middle East sat in the first row of coach and kept his Koran and book about weapons displayed on his tray table for all to see. We ignored him, and his evil glare, as it was all too aggressive to be taken seriously. Plus, we knew there was a lawsuit just waiting to happen.
Even now, ten years later, whenever I hear about any accident involving an aircraft I’m taken back to that day in September. Most people don’t have to think about it every time they go to work the way I do. From the moment I step out of my shoes to go through airport security until the aircraft slides into the gate, I think about what happened to those planes. They were my planes. My coworkers. My passengers.
After 9/11 many flight attendants lost their jobs. The ones who stayed took pay cuts, watched days grow longer while layovers grew shorter, and began working flights staffed with FAA minimum crew. Things we took for granted, like pillows, blankets, and even a few airlines, slowly began to disappear. At yearly recurrent training we were taught something new: karate. We talked about throwing hot coffee at lunging terrorists along with other things I’m not at liberty to discuss.
If passengers weren’t afraid to fly, they could no longer afford to do so, so the airlines had to drastically lower ticket prices. A one-way ticket could now be had for the same price as a pair of designer jeans. In July 2011 my airline advertised a fare from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for $46. That’s about the same price it costs to take a cab from JFK Airport to Manhattan. Because airlines are determined to fill every seat by offering rock-bottom airfare specials, commuters have a difficult time getting to work. I’ve seen flight attendants trying to get to work come to blows over who’s next in line for the one and only jump seat on a flight. In an effort to stay in business, free food in coach was the first thing to go. Airlines no longer had to pay for the food, or the food’s weight in fuel, or the caterers who delivered the food to the aircraft, or the extra flight attendants required to serve the food.
Slowly but surely people returned to the skies. First-class closets were taken away and replaced with extra passenger seats. Ticket prices stayed low, and everyone and their grandmother could afford to fly, many times a year. In the past it was during the summer that our flights were filled with kids, but after 9/11 our strictly summer passengers turned into year-round passengers. There’s no longer a busiest season of the year—it’s now a constant. Frequent fliers multiplied, so the airlines had to create a VIP top tier to separate the million milers from the three million milers. Flights were booked full and the lines at security grew. Passengers began losing their patience, not just with airport security but with one another. No longer did they remain seated on the plane when it arrived at the gate so those with tight connections could deplane first and not miss their flights. It didn’t take long before I started having flashbacks to an earlier time. It was like working at Sun Jet all over again, but now I had to dodge insults
and
keep a watchful eye on the cabin for up to fourteen hours on the job after an eight-hour layover at an airport hotel.
These days when passengers complain about “bad service,” I take it personally. There’s only so much I can do with the tools I’ve been provided. I work hard, harder than ever before, to do a job I still take pride in. The reality is that passengers are not getting bad service, they’re getting limited service—à la carte service. I’m still serving passengers the same way I was taught fifteen years ago. The only difference is, we charge $7 for a small bottle of wine and $10 for a turkey sandwich with chips in coach. My career changed to meet the demands of the flying public—cheap tickets. But now everyone seems to have buyer’s remorse, including my husband, who is a frequent flier who travels more than a hundred thousand miles each year for business. When we first met he used to joke around about hitting the jackpot: an unlimited amount of travel passes. Nine years later he prefers to pay for tickets.