Authors: Heather Poole
Georgia peeked back into the living room. “Hi! I’m Georgia and this is Heather! We’re moving in.”
Staring straight ahead she said, “Marge.” Georgia and I just looked at each other.
Not one to be easily deterred, Georgia sang, “Nice to meet you, Marge!”
“Likewise,” she mumbled. That was our cue to go check out our room.
Twin beds lined the walls, six of them, which meant there would be six of us sharing a closet, one teeny-tiny closet, without a door.
Georgia sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This just is not going to work!”
We had no choice but to make it work.
“Maybe we can purchase some cardboard drawers to place beside our beds,” I suggested, after noting that’s exactly what the others who were not there had done. After further inspection, I added, “What doesn’t fit inside our two drawers we can keep packed away in our suitcases under the bed.”
After we unpacked as much as we could, which wasn’t much, we decided to take a look around the big, dark, creaky house. The first floor consisted of the large bedroom where Georgia and I now lived, a living room where Marge continued to camp out for the next twelve hours, and a pretty big kitchen. I peeked inside the fridge and noticed that everything had been labeled with different names. Same went for the pantry. Upstairs we found three other bedrooms. These were large rooms that looked more like army barracks than actual bedrooms. Two rows of unmade bunk beds stretched across the floor from one end of the room to the other. The occupants of these rooms were nowhere to be found, but a couple of suitcases were lying on the floor against the wall, unzipped, with clothes eager to escape.
The bathroom, located on the same floor, was shared by all of us. Each night from that night on I’d march upstairs and scribble my name on the piece of paper that allotted ten-minute shower times throughout the day. There were so many of us sharing that one bathroom that no one took responsibility for cleaning it. The black-and-white checkered floor had turned black and gray. A ring of dirt always surrounded the bottom of the tub. The drain was always clogged with hair, so showers consisted of standing ankle deep in water. At first the ten-minute shower rule seemed impossible, but the bathroom was so disgusting I did not dare linger any longer than necessary. Rubber shower shoes soon became my best friend.
Because so many of us slept in the same room, and because there was more time to shower if we skipped using the mirror in the bathroom, we all wound up using the living room downstairs as a kind of dressing room. Two dressing tables were pushed against the wall between the sofa and the giant TV. Flight attendants with early sign-ins would pack their bags the night before and leave them, along with makeup and curling irons, on the living room floor so as not to bother everyone else in the house while getting ready.
For all I know, there could have been sixty flight attendants living in that house. It was hard to tell because there was so much coming and going at all hours of the day and night. With so many people in one house, you’d think the place might feel crowded, but it was just the opposite. Many nights I found myself alone. And depressed. In the beginning I tried to introduce myself to each new face that walked through the front door, but then I eventually realized I rarely ever saw the same face twice. I’d just smile and say hello . . . until I finally just stopped smiling or saying hello, like Marge.
Now for a little Crash Pad 101.
A flight attendant’s “base” is the city where his or her trips are scheduled to begin and end. “Commute, commuter, commuting” is the process of getting to work, in other words, flying to one’s base city. Some New York–based commuters even live as far away as Europe and Hawaii. For the most part, commuters work “commutable trips,” which are trips that depart late enough or return early enough that the flight attendant can get to work and home again on a single workday instead of wasting a precious “day off” commuting.
Flight attendant schedules average eighty hours per month—and by that I mean strictly flying hours. Time on the ground does not count toward a flight attendant’s pay. And the clock doesn’t officially start ticking until the aircraft door is shut and the airplane backs away from the gate; the flight attendant saying hello to you while you’re boarding is not getting paid yet. Because of this, delays affect flight attendants just as much as they do passengers, maybe even more so. But this is also the reason that we can—and frequently do—trade, drop, and pick up trips from one another. This allows commuters to “back up” their trips (fly several trips in a row), which enables them to maximize time at work and get more days off at home. Commuters tend to work “high-time” trips. These are trips that are worth a lot of hours, enabling them to get their hours in as quickly as possible. For example, one four-hour trip takes less actual time than two two-hour trips, even though the paid flying time is exactly the same.
When it comes to finding a place to stay between trips, a commuter doesn’t need much, since we spend very little time on the ground at our base cities. Enter the crash pad, a place where crew members literally crash between trips. These can be large apartments, a single room in a house, or even just a friend’s couch. Some crash pads only allow men, others house only women, and some are mixed. In a crash pad with both men and women, usually the men will sleep in one room and women will take another, but not all the time. On top of that, there are crash pads for flight attendants and crash pads for pilots. Even these can be a mix of both flight attendants and pilots, but if so, usually the flight attendants will stick together in one room while the pilots stay in another.
The cost of a crash pad can range anywhere from $100 to $300 a month, depending on the size of the space and the number of people sharing it. A few flight attendants might be willing to fork over a little extra cash for their own room, but most of us prefer sharing with several other flight attendants to bring down the cost. Bunk beds make this possible. This is yet another aspect of flight attendant life ruled by seniority. The best beds, bottom bunks away from doors and light, are claimed by the most senior crash pad dwellers. The upper bunks tend to belong to the most junior crash pad residents. Rooms are also determined by seniority. In a house with more than one level, the top floor is the most senior since there’s less traffic.
If you can believe it, there are even flight attendants who share beds to save even more money. These are called “hot beds.” Because flight attendants are constantly coming and going, hot beds are literally kept warm because they’re always in use. The way this works is simple. Before leaving for a trip, flight attendants will pack their pillows and sheets and store them in a tub with the rest of their belongings. Other flight attendants can use the bed on a first come, first served basis. There are sign-up sheets for hot beds at the house or apartment, so that flight attendants can sign up in advance on the nights they need them. This allows them to adjust their schedules accordingly.
Of course, a crash pad isn’t the only option for a commuter. Some stay at airport hotels offering discounted rates and free shuttle service to airline employees. To cut costs, they will share these rooms with other flight attendants, even flight attendants they don’t know. It doesn’t matter if two flight attendants sharing a room work for the same company or have ever met before. Because the job is the same wherever you go, regardless of where you work or who you work for—and because we know that everyone who works for an airline has had a background check—we tend to have an automatic sense of trust and respect. So when two flight attendants out of uniform discover each other during or after a flight, only to find out that neither of them has a crash pad, they very well might pair off and get a room together. The rules in this situation are simple: no small talk, set cell phones on vibrate, only take calls in the lobby, and be packed and ready to go before lights-out. It’s all business when it comes to commuting—get in, go to sleep, get out! Sometimes I wonder: in what other occupation, besides prostitution, do two strangers trust each other enough to spend the night together in a hotel room five minutes after initial contact?
On the most budget-conscious (and in my opinion, least comfortable) level, there’s even a small community of commuting flight attendants who have chosen to “live” at the airport between trips. Before 9/11 commuters could wander down to an empty plane to sleep in first class. Even though no one is “allowed” to live in flight operations, some flight attendants do, and have established a sorority-like environment. By day they take bus rides to Jamaica or Kew Gardens to get hair and nails done, or even better, trips to the city for fake designer bags in Chinatown. At night there are Chinese food takeout parties. The “quiet room” is where they sleep. It’s a dark room with several recliners lining the walls, and it’s normally meant as a resting area for crew members with a long sit time between flights.
There are many unwritten rules one must abide by when sleeping in flight operations. Most important is the chair located in the far right-hand corner of the room. It belongs to Kat. No one else is allowed to sit in it. God help the flight attendant who accidentally sits in Kat’s special spot, a chair that looks just like all the other chairs except that right next to it sits a fan and a small wooden chest of drawers, topped by a dainty lamp that she lugged on a flight all the way from home. If a flight attendant is too loud at night, Kat will take care of the situation by flashing the guilty party with her FAA-required flashlight. If a flight attendant unfamiliar with the quiet room seating arrangement settles into the wrong recliner, that flight attendant could very well wake up shaking violently as two other flight attendants push the recliner across the room and out of the way. Despite the seeming convenience of a night at flight operations, if one of these flight attendants has enough time to jump on a flight home and still make it back to work in time the following day, even if that means she’ll only spend five hours in her own bed, she will.
There are commuters, and even some noncommuters, who actually live in the employee parking lot at JFK. Their motor homes and campers line the back fence. If too many recreational vehicles begin to accumulate on the lot, the gods in charge of airport parking will intervene and run them off. No big deal. They’re always packed and ready to go to a nearby airport where they’ll set up camp again. The more adventurous, those without a permanent address, will drive across country and spend months at a time visiting new cities by day and sleeping in different airport parking lots at night.
And then there’s Tom, the only commuter I know without a crash pad who manages to live the ultimate high-roller lifestyle. By gambling in Vegas he’s acquired enough hotel comps to live for free in luxury on the strip for one week out of each month. He’s been doing this for years now by flying high time and arranging his days off into blocks of three. When he’s not living it up in Sin City, he’ll either visit his parents for a few days or crash on an old friend’s couch. Personal effects are stored in the trunk of a car he keeps parked in the employee lot or inside a gigantic suitcase that has yet to leave Ops. There’s a reason the airline won’t allow us into the frequent-flier lounges: We’d move in and never leave!
When we landed in Crew Gardens, Georgia and I were not “commuters.” (Not yet anyway.) Because we were new hires, we were on probation for six months straight—if we did anything at all wrong, we were at risk of losing our jobs. Even worse, we didn’t get travel benefits until our seventh month on the job! This is how Georgia and I came to actually live full-time in a crash pad. Now if we’d had our passes, we would have flown home as often as possible, that’s how homesick we were. Instead we were stuck in New York, sharing a large bedroom in a three-story house with who knows how many commuters and six other new hires who also did not have travel benefits! And when we weren’t flying, we were all there together 24/7.
Our crash pad on Beverly Road was owned and run by a man named Victor. He charged each of us $150 a bed. A retired TWA flight attendant from South America, he had a thick accent that was hard to understand. I figured he had to be in his midsixties, based on the handlebar mustache and two strands of greasy hair that covered his freckled head. He occupied the third floor, which consisted of a master bedroom bigger than most one-bedroom New York apartments, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom large enough to house two chairs and a claw-foot bathtub. Victor, unlike most male flight attendants I’ve encountered, was not gay—although he did enjoy soaking naked underneath a mountain of bubbles. I know this because the night we arrived Georgia and I went upstairs to introduce ourselves and pay the rent. We knocked on his bedroom door and a voice from a door down the hall told us to come in. We did. That was the first time we encountered him in the tub. Victor also had a tendency to hang out around the house wearing nothing but a mankini or a long satin robe. The guy was pretty laid-back, considering he kept the thermostat under lock and key and didn’t allow men inside the house (rule number 1: There were no other rules). Well, no men other than the two pilots who lived in the basement. I liked Victor.
Even though I had an idea of what life would be like living in a crash pad before I went to bed that first night in New York, it was still jarring to wake up and find Georgia missing from her bed, but two other women sleeping soundly nearby. How in the world did I not hear them come in? I threw on a robe and quietly tiptoed out of the bedroom, softly closing the doors behind me. In the living room I found Georgia sitting on the sofa drinking coffee. The television was off. There was no sign of Marge.
“I didn’t think you were ever gonna wake up. Better hurry and get dressed or we’re going to be late for flight attendant orientation!” Georgia chirped.
Flight attendant orientation was set up to familiarize us with the airports, all three of them: LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark. This way, before our first trip, we’d know how to get from the employee parking lot to the terminal, where to find flight operations, and how to go through airport security to get to the gates. Before running to get dressed, I offered to call for a cab.