Coffee, Tea or Me? (32 page)

This stewardess, forgetting her loop or pill or whatever it was she was using, became pregnant by the Madison Avenue flash. She told him about her condition on a Friday night.

“Give me a few days to run this thing around the track, honey,” he said thoughtfully. “Let’s swish it around a little before we drink it.”

She hadn’t heard from him by Wednesday of the next week so tried to call him at the agency. She was told he no longer worked there but could be found at another agency.

She called the other agency and was told he had never started there because the account never materialized. But they thought he was with a pharmaceutical agency. She tried there and found he was out of town.

She tried him again the following week but he was no longer employed by the pharmaceutical agency. They didn’t know where he was.

The gal had her condition taken care of, a course of action always under great debate when we get together, and finally ran into her ad hero at Friday’s, a bar on First Avenue. She let him know just how furious she was.

“Well, sweetie, you know how it is. I wasn’t running from you. This agency business is a tough sell, tough sell. Run all the time. By the way, I just put in a new $597.95 amplifier in my pad. Let’s go up and have a drink and talk about old times.”

“Let’s not rush into things,” she replied. “Why not run some juice through your friggin’ $597.95 amplifier and see if it blows up.”

Assuming you don’t misplace your loop, admen can be good for a fast night on the town. We find that admen make more pitches to us than any other group of men. They all have a strange attraction to stewardesses, which is part of their insecurity. An adman never dates just
a girl.
She has to have a handle, an image for him to date. That’s why admen, when recounting past dates, will always say she was a stewardess, a model, an artist, a bunny, a writer, an actress, a director, or an heiress. It’s kind of sad, really. A
girl
just won’t do.

Their insecurity shows up in other ways, too. Everything they own has a price tag on it. They have a $597.95 amplifier, a $200 chair, a $107.25 watch, or a $210 suit. And until you get on to this dribble, you tend to be as impressed as they are. But then again, admen are impressed easily. So are their bosses and clients who prefer their underlings to look right rather than think right.

But there are worse dates.

Asking a civil servant what he’d like to drink is like trying to get service from one when you’re renewing your driver’s license. He’ll chitchat with his seat partner, look out the window, clean his nails, and light a cigar. After you’ve asked him for the fourth time, he’ll look at you and say, “What do you want?”

Civil servants are a small part of our life. They aren’t inclined to make a pitch and the few that do try fail mightily. But identifying them correctly helps build up our point score.

A stewardess usually takes the first step in her own seduction where a lawyer is concerned. Everyone in the world has a legal problem of one sort or another and wants free legal advice.

Consequently, all a lawyer need do is announce his profession at the earliest part of the flight. This takes him out of the running as far as the identification game is concerned, but puts him strongly in the running as far as the evening is concerned.

“I have a silly question and I’ll bet you’re tired of being asked silly questions but would you mind being asked another?” the stewardess will ask at an opportune moment.

“Go right ahead,” replies the lawyer.

“Well, you see, three of us have this rent-controlled apartment in New York and the lease is up soon and we want to know whether the landlord can raise our rent now.”

“Well, there are many factors to be considered here. This kind of a situation can be long and costly where the courts are concerned. That is to say, deeming your stand legal, in view of the validity of the elements heretofore contained in the lease instrument, might as well be construed as a de facto admission. See?”

“I think so.”

“But I think it would be silly to spend all the legal fees required over this situation. Look, I’ll call you when I come back to New York and we’ll set a date when I can come up, look at the apartment, and check the lease.”

“You have to actually look at the apartment?”

“Of course. That is to say, if, in fact, there is evidence of landlord neglect in certain vulnerable areas, we may be able to ascertain the validity of the entire clause in the lease instrument, as opposed to a part or portion thereof as might affect the entire agreement.”

“Here’s my number. And bless you.”

It’s hard to tell a musician unless he’s carrying a bass fiddle. When he does carry one, you’re in for trouble.

Most airlines will sell a bass fiddle a seat at half the usual fare. This instrument is large and fragile, and its owner must carry his bass fiddle in this manner. Putting it in the cargo area of the plane would be certain disaster.

We had a jazz bass player on a flight to Los Angeles where he was to appear at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He carried his wooden seat companion, strapped it in with great care, and settled back for the flight. The fiddle caused no trouble until mealtime.

“Hey chick, where’s the meat for my friend?” he asked.

“That’s funny, sir. But obviously we can’t give a meal to a bass fiddle.”

“You’re puttin’ me on, chick. Like I bought a seat for my friend and he should get a meal, like.”

“That is so funny. But we can’t.”

“Oh, like, I’m gonna flip baby all over this big eagle.”

“All right. I’ll get your friend a meal.”

“Hey, wait a minute. Like, you forgot to serve him his juice, too.”

“His juice.”

“Yeh, like, his goon-water, you know. His
booze.
”

“Absolutely not. Food, yes. But I know you’re just going to drink his two drinks and that’s against the rules.”

“The rules? The rules? To be broken, baby, to be broken. One seat’s worth two drinks, right?”

“I’ll check with the captain.”

“No, no, no, swinger. Don’t upset our flyboy. I’m like shook enough already. Just bring my friend two gins on the rocks. No peel.”

We were tempted to pour the drinks into the monster strapped next to the musician. But we didn’t. Better a drunk bass fiddle than an upset musician.

Generally, musicians are good passengers. And their approach can always be counted on to be funny, different, and unobtrusive.

Teachers have managed to con the world for too long a time. The general conception we all have about teachers is that they represent purity of mind and body, a dedicated group of men and women interested only in educating the nation’s youth.

But they’re not that way. If you’ve been around at all, you know that female teachers rank among the world’s greatest swingers. Put a knowledgeable guy in a bar loaded with women of different backgrounds and he’ll head for the teacher. He knows.

The same goes for the masculine version of the teaching profession. Both sexes are weary of being looked at constantly by their boards of education for any violation of the highest code of personal conduct. Put them on an airplane where there isn’t likely to be that scrutiny and you’ve got a man or woman on the prowl.

Married men working as teachers are even more prone to swing. They have both the school board and their wives on their back, and succeeding in accomplishing a little action on the side is as welcome as a pay increase.

The specific approach a teacher will make depends a great deal on what he teaches. If he teaches business law, he’ll take the lawyer’s tack. Math teachers will go after you à la engineer. And so on.

All the traveling salesmen jokes are true, at least based on what we’ve observed. The unique thing about a salesman is that he isn’t at all concerned whether he scores with you or not. He has plenty of girls in the cities he visits, and his interest in you reflects his need to keep his stable fully stocked.

There is very little we can add to all the stories about salesmen. It seems the majority of our passengers are salesmen and, consequently, we’re on the receiving end quite often. We suppose salesmen have become “old hat.” Other men now have expense accounts and are good talkers. The day of the traveling salesman knocking over girls like bowling pins is gone.

Salesmen are generous to stewardesses. Very few flights go by on which we don’t receive some sample from some salesman. His samples don’t buy us but they’re nice to receive.

Everyone has his own special pitch and to attempt to be all-inclusive in this chapter would be impossible. We’d end up covering such professions as undertakers, the clergy, mailmen, grape pickers, and male secretaries.

Despite the many bad thoughts we have about many men, we usually end up marrying one. That’s the way it’s supposed to go, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Should we be asked to divulge what we consider the perfect pitch a man can make to us, we’d both agree that a courteous, reserved man with a sense of humor and a respect for the difficult job we perform would rank at the top of the list. Of course, climbing aboard our airplane with a copy of this book in hand will surely elicit some conversation from any stewardess. You might even end by checking the validity of what we’ve said.

We belong to a union. It seems a good idea. As stewardesses, we’re subject to an incredible number of company policies and rulings that can make life miserable. Our union tries to make our lives easier. It gives us the comfort of numbers, in a group with common problems and goals. Rachel and I have never been involved in a strike by our own stewardess union. But we’ve been affected by strikes by other unions within the airline.

We remember one strike when all the maintenance men walked out. They wanted their mother’s birthday off or some such holiday. Naturally, without these people to fix the airplanes when they got sick, the airline couldn’t operate. They immediately put all employees on half-pay, threatening that if the strike wasn’t settled within fifteen days, we’d all go on no-pay. It wasn’t a happy thought.

On the sixteenth day of the strike, money stopped coming. That meant a scramble for rent, food, and cosmetics funds. It was at this gray point in our lives that we realized the value of having a steady beau, preferably one with a well-paying job. The girls who did enjoy such a situation made out pretty well.

The strike also gave the hoarders the last laugh on those of us who had scorned them for their frugality. A fringe benefit of being a stewardess is the chance to walk off a flight occasionally with a couple of filets, a lobster tail or two, miniature packages of cigarettes, and whatever bottles of booze the first-class passengers didn’t drink. Usually when we’d come home with an unusually good haul, we’d throw a party. Not so with the stockpilers. Their food would be carefully wrapped in foil, labeled with their name, and placed in the freezer for their own use. The miniature bottles would find a secure place in a locked drawer and the cigarettes would nestle alongside the bottles. Most of us think of this kind of Hooverism as distasteful and even antisocial. Except during a no-pay period.

We managed though, with the nurturing of the stew-bums who gladly seized this opportunity to further entrench themselves in our minds and hearts. Stew-bums have saved many a stewardess during a strike. There were rent parties, too, to which we invited everyone we knew. Each guest brought a bottle and five dollars for the cause—our cause. It was all marvelous fun and the take from such a party often far exceeded the rent needs.

In retrospect, some strikes were fun times. But others weren’t, especially when the strikes were on other airlines. As soon as another airline that flies routes also served by our line goes on strike, we beef up service to those cities. This is all very neighborly. But it puts a severe strain on stews and crew to deliver the extra service.

Once in a true picture of management ingenuity, the airline brought back ex-stewardesses to fly during such a strike. Rachel spotted one of these rehired stewardesses in the terminal as we walked toward our flight.

“The uniform looks funny with the white hair,” she commented casually.

I saw what she meant. “It’s not white hair, Rachel. Just sort of gray.”

“It’s white, Trudy. She must be at least forty.”

Rachel was right. The stewardess in question had obviously been away from the airline for more than just a few years. To our surprise, she was flying our trip with us. She was very pleasant, smiled a lot, and seemed willing to help.

We were off the ground and ready to bring the meals out of the galley when we realized our white-haired stewardess wasn’t around. We looked for her in the cabin and found her chatting with a businessman.