Heather Poole: Cruising Attitude

IT’S ONE THING to get down on your hands and knees to crawl inside a dirty food cart in an attempt to find something, anything—half a cashew!—to eat after the captain announces a two-hour air traffic control hold in flight due to bad weather on the ground after you’ve already flown five and a half hours across country. True story. It’s quite another thing to collect a mountain of leftover Saran-wrapped sandwiches piled so high in your arms that you can actually rest your chin on top. Simply because you might get hungry later on. Flight attendants are a lot like survivalists. We’ve learned from experience to plan for the unexpected. We’re like raccoons, scavenging to survive.

“Hey, guys, look what I saved for us!” I exclaimed in front of the cockpit door. In my arms I held two hundred gourmet sandwiches.

After a very long pause, one of the pilots, the more handsome of the two, asked, “Why?”

Why? He had to be joking. Now it was I who looked at him strangely. “In case we get hungry on the layover.” Duh. For the life of me I could not figure out why they weren’t more excited about the sandwiches! Most of the pilots I had encountered up to this point were just as bad as the flight attendants, if not worse, when it came to leftover airplane food.

The problem with these two ungrateful pilots was this. They were employed by bazillionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. We were on board Mark’s GV, a fourteen-passenger Gulfstream jet. To put it in perspective, at the time Oprah also owned a private Gulfstream jet. Because of this plane he bought online, Mark made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for largest electronic transaction ever made. And there I was, in my own black slacks and red silk blouse, in need of a serious sandwich intervention on board a $41 million private jet.

The pilot sitting in the right seat, the nicer of the two, with five kids at home and a tendency to wish people a blessed day, finally spoke up. “You know you get a per diem, right?”

Per diem? What did that have to do with anything? At my airline, the per diem was about $1.50 an hour. It wasn’t enough to buy airport food, let alone room service, much less pay the monthly rent after purchasing a few pairs of DKNY opaque tights. Sure, designer hose are a little pricey for a girl on a budget, but they were the only ones I knew of that didn’t snag each time my leg rubbed against an aisle seat, so by spending money I was actually saving money. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

“Seventy-five dollars a day,” he said, snapping me back to reality.

“Wait… what? Oh my God—oops, sorry!—say that again!” I wanted to make sure I heard that right.

At that moment, the clouds parted, light came streaming down into the cockpit upon his bald head, and I could have sworn I heard angels singing in the background as he spoke. I almost dropped all two hundred sandwiches on the floor. Holy moly, hallelujah, it truly was a blessed day!

At my airline, it would have taken half a month to make what the Mark Cuban gig paid for two days of work. At my airline, I never would have dreamed of laying over anywhere for longer than thirty-six hours. Now I had three days off between two easy workdays. At $75 a pop, that totaled to a tremendous amount of food I could eat, and would eat, just because I could. All I had to do was keep track of my receipts.

That night, I agreed to meet the pilots for dinner at the hotel restaurant. As luck would have it the restaurant turned out to be a Benihana steakhouse. Things were looking up. I went a little crazy and ordered the shrimp and chicken combo, as well as a spicy tuna roll appetizer. Why not? For the first time in my flight attendant life, I could afford it. I even paid the extra fee for fried rice instead of white rice. Talk about living it up! To top it off I asked the waitress to bring me a Japanese beer, Sapporo. The big one.

Afterward, when the pilots made a beeline back to their rooms to call the wives and kids, I took a quick stroll across the street to a health food store I’d spotted earlier in the day. I placed a case of protein bars on the counter. Name a flight attendant who couldn’t use twenty-four grams of protein covered in yogurt? I’d need one in the morning. Back in the hotel room, I spotted a bottle of Evian water provided by the hotel in my room sitting on the dresser next to the television. After staring at it longingly for a good five minutes, I realized I didn’t have to lean over the sink and slurp water out of the tap. I could actually break the plastic seal and guzzle it down without having to worry about paying the five-dollar charge or running out to a convenience store to find the same brand in the same size before checkout. I’ll never forget how freeing it felt to crack the seal on the plastic cap. Water never tasted so good.

Without thinking, I picked up the remote and ordered a movie in my room the old-fashioned way. I pressed MENU, scrolled through a list of titles, chose a classic chick flick, and pushed OKAY. I can’t tell you how nice it was to skip spending twenty minutes unscrewing cable cords, crisscrossing the lines and then screwing them back in in a lame attempt to score free cable without getting electrocuted. Life didn’t get much better than this.

So how did I come to be lying on a king-size bed in a nice D.C. hotel, propped up against the fluffy white pillows watching the movie Serendipity starring John Cusack with the curtains drawn all the way back to reveal way off in the distance a beautiful view of a big white building, possibly the White House? (I wasn’t sure.) It’s kind of a strange story. I got the job through Mark’s brother, Brian, whom I had met on an online dating website a year earlier. Let the record state I never went out with Brian. Let the record also state that I think Brian had a crush on my sister, who was also using the same online matchmaking site, which may have had a little something to do with getting the job. Then again, Brian is a really nice guy, so he may have just been doing what he does best, connecting people, creating opportunity.

For his birthday Brian wanted to borrow Mark’s jet to fly friends and family to Vegas for the weekend, and because he knew what I did for a living he offered me the job. I didn’t have any private jet training, but apparently I didn’t need it since the plane only seated fourteen passengers and I would be listed as one on the official paperwork, a passenger who also could serve drinks. I didn’t ask. I just went with it.

I wish I could say that working on a private jet was a dream come true, but the truth is, I never dared to dream so big. The plane looked like something out of a movie. It was so breathtaking I had to photograph it from every angle—twice. Just so I wouldn’t forget every single light beige leather with dark wood grain detail. Who knew if I’d ever be given this opportunity again? Four oversized leather swiveling chairs faced each other in front of the cockpit—snap! A long leather couch with decorative throw pillows spanned the length of the cabin—snap, snap! A large wooden boardroom table at the back of the plane between four more of those first-class swiveling chairs—snap, snap, snap! On the walls were a couple of television screens. I’d been instructed to have each one tuned into a specific sports television station before Mark boarded the plane. The bathroom really impressed me the most. It was roomy, and the gold sink fixtures added a special touch. Never in my life had I seen such a cushy seat on a toilet. Like Goldilocks I was tempted to sit on it just to see what it felt like—snap, snap, snap, snap!

While the galley looked impressive at first, with its crystal wine goblets housed behind clear panes of glass, I quickly learned the space was not flight-attendant-friendly. The dorm-room-size refrigerator was too small to house the cold lobster and shrimp party trays. Pouring water into the coffee machine proved to be the biggest challenge. It was mounted on the wall so high above my head that I had no idea if I was even pouring water inside. Hence all the half pots of brewed coffee during flight. I’d thought working the first-class 737 galley with its lack of counter space was bad, but this was ten times worse! But what the galley lacked in comfort, my jump seat more than made up for. Secluded behind a wall, it felt a world away from everything else, like my own private closet. To see what was going on during the flight, I’d have to stand up and step around the corner to check on everyone. Well, that is, if I could remember to do so, because with one push of a button a small video monitor popped out of my chair. There were dozens of channels to choose from!