that’s what friends are for

When I finally arrive home, I am completely shattered. My body still feels like it is going up and down with the turbulence. I have been seasick before, and this feels similar to that. The one saving grace is I now have four glorious days off before my next trip. For now I sleep, and then I will enjoy every precious second of being at home.

The bed feels like it is rocking from side to side, but I am so exhausted that I could probably sleep on a roller coaster. When I wake up, I do absolutely nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is vastly underrated. I enjoy every second of that nothingness.

At least until the phone rings. It is Mary-go-round on the other end, and she is hysterical.

‘What’s wrong?’

When you ask a question like that to a crying woman, you just know that you’re going to be listening to her answer for a long time.

Mary is obviously drunk or drugged or both, and she is home alone. She shares an apartment with a gay guy, who also flies, but he is away on a trip. Thank god, she doesn’t live on her own, I think to myself. This woman just couldn’t handle that.

Mary tells me that she and Mike have just had the world’s biggest fight and – whoever saw this coming (everyone) – it’s all over between them. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict this would happen, I want to tell her. However, she is threatening to throw herself over her balcony. Mary makes a lot of bad decisions. One of them is choosing to live on the tenth floor of an apartment block.

Although this is not the first time she has made such threats, I know I should go over to her place and calm her down.

The first thing I do when I get there is lock the balcony door. The second thing I do is take the glass of pure vodka out of her hand.

Just as I begin to calm her down, the phone rings. It is Mike, she tells me when she picks up, and he wants to apologise to her. She is absorbed in the phone call for over an hour, while I sit there thinking, ‘Of all the things I could be doing right now …’

After a point, I realise that Mary has forgotten all about me. She doesn’t even remember I am in the room with her anymore. I go up to her, indicate that I am leaving and ask for her to call me later. She breaks the conversation with Mike for a heartbeat and looks up at me with puppy-dog eyes, ‘Mike still loves me.’

I am out of there before she can say something else.

Is this the last time I will get a suicidal call from Mary? Of course, not.

Will I rush over to her place to help her again, if I have to? Of course, yes.

I desperately need a dose of reality, so I call Helen.

We meet at our usual café, and she listens patiently to all my stories about Mary although she has heard them before. Helen has met Mary only once, at a party I threw years ago. Mary, as one would expect from her, ended up getting sloshed and having sex with a man, whom both Helen and I know, in the toilet. I know Helen doesn’t have any respect for Mary (In all fairness, Mary doesn’t have any respect for Mary).

Helen still cannot fathom how anyone would want to have sex in a toilet. If Helen only knew that this happened all the time (particularly with the likes of Mary), and at 35,000 feet too. The Mile High Club is not a myth after all – and if they ever elect a president, I am sure it would be Mary.

Like Helen, I believe that toilets – especially toilets in aircrafts – are the last place in the world I’d want to have sex in. Yet some people do just that. I’ve been on flights where it is obvious that a couple is planning to go in there, but the crew members generally turn a blind eye if the couple is subtle about it.

However, sometimes, couples are not so subtle and that’s where we have to intervene. I’ve seen things that a single well-bred woman like me should never have to see. And it is not just heterosexual couples who are up to no good. The most trouble I have ever had was with a lesbian couple – they didn’t end their action in the toilets, but brought it back to their seats.

And it’s not just the passengers who misbehave.

There is a story about Mary that I haven’t told Helen yet. A year or so ago Mary was in all sorts of trouble with the company over an incident in our crew-rest area. A 747 usually has a rest area with little bunks in the tail of the plane. Mary was up there with another crew member, who just happened to be married to another flight attendant, although his wife was not on that flight.

Apparently Mary climbed into his bunk in the crew-rest area, at his request, and the ensuing shenanigans were seen and heard by another not-so-impressed crew member. That member then reported the incident to the company, and both offenders were dragged into the office.

Mary has been caught red-handed on a number of occasions and on a number of charges, but this was the first time she has been caught having sex on the plane – the key word here is, of course, ‘caught’. Both she and her married lover didn’t deny being in the bunk together, but did deny doing anything sexual, thus going with the Bill Clinton ‘I did not have sexual relations’ defence. With only the verbal evidence of the crew member against them, both offenders were let off with a warning.

It is very hard to get sacked from this job – just ask Mary.

There are plenty of married guys who work as hosties. A few are married to other hosties, most are not. But, married or not, not all of them are sleazy like Mary’s crew-rest buddy. In fact there is a terrific married man that I have done a few trips with. Coincidentally, his name is also Danny. He calls me Danny L. and I call him Danny W., as his last name is Weily. Along with the matching first names, we also have a lot more in common. He is not a bad-looking guy, but there is no way he would ever cross any line with me. I trust him implicitly, and he trusts me just as much.

We travelled to Rome once, years ago, and I don’t remember ever laughing as much as I did with my namesake while on the trip. I haven’t seen Danny for a while, but I have a trip with him later in my roster, and that trip is one I am really looking forward to. Helen does not want to hear about well-behaved married men like Danny. She wants to hear juicy gossip.

‘Have you seen any celebrities?’ Helen asks as she usually does, and breaks me out of my thoughts about Mary, Danny and sex on airplanes.

I decide to talk to Helen about what she wants to hear, celebrities.

‘Did I tell you that I had Hugh Jackman onboard?’

Helen moves to the edge of her seat, excited. ‘Hugh Jackman? You mean ‘Wolverine’ Jackman? ‘Van Helsing’ Jackman? I love him. What was he like?’

The reality is I did have him on board, but it was probably two years ago. Hence, technically, this is not a lie. I know how much Helen loves these stories.

‘He was such a nice guy.’

Helen gushes, ‘I thought he would be.’

Helen’s favourite celebrity story, which I have told her and she has then retold to everyone she knows goes something like this: a particular celebrity singing-diva, with a reputation for being difficult, was sitting in first class and arguing with a crew member over a simple safety-related request he had made.

‘Do you know who I am?’ the diva protested.

The flight attendant turned to his passing supervisor and simply said, ‘Can you get me the passenger list, please? This woman doesn’t know who she is.’

I wasn’t actually on that flight, and this may as well be an urban myth, but Helen lives for such stories. As I have explained already to Helen, most celebrities are great onboard – most, but not all. When we spend as much time as we do with them, we often catch them with their media-guard down, and thus get to see the real person behind it. Sometimes that real person isn’t so nice.

The crew is particularly savage with celebrities who are disrespectful to or dismissive of us, and news about how badly they behaved travels faster through our network of hosties than through any gossip magazine.

I leave Helen to go back to my favourite recreational activity – doing nothing. My nothingness is briefly interrupted by an apologetic and now deliriously happy Mary. It is hard work having a friend like Mary, but she does have a good heart. Besides, being friends with her has paid off in its own weird way: she has taught me what not to do with my life.