Flying Low in First Class
Stein, Benjamin J.
Benjamin J. Stein FLYING LOW IN FIRST CLASS What misery lies behind the Pepsodent smile? Albert Camus said that you could neasure the humanity of a society by Examining its prisons, not its...
...Sometimes he sets their house on fire...
...A different purse for every day of the week from Bottega Veneta...
...Marilyn, Vicki, and Valerie are far more than representative stewardesses...
...One guy wanted me to keep the convertible...
...Right away that tells you something...
...Her whole face, hei body look crazed with fatigue anc humiliation...
...Why do they pick or me...
...I've got my life to live...
...If he's got any of those big brands like a Rolex, that's pretty good...
...A big dog, like maybe a Great Dane, who would go with her everywhere she went, even on airplanes...
...There are still towns out there where men can't sleep at night remembering what they did the first night they met me...
...If the guy is wearing running shoes, forget it, even if he's Rod Stewart...
...I mean, there's a million guys out there with money, and every one of them is looking for a good time...
...That's just in Cincinnati...
...All they can think about is how great they are...
...They feel like they're doing you a great big favor to let you come back to their hotel room with them...
...In fact, I've been on the covers of magazines...
...I like to have fun...
...Her eyes are bright and blue...
...Very major...
...Marilyn would never have gone to Las Vegas with him after the flight except that Mr...
...I was getting really sick of it anyway...
...Anything at all and it's yours.' I've had guys who were the heads of big oil companies tell me that they never knew why they were alive until they met me...
...It is a beautiful, clear day at LAX...
...Outside, it is windy...
...All these rich guys have apartments all over the place...
...That's what my Dad always told me...
...And whenever I reach out to hand him a drink, he makes sure he touches my arm...
...Her eyebrows arch invitingly...
...And this guy holds up four fingers and says, 'Four, prease.' And I say, 'Four what?' This little guy says, 'Four thousand...
...I can't get hung up about it...
...But if your goal is somehow to crowd so much living into a lifetime that you store up enough to defy the possibility of a solitary eternity, how can you possibly hope to succeed...
...He's a great guy," she says tonelessly...
...Always...
...Her long blonde hair flies around angrily...
...I would have to say that Cesare is about the leading loan shark in the Midwest...
...I want the man who owns the company...
...That means he's working for somebody else...
...He disappeared about a year ago...
...Seemingly filled with life and zest, they flirt with death...
...I did it...
...Until she met Cesare, Vicki had a thing for black athletes...
...She has an offhand, flippant way of talking which is betrayed by her frantic hand motions...
...She wears tight Calvin Kleins and a leather vest with no brassiere...
...Phil was a great guy, who knew everyone in Vegas and very strongly hinted that he was wired in with Mickey Rudin and Clifford Perlman Mairilyn arriving at the Sunset Marquis after she has just learned that Valerie has been fired for doing the mile high number on a flight to Chicago with a man who sells tax shelters in multi-unit dwellings...
...He still lets me stay watched the men go...
...He never worries about money," she says, "which I think is a really good sign...
...You can't believe how many guys there are out there who think a thousand dollars is just for tips...
...I really have...
...The first thing I look at is the watch," she says...
...I'll like having some money of my own...
...That's why we have the unioi and everything...
...You can appeal...
...In the narcissistic society, they stand out as the most self-obsessed, the most likely to tell someone sad to drop dead and not disturb their good time...
...The first guy was an antique-store owner...
...No way...
...she demands...
...I wanted to get out, to have a good time...
...Marilyn at brunch on a Sunday at the Polo Lounge Lanai outside at the Beverly Hills Hotel...
...Seemingly eager to serve and wait upon travelers, like everyone else, they want to be served and waited upon...
...Marilyn looks edgy, as if some untamed thing in Val might set off something uncontrolled within her...
...After the meal, he tells me about being a stewardess 1 first class...
...I'll make a lot of money at it...
...He gestures to me to bend over because he wants to talk to me...
...Totally...
...The problem was this guy I met on the plane last night...
...No more men hassling her without giving her presents...
...Valerie stands in front of us anc starts to pull her hair out...
...Benjamin J. Stein's latest book is The Manhattan Gambit (Doubleday...
...You know what it's like riding around with millionaires when you don't have enough money to pay your rent...
...I wanted to meet the kind of men who throw around hundred-dollar bills as if they were Hershey kisses...
...He sells a couple of thousand Chevies a year...
...What should I do?' "So the A stew looks at me and says, 'Get the money in advance.' That's how I got my first BMW...
...Her hair is incredibly shiny and lustrous...
...I wanted to get out...
...That's how wired she is...
...He tells everyone I know that I'm going all around whoring myself out as if I were a hooker or something...
...I don't want that...
...The love stays and the men go...
...She suddenly looks incredibly weary, as if fatigue ran through her entire cortex out to her pale-blue eyes, and then ran back in upon itself and grew fatigued with fatigue...
...She exhales for a long moment and speaks to the floor...
...Only the young and the deceived would even try...
...One of L.A.'s Santa Anas is blowing up...
...And I did it, too...
...I'm flying on this run to Hawaii," she says, "and I get on and start serving drinks in first class...
...They are representative of a whole huge slice of a nation's deluded young women, deceived at an early age, who exist to be near money, to stay up all night and party, to keep away from Wonder Bread, to look for that next rich man in first class...
...Why shouldn't I make them have a good time...
...Marilyn has a test to measure what kind of man is trying to pick her up on each and every flight: a list of fashion accessories which prove or disprove that a man has money...
...It's no good...
...Phil had a limousine waiting for them at the airport and a limousine waiting for them at the Hilton and at the Sands and at Caesar's where they saw Shecky and Diana...
...He and my Mom told me I was too good to ever have to be sad...
...But Vicki likes Cesare the best, anyway...
...He's got three assistants traveling with him, all bowing to him all the time as if he's King Tut...
...He offered me four thousand dollars to go with him into the lavatory...
...They'll give your job bacl to you...
...Albert Camus said that you could neasure the humanity of a society by Examining its prisons, not its salons Or universities...
...Make a big stink...
...This time, it's the kind of guys who make the world go around, the kind of guys who have limousines waiting for them, not bill collectors...
...To say that she turned out all right like saying that David Rockefeller ; not on welfare...
...Valerie is right behind her in the BMW she got for devoted service to £ Japanese industrialist, under unusual circumstances...
...Cesare gave me this...
...He turned out to be gay...
...Then you'll be waiting on me...
...Then she twirls her wrist and shows me a gold Piaget watch...
...Then Marilyn looks to see if the man is wearing a suit...
...Valerie nods emphatically in agreement with herself...
...I'm sorry I was late," she says...
...Plus, they can really move...
...They just have so much self-confidence," she says...
...Then I check out the shoes," she says...
...If he's wearing, a three-piece suit, you can forget about that, too," she says...
...marilyn, a stew in first class on a inited flight to Newark, stands at the poor taking boarding passes...
...I've alway: been totally upfront about every thing...
...Never mind, just another kamikaze...
...For all I know, most stewardesses are creatures of sober and regular habits...
...I've always ' 'Give me a small businessman, a man who owns a few department stores in Oklahoma, over the biggest producer in Hollywood any day...
...He has a really good attitude about money...
...You're supposed to have a good time when you're young, right...
...Sit around and cry all day...
...They like to have fun...
...I never did...
...Marilyn says, "You can probably get your job back...
...Without any lasting moral or social standards, they travel through life like moths, drawn to the flame of a gold watch or a Rolls convertible, as so many of us do, getting seared and scorched, as we all do...
...He doesn't worry about it at all...
...I didn't have to be a stewardess," Valerie says...
...He'll get his choice of chateau-briand, veal, fruit salad, or red snapper, but he can forget about getting Marilyn...
...One guy gave me an alligator pocketbook from Paris, France...
...So when we're about an hour over the ocean, he starts to look at me really hard and his face gets all flushed...
...When my mother was pregnant with me," she says, "she asked the riest if she was going to have a erfect baby...
...I don't want my job back," Valerie says...
...She has the most seductive smile I have ever een...
...Her eyes burn with excitement and eagerness...
...A house in the flats of Beverly Hills with a maid who would make her kamikazes while she floated in the pool...
...Her lips are open in a half pout...
...It worked and now here I am, flying from New York to L. A. on the only route that matters, the one where you meet the guys who make it all happen...
...They aren't even my size most of the time...
...Marilyn usually does not find the guys with the Rolex watches and the Gucci shoes...
...He always had enough money to send me to college or to art school or anywhere I wanted to go...
...Inside, with the curtains drawn-the usual for stewardesses' accommodations-the only wind is Valerie's lament...
...At least he used to...
...I guess he worries about the money that people owe him," I say...
...There may be others who are pretty big, but Cesare is really extremely big...
...Life's too short...
...No more men hassling her...
...Is that right, Marilyn...
...He has out a few million every day not counting the vig...
...We're stewardesses," she says...
...The snapping of necks in the garden is like a chorus of crickets...
...She drinks coffee and starts to cry...
...Ma and some very heavy hitters indeed...
...He has little branches like that operating all over the Midwest...
...She has the most nearly perfect legs in Southern California, as she likes to tell people...
...The priest told her to ive up chocolate as an offering so that she would have a perfect baby, my Mom gave up chocolate and I uess I turned out all right...
...Marilyn was in a really bad mood when she got on the plane thinking about Mr...
...Pretty soon I'll have my own Corniche...
...Not this time...
...So I look really shocked and straighten up...
...There's probably no way the airline's gonna let the story get into the newspapers...
...It's hard to find a bar where the owner hasn't been into Cesare at one time or another...
...To losers...
...He doesn't even have the brains to hear that I've told him three times that I want a gold watch...
...Marilyn's eyes sparkle when she talks as if all the light of the azure sky around us were bound up inside each magnificent blue jewel...
...a stall out back, with a cold wet nose, or is it the dog that would have the cold wet nose...
...I could've been a model...
...She clutches my arm and says, "I've been married twice...
...A horse who would live with her in at his condo in Century City, but he doesn't really like to even do me and Marilyn anymore...
...After about an hour, Vicki has had three bullshots and enough cocaine to wake up everyone in Canton at three a.m...
...Like sometimes these really tough guys from Kansas City come up and Cesare has to talk to them and so he hands me a whole handful of hundred-dollar bills and just tells me to go shopping for a few hours...
...Men tell me I'm pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine all the time...
...I'm thinking of opening up an interior design studio...
...It should be Gucci, but Bally's all right...
...It's just a guess, but I think they are starting to understand the role of the stewardess in society...
...Marilyn also does not like athletes...
...Go see a psychiatrist.' I mean it...
...Stephen Miller...
...Valerie sits down wearily on the plastic, white love seat in the suite at the Sunset Marquis that has probably seen many beautiful, angry women wearing high-heeled pumps...
...Same as show biz types," she says...
...Yet, they are always tired, always in pain...
...He's in the dress business and he's got this really big factory, and the absolute most he's ever given me is a few samples...
...There's always another rich man in first class, and I wanted to meet them all...
...She sits down at my table...
...All they ever think about is themselves...
...Out on the edge, riding on a tight skirt and a smile, traveling blindfolded into the heart of the American dream, the tewardess is the perfect example of young American woman deluded into throwing away a perfectly good life in the pursuit of something that was never there anyway...
...But I didn't want that...
...They're really stupid...
...That was the only reason she bothered talking to Phil, who is a manager of the biggest of the big, who wears heavy gold bracelets and who actually had an airplane at LAX which took just him and Marilyn to a suite at the Las Vegas Hilton which was reserved just for him and his bands whenever they happened to be in town...
...So I bend over, and in this very pidgin-type English he asks me if I'll, you know, well, you know, prease, in the lavatory...
...What are you supposed to do...
...I like that...
...I don't need sample dresses...
...At this moment, Valerie is so wired that she looks like she could be a model for electric chairs...
...What Valerie Cross would like to own: A house in the Malibu Beach Colony...
...After I had been flying in coach for about five years, I gave up chocolate as an offering so that I would get into first class...
...She looks as if she might be really mad at me if I don't like it...
...I've seen those rich guys...
...It was a carnie sideshow cheat from the start to finish, a silver-plated pistol with one coat of cheap lead paint and then plastic...
...Not the flying nun...
...But he doesn't ever worry...
...He doesn't have to dress up to impress anybody...
...Marilyn nods her head...
...Marilyn, Vicki, and Valerie are not supposed to be taken as representative stewardesses...
...One time, prease.' " Valerie looks at me to see if I'm enjoying this anecdote...
...My Dad's a Chevy dealer in Richmond...
...If somebody doesn't pay, he just has them beat up really bad and-that's the end of it...
...No," she shakes her head emphatically...
...The whole trip to Vegas was great until about three in the morning when Phil was wired like an electric blackbird on some very genuine Peruvian flake and called her a whore, which is something she hates to be called...
...The second one was a cop in Cleveland...
...They'd take me into Bendel and say, 'Just pick out anything you want...
...You have to have a good time while you can...
...I've been on the cover of that magazine for the Lincoln Continental collector a few times...
...Valerie is satisfied with that and continues, "So I went back to the A stew and I told her what this little Japanese guy said...
...I could be a model in New York City right now...
...I've been on flights with sheiks from Kuwait and after they spent the night with me, they'd have a Rolls convertible waiting at the door to take me back to the airport...
...Pretty soon you'll be seeing me in first class as a passenger...
...My second husband calls me that all the time," she says...
...We're not nuns as far as I know...
...1 really hate being called that word...
...I'll help them make the places really pretty...
...I just didn't want to be tied down...
...It's not going to happen again...
...I'm tired," she says...
...I don't go for guys in show business anyway...
...Levensohn, a long-time admirer in New York, had been acting like such an incredible jerk...
...When you consider the pretty young person who really thinks that the Pepsodent smile will win her the cowboy-oil magnate, when you consider the gorgeous lower petals of material glitter overing up the padded cell, think of he stewardess, who, all too often, relieved all of it...
...Valerie fishes a vial from her pocketbook, hits up six times, three per nostril, and resumes her lament...
...A jet black Rolls Royce convertible...
...I think you an take the measure of our society By looking at our stewardesses, the Way we treat them, and the way they reat themselves, far more than if we tudied the lives of the women at the op of America's pyramid...
...Yet these stewardesses do and they grow deathly weary...
...The guy she met on the plane last night was a personal manager for a lot of very major rock groups...
...I usually just go out with anybody who's friendly and doesn't look like he's going to kill me," she says...
...That's always the way it is...
...Everything about her looks angry, cheated...
...My Dad restores old Lincoln Continentals...
...And like right away I noticed this little Japanese guy looking at me...
...I like a simple brown or black loafer...
...A condo on Kahala Beach, Diamond Head, Hawaii...
...I've only been in love with a few men in my whole life," she says...
...He turned out to be on the take from gamblers and loan sharks...
...Palm fronds smash against the sliding glass windows...
...Pouting lips and shiny, even eeth and deep-blue eyes framed by bsolutely black hair...
...I don't think Cesare is really that interested in me anymore...
...Valerie sits down heavily on the plastic love seat and shakes her head emphatically...
...When I meet a guy who's really depressed and down, I say, 'Hey, pal, that's your problem...
...They become so tired that they cannot get up, cannot shake off their obsession long enough to hear a voice from across the swimming pool telling them that in the end they might not have been worse off with white bread, that every little housewife in, say, Des Moines might not envy them, that they sold their youth far too cheap...
...The best is a simple gold watch from Cartier with a gold band...
...Marilyn, who is a kind and spiritua stewardess, hugs Valerie and says "It's okay...
...That's the whole thing...
...One of those new Cartier ones with all the screws and everything on it is pretty good, too.'' If the man who tries to pick up Marilyn is not wearing a gold watch, or at least a good brand, he can just forget about it...
...I didn't have to be a stewardess," she says...
...V icki Cieslowski, a blonde stewardess with a severe but pretty face, has a rich boyfriend in Cincinnati...
...Forget it...
...Give me a small businessman, a man who owns a few department stores in Oklahoma, over the biggest producer in Hollywood any day...
...Too crazy...
...I'm sure you can get your job back...
...I'll like being rich myself...
...I'm still getting his bills...
...A Cadillac convertible, also jet black...
...Maybe so...
...He gives me hundred-dollar bills every time I turn around, she says...
...An anecdote from the life of Valerie Cross, a close friend of Marilyn: She is a thin, angry-looking girl who radiates sex...
...Val looks up at Marilyn and me imploringly...
...Valerie's tears fall on Marilyn' Cacharel blouse, making dark spots on the ivory...
...After all, no one lives forever...
...Amazing," I say...
...Levensohn...
...But I've always got my eyes open...
...A diamond and emerald bracelet from Harry Winston...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
