Coffee, Tea or Me?

by Donald Bain

  After dinner, Mr. Lunts led a few of his fellow passengers in a rousing community sing, the chief song “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with a few bars of “If I Had a Hammer” thrown in for emphasis.

  Upon landing, Mr. Lunts assured us he was planning to inform management about us and our superior attitude and performance toward our job. As he put it, “You are the exemplifying advantage of aviation history today, young ladies, and furthermore, your skillful laying down . . . ah, laying down . . . ah, laying down of the regulations and personal habits of every admiral will be forever in my heart . . . and hand. Good day.”

  We see Mr. Lunts a great deal whenever we pull New York-Chicago as a route. He’s always drunk, never very unpleasant, and always promises to praise us to management. He gave us each ten dollars for Christmas and has never argued when we’ve reminded him of certain rules. Even with his happy way of getting drunk, he poses a problem. But all drunks should be like Mr. C. X. Lunts, if there have to be drunks on airplanes at all. By the way, the X in his name means nothing. A former business partner was also named C. Lunts, and the X was slipped in to help differentiate various aspects of their dealings. He might come up with another story when he’s sober, but finding him in that state will probably never come to pass.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Lunts is the exceptional drunk. In contrast, we offer Mr. Lippingdone.

  We met Mr. Lippingdone only once. It was on a flight from New York to San Antonio. It was horrible. Mr. Lippingdone is at least three hundred pounds. He boarded the airplane on that particular day in our lives and proceeded to bump into Rachel as she stood in the open doorway greeting passengers. He completely lost his balance, and his bulk flattened her against the wall with a devastating thud.

  He immediately turned on her and snarled, “Why don’t you stand somewhere else? You’re blocking the whole door.” With that warning, he stumbled into the cabin, falling left and right as he made his way up the aisle.

  “Either that son of a bitch flies or I do, but not both,” Rachel cursed as she felt for broken bones. She stormed off the plane and grabbed the ramp agent by the arm.

  “Listen,” she said, “there’s a two-ton drunk on the plane and I’m not flying with him.”

  The agent laughed. “Oh, Lippingdone? Big pain in the rear end. But he’s close with the board of directors, and the word is VIP him to death. Big stockholder, too. Sorry, sweetie, but he’s yours. Maybe he’ll fall asleep.”

  “You bet he will,” Rachel warned with determination in her voice. “I’ll make damn sure of that if I have to slit his throat to make it come about.”

  Lippingdone was trouble from the minute we took off. We received numerous complaints from passengers about his foul language, foul actions, and general foul self. He spilled his dinner all over himself and screamed at me, “I want to see the captain, goddamn it. You set the tray to tip over on me. I know that for a fact (belch). I know all the people you work for on this (belch) airline, and I intend to see that you (belch) and your friend get your asses fired (belch).”

  We tried to steer clear of him and succeeded until the light flashed on in the galley indicating someone wanted service in the forward bathroom. We looked at each other in despair. Lippingdone had gone in there moments before. Neither of us wanted to be in that small bathroom with him. We pointed at each other. Rachel with a sigh made the supreme sacrifice.

  She knocked on the door and Lippingdone threw it open.

  “There’s no soap in here,” he bellowed. “No soap!”

  “It’s right there, Mr. Lippingdone,” Rachel said with all possible kindness, pointing to a pile of small bars of soap resting on top of the vanity.

  “You call that soap?” he menaced, banging his hamlike fist on the counter. “That’s not soap.”

  It was then that Rachel noticed the small, round window in the bathroom. She couldn’t believe it at first. And when she finally did come around to accepting what she saw, she had to bite her tongue from laughing. Even this painful technique didn’t keep some audible snickers from coming out. Lippingdone went into a rage.

  “Laugh at me, will you? Laugh, huh? I’ll have your ass fired.” He thought she was laughing at the soap problem. Then he followed her eyes and realized she was laughing at the window. It was carefully covered with toilet paper, the edges of the paper held to the wall by Scotch tape.

  Lippingdone turned a deep red. His whole body trembled with rage, his lips twitched, and his jowls shook. Rachel couldn’t contain herself any longer. She broke into gales of laughter, which made Mr. Lippingdone’s condition even worse.

  “This is marvelous,” she said between outbursts. “The other passengers will love to hear about this.” She turned to leave the lavatory but Lippingdone grabbed her by the arm.

  “Don’t you dare. I happen to be a modest man, something you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh yes, I do understand, Mr. Lippingdone.”

  “Damn it,” he muttered to himself, furious he’d forgotten to remove the paper in his furor over the soap. “Damn it,” he repeated, only louder.

  Rachel pulled herself together. “Look, Mr. Lippingdone, you’ve been nothing but trouble for us all day. I won’t say a word about the window if you promise to shut up and sit in your seat. Not a word all the way to San Antonio.”

  He shook again with vehemence. Rachel thought he was going to strike out and hit her. But he didn’t. He said, “Oh, all right.” He sulked out of the lavatory as Rachel removed the paper from the window and flushed it down the john.

  It worked. Our fat Mr. Lippingdone sat silently for the rest of the flight. Rachel told me about what had happened, and we had a marvelous laugh behind the closed curtains of the galley.

  We stood at the door at San Antonio as the passengers left the plane. Mr. Lippingdone was last to leave. As he came by us, head down, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, I handed him a little thing we’d made up in the galley from a napkin. It was a perfect circle, just the size of the lavatory’s porthole. Written in lipstick was, “For Your Next Flight!”

  Of course there are certain drunks you excuse. We’ve had drunken soldiers flying out of San Francisco after spending their tour of duty in Vietnam. Who can blame them? We’ve had people with large problems that led them to drink too much before boarding the plane. Many times they want to talk about these problems, which range from flying to claim the body of a loved one to dejection over jilting by a lover.

  Of all the drunks we’ve known, none can compete with Mrs. Frazier, a passenger flying to New York from Los Angeles. To begin with, the general run of people boarding airplanes in Los Angeles often leaves something to be desired. Their dress, manners, and overall behavior tend on the whole to rank lower than other cities. But this particular person, Mrs. Frazier, wasn’t to be believed.

  She was literally carried on the airplane by a Hollywood-looking young man. He was barefooted, had hair down to his shoulders, and wore a T-shirt and chino pants.

  “This is my son, Frazier,” Mrs. Frazier mumbled as he lowered her into her seat. “I love that name, don’t you? Frazier Frazier. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I asked him whether she was fit for the trip.

  “Oh yeh, baby. She’s just gettin’ cool now. A very hip chick, my old lady. Very hip. Even surfs with me once in a while. Not too good, but A for effort, like.”

  Frazier Frazier left mommy on the plane. She fell asleep and we crossed our fingers she’d continue in that state until New York. No such luck.

  She woke up an hour out of Los Angeles and it was show time. She was wearing a tight, gold dress when her son carried her on board. The first thing she did was to unzipper the back and take her bra off. Once she accomplished this maneuver, much to the delight of this man sitting next to her, she strolled up the aisle swinging the bra over her head. She also threw in a few bumps and grinds for good measure.

  Next came her panties. They were slipped off in her seat and she threw them at a man across the aisle. He caught them
and winked at her. We must admit that never once did her dress come off. Her stockings and shoes were discarded, but the dress maintained her decency. She insisted on helping us serve the meals, but we made it very plain that she was to stay in her seat.

  “My, my, what efficient girls,” she chided. “Just the kind of girls my Frazier needs.”

  She held hands with the man next to her, poured champagne into her shoe . . . and giggled when it ran out the open toe. She showed us an exercise she used to increase the size of her chest, implying we both could stand enlargement in that department. And she tried to frug with the flight engineer when he came back to replace a bulb in a reading light.

  We got so we just couldn’t take Mrs. Frazier any longer. She must have had her own secret supply of booze, because she kept getting more zonked as we got closer to New York. We watched with interest as she left the plane. On hand was another young man ready to help her up the ramp. She leaned over his back and together they managed to pass out of our sight.

  “Don’t ever let me get that drunk, Trudy,” Rachel said as we walked together to operations.

  “Do me the same favor.”

  CHAPTER XV

  “Baby-Sitters of the Sky”

  “...Well, Miss, the air forces acting on this aircraft are equivalent to both drag backward in the reversed direction of the motion and a lifting force at right angles to the direction of the motion. That is to say . . .”

  His mother modestly termed him precocious. To us, he was a seven-year-old genius.

  “. . . To most learned people, the French Revolution is dated from the states-general convention at Versailles in May of 1789 . . .”

  We’d never met a genius before and certainly never expected him to be seven.

  “. . . absolute monarchy reigned, of course, from the sixteenth century until the Revolution . . .”

  “He’s especially interested in French history,” his mother said, as another would of her son’s special interest in soccer.

  Naturally, we catered to this little fellow with the oversize mind. It was unnerving to talk to him, especially when you tried to think of something to say that might sound reasonably intelligent. You just knew you’d fail.

  Before we reached Memphis, we’d learned about frogs, physics, algebra, celestial navigation, selling short on the market, Asian customs of courtship, and the future of every major politician in the nation.

  “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” I told his mother as she gathered up belongings just before descent. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Yes, Craig is bright. Very bright.”

  We landed and I came over to the mother to say good-bye and see if I could help her with anything. She looked very sheepish.

  “Do you have some paper towels?” she whispered.

  “Sure. Any problem?”

  “Well, it’s Craig,” she looked at him. His pants were soaked.

  “He’s been very slow to toilet train,” she said with a sigh.

  “Oh.”

  That kind of thing could be a problem for Craig in later life. I’ve never forgotten him.

  We’ve never forgotten Johnny either, a six-year-old who flew with us from New Orleans to Chicago. Who said there’s never been a bad boy? Meet Johnny.

  He boarded the plane with his mother, and promptly whipped out a very realistic six-shooter from his belt and said, “Bang, bang,” at us. That was cute, except he managed to jam the gun into Rachel’s belly while pulling the trigger.

  He took all the magazines off the rack before we had a chance to distribute them, and wailed when we asked that he give them back.

  “I’ll get them from him in a second,” his mother said quietly to us, winking to indicate something. She kept her promise, but only after a half hour went by and we came back and asked again. He made an airplane out of the menu and flew it across the aisle. It made a perfect, nose-first landing in the face of a very stuffy lawyer who was trying to get some work done.

  He threw up twice.

  He spilled his milk all over the seat.

  He ran up and down the aisle yelling, “Batman. Batman.” An air force major grabbed him by the arm and whispered something in his ear. Johnny returned to his seat.

  “What’d you say to him?” I asked the major.

  “I told him I was the Penguin in disguise and that I was planning to throw him out of the airplane unless he sat down.”

  “Very effective. I’ll remember that.”

  Johnny refused to leave the galley when we asked him to do that little thing. “I don’t have to,” he whined, and stuck his tongue out at us.

  Rachel looked around to make sure no one else was watching. Then, she took a knife from a compartment in the buffet and pointed it at Johnny. “Oh yes you do, little boy,” she said with a sinister snarl on her face. He took the hint, but not before showing us his tongue on the way out.

  Ten minutes later, his mother stormed back into the galley.

  “My boy said you tried to cut him with a knife.”

  “Not us, ma’am.”

  “He never lies.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t, ma’am.”

  “I’ll report you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Johnny stayed in his seat for the rest of the trip. His mother glared at us all the way to Chicago. As we got close to arrival, we decided it wouldn’t be such a good idea to have his mother report us. We felt it might be wise from a practical sense to make amends. We tried, as Johnny and his mother passed by us at the open cabin door.

  “It sure was nice having you fly with us today, Johnny,” Rachel said happily, leaning over to make sure he heard her.

  Johnny answered her. He stood on his tiptoes and whispered in Rachel’s ear. His mother grabbed him by the back of the neck and marched him out of the airplane. “You’ll hear about this,” she threatened. There was no doubt we would.

  “What did he say to you?” I asked her after they’d passed out of sight.

  “He said, ‘I hate you, you stupid doo-doo head.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “His father made a great mistake having that boy. Someone ought to send them some birth-control literature.”

  “Amen,” I agreed.

  Of course we heard from Johnny’s mother. Our supervisor called us in to answer for the mother’s letter, which had gone to the president. We told her the story.

  “Look, I understand,” she said, “but no knives, OK?”

  “OK.”

  We’ve had other little boys and girls on our flights who could have benefited from a few threats, backed up with the blade of a knife. But we’d learned our lesson. We’re now more subtle, and tell them things like, “Why don’t you play outside awhile?”

  As we said, parents are usually to blame when a child causes trouble on a flight. We realized we were correct in this feeling after taking care of children who were flying unaccompanied. Remove them from mommy and daddy, and they behave beautifully.

  If a child is even halfway good on a flight, he or she can be a delight. Children make a lot more sense than many of the adults we’ve flown with. In fact, not all the passengers who require baby-sitting services are children.

  It was a night coach from Miami to New York and seemed like a quiet night. But when I went back for a routine check of the seats, I found I was missing two people. I remembered that an older couple had come aboard and I recalled seeing them go into the lavatory. Perhaps they were still there. I checked—they weren’t. I counted passengers again. Two short. I told the other stew. She said, “Come off it, Trudy,” and began counting with an air of great superiority. She came up two short. Together we checked every cranny of the plane—including the johns and the galley. Nothing.

  Finally I went up to the captain “Now, look. Don’t say I’m crazy, but two people are missing. They just couldn’t have walked off, but we don’t know where they are.”

  The captain walked down the aisle looking at the passenger
s—some asleep, some reading. Suddenly he let out a yell, “Come here, you’ll never believe this.”

  He was looking up at the rack above the seats where pillows and blankets are kept. There curled up in the overhead rack were our two missing tourists, nicely clothed in pajamas, covered with blankets, and sound asleep. I guess they’d always traveled by train before, so they’d figured the racks were berths and just climbed up and turned in. Well, that whole plane broke up. There wasn’t anyone on board who wasn’t laughing hysterically.

  I must remember to tell Aunt Laconia about my sleeping beauties.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “Even Your Best Friend Won’t Tell You”

  It was a great party, but hardly worth a thirty-day suspension.

  The get-together, an impromptu one, was in honor of a departing stewardess. She was leaving the glamour of the sky for the altar, an event not to be questioned and most certainly to be celebrated.

  The celebration began with six of us. It turned into a loud, sloppy ruck within an hour after we toasted our first glass of champagne to the bride-to-be. It ended at 3 A.M.

  Rachel and I stayed until the bitter end despite having to work a 10 A.M. trip the next morning. It flashed through our minds a couple of times how tired we’d be, but it wouldn’t be the first time. And we never gave a thought to the rules prohibiting a crew member from drinking twenty-four hours before a flight. That sort of regulation made sense for the men who had to fly the airplane. But it didn’t make much sense for stewardesses. A good toothbrushing, breakfast, a few mints, and no one would be the wiser. Right?

  We were checking in with dispatch when we were handed the note.

  “What do we have to report to the supervisor for?” I mumbled as we went to her office.

  “Maybe we’re going to be commended,” was Rachel’s suggestion.

  “Yeh. Like the first trip we made.”