But off the plane I crash completely. I don’t see anybody. I don’t date. Of course the word is out instantly and the pilots know I want to be alone. Or maybe they just figure I wouldn’t be much fun to be with until I come out of my funk. Whatever it is, they leave me alone, and alone is where I have to be.
Of course I overreact. I swear off men and decide never to date anyone again. Sort of a variation on the flying-nun theme. And I get deep into this self-pity thing, and I stay in my hotel room if I’m on a layover or my apartment if I’m home, and I usually have a bottle with me, and I drink too much. I always go to bed alone, but I never manage to go to bed sober.
JWW: And you never have trouble holding your job through all of this?
TRACY: Never. I make damned sure it doesn’t show in my work. That’s not easy, but I guess I pretty much have it down to a science by now. There’s a mental thing, a mental switch I can throw that gets me through the work day. I really do manage to keep my mood from showing on the plane.
One of the reasons for this, I guess, is that my work is so important to me. I mean really important. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing a girl can do that’s more important or significant than being a good stewardess. Now part of this attitude is just my stew training showing, the way it all sank in deep, and part of it is my whole thing with flying, my father thing, but also I really believe in the importance of my work. I can’t think of anything else I could do that would fulfill me this way, or that I could really take seriously as a way to spend my life.
That sort of mental attitude can get you through a lot of hangovers.
Besides, I do have pretty good recuperative powers. A pilot taught me a long time ago to take a couple of vitamin B-complex capsules before I go to bed if I’ve been drinking. According to him, the worst thing alcohol does is use up the vitamin B in your system. That’s what gives you the hangover, and it’s also why alcoholics have bad livers, because of the lack of vitamin B. So I drop a couple of pills before I go to sleep, and then if I’m foggy the next morning anyway, then I may take something like a Dexamil to get the wool out of my eyes. Even when I still feel rotten, I’m lucky enough that it doesn’t show in my face. Some girls will get dark circles under their eyes the first night they have a few drinks or miss a few hours of sleep. Fortunately, my health is basically good and I never have to worry about this.
JWW: And this is your general reaction pattern after a love affair? Just solitude and drinking?
TRACY: That’s it.
JWW: How long does it last?
TRACY: Forever. At least it seems that way. Oh, I don’t know. After a certain amount of time it gets easier to think about what has happened, and then thinking about it helps me get out of it. I begin to see things more clearly. I begin to realize that what looked like the greatest love affair since Dante and Beatrice was actually nothing that cosmic at all. That Dante was a hung-up pilot with woman trouble and his brains in his crotch and Beatrice was a neurotic stewardess with hot pants and a fetish for self-destructive flyboys. Knowing this doesn’t constitute an instantaneous cure, by the way. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn’t. It all takes time.
But gradually time does the trick and getting drunk loses its charm, and I smile at people off the plane as well as on, and the pilots sense that the Good Kid is back, her wings patched up and her engines functioning, and the passes start again.
And the Good Kid is receptive.
JWW: Just like that?
TRACY: Just about. It’s a very funny feeling, getting back into the swing of things. A very funny feeling. Do you know what it reminds me of? Remember when you were a kid and you used to go to the park and go on the slides? Maybe you didn’t, but I guess every kid did. I remember that I liked this one slide, the really big one. Everything is bigger when you’re small yourself, but this slide was really big, really huge. And I would climb all the way to the top, and on the way up, climbing, I was really terrified. I went on this slide all the time, you understand, but the climb was still never a routine matter for me. It was so high, and God help you if you looked down . . .
And then finally I would get to the top, and I would just sit there for a moment, you know, looking forward to what was coming and wanting to savor the moment of anticipation. Just waiting up there and tasting the thrill of it in my mind. Did you do anything like that when you were a kid? And then I would push off, finally, I would slide slowly at first, then faster and faster. Of course when I got to the bottom I would have to go through all of that climbing again, but I didn’t think about it on the way down.
With men, when I come out of my depression and get with it again, it’s a lot like that. I get that same feeling of anticipation, and the business of sleeping with pilots just for the hell of it, that’s like the very start of the slide. And then a love affair, a good hopeless no-holds-barred love affair, that’s hitting top speed on the slide, with all the thrills and all. And of course I know that when I get to the bottom the world will fall apart, but I forget it because I don’t want to spoil the thrill.
JWW: Do you ever think about breaking the pattern?
TRACY: Of course. When I’m recovering from a bad affair—and they are all bad in the end—I tell myself I’m never going to have anything to do with men, ever. And I mean it. And when I do get straightened out and start dating again, I’m just as quick to tell myself that I’ll always keep it light and casual and never fall in love again. And I mean it then, too. My intentions are always good. It’s just that things don’t work out the way I plan them.
I could be giving you the wrong picture, though, by dwelling on how rotten it can get. Let’s face it—very few people have a life that’s nothing but lollipops and roses. Life treats most people a little harder than that. And when you do find someone who manages to avoid the occasional spells of blue meanies, someone who misses the depressions, you usually have a person who doesn’t have the good times either.
JWW: The sort of person who lives life on an even keel.
TRACY: Exactly. It’s my opinion that life tends to balance out. If you’re going to have good times, you have to pay for them with bad times. If you are going to have periods of happiness, real elation, you absolutely must expect them to be balanced out by periods of despair.
I’ve been told that this is a very neurotic view of life. That it’s not like this at all, that you can learn to find more genuine happiness in quiet contentment than you can in those wild beautiful thrills of an up mood. People who really think this just don’t know what it’s like to be in love the way I’ve been in love.
JWW: What you call crazy love.
TRACY: Crazy love. Yes.
JWW: No matter how much it hurts you in the long run?
TRACY: In the long run we’re all dead, John. But that’s no reason not to live in the first place, is it?
JWW: You think it amounts to the same thing?
TRACY: Just about. Sometimes I think, you know, Peter Pan. That I’ll grow up some fine day and I won’t be caught up in this cycle any more. That I’ll have outgrown it.
JWW: Do you hope that will happen?
TRACY: Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think the lows are just too great a price to pay for the highs. But other times, oh, it’s completely the reverse. Other times nothing is too great a price to pay, and I think that if I ever do grow up and learn to control myself and my moods, that from then on life will just be flat and lifeless and I won’t have anything to look forward to.
JWW: Seems a little overstated, don’t you think?
TRACY: Maybe. But, you know, Peter Pan. That story does stick in my mind. Remember, if you grow up, then you can’t fly.
JWW: I remember.
TRACY: And that’s very important to me, John. In every sense of the word. To be able to fly. To have wings, and to fly.
Shirl—The Lesbian in the Sky
While every stewardess is all things to all men, some stews do tend to inspire similar reactions in a majority of their pas
sengers. Men will lust for one girl, admire another, adopt another, befriend still another, depending upon the type of image a girl projects.
Shirl is the one they are most likely to tell jokes to. She carries a distinct aura of sophistication and knowing wit, and the average male passenger is immediately certain that he can joke with her and that she will enjoy it. At the same time, there is something in her attitude which somehow intimidates them—perhaps it is this same air of sophistication—and relatively few of them try to date her. Nor does she get as many physical passes as other girls do. The fanny-pinchers and thigh-patters, men who go through life oblivious to the fact that no stewardess likes to be pawed while serving drinks and checking seatbelts, nevertheless manage to sense that Shirl finds their attentions unwelcome. They joke with her, but they keep their hands to themselves.
The pilots she flies with have learned that she is not interested in them. The small percentage who insist upon physical contact with their girls make Shirl play her part, and she does so in more or less good spirits. Those few pilots are mostly interested in nothing more than token attention, anyway. They may insist on a kiss or pat a breast, but the sexual attention Shirl has to pay to them is hardly more than symbolic.
Shirl is just under medium height, a slender girl with dark brown hair and a round face. Her features are attractive but not striking. She grew up in upstate New York, one of the younger children in a large family. Her family moved around a great deal, and Shirl grew up without any real roots in a community and with a sense of alienation within her own family.
I interviewed Shirl in New York. Her home base at the time was on the West Coast, and she was on an overnight layover at JFK. Another stewardess had suggested I talk to Shirl and had arranged the interview. She was pleasant and communicative from the onset, but became increasingly interested at the thought of a study dealing with the manner in which the stresses of stewardess life tended to influence sexual behavior. She had had many thoughts of her own on the subject and warmed to it at once.
At the time of our talk, Shirl was twenty-three and had been flying for almost four years.
• • •
SHIRL: There’s no question but that this life has a tremendous effect on all of us. There are very few girls who would say otherwise. Some do, of course. Some girls insist that they would be exactly the same if they were working behind a counter in a department store or taking dictation in an office or wiping noses and changing diapers. I think they know better but don’t want to admit it. Just as some people try to blame everything about themselves on their situation, others absolutely hate the idea that they’ve been influenced at all by it. They prefer to think that their entire personality was formed from the day they were born and nothing that has happened to them since that day has made the slightest bit of difference to them.
As I said, I think they must know better. It’s so obvious that being a stewardess has an effect upon a girl’s development. Oh, in so many ways. When I think of the girls who went to stew school with me, the girls in my class . . . I was fairly hip to things at the time, more so than the average girl. I had been around a bit, and also I’ve always been able to give the impression of hipness, of knowing more than I actually do. It’s a technique I learned ages ago, a way of a wink and a knowing look, of nodding at the right times and either smiling or looking serious at the right times. You could be talking with a person in a foreign language—rather he could be talking, and you could nod in the right places and he would never even suspect that you couldn’t understand a single word he was saying. This has actually happened to me . . .
Other girls, though, most of them in my class struck me as pretty naïve. I don’t mean just sexually, although I would say that girls in stewardess school have less in the way of sexual experience than the average girl of the same age. I certainly don’t have any statistics, but this is definitely the impression I’ve gotten over the years. The majority, very definitely the majority, were virgins.
JWW: Were you?
SHIRL: ’Fraid not. No, as I said, I had been around a bit. Nothing that would qualify me for an all-time tramp award, but I had been slept with a couple of times. In that company, though, I was regarded as pretty knowledgeable. As I said, most of the girls hadn’t done much and didn’t even know very much about the things they hadn’t done.
But this inexperience, this naïveté, was more than just a sexual thing. All things considered, we were a pretty green crew. We didn’t know how to dress or how to put on makeup or how to order a meal in a restaurant or how to talk to a man without stuttering or, oh, so many things.
And in less than a year, in just a couple of months, all of us had changed completely. I don’t think there were many virgins left after a few months. You can’t tell me that so many of those girls would have lost their virginity the same way if they had stayed at home. I’m sure with some of them it was just a question of time, and that they had just been waiting for the opportunity that they found in the life of a stew. But I’m sure too that the general attitude you find in the life and the image that stews have and the stresses and tensions involved, that these played a part. All of us went through some very profound changes, and found ourselves up against new situations and living new lives, and this had a very considerable effect upon us.
In my own case, I would say that being a stewardess has made me what I am today. God, how dramatic! I feel the slightest bit awkward about this, John. Did Fran tell you much about me?
JWW: Just that you would be a good person to talk to.
SHIRL: She didn’t say that I was a lesbian?
JWW: No.
SHIRL: I’m pretty sure she knows. She must know, to have said anything at all about me. I don’t know . . . of course that’s one standard thing about being gay, that you always have a distorted idea of who knows what. Either you’re convinced that no one has the slightest suspicion about you or else you take it for granted that everyone knows, and actually I guess it’s usually somewhere in the middle. Fran . . . well, it’s pretty pointless to speculate. Nor am I all that interested. She’s a sweet kid, but not exactly my type . . .
To return to the point of all this, I don’t know whether or not you could really say that being a stewardess is what made me a lesbian. Obviously there’s more to it than that. It’s not a matter of all stewardesses being turned into lesbians, although I have a feeling that there are a lot more gay girls in the sky than the average person suspects. Very definitely more than the average jerk of a passenger suspects. They think we’re all nymphomaniacs, naturally. All those myths about screwing pilots at thirty thousand feet, balling a different passenger every night. They really believe those myths, you know.
JWW: A lot of stews believe them, too.
SHIRL: Oh, there’s no question about it. A lot of girls live that way. I know it. But it’s not universal, you know. There are girls who have boyfriends and who limit themselves to one guy, and there are girls who, believe it or not, have still got their precious maidenheads intact after God knows how many hours in the air. And, as I said, there are a few of us, maybe even more than a few, who are, well, queer for each other, to use an expression I don’t exactly love.
I never thought this would happen to me, that I would turn out this way. I don’t think about it that often now because it’s how I am now, it’s the way I live, and there’s no point in spending all of your time contemplating your navel and trying to figure out how you got the way you did. All you accomplish that way is to drive yourself nuts. But when I look back, well, I never had any particular interest in girls. I’ve done a lot of reading about lesbianism—everybody who’s gay suddenly becomes hooked on reading about it, you know. And I can’t see any of the standard patterns operating in my case. In fact I think I was growing up with a fairly normal attitude toward men and sex. I enjoyed it, I hadn’t had any bad experiences with it, but at the same time I wasn’t hooked on it to the point of being compulsive or promiscuous or anything. Just a good healthy att
itude toward sex, or at least I always thought of it that way . . .
• • •
Shirl went on at some length, describing her early experiences with sex and her attitudes before becoming a stewardess. After completing stew training, she rather quickly fell into the habit of dating passengers and leading a generally swinging existence. These dates did not always wind up in bed, but that was their general pattern.
“It’s virtually impossible to date a man under those circumstances and not go to bed with him,” she said. “That is, it’s impossible unless you simply go out of your way to be a tease. You see, it’s not like normal dating. The guy can’t call you again the next day, and you can’t take time getting to know one another. It simply isn’t in the cards. You both know that you are going to see each other this once and then not see one another again for a long time, if ever. And since sex is the point of all dating, in one way or another, the only way the date can serve its purpose is if the two of you wind up in bed the first night. Some girls say that this speeds things up in a positive way, that it makes you learn to get to know people much more quickly than you would otherwise. I think this is a song-and-dance we like to give ourselves to make a very casual sexual experience take on a bit of a glow. Actually it speeds things up by simplifying them. You learn to be very casual not only about sex as such but about the whole business of relating to people. You learn to develop a fast surface relationship and then you never get beyond that relationship.”
She sensed that her relationships with passengers whom she dated was an extension of the relationship which prevailed on the plane itself. In either case the conversation was essentially superficial, the interacting all on one level, and the roles quite clearly defined—she played the part of a devoted servant who existed to feed a man’s ego, and the role remained essentially unchanged whether she was tightening his seat belt, serving his dinner, plumping his pillow, or servicing him in bed.
Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 4