We are all creatures of our environment. Everything that happens to us makes us who we are ...

The Stew -- My Own Story

by C. J. Heck

Saying goodbye to the last of the first class passengers had become methodical. My feet hurt. I was tired and trying my best not to sound sing-song. I was having trouble keeping focused and my thoughts were wandering elsewhere.

It was the last night of my nonstop coast-to-coast run for the month. It had been a long and difficult flight. For one thing, the passengers had had too much to drink and had become overly rowdy. We'd been forced to take a two-hour layover at O’Hare so the ground crew could repair an engine problem. As an apology for the delay and with the best of intentions, the captain opened the bar once we were again back in the sky.

I was really looking forward to my four days off before the next cycle when it would begin all over again for another month.

I had made plans just the day before to join my three roommates for a long bicycle ride on Angel Island tomorrow. We had done this several times before and ... I remembered at that point, that I was to buy the sourdough bread. The other girls were bringing the wine, cheese, and a blanket. It was one of our favorite weekend haunts.

San Francisco. How I loved it there! It was the tail end of the sixties with hippies hanging out on corners with beads and music and wearing bright flower garlands in their hair. Then there were the adorable cable cars clacking up and down the busy and steeply-angled streets. How I loved going to The Cannery and Ghirradelli Square.

On Sunday, we planned on going to Half Moon Bay to soak up some rays. There was never a lack of things to do in San Francisco, only the lack of time in which to do them.

I remember thinking, OK, now the coach section and we’re through. More smiles, more good-byes, although I knew I had lost the battle to sing-song halfway through first class. My smile felt like it was bordering on an out and out grimace, but oh well, I was almost done and then I would head for home.

The fear in icy tendrils prickled the nape of my neck as I walked through the all but deserted parking lot. I chose to ignore the feeling, chalking it up to the hour and being drag-my-butt tired from the long flight. As I did most nights at three a.m. walking through the lot, I marveled at how the dew crystallized on the hoods of the few remaining cars, creating a twinkling diamond field effect under the lights.

Odd, I thought, this “feeling”. That night was no different from any other night after the red eye. I was always bone tired after, but right about then, I was generally relieved, almost rejuvenated, by being earthbound and heading towards home and my days off.

To speed the mindless steps to my car, I typically filled my mind with the goings on of yet another red eye special, although “special” was way too nice a word. The work was grueling and the hours long that a flight attendant spent on her feet baby-sitting jet loads of bored sleep-starved passengers who were anxious, themselves, to be home.

I really loved my job with TWA. It’s what I had wanted to do for as long as I could remember. Oh, there were parts of it that rankled … at times, the wandering hands of the crew for instance, but easy enough to fend off, if you knew how.

I grinned as I thought about their almost universal arrogance and the somewhat symbiotic question, “So, sweetie, what did YOU do before joining us in the ‘air’?”

I chuckled to myself with smug satisfaction as I recalled my latest comeback only just that evening,

“Why, a stock car driver, sir.”

Usually, a knife-sharp comment, a demure smile and the ever popular batted eyelashes was all that was needed to deflate even the most amorous jerk, mid-grope.

And the passengers! I wish I had a dollar for every time I asked, “And you, sir? Coffee, tea, milk, a cocktail?”

and then heard the condescending, way-too-familiar response, “I’ll take you, little lady! Har de har har.”

Then he would give a “see-what-a-big-man-I -am” nod to his seatmates. I tried never to dignify the remarks with an answer and instead, gave them my well practiced smile which said, ”Oh, you clever man, you.” 

After flying for awhile, you discovered there were ways of deflecting, ways of getting even, with even the biggest big-shot. Devious? Maybe. Necessary? Absolutely.

“Oooops! Oh, my! I’m so-o sorry, sir! Must have been the turbulence. Let me get you something so you can wipe that wine (tomato juice/hot coffee) off your nice trousers.”

Or like on that particular night. I had picked up the dinner tray from a playboy type and found a room key to the Fairmont Hotel and a one-hundred dollar bill tucked under the used napkin.  DUH ... as if I would ever be so stupid. What an idiot. For the most part though, those kinds of passengers were the exception rather than the rule.

To me, the irony was obvious, at least back in those days when hijackings to Cuba were in the news. At the very first sign of a problem, the bad apples were the first and loudest to bombard the flight attendants with pleas for help in getting out of the plane. We were suddenly promoted to angels of the skies where only moments before, we had been treated like flying call girls.   Ah, yes ...the glamorous life of a flight attendant.

It sure was different from the Bible Belt Brady Bunch family in which I was raised. San-Fran-cis-co. It really was the perfect place to be back then. It was also the perfect place to renew my trampled spirit after I buried my new husband and my rose-colored glasses along with him the year before.

He had been a medic in the Army and one of the casualties of the crisis in Viet Nam. I had been only twenty then and totally devastated. My family, with well-meaning love and frustration believed the best thing would be for me to jump right back on the proverbial horse of life and, if not gallop, at least plod back into some semblance of life.

Thus encouraged, I wrote a letter to TWA and then flew to Kansas City for interviews. I was accepted and attended their training academy, also in Kansas City. After graduation, I found myself in the most sought after domicile in the whole TWA family.

Walking through the lot, I shivered. Funny I should again feel shards of ice-cold terror prickling and poking, interrupting the cozy home-glow after-flight mind ramblings that were the norm. Jeez oh man this is nuts, I thought, as the razor sharp panic once again snaked up my spine and sunk its teeth in. Again I ignored that sniggling inner voice. It was more than a whisper, but it wasn’t yet at defcon one.

I couldn’t have seen from that distance the broken glass twinkling on the pavement below the driver’s window of my car. I would have been horrified to see the long thin slice cut through the ragtop of my most prized possession, the little red Alpha Romeo. Alfie had been a present to myself and I treated that car like it was a long awaited child.

I also couldn’t have sensed HIM. But the little voice down inside me had and it had at once spoken. Then a second time, and then again, but I still failed to give it life. But he was there, all right. He was hidey-holed and waiting like a creepy spider ready to bite. His warped mind was filled with who knows what feral thoughts and his crotch was bulging with sick anticipation.

The comings and goings in the lot had been followed under the comforting cover of night, his trusted friend. He had watched my routine and he knew it well. He had watched, he had planned, and he had waited. He really didn’t care who’s thighs he got to part. He merely had learned my routine. His mind erupted like a boil as he sat and waited for the red eye special that night while a sick smile played across his face.

All of a sudden, the fear was overwhelming, like the static in the air when lightning is about to strike. This time, right as I opened the car door, I heard the little voice booming alarm like God’s own thunder.

He came at me then with a punch to the face to throw me off-guard. He brandished a knife between us in his other hand like an amulet held out for good luck. His rage for all women let loose and he demanded “Put out, stew, you bitch!” There were more punches, more yelling.

I never really heard his words. I never actually felt the punches, because that’s when my mind took flight. Mind curdling screams rang out into the night like a metronome gone mad. One scream piled on another, and another. I didn’t realize they were mine.

”Maybe the screaming is what saved her ass”, the officer said later down at the station. The screaming, and the elderly couple who found her walking, still screaming, down the center of a busy two-lane road with cars whizzing by in both directions."

Thank God, they stopped and convinced me to get in their car for a ride to the police station. The couple was still there, too. I could see them sitting on a bench by the wall, wringing their hands. I guess they wanted to see if there was anything else they could do to help.

As for me, when anyone asked, all I could recall was having feet like lead and being unable to move, completely frozen into the twinkling pavement. Imagine that. Even through it all, I remember seeing the twinkling glass on the pavement.

It had been like some bizarre one-act comedy. One actor was screaming like a lovesick concert fan, the other, a boxer miming punches at a dummy in the ring. It must have looked like some eerie, Mexican standoff. Which one would break first and run? Thank God, it was the sinister star of the freakish play. He lost all interest in the crazed screaming woman. He ran, his legs like pistons pumping up and down, propelling him towards whatever rat infested hell-hole he called home that night.

They never did catch him. Oh, I really didn’t think they would. I wasn’t able to tell the authorities much, as freaked out as I had been. I marched right into the airline terminal the next day, though, and quit on the spot, sporting my cuts and bruises like my husband’s medals from Nam.

I did feel the punches that day. Somehow, I knew it would never be the same again. The girl-next-door type of flight attendant bubble I had strived so hard for had burst out there in that almost deserted parking lot amidst the dewy diamond fields and the twinkles on the pavement....