PART 16: SOUTHERN COMFORT

PART 16   SOUTHERN COMFORT

When I got back to my apartment after Adrianne and I had said our brief goodbyes, the sadness I felt was more like novocaine than an enduring condition, in that it wore off quickly. It had a component of numbness to it: as I walked home on Riverside Drive, I felt neither hopeful about the future nor mournful about the past. Still, a relationship that had been at the center of my life for four years had ended without any warning, and I needed some steadying. I called Tom Steiner, and he came over and kept me company for hours. By two A.M., I was exhausted and so was he; he fell asleep on the sofa and I got into bed and slept for about ten hours. When I woke up in the morning, he had left, and my mood was cheerful and optimistic. The breakup seemed already to have receded into the past, and assumed the status of an inevitable ordeal that was now done with. There was a city outside that fairly bristled with pleasures. The sun was shining through the iron grillwork on the door to my patio, and the of its filigreed pattern on the carpet made it seem like an amulet of good fortune.

What pleasures in particular awaited me? At that time, Tom was dating a flight attendant, or, as they were called in those days, stewardess, or, as they called themselves, stews, and he had told me during our conversation the night before that Claudia had a friend, also a stewardess, who was fun-loving and unattached, and would I be interested in meeting her, or was it too soon? I consulted the Siri who lived in my head, and she told me it wasn’t too soon at all.

Josephine was from Louisiana, hence the Frenchified name, but she had always been called Jo-Alice, the way Southern boys are called Billy-Bob. When I phoned her, I was charmed by her accent, which wasn’t deep-South, of course, or Cajun, but had a little of the bayou in it. We arranged to have a drink the next day. And she was just what the doctor (-al candidate) ordered: a pretty oval face, blonde hair, and a lithe body; as I watched her walk into Dorrian’s, every milliliter of testosterone in my body awoke. The first-date mutual interrogation revealed to me that she didn’t read books and had no interest in theater or art or foreign movies, and to her that I was a fearful flyer – not a match made in heaven, or even at 35,000 feet, but a tradeoff that both of us were willing to entertain, at least in the short term.

She lived in a kind of stewardess aviary on 65th Street and First Avenue, one of those white brick buildings developers were starting to put up all over the city. In this case, almost every one of its hundreds of apartments was rented to three or four or five Eastern or Braniff or Pan-Am stews – an arrangement that sounds cramped but wasn’t because at any given time, half of them were on their way to or from Miami or Barcelona or Tokyo. Jo-Alice herself flew for United, and her current schedule took her twice a week from JFK to LAX and back, an extremely desirable route among the stews because of the perks it included. There was next to no security in those days, Homeland or otherwise, and FAA rules were few and only sporadically enforced, which made it easy for the girls to pilfer large numbers of the tiny airline bottles of spirits that are served in First Class and sold in Economy. When they’d accumulated several hundred of these, an apartment would throw a party. There were always several social events going on in the building, as you could tell by the stream of men pouring through the lobby. Many of them were crashers; a guy would ask another guy “Where is it?” and he’d answer “4F” or “12 B” and if he was presentable, no one minded. And everyone wanted in. In those days, when most people who flew were men, flight attendants were chosen largely on the basis of looks. National Airlines codified this trend in an ad campaign that began in 1971 in which, next to a picture of a winsome girl-next-door with a welcoming smile appeared the words, “Fly Me.”

 

What could be more wholesome than that image of innocence, but the slogan was the real message. Stewardesses were thought of as party girls who were by definition transient, whose job was essentially to serve the needs of men, who were as interchangeable as their uniforms. What “Fly me” actually connoted in the male imagination of the 60s was actually more like this:

And it wasn’t without more than a grain of truth. The airlines were, in effect, pimping the girls out. Jo-Alice’s supervisor wanted to her wear falsies, so that “the uniform will fit better, dear.” It fit fine. It was, for me, a huge turn-on. I loved to watch her undress when she came home straight from the airport; it was as though I were living the fantasy that the ads promised.

There were many side benefits for airline employees in those days. Some months before, Jo-Alice had subbed for a friend on the Yankees’ team charter flight, which for some of the girls was the main perk of the job – cloistered for hours with hunky rich young athletes away from home and looking for a good time after landing. One of the ballplayers (a bold-face name I promised her I’d never reveal) started hitting on her almost as soon as the wheels came up. She had noticed the white band of skin that his wedding ring, when he wore it, protected from the sun, and she asked him, in the middle of his come-on, if he was married. “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “But I’m not a fanatic about it.” She turned him down; among her sisterhood, she was thought a vestal virgin because she didn’t go in for one-night stands. Another benefit on Jo-Alice’s regular route was that boyfriends flew free. In those days, on United, it was the cabin staff who had the final say about who boarded and who did not, so if the flight wasn’t full, two or three extra travelers could be folded in with the rest.  And to further sweeten the deal, in 1965 United was running a promotion for one of the car rental companies that gave the passenger who could make the most accurate guess about the exact time of touch-down in Los Angeles a convertible for two days – unless the stewardesses who were supposed to run the game didn’t announce it, and simply wrote their boyfriends’ names on the winner’s line.

But sadly, in those days, I wouldn’t get on an airplane for a five-hour flight, so I missed out on that particular benefit. The panic attacks of my earlier twenties were gone, but the panic I felt on airplanes lingered until I was married and well into my thirties. I could grit my teeth for the 90 minutes it took to fly to Montreal or Detroit, but the rest of the world, including California, was out of range until, years later, my wife and I, on our way to her sister’s wedding in Minneapolis, got bumped up to First Class. I stretched my legs out, and all my anxiety melted away. My claustrophobia revealed itself to be merely the universal physical discomfort of tall people wedged into an economy seat. From then on, flying successfully was just a matter of upgrading to Business Class or scoring a bulkhead or exit-aisle seat; In the past few years, I’ve been to Tanzania and Abu Dhabi. Whenever Los Angeles is on my itinerary, I think of what might have been.

Jo-Alice was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t share in the sybaritic pleasures of the Sunset Strip, but she was a very easy-going person, and there was fun to be had in New York, vertically as well as horizontally. She and I were highly compatible, physically speaking; at a New Year’s Eve party, she announced to the twenty or so people there that I was the world’s best kisser. When the ball dropped in Times Square and everyone started smooching everyone else, girls I’d never met before that evening were dying to find out if Jo-Alice was right, and I did my best to convince them that she was.

But after about four months, I began to tire of the routine we’d fallen into. Instead of going to movies and plays, we hung out in bars with her friends and their dates, who mostly liked to play drinking games, or we went to someone’s apartment and drank while we watched TV. Jo-Alice could do shots of Wild Turkey with the best of them, but hard liquor in quantity gave me headaches, and it wasn’t all that much fun to sit on a backless stool, sober, listening to some half-loaded guy who only wanted to talk about University of Kentucky basketball. I still got a kick out of the girls, but the guys who were attracted to them were usually boring and sometimes unimaginably crude. Her roommate was dating a man whose name was Earnest A.Tarnapol, and he bragged that the license on his car read EAT 69.

And it became obvious that Jo-Alice was getting serious about me; she began to talk about a visit to meet the parents. “We can take the train,” she offered solicitously. My feelings about her were quite tender, but it was impossible to visualize her as a faculty wife; the intellectual snobbishness of the academic world would have been intolerable both to her and to me. A professor’s wife who’d never read Pride and Prejudice? Who’d gone to Sophie Newcombe, Tulane’s poor-relation sister school, and never taken a literature course there? She’d have been eaten alive at dinner parties and department teas.  And in truth, I wasn’t free of snobbishness either. Adrianne and I had talked about books we’d read and plays and movies we’d seen and articles in the New York Review of Books; I found myself longing for conversations like that.  The other boyfriends were militant philistines, proud of the fact that they’d never read a book all the way through, not even in college. When they found out I was a graduate student in liberal arts, you could feel them recoil, and of course none of them became my friend. Tom solved this problem by changing the subject when he was with guys like that; the fact that he’d served in the Navy for four years was an impressive credential, but I had nothing like that to offer.

When J-A and I had been dating for five months, my powers of empathy had emerged from their dormant stage, and I didn’t want her to become yet another girlfriend whom I’d led on and then disappointed, so I told her as gently as I could that I didn’t think we should see each other any more. She was silent for a long moment while she processed this. “Now, Dick,” she said, “I’m going to cry, and I’m not doing it to make you feel bad. I just have to get over this. Don’t you worry, now.” Of course, that speech made me fall in love with her, if only for a few seconds. But it confirmed me in my decision; she deserved someone who would treat her as well as she’d treated me. And the following year, Tom’s girlfriend Claudia told me that she’d found such a person and married him. The news made me insanely jealous for about half an hour, after which I subsided into a state of self-congratulatory calm. I had done the right thing. And I’d discovered that Sex and the City wasn’t really working for me; my life was more like Ross’s on Friends or George’s on Seinfeld (though none of those shows had yet aired). Maybe it was time to get serious.