Note from a Stewardess

You only get one bag of peanuts.

I figured I’d best address this “to whom it may concern,” as opposed to the simpler, riskier “dear assholes.” I do this as a cynical choice, knowing that if I offend you you may leave now, rather than hearing me out.

So, whom it may concern, it is to you I address this note, in hopes that it leaves you justly concerned. Consider this message something I might have slipped you on a cocktail napkin, scrawled in prim black ink: a reminder that I exist not to serve you, but to suffer you en route to collecting my pay.

I am a stewardess by vocation, a “flight attendant,” though I have always found this term rather stupid: the pilots attend the flight; we its passengers. You’ve seen me a million times, standing with a plastic grin at the front of the cabin, sliding a belt through a buckle, puffing daintily on my life vest’s wand.

But what you may not realize is that I’ve seen you too: a million times for each of you (in all your shapes and sizes), lined up in six long columns receding to the rear. I know your archetypes. I know you first-timers, wide-eyed and giddy; you weary souls, one homestretch from home; you cosmonauts, struggling not to tweak as your edible kicks in.

I know you oglers, trying your utmost to catch my eye and hold it, communicating to me your astonishing fact, that you’d like to bend me over and do whichsoever thing to me. I know you rich haughty cunts, who think you’re better than me, your condescending looks and workless nails. And I know you little boys with skin like raw chicken, never looking up from your silly games — until you do, and drop your jaw. And so on.

To yourself, you are a singular you, but to me you are just another genus of passenger, ranked somewhere on the scale from agreeable to not, possessed of more or less dignity and respect for the others around you.

Lately, I regret to tell you, it’s been a whole lot less.

A whole lot less.

One example. There was a very angry man on the larboard side the other day. A tantrum man, or is it tantric? Tantrumnal? Sorry, but I like words, I read a lot. I spend many jet-laggy nights reading alone in hotel beds in Milan, New York, and Nice. I consider Cortázar and Calvino my ex-husbands. This man though, I didn’t like his words. And I didn’t like the spittle that sprayed from his mouth as he spoke them.

O the height of irony — 30,000 feet. You can guess what he was on about: he had not been allowed to keep his own row. We had been forced to make an adjustment on account of a sanitation problem involving a baby — no, you don’t want me going into it. On the one hand, yes, he is an older gentleman, 60-something. I am sympathetic to his fears. On the other hand, he is a passenger of his own free will, and nowhere was it suggested that he would be granted his own row. Also, there’s this concept of triage.

So he tried his best. To have a row. Yes, my colleague had to restrain him, and the other passengers were yelling to lock him up. And where, exactly? Is there a brig I’m not aware of? Perhaps they had the lavatory in mind. Don’t get me wrong, I would have chucked him overboard if it were possible, but regulation disallows it (yes, I’m writing under a pseudonym. No, my employer would not want news of this to spread).

What I hope you’ll understand is that, in crisis-mode, there’s nothing more infuriating than a peanut gallery. So unless you happen to be The Rock or an Air Marshal, shut up and sit down.

That is my first request to you. Here is the second: if you’re going to fly, accept the risk. You will be placed in close proximity to others, and you (or a loved one, or some unknown stranger) may well die because of it. Probably you won’t; perhaps they will; you know the risk. But if you plan to bitch?

Stay home.