Sex and the Stewardess

TRACY — The Damn Good Kid

Just a touch of southern New Hampshire remains in Tracy’s speech. She lost some of her accent at a Midwestern university and parted with a little more in stewardess school. A tallish, striking, brown-eyed blonde, long of leg and full of bust, Tracy possesses the healthy and uncomplicated beauty of a Playboy foldout, and has indeed posed for similar spreads in other magazines, if not in Playboy. When I interviewed her she had been flying for almost five years, primarily on a New York-Miami run. I met her not long after her plane had gone to Miami by way of Havana. She seemed quite unaffected by the hijacking, explaining that all of the girls and crew members had expected to be hijacked sooner or later. “We had all the procedures down pat, almost as if we had held rehearsals,” she said. “Nobody panicked. Even the nut with the gun was remarkably calm about the whole thing. It’s the things you don’t expect that rattle you, like an engine deciding to go out or some mechanical malfunctioning or anything like that. We had joked about this in advance and now we joke about it afterward. Of course the airline hates it because they feel it will make people nervous about coming to Florida.”

In a field where good looks are an entrance requirement, Tracy nevertheless is a standout. It is hardly surprising that she receives dinner and bed invitations every time she works a flight. Another girl described Tracy as the sort who would get asked for a date on the subway.

But Tracy never goes out with passengers. She insists that she never even feels tempted.

But she’ll sleep with any pilot who asks her, and she’s in love with every last one of them.

TRACY: Ever since 1951 I knew I would be a stew. As a matter of fact, at first I wanted to be a pilot. Me and Amelia Earhart. But somewhere along the line I lost all desire to actually fly planes and wanted to be a part of things.

That was the year my father began flying jets in Korea. He had been a commercial pilot before then, but it was when he went overseas that I really got caught up in the whole romance of flight. He jockeyed an F-84 and chased MlG’s back to the Yalu River. In 1952 he lost his plane in a dogfight up north. Another pilot was there at the time and wrote my mother a beautiful letter. My father ejected and the Chinese pilot cut him up after the chute opened. I always thought that was the most vicious thing I had ever heard of. But since then I’ve flown with pilots who were over there and they say we did the same thing. I can’t believe my father ever did anything like that.

But of course that’s my whole little scene. Hero worship and an Electra complex and transference. My heart belongs to Daddy — and to anyone else who wears wings.

That’s not just my own amateur analysis, incidentally. I’ve got a professional opinion to back it up. I had a few psychotherapy sessions about a year and a half ago. Very interesting, and they did seem to help me out of a pretty desperate depression, but one thing I found out was that knowing what makes you do things doesn’t change what you do or why you do it. I know a girl in analysis who just keeps going further and further back into her childhood and probing this and contemplating that, all to find out how she got where she is. That seems to me like making a splash landing in the middle of the ocean and sitting around trying to figure out what went wrong with the engines. It might be nice to know, but the first thing to do is get back on dry land.

JWW: How far are you from land now?

TRACY: Me? Oh, close enough for comfort, I guess.

JWW: Meaning?

TRACY: Meaning that most of the time I like being me well enough. I’m very good at my job, and that helps. Whatever a person does, there’s a tremendous satisfaction in knowing that you’re good at it. When it’s a demanding job like this one, that goes double. I’m doing important work and doing it well, I’ve got pretty decent seniority on this line, and all of this is very satisfying.

As far as my personal life goes, love and sex and all those good things, most of the time I’m on a pretty even keel. I am what is known on the flight deck as a Good Kid. In some circles I’ve been promoted to Damn Good Kid. You know what that means?

JWW: I think so.

TRACY: A Good Kid is a stew who will go to bed with a pilot any time he asks her, perform like a thousand-dollar call girl, have the decency to be out of the room before he wakes up, and never expect more from him than an occasional wink and a pat on the bottom. A Damn Good Kid does all of that and also picks out a present for his wife and wires flowers to his mistress.

JWW: And has a sense of humor about it all?

TRACY: That certainly helps. To tell you the truth, I like being a Good Kid. If you’ve got the right emotional outlook for it you can keep your sanity that way.

But the thing is that every once in a while I get involved. I love pilots, all pilots, and that’s fine, it’s perfectly safe. The danger comes when I pick one out and really fall in love with him.

And you know, it happens about once a year and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can even feel it coming on in advance before I even know who it will be. Like a tree responding to a change in season. The sap runs, all right. I start getting moody and wistful, and I cry in movies, and I get rather desperate about sex, and I have trouble coming, and I get frustrated, and, oh, everything. Maybe it’s some deep atavistic thing, maybe it really is seasonal and it stems from some desire to be pregnant, some instinctive thing.

The man I fall for is always impossible. And in every sense of the word. Always married, and sometimes involved with another stew at the same time, or a supervisor or something. And generally an emotional basket case. I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of pilots are very messed up that way. They are without a doubt the greatest guys in the world, and I dig them so much that even the nasty ones seem pretty great to me. But often they are emotional wrecks. The work they do is enormously high pressure, and it can do things to a man. The long-distance flights are especially rough because most of the time there’s nothing to do but sit there waiting for something to go wrong. The guys who work for the little trunk lines at least get to make a lot of takeoffs and landings every day.

And there’s the disorganization of the life. Always moving around, sleeping in hotels every night, bouncing from place to place. It’s the same for stewardesses, of course, but you have to remember that we are far younger and almost entirely single. It’s a different proposition for them. You take a pilot who’s not twenty-five but forty-five, and married, and with a couple of kids that he never sees, and it’s a very different life.

It’s not surprising that some of them reach for a bottle as soon as they put the plane on the ground. Most of them fly sober, and the drinking they do on the ground is their own business...

It took me a long time before I realized why I was attracted to this type of man. Not necessarily the drinker, but the emotional cripple. Of course it all goes back to the Daddy thing and wanting to save a man in trouble, and also not really wanting to marry any man because I really want my father and thus picking men who would never marry me and having affairs that could never work out...

JWW: And these affairs—

TRACY: They are very destructive. Every girl who’s had fifty dollars’ worth of therapy uses that word. Destructive. But it’s the only word that will do. I get completely torn up. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight. I spend twenty-four hours a day being in love. That may sound like fun. It isn’t.

The last time there was this very sweet, very screwed-up guy named Gene. We had flown together, oh, tons of times. No passes ever. He was in his forties, divorced and remarried to an ex-stewardess. She lived in Miami with their two kids, and the first wife lived in New York with their three kids, and here was Gene, flying back and forth between Miami and New York six or seven times a week. Just like an aerial version of Captain’s Paradise except that it wasn’t paradise for him at all. He was having troubles with his second wife and he was starting to have sex with his first wife again, and he’d been called down for a bad landing at JFK, and he was starting to drink so heavily that it showed around his eyes and cheekbones. You know things build up, feeding on each other, and when you have no way to let them out they build up a head of steam, the pressure gets terrible.

Well, this one night we spent forever getting cleared for landing at JFK, and it had been one of those really stinking flights anyway. There was this one shitty little kid who kept puking violently, and even though the flight was perfectly smooth he was so obvious about it that he set half the plane off. I absolutely hate vomit. I don’t suppose there are many people who are exactly in love with it, but I really hate it and I guess I’ll never get used to cleaning it up. It makes me gag, and I’m always worried that I’ll be cleaning a passenger up and then I’ll suddenly vomit all over him. That’s not the way to get elected Stewardess of the Year.

The point is just that it was a depressing flight for everybody and even the landing was bumpy and crummy, and when we were off the plane I looked at Gene and he looked like I felt. I knew what his general scene was although I didn’t have the details. But I looked at him and my heart went out to him. Exactly that. I suddenly knew what that expression means. I told him we were each going to have a thick steak and about a pint of gin and he could tell me all his troubles. And he said something, I forget what, and I said something, and we looked at each other, and that was it for me, I was stuck.

We had the steaks and barely touched them, but we did a hell of a job on the gin. We are in a restaurant at the airport and went from there to the airport motel and had the bellhop bring us a bottle of gin and some ice. For hours all we did was talk. We were so involved with this, pouring ourselves at each other, that we didn’t get around to anything remotely physical for the longest time.

JWW: Did you realize right away that, oh, that this could be the start of something big?

TRACY: I think I even heard the song in my head. Oh, I knew what was happening, John. It had happened before, you see. And they say the one hope of neurotics like me is not that we’ll get over it but that we’ll learn to see things coming and develop defenses. That’s the hope, anyway. I knew what was happening and I even knew it would be pure unvarnished hell before it was over, but even so a part of me sang happy songs about how this time it would work and we would love each other until the end of time. And if I seem to be talking in clichés now that’s not entirely an accident. My kind of love is like that. All of a sudden the most worn-out pop songs have levels of meaning I never knew before. If you’ve been there you know what I mean, and if you haven’t I don’t think I can describe it.

JWW: I know what you mean.

TRACY: And of course the whole night was heaven. It could hardly have been otherwise. We killed the fifth of gin on top of everything else we had been drinking, and we didn’t even feel it. We were so high on each other, on this wild perfect love thing, that the gin couldn’t get anywhere near us.

When we made love it was fantastic. We were both completely in tune with each other. He would touch me just where and when I wanted to be touched, and I would do the same. There was a real sense of the two of us being one person. It was almost as if I was using his hands and mouth and penis to excite myself, as though we had some sort of mutual will that was operating.

The lovemaking lasted forever. His penis was hard as a rock when he got in bed with me and it stayed like that all night long. And I kept coming and coming, I would go into these wild serial orgasms and just go on climaxing forever.

It was so good I was afraid I would die from it.

JWW: And it had never been like this before?

TRACY: At the time I thought not. But looking back, no, it wasn’t new. It is like that for me when that kind of crazy love happens to me.

JWW: Why do you call it crazy?

TRACY: Because that’s what it is. Because it’s impossible, it’s two people pretending that they’re somebody else and that the world is other than it really is. And it doesn’t last, you know. It usually lasts longer for me because I have a feeling that a lot of the perfection of it is happening in my own mind. And another feeling — this will sound a little kooky—

JWW: Go on.

TRACY: Do you... don’t laugh at me, but do you pay any attention to psychic phenomena?

JWW: I’ve done some reading in the field.

TRACY: You keep an open mind?

JWW: I try to. I think the whole field is overrun with lunatics and charlatans, but the same thing goes for psychiatry. I suppose I think there are more things that happen on earth than man can understand.

TRACY: Amen to that.

JWW: But what’s it have to do with love? And with what you do in bed?

TRACY: I’m sort of sorry I brought it up because I’m not sure what I mean...

I think... do something unconsciously when I get in one of these love things. I think it’s very much like a kind of witchcraft. I bewitch the man and I bewitch myself.

JWW: You cast a spell.

TRACY: I’m serious, John.

JWW: I know.

TRACY: I may be wacky, but I’m serious.

JWW: Yes, I understand.

TRACY: Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than that I hypnotize myself to the point where I just make myself exactly what the man wants at that moment. But I almost think it’s spookier than that. There’s a kind of telepathy that goes on. There’s a control. It happens that way in bed, this fantastic control, this incredible capacity for pleasure.

JWW: Do you normally enjoy sex?

TRACY: That’s a hell of a question to ask a bonded and certified Damn Good Kid.

JWW: Do you?

TRACY: Definitely. But—

JWW: Yes?

TRACY: That’s not why I go with the guys. Not because I’m looking for the pleasure. I usually get it, but I go with them because — because they want me to, I suppose.

JWW: Yes, I had that impression.

TRACY: But in the love scenes it’s different. I really think something spooky is going on. Either I’m possessed by a demon or I’m an unconscious witch or I don’t know what. I wonder if I had an ancestor hanged at Salem.

JWW: Maybe you ought to find out.

TRACY: Maybe I’m afraid of the answer...

Tracy speculated at some length upon the possible psychic aspects of her “crazy” love affairs. She advanced a variety of theories, some of which seemed unlikely at best, others of which had a logical pitch to them. While I found all of these quite interesting, they are outside the scope of any study of sex and the stewardess. I might suggest, though, that readers with an interest in this sort of thing might have a look at Brad Steiger’s recently published book, Sex and the Supernatural. (Perhaps Steiger and Tracy can someday collaborate on Sex and the Supernatural Stewardess, for that matter.)

TRACY: At any rate, if I am a witch I’m not very good at it. Not in the long run, because the spell generally lasts a lot longer for me than for the man. I guess I’m an easy girl to get over. Or maybe they have enough sense to realize that the last thing they want to do is marry someone who’s slept with every pilot on the Eastern Seaboard. When the spell wears off the witch is just a Good Kid again, and there’s nothing easier than kissing a Good Kid goodbye.

JWW: There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You said that you seem to go out of your way to pick men with whom any situation would be impossible. Men who are fouled up emotionally to begin with and who are involved in difficult situations. This Gene, for example — he had a wife and a mistress at the time and he needed a third woman like Custer needed more Indians. When a love affair with a guy like that doesn’t lead anywhere, you can blame yourself for being a bad witch. You can’t even pin all the blame to your Damn Good Kid reputation. Hell, you said in the first place that you never get around to falling in love unless the affair is doomed from the start. Right?

TRACY: I don’t suppose I can deny it. You’ve got it all on tape anyway. But what I just said now sums up the way I wind up feeling when I’m left holding the bag or the torch or whatever it is women hold.

JWW: Then what happens?

TRACY: The sun goes down and the moon turns black and I go into a perfectly miserable depression. The only thing that keeps me going through all of this is my work. I’m not kidding. It’s no exaggeration to call my job a lifesaver. The responsibility, the realization that I have to keep moving fast because everybody is depending upon me, this keeps me from going too far down. It makes me function, makes me get up on time and get where I have to go and do what I have to do. Being a stew is a lot like being an actress in certain ways, you know. The old tradition of the show must go on, for instance. And the laughing-on-the-outside-crying-on-the-inside bit. No matter how sick you got last night and how dead you feel this morning, you get on that plane with bright eyes and a flashing smile and make every passenger feel as though he stepped into a happier world. Believe it or not, it becomes so reflexive after a certain amount of time that you can do it no matter how bad you feel, and it actually brings you out of your funk while it lasts.

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.