Eager Eucalyptus #4

"Ms. Wing? Anything to drink?"

"Champagne, please."

Yesssssss.

I have asked people that exact question--anything to drink?--many, many times. I calculated it once: two flights a day on average, certain number of people in first class on average, certain amount of time spent as a stewardess, certain ratio of inquiries to requests for champagne = 20,000 requests for champagne.

And now! Someone asks me for a change!

"Where are you headed?" asks the man next to me, as if unaware that our flight will land in the same location. He's tall and has a mustache and glasses, and I realize he might not ever have flown on an airplane before. If he told me at that moment that he'd spent his whole life as a blacksmith in the Old West, I'd have believed him.

"London," I say.

"Me too," he says.

Then we don't talk again for a little while, because my stewardess brings my drink. That's right: I don't call my job "flight attendant." I may just be a stewardess, but I've got the intelligence to know what words mean, and "flight attendant" is a terrible description of my job. I don't attend to the flight. The pilot attends to the flight; the ground crew attends to the flight. I attend to the passengers.

"Passenger attendant" is a long, clumsy phrase, though. There is already a short word that means "person who looks after the passengers on a ship or plane": steward. And I'm a woman, so the feminine form is stewardess. Why a neutral, detached description of my job is supposed to be demeaning, I'll never know. In the old days, "steward" used to be a compliment: ever heard the phrase "good steward of the land?" It's a nice thing to say. "High-performing land attendant" just doesn't have the same zip.

I drink my champagne, a little.

I'm going to London because I saw something I should never have seen, and now I get to go where I want and do what I want. I picked London because, although I have been to its airports (Heathrow and Gatwick) many times, I have never really gotten to visit the city properly or spend any amount of time there. As my first act as a Newly Free Woman, I have decided to go there and look at... I'm not sure. Museums, and jewels, I guess. Who cares? If it sucks, I leave, and go to Jakarta. I'm going there because I think Java is there, and I like coffee. I don't need to do any more research than that, because I am Newly Free.

The guy next to me opens his mouth a little bit, as if to talk, and instead drinks his water. I pretend not to notice this, and time the next drink of my champagne such that he will not think his water drinking inspired me to drink my champagne, even though it did in fact do so; this is because I do not want him to think I am watching him, because he will get the wrong idea.

The thing I saw was this.

Before the plane takes off or people board, the stewards and stewardesses have to go through and clean it up a little bit. Check for lost belongings and stuff like that. Very often, a plane will land, its passengers will disembark, the crew will tidy it up, and then it will turn right around and fly elsewhere. This was one of those times. After a New York to Los Angeles flight, the plane was going to fly back exactly the same route.

I was doing my thing--tidying up, humming, whatever--when I heard a noise coming from the first class bathroom. The first class bathroom on this particular model plane is a little larger than others, although still not large. It is because of this slight increase in size that two people can, in relative comfort, fuck inside it. That is what I heard coming from the bathroom, and it was not the first time. It was no longer exciting or titillating; it was just bathroom sex now, and my job to break it up so I could check to see if anyone had forgotten anything inside that needed to be turned in.

I knocked. They stopped. They always stop.

"Come on out," I said.

There was a pause, a long pause; but what can you do? You're caught, right? Everyone takes this pause. They think to themselves: goddamn. Fucking in the bathroom was a bad idea. Why did I do this? And I'll never know, you can't ask, but I think these two had different motivations, both different from one another and different from the norm.

The first one to come out was the man. Elderly and white, he looked not at all out of place in the first class bathroom. He had one of those shirts where the collar is white and the rest of the shirt is a color; his color was blue. It's called a "contrast collar," and I think this guy liked contrasts. Because the second one to come out was the girl. And she was not elderly, and she was most definitely not white.

She was, at most, thirteen years old. She had very, very black skin. Her breasts were almost completely undeveloped; she had hips like a boy her same age, and because of this her jeans sat low even by today's standards, revealing (at minimum) two and a half inches of her underwear, underwear I judged inappropriate for a woman ten years her senior.

The way they looked at me was different. She looked at me with... basically, nothing. No fear. No concern. No shame. Maybe a little shame, but you got the sense that whatever fucked up situation had led to this thirteen-year-old girl fucking some old man in an airplane bathroom had also dulled her sense of shame (or enhanced her ability to hide it).

He looked at me with terror.

In a certain sort of individual, terror is unusual. When you are an old, white, rich man, you do not ever experience real fear. Nothing can hurt you, mostly. If you fall into ill health, you can afford good doctors. When you are at home, you are walled off from the violent people of the world. When you are at work, your subordinates kiss your ass. When you go to the movie, everyone calls you sir, and no one suspects that you are trying to steal from them. When you are at the golf club, you're in a nice, peaceful place. It has been so long since you ever had to face the realistic prospect of losing everything that you have forgotten what it feels like.

I know this, because I watch rich white men fly around for a living. Not exclusively, of course. But let's be real about who's flying first class to London, shall we? And in this man's face, I saw the most abject sort of terror. I couldn't tell, won't ever be able to ask, what he was more afraid of: that he would be exposed as a pedophile, or that he would be exposed as thinking black children were beautiful. And to this old piece of shit in the contrast collar, either one might have been a life ending event.

What I do next in this story is not virtuous. So if you will allow me a short pause, while I sip my champagne and recollect... ah. Yes.

I could have turned him in. I elected not to. My first thought was to turn him in, of course. Lock up this pedophile for the rest of time. But he said something to me. He said: "If you let me go, I'll make sure you never have to serve assholes like me again."

Never... again...

"What about her?" I asked.

She looked at me and said nothing.

"I never saw her before," he said. His voice was pleading and shaky, and old. I didn't know if I believed him or not, and she gave no indications.

"You'll do this to other girls."

"I won't. I never did before." Now I was sure he was lying about the second part, but what about the first?

"You'll have everything," he said. "I can take care of it. Money for your family. You can quit this job, do whatever you want. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He started crying then, and I realize it's cool to go on FOX News and talk about how much you hate child fuckers, and I do. I did hate him. But the sympathetic instinct to take pity on a pathetic, crying old man just can't be reversed.

Twelve hours had passed. We landed in London. I saw the crown jewels.