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Conquering Half Dome -- and the fear of falling
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Only the hardiest flight attendants remained mentally and physically unscathed after working a typical three-and-a-half-hour flight. The Saturday night departure (a.k.a. the Saturday Night Special) was particularly rough. There was always a fight, always a problem, always an incident to add to the pages of airline folklore.

On one particularly comical Saturday Night Special, I watched a new flight attendant experience a complete nervous breakdown while she collected tickets at the boarding gate. A wave of overanxious New Yorkers -- the likes of which the poor, naive Texas girl had never seen before -- descended upon her, trying to board the airplane all at once. From my faraway position at the aircraft end of the jet bridge, I could hear her frantic shouts: "Please, please, back up," she cried. "Y'all listen to me ... Oh my Gawd, nooooooo!"

Forgoing my assigned position at the aircraft entry door, I stepped into the jet bridge, looked down the corridor and saw the funniest sight of my airline career. The flight attendant was sprinting toward me -- arms flailing, knees pumping, big hair splashing around her head like a waterfall gone berserk. She was being followed by a herd of heckling passengers.

"They won't listen to me, they won't listen to me," she cried. "They won't listen to me, they won't listen to me," mocked a voice from the approaching mob. Riotous laughter erupted inside the jet bridge.

But from the flight attendant's perspective, it might just as well have been Mount St. Helens erupting. Crazy with panic, she shifted into Michael Johnson gear. I had no idea a country gal could run so fast wearing three pounds of make-up and two-and-a-half-inch heels. She seemed to be more than 10 feet away when she launched herself, flinging her arms and legs around me as if I were a soldier returning from war and she the expectant fiancée. Sobbing uncontrollably, twin rivers of snot running from her flaring nostrils, she trembled like scrub brush in a cold Siberian breeze.

With the sobbing flight attendant still glued to me, and a smile struggling to blossom on my pseudo-serious face, I announced to the passengers that boarding would commence in a moment. They waited impatiently -- smirking, rolling their eyes, jostling for position with an elbow or a knee -- while a co-worker escorted the traumatized flight attendant to a lavatory where she could collect herself. But she never did. The very next day she submitted her resignation and returned home to Texas, where only the cattle stampede.

Such was life on the San Juan Special. The passengers ate you up and spat you out; only the strong survived.

During the beverage service, it was not unusual for a female passenger to demand a can of Coca Cola. Not for herself, mind you. The high-octane soft drink was to feed to her infant child. S.J.S. flight attendants have been known to shake their heads and sigh while pouring oceans of Classic Coke into baby bottles. I've done so many times myself. To add insult to a very possible long-term injury, the same retro-mommy might request five or six packs of sugar, which would be torn open, poured into the baby bottle filled with Coke and then, like a tit plump with sugar and caffeine and carefully balanced phosphoric acid, the bottle would be jammed into the screaming infant's mouth.

At any time during the flight you might witness a card game with serious money involved. Gold chains were de rigueur, boom-boxes optional. Rumor had it that on one exceptionally rambunctious flight, a group of hookers worked the coach-class lavatories. Passengers who wished to use the lavs for conventional purposes simply had to wait.

Patience never fared well on the San Juan Special, however. Whenever the lavs were occupied, even when hookers weren't on board, passengers sometimes found creative ways to purge their swollen bladders. Once I saw a man standing absently a few feet away from the lavatory. Upon closer inspection, I realized he was peeing into a free-standing garbage bag. As if squirted from a figurine in some debauched European fountain, the golden arc of fluid glistened in the dim cabin light. Considering the distance between man and bag, the passenger was blessed with remarkable aim and trajectory.

Had we been young boys engaged in a peeing contest, I might have been impressed. But we were grown men on a goddamn airplane. I walked up beside him, threw up my hands in exasperation and yelled, "What the hell are you doing?" He tossed a sidelong glance, nodded his head and simply smiled the smile of a man who had finally found relief.

On my very first Saturday Night Special, New York police officers were summoned to the departure gate to break up an airplane brawl. The fight was initiated during the boarding process, by two men who, as children, probably had suckled a million Coke-filled baby bottles. Here's how the action unfolded.

Next page | A crushed Panama hat and flying fists