My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

the DC-9 on our way to St. Louis, our first destination of the day. Amity breaks in, “I want to tell a gay joke, but I’m sure Harry’s already heard it.” “Why?” Bart asks.

“Because he’s gay.” Guy, it sounds like.

Bart nearly shits a chicken-fried steak. “You are?”

“Of course he is,” Amity says. She looks at me. “You don’t mind me saying so, do you, Harry?”

“Not at all,” I answer nonchalantly. I want her to like me, to think I’m as comfortable as she is. But the truth is, while I’m a pretty candid guy myself, I’m stunned a little by her perpetually openhanded game. She’s just so unabashed. So casual with her candor. I half expect her to get on the PA. system and announce, “Ladies and Gentlemen, at this time, for your own comfort and safety, Harry Ford is gay.”

Bart is shocked because I hadn’t divulged my orientation to anyone in my training class. It’ sfunny what you learn about yourself when you change your surroundings. I always prided myself that I came out to my family at the age of seventeen and that I lived an open life in a family whose heraldic crest probably looked like one of those red-and-white CLOSED signs in the window of a dry cleaner. But my flight attendant classmates just seemed so much narrower than my college chums, and I knew my friendships with them were finite, so I kept my sexuality to myself.

I also hadn’t told anyone I was gay during flight attendant training class because I figured the airline could fire me if they wanted.

There aren’t any employment laws to protect me, and after all, it was obvious they were trying to hire “straight.” Out of the twelve guys in my class, I was the only gay one. Straight male flight attendant? I thought that was an oxymoron. Maybe at other airlines, but not at this one. For the first time since the age of seventeen, I strategically crawled into the closet. Fortunately, I only lasted two months inside before I came jumping out, figuring, “Fuck it. Let them fire me if they want.”

“How does a guy know when his roommate is gay?” Amity asks, launching into the joke. Pause, punch line. “When his dick tastes like shit!” I laugh, and Bart does too, but neither of us louder than Amity. “OK, y’all, time to feed and water the cattle,” she commands.

Amity works the first-class section, and the first few rows of coach, and Bart and I drive the cart in the back of the bus. Bart’s not really cut out for this work. He’s more accustomed to holding a football than a coffeepot, and he’s only truly comfortable when he has a can of beer in his hand, which is just long enough to hand it over to a passenger. But he’s so gorgeous that few people care that his thumb is in their drink or that he’s forgotten the cream for their coffee. Between my socially adept upbringing, and my subsequent poverty during the college years, I’m pretty well suited to the tasks at hand, and Bart often defers to me for help in the delicate operation of spearing a wedge of lime with a swizzle stick without touching it with your fingers or separating two napkins stuck together. When someone asks me for decaf, and I realize we’re out of the little instant packets, I traipse to the front galley to procure some from Amity. “You spear your limes ahead of time?” I ask, noticing her cupful of sticks stuck through lime wedges.

“It’s the only way. Whether you just picked your nose or not, you gotta take those things in your fingers and shove them on the

stick. I don’t have time to do all that ceremonial bullshit in the aisle with everyone watching.”

She’s the master. I’m the student. “We’re out of decaf,” I tell her.

“Why bother?” she says, grabbing a cup and pouring it full of regular coffee. “Give them this.”

“But they’ll be wired up for Jesus,” I laugh.

“No, they won’t. They’ll think it’s decaf and it won’t do a damn thing to them. Power of the mind, baby, power of the mind.”

When all the cattle have been fed and watered, and we’re all back in the galley, Bart gives me the old line. “I don’t think you’re really gay. You just haven’t had the kind of woman that would show you you’re not.”

Amity winks at me before taking a glass of water out to a passenger.

“That is such a crock of shit,” I tell him, smiling. “You straight people always think you’ve got it figured out. What if you’re gay and you don’t know it because you just haven’t found the right guy?”

“What if?” he says, his accent making magic of the question, his thumbs in the belt loops of his uniform pants, his fingers hanging down to the natural bulge of his crotch. He looks at me with a shit eating grin on his face.

I’d drink this guy’s bathwater and he knows it.

Of course we’re one big happy threesome by the third flight of the day. It truly is a bonding experience to serve little bags of peanuts to people sitting upright in rows of chairs. Amity breaks out the in-flight champagne in Styrofoam, and we illegally indulge while she teaches us that if, ten napkins are stuck together, we should give the passenger ten napkins, because it isn’t worth your valuable time separating them. And even if you’re working a flight to Europe, when someone asks how long the flight is, we should

always say, “About an hour.” And if the captain asks for lemonade, we should tell him we’re out, because it isn’t worth the trouble to fix lemonade for a guy who (in her case) only wants to “stick his hand up my skirt and play grab ass.” And when I ask her what a woman captain wants, she says, “To stick her hand up my skirt and play grab