1973, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

By Claudia Sternbach

I suppose if I had to list every occupation I have ever had I could put diamond smuggler on the list. I was only a temp, but I did get the job done. I wasn’t paid to smuggle diamonds so I guess to be really accurate I would have to call myself a volunteer. A volunteer diamond smuggler.

One year, between failed marriages and uninspiring semesters at school, I decided some traveling might be just the ticket.

I knew there was no way I could actually call the airlines and book a seat on a flight to Paris or Athens. I couldn’t even book a seat on a flight to Sacramento or Fresno (both cities so uninteresting to me that I could only imagine planes needing to airlift people out, never fly people in). But I was ready for a change.

Thumbing through the yellow pages I was surprised to see there were actual listings for airline schools. Jotting the numbers down I felt my life had new possibilities. New horizons. Potentially friendly skies.

Seven weeks later I was on a plane headed to London, England. I was wearing a dirt-and-persimmon colored two-tone double-knit dress. I was wearing regulation dirt-colored nail polish. Matching pumps. But what I was most proud of were the small gold wings I wore on my chest to complete the outfit.

My timing had been perfect. The airline I called had just bought a few new shiny 747s and had no one who knew how to fly them. Well, they had people who knew how to fly them, but not anyone who was certified to wait on the passengers. They were hiring right then and there. They needed a whole slew of folks who would be willing to drop everything and begin their lives anew. Well. I was ready for anew.

“Come on down for an interview,” a woman said on the phone. She had a very perky voice.

In the 1970s the airlines had an image. To fly was glamorous, exciting. So it obviously required that we wear false eyelashes, pluck any stray hairs, and be weighed on a regular basis.

I had never been weighed at a job interview. And this wasn’t even for the job, this was to see if I was qualified to get into the five weeks of boot camp.

A very thin woman with very thick eyelashes stood clutching a scale to her chest like Moses with the tablets. Within hours of being accepted into the program I realized that hair color, makeup, eyebrow shape and body fat were as important as C.P.R. skills. It was religion.

“Your eyebrows are too widely spaced,” the weight monitor said as she scrunched hers together. “And they are too light.”

Well, if they are too light, I thought politely, then who can even see that they are too widely spaced.

“Here,” she said handing me a magnifying mirror. “See for yourself.”

Ah ha. This could be the reason for the often skimpy tips at the end of the evening. How had I even dared to show my brows in public.

It was what I imagine training for a beauty pageant must be like. We actually did have to work on finding the perfect hairstyle. Get the right shade of blush. Try out new lipsticks. Practice walking across rooms with stacks of books on our heads. And I knew there were quite a few of us who would have preferred reading those books.

To be fair we also put in quite a bit of time learning about jet engines, what makes them work. We practiced C.P.R. and learned how to evacuate an airplane using giant inflatable slides.

And when we had mastered cooking food in the tiny toy ovens we graduated. There was even some pomp and circumstance.

Our class had bonded. We had spent five weeks together primping and studying and being thrown into the swimming pool at the hotel close to the airport so we could practice saving people’s lives should we have to “ditch” the plane.

So when we began traveling together we just got closer. Now we were sharing hotel rooms, early wakeup calls, and stories of cranky, demanding passengers. Of course we had favorites. Friends who, when we saw them listed on the crew sheet, made us feel like this trip would really be fun.

Jason was one of my fun friends.

Jason had wanted to be a model. Or a cabaret singer. He hadn’t given up on either dream completely, but found he was tired of his Photo-Mat clerking job, which was as close as he had come so far to earning a living having his picture taken. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the looks. He did. He had dark curly hair, eyes like a pound puppy, and his skin was smoother than mine ever had been or would be. Moisturize was his motto.

Jason was my first totally out-of-the-closet gay friend. He was invaluable on trips. He knew how to throw an outfit together using stuff you had been carting around in a suitcase for 10 days. He could accessorize to beat the band. He was the living, breathing cliché of a gay man. And he liked it that way.

Jason brought lovely trinkets along with him every trip. Things to share with those of us who needed “perking up.”

You can’t know how excited I was when I was assigned a trip to Amsterdam by way of Bangor, Maine, and saw that Jason was on the crew list.

I had never been to Amsterdam. Couldn’t wait to set foot on the street where Anne Frank had lived up in the tiny attic. Couldn’t believe I would be able to go to museums and see for myself the paintings of the Dutch masters. Sunflowers, sunflowers, sunflowers. I could hardly stand thinking about all of the Dutch chocolate and pastries I would be able to consume, to say nothing of their famous Gouda cheese. I didn’t care if the “Keeper of the Scale” would be waiting for us when we got off the plane back home.

And Jason couldn’t wait to shop for diamonds.

We checked into our hotel and I went off to find Jason.

“Who is it?” he asked when I tapped on his door.

“Me.”

He opened the door with a grand sweeping gesture. He was wearing a Japanese Kimono and a pair of clogs.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said and disappeared into the bathroom. Jason had a room to himself. No other male flight attendants on this trip. I flopped down on the bed and stretched my legs. Scissored them back and forth. I was tired, but anxious to see everything. We would only be here one night and morning. Amsterdam was more than I had even dared hope for. Narrow cobblestone walkways, canals and bridges. Little shops and lots of bicycles.

We sampled cheeses. Stopped into a cafe and drank wine. Decided on an Indian place for dinner and had the best curry I had ever tasted. My mouth was on fire clear up to my nose. I couldn’t help but think of how interesting it would have been if Jason were straight. We had stopped into a bar to listen to some music when he leaned over the table and told me he was going to put me in a cab and send me back to the hotel. He had an appointment.

I of course thought he meant he had a date. I wanted to know how he had found someone so quickly. I wanted to see what he looked like. Was he a tall, blond Nordic type? Or a swarthy-looking Italian? Or was he Dutch? And did he too wear clogs around the house with a lovely Kimono?

I asked my questions. Begged for answers.

“I’m going to buy some diamonds. Some black market diamonds. And if you can keep it a secret, I’ll take you with me.”

I crossed my heart.

It was just a regular jewelry store. Small, but with a sign over the door. The shades were drawn, however. The door locked. It was closed up for the night.

But Jason knocked twice. And a hand pulled the shade from the door. One eye peeked out into the darkness.

“It’s OK,” Jason said, nodding in my direction.

And the door creaked open. A bent little man was standing there wearing wool slacks and a cardigan sweater over his plaid shirt. He had a jeweler’s eye piece on his head. He reminded me of my grandfather. My father’s dad. Little tufts of hair sprouting from his ears.

“Come, come,” he said, motioning us in. And he closed the door behind us, locking it with his key.

Shuffling across the floor, he went behind the counter. Stooping down he picked up a pouch. Next he took out a piece of dark velvet which he rolled out flat. Onto the velvet he emptied the pouch. Diamonds spilled out like stars in the night sky. Dozens of diamonds. Small. Medium. Large.

“Go ahead,” the little man said, smiling. I loved his accent. It made this all feel so safe. So legal. We were just a couple of people looking at diamonds in a jewelry shop. In the middle of the night with the door locked and the shades pulled down.

Jason took the eye piece the little man had offered. He looked at first one stone and then another. He began to separate them. At one point he held one up to me.

“What do you think of this one?” he asked.

I just nodded. I didn’t know what kind of small talk was appropriate when buying black market diamonds so the cat had taken my tongue and was now batting it around over in the corner.

Jason settled on the pile to his right. He and the little man stepped off to the side to negotiate the price.

Thirty minutes later we were back at the hotel, sitting cross-legged on Jason’s bed, diamonds spread in front of us. We were suffering from something I now think of as Diamond Fever.

We were giddy. Jason opened a bottle of wine from the mini bar. We toasted each other. He held the diamonds up to my ears, just to see how I would look with really good accessories. And perhaps that’s what got to him: my finely dressed ears. But the next thing, we were kissing. It was only one kiss. But I will say it was a good one. Really good. Surprisingly good. Considering. I thought about all the times Rock Hudson had kissed Doris Day. Is this what it was like for good old Doris? Handsome Rock kissing away and Doris knowing he was probably thinking of Roddy McDowell?
When we pulled apart I noticed Jason’s eyes were still closed. And his hands were still on my earlobes. Slowly he dropped his hands and opened his eyes.

I wondered if he might cry. Might accuse me of despoiling his lips. Maybe they had never been kissed by a woman other than his mother. I was ready for drama. But he looked fine. Really fine. Like nothing at all unusual had happened.

“So, let me show you how we’re gonna get these babies into the country,” he said, smiling. “Wanna help?”

And he took two sinus inhalers. The kind we all carried on the plane in case ears plugged up. He unscrewed the bottoms and emptied out the innards. Then taking tiny pieces of tissue he showed me how we would wrap each and every diamond, placing them back into the inhalers, screwing the bottoms back on.

The next day, I couldn’t decide which was the bigger secret, the kiss or the smuggling. But when passing through customs and being stopped by the agent we both simply smiled and said we had nothing to declare.

Claudia Sternbach is a newspaper columnist and author of Now Breathe.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, February 12th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.