Could You Survive the Chaos of Crash Pad Life?

No one tells you where you’re going to sleep when you become a flight attendant in New York.

They tell you how to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds,* how to guide people to "step, JUMP, and slide" out of the 777 once you've popped the slide, how to read your trip details, how to clock in to the system on time for a flight.

But no one sits you down and says: “Hey, by the way, you’re about to become professionally homeless in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Good luck.”

That's basically what happens once you graduate from flight attendant training. You're turned loose with a positive-space ticket to your new base city and a week off to get oriented. It's up to you to figure out where to put all your stuff before your first flight.

First, What Is a Crash Pad?

In case you aren't in the industry, allow me to explain: a crash pad is exactly what it sounds like. It’s not a home. It is a place you land between flights. A place to drop your suitcase, take a shower, try to get some sleep, and then fly off again. It’s like crashing on a friend’s couch…except it’s not your friend's place. And it’s not a lumbar-destroying couch (thankfully).

Usually, it's a two- or three-bedroom apartment shared by a number of people (anywhere from 6 to 15) who are also in the "above wing" jobs at an airline. So, flight attendants or pilots. It was rare, in my experience, to see pilots and flight attendants mingle in the same crash pad, unless they were all male. In thinking back, this was probably for good reason.

And—important detail—it’s not particularly legal.

Different states have different laws, but in New York, the number of occupants legally allowed to live in an apartment depends on how many people are on the lease and the square footage of the unit. But, no matter what kind of fancy math you do, cramming fifteen people in 600 square feet is objectively kind of nuts.

Today I was inspired to write about crash pad life. Partly because most people only kind of know what they are, and partly because they are such an absolute hot mess of hilarity that I’m still shocked no one has made a TV show about flight attendants living in a New York crash pad. I sweatergawd, that show would do numbers Pan Am** only dreamed of.

Finding a Place to Crash In New York

This whole memory spiral kicked off because I emailed an old friend—Lex—who showed up in my last blog post. We haven’t talked much in recent years because, you know, life does what it does. But Lex was a huge bright spot when I first became a flight attendant.

We already had history. We were both writers for Intrepid Media (wayback machine ftw!) in the early 2000s. Intrepid was this scrappy, chaotic, deeply fun pop culture zine that doesn’t exist anymore but absolutely should. It had this not-quite-bulletin-board, not-quite-forum energy where everyone talked in the context of the articles we wrote. We all got to know each other in that weird early-internet way that somehow felt more real than most “real life” interactions.

Some of those writers went on to become actual paid authors. Some got internet-famous back when Twitter wasn’t a flaming landfill. It was one of the best creative environments I’ve ever been part of. The Intrepid Media crew published a few books of our own (those three links are all amazon links).

So when I got assigned to New York City as my base, I did what any sane person would do. I panicked, packed my two suitcases, and texted the one person I knew in New York.

"Lex! Can I sleep on your couch?"

If you're familiar with New York, you'll know it was bold of me to assume her apartment had room for a couch. People joke about apartment sizes, but it’s not really a joke. In New York, space is a luxury. Like diamonds. Or sanity.

Lex wanted to help, but her roommate wasn’t exactly thrilled about an indefinite houseguest who would be coming and going at unpredictable hours. So she did what good internet friends do—she outsourced me.

Enter: Adam Kramer. Adam was funny, dry, sarcastic, and kind; exactly the kind of person you want to land with when your life has just taken a sharp left turn. He and Lex both lived in Astoria, Queens. Which, at the time, might as well have been another planet. Here's a 30,000 foot view of the situation:

• Brand new flight attendant
• Brand new to New York
• Brand new to subways
• Barely enough money in my bank account to afford a $2 slice of pizza

This was already a shit show. I stayed on Adam’s couch for two nights. Then moved to Lex’s place for two nights. Just rotating like a polite and pressed nomad in polyester. It was lovely, but it wasn't the best set up for me. Turns out, Astoria isn't that convenient to the airports, and there's no free transportation.

I knew there were crew shuttles, vans providing scheduled trips to each of the three NYC-area airports, but they all picked up in one place: Kew Gardens. I needed to be closer to those shuttles, so my life would be slightly easier.

This is when I made my first truly questionable decision.

The First Crash Pad

I reached out to someone from training, this guy who graduated a week ahead of me, who I knew from meal times and smoke breaks. Eric, with the knife tattoos on the backs of his forearms, who claimed he was in the Marines, but I know a few of those and...not likely (I recognize this sounds questionable but his behavior with me was never questionable, thankfully). Eric had found a crash pad in Jamaica, Queens. Not the cute part of Jamaica. The other part.

Now, location-wise, it made sense. It's close to the train (which would get me to JFK easily) and close enough to walk (or take a bus) to the Delta crew shuttles that run out of Kew Gardens (aka “Crew Gardens”).

Side note: Kew Gardens was often referred to as "Jew Gardens" by folks who heard where I lived. I add this as a non-derogatory anecdote to paint a picture: there is nothing quite like seeing exhausted, slightly hungover flight attendants doing the walk of shame past Orthodox families heading to synagogue. The kids are in traditional clothing, the moms are in headscarfs, the dads are wearing black suits and black hats with their tassels swinging as they stoically stride along the sidewalk. The contrast is…cinematic. It's a fascinating neighborhood, and somehow everyone co-exists peacefully.

Anyway.

This crash pad? Not good. Not even “bad but manageable.” Just…not good. There were so many roaches. Everywhere. I threw my toothbrush away after two days there because I just knew they had crawled on it in the bathroom. The whole place smelled like stale trash. And the front door had an indoor-type of doorknob, on an indoor type of door, with no window.

Sketchy. As. Fuck.

Also, it was all dudes, and I only knew the one dude. Eric and I shared a twin-sized bottom bunk for a couple of nights. Not metaphorically. Literally. I barely knew this guy (okay, we made out drunk in training, like twice), but he was just letting me crash there for a couple of nights while I figured things out.

One twin-sized bed. Two people. IKEA’s finest cheapest option. That was my introduction to crash pad life. I learned very quickly: this was not going to be sustainable for me.

The Upgraded Crash Pad

After aggressively calling around to total strangers, flight attendants whose number I got from another quasi-stranger flight attendant, I found my first official crash pad. It was in a building on the northeast corner of Metropolitan Ave. and Lefferts Blvd., above a bank. This one cost $300 a month, and after the adventure with the roaches, it felt like outright luxury, as long as you didn't look too closely at the cleanliness of the floor. Or the bathroom.

Let me walk you through it:

After walking up very steep, thickly carpeted stairs (that I almost died falling down at least twice while maneuvering my luggage) from an outside door, you find yourself on a three-way landing. This crash pad's apartment door is on the right at the top of the first flight of stairs. The other two directions included more stairs to other doors.

A note: New York City renovation design decisions are the most creative I've ever seen outside of a third-world country. IYKYK

Coming in the apartment door, you're in the living room with a floral couch straight out of a 1996 Laura Ashley catalog, flanked by white wicker side tables, and two mismatched chairs in front of the window. You're facing an L-shaped kitchen with a short bar top between the kitchen and living room. If you turn left and head down a short hallway, you're looking at the apartment lease-holder's bedroom door. Turn right before walking in that bedroom and you're looking down another short hallway, facing the back bedroom (straight ahead), and the only small bathroom is the door on your right.

It's a layout that makes zero architectural sense (a common theme). The bedroom in the far back had two bunk beds and a dresser. The lease-holder's room hosted two queen beds and two dressers, and the front bedroom, which you have to cross the living room to get to, had double glass doors and was definitely never meant to be a bedroom. This room has windows overlooking the busy corner of Metro and Lefferts, and features two metal bunk beds with a twin bed in between them.

My bunk was the top one on the right, directly in front of the window, directly in front of the window air conditioning unit. I bought a set of childishly-patterned sheets and a flammable-feeling blanket at a questionable "everything" store down the street, and I was basically set. I froze to death every night I was there, but $300 a month for a reasonably clean, all-women crash pad was about as good as it gets.

I am dying to go into a side story about one of the other flight attendants, Jessica (who I mentally referred to as Messica for many reasons), but I'm going to hold off because doing so will derail this story way too far. Messica deserves her own post. And trust me, she’s getting one.

This crash pad was just two blocks away from the crew shuttle and directly above the best restaurant (Tu Casa, mentioned in the last post) in Kew Gardens. Across the street from a bodega with a nice cat. Beside a laundromat. A block from a nail salon. Really great location on the bus route directly to JFK. For $300 a month, this is basically everything you need. I mean, it could have benefitted from a vent fan in the bathroom and maybe a better place to get ready without turning on the lights and disturbing a sleeping roommate, but I didn't know enough about being an efficient commuter yet, so it was perfect for me.

This crash pad had me learning some important lessons about living in a big city. One of these comes to mind:

After about nine months in this crash pad, I upgraded to a bottom bunk, which was a big win. If you haven't climbed up the skinny metal rungs of a cheap bunk bed to the top bunk, you don't know foot pain. After a day of being on your feet for fourteen hours, wearing high heels in the concourse (one reason why a lot of flight attendants end up with hammer toes), climbing these rungs was torture. And then there's the terrifying feeling of trying to roll over and almost falling off, then nearly throwing your back out in the panic of trying not to fall off, but overcorrecting...

Anywho.

So one day, while I was in the same room but on the bottom of the other bunk bed, I made a classic New York mistake; the kind you only make once: I came back from a Mumbai trip with amazing spiced snack mix. Like, truly elite snacking material. I inhaled a bag of it while I was there, and another on the flight home (begrudgingly sharing some of it with the rest of my crew). I had a third bag I was so excited to enjoy with some wine between my next two trips. But somehow during my unpacking and repacking for a trip with a very different weather forecast, I shoved it under my bed with my suitcase.

If you have lived in NYC, I think you know where this is going.

The next day, I went on a domestic three-day trip. When I get back, I'm in the crash pad alone, yapping away on my phone, cuddled up in my cozy bottom bunk and suddenly I notice this weird crunching sound. It sounded like it was coming from my pillow.

I stop talking for a few seconds, tell my friend to hold on, and sit up.

I don't hear anything for a minute or two.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Must not have been anything.

I lay back down. A few minutes later, I hear more crunching, and some crackling.

I sit up, I move my pillow, I look around.

Silence. WTF?

This plays out like, four more times before I think to look under my bed.

Sure enough, I discover a mouse (not a rat, thank goodness, just a healthy little mouse, cute round ears and beady black eyes and all) munching away under my bed, absolutely going to town on my snack mix. I didn't shriek like a cartoon character, but only because I knew someone was sleeping in the bedroom on the other side of the wall. I did suppress a closed-mouth throat-scream while reaching my naked hand under the bed to snatch the bag of snack mix. Immediately I ran it out of the apartment to the dumpster behind the building. I definitely left some crumbs, but I was unwilling to reach back under there to clean further.

I'm shuddering just reliving this moment as I type it out.

I was furious. At the mouse and at myself. Also, immediately done with that snack mix forever, because there's no way I am getting Hantavirus, or anything even more medieval. I don't care how little or how much he ate, it's gone.

This is when I figured out that everything, regardless of perceived edibility, needs to be stored in sealed tubs with clip-on lids. Everything. Even the things you don't think a mouse will eat, they will eat it. Like the on-board shoes which apparently had food particles on the soles that I didn't notice. They ate those, too.

The Best Crash Pad

The best crash pad I ever lived in, and the one where I stayed the longest, was run by a Dutch speaker and a Hungarian speaker. These classy queens somehow secured an apartment in an awesome, solid pre-war building. The apartment itself made no logical sense in layout but worked perfectly for what we needed. And when I say they optimized it, I mean optimized. IKEA had never worked harder. Those two ladies bought and built ALL OF IT (honestly, is there nothing women can't do?), and this is before IKEA delivered.

One bedroom had three bunk beds, all with a double bed on the bottom, along with three tall armoires for storage. The other bedroom had one basic bunk bed (both top and bottom were twin size) and five more twin size beds, with two dressers. All the most inexpensive, basic furniture, but still a quality set up. There was a teeny tiny little room that was probably meant to be a bedroom, but was instead used as the media room, which had a huge soft couch and a TV taking up 90% of the space.

The main room you walk into from the door, past the only built-in closet in the whole place, a space that would probably used by a traditional tenant as the living room, was instead used as a general space for trip prep. This is where you would typically find our suitcases in various stages of packing. This room had two makeup tables with mirrors and lights (critical for multiple flight attendants trying to get ready for trips at the same time!), along with two 2x4 KALLAX bookshelves where we each had a bin for storing things we didn't want to take on trips with us. The kitchen was off this space and we each had a single shelf to keep our goods, along with a small carve out of space in the fridge.

Biggest rule that was mostly followed (because breaking it caused drama): no using someone else's stuff. Especially if it was labeled with their name. The items that were ahem "liberated" from the plane and found their way to the communal area of the fridge (like the extra delicious double cream that would be catered in first class from Ireland and London), that was fair game.

We used a whiteboard on the door of the bathroom, so anyone who needed to get ready for a trip at a specific time could call 'dibs' on the bathroom for an hour by putting your name and the time on the whiteboard. Sometimes you might be expected to use less time in the one bathroom if there were multiple people leaving at the same time.

It always startles people when I tell them I shared a two-bedroom apartment with 11 other women, but I have never known a time when all of us were there at the same time. Usually, there were only two or three people in the crash pad at any given time. The most I ever experienced was five people in one night, and even then it was only a 12-hour overlap for a few of them.

I was lucky enough to know the two ladies who rented the apartment, Maartje and Malia, and I got to call dibs on one of those glorious bottom bunks in their room. With sheets and towels, I turned it into my own little cave. Total blackout. It was basically a closet-sized sanctuary where I could stretch out, and I loved it. The whole place was functional, thoughtful, and quite cozy.

And I paid just $275 a month.

The Hotbed Crash Pad

Later, when I moved to Oregon and started commuting, I downgraded to what’s called a hotbed crash pad. This is where things start to feel really sketchy. Imagine looking for a place to spend the night and calling a number a friend gave you, getting an address and instructions to let yourself in and sleeping in an apartment with complete strangers.

Instead of having your own bed, you get assigned a bed based on whichever one is currently empty. It's a great way for the apartment owner to be efficient about space. It's also cheap, often between $40 and $60 a night, with no paperwork.

So, you just show up and sleep in a bed that may have been vacated just hours earlier (if you're thinking about the icky feeling you get sitting on a warm toilet seat, we are on the same brainwave). That person, or someone else, might sleep in it again the next night. You may never meet them.

You're expected to bring your own sheets (me, I learned that having a silk sleep sack (like this one, which was a lifesaver when I was backpacking through Southeast Asia) is the most sanitary option.

Yes. Strangers.

Yes. Rotating bodies.

Yes. Exactly what you’re picturing.

And no, I don’t know how I didn’t end up on a true crime podcast, but I didn’t, so we’re calling that a win.

People act differently around strangers than they do people they care about, and not in a good way. Hotbed crash pads were home to the most unhinged behavior I've ever seen, but those are definitely stories for other times.

There were more crash pads. One with an attic bedroom, a creaky twin bed and weird vibes (I only stayed a couple of months there). One in a townhouse across the street from 7-Eleven, which is the pickup location for crew vans, so it was super convenient. That one was co-ed and had major drama but I can't quite remember what it was about (which probably means it was messy in a very specific, exhausting way because of relationship shit).

At a certain point, they all blur together. Same energy. Same layout logic. Same underlying rule: Spend as little as possible. Stay as little as possible.

You Don’t Live In a Crash Pad (Except When You Kind of Do)

Only the people who lease the apartment, like Malia and Maartje, were technically and legally allowed to "live" in the apartment. The rest of us are just “crashing” between trips.

Me? I hovered in the gray area. I’d stay 2–3 days at a time, then leave. I would travel to visit friends or family, or back up work trip after work trip with a couple of days in between. I was there maybe 10 days a month. Which, legally and spiritually, meant I was definitely not living there. But unlike most commuting flight attendants, I didn't have another home I went to part of the month. The crash pad was where I kept the sum total of all of my stuff: about two suitcases worth of clothes and personal items.

Most people had a real home in another state and only flew in for their trips. They treated the crash pad as just a place to sleep two or three nights a month, at most. Some flight attendants actually had other jobs, like the woman in my class, Amy,*** who was a dental hygienist in Boise half of the month. Many flight attendants only worked the minimum amount of hours (45, I think? Maybe only 25?) to keep their flight benefits.

Technically, I could claim I wasn't living in the crash pad, despite it actually being my only place of residence, because all of my mail went to my grandparent's house in South Carolina. However, in retrospect, I should have changed my address to the crash pad because then I could have qualified as a NY resident and gotten the benefits of that. In fact, I made so little money my first year as a flight attendant (just over $16,000!) that I qualified for food stamps, I just had no idea how to access them.

I was often there by myself, so that made it easier to pretend I wasn't there as often as I was (both to myself and Maartje and Malia). That's kind of the point of a crash pad: you're not supposed to be there a lot. It's just a place to sleep between trips.

It’s functional survival. It’s not a home. It’s not even close. But if you stay just a little too long, it becomes the only one you’ve got.

*Additional Notes

• As long as 14D leaves her f@!king bag behind, it can be done in 90 seconds!
• Pan Am was a highly-anticipated, short-lived ABC series that could have leaned into reality, but instead went with something like Desperate Housewives Meets Catch Me If You Can and the ratings fell off hard.
• All names have been changed, just FYI. Well, except for Messica.