A Time When Many Give Thanks to the Skycap

Thanksgiving travelers know not what they do.

Their odyssey to the airport leaves them out of breath, short-tempered and shouting for help like lost children.

Skycap Hasanjee Bholat has seen grown men toss their luggage onto the roadway by the terminal and storm off in a huff. He has refused the $20 bills that desperate travelers push into his palm for faster service. He doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t budge either for travelers who want to check in a slew of extra suitcases, beyond what the airlines allow, for no extra charge.

After more than 10 years at Los Angeles International Airport, he has mastered a Zen-like calm as frantic strangers barrage him with questions and unreasonable demands.

“We are the first contact they have,” the 60-year-old skycap from Lawndale said. “We are the first person to get hurt.”

Today is one of the busiest travel days of the year, when thousands of anxious locals will leave work early to throw some clothes into a suitcase, round up the kids, drop off the dog and race to the airport. For Bholat and the four men he supervises at Continental Airlines’ curbside check-in stand, the day before Thanksgiving usually is a kind of Super Bowl without the cheers.

The line of luggage-weary travelers will snake along the curb and Bholat’s crew will have to move quickly to accommodate travelers who do not want to wait inside the terminal for luggage check-in. Again and again, the skycaps will tag the bags for their destination and toss them onto a conveyor belt, headed toward the plane. That’s a lot of heavy lifting.

For the skycaps, the extra bags can mean extra cash, although they won’t discuss how much a Thanksgiving can generate on top of their base pay, which is not much above minimum wage. Tips, however, vary widely. Some people offer nothing, or $1 to check six bags, while others give $5 per bag.

“It’s a crazy day,” Bholat said Tuesday. “When you are so busy, people don’t have time to give you a proper tip. You can hardly get $5.”

On Tuesday morning, LAX traffic crawled and car horns blared. People late for flights bumped and pushed one another. Some smoked their last cigarettes before entering the nonsmoking world of airline travel. Children squirmed in line.

Bholat watched calmly as one well-dressed man unloaded 14 bags into the street. When the skycap directed him to wait in line at the curbside counter, the man stormed inside without a word. He left his bags.

“Sometimes they come in with a very bad attitude,” Bholat said. Then, to his skycaps, he said: “Don’t touch his bags! Something happens, he says we lost his bags.” Later, the man returned and one of Bholat’s crew loaded up his luggage on a cart and took it inside the terminal.

Bholat works for International Total Services, one of about a dozen skycap companies that contract independently with airlines at LAX. Previously, he worked at a security checkpoint for another airline, but his current job allows more interaction with people--for good or bad.

Actor Jason Mersell handed one of Bholat’s co-workers $5 for checking his single suitcase onto his Newark, N.J.-bound flight.

“Five dollars a bag,” Mersell, 30, said. “That’s just my policy. They save you a lot of time. I’m done. Now I can go eat and get a book or whatever I want.”

Another traveler, Jesse Sparma, held a wad of bills in one hand and his plane ticket in the other as he watched Bholat pack a box for him. Sparma, 39, was headed home to Chattanooga, Tenn., after visiting his sick mother in Simi Valley.

The good news, Bholat told him, was that Sparma could check the box. The bad news? Sparma was a day late for his flight, Bholat discovered after scanning Sparma’s ticket.

The traveler took the news calmly. He picked up his bag, walked into the terminal and took his place in line behind 20 others.

“The nightmare begins,” he said.

Much to Sparma’s surprise, his odyssey had a happy ending.

Thirty minutes later, he returned to the skycap counter to show off his ticket home.

“The people at the airline were really cool,” he said. “It didn’t cost me a dime!”

Meanwhile, Bholat was back at his station, keeping the next round of travelers headed home for the holiday and handling the next crisis.

“We have to take one at a time,” he said.