After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  Back in the car, I stared out the window at the metal pull-down gates that protected storefronts that were closed, lighting up the cigarette hanging out of the side of my mouth by tilting my head toward the flame.

  After he parked, we went up to his apartment, and I was taken aback by how empty it was: the living room only had a metal desk with a computer on top and a couch. No photos, no armchairs with blankets draped over them, no end tables or magazines or any sign that someone lived there.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, ducking into another room.

  I wandered over to the computer, clicking the mouse to bring the dark screen to life. I searched through an iTunes library and scrolled down until I found a song I recognized. I sat on the couch and waited for him to come back with the bottle cracked open. He poured me a cup of something that tasted like poisonous fruit, something that could have been named after Snow White’s Apple. I lit up another cigarette and chugged what was in the plastic cup, and when he got up to refill my glass, I put a hand up to stop him. I walked over to the kitchen island, picked up the bottle by the neck, and chugged the vodka straight from there, trying not to wince as it went down and “chasing” the triple shot with the drag of my cigarette.

  “Wow, you are not playing games, little girl,” he said.

  Another song I knew came on, and I started to sing it, quietly.

  “Damn girl, you can sing? Sing!” he prompted me.

  So I did, facing the window, not him, looking over an industrial landscape of buildings and trucks and bridges, of trucks and parked cars and garages. I belted out that song, the vodka loosening up the block that lived inside me when I was sober, too ashamed of how I had “blown it” when my singing teacher told my grandma she shouldn’t bother with the singing lessons anymore, because, at nine years old, I just wasn’t practicing enough and wasn’t taking it seriously.

  After I finished, he clapped, scooped me up, and brought me down onto a bed in another room, shirt over my head. Suddenly, I was staring down the lens of a camera.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, putting my hand up in front of the lens.

  He still had all of his clothes on, which was a plus, but I didn’t understand where the camera had come from and why he was taking pictures of me.

  “Stop,” I said. “Just stop. If you want to have sex, I’ll have sex with you. But get the fucking camera out of here.”

  He tossed the camera into a closet and pulled out an aluminum foil pouch. He unfolded its corners to reveal a bunch of pills with strange markings on them.

  “Want one?” he asked. “Ecstasy?” I guessed.

  He nodded.

  “No thanks,” I said. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t, either. You have to drive me home.”

  Then, my memory goes black. I wish I could remember if we had sex. Part of me believes that I was strong enough to say no, the same way I said no to the photos, which I’m sure he still has somewhere. Another part of me knows that it could very well have happened, because I could have just lost consciousness and not been able to do anything but let my body go through the motions, a body that was craving attention and warmth and wasn’t very discerning.

  Whatever happened, the next thing I remember is being back in Q’s car as he explained that we had to make a detour on the way home.

  “This guy who’s buying from me, he’s a big Reggaeton producer,” he said, referencing the latest Latin crossover song that I might know, which I did know, very well.

  We went up to the apartment, and he introduced me, like a gentleman. The producer looked me up and down.

  I’m sure I was something to look at—long, straight jet black hair, the tight jeans that held my legs together so they didn’t buckle in fear underneath me, the tank top that was nearly bursting at the seams under my swollen chest, the painted, sad eyes glazed over with defeat.

  Behind that defeat, which I hoped he couldn’t see, was fear about what was going to happen next.

  “You want some?” the producer offered me.

  “No, thank you,” I shook my head. “I have to get going. My parents are waiting for me. I have school tomorrow.”

  The point got across, and in the hallway, as we waited for the elevators that had no numbered lights to indicate whether they were on their way, I asked Q, “You good to drive?”

  “Ma, of course I am. I got you.”

  On the way home Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl” came on the radio, and I moved my shoulders to the beat, lighting up another cigarette and hating myself for it, imagining the tar and the smoke blackening my lungs.

  I don’t know what sort of lies I devised to my parents, but I continued to go off with boys, and I never came home “trashed.” Or, if I did, I hid it, or I thought I did. When my dad finally said, “I think you should ask your friend to come up and say hello,” I was relieved that it was an art student from Pratt who was downstairs, not someone like Q. If my parents knew I was meeting strange guys online and taking the L train from Brooklyn at one in the morning, they would have put me under house arrest.

  * * *

  They say you date at a level of your self-esteem, which would explain why everyone I met was so tough on the outside, and dead, empty on the inside The boys I met all had something in common—they had real problems. They seemed older. Ideally, they had a car, and they could take me somewhere else. Just get me out of here. I need to get out of here. I was attracted to the sad, the difficult, the complicated. I liked guys who seemed like they had been through shit. On some level, through the sex, the booze, the weed, I was actually making real connections. Whoever I was with, there was always a brief moment in our time together that I believed I could “save” them, but my rescue van was always low on gas, so I’d pick up this hitchhiker and then strand us both off in the mountains somewhere.

  Not all of them were dangerous bad boys I met online. There would be more like Q, but sometimes I met people while drinking and smoking with other people, having long talks, going with one bad boy to a party and meeting a girl who would introduce me to another. There were musicians, athletes, college art students, and I could keep up with all of them, quick-witted and smart, able to figure out what each of them wanted from a girl, from a conversation, and, more importantly, what they didn’t want. I was malleable, because I was barely anything, or anyone, myself.

  The players changed, but the plot was always the same: we’d be sitting on some bench, staring out at either body of water around the island, the East River or the Hudson River, from Queens, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Randall’s Island, downtown or midtown or uptown, to the east or to the west, lighting up a joint, or a cigarette, or swigging from a well-concealed bottle.

  I always “gave it up,” because I didn’t even care. I didn’t enjoy sex—usually, I was thinking about something else, or I was too drunk to think. There was some humanity in the deed, some affection, but that wasn’t the point. These encounters gave me something to pull me forward, the ghost of girl who wasn’t quite dead yet, only a reflection of whoever I happened to be near. I didn’t care either way. My body was just there, this thing that I carried around. It wasn’t something that I had respect or no respect for. I didn’t regard it in that way, because I didn’t regard it at all.

  I put it out there, and you take the bait. It was comforting, almost, having that kind of power, knowing the outcome.

  When the day came that I found out, for no reason that I could ever figure out, my best friend Hailey, who hated Vin, had secretly been friends with Vin for two months, the world turned upside down. She had given me access to her MySpace so I could “keep an eye on him,” so he knew I was cyber-stalking him. She had listened when I told her I wanted to have him jumped, and relayed the message to him, trying to talk me out of doing it. She had three-way called him when I told her I had gotten my results back, dialing him in just in time for him to hear that I had “gotten gonorrhea and didn’t know who from.”

  After that, Hailey would call Vin
during lunch at school, talking to him in front of me, putting other kids on the line with him. While they may not have been intending to “hurt” me, I definitely found enough evidence to support the fact that I was being “plotted against.” I linked up with a black guy, who went by the name of “Vivo,” whose father never seemed to be at their Upper East Side home, who would call or message Vin every once and a while warning him to stop talking shit about me. I posed with him in pictures and posted them online, throwing up gang signs I had no clue about, trying to look tough, not hurt, normal.

  In a particularly dark moment of desperation and desire to be part of the world, I reached back out to Isaac, my first “kiss.” We drank with his friends at a spot in the East Village, a bar with an outdoor garden that we sat in even though it was cold. Huddled under heat lamps, wearing our puffiest jackets, we drank something called “Devil’s Spring” that’s exactly as strong as it sounds. Before moving to another party, we went back to Isaac’s apartment, the apartment that, three years earlier, he tried to feel me up in. This time, I let him do whatever he wanted.

  We met back up with everyone on the roof of someone’s apartment right by the Seaport, where we drank and I clung to Isaac, then let him go when I saw Trevor.

  Slurring my words, I said, “Trevor, let’s go have sex.”

  “You just had sex with my best friend,” he said, looking at me like I was crazy.

  Trevor was in his own special kind of hell, I would later learn—therapists, bottles, drugs, throwing furniture at his parents, blacking out, and wishing for the permanence of that conscious absence.

  I smiled. “Okay then.”

  I felt my phone vibrating; it was the guy I had called to tell I believed it was him who had given me Gonorrhea—he went to Millennium, and I had met him through Christine. I knew it had to be him, because it was right after our “tryst” that I went home and started burning. Fortunately, our biology teacher at Baruch taught us the symptoms of STDs, and I had gone to the gynecologist right away, and it could be cleared up in a day or two with just one pill. Unfortunately, she had left the test results right there on our house phone answering machine for my dad to hear.

  But on this call, on the other line, it was a girl.

  “Let me tell you something. This is his girlfriend, and if his tests come back positive, we’re going to have a problem. I know where to find you,” she said, threatening me in a thick Dominican accent.

  It must have been the alcohol talking, when, cool as a cucumber, I said, “Listen. I don’t do things the way you do. If something happens to me, I will trace it to you, and I will make sure you’re arrested. My cousin’s a lawyer,” I said, throwing in some curse words before hanging up.

  I never heard from either of them again.

  * * *

  “A plane just went into a building uptown.”

  I whipped my head around to face Jeremy, who had made the announcement.

  “What?” leapt out of my throat, along with my heart.

  It was October 11, 2006, math class, the last class of the day. There were just four of us there. I just started running. I shot down the stairs … then back up the stairs … then down the stairs again. It’s happening. It’s finally happening again.

  I ran back into the classroom.

  “Okay, we have to go. I have to go. I have to go home. Are their subways? What’s happening?”

  Nobody had any answers.

  I took what I needed from my locker and called my mom on the way out.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “Let me check….”

  I waited, standing on the corner of Fifty-First Street, watching people with briefcases zoom by, watching the hot dog guy flip the wieners in the water, watching the homeless man shake his paper cup, all in slow motion. Like a runner before the gun, I was braced and ready to do whatever I had to do to get home.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It was a small plane. I don’t think it’s terrorism. You’re probably okay to get on the subway.”

  I got on the subway and, keeping both eyes wide open, thought about my visit with the college counselor who had come in earlier to talk to me about a place called Eugene Lang college. I pulled the catalogue out of my bag and looked over all of their writing courses.

  “What is that? I’ve never heard of it,” I’d said.

  “It’s part of The New School,” she said.

  “What new school?” I asked.

  “It’s called The New School. They have a strong writing program. I think you’ll like it. Take a look.”

  The school was right here in the West Village, which was close to home. As much as I wanted to “get away from my parents”—although things had been better with Vin out of the picture—I knew that leaving home wasn’t an option for me. For one, I wasn’t going to leave Grandma; even if I wanted to, the world was too slippery for me to be able to uproot myself and venture out alone into. If there was an emergency, I wouldn’t know what to do. My doctors, my pharmacy, my therapists, my family, my home, my subway system, my taxi routes, everything I knew, was here.

  Arriving at my stop, speed-walking home, and heading directly to Grandma’s place, I found out that it turned out to be an accident, after all: a Yankees pitcher named Cory Lidle was piloting the plane when it crashed.

  * * *

  Just to humor my mother, I went with her on the MetroNorth train to visit SUNY Purchase. No way in hell was I going to live in a dorm—especially when proper college campuses, like Virginia Tech, were prone to shootings—but, “Sure, let’s take a look.”

  We took the tour, looking into classrooms and student housing. Along the way, a lesbian couple holding hands looked defiantly at our tour group.

  “Oh please,” my mom leaned in and said to me, rolling her eyes. “We’re from New York. You’re not shocking us.”

  Marymount Manhattan was my second option, and I had a leg up if I wanted it, after winning that essay contest. I got in, and they even offered me a partial scholarship, as did Pace University, which was literally across the street from home.

  But something about Marymount smacked of Loyola, and I had a feeling Pace just wasn’t for me.

  I was accepted to the New School, and they invited me in to sit in on a couple of classes as I made my final decision.

  It was one of the first subway trips I took by myself in a neighborhood I had never really navigated before, long before an iPhone with navigation systems came into my life. I finally found it, and sat through a very boring Literacy class on the novel Frankenstein. The classes were an hour and forty minutes long, which, for a restless person, is excruciating. As it turned out, I wouldn’t need to sit through the entire class: about an hour in, a fire alarm began to sound.

  Everyone got up, left their stuff, and headed outside.

  The alarm bells were triggering something in me, so while everyone else was talking and laughing on the sidewalk, I was having a silent meltdown.

  I didn’t even know which way the train was, I didn’t recognize anything, and when fire engines started pulling up to the building, I started texting Aaron, my new boyfriend, that I wanted to leave, that I wanted to just go over to his house.

  How would it look for me not to finish the tour?

  I called a few times, and texted a few times, and finally he responded:

  “I’m sleeping.”

  The invisible girl spun black webs of panic in my mind as time ticked away … five minutes … fifteen minutes … twenty minutes … and I was nearly about to pass out when the crowd began filing back in.

  I was so anxious that I didn’t want to stay for the second class they had me scheduled to sit in on. I decided to head to Aaron’s house anyway, even though I wasn’t due over there until around 2:00 p.m.

  I had met Aaron on Facebook. I’d heard his name thrown around dozens of times but had never met personally. He was tall, lean, with small, beady eyes, black hair he kept cut close, and wore long sleeve shirts like thermals and sweaters t
hat made him stand out, to me, from someone like Vin. His jeans fit, and he wore his fitted hat the right way. He lived in Becca’s apartment complex, and because he was a high school drop-out, had gotten his GED and was taking community classes at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

  That day, his mother let me in, and he moved over for me to lay down with him in his twin bed. Obviously, I was more than wide awake.

  “Hey, I want to tell you about what happened,” I said. He told me to be quiet, but I wouldn’t, and before I knew it, he had thrown me across the room, and I started crying and screaming.

  His mother knocked on the door, “What’s going on in here?” she said.

  “I need to leave,” I said.

  Aaron looked at her.

  “Go ahead, get her out of here,” he said with a shrug.

  I took a long, awkward drive down the West Side Highway with his mother, who didn’t seem to think anything out of the ordinary had happened.

  “I think you guys both just need time to cool down,” she said.

  I thanked her and got out.

  This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and of course, I had gone right from bad to worse, finding out that while sweet dispositions were in short supply to begin with, soon, more unsettling changes were under way. He never had a girlfriend before, so to his credit, maybe he didn’t know, yet, that when triggered by love, he was a violent psychopath.

  * * *

  Three days before Christmas, Grandma tried to travel alone on the subway to visit my grandpa in the nursing home on her own. My dad always offered to take her, but she didn’t like to rely on anyone or make them feel as though she was inconveniencing them. On the platform of the 2/3 train at Fulton Street, as she tried to board the train, a group of men pushed her out of the way.

  She fell, and the conductor closed the doors on her hip and broke it.

  There was a doctor with his family on the platform. He stayed with her and told his wife to go call 911.

  She was in the hospital on Christmas Eve, and we tried to put on a brave face to open presents in her room, ignoring the beeping of the monitors and the snoring of a stranger in the next bed over. I opened a glittery gold wallet she had gotten me from coach, and we wished her Merry Christmas before we left, although I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to stay.