After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

Why is he taking so long to look it over?

  If I can’t even get in here, none of this is real.

  You thought you were going to get your life back? Ha.

  You can’t even get close to the club. You’re going to spend the rest of your nights at home, alone.

  The doorman waved me in, and I rolled my eyes at him as if he had offended me by checking it in the first place.

  Carissa was inside already, staring at us with her icy blue eyes as we entered. She quickly flashed me a smile and extended her arms.

  We’d never been too friendly in high school, but we were friendly enough. Carissa could only hold a conversation for about five minutes before you got bored with her, her voice flat and uninviting. Luckily, she’d never said much to me in our two plus years at Beekman.

  After a round of apple martinis, we gathered our coats and headed down the block toward Eleventh Avenue and the West Side Highway.

  I heard my mother’s neurotic voice in the back of my head as soon as we entered Suzie Wong.

  Be careful, don’t stay with your friends, and don’t leave your drink.

  We went right by the lines of people on either side of the massive set of wooden doors, waiting to get in. Walking through the entrance was like being sucked into a whole other underground world.

  I was instantly smacked in the face with the bass of whatever the DJ was playing, pulsing purple lights, the floor vibrating underneath my feet. People were bumping into me, sipping drinks, laughing, and kissing each other on the cheek. We were led to a table, one that I later learned cost thousands of dollars. I learned a lot of things that night, like what a “CFO” was (the guy who bought the table was the Chief Financial Officer of a huge internet company), what “bottle service” was (the agreement to pay ten to fifteen times what a bottle of alcohol is worth, plus gratuity, for a tiny table the size of a cardboard box and permission to sit or stand near it), and that if you make eye contact with a man at a club twice, not once, he will come over and offer to buy you another drink, and/or dance with you.

  I stood around the table with everyone else and watched as waitresses in short, black, crushed velvet dresses and stilettos brought over this tower of glasses and multitiered tray of strawberries, chocolate, and lemon wedges, two buckets full of ice, one with champagne, another with vodka, and four carafes filled with seltzer, cranberry juice, orange juice, and water.

  This is all for us?

  The scene constantly changed with the song or the people passing through, and there was a lot of shouting even if we were standing right next to each other. There was very little actual dancing before 1:00 a.m., and when 1:00 a.m. came around, there was so much happening it was hard not to get lost in it. Individual drinks at the bar were about $20 a pop, and all of the girls standing around it looked like clones that had been shipped from the same factory. They either had short black hair or long blonde highlighted hair that had been curled with an iron, then tussled. The uniform was a black dress or skin-tight red, white, or black tube skirt with some sort of shiny top that was either low cut or backless. Shiny red lips matched the shiny red nails that held glowing cell phone screens, all perched atop four-inch heels that looked incredibly painful just to stand in, and flagged by a tiny purse that cost a small fortune tucked under an armpit.

  There was a certain way to hold your glass, a certain way to dance in place, a certain way to subtly size other girls up.

  I didn’t get drunk that night, I just danced with my friends, and when Kate put my number in her phone, I felt like I was “in.” For the first time in my life, I had earned my place somewhere, all because I was “hot.”

  I went home, and I thought, this is going to fix everything. If I went back there the next night, or the next week, I could finally have something that resembled a life. I was finally going to be normal; no, better than normal, and everyone would be jealous when they knew. Somewhere in Wisconsin or Boston, girls in dorm rooms were drinking beer in their pajamas and sneakers with stupid boys in fleece pullovers who took shots and quoted Adam Sandler movies. This … this was something else. This was where everyone really wanted to be, and for the first time, I was on the other side.

  The next night I showed up was a Thursday night. I didn’t have class on Friday, just work at P.S. 150 (formerly known as the Early Childhood Center, where I had gone to kindergarten, first, and second grade, which had morphed into a full-fledged K-5 elementary school), where I was now an after-school counselor, and I didn’t have to be there until 3:00 p.m.

  We had all made it successfully to the front doors of Marquee, the “next hot club,” but Rockstar had needed to make a bit of a scene first.

  I didn’t have my fake ID yet, and a couple of the other girls were definitely not twenty-one, either, and we were holding up the line at the front. Rockstar felt it necessary to yell, “C’mon, I’ve got six hot girls here!” as if he was scalping tickets. I fiddled around in my bag to avoid making eye contact with anyone when this happened.

  This isn’t you, my conscience whispered. So I drowned her, as soon as we walked right through the velvet ropes and were led to a table in the center of the club.

  I started drinking because strawberries and pink lemonade and chocolate were brought with every bottle, and it was fucking awesome. I kept drinking so I could lose all inhibition and hit the dance floor. I drank some more because the alcohol silenced the fear of their judgment, the envy I had of other people, the anxiety I carried inside me at all times. I had always dreamed of rolling with the “in crowd,” and there we were, dancing among celebrities and the Manhattan elite. With every sip I expected to feel lighter, sillier, out of my head, and into the reckless abandon of the music. The alcohol drowned out the anxious voices in my head and made me feel calm, confident, more connected to the people around me, including my new well-connected “friends” who weren’t really my friends, but I wanted them to be.

  And, because I drank, I was able to shrug off Rockstar’s hand when it went up my dress as he hoisted me up onto a club couch, which you weren’t supposed to dance on, but we could, all eyes on me, or on us, wiggling around in the middle of thousands of people, lights flashing, the song’s bass punching me in the face in the best way, sweating and pulsing and glasses clanking, because we were special.

  On those nights, I usually went home with someone I didn’t know and woke up slapping my forehead: Oh God, not again. Or even worse, on rare occasion, I didn’t hook up with anyone, and I felt like such a failure. So worthless, all wrong.

  All the while, I was trying to break free of Aaron, who I was more addicted to than any of it, still feeling that without him, I had nothing.

  I went home with the beefy banker who, at his apartment near The Beekman School, took hits from a big bong and had some fancy Apple-powered music system connected to the TV that I could play around with.

  I went home with a red-haired high school teacher named Adam who lived in a Bleecker Street walk up and only kept beer and bread in his fridge. I remember him, specifically, because he warned me not to try and make him do it “doggy style” because it would be over quick, which was exactly what I wanted, anyway.

  I went home with stock-broker Jim, who I met at the table next to us at Guest House one night. He was thirty-nine, worked twenty hours a day, seven days a week, and took something called Yin Yang to keep him going. He had a Puggle named Nigel who pooped next to the bed because he was jealous of us. While walking Nigel around Central Park’s Great Lawn the next morning (Jim just sat in a folding chair reading the Wall Street Journal), I got to meet other guys, like the thirty-seven-year-old gym teacher who took me to a comedy club.

  I remember the gym teacher (but not his name) because I got so drunk and so sick to my stomach that night that I told him he needed to call 911. I walked to the ambulance with just my tank top on, as if it were a dress, and after waiting for two hours in the emergency room, simply went home in a cab and found myself trying to explain the ambulance bill to my parents a
month later.

  The more men I slept with, the more distance I put between me and reality. Until the very moment I got drunk, I lived in and cringed at the past and was terrified of the future. The slight nausea that came like clockwork after four drinks temporarily blotted it all out and was easily remedied by a cigarette and some fresh air. I mixed vodka with pink lemonade, threw it back, gagged. I hated the way alcohol tasted. But I loved what it did to me.

  I wouldn’t like what it did the next day, but that didn’t matter.

  It was the closest to being unconscious as I could get, even though I could never quite get drunk enough not to worry about what happened when the drunkenness faded.

  * * *

  Back on the Upper West Side, a particularly difficult session with Dr. A was starting to bring up the old instinct to cut someone off.

  Her.

  First, she told me that I was getting in the way of my own progress.

  “Meeting all of these guys and making unhealthy friends and bad choices is making you feel even worse.”

  She said I was blurring any ability to look back and see my actual progress, waking up to “what I did last night” like a bag of rocks whopped across my face.

  “Why do you have to keep getting drunk and going home with strange guys? Can you not drink? Or if you do, can you go home alone?”

  “Yeah, great idea! Because when I’m alone, I want to die, and I’m alone almost all of the time.”

  What did she want me to do? Nothing? Nothing at all, except schoolwork? With the semester ending, that would leave me pretty barren.

  “What about meditating?” she offered.

  “Sure, let’s throw gasoline on the dynamite. I’ll just let all these psycho thoughts have free reign to take over and make me dizzy.”

  I had an attitude for a reason, but we hadn’t talked about it yet.

  Over the weekend, I had called her during a time when I felt very triggered. She told me I could start calling her when I felt it was an emergency, and that she would get back to me when she could. I had called three times, actually, and I could tell that on the fourth time, she sent me straight to voicemail. So, I left a message that probably reflected the initial distress that prompted the call, coupled with the feelings of rejection and even betrayal at the fact that she hadn’t answered.

  It was Thursday, and she had not gotten back to me.

  Obviously, I was going to have to be the one to bring this up.

  So I sighed, and asked, “Oh hey, did you get my voicemail?” my voice dripping in resentment.

  “Yes, and I’m not going to answer a message like that.”

  “Excuse me? A message like what?”

  “Do you realize how you sounded? It was incredibly rude.”

  “No, didn’t realize, because I was too busy feeling like I was going to have a complete meltdown,” I snapped. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “You sounded angry with me for not answering, but that’s not any way to get what you’re asking for.”

  “Now you’re judging me? You’re telling me to be comfortable asking you for help, and you’re kicking me while I’m down because I didn’t ‘do it right?’” I fumed.

  She held her clipboard rather tightly, the only barrier she had between the twelve inches of space between my couch and her chair, and stood her ground.

  “When my boys do this, I don’t respond to them. If they throw a tantrum, I tell them that when they’re ready to be nice, I’ll listen and try to get them what they need. But they have to tell me calmly.”

  I started to shake, I was so angry.

  “I’m holding you to a higher standard because I’m treating you like any other adult I respect. If you’re going to get anywhere with people, you have to try and be skillful, even when you’re on edge.”

  I took a sip of water, sniffling and trying not to completely fall apart.

  “You have to learn to say, ‘I understand you’re busy, but I want help.’ You have to get past this desperation for another person and learn to talk yourself off of a ledge.”

  This was part of the larger social struggle I was having with the way I communicated. I must have picked up some of it from my parents, or at the very least, my mom, who blamed and attacked when she felt hurt or worried, instead of making an appeal.

  I left the session feeling a whirlwind of different things, almost shell-shocked from how much I had to absorb.

  * * *

  The next morning, my mother woke me up at 8:00 a.m., saying, “Grandma fell again. We don’t know how long she’s been on the floor.”

  I ran upstairs with her in my pajamas to find her on the floor between the small bedroom and the bathroom, just laying there, looking in front of her.

  “Hi, Grandma,” I said, crouching down, then letting my legs fall to the side so I was as close to eye level with her as I could get. My mom called 911.

  “What are you doing down here, silly goose? We should get up soon, but let’s stay down here for a few more minutes. I like it down here.” I knew we would have to wait for the EMTs to arrive and move her, in case she had hit her head or broken something.

  From then on, the hospital became a revolving door.

  Grandma’s insurance would not cover twenty-four-hour home care, and we couldn’t afford it out of pocket. So, we tried everything, taking turns sleeping upstairs, my mother, Aunt Fran, and me, trying to honor her wish of keeping her out of a nursing home.

  She came down to eat dinner with us every Friday night, and my father cut up her pizza into teeny tiny pieces night after night so that she could eat them.

  I went upstairs to spend time with her several times a week and on weekends, and my mom checked on her most evenings.

  We tried to play cards, and she tried not to show that she didn’t understand the rules anymore.

  Whenever she was at the hospital, my dad “gently” stalked the staff to make sure she was being given the attention she deserved. I stroked her forehead, which she felt was soothing, and tried to ignore the scared look in her eye, a look that defied her attempted bravery, a look that only someone who knew those eyes so well could discern from the simple composition of pupil and retina.

  * * *

  Syd, like me, was close to his grandmother, who lived about ten minutes away in another apartment complex closer to Chinatown. We learned all sorts of things about one another, though he was mostly silent and I was pretty chatty.

  But in all of that time sitting on the roof together, we never talked about what happened on 9/11. We didn’t bring it up, because it was so far behind us, not a topic of conversation you brought up like what movie you’d seen lately or the silly thing you did the last time you were drunk.

  It wasn’t until years later that we talked about how, on that day, he had surfaced from the subway, leaving a subway car so packed he couldn’t move an inch, into madness. It had taken him hours to get home by subway, as close as he could get. By the time he surfaced, there were no cops to stop him.

  He could have gone to his grandmother’s apartment, which was farther from the Towers than his own apartment was, but instead, he went home.

  Stepping onto his terrace, he collected a handful of debris in his hand. Who am I holding? he thought. A couple of years my senior, he had the intuition to immediately know that there were people in those ashes.

  The next few hours disappeared, and when time returned, he was helping doctors and nurses at the neighboring New York Downtown Hospital up and down the slippery, ash-covered stairs of his building with a flashlight. Many of the medical staff lived in his building.

  “Mom, I want to go down there to help,” he told his mom, a nurse at the hospital.

  “You’re not going over there, it’s too dangerous,” she insisted.

  “Okay, can I at least give blood?” he asked.

  “No, you’re fourteen, you can’t give blood.”

  Two days later, he did manage to get close to the site, closer than most, with his v
ideo camera. He watched people with no masks or protective gear sifting through the debris, bare-handed.

  “They were mobilizing, flushing their eyes with water then going back in. They had to be looking for survivors. Desperately. Why else would you expose yourself to that?”

  Not only did he not tell me all of this until years later, but he didn’t talk about it with anyone at all.

  “Whenever I left the state and people knew I was from Lower Manhattan, I lied about being here to avoid their intrusive questions. My counselors at school tried to talk to me about it, but I was ‘unresponsive’ as they’d say. In eighth grade, I was a happy kid. I’d go to friend’s houses after school at St. Joseph’s, we’d play video games like Golden Eye, or we’d play at Cherry Street Park, or at least we’d try to—it wasn’t conducive to football because of all the concrete, and the assholes in the grade above us tried to clothesline us by sticking their arms out.”

  The talkative kid who worked the room on his first day of high school fell silent. He began getting into fights and acting recklessly. He became an angry, irritable shell of what he used to be, and began to constantly put himself in danger. The lines between reality and fantasy were blurred.

  “I didn’t understand the way I thought and acted, but I knew I was prone to emotional outbursts,” he said. “My friends were always telling me to chill out. I only slept for a few hours every few days. My parents saw how pale I was. I looked sickly. But the nightmares were so bad that I avoided sleep. The thoughts that came when I tried to lie down were morbid.”

  He began speeding down highways at insane speeds at 6:30 a.m., one time, “Holding a plastic bag out the window and watching it disintegrate,” then getting back to the city in time for class.

  “I was in a Mustang, because I ran with kids who made a business of buying Mustangs online and flipping them,” he explained.

  “Have you ever thought about suicide?” I asked, thinking about all the time he’d spent trying to stop me.

  “I’m not sure. Would you say that taking a harmful drug excessively is a form of attempted suicide?”