After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking about the ways I put myself in situations I almost hoped I wouldn’t make it out of.

  Desperate for an escape from the torture of simply being, he began binge drinking day and night, which continued throughout college. He unsuccessfully attended four different colleges attempting to earn a nursing degree. He began working odd jobs, which he could never hold. Most of those reasons were his own, and that one time, it was because of me.

  “What do you want to do with your life, though? You can’t just keep picking up all of these random gigs.”

  “I’d want to join the Coast Guard to help rescue people in disaster zones, but …”

  “But what?”

  “I have psychological issues that they’ll find out. They’ll get in my way. They won’t let me in.”

  * * *

  For a while, I kept going to the clubs, bopping around in this bubble of celebrities and ignoring texts from my mom that read “Another girl was abducted from a club and killed.” I wore nice clothes, my makeup was always perfectly done, but I left lipstick all over countless collars, waistbands, and martini glasses. One sip started a fire: what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. This restlessness grew inside me, a desire to chase the feeling, keep it going, even though drinking more always made more of a mess. I was the same girl on the inside that I had always been, and I was still unable to completely let Aaron go.

  I kept it up until the bubble burst one Saturday night, the “off-night” of the week. The club we were supposed to go to had been shut down by cops on a drug raid, so we were stuck at Marquee, where the magic was somehow lost, because nobody went to Marquee on a Saturday. No crowds, no glamour, practically empty save for a few sailors in town for Fleet Week. Rockstar and I picked a random table to sit at with our drinks. Nobody even cared that we hadn’t paid for the table, because all of them were empty. It was like someone had flipped on the lights during a Broadway spectacular, removed the scenery, stripped away the costumes, and left this hollow, sad skeleton in its wake.

  When it became apparent that I was not going to go home with Rockstar, he left to find someone who would.

  On Sunday, Rockstar emceed a karaoke night at Kenny’s Castaway that took a tragic turn and ended in a public fight between the two of us out on Bleecker Street, so my exit from the club world turned out to be abrupt as my entrance.

  I still went out with the guys who I’d kept in touch with, because I needed a reason to drink, even if—especially if—I didn’t like the person I was sitting across from.

  I went to the expensive steakhouse in the Time Warner Building and drank lychee martinis with my broiled three-pound lobster. I went to an expensive sushi restaurant on the Lower East Side and drank lychee martinis and ate shrimp tempura rolls. I went to that expensive lounge in the Meatpacking District and nibbled on empanadas and drank—you guessed it—lychee martinis.

  I let the liquor loosen the hold life had on me, going home with one guy, getting three hours of sleep, going out with another guy, resolving to do a quick dinner and drinking too much, throwing that plan to hell, taking a cab ride to his place, showing up slightly hung over to work at P.S. 150, and repeating the next night, never feeling good about a single moment of those nights I lost control.

  But no matter how much work I did in therapy, this was still the only social outlet I had, the only chance for fun. Often, it was fun, at least, for most of the night.

  * * *

  After one violent fight with Aaron too many, I came home totally broken on the inside and only slightly bruised on the outside.

  After he’d put his hands around my neck and flung me across the room, and I had made my escape by darting past him, past his parents, who were rolling on some sort of drug, out the door, down eighteen flights of stairs into the subway and home. He called me that night, from his roof, saying he was going to kill himself.

  “I’m such a monster, I can’t stop doing this to you. I don’t want to live.”

  I wandered into the living room and just handed the phone to my dad. I wasn’t about to have his blood on my hands.

  “Can you talk him down?” I said. “He wants to die.”

  I’d never let on to my parents about how things really were between Aaron and me. He showed up a perfect gentleman on holidays, and whenever I cried, or came home crying, I just quickly hustled into my room, or tried to cry quietly, hoping nobody would notice.

  The next morning, I could hear my mom and dad talking over coffee, sitting at the dining room table. My father was nodding, and smiled when he saw me.

  “How you doing, baby?”

  I sighed.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Listen, I know your mother and I are supposed to be going to Amsterdam and Brussels next week, but I was thinking, would you want to take my ticket? I bet you guys could have a great time,” Dad said.

  “No, I don’t want to do that. You deserve a vacation.”

  “It’s okay, honey. I think you can use the break more than I can. I’ll have Gucci to keep me company.”

  So, I wrote to all of my college professors, asking permission, and they said yes, no problem, because I had proven myself someone who could keep up, and it was settled.

  After a turbulent plane ride spent digging my nails into my mothers arm, we got into a cab and arrived at a lovely boutique hotel in Brussels, exhausted and in need of a nap. Before that could happen, though, the manager came clacking out in her heels, offering us snacks, and tea, and suggestions of where to take a walk that afternoon.

  We did manage to take that nap, then walk around for hours, down cobblestone streets and majestic alleys, looking into this shop and that one, passing fountain after fountain. I wasn’t afraid, even though we were two tiny ladies alone in a foreign city. We carried almost nothing with us except our feet and our eyes, curiosity and wonder, adventure and excitement. All of my baggage was literally back in the room.

  After a long train ride to Amsterdam, we checked into a hotel next to a shimmering canal—there were shimmering canals everywhere, all of these beautiful arches and waterways, more people and children on bicycles than you could count, and, surprisingly, nobody smoking weed (later, in the Red Light District, we’d find most of the weed smokers—tourists, all of them—shoveling Pommes Frites from a cone into their mouths).

  At night, without being carded or having to pay anything, we wandered into a club that smelled like stale beer and cologne. We just took a seat and listened to a cover band. A man wrote in broken English on the back of a coaster that he thought I was pretty, and we joined them at their table. We left and wandered into another bar, a slightly fancier one, and listened to a man with a guitar sing “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

  On our fourth day, we visited Anne Frank’s house. The house, too, was along a canal, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it entryway that looked like all of the other four-story buildings along the street.

  We walked through the house, and this feeling of sadness ran the cold pads of its fingers across my face, tapping my eyes, my temples, my neck, spreading everywhere. The annex, Anne’s room, was closed for repairs, but a mirror had been set up at an angle, so that a good portion of the room could be seen in the reflection. Something happened to me at that very moment.

  She had no choice. You do.

  Anne couldn’t go outside.

  Yet, she took out her notebook and wrote that the best remedy for people who felt lonely was to go outside.

  More importantly, she wrote that all children must look after their own upbringing, and that she had to believe people were good at heart because she simply could not build a foundation for herself consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

  * * *

  I finished out my freshman year strong, even though I had made the very poor choice to take an Existential Philosophy class, feeling, initially, that my prior AP class in high school would give me a competitive edge, not realizing that I would still despise the subject itself.
I wrote an interesting final paper, entitled “A Socially Acceptable Form of Schizophrenia,” which opened with a quote from Sartre’s “Consciousness and Action.”

  It was a paper about how a person’s past plays a large part in determining her identity, because she makes future decisions and defines herself based on those experiences. Essentially, my theory was this: if someone can begin to register impulses in a different way, they can begin to change their actions. Sartre profiles a skier, whose purpose is to illustrate how the evidence of one’s past never truly leaves him.

  The tracks are always there, accumulating over time, creating a value system upon which he bases his life. Ideally, these tracks, more readily known as one’s memories, would not have a permanent affect on someone’s choices. Sartre says that there are always more possible versions of the self, they are just waiting to emerge once we disregard our present perception. A person can alter her way of thinking and let go of this fear by accepting the new ideas that surface. Writing is a way for her to see her thoughts enter the real world; they are existent outside the self, more readily changed with a simple deletion and replacement. When a person allows herself to write something new, she is changing her plan and freeing herself of the constraint of writing what she is comfortable with, what is expected of her.

  That summer, I woke up at 6:00 a.m. every day to commute up to Harlem to work in the office at a camp for at-risk kids. I felt very much the “other,” the only white girl there, except the art teacher, and it was made clear very quickly that people were not a fan, that they didn’t really “understand” what I was doing there. To be frank, it was the only summer job I could find that year, not wanting to return to Downtown Day Camp or its offices. It wasn’t an enjoyable job, and the only moments of happiness I had were hugs from the kids as they passed the office, but I had to do something to get myself out of the house every day.

  That gig all the way uptown ended badly, too: a bad fight with a male counselor, a suspension, a relocation even further into Harlem, an exile after asking to be switched to their main office in Central Park.

  My mom, who sent me texts from work like “Slasher at Thirty-Fourth Street, be careful” or “Random stabbing in Washington Heights, and don’t look at your phone when you’re on the subway” and “A girl got hit on the head with a hammer on Prince Street, so make sure you pay attention,” was not sorry to see me out of that neighborhood and back home, even if the grounds over which I was fired were unfair.

  I tried to ask her to stop, but she insisted she was just “keeping me safe.”

  I explained this to Dr. A, who said, “You need to communicate with her in a way that she can understand, and hopefully, treat you the way you wanted to be treated.”

  “Yeah, except she insists that what she’s doing is right, that her opinion is always right, that she knows best.”

  I was trying to separate from my mom, dissolve what I felt was this toxic glue, this attachment, to be healthier myself and try to improve our relationship. I didn’t want a war with her anymore.

  “My mother always tells me I’m the problem. She doesn’t understand a lot of things, and she doesn’t see I’m doing the best I can. She just says, ‘There’s something wrong with you.’”

  The following week, when I showed up for our appointment, I found my mom inside.

  What the fuck?

  She had become “involved” in my private work. I was livid.

  I literally screamed “No!” and left the room.

  Then, I came back in, slamming the door behind me.

  “Actually, no, she has to leave,” I insisted.

  I kept going in and out, slamming the door and shouting, until the doctor in the office next door asked us to “Please keep it down” because she could hear screaming in her office.

  I had not yet learned that there was a way to get through a moment like this, when I felt like I was on fire, when things felt painful and difficult and scary, without making it worse.

  But I would.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

  —Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher

  The year the housing bubble burst, I was dating a very nice, buttoned-up guy who worked for one of the big banks.

  John tried to explain to me why we were heading toward a recession, because the way my Intro to Media Studies professor broke it down that morning went in one ear and out the other.

  “The stock market is crashing because the big banks really, really fucked up,” he’d said over Mexican food. “They gave everyone something called subprime loans, and credit default swaps, and now it looks like millions of people are going to lose their jobs and their homes.”

  I was rotating my glass, making the coconut martini inside swill around like I was letting a fine wine breathe.

  “So basically, we’re going to have another great depression?”

  “I hope not,” he said, spearing a piece of his pork quesadilla.

  Despite the rounds of layoffs that would follow, John would manage to keep his job, and the word “recession” would become a permanent part of the landscape in 2008 and 2009.

  John and I had been friends for a year before I made the decision to let the guy “be my boyfriend.” I knew he had feelings for me, and Dr. A had said, “This could be great for you.” His mother was from Ecuador, and his father was an Italian retired military lieutenant. He lived in a three-family house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, which was a solid hour from the city on a train I’d never taken in my life. I had met him online, and we met up every now and then and caught an independent movie at the Angelika Film Center on Bleecker Street.

  I drained my second coconut martini, thinking if I drank it faster, maybe it would hit me harder. I didn’t have time for a third, because we had to make the movie.

  Besides, if I did have a third, I would have to pee too many times during the movie.

  “Don’t let me have another one,” I’d tell him, because it was becoming clear, then, that if I answered the waiter’s question, I was going to say “yes, I would like another one,” as automatically and thoughtlessly as if someone was asking me what my name was.

  John would say, “No, she’s good,” and when the time came, I’d scrunch up my face and say, “Well ….” like I was making a lighthearted decision about whether to go with the pink nail polish or the blue, “Eh, I’ll just have one more.”

  John would try to stop me, and I’d wave him away dismissively and motion again to the waiter, tapping the rim of my glass and winking at him.

  “It’s fine,” I’d say to John, who’d be raising an eyebrow. “I’m eating.”

  Unlike in the clubs, now, I was saying, “yes” because I couldn’t get the word “no” out of my mouth. Because he saw past my alcohol-related antics and further down into my “good heart” John put up with it, just like he put up with my neediness and my controlling behavior. The dynamic, for me, had shifted: I had gone from being just plain afraid of Aaron to being so terrified of losing John, a great guy, that I absolutely smothered him.

  Nothing made me happier than the fact that Grandma liked John.

  She was eating dinner with us more often during the week now, slipping Gucci food under the table while my dad asked her to “please not feed the dog at the table.” Sometimes, I brought John upstairs with me to visit her, and she would call him “Poor John.” Maybe it was deliberate, she was being funny, or maybe the dementia was laying its early groundwork, because she had given that name to my Uncle John when he first asked permission to marry my aunt.

  When John had to go to Raleigh, North Carolina, on business for three nights, I reacted like he had just been drafted into battle overseas.

  I cried for hours, and texted him incessantly, and I especially missed him cuddling up in bed next to me when I got the migraines.

  I was getting them more frequently now, with varying intensity, and John would come o
ver after work and lay down with me, and say, “I feel so bad, I wish there was something I could do,” and eventually we’d leave my room and join the rest of the family for dinner.

  Because of the college’s absence policy, I had to register with the New School’s disabilities services department.

  Nothing over the counter helped, so my mom suggested I see a specialist.

  At first, the doctor suggested several medications that my mother vetoed, explaining that they had made her terribly sick when she tried them (she got migraines, too).

  “You’ll throw up and dry heave,” she said. “The migraine itself is better than that.”

  So we tried other medications through trial-and-error with minimal results.

  That doctor wasn’t very responsive, and these migraines were seriously disrupting my life.

  But when I called him twice in one week, the next response I got was a letter in the mail, stating that leaving two voicemails in one week was overkill and “I’d damaged the patient doctor relationship.” He refused to see me anymore.

  I went to another neurologist, who looked over all of my notes, and told me to take something called Nortryptalin every night to prevent them, and to take something called Axert when I got them, which would sometimes take a few hours to kick in. I woke up each morning knowing the day likely would not end well, that by 2:00 p.m., I’d be on my way home to lay in the dark, reeling.

  I woke up, knowing I’d have no choice, because I had to wake up.

  * * *

  Soon, another health crisis surfaced.

  After a routine gynecological checkup, I was called back because there were “abnormal results” on my pap smear.

  “What does that mean?” I asked the nurse on the phone.

  “The doctor can explain it to you when you come in,” she said in her Australian accent.

  “They say that all the time, it’s probably nothing,” my mom offered.

  Things were a little bit better between she and I. We were trying. She bought us tickets to shows because they were on sale at the Theater Development Fund, and we went to the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City to have dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant and see the comedy show. And, of course, on the weekends we went shopping.