In reality, I was crushing it at my internship and in my college classes, and I loved working with the kids at P.S. 150. I loved it so much that I started to go back and forth in my mind between writer and teacher, as a career choice. The kids brought me so much joy, and demanded my immediate attention, which was good for me; but after just three hours I was so exhausted, I didn’t know how teachers could do it. To top it off, I had even managed to make and keep a few friends.
Through all of this, alcohol became the way I propelled myself forward, creating a life that looked good on paper and on Facebook. I figured I was drinking like everyone else. I didn’t get drunk every day, or even every weekend, and I could go weeks at a time without picking up a bottle. I was young and carefree, scurrying from bar to lounge to club to party to dinner, sipping here and there and everywhere just like everyone else.
But then, I punched Anthony, and then, I lost my cell phone in a drunken stupor, and then, I was sick for twelve hours the next day, again, convulsing, sweating, hyperventilating.
Hoping to control myself, I switched from wine to vodka to beer. I cut out alcohol for weeks, even months. All the old tricks. How could this keep happening? I kept asking myself. I was a smart, responsible person. It felt like someone had a high-heeled voodoo doll and a vendetta against me.
On the night before Thanksgiving, I went on a date with a girl for the first time, something I had always known I would want to gather up the courage to do one day. I liked men, obviously—but I was also pretty sure I liked women.
Because she was a girl, I justified that it “didn’t count” as cheating on Anthony.
She made me so nervous that all I wanted to do was drink enough to be able to get over my anxiety … and have sex with her. But I kept throwing back drinks far past that point, and ended up throwing up in the Gold Street Diner bathroom, my head spinning.
I called my lifeline, who, naturally didn’t know I was on a date.
“I’m drunk. I need you to come get me,” I said. Anthony was furious.
“I’m tired of this. Whenever I have plans of my own, you’re always ruining them with this shit.” He hung up.
My date entered the bathroom, walked me to my apartment, and we got into bed. I leaned over and gagged into the trash can.
“Attractive,” she mused sarcastically.
Then, it all went black.
I woke up to fourteen missed calls from Anthony. Turned out, he had taken a cab downtown, spent an hour looking for me and trying to contact me, then went back uptown.
On Thanksgiving Day, after six hours of retching, shaking, and convulsing, I landed at New York Downtown Hospital for alcohol poisoning, my fourth time since I started college. It had almost become a routine.
“Ok, let’s go,” my dad said knowingly, grabbing his coat.
In the emergency room, while hooking me up to an IV, the nurse whispered to the doctor, “She’s the ninth one today.”
There were three college dormitories within a four-block radius of the hospital.
I am never drinking again, I resolved.
Despite what had happened, Anthony came right away.
“How can you say you love me and do this to me?” Anthony asked. “Don’t tell me you love me anymore.” But he stayed by my side the entire time.
I was released at 6:00 p.m.
My family waited for me to eat dinner, and as they ate turkey, antipasto, and stuffing, I drank ginger ale and sipped clear broth.
* * *
My internship at the Downtown Express had ended, but several months later, James, their new editor, called me up and asked if I’d be interested in reporting for them—not as an intern again, but as a paid reporter.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Just let me know when I start.”
I went in to meet him dressed in a pencil skirt, blazer, and trendy work top I got from Express—one that only showed a slight amount of cleavage.
He immediately set me out to work, telling me he had a feeling I would be good at certain types of stories.
He sent me to the New York City Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter and recovery program down on Canal Street that was looking to raise money to build additional floors to make room for more people.
I loved covering that story more than anything, and I kept asking to go back: to cover Thanksgiving, to cover their graduation ceremony, to cover their SOUPerbowl party, where there was no alcohol.
I loved interviewing the men about their families, their experience in prison, their desire to start over.
For a story on their Mother’s Day Banquet, James sent me up to a group home in Harlem to interview two of the mothers who would be in attendance at the luncheon.
“I went back to doing crack, because I just needed an escape,” said one mother. “There was so much going on. I just wanted to escape.”
I looked her in the eye and said, “Yes. I know exactly, exactly what you mean.”
No matter how much I drank, the discontent, the restlessness, never went away. The desire for alcohol was like a child’s fever for toys: more, more, more. I made promises I failed to keep. I worried my parents sick. That damaged, invisible little girl was laughing a disturbingly flirtatious laugh, trying to drown out the whisper of the woman I was on my way to becoming.
Convulsing on the bathroom floor for eight hours at a time, dizzy and dehydrated, was not my idea of a good time. I hung out with people I didn’t like and went places I didn’t want to go, drinking up any opportunity to be social and depending on the alcohol to create the good time for me. Each time I said, “never again,” during a hangover from hell, I meant it. The will was there. But the problem was, it was nearly impossible for me to get sober alone, without support.
One day, I texted Dr. J that I felt like I had a split personality.
I can’t implement what we work on sometimes, and its like I’m a different person, I said.
She wrote back:
You don’t have a split personality, although at times I know it feels like you do. It’s like learning anything new—it’s not always gong to work no matter how hard you try. It’s just continuing to try that matters. Go enjoy the beautiful day. Be mindful of all the things you see, smell, and hear. Stay focused on the positive changes, no matter how small, and give yourself permission to fuck it all up. We are all fallible. It’s how you try next time that matters most.
Next time I saw her, she said, again, “You don’t have these episodes when you’re sober.”
But I wasn’t ready to hear that. I wasn’t ready to stop. And I sure as fuck wasn’t ready to think about a world without an escape route.
* * *
On September 11, 2010, the “Ground Zero Mosque” issue surfaced.
The neighborhood was once again at a level of maximum security, streets shut down, barricades put up, and police everywhere.
All of the city’s elected officials had jumped on the bandwagon to preach religious freedom and make public their support of the project. People were calling my father, telling him that they were going to kill us because Community Board 1 was “in support” of a mosque, even though he, like other board members receiving these calls, weren’t for or against anything.
How did they even find our number?
This was exactly what they were trying to avoid by doing what they called “tabling the issue.”
Over dinner, baked chicken thighs and pilaf rice, one of the few dishes my mom cooked, my dad explained the situation.
“The issue was never whether or not they had the constitutional right to build the center. That’s what these bigoted people are making it out to be, and now what politicians are making it out to be. Did you know that there are already two other mosques in Lower Manhattan, including one right here on Fulton and Cliff Street?” he said.
“You also can’t throw a brick in Lower Manhattan without hitting a For Rent sign hanging in a nearby window. Given what the ‘Cultural Center’ has come to represent, the simplest thing would ha
ve been to move it. This Imam claimed he’d held out an olive branch to ‘mend fences’ between the Muslim community and Western nations, but given how emotionally charged this issue has become, reconsidering the location could have easily accomplished that goal.”
I nodded, picking at my chicken.
“A major investor in the project said he would sell for a good enough offer. Donald Trump offered him a twenty-five percent profit, which he turned down, making his claim that this was about mending fences—a load of crap. The heart of the debate is about money, real estate, and politics.”
These were the issues that ultimately cast a dark shadow over a “sacred day,” meant for honoring the fallen.
On the scene, when James confronted a man ripping pages out of the Quran and literally wiping his ass with them, he had an engorged black eye to show for it.
All of it reminded me of the news stories I had seen so many years before, equating “Muslim” with “Taliban.”
Equating any dark-skinned person with “terrorist.”
People throwing garbage and rocks at the bodegas and delis owned by people who met those descriptions, looting their stores.
People shouting “You knew! You knew!” at the men who operated hot dog stands on the streets.
“Never forget” was supposed to be our motto. Originally—explained Mark, who I was now taking a second poetry class with, even though I was probably one of the worst poets to put pen to paper—the motto was used in reference to the Holocaust as a way to remember the people who died as individual souls, not statistics. It was supposed to be a way to remember that mankind will never stop perpetuating evil, killing innocent people along the way.
“We regenerated that motto on 9/11 because we were not supposed to forget what had happened to us, what we’d become, all of the lessons we learn from collective memory,” Mark explained.
As Ecclesiastes said in the Bible, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
And there we all were. Nothing new.
* * *
“Why do you care what you look like all the time?” I asked my mother on a late car ride home from a wedding in 1996.
“After a certain age, you can’t go outside without lipstick,” my mom said as she meticulously reapplied.
When I was four years old, I marched up to the salesgirls on the ground floor of Bloomingdales and declared, “Look, I can put lipstick on perfectly without a mirror!” I demonstrated, and the girls in fancy black suits with long lacquered nails laughed and said, “That’s very good!”
I sauntered away, swishing my hips from left to right, hand poised, and wrist limp, making my way up to the children’s section feeling very satisfied with myself. I was a little adult, and I was a pro. But I still clung to my mother’s legs whenever she told me to go play with the other kids, or get up on stage when a magician needed a volunteer; the little girl who covered her ears when mom tried to mention sleep away camp.
My aunt and my mother always criticized each other’s appearances. I saw it as normal, and thought the whole world would judge me the way they judged each other.
“I’ve got it together!” I wanted to broadcast to everyone, because I still only saw myself as others saw me. I still felt so damaged on the inside that I preserved with compulsion how I appeared on the outside, the part that was still attractive and seemingly scar-free. It was one of the only things I could control when chaos came at me from all sides, showing everyone, but mainly, myself, that I would not be destroyed.
Grandma, even in her elderly years, had always looked beautifully put together, makeup flawlessly done, wearing a stylish outfit, and sporting manicured nails.
The first thing my aunt would say upon entering my grandmother’s hospital room—a place she now found herself frequently—was, “Look at her hair.” With a small plastic comb, she’d lift her mother’s head and try to manipulate the thin white strands to resemble the style my grandmother had always sculpted each day. My aunt also insisted on putting lipstick on her each time she was in the hospital. Lipstick was her attempt at preservation.
If I put the lipstick on her, then this isn’t happening.
I fell into the habit of putting “lipstick” on things, too. I wanted to be strong for my aunt and my mother, so, I kept myself emotionally “covered up,” not fully acknowledging just how scared I was of what was happening to Grandma. I suppressed those fears, and just like holding a life preserver under, it exploded with even more force when I least expected it. Most often, it exploded onto Anthony, who I expected to fix everything, to comfort me, which he couldn’t. Nobody could. No amount of reassurance in the world would have been enough.
The hospital was an endless, exhausting rotation of despair and goodbyes and new hope.
Doctors never expected her to make it, through the pneumonia, through the heart complications, through this fall and that broken hip and the pneumonia again, but she was so fucking tough, she survived.
She proved them wrong, but we lost more of her each time, piece by piece, traumatized and disoriented by each hospital visit.
Whenever they took her blood, she felt like she was falling—she cried out for help and gripped the rails as though she were going to fall through, trying to steady herself.
“Helaina, I’m falling,” she would start out soft, but grew panicked. Her hands would shake.
“I’m not going to let you fall,” I said, thinking of her standing behind me on the windowsill as I sat and watched for my mother coming home.
When I was the one put up in the hospital bed—alcohol poisoning, of course, or food poisoning, or some reaction to a new medication—I felt trapped, short of breath, listening to the sounds of other people moaning, homeless men screaming, nurses whispering. I’d watch the slow drip of the fluid into the IV shoved into my hand, and my father, wearing a black sleeveless workout shirt and gray striped Adidas pants, would stand with his hands and on his hips, looking disapprovingly around for some help.
Surrounded by the same monitors and tubes, one feeling among many was the same for both of us: How does this keep happening? What’s going to happen to me?
Everything I loved, everything that was good about the world, was shaking in that hospital bed, becoming teary eyed whenever the nurse came to change the bedpan and the bed sheets. Grandma was embarrassed, of course, but most of all, she was afraid of what it all meant.
* * *
For my twenty-first birthday, we took a trip to Paris, just my mother and I.
Technically, it was for both of our birthdays, and it was a few weeks before mine, but we were there on her actual birthday, June 11. We decided consciously, this time, to leave my father behind, since we loved to walk around forever and go into all of the shops and he—well, didn’t. He had always tried to be a good sport, but we would feel rushed because we knew he was waiting.
We went to Buddha Bar, and I told the waiter that my mother was going to say she didn’t want dessert, but to please bring some anyway so we could have the candle, wink wink. My dad had taught me well.
They brought out a giant cake that could have served about twenty people, this beautiful chocolate fondant creation decorated with orange slices and flowers and served with a sparkler.
The waiter left us with it after we finished singing, but never came back with forks or spoons.
“Oh my gosh, this is probably going to cost like $80,” my mom giggled, sticking her finger in the frosting and tasting it.
“It’s okay, it’s on me,” I said, able to make offers like that now that I had a debit card and two paying jobs. I looked around to see if anyone was going to bring us new forks and plates, but nobody seemed to care.
“Maybe I’ll just take them off this table,” I said, getting ready to get up.
“No!” she giggled. “You can’t do that at a place like this. Just wait.”
I started to take an orange slice off the cake, and my mom picked lit
tle pieces off with her fingers.
Suddenly the waiter came rushing over.
“No, no, no!”
He proceeded to try to communicate, in broken English, that the cake was just for show.
I suddenly realized I had seen the cake making its way to all of the tables where people proceeded to sing, but I thought that was just the kind of birthday cake they served. The waiter took it away back to the kitchen, grumbling.
“Oh my God, he must be cursing us back there, calling us stupid Americans!” my mom said.
She and I looked at each other like two teenagers who had just gotten caught by the principal, our hands over our mouths in shock, holding in giggles that came first from our nose, then our throat, finally exploding into laughter that carried itself up to the ceiling, framing a memory that, along with all of the fond memories of shops and cheeses and markets and museums, we would never forget.
* * *
As Dr. J tried to re-introduce me to a reality that wasn’t as awful as the one I always made up, I was confronted with a very real one.
A week before my twenty-first birthday, Grandma fell again, and this time would be different.
We found her on the kitchen floor in the morning, just lying there, staring blankly at the wall.
“Where am I?” she asked. “What’s happening?”
Her wrist was swollen, and the steel medical alert bracelet was cutting into her skin. Two EMTs arrived and began filling out paperwork, looking bored.
“I guess we’ll take her to the hospital,” one of the EMTs said with a sigh as he tried to get her bracelet off.
She began wincing despite herself—trying to be brave.
“Leave her,” I said as calmly as I could. “She’s in pain.”
The invisible girl started arguing with me.
Do something!
There’s nothing I can do.
You’re letting them do this to her.
Dr. J would say there’s nothing I can do.
Like a doll, Grandma couldn’t stand up on her own, so the EMTs put on blue rubber gloves like they were getting ready to handle a wild animal and gruffly hoisted her up. She softly cried out in pain despite herself, and something was hoisted inside of me. I wanted to bash their heads through the mirror, angry at them, angry at everything, angry because I knew exactly what was going to happen now—it was going to be hell.
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