After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  * * *

  At 6:20 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in March 2011, the air was strangely moist, the temperature, stubbornly cool. After saying goodbye to a stranger and making my exit down a hallway I did not recognize, I scrambled through my bag for my phone, thrashing through lipstick and eyeliner.

  Gold Street?

  I was three blocks from home. I tried to use my phone and stared at a black screen, then remembered it had died the night before. It started coming back to me like sucker-punches to the gut.

  I told my parents I would be coming home, and I hadn’t.

  Never again, never again …

  I knew they would be worried sick.

  I had spent the last several months reassuring them that I was fine, that they could stop worrying about me and the drinking. But my mom was still waking up to the sound of retching and various objects (or myself) clattering to the floor. She got into the habit of staying up almost every weekend night that I went out, but always claimed that she had “just woken up.” She’d appear in the small space between her room, my room, and the bathroom to ask how my night was, trying to see what kind of condition I was in. When I started going out on weeknights, the same pattern held true. How my mother was able to function on so little sleep, I will never know. I always told her not to worry, and then I always did it again.

  My mother hadn’t been able to sleep all the while that I was drunk and passed out at the stranger’s house.

  She emerged from her room in tears, telling me she texted Anthony to see if I was with him. Great. Of course, I wasn’t. Now everybody was sleepless and worried.

  Several minutes after putting my BlackBerry on the charger, I received a text message from my friend, who I was with the night before. The guy she’d left with and the guy whose place I’d ended up at were not friends, as we had thought, even though we met them all at the bar together. In fact, they didn’t even know each other. The stranger was a random person who had approached the group and offered to buy everyone at the Stone Street bar some drinks.

  After the usual ritual of throwing up a few times, taking a sleeping pill, throwing it up, and not being able to go back to sleep, I spent seven hours in pain, nauseous, heaving, dizzy, and crying. I was still in awful shape by 4:00 p.m., but I hadn’t seen my grandmother the day before, and missing a day was like missing a year.

  I was doubled over on the couch as Lynette, the Tuesday aid, wheeled her in. I could barely sit up. I felt like death. My stomach was killing me from ten hours of retching, trying to expel at least ten drinks, plus the Ambien, Nortyrptalin, and Celexa. I had only gotten two hours of sleep.

  I held the couch for balance and positioned Grandma’s wheelchair so I could sit close enough to hold her hand. She looked straight ahead, so I took both of her hands in mine and gently turned her face toward me. For all that she could not see, understand, or remember, she could still tell that something was not right.

  “What’s wrong, Helaina?” Grandma asked, her eyes full of worry.

  “I’m sick,” I said. Her face crumpled and she looked as though it were she who was in pain. I realized then that as much as I suffered her pain with her as though it were happening to me, she had always suffered mine too.

  “Oh no,” she said. “My baby …”

  “It’s ok,” I lied. “I’ll be better soon.”

  I paused for a moment to gently guide her face back toward me, as she had begun staring at the wall again.

  “Remember when you used to take care of me when I was little?” I asked.

  She nodded and smiled.

  “You used to come downstairs with a piece of bread soaked in wine and lay it down on my stomach when I was sick. You said it was an old Italian tradition.”

  She smiled and said yes, though I could see she didn’t remember.

  My father didn’t like that ritual very much, so we only did it when he wasn’t home. It was rare and exciting, and at a young age I became intoxicated and spellbound by the smell of wine.

  “When you’re sick, I’m sick,” Grandma said.

  My eyes began to tear up, and I tried my very best not to cry. I knew she’d be able to tell.

  I started to sing, “You Are My Sunshine.”

  Whenever I sang it to her, she usually came in right before the end, finally recognizing and remembering the words, with a very emphatic, “How much I love you.”

  That day, she took my hand in hers, looked me in the eye, smiled, and in the gentle, warm voice I recognized from so many years ago, recited the entire song like a poem.

  I knew that there was a second verse, a sad one that I didn’t like and never sang, about “dreaming I held you in my arms and waking up to see you weren’t there, and crying,” so we never sang that one.

  After my grandmother left, my dad appeared in the doorway.

  “You know,” he said. “I didn’t quit drinking for you or Mommy. That was part of it. You have to quit for yourself.”

  The next day, good as new, I went back up to Grandma’s house.

  Our new thing was “dancing.”

  Or rather, simulating dancing.

  I downloaded a few cheerful-sounding songs off of Sia’s 2010 album, “We Are Born.” This was right before she exploded onto the pop music scene. Those songs had lots of bells and tambourines and cheerful lyrics, plus, clapping sounds, which made my grandma’s body feel motivated to dance. She would raise her arms and twinkle her fingertips to simulate rain and glitter, reaching them out in front of her and shaking her wrists, like she was a wizard sending a love spell over to someone. She let me take her hands in mine, moving them around, even if we were only dancing with our top halves. When she became tired or out of breath, she playfully tossed them away.

  Several years later, Sia’s “Chandelier” would become a huge international hit. Some girls would see it as a party-girl anthem, a cheer with tiny holes of regret poking through the melody. The rest of us who knew better would see it as a raw ballad of surrender, sadness, maybe even regret, and a Google search will confirm that Sia had been sober for five years.

  * * *

  In spring of 2011, right before I graduated college, I found myself in the Time Warner Building on Columbus Circle sharing iced tea and cookies with Dr. Patricia Bratt, a psychoanalyst and a director of the Academy of Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis and the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

  For my senior work thesis, I was writing a collection of essays based on my experience on 9/11 and living in New York City in the years after.

  Dr. Bratt accepted my request for an interview about her work with adolescents and children who have been through trauma, and how that trauma manifests in different people—namely, people like me, who had experienced all of this out of control behavior that didn’t exactly fall under the DSM Manual categorization of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Her response to my initial email woke up something in my brain that, until then, had been dormant, unaware of the need for answers it was not actively seeking:

  It is very hard for a young person such as yourself to recover from a catastrophe like 9/11 without continuous adult intervention to reconfirm the validity of your feelings. If your environment didn’t provide a supportive and secure foundation, it’s very possible to see, in you and many children, regression, depression, or withdrawal. You could be faced with manic, risk-taking, aggressive behavior, or even suicide. Sex, drugs, all sorts of addictions could manifest. Everything that ordinarily characterizes the fragility of adolescence could explode exponentially.

  I had prepared questions ahead of time, and I was ready to find some answers.

  We sat across from each other in a floating island of chairs overlooking Central Park, and I took out my notebook and the white a tape recorder I had just bought at J&R.

  Looking across Central Park, it felt difficult for both of us to connect with those days of uncertainty, chaos, and persistent reminders of potential disaster; but we both knew the shakiness just talking
about the events triggered.

  “Thank you so much for meeting me,” I said.

  I was still coming down from the anxious rush of train transfers I didn’t usually make, then finding her office building and calling to her to let her know I was there.

  “Sure! Do you want anything? Are you hungry?” she asked.

  I had eaten lunch already, so I ordered a chocolate chip cookie while she ordered a tuna nicoise salad.

  I took a deep breath and hit the red button on the tape recorder.

  “So, do you think kids are really naturally resilient?”

  “Some people believe that. There’s definitely discussion about whether resilience is a ‘fixed’ or learned trait,” she said. “I think it needs to be taught to young children just like any other skill, even before something bad happens. Things like flexibility, confidence, personal problem-solving skills.”

  “I feel like I never learned any of that,” I said. “I don’t think I had any resilience.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. You managed to stay focused enough to get yourself to college, you’ve reached out and connected to me. You kept fighting through a mental health system that was relentlessly unhelpful. It’s human nature to look at negatives first.”

  “Maybe,” I said, looking down.

  “I think you were resilient, even when the world was overwhelming,” she said, and our food arrived. I left the warm cookie where it was for the time being. “I’ve seen a lot of kids act out their childhood in extremes.”

  I pondered this for a second before describing what happened after I broke up with Vin.

  “So you were acting out sexually. Maybe you were telling people that you felt out of control, so your body acted out your story for you,” she said.

  “Things typically go ‘out of control’ at the developmental level where you were traumatized. So, if you were six, you might regress to being infantile, throwing tantrums. In the case of sexual abuse, you might start injuring your body or develop an eating disorder.”

  I thought about all of the episodes of crying hysterically, throwing things, screaming, and crumbling on the floor, something I must have thought out loud, muttering, “I thought I was just a fucking psycho.”

  She smiled.

  “No, you weren’t. Children need to know that the adult world is there to protect them as best it can. Otherwise, you’d always be asking yourself, ‘What’s wrong with me, with everyone else, with the world?’”

  She paused briefly to motion for the waiter to refill our water glasses.

  “You would begin to doubt all your perceptions, feel life is too fragile, and start challenging all rules and boundaries. After all, if nothing is as it seems, why should rules be followed? Why do things to safeguard yourself in an unpredictable, chaotic world?”

  “But I’d always been a rule follower. I was never one of those kids who flipped off a teacher or talked back. I never really committed any crimes, unless you count sex in a hotel staircase or underage drinking.”

  “You knew better than to meet these guys you didn’t know and go off with them, I’ll bet. But we all have this need to fill a void, to be connected, and when you can’t trust your own perception, you look for external validation.”

  “Through sex?” I asked, grateful that I didn’t have a tendency to blush, but most likely giving a tell by the way I kept grabbing for my water glass over and over.

  “What kind of emotional validation does an adolescent get?” she asked. “Sexual relationships, affiliation with groups who want to ‘go to war’ with other people, adults, ‘the system’? It’s a time of natural, boundary testing. Couple that, especially in early adolescence, with trauma or catastrophe, and you’ve lit an explosion of identity crises, hormonal overload, impulsive and compulsive behavior. Potential chaos.”

  “Everything felt like chaos,” I said. “My therapist says I created a lot of my own chaos without even knowing it.”

  “Sometimes we unconsciously make choices to dredge up certain feelings to see that we are able to get ourselves through new disasters. It’s the same reason kids go to horror movies.”

  Not this kid, I thought.

  “There is a psychological addiction, almost a compulsive draw to the chemical reaction. Everyone likes a thrill, but in a post-traumatic emotional state you can be training your brain to need-and-survive the threat. The adrenaline rush can become addictive.”

  She set down her fork, finishing her salad, chewing her last bite. I waited, almost in a trance.

  “The feeling that danger is imminent and that we can find a way to survive is exciting. Some people deal with trauma exposure by becoming risk averse, others jump in and keep re-creating threats. People in law enforcement, the military, or emergency medicine confront this adrenaline-loop-challenge every day. They have to be charged up in a prolonged adrenalized state, then come back to mundane reality. It’s not an easy transition.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  These past ten years have shown that America does not give in to fear. The rescue workers who rushed to the scene; the firefighters who charged up the stairs; the passengers who stormed the cockpit—these patriots defined the very nature of courage. Over the years we have also seen a more quiet form of heroism—in the ladder company that lost so many men and still suits up to save lives every day; the businesses that have rebuilt; the burn victim who has bounced back; the families that press on.

  —President Barack Obama’s remarks on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as released by the White House

  Just get over it! Move on!”

  James and I were the only ones left in a restaurant on Front Street by the Seaport, and the bartender, who I knew, raised an eyebrow at me.

  Well into his fourth Jack and Coke, James was rambling on about how he was “so tired” of hearing about 9/11. Writing for the local newspaper of Lower Manhattan, it’s safe to say he’d been inundated with it all year.

  “You don’t see anyone making this big a deal over Katrina,” he said, loudly. He whipped out his phone and showed me pictures of his home in New Orleans, which had been destroyed by the 2005 hurricane.

  “I was getting promotional emails around the five-year anniversary, saying that girls named Katrina would get into clubs or bars and drink for free,” he said. “I would love to see the same for guys named Osama.”

  The bartender shot me a meaningful look. I nodded and made the universal air sign for the check.

  “I understand,” I said. “I get it. People have moved on down here, you know. But moving on looks different for everyone. Sounds like you’re pissed that people don’t really know or respect what you went through personally. I would be too.”

  “Nobody … knows,” he said, trying, and failing, to button the last button on his corduroy blazer, then reaching for his puffy green down jacket. “I mean, I don’t care, man! I don’t care. But I had to just move on. So everyone else should too.”

  I handed the final check to the bartender.

  “Sorry about him,” I said.

  “Don’t bring him back here,” he said in return. I nodded.

  * * *

  With the anniversary approaching, I reached out earlier that spring to a few publications, thinking maybe they would want to hear my story. I had made a decision to write about my experience on the day of September 11, 2001 with Mark Statman as an independent study, which turned into a year-long project, rounded out by a collection of essays for my senior thesis project.

  Mark made one last observation before we concluded for the year.

  “I tell this to my wife all the time, when we talk about our son: you need to feel safe before you can feel happy, or feel love, or anything else. You have to feel safe.”

  When I let other people hold the pen, it didn’t quite go as I had hoped. The New York Daily News ran a story in June that made me look a little worse for wear than I’d hoped I would, but I was glad to have it out there.

  Until I read the comments.


  “A slap on the ass and a black boyfriend ought to set her straight.”

  “Just another ballad of Jewish suffering.”

  “If it was so bad, why didn’t you move?”

  It wasn’t as painful to read as the story that ran in the Chicago Tribune, though.

  I had sent some notes to the editor, and on the morning after Osama bin Laden was tracked down and assassinated, she told me she really thought we should run something for the next day.

  The only problem was, I had woken up with this mysterious inability to open my right eye. Tears streamed down like a babbling brook, and every time I tried to open it, I couldn’t. I hopped in the car with my parents on the way to the eye doctor, firing off emails to my professors and the supervisor at my internship, when I got the call.

  “I really think we should run this,” the editor said. Run what? I hadn’t even thought about what my Op-Ed would be about. I explained the situation.

  “I think we should wait. I don’t even remember what I sent you … I won’t have a chance … let’s just wait until September?”

  “Ok,” she said. But then, twenty minutes later, she called me back. She was determined, and I wasn’t going to blow the opportunity altogether.

  “I’ll put together what I can then call you for a fact check to go over it with you,” she said.

  It turned out I had managed to develop two ulcers in my right eye, by the way, which I was almost sorry I could open again the next morning.

  I thought there was so much left without an explanation in that Op-Ed, that it almost appeared like a laundry list of every shameful thing I’d ever done, blamed on bin Laden.

  Surprisingly, though, based on the comments, it seemed like people were inspired, and even humbled.

  Someone else, though, was angry.

  “Take your pity party somewhere else and take responsibility for your actions,” he wrote. “People lost their parents. Those are the people who deserve sympathy. Sounds like you were just another American teenager.”