After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  Trevor jumped in to my defense in the comments section, as did other people.

  But that was the end of my ever reading the comments section.

  For the anniversary, I decided I was going to write something myself, something better—because I was going to get in touch with my former classmates to see if any of them had gone through the same thing.

  Through Facebook, I began getting in touch with them, and managed to find sixteen people who were willing to sit down to talk or hop on a call. Over the course of many interviews, I heard about struggles and pain that could have been lifted from my own story.

  “I thought I’d never be normal like my friends were.”

  “I couldn’t just relax and have fun. I panicked if plans changed.”

  “I cut myself. I banged my head against a wall.”

  “What seemed like a small problem to others felt like a tragedy to me.”

  “I felt branded, wounded, damaged, and crazy.”

  “Getting upset was never just getting upset—it lasted for hours, days, and months.”

  “I cut off friends at the first sign of betrayal, but mostly they were paranoid delusions.”

  Only a few of my former classmates had tried therapy, and those who did became lost in the same labyrinth of misdiagnosis and prescription pills. Some had become shut-ins, some became addicts, but whatever their story, normal teen angst seemed to be amplified, and their parents—caring, supportive—watched helplessly as the happy children they loved receded into a dark place nobody could reach.

  The most common thing I heard was, “I’ve been waiting ten years for someone to ask me my story.”

  Like James, they felt that their pain had just been passed over.

  They didn’t volunteer themselves, to other people, to the media, because they didn’t want to sound like they were “bragging.” They did not believe anyone would understand—or that it mattered. Or, they were horrified listening to ill-informed, insensitive accounts of the day from people who hadn’t been there, people who “didn’t know what it was like to know that your parents could no longer protect you,” that no one could. They were annoyed with the politicians who used 9/11 to grandstand on some sort of issue, or attack their opponent for saying anything questionable about New York or New York Values.

  The main reason they stayed silent, though, was because nobody ever asked.

  * * *

  James, full of Jack and Coke, walked with me over to the water, where we sat on a bench, the reflection from the Watchtower sign creating a red path of light across the water that led right up to the pebbles and garbage on shore at our feet. I lit up a cigarette, then lit up another one using the one in my mouth, and handed it to him. It was chilly, but not freezing, the breeze from the water prompting me to pull my leather jacket closed more tightly.

  “You could always write your story,” I offered. “I’m going to write mine. I don’t know if anyone will care, but, we’ll see.”

  “It only takes one person to care,” he said. “Look at Mitch Albom. He was a sports writer. A sports writer!” he shouted into the river to nobody in particular, but consequentially, to me. “Tuesdays with Morrie got only one ‘Yes’, and it turned out to be the best-selling memoir of all time.”

  “Well, if you ever decide you want to write a book about what happened to you, I promise, I’ll read it,” I said, dropping my cigarette and stomping it out. “I’ll talk to you soon. Get home safe.”

  I headed over to a bar across from the former Fulton Fish Market, where I was meeting a man named JC who had promised me a ride on his motorcycle as a thank you for writing his brother’s story for amNewYork.

  I arrived to see him leaning on the bike outside, wearing black boots and a long braid draped over his shoulder, underneath a red bandana. He was wearing a leather jacket that was covered with patches and words, on the back was an American Flag, an Eagle, the Towers, and a message: Never Forgive, Never Forget.

  JC, his sister, and his brother all worked in the World Trade Center. He and his sister got out in time. His brother, an electrician, did not. His brother’s motorcycle was now parked in the window of the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site on Vesey Street, decorated with tiny illustrations of Curious George, his favorite character.

  “My brother was the kind of guy you wanted your daughter to date. He always said it was distracting working in that Tower, all of the pretty girls who worked there. But he was shy,” JC said, stopping to turn his beer bottle upside down into his mouth. “He tried to make eye contact with them, though.”

  I took a long sip of my White Russian, which I didn’t even want.

  “They never found him, but every year the Medical Examiner’s Office holds a service for the victims’ families, people who maybe only had found an elbow, or a kneecap, who didn’t have anything to bury,” he said.

  The family hosted a service for his brother before any remains were found, a memorial that eight hundred people showed up to, people he didn’t even know.

  “You don’t realize how many lives someone touches until something like this happens,” he said. “The mayor wants this to be the last year we hold the ceremony with the names read, but I don’t need his permission to remember my brother. I think about him every day.”

  He got up to get another round, and I checked my cell phone. Nothing from Anthony, so I was still in the clear.

  “You know,” he said when he returned, with another White Russian for me, “I tried to enlist in the Army, but they denied me. They could tell I was out for revenge. They told me, ‘Come back in three years, and if you still want to go, you can go.’”

  “You didn’t go back, I’m guessing.”

  “No. That’s probably for the best. Those guys want to put you in a burka, you know.”

  “You’re still a devout Catholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lots of people lost their religion after what happened.”

  “Lots of people did. But God doesn’t do these things,” he said, clunking his beer down on the table, shrugging his jacket on, and holding out his hand. “People do.”

  With that, we stepped outside, he handed me a helmet, and we were off on his motorcycle, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

  * * *

  Six weeks later, on October 27, 2011, I woke up after my Halloween party and ran to the bathroom. When I was finally able to pull myself up off of the cool tiles of the floor, I looked around the apartment and thought, what the fuck happened here?

  My Blackberry was resting in a puddle of spilled Rum. There were chicken nuggets on the terrace. The floor was covered in sticky black footprints. Somehow, blue paint had gotten all over my nurse’s costume.

  I picked up my digital camera, scrolling through for clues.

  I’d had the balls to invite the guy I’d cheated on Anthony with a few nights before, a guy I had no interest in, who I thought was gay, frankly. But after enough drinks, I had pulled open the snaps of my dress that closed all the way down the front, and my body had gone into autopilot. Sick as a dog the next day, I had asked Anthony to leave work early to meet me at his apartment because I wasn’t feeling well, and I needed him.

  I put the camera down and took a deep breath. I crawled back into bed and turned to look at Anthony, who was still asleep, and it all came back to me.

  I had said I wasn’t going to drink until midnight, and I hadn’t. Then, at midnight, I made a drink that was 90 percent vodka, 10 percent juice, and mixed it with weed, something I knew I couldn’t do.

  Then, nothing.

  I ran back to the bathroom, stayed there for a while, and climbed, once again, back into bed, blotting my forehead with a wet, cold paper towel.

  Anthony turned to me and said, “How much longer are you going to keep doing this to yourself?”

  I picked up my Blackberry, which, miraculously, would work for a few more minutes, and sent an email with one line to Dr. J.

  “Do you know of any twelve-step meetings people under
the age of fifty go to?”

  I was surprised that I’d even though of it, but the thought must have been waiting in the back of my mind after I read about those meetings in Caroline Knapp’s Drinking, A Love Story a few months before.

  The seed had been planted, all the way down there at rock bottom, just waiting to see some light.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it’s painful and you’re afraid. When you drink, you can’t do that. You can’t make the distinction between getting through painful feelings and getting away from them.

  —Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

  Dr. J sent me a list of meeting suggestions, so, that Friday night, I went into the basement of a church on the Upper East Side. The name of the meeting was Fearless, because apparently, there were so many of these meetings in New York City that they each had names.

  “Be careful,” my dad said before I left to get on the 6 train to Seventy-Seventh Street. “You don’t know what kind of people will be there.”

  I was less afraid of the people who would be there than I was of drinking again.

  As soon as I entered, I wondered, am I in the right place?

  It was a plush room by a fireplace, with well-dressed people talking and laughing.

  A sign hung over the mantle:

  False

  Evidence

  Appearing

  Real.

  Everyone looked so happy, so comfortable.

  The woman next to me held out her hand.

  “Hi! I’m Mary,” she said.

  “Oh hi! I’m Helaina … er, this is my first meeting.”

  “That’s terrific!” she said back. The woman was in her forties, had blond hair done up in a clip, and wore a purple cashmere sweater with a satin scarf. She smelled like Chanel No. 5, which wafted off of her wrist as she scribbled down her number for me on the back of a piece of paper.

  Wow, I thought. She’s friendly.

  “Try to make ninety meetings in ninety days,” she said. “Call me or text me anytime just to say hi, or if you have any questions.”

  I smiled gratefully, and with a few minutes left before 7:00 p.m., decided to walk over to the front of the room where two women were sitting at a table covered in brochures and books.

  “Hi,” I said to the woman with the black hair first, smiling at the woman next to her, an older woman with straw-colored hair and blue eyes.

  “This is actually my first meeting, I’m not sure if I need to do anything ….”

  “Welcome! That’s fantastic. No, nothing you need to do, except you can take one of these,” she reached underneath the table and handed me a manila envelope.

  “Here’s your newcomer packet. It has a copy of Living Sober, a meeting book, and some pamphlets.”

  “Thanks!” I smiled and went back to my seat.

  Why would Dad have told me to be careful? This is awesome!

  Someone rang a bell, and the woman with the dark hair began talking about how the group was not affiliated with any religion, and was not governed by anyone in particular. She said that everything that was said in the room should stay in the room.

  I guess everyone really trusts each other.

  “Is this anyone’s first meeting?” she asked.

  I didn’t raise my hand, but she didn’t call me out on it.

  “Is anyone counting days from one to ninety?”

  Some people announced how many days they had, and I thought they sounded like a lot: thirty-eight, sixty-six, eighty-six. Those paled in comparisons to the anniversaries, though: one year, seven years, twenty-five years. Everyone clapped whenever someone announced their number, so I clapped too.

  After all of that business was done, the woman with the straw-colored hair began talking, telling her whole story, explaining how drinking was a relief, something to look forward to, how she felt coddled and taken care of, which I understood. I nodded.

  “Now, I have to get out of my own head and in the moment. My sponsor asked me today, ‘Are you ok?’ If you don’t feel okay, you’re thinking about the past or the future. In this moment, you’re okay.” Fifteen minutes later, she ended with, “The war is over. You never have to drink again.”

  Someone passed around a basket.

  “You don’t have to put anything in there today,” Mary whispered.

  After that, people began raising their hands and saying what was on their mind. One girl who looked about my age said, “My family keeps asking me if I’m sure, but I know that I’m sure, because people who drink normally don’t have the thought, ‘Am I an alcoholic.’ So it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand. Only I need to understand.” A man held up a finger signaling that her time was up.

  I listened to other people talk and took notes on the back of a pamphlet, because I liked the way they put their feelings into words. With ten minutes left before 8:00 p.m., I raised my hand.

  “I’m Helaina, and I think I’m an alcoholic, this is my first meeting ever ….”

  Suddenly the room erupted into this roar of applause, like I had just scored the game-winning home run.

  “I chose this meeting because of the name. I’ve been living in fear for ten years.” I told my entire story, what happened on 9/11 and after. I’m sure I went over the three-minute sharing period, but nobody stopped me or told me to wrap it up.

  “I’m afraid I wont be able to handle it when the impulse comes,” I concluded.

  At the end, they all stood in a circle and held hands and said something. I held Mary’s hand, and some stranger’s hand, and just watched the group. One last round of applause, and it was over.

  But before I could put my pen back in my purse, a small group had formed around me.

  “Could I give you my number?” asked a Japanese girl in a bomber jacket with a huge scarf wrapped around her neck. “I related to what you said so much. We should have coffee.”

  Startled, I said, “Of course, yes …” and took down her number.

  More women moved in, some handing me their business cards, circling their cell in red pen, another invited me out to dinner with the group.

  Holy shit, where were you guys when I was in school?

  One last woman made her way through the crowd.

  “Here’s your newcomer packet!” she chirped. “I’m Emma.”

  “Oh, I already have one, but thank you.” I said.

  I took her number, too, and walked twenty blocks up to Anthony’s new apartment on Ninety-Fifth Street.

  After he sold his business for much less than it was worth and began working in the flower market doing wholesale, he had qualified for some sort of rent discount program in a fancy doorman building.

  After he went to sleep—he woke up at 4:00 a.m. now for work at the market on Twenty-Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue—I sat on the toilet of his studio apartment reading through the contents of the newcomer packet and smoking a joint.

  The following Wednesday, after another, much larger meeting at another church, I sat with Emma at the diner on Eighty-Ninth and Third on the Upper East Side. Emma, it turned out, had a condition that deemed her legally blind. She could see patches of color, almost like tunnels, and could also recognize people when she was very close their faces. She reminded me a bit of a Barbie, save for the fact that one of her front teeth crossed slightly over the other, and, well, there was the eye thing … but she was exactly what you’d expect from an Upper East Side real estate agent: blonde highlights, a furry coat, sequin Ugg boots, shimmering lip gloss, and the latest Gucci bag, all covered in a cloud of sweet smelling French perfume.

  “How many days d
o you have again?” she asked. “Twelve,” I said. “I haven’t had a drink in twelve days.”

  “Are you doing any other drugs?”

  “Well, I smoked weed,” I said. “Sometimes.”

  “You smoked, or you smoke?”

  “Once in a while, I still smoke,” I said, stumbling over my words because I knew what was most likely coming next. She was going to try and stop me.

  “Well, maybe you should stop counting days then.”

  “What! Why? I thought this was about alcohol,” I said.

  “Think about it this way,” she said as she held up the menu right to her face so she could read the offerings. “Are you reaching for something outside of yourself to feel something?”

  Fuck.

  On the way to Anthony’s, only a few blocks away, I called one of my professors from college who I still kept in touch with. He told me to call him after my meeting, a meeting he knew I was going to because it was my explanation for not going to see his son’s band.

  “What’s your program?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “What’s your program?”

  I had no idea how to answer that.

  “Helaina,” he said with an exasperated laugh. “I’m trying to tell you I’m in the program too.”

  As I rolled a joint, I listened to him explain how he had a hard time with the notion of giving everything up.

  “As a writer, I worried plenty about how much I would suck. But I’ve done some of my best writing in sobriety,” he said.

  I continued to read Living Sober, thinking, geez, this book could be about me, and it was written forty freaking years ago.

  I wanted to finish what weed I had left, so, three days later, I smoked my last joint, making my official sobriety date Saturday, November 12, 2011.

  “Okay,” I told Emma at that night’s meeting. “I’m ready. But I’m kind of afraid.”

  “Of course you’re afraid!” Emma said. “We’re all afraid. We all live with this fear in every aspect of our daily lives that other people don’t. Why do you think we all drank?”

  I was just one day sober when I accepted an invite to a sober party uptown after the meeting. The people at this party could have easily been gathered together inside the hottest club West Chelsea had to offer. Not only did they look cool as hell, but they were the happiest crowd of people I’d seen in a long, long time, and the most cheerful I’d ever seen sans alcohol. All of them were in the program—some had five years, some five months, others had decades.