Lucky (33 page)

Two men were sopping up the oil from my plate with bread. We went back to a house on a hill. I heard the name of my Greek student mentioned but he wasn't there. We smoked black tar and walked outside again. One of the men disappeared, the other wanted to sleep with me. I had been on American TV

At the same house, with a new population shooting up in the back, I put on someone's jacket because I was cold. There was a used needle in the pocket. It stabbed me. I was startled for a moment, immediately I thought, AIDS, then I did what I had become good at: played the odds. It was Greece. How bad could the risk be?

After thirty days I went home. I wrote a travel article for
The New York Times,
which appeared the following spring in time for people to plan their vacations. In the meantime, I flew back to Europe with another former student, John. He and a friend had scammed cheap tickets to Amsterdam through the friend's relative. We took the night train, high as kites, into Berlin. The wall was falling. It was after midnight by the time we reached the concrete separating West from East. John and Kippy pitched in. They borrowed a pickax from a group of raucous and euphoric German men and took their turns. I stayed at a remove. This wasn't my country and I was the only woman among men. A German man came over and offered me a cigarette, a bottle, said something to me, and grabbed my ass.

Up along the wall, an East German border guard stared down.

It was sometime after that in New York that John was hit. I remember seeing him round the corner. He had been gone longer than usual. I could see his glasses were missing and his nose was bloodied. He was upset.

"Did you get it?" I asked.

He nodded his head. Didn't speak. We started walking.

"I got hit."

This, like the needle in Athens, startled me. The question was: How bad did it have to get? I didn't want John to cop alone anymore and made a point of that. He tried not to, but sometimes, when we were desperate, he went.

It got much worse, and then, in the spring of 1991, having just moved into an apartment on Seventh Street, something clicked. Something was wrong with me but I didn't know what. I lay in bed. I ate again, as I hadn't since college, and I wore my old flannel nightgowns. The boxes from the move remained unpacked. John was working grueling hours. He was uncomfortable around me now. When he came over I sent him out to buy me brownies. I gained weight. I stopped caring about what I looked like or how fast I could walk at a clip to a club. I wanted to be better but I didn't know how.

A friend of mine I'd known since we were teenagers called to say I'd been quoted in a book. My friend was a doctor now, and he worked in Boston. My
New York Times
piece had been quoted in
Trauma and Recovery,
by Dr. Judith Lewis Herman. I laughed at this.

I had wanted to write my own book but I couldn't seem to manage it. Now, almost ten years after Lila's rape, my name had appeared as a footnote in another person's. I thought about buying it but it was hardback—too pricey—and besides, I thought, I was done with all that.

In the next six months, John and I stopped seeing each other, I joined a gym, and I got a therapist. John kept using. Part of me wanted him back so desperately I did humiliating things. I begged. Part of me knew he was killing himself. First Avenue became a line I wouldn't cross. I felt the pull of my old neighborhood was too strong to resist and so, when an opportunity came to spend two months in California at a rural artists' colony, I took it.

Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, which sits in the mountains of rural, redneck California, is rustic by anyone's standards. The cabins are constructed of cinder blocks and plywood.

There is no electricity. It is run on a shoestring budget.

When I arrived, I was met by a man named Robert Willis. Bob. He was in his early seventies. He wore a white felt Stetson, Wranglers, and a denim shirt. He had silver hair and blue eyes and was chivalrous but disinclined to talk.

He lit my propane lamp, came up the next day to check on me, drove me to town for food. He'd been there a long time and had seen a lot of people come and go. Odd as it was, we became friends. I told him about New York and he talked about France. He lived there half the year, in a similar caretaking capacity, on a horse farm. Eventually, in his cabin, after dark, by the light of the propane lamp, I told him about my rape and Lila's.

He listened, saying only a few words. "That must have hurt."

"You never get over certain things."

He told me about serving as an infantryman in World War II and losing all his buddies.

Years later, in the winter of 1993, in France, he had stared out a window down at a tree.

"I don't know what it was," he said. "I had seen that tree from that window hundreds of times, but I started sobbing like a baby. On my knees sobbing, like you'd never seen. I felt ridiculous but I couldn't stop myself. While I was doing it, I realized it was my buddies, that I had never cried for them. They were all buried in a graveyard in Italy near a tree like that, so far away. I just lost it. Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?"

Before I left, we had dinner one last time. He made what he called army vegetables—

canned corn and canned tomatoes heated up on the stove—and bacon. We drank cheap wine, jug cheap.

Dorland could be a spooky place in the daylight. At night it was pitch black, only a few kerosene or propane lights dotting the hill. After dinner, as we sat on the porch of his cabin, we saw what Bob took to be a truck's lights on the dirt road that led up from the highway.

"Looks like we've got a visitor," Bob said.

But then the truck's lights went off. We didn't hear it move.

"You wait here," he told me. "I'm going to investigate."

He went into the back and got his rifle from where he kept it hidden from the fragile liberal arts colonists and Dorland's board of directors.

"I'm going to circle back through the brush and come up on the road," he whispered.

"I'll shut off the light."

I stood absolutely still on the porch. I strained to hear anything, gravel under a tire, a twig snapping, anything. In my mind the men in the truck had hurt or killed Bob, and now they were advancing toward the cabin. But I had made a promise to Bob. I would not move.

Moments later I heard a rustle in the leaves on the far side of the cabin. I started.

"It's me," Bob's whisper came through the dark. "Stay still."

We watched the road. We never saw the lights on the truck go on. Eventually, Bob stepped through the chaparral with Shady, his faithful wolf-malamute, and we lit the propane light again. Both of us were amped up, went through the course of events a dozen times, shared our perception of it, talked about threat and how you could sense it.

How we were lucky for war and rape because it gave us something no one else had: a sixth sense that turned on when we felt danger near us or those we loved.

I went back to New York, but not the East Village. Too many memories. I moved with a boyfriend to 106th Street between Manhattan and Columbus.

My parents had visited me twice in ten years on my home turf. My mother had stood in an apartment of mine and said, "You can't tell me you want to spend the rest of your life this way." She was talking real estate and apartment size but they were words, as I came to repeat them, that took on a different meaning for me.

That fall I quit dabbling in heroin. It had as much to do with losing easy access to it as it did with anything. I drank again and smoked cigarettes but so did everyone. Then I bought Dr. Herman's book. It was out in paper. I reasoned I should have a record of anyplace my name appeared in print.

Herman chose to use one sentence from my article at the beginning of her chapter called

"Disconnection." The sentence, as it appeared, is this: "When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was." It appeared on page fifty-one of a three-hundred-page book. I read the sentence and my name again in the bookstore before purchasing it. It was not obvious to me until I was riding home on the subway. In a book called
Trauma and Recovery,
I was cited in the first half. I decided not just to keep the book as a memento, but to actually read it.

They do not have a normal "baseline" level of alert but relaxed attention. Instead, they have an elevated baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger. They also have an extreme startle response to unexpected stimuli .. . People with post-traumatic stress disorder take longer to fall asleep, are more sensitive to noise, and awaken more frequently during the night than ordinary people. Thus traumatic events appear to recondition the human nervous system.

Paragraphs like this began the most gripping read I had ever had: I was reading about myself. I was also reading about war veterans. Unfortunately, my brain went into overdrive again. I spent a week in the main reading room of the New York Public Library plotting a novel that would use PTSD as the great equalizer, bringing together women and men who suffered from the same disorder. But then, in the midst of the narratives I read, I lost the will to intellectualize it.

There was a collection of first-person accounts of Vietnam that I read over and over again and kept on reserve. Somehow, reading these men's stories allowed me to begin to feel.

One particularly affected me, the story of a hero. He had seen heavy action, and watched as his friends were cut down. He bore it all stoically. I couldn't help but think of Bob.

This vet got home, received decoration, held down a job. Years later, he fell apart.

Something gave. The hero could not hold. He became a man by crumbling. The account left off in process. He was out there somewhere, working on it. I'm not part of any religion but I prayed for that vet and for Bob.

I read Herman's entire book. It wasn't a magical cure but it was a start. I also had a good therapist. She had actually used the words
post-traumatic stress
a year before but I had dismissed them as so much psychobabble. True to form, I did everything the hard way: wrote a column, got it quoted, bought the book, and recognized myself in the case histories of the sick. I had post-traumatic stress disorder, but the only way I would believe it was to discover it on my own.

While I was living on 106th, my boyfriend worked late bartending, and I spent the evenings alone. I watched a lot of television. It was an old tenement house in a bad neighborhood. It was what I could afford in New York City on an adjunct's salary. I lived behind gated windows, and the nights were regularly peppered with automatic fire. Tech-9's were the gun of choice in the neighborhood then.

One night I'd turned the toaster on while coffee was brewing. I blew a fuse. The fuse box was down in the basement. I had to go outside and down a dark stairwell to get there. I called my boyfriend at work. He was brusque. A large crowd had just entered the bar.

"What do you want me to do about it? Take a flashlight and do it or sit in the dark. Those are your choices."

I decided I was being stupid, helpless. I used something I had learned in therapy, "inner talking," to psyche myself up for the chore. It was around 11:00 P.M. I reasoned this was not as bad as 2:00 A.M. To say the least, my inner talking was faulty.

Down two flights and out into the street, around the corner, over a wrought-iron gate whose lock had rusted shut, down the outdoor stairs, turn on the flashlight. I found the keyhole, inserted the key, got inside. I turned the latch on the inside and stood for a moment against the wall. My heart was racing. It was pitch black and windowless in the basement. My flashlight trailed across a far wall with rooms tunneling into the back. I made out the possessions of a Dominican man who had been evicted a month or two before. I heard rats squeaking in annoyance as my light discovered them.

Focus, I said to myself, the glass fuse cold in my hand, and then I heard a noise. I shut off my light.

It was outside. Against the door. People. Soon, by listening through the door to their Spanglish, I understood I would have to wait awhile. I stood two feet from them as he slammed her against the door. "Fuck me, bitch," he yelled. I stepped back as far as I could, but staying near the fuse box, what I had come to do, seemed better than going farther into the dark rooms of a sealed-off basement. Once the landlord's nephew had lived down here, my boyfriend told me. He had been a crackhead and someone had come in one night and shot him to death.

"That's why she won't rent to Dominicans anymore," he told me.

"But she's Dominican."

"Nothing makes sense up here."

Outside, the man grunted and the woman didn't make a sound. Then the two of them finished. They left. He called her some name in Spanish and laughed at her.

For the first time, I allowed myself to feel really scared. I changed the fuse and worked myself up to get back inside. My only goal was safety now, and inside the building upstairs was safer than down here, buried in the dust with the rats, the ghost of a murdered crackhead, and a door against which a girl had just been fucked.

I made it.

That night I decided to leave New York. I remembered reading that many of the men, upon returning from Vietnam, were drawn to places like rural Hawaii or the Florida Everglades. They were recreating the environment they knew best, where their responses to things seemed more natural than they did inside suburban homes scattered across the less lush and green United States. This made sense to me.

I'd always lived in bad neighborhoods except once, when I lived over a wife beater, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. New York meant violence to me. In the lives of my students, in the lives of those on the street, it was commonplace. All this violence had reassured me. I fit in with it. The way I acted and thought, my hypervigilance and nightmares, made sense.

What I appreciated about New York was that it didn't pretend to safety. On the best of days it was like living in a glorious brawl. Surviving this year by year was an honor mark that people wore proudly. After five years you earned bragging rights. At seven you began to fit in. I had made it to ten, almost dyed-in-the-wool by the projected East Village shelf life, then, all of a sudden and to the surprise of those who knew me, I left.