The Third Wave (6 page)

I was flabbergasted and alone, with nothing and nowhere to go. I’d been in New York only a month and didn’t have any real friends I could turn to. I wasn’t so bothered about losing my clothes, but the loss of my personal items and family photos made me cry. Also gone were phone numbers I had collected of all the people I had met so far in the United States.

Just like that, I was homeless. I lived on the streets for four days. I walked around at night talking to safe-looking strangers and fell asleep during the day on the chairs outside the ladies’ powder room at Bloomingdale’s. I had so little money that I would watch people eating to feel full.

On the fourth day, I signed up for a free day membership at the New York Sports Club and went inside to take a shower and read the newspaper. I found and applied for a job as a nanny on Park Avenue, and was hired straightaway. I went to live with a Jewish family with twin ten-year-old boys, and I was back on my feet. I had a roof over my head and some spending money again.

Over the next few years, I tried a variety of jobs, from piano
teacher to mathematics assistant to a professor at a college. Eventually I landed a job as an investment banker on Wall Street. It was an entry-level job, working in IPOs for a vice president, but I felt excited to be going there every day. I steadily moved up the corporate ladder to jobs with higher pay and more responsibility. I also received a large third-party insurance settlement from my bus accident, and invested it in land and stock options.

The inclination to be a filmmaker didn’t strike me until I was in my early thirties. I bought a video camera and took it with me everywhere I went, interviewing everyone from taxi drivers to bums sitting in the streets. I loved to look through the lens and capture people going about their everyday lives.

Thanks to my banking job, I was making a good salary and leading quite a jet-setting lifestyle, but the job didn’t fit my personality. So, when I was in my mid-thirties, I quit my secure job and decided to try to make it at something I was really passionate about. I signed up for an intensive fifteen-week course at NYU film school. I had no background other than the amateur films I had taken with my handheld camera, but I soon discovered that I could draw on all of my skills and life experiences—from teaching, to nursing, to travel, to photography—and combine them into storytelling.

A few months after the course ended, I helped raise one million dollars from my Wall Street banker friends to make my first comedy feature film. Shot in the streets of New York, it was called
High Times Potluck
and was written by
Summer of Sam
author Victor Colicchio. It was a fun, lighthearted movie about a suitcase of marijuana and the mob. I secretly dedicated the film to my sister, Lyndall, who had been busted for growing pot when she was a teenager. I was finishing up filming that project when the September 11 attacks happened.

In New York, I dated different types of men from all over the world. All of my romantic relationships were long-term. They usually ended when the guy had to move interstate or overseas for work, and I wasn’t ready to follow, attached as I was to New York. I let a few of my soul mates slip away, but I didn’t know it at the time.

In late 2002, I met Oscar. I was showing my film
High Times Potluck
in Toronto, where he was also showing his film. We met in the middle of a large crowd at my film party. He reached over and grabbed my arm, gently pulling me over, and started speaking with his charming Italian accent. Toward the end of the night, we kissed passionately against the wall. He was Sicilian and sexy and a fantastic break-dancer. He danced his way into my life.

Oscar and I were pretty much inseparable after that. He had an unbelievable way with children and animals, but was also always broke, just like most of the guys I had dated. Still, we never seemed to need any money to have fun. Oscar was romantic and a great cook. He would come up with creative ideas about where to picnic around New York. Also, he could fix anything. He found broken bicycles in the street and painted them bright yellow with daisies. We would cycle for hours around the city in the snow, laughing and falling off and getting into stupid situations. He reminded me of my adventurous brothers, with a touch of my quick-tempered father thrown in as well.

Christmas has always been my favorite time of year, and no other city I know celebrates it like New York. The Salvation Army donation bells ring out on every street corner and the smell of chestnuts sizzles up my nose. Elaborate window dressings romance shoppers and winter snow fights break out between strangers in Central Park. There are black-tie parties with friends and horse-drawn-carriage rides through slushy streets.

Christmas 2004 was a slightly bleaker season for me than usual, as Oscar and I were both broke. Oscar was between jobs producing films and had taken up bartending at a local Italian restaurant. Meanwhile, I was a trailing director for the TV drama
Law & Order
. I had to observe the other directors on set to make sure the show was shot in the same manner as it had been for the past twenty years. Unfortunately, I had spent the past twelve weeks on set shooting at Chelsea Piers—with no pay.

But we managed to smile through it. Christmas had become way too overcommercialized anyway, we rationalized, so our nearly depleted savings would bring us back to a simpler holiday.
We decided that this year, we could buy each other only one gift, which had to be purchased for twenty dollars or less. I gave Oscar gumboots and he gave me his favorite soccer jersey from his beloved Palermo team and a box of chocolates. Soccer is a religion for Italians and most would sell their mothers before giving away their favorite soccer jerseys. I wore my new jersey proudly as I cooked a succulent chicken, golden baked potatoes, and vegetables for dinner.

We did splurge on a real Christmas tree, which we decorated with photos of our friends and family. I also hung a few of the precious paper angels that I had saved from the September 11 Christmas tree at Ground Zero. The angel decorations had been made by schoolchildren from all over America and sent to the rescue workers to cheer us up. Our tree was mesmerizing. I sat watching it for hours and filmed it on my video camera. At Christmas I became a little girl again.

I thought of Christmas in Australia, which arrived in the middle of summer. Santa Claus would come on water skis. On Christmas Eve, we would go from door to door singing Christmas carols with friends and visit sick people at local hospitals. We would leave milk and cookies for Santa and wake up the next day to find a stocking full of candy on our beds. We would race downstairs and sit like puppies under the tree ready to rip open the presents, which we had already poked holes in with anticipation. At dinner we ate cold meats, lobster, and salads, and after church we played cricket on the beach.

On Christmas this year, it was snowing outside. I lay around in love beneath the tree while Oscar hand-fed me Italian Baci chocolates. Inside the blue wrappers were romantic messages for lovers translated into four languages.

But my bubble burst on Christmas afternoon when I looked at the news on the Internet and saw that a 9.3-magnitude earthquake had struck the sea near Indonesia, triggering a massive tsunami to hit much of southern Asia. The Internet reported that over a thousand people were dead. As each hour passed, that number grew. Soon it reached 5,000, and it kept climbing. I thought about how that was 2,000 more deaths than on September 11 and what a serious disaster it must be.

Oscar and I sat in a trance as events unraveled before our eyes. The death toll climbed to 10,000 and kept going. We were hypnotized by CNN, watching it twenty-four hours a day. The television reports were uncensored. They showed hundreds of dead bodies lying in the streets and wounded people walking around in a daze. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was reporting from a pile of rubble when he stopped mid-sentence to acknowledge a bad smell coming from beneath him. He said he thought there was a body under the very spot where he was standing.

It was during Cooper’s report that I realized I had to go to Asia to help. I called my mother to tell her about my decision, and she responded by saying that she already knew I would be going. She gave me her blessing.

Later that night, I turned to Oscar and told him I was leaving to help and asked if he would like to come with me. I said it was okay if he didn’t want to, but I was going anyway. He thought about it for a few hours and then said yes. I was happy he agreed to come on the adventure, but since he had never done anything like it before, I wondered if volunteering together would put a strain on our relationship.

We began talking about the logistics of getting there and gathering the necessary medical supplies. Money was another problem,
but I already knew that if you want something badly enough and summon up all the faith and courage inside of you, the whole universe opens up for you.

The next day, Oscar called his parents. They were upset at the idea of him going to Asia and advised against it. His mother was so worried that she wouldn’t send any money to help with the journey, hoping to discourage him. Oscar and I started calling our wealthier friends about the possibility of using their frequent flyer miles to get our plane tickets. I also contacted my healthcare worker friends at local hospitals and began collecting basic medical supplies.

We then visited a World Health Organization doctor so that we could get the booster injections we needed. I was nervous about not having the money to pay the doctor’s bill, but I kept my faith that somehow I would be able to pay later. When the nurse giving us the injections heard about our plan, she gave us some of the treatments for free, adding in extra ciprofloxacin antibiotics and diarrhea pills.

Next, we had to decide where to go. We chose Sri Lanka because it was an extremely poor, small country and wouldn’t receive as much assistance from its own government or international aid organizations as the other countries that had been hit, such as India and Thailand. Some of my friends had been on surfing trips to Sri Lanka, and they had told me shocking stories of the poverty and horrible hospital conditions there. I read that although the coastline had been devastated, there were still places in the capital city of Colombo where one could buy food and supplies, so I found a cheap hotel online where we could stay the first night, and printed out road maps of Sri Lanka from the
Internet. We would head out to the affected areas after we’d had a chance to stock up.

Later that week, my friend Samantha brought us sleeping bags and walkie-talkies. We packed those along with our other basic necessities—a first aid kit, medications, rubber gloves, waterproof matches, and flashlights. We had to be ready to camp out in the wild if necessary. Of course, I also threw in my bottle of Chanel No. 5. I packed my handheld video camera, thinking it would be useful for taking some shots of the tsunami damage. That way, I figured, we could hold a small fund-raiser when we returned to New York a few weeks later. Noticeably missing from my gear were plane tickets and spending money, but those were only minor details. I knew that I was going to make it there somehow.

I continued to watch the disaster day after day on TV. I couldn’t believe it when the reporters said that the death toll had now reached over 100,000 people. It made me sick with frustration to think about how every second I sat in my apartment could mean life or death for someone over there.

On New Year’s Day, Oscar heard from a friend of a friend in Telluride, Colorado, who knew a chef called Bruce who was also heading over to Sri Lanka. We spoke with Bruce on the phone and coordinated a cooking stove and a few other supplies. We told him to stay in touch about travel plans.

My friend Mark Axelowitz had three children, Nicole, Jared, and Chloe. They had the idea of making hot chocolate to sell outside a grocery store in New York to raise money for the tsunami victims. The next day, the whole family sat outside in zero-degree weather selling hot drinks and cookies. Then Mark and his wife invited me to their home, where his children presented me with $300, half the money they had raised (the rest they were donating
to the American Red Cross). I was excited and humbled by his children’s actions. It was the only cash donation I received before leaving home.

At 2 a.m. on January 3, 2005, I finally received the phone call I’d been waiting for. It was from my friend Joe in Michigan. He had found me an air ticket and had driven two hours in a snowstorm to the airport to buy it for me. The only hitch, he informed me, was that I had to be at JFK Airport in three hours. I was ready. I turned to Oscar, who still had no clue where his air ticket was coming from, and told him that I needed to leave. I said that he should follow me as soon as he could, and not to give up until he found a ticket.

Two hours later, I set off into the unknown, waving to a nervous Oscar through the rear window of a taxi. I was leaving home with $300 in my pocket, tears leaking out of my eyes, and a heart full of love.

Eighteen hours later, I landed in Singapore to connect with my flight to Sri Lanka, and the airlines informed me that I had a twenty-three-hour layover. It felt like I was finally at the marathon starting line but the race official had yelled, “Ready, set, stop!” Furthermore, Singapore Airlines wasn’t going to give me a free room to wait in. I burst into tears like a little girl. I explained my mission to the airline attendee and flashed my September 11 Ground Zero American Red Cross badge, and they quietly slipped me a hotel coupon.

When I got to the hotel, I checked my email. Oscar had written to say that he was now on a flight heading toward me. He had called his friends Tony Detre and Henry Jarecki, who had happened to be at the airport at the time and purchased him a ticket.
Oscar had had two hours to pack and get to the airport. He’d only just made it. The best news was that due to my extended layover, Oscar was able to catch up with me in Singapore. After some long Italian kisses in the airport, we continued on to Colombo together. So far the whole trip had been like watching a magician pull a rabbit, a tiger, and then a jet plane out of an empty hat. The universe unlocked its magic, and we were ready to ride.