September 10

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, may have been the last great hurrah for the business of print journalism.  People were buying newspapers.  I know this for a fact, because they were reading them on the bus, or at the bus stop, and leaving them there.

I was a student at the time at a community college, no more than half an hour's drive away from home, but as much as a couple of hours by bus - and as a non-driver, I found myself spending three or four hours on buses and at bus stops, four days a week.  Although I often brought a book with me, and always carried a little notebook for recording my thoughts and observations, it was always a special pleasure when I happened upon some discarded reading material left on a bus bench.  Usually it happened once a week, maybe twice.  After the terrorist attacks, however, I would come home almost every day with an abandoned newspaper or two.  Lying on my bed in the evenings, I would scan the headline news and browse the comics.  It was at least a week before the comics started being comical again.  I guess, with the names of the dead only just beginning to be confirmed and the air still thick with smoke at Ground Zero, there was something almost embarrassing about making a living drawing talking dogs and wisecracking babies.

One day, there was an article in the Los Angeles Times entertainment pages about a cake-decorating contest at the L.A. County Fair.  Now, although in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks my family had been concerned about my delicate mental health, I hadn't been hit all that hard emotionally on September 11.  Oh, I had watched the news in horror like everyone else, and written long reflections in my journal about hatred and anger and survivors' guilt.  But although I have always been one to fold easily under the pressures of my own life, there is something about a time of crisis that brings out the strength in me.  I am there to be a support and a help to others - as long as they have need of me - and only afterwards does my own emotional response rise to the fore.  I had been in strong-supportive mode for a week and a half when I read the article about the cake-decorating contest.  When I read how third-place winner Laura Palomino had considered backing out of the competition, feeling guilty about enjoying something so frivolous, I felt a familiar burn of anger.  "We have to show [the terrorists] they can't stop us," she concluded, and then my anger boiled over into a tearful rage.  Everything I had been quietly feeling since I sat in front of the television and watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center rose up in me at once.  Who are these people? I raged.  How could they want to hurt us so badly - take things away - not from the government or from media or from big business, but from plain ordinary people!  Who are they to change our lives like this?  Can't a woman even decorate a goddamn cake now without it having to be some kind of political statement?  What did I ever do to them, that now I have to see the world through newly wary eyes, that I have to live surrounded by all this grief and horror and fear, that my world - I already know it - will never ever be the same again?  And for a long time I cried, for my country and my world and my species, but finally, most of all, for myself.

Everyone has a 9/11 story.  For the first few years after the terrorist attacks, my mother had her seventh-grade students start the school year by writing about theirs: where they were, how they learned about it, what they felt.  Of course, she can't use that assignment any longer.  Her current class was a gaggle of toddlers on that fateful day.  As far as they're concerned, the terrorist attacks might as well have happened back in "history days."  For those of us who were young adults at the time, however, 9/11 will be the defining moment of our generation, as the Kennedy assassination was for our parents and Pearl Harbor for our grandparents.

I remember where I was, of course.  I was sitting in my bedroom, flipping idly through a book I'd already read, when my father came knocking on my door.  He and I had never gotten along well, and I didn't really want to have to deal with him this early in the day, so my first feeling was one of irritation.  My mother had called, he said, and told him to turn on the TV so I could see the news.  He was annoyed that she had seemed to feel the need to make sure I was informed, inferring that she didn't care whether he was kept in the loop or not.  I remember thinking this was incredibly petty.  I followed him out to the living room and sat down while he turned on the TV, and there was the World Trade Center with smoke pouring out a hole in the side.

Yes, I remember where I was on September 11.  And so do you.  And so does everybody else.  But how many of us can say how we spent September 10?  How many of us remember the last day of our innocence, our security, the world the way it used to be?

I do.

Ironically, I woke on the morning of September 10 feeling tense and anxious, having tossed and turned even more fretfully than usual.  I considered simply staying in bed.  It would have been so easy.  It was Monday, the one day of the week that I didn't have classes.  Normally, on a Monday, I would sleep all morning, if I didn't have plans.  Although today I did have plans, no one knew about them.  My psychiatrist knew, of course, as did the people with whom he'd made the appointment.  But it would be no skin off their backs if I chose to stay in bed today.  What, to them, was one more noncompliant patient, one more no-show?  I intentionally hadn't told any of my family or friends what I had promised to do today, in order to give myself this very option: to not do it, without having to justify myself or hear their urgings or bear their disapproval.

Giving myself that out, however, meant that I would have to face this ordeal alone.

Because, although I could, I wasn't going to stay in bed all morning.  I was going to get up.  I was going to take a long, hot shower, as close to scalding as I could bear, and come right out of the shower and get dressed, pulling a heavy red wool sweater on over my t-shirt.  I was going to walk up to the corner and wait for the bus.

After all, I told myself as the bus came into view, and a chill passed through me in spite of the late-summer heat and my unseasonable choice of clothing, I was an adult.  A free agent.  I could change my mind right up until the last second.  No one was going to force me to go through with it - except myself.  If I could.

Why on earth had a trypanophobe like me ever agreed in the first place to go on a medication that would require semiannual blood monitoring?  Surely I had to know that this day would eventually come.  My new doctor wasn't going to take "I don't care if I get liver damage, really" for an answer.  Last week, I had allowed him to make an appointment for me to have a blood sample drawn at a local clinic.  All weekend I had struggled with myself over whether to go.  I really didn't want to do it - no!  And yet, I did want to prove to myself that I was capable, that my willpower was strong enough to overcome my fears, even in the absence of external encouragement or compulsion.

It was because I wanted to know that I could do it - not because I was worried about my liver, or even eager to impress my new psychiatrist with my treatment compliance - that I got up that morning, took a hot shower to dilate my blood vessels, and pulled on a thick sweater to try to hold in the heat.  The wider my veins were, I reasoned, the easier it would be for them to get it over with.

The ride to the clinic seemed endless.  I started out on one of the same buses I took to get to school four days a week, but the familiar scenery seemed to blur before my eyes under a veil of terror barely contained.  When I changed buses at Pomona TransCenter, I gave some serious consideration to getting right back on a bus going right back the way I had come.  Or out to Los Angeles, or anywhere at all - except to the clinic where I had that appointment.  Somehow, though, I pressed on.  I had made up my mind that this was the thing to be done, and I was going to do it.  No choice, no other way.  It was a mindset that had served me well through high school, the years of undiagnosed and carefully concealed depression, the dissolutions of my first real close friendships, the humiliations of emotional abuse.  With my penchant for neologism, I had even coined a word for this state of dutiful endurance: statofficiality.

I had never done anything like this before, going voluntarily to face my worst fear, alone.  But my years of practice in the art of stalwart compliance had prepared me better than I might have thought.  I got on the second bus.  I rode to the clinic.  The endless ride suddenly over much too soon, I got off.  I walked through the doors.

That was the hardest part, of course: the waiting room.  Checking in, sitting down to wait.  They told me it would be about twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes!  That was too long!  It wasn't nearly long enough.  I tried to flip through a magazine, to watch whatever mindless talk show was playing inaudibly on the television.  I went into the bathroom and ran the water over my arm, as hot as I could get it.  I wondered irrationally if a team of practiced and muscular nurses would grab me and drag me back in if I made a run for the street.  I tried to write in my little notebook, but my eyes kept wandering up to the clock, where the minutes ticked away with excruciating precision.  It was more than twenty minutes before they called me in, of course, and everything after the twenty-minute mark was pure torture.  Finally, I just wrapped my arms around myself in a tight hug and waited.

Then they called my name.  I rose on my unsteady legs, arms crossed stiffly in front of me, each hand painfully clutching the opposite elbow, as I made my way to the sterile white room where the phlebotomist waited.  It wasn't too late to turn back.  No.  The decision was already made.  What would happen was going to happen.  And in a minute . . . it would be over. . . . I focused on my breathing, keeping my mind focused on the afterwards, as if I could propel myself there through sheer force of effort.

Well-meaning family, friends, and nurses always tell me not to look.  And I tell them, every time, that I have to.  If I can't stop it from happening, at the very least, I can know exactly when and where it is going to happen.  Knowledge becomes my last vestige of control in the face of unendurable anxiety.  I had to watch every step of the process, as the phlebotomist swabbed the inside of my left elbow with an alcohol wipe and tied a rubber strip around my arm.  I watched him pick up the little needle and angle it over the glistening, freshly-swabbed skin.  I watched it slip beneath the surface.

"It doesn't hurt," I hear over and over again when I tell people about my phobia - as if the phobic response had anything to do with rational dangers.  At any rate, whereas I freely admit the pain probably isn't enough to justify the intensity of my response (I have endured much greater pain with forbearance, if not aplomb), I stand by my repeated observation that having a needle stuck into one's flesh does hurt.  Only once have I ever had an injection without any pain to speak of - and that was the day.  I watched, only a little uncomfortable, as my blood flowed through the tube attached to the needle, rapidly filling a little vial.  When the vial was nearly full, the phlebotomist seamlessly replaced it with another.  I sat very still, the needle still in my arm, as he took several vials of my blood.  Then I felt a little twinge as he slipped the needle out of my vein, out of my arm.  And it was over.  I'd done it.

I'd done it!  I'd done it!  I had been anxious for several days, ever since my doctor had made the appointment.  I had woken that morning in full-fledged fight-or-flight mode, and all at once, as the phlebotomist untied the rubber strip from around my arm, the tension was gone.  Although I was out of "danger," however, my bloodstream was still thick with the stress hormones that had kept me so tightly sprung all morning.  Pride at my accomplishment was quickly amalgamated into the heady euphoria of adrenaline rush.  My muscles felt stiff and sore, but I was fidgety and too giddy to care.  Back at the bus stop, I giggled and chattered volubly to myself.  "I did it, I did it," I sang under my breath.

By the time the bus had carried me as far as the TransCenter, I had recovered my self-possession, but the blissful feelings had yet to fade away entirely.  I was waiting on the bench, writing in my little notebook, grinning broadly, when I sensed someone sitting beside me, a little closer than made me altogether comfortable.  I looked up into a familiar face: the first man I had ever kissed.  No, correction: the first man who ever kissed me.

Owen and I had met on the bus, back in July.  We'd started talking, and it had gone well at first.  When I'd arrived at my stop, he had gotten off the bus to walk with me.  We ended up in the park just north of my old high school, sitting on the grass and talking.  I wasn't at all attracted to him - he was too young for my tastes, and a little too slick, but that didn't matter - after all, we had just met.  Up until a couple of months earlier, I had never been on the receiving end of any sort of romantic or sexual attention, and, frankly, it was still so new to me that I hadn't yet started to resent the attentions of unappealing men; I was just glad that anyone had seen fit to notice me at all.  I was enjoying the conversation with Owen, enjoying the feeling of being female and desirable, even if I didn't much care for the one who was doing the desiring.  Then, suddenly, he leaned over and put his mouth on mine.  It wasn't at all the way I had imagined a kiss would feel.  It was wet.  Slimy.  I was too stunned to do anything but sit there and take it.  When he pulled away, I sputtered, "That was my first kiss."  He apologized; that hadn't really been much of a kiss, he told me, and then he did it again, this time at length, sort of sucking on my mouth.  Since I hadn't put up any protest the first time, I didn't feel I really had the right to refuse him now, so I just sat there and let him do it.  Apparently he didn't notice any difference in me afterwards, but I felt sick, just sick.  He rested my head on his shoulder, and I let him do it.  After all, I'd let him kiss me.  Before we parted ways, he sucked wetly on my mouth once more.  He gave me his telephone number, but I knew I was never, ever, ever going to call him.  And if he called me . . . ever since I was a little girl, I'd been lying to my father's clients for him, telling them he was out of the house.  It was high time for my father to return the favor.  I needn't have worried.  He never did call.

The man who had stolen my first kiss was gone from my life forever - and good riddance to him.  Or so I thought, until I looked up that Monday at the TransCenter and saw Owen sitting beside me, leering at me with that smooth, confident look of his.

"Hey, baby," he drawled, "you never called me."

"No," I said flatly.  "I didn't.  I decided you were a jerk."

He made a face of suave outrage, but before he could muster up some glib defense, I spotted the bus pulling up to the stop, and went to catch it.

I couldn't have felt more triumphant and proud than I did on the final leg of my bus ride home.  I had walked with dignity into a confrontation with my greatest fear - and come through splendidly.  I had had an unexpected encounter with someone who had treated me unpleasantly, and I had acted for once with unhesitating confidence to put him in his place, instead of sucking up my true feelings to play sweet and nice.  I was courageous.  I was awesome.  I deserved ice cream.

I stopped at Bert & Rocky's Cream Co. in the Claremont Village to order myself a sweet treat, enjoying the cold dessert as I walked the rest of the way home.  Back at my house, I called several close friends and family members, eager to brag about my triumph.  The rest of the day was pleasant and low-key.  I did some reading, ate some dinner, did a little homework.

I didn't sleep well that night, but then, that was nothing unusual.  I tossed and turned a bit, managed to get a couple of hours' rest, then got up before sunrise to poke around for a bit, expecting that after an hour or two I would get tired again and go back to bed for a couple more hours of sound sleep before I had to get up for school.

Instead, I looked up with irritation when, a little before 6:00 A.M., my father came knocking on my door.  With a sigh, I set my book aside and followed him out to the living room.  I knew whatever had happened must have been something tremendous, for my mother to call at this hour.  I could not have imagined just how tremendous.  We sat down together in front of the television, and that day I learned, with the rest of the nation and the world, what real terror, real suffering, real bravery looked like.