slacklust:

There are two main kinds of prostitution memoir stories: In the first kind, a sad vulnerable young girl with no self-esteem talks about numbing herself to a life of repetitive exploitation. In the second kind, a quirky young woman finds empowerment by getting paid for dominating men.

1. 9/11 is like a goldmine of material!   For the ten year anniversary of 9-11, I wanted to produce a 9-11 themed comedy show.  I already had a few titles in mind – “Still Too Soon, Guys? A 9-11 Comedic Retrospective” – or “9-11: Let’s Blow This Shit Up!”  Sorry.
2. I lived through 9-11 fairly directly.  It impacted my life more than, probably, yours.  Maybe less than one of yours.  More than the rest of yours.  This gets competitive.
3. I didn’t produce the show. I got busy.  And also I have nothing funny to say about 9-11.  Except some fragments.  But they don’t always come across as funny to other people.
4. I’ve been trying and failing to write about 9-11 for several years. I wrote some essays that never gelled.  I tried to write a show. “It’s kinda heavy,” the director offered.  I did a five minute story at a storytelling competition once.  I left the stage feeling pretty proud of myself.  I’d managed to pull a lot of information into five minutes.  Short of booing me off the stage, the audience made it clear that I didn’t connect.  The scores were low.  People looked upset. 
5. I still couldn’t – can’t – communicate events and experiences around 9-11 in a way that is cathartic or successful, let alone humorous.   It doesn’t usually take this long for me to process something negative and turn it into schtick.
6. I also still can’t handle 9-11 content.  My heart races when disaster movie trailers come on the screen.  I quickly rush to change the channel when the talking heads discuss 9-11.  Tall buildings, planes, subways, and New York City below 14^th street make me panic.  I eat a lot when I’m downtown to calm my nerves.  I get off the train downtown and immediately think “Rice balls” and start food-hunting.
7. I got very mad at Steven Spielberg when I saw “War of the Worlds” and realized it was actually a 9-11 movie.  Asshole. He was already on my shit list with “Schindler’s List.”  It was really boring. Sorry.  I’m avoiding the topic.
8. I have given myself permission to avoid 9/11 and say whatever I want about it.  I’m entitled, and you’re not. Ha. Sorry.
9. Last month, I took a follow-up “Health Survey” of people affected by 9-11. It asks questions about physical and mental health symptoms. I took the same survey a few years after 9-11.  At that time, the survey fucked me up.  I muted the voice screaming in my head: “You see!  You see!  I wasn’t alone! I’m drowning!  I’m drowning!” Something like that.  I had the same reaction last month.
10. What I remember about September 11, 2001, a day that will go down in history on my to-do list:
11. I was working for a large nonprofit organization.  Their mission is to help victims of violence, or what they call “survivors.” They changed the mission statement in the late 90s to reflect the new thinking.  I was one of their grant writers.  I had learned to milk one word for money: “trauma.” 
12. I didn’t have the best childhood.  I’ll leave it at that.  But I was definitely ‘under-treated’ at that point.  So it was a little weird to be talking about other people’s trauma with no sense of my own. 
13. Oy, I do not want to be mentioning that or writing about it.  It’s not cool.  But it is relevant to what follows.
14. Back to 9/11. It was around 9am.  I was taking the A train from Washington Heights to the World Trade Center stop for my job.  For the first time in months, maybe a year, I was going to be on time.  I was usually 30 minutes late and always feeling guilty about it.  Nobody cared at my job, as long as you proved yourself by staying very late. I just fought this self-abusive battle with the clock every morning as a matter of habit.  I was always late for school as a child and guilty then too.  My advice: if you’re always late, be cool about it, own it.  Don’t be like me.
15. At Canal Street, a stop before the WTC stop, the train stopped for too long.  “Hmm, something isn’t right,” I said to myself and got out of the train. 
16. My logic stopped there.   As I noticed floods of people walking away from the Trade Center and lines of people at pay phones– and as I noticed a fire on a high level of both of the twin towers - I continued to walk downtown because it was now 9:15, which meant I would still be earlier than usual. 
17. It never occurred to me stop and think: “Hmm.  How is it that both building are on fire? That doesn’t happen naturally!” I was obsessed with getting to work on time.
18. Then I determined that work wasn’t going to happen. I think I asked someone something.   Rather than walk away from danger, I got in line and called the office. I left a message.  I made sure that they knew that I would’ve been on time.
19. And so I walked north, up Broadway, and then I picked up the pace. People were walking faster and some of them seemed upset.  The word on the street – I don’t remember how I learned it – was that we were being attacked.  “We” = America. And since I was there and not in front of a TV, I was hearing the worst.  Washington DC had been attacked.  My parents live there! Oh no, it’s really happening?  I’m slow to awaken to reality.
20. Within minutes, the towers collapsed. One, then the other.  Many of my coworkers got caught in the dust and flying debris. I was spared it.  But I saw it behind me.  A red-brown cloud. The next things I remember, while walking north on Broadway:
21. The cops were not helpful.  They looked lost and scared.  They told us to run; then they told us to go inside buildings. They were confused.
22. The first thing I did, once I learned what was happening, was pull out my to-do list. I live by this list. I rewrite it everyday, sometimes more.  Writing things down means I don’t have to think about them or do them. (Hence, this list.) So at that moment, of discovering that it all might be ending ASAP, I wrote at the bottom of the to-do list: “TMPL.”
23. That was code for “temple.”  If I got out of there alive, I would finally go to temple.  I’d been an atheist all my life. I wrote it in code, with vowels missing, in case anyone read my to-do list.  In case I made it out alive.  I stopped to take the time to do this.  It put my mind at ease.  This would be covered, if I got out alive.
24. I passed cars that were parked with the doors open and the radio on. People gathered around them, trying to figure out what was happening.  I didn’t want any information. I was comfortable with hearsay. Standing and listening to what was happening would’ve involved dealing with reality.  I just wanted to keep walking.
25. I stopped to talk to a man standing in a doorway. He said that his brother was in one of the towers.  But he was hopeful.
26. I made a pay phone call to my brother, still just north of the towers.  He was never as loving or attentive to me as I wished.  So instead of saying “I’m okay, in case you were worried,” I said, “Is Emily okay?” That’s his wife.  She also worked downtown.  He said that she was home that day, and that I should “probably get out of there.”  He didn’t sound as worried as I’d wished he were.
27. Starbucks were assholes.  They all closed, so that we definitely didn’t have any bathrooms we could use.  Those bitches had taken over New York around that time.  There was at least one Starbucks, often more, every few blocks, and no other coffee shops left that could compete. I guess they were protecting their employees but I remembering feeling like they’d violated their public trust as bathroom providers.
28. The trains were not running.  I walked to 49^th street, where I stood next to a man covered head-to-toe in dust and debris.  A police officer asked him: “Are you okay?” He nodded.  I remember thinking: “Hey, what about me?” I know that’s not cool to admit.  I secretly wished for some outward manifestation of what I experienced.  Later, if you keep reading, you will see irony in this.
29. I made it to 59^th street and stopped somewhere and called my mom.  “Mom, I was there!”  I said.  “How was it?” she asked, casually. And then she caught herself: “I didn’t mean…” But she’d lost me already. “It was great,” I said, or something like that, and hung up.
30. Crossing 59^th was like crossing out of hell.  There were trees and broad open streets and far fewer people.  
31. But then I stopped in some bagel place around W. 96^th St. People were sitting and eating like the world had not just changed forever and danger was miles away.  They gossiped about the attack.  Now I missed downtown.
32. I took the train from there up to Washington Heights, huddled in bed, and didn’t cry yet.
33. I got to help out, and that helped me (the “false high” part of the story): My boss called me the next day.  They needed people to help in the Family Assistance Center temporarily located in the 30s.  “Um…” I lied and said my mother didn’t want me taking the train. I know, it’s not cool to admit that.  I wasn’t ready. I stayed home a few days.  I still didn’t cry yet. 
34. My friend and I had a terrible phone conversation.  “Yeah the funny thing is that those towers were so ugly anyway, it’s kind of like karmic… I mean they represented our arrogance… now the beautiful skyscrapers will stand tall again…”  I know!  Terrible!  We were in shock, eh?
35. That night after that call, I cried. I began having these visions: I pictured people jumping out of the WTC windows, as if I had seen them myself.  I lost it. I called my father at 2am.  “I can’t believe what happened! What I saw!”  He replied: “Oh dear. I thought this would happen…” That familial response worked for me somehow. 
36. The next morning, I knew I needed to go downtown to help out. I had my first conversation with the CEO that day. I had a crush on him. I thought he flirted with me. So it was a good day? Sorry.
37. That night I went to my improv comedy theater.  People were gathering to do shows and support each other.  I lay on the couch and cried.  People looked at me like I was weird (part 1).
38. They moved the Family Assistance Center to one of the Chelsea Piers and it became this safe haven from the city. The only place I felt safe.  It was a huge enormous center, with massage tables and snacks… for the family members… but, hey, we workers needed love too! 
39. My job there was something else:  I helped family members fill out “Missing Persons” certificates because nobody was ready to fill out “Death” certificates.
40. I was not prepared for this job.   I was a grant writer, with some teaching experience.  The eyes of these desperate, hopeful family members… I will not forget them. I wish I had watched enough Law and Order SVU by that time to know what look they needed back from me.
41. I remember most clearly one tough lady, an FBI agent, who was missing her brother.  She told me she worked in narcotics.  “But I wish I were working anti-terrorism now.” She toughened me for a second.
42. The rules kept changing in terms of how people could receive checks.  Eventually they had to bring pay stubs of their lost loved ones and we’d pay them that amount. That is, the wealthier ones got paid more.
43. People could also get some money if they were injured.  A handful of African security guards were trying to get money this way.   It was the only way they could get money, so they would fake a cough or injury.
44. I didn’t blame them.  I encouraged it.  You see, their company had told them to stay in the building and help people, even though they were untrained to do that.  They were just security guards, not officers of the law.  These guards lost many of their friends in there; they watched them die. Many of them had been through war to get to the United States. Then, get this: their company closed down immediately after 9-11, laying all of them off.  But they weren’t eligible for the pity money. Unless they faked an injury. 
45. I felt the injustice. The whole rescue and recovery scene jaded me. 
46. I took the shuttle home one night and overheard some hardened case workers talking about how people were trying to steal money and I thought, “How have they not been changed forever by this?”  I wasn’t changed forever, by the way. I was just feeling superior for a minute.
47. FYI – The Red Cross was bullshit. They had NO RESPONSE for weeks.   I went by their tent. They weren’t “ready” to help people.  My agency did everything and eventually told the Red Cross what to do.  All those millions of dollars they got? They were taking time to figure out how to respond? Yep!
48. My direct supervisor, Elizabeth, was overseeing all of it.  I idolized Elizabeth.  She was tall, athletic, young (a Vice President by 35), smart, and no bullshit.  She ran marathons.  She had survived cancer and some heart condition.  She came from a wealthy Catholic family. I saw her as a horse girl.  I don’t know if I meant that she was the type of girl to ride horses, or that her gait and stride reminded me of a horse.  This is all relevant, you will see.
49. Elizabeth had lost friends in the buildings.  And now she was fearlessly taking charge of helping family members and victims.  It wasn’t her job. She was in charge of the Planning and Research.  But she saw an opening and heroically stepped in.   I don’t think she was ever that into Planning and Research.
50. The money was flowing in to my agency.  I used to write about “a $40 million budget.”  Within weeks, I was instructed to write “over $50 million budget.”
51. This moment marked the end of my love-affair with charity.  I still work for nonprofits, but I never quite got it back. I’m cynical at the core.
52. As there was now “great opportunity” for fundraising, they needed me downtown again to write grants.  Um needed?  I could have lobbied, I suppose, to work from home, but I had a people-pleasing relationship to that job. 
53. The dark and sucky days to follow: My first day back downtown, two or three weeks after 9/11, I emerged from the subway on Chambers street to a ghost town. The stores were all closed down. My favorite falafel place was covered in grey dust and boarded up. There was half of the usual pedestrian traffic.
54. Oh, and on the street corners stood men wearing army fatigues and gas masks.  Gas masks? 
55. I saw all of this, spinning around me, and I dropped my coffee cup.  I yelled, because I had hot coffee poured on my pants.  The guard with the gas mask turned around to look at me and looked right past me.  I wasn’t worth the time.  There were bigger fish to fry than a girl with hot coffee on her. Nobody stopped to say anything to me, validating my pain.  Before 9/11, someone would’ve said, “Are you okay?” I’m sure.  I was in a New World Order.
56. It was totally absurd to be downtown.  It was unsafe and isolating and disturbing. We were scared of future attacks and cancerous air.  Indeed, there was a very strong, distinctly sweet smell, wafting through the windows from down the street… the smell of burning steel… and, it turned out, asbestos and awful things… and, yep, a holocaust of thousands of burning bodies. 
57. It was also pointless to be at work from a work point of view since the internet and phones were down and half of the office was in the Family Assistance Center, where I imagined them laughing and getting massages. Sorry.
58. It was stupid as shit, but Giuliani had issued a call back to normal.  We were not going to let them win!  We were going to live as if nothing had happened!  He did well for a day then lost me with all of that bullshit.
59. People felt unsafe in New York for awhile, maybe months. There was 9-11 and then, um, Anthrax. Trains would stop suddenly for minutes and people would panic, assuming death to follow.  We were all now prisoners of this subway system It was also the dead of winter. 
60. Everyone was miserable all of time in New York, but occasionally I would hear someone giggle out loud on the train.  They were almost always reading David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, which had just come out.
61. I started writing grants about how we were going to help people through 9-11: employees who worked downtown and were affected by what they saw and by returning to work; social service workers who were traumatized by helping people in crisis; people who were “retraumatized” by 9-11 because they had past trauma in their lives; children who were affected by the loss of a parent.
62. Notably, I fit almost all of these categories to a tee.  But my agency forgot to offer to help me, or any of us, and wait till you hear about the price they paid for that!   Anyway, it was very strange writing about all of this.  I can see now: I wanted a hug.
63. One month too late, they did schedule some lame debriefing meeting, the kind we were providing to everyone else around the city.  It was led by a woman that kept saying “I don’t know” and looked like she was about to cry.
64. There were two camps of people in the office:  First, people losing their minds – showing up late, loudly asking what the hell they were doing there, etc.  Second, people who were super excited because the agency was finally getting lots of attention and money! Sigh. Set this please blocks away from Ground Zero, and you will feel the ickiness more.
65. I pretended not to be one of the first type of person, but some people thought I was, because I asked for a transfer to the Brooklyn office, because I started wheezing a lot from the air.  I have had terrible allergies and bronchitis my whole life.  It got worse when I moved to New York anyway and much worse after 9/11.
66. I didn’t even trust myself that I was having an honest physical reaction to something external because I was also in a fear state.  But if I was wheezing all of the time, it would’ve made sense, because my allergist said the line was “out the door” and laughed when I asked if I was having a normal reaction.
67. So I worked in a remote office in Brooklyn for two months and felt guilty about it all of the time. I could’ve just worked from home.  I needed a hug though, so any people were better than no people.
68. One day, that winter, I wanted to fool myself into thinking that life was normal.  I took a long walk from Brooklyn across the bridge up to midtown, like I would’ve done before 9-11.  Walking in the city was my thing!  The entire trip was terrifying.  There were still police in the street, closed-down stores, very few pedestrians, and the horrible sweet smell of death that made me wheeze.
69. That night, I got to Grand Central Station and saw some kind of duffel bag unattended in the street.  I actually approached the police about it.  They thanked me.  I recollect this, and it reminds me of what a different world order I was experiencing.
70. Things get better by force of will, or so it seems: In January 2002, I consciously decided to apply “fake it until you make it” and go back to the offices and normalize.  Anyway, my boss suggested that I return to the offices downtown because they 1) stopped burning the buildings; and 2) the EPA was claiming that the air was clean.
71. They lied!  They lied!  The EPA lied about the air quality!!
72. Learning this a few years later, when I learned that rescue workers were getting lung cancer, moved me into the category of the 911 truth movement conspiracy theorists.  They lied about a pile of shit, sorry.
73. I worked hard again and pretended not to be wheezing or scared – to myself and others. Mommy, I mean my boss, wasn’t around much supervising me, so I became more “self-directed” to please her.  In February, she said, “You’re hitting your stride.” 
74. I got through a pretty good spring and summer, in 2002.  Downtown returned to “normalcy.” So long as you maintained a few blocks from Ground Zero, you would hardly know it had happened, but for the smell that sometimes persisted depending on the wind.
75. I did pretty well, so long as I just kept ignoring what was happening to my body.  
76. The rash, which feels like another story altogether: The rash started in sensitive areas – skin near my elbows and ankles. Then personal areas.
77. For the summer, the rash wasn’t yet on my face or neck, so nobody had to know.  I saw an allergist, who put me on daily pills and breathing things.  They didn’t really work.
78. Then ragweed season hit in late August 2002, and the rash spread.  I saw another allergist who put me on a strict diet (eggs and pork only) and wouldn’t let me use any soap products and gave me allergy shots which caused the rash to spread to every single part of my body – into the crevices between fingers, face and neck, etc.
79. In time for the one-year anniversary of 9/11, my body was finally manifesting what my brain was feeling the year before.  Remember, I had secretly hoped for an outward manifestation.  Yay, irony.  Good for stories, terrible for life.
80.  “What happened to your face?” the tactless German lady at the health food store across the street from my building asked me.  So I stopped going there too.
81.  “You could wash your hair once,” my mother said to me, thoughtfully advising me to forgo medical advice for beauty.
82. The doctor gave me courses of steroids, which worked temporarily, but ultimately made me worse.  Steroids = bad.  Western medicine = makes you sicker.
83. One night at improv, I showed my coach the rash and cried.  She recommended I take time off.  People in comedy thought I was weird (part 2).
84. Not everyone in my life believed I had an environmentally-caused rash.  That felt great!  You know, people asking me if it was in my head.  Yep.  But then the health studies started coming out, and rates of all kinds of disease including asthma and eczema had been shown to increase in the area. Ah, the sweet vindication of long-term health studies. But I learned that people say stupid stuff about other people’s illnesses.  Giant whatever.
85. Redemption, Miami-style: Mom and dad really did come through for me. Long story short (six months long): My allergist was hopeless; I researched places to live with fewer allergies; I took a trip to California beaches where I felt instant relief.  I traveled a bit and settled in Miami where mom and dad were moving in their retirement.  They helped me out tremendously.  After a few months in Miami, I rebuilt my strength and health. 
86. Miami was a great place to forget about 9-11.  The air is always clean. Life is peaceful and fun and thoughtless. Work always starts late and gets out early.
87. There’s always enough tequila around in Miami to avoid retraumatization by hurricanes.
88. Every so often, I would have an attack of the nerves and insecurity.  I found relief by staying up all night reading the 911Truth.org website. Conspiracy theories = relaxation technique.
89. I had trouble still working in offices for years.  I felt claustrophobic and unhealthy.  I became an independent consultant.  That was a good move, anyway, but it was also emotional survival.
90. Epilogue – heroes are losers: Hey guess what happened to everyone else at that job? They all lost it!  Good work, charity that helps survivors of violent attacks!
91. My coworkers in the Planning and Research Department: The young woman with a history of panic attacks smoked excessive pot, broke up with her boyfriend, and moved upstate.  The tough woman who had lost her mother as a child was let go for being too argumentative at work and hasn’t been able to hold a steady job since.
92. There was also some brain cancer in that office after 9-11. I said “some.”
93. And brave Elizabeth!  The de facto citywide leader of the 9-11 social service response… the great and heroic boss that I’d always admired… who always seemed, if not perfect, at least so strong and true… Hey this happened to her:
94. My old friend from work called me: “Did you hear about Elizabeth?  She’s being stalked by someone.  He’s writing violent letters and sending them to work and to her parents ‘house.  She requires full-time police protection!” Me: “Weird.” And: “Good thing she works at that agency, where she helped create the first citywide response to the crime of stalking.”
95. A few weeks later, she called again: “Hey, it turns out Elizabeth was writing those letters herself!  She was arrested for fraud.”
96.  (!!!!!)
97. Does anyone know a better example of the old expression: “a cry for help”?
98. We began to wonder about all the legends around Elizabeth.  Was there really ever cancer? That heart condition she said she’d had?  Was she always subconsciously channeling her emotional need for a hug into saving other people?
99. I felt so sad for her. I also felt relieved!  That person she represented – the A+ worker, who has it all together, who responds to crisis in the perfect, strong way – does not exist! 
100. I haven’t looked up to anyone since. At least not anyone in an office setting.