I moved to New York and lived in a minority low-income housing project on Tenth and C. My roommate, Zulma, was Puerto Rican and had raised her family in the apartment. Now she rented out her extra bedrooms. She liked to drink too.
I hostessed at a place in Midtown called La Fondue and then I landed (by meeting a drunk man in a bar called King Tut's Wawa Hut) a teaching job at Hunter College. I was an adjunct. I didn't have the requisite degrees and only a year of experience (I had been a teaching assistant in Houston), but the hiring committee was desperate, and they recognized some names: Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver. During the interview, I took fifteen minutes to remember the word thesis, as in thesis sentence-the basis of all composition courses. When the chair called and Zulma handed me the phone, I had never been more surprised by what I took then to be the fortuitousness of drinking.
And my students there became the people who kept me alive. I could get lost in their lives. They were immigrants, ethnic minorities, city kids, returning women, full-time workers, former addicts, and single parents. Their stories filled my days, and their troubles in assimilating preoccupied my evening hours. I fit in with them in a way I had never fit in since before the rape. My own story paled when I compared it with theirs. Walking over the bodies of their countrymen to escape Cambodia. Watching a brother be stood against a wall and shot. Raising a handicapped child alone on waitressing tips. And then there were the rapes. The girl who had been adopted for the purpose by her father, who was a priest. The girl who was raped in the apartment of another student, and whom the police didn't believe. The girl who was a militant and tattooed dyke but who broke down in my office when she told me about her gang rape.
They told me their stories, I like to think, because I never questioned them, believed them utterly. They also thought I was a clean slate. I was obviously a middle-class white girl. A college teacher. Nothing had ever happened to me. I was too hungry for comfort to care that it was a one-way relationship. Like a bartender, I listened, and like a bartender, my position kept me at a safe remove. I was the ear, and the tragic stories of my students' lives medicated me. But I began to build up a resistance to them. By the time I wrote the article for The New York Times, I was ready to talk. Some students read it. They were shocked. Then came Oprah. Many more saw me there, holding forth, their English teacher, on her own rape. For the next few weeks I ran into former students on the street. "Wow," they would confide, "I never thought you, I mean, you know." And I did know. Because I was white. Because I grew up in the suburbs. Because without a name attached to my story, it remains fiction, not fact.
I loved heroin. Drinking had drawbacks-namely, the volume needed to reach oblivion-and I didn't like the taste or the history-my mother had done that. Cocaine made me sick. I went into paralytic cramps once on the floor of a club called the Pyramid. Rastas and white girls danced around my curled-up body. I did it a few more times just to double-check. Ecstasy and mushrooms and acid trips? Who wanted to enhance a mood? My goal was to destroy it.
I found myself in odd places. Vacant lots, alleyways, and Athens. One night I came to from a nod in a tiny cafe in Greece. In front of me, on a dish, were small silvery fish. 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."