De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

My schedule report is as late as my expense report. I didn’t really feel anything, until I came back from this job, and started to describe the experience to friends and family. Whenever there is any major news event, my Nana calls me to check in, half out of curiosity about what I know, and half out of concern that I’ll have the same reaction I had when I learned about the London subway terrorist attack. Thirty minutes later, I had a full blown panic attack in the NYC subway as I was going home from work. I ended up in Blackburg, VA, a day after the tragedy. My perspective of the event is pretty limited, but it was a part of my life’s experience that I wanted to record.

Monday 4/16/07 8:52a.m.: Sipping my morning coffee on my day off. It is one of those perks of my odd schedule. While most people are struggling to start their week, again, I sometimes get weekdays off, to do what I please. Then the phone rings. Supreme Scheduler wants to know where I am. I tell him that the Switcher of Switzerland has given me the next two days off. He groans. Tells me that it was a mistake. He needs me come into the studio right away. My call time is 10 a.m. I have an hour and 8 minutes to shower and take the 40 minute train ride into the city.

Monday 4/16/07, 10 am: Walk through the front door of the Broadcast Center at 9:56. Smugly think about what a dedicated employee I am, and pray that this will continue to provide job security in a very insecure field.

Monday 4/16/07, Noon: Finish my morning shift. Zen Budda arrives to relieve me of my duties. Go to Supreme Scheduler’s office to confirm my work schedule for the next week and to fill out my expense report. It seems like a fairly average news day: Pet food recall, Attorney General in the dog-house, a tragic shooting at a college campus, 8 people reported dead. I leave the Broadcast Center with several hours of daylight left to enjoy. Get on the train back to Brooklyn.

Monday 4/16/07, 12:45pm: My cell phone rings as the subway goes over the Manhattan Bridge. The Switcher of Switzerland says,”We need you to come back to do the Evening News. Zen Budda had to leave to catch a chartered flight to Blacksburg, VA.” When the train arrives at its first stop in Brooklyn, I dutifully cross over to the uptown platform and catch the next train back.

Monday 4/16/07, 2p.m.: I’m sitting back at my desk in the studio as Special Events; a group of writers, producers, and anchors, who go on air when unexpected news events occur, continue live, on air with their report. Over thirty students and professors are reported dead and several others are critically injured.

“This is the deadliest mass shooting in US history” the anchor reads the teleprompter on the camera. I look down at Zen Budda’s empty open backpack, underneath our desk. His emergency overnight bag is gone as well. He didn’t even have time to go home and say goodbye to his wife before he left.

Monday 4/16/07, 6:30pm. Evening news has special one hour show, that is co-anchored in New York and Virginia. I pull a twelve hour shift. I go home and prepare to turn around the next day to do it again.

Tuesday 4/16/07 11 am. Back at my desk when the Supreme Scheduler walks over, (does not call me on my cell), and asks me to fly down to Blacksburg. I leave from the studio for a flight to Virginia.

Tuesday 4/16/07 9p.m: My flight to Roanoke was delayed by two hours. I’m sharing it with a dozen local residents, two freelance photographers, and a German news crew. We stand impatiently at the gate waiting for those magic words, “We will begin boarding…”

To my right, a slight man stands with a modest carry on bag. I look down at the tag and notice it says,”Happy Tours…Seoul South Korea.” I over hear his cell phone conversation. He is talking to someone on his cell about not knowing how to get to Blacksburg from Roanoke. At this point, if you are trying to get to Blacksburg, it can only be for one reason. I think, could this be the shooter’s father, cousin, uncle? My imagination, can only assume. I know I am probably wrong. Maybe he’s a family member of a victim. We are all in the middle of the story right now.

The two hour flight lands. The Red Cross has set up triage of tables to help parents and friends navigate from the airport to Blacksburg.

Tuesday 4/16/07 almost midnight until Friday 4/19/07: I am driving in a rented car in the middle of the night in a state I’ve never been too. I’m exhausted, but this is the job I love and signed up to do. I listen to the radio stations, every song is dedicated to the students and victims of the shooting. The Christian Evangelists have already gotten into the action, and are soliciting G_d’s comfort on both television and radio. I get barely two hours of sleep before I drive to Blacksburg.

I will put in over thirty hours of overtime, and I will question my presence at the center of someone else’s grief and pain. I will watch one six foot, well respected anchor admit off camera that he broke down the night before in his hotel room because of this story.

I will avoid the students and the memorials. I will stay in my small “media city” of satellite trucks and tents to maintain my professional distance. I will without emotion listen to a friend who can’t believe that we the media are all wrapped up in this story while hundreds of people died in Iraq each day. I will think apples and oranges…someone else’s grief can’t be measured or compared with another person’s.

I will not have any emotion or reaction, even as I watch the President of Virginia Tech nearly fall off the stage after he announces that NBC was sent that now infamous tape . I will pick up the phone and warn the crew that the day will be just a little longer, because this is just my job.

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That familiar pain is pressing down on the middle of my chest. I opened my yahoo account to empty it of spam. I use this account whenever I have to put in an email address on a web page. It’s an oldie. I kept it out of sentimentality because the name referenced my first real job in New York. My first stab at independence and self reliance. Almost 100 spam messages and newsletters had filled it.

I started deleting, by selecting all messages on a page, and hitting delete. I got to the third page, when I saw it, a personal email message from someone I had been out of contact with for a few years, a business acquaintance, and a good listener. The email was short. “I was asked to forward this message to you. They’re looking for you. She’s passed away.”

For nearly ten years I’ve lived on my own terms…pass or fail…falling up…making mistakes, but doing so without the glare, insinuations, and back-handed half truths. For this precious time, the threads of shame have slowly unraveled themselves as I have been able make my own identity and forge my life, without this other piece overshadowing any accomplishments. I had fought the fight, even though it played on my self hatred and shame, and found small ways to love myself again. I lost many times, but ultimately, here in New York, I found a way to be…almost free.

There was a family story told to me by my grandparents. They had a very smart border collie who use to follow my aunt as she ate her apple and would grab secret bites from it, whenever she lowered her hand. My aunt would continue to walk around oblivious that someone else was eating her apple. Her head was in the clouds, “dans la lune”. The moral of the story was not how smart their dog was, but how many brain cells they thought my aunt, their daughter, lacked.  The person who died was not my aunt, but was someone who used stories like these as social leverage.  I was not proud of this story, but it has to be told, because it reflects a part of my history, a door I’ve been trying to shut ever since.

Unfortunately, when I think of small towns, I think of unfair judgements, and I think of her. I think that when certain people decide that you are “one thing”, they close their minds and their ears and they cease to love you unconditionally, that you can twist and turn in your own self hatred, or you break away and find it for yourself. It has been hard to separate myself, from the identity that was put upon me. I never thought I’d feel released from that self doubt.

But when I heard about her death, my own reaction surprised me. I wasn’t relieved. I felt pain and shock. The pressing anxiety in the middle of my chest is ever present. I was nearly sleepless last night. My dreams were fleeting pictures, not totally immersed REM visions, with depth and emotional, truthful subconscious meaning. I don’t know what lies ahead or how many questions will still remain unanswered. She was someone’s mother, even if she wasn’t perfect. Neither or us were.

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Here is a glimpse of my glitzy Saturday night in New York City. There was a bottle of wine, a couple of rented movies, a box of moist towelettes, and thirty pairs of shoes of all varieties and persuasions, strewn across my living room floor. La vérité was far less scandalous than you think.

I was actually engaged in some rather neurotic spring cleaning. I wiped down each pair, removing dirt and scuff marks, and I intend to give them away to a local women’s shelter. It eases my conscience to know that I’m giving back perfectly good shoes to someone who might really need them.

And I feel slightly less guilty for purchasing, not one, not two, but five pairs of high priced shoes, with well bred names, like Tod, Salvador, and Jimmy.

The real truth is I don’t wear them. I have outgrown these old friends, and they’re ready to move on someone who’ll appreciate them more. Why is our relationship unsalvageable? Most of them were bought on the cheap, and give me enormous, passive-aggressive blisters. The kind than turn pinkie toes red, with puffy skin bumps ready to burst. I have spent years literally bleeding for cheap fashion. I blamed it on wide feet inherited from my father. The time had come. Cheap shoes and I simple needed to part ways.

I hit a low point three weeks ago while I laid in my podiatrist’s office, and had four needles of anesthesia shot into my big toe so she could pry off, a rather grotesque, infected ingrown toenail. Between my expletives and the contorted expressions on my face, I finally had a revelation that allowed me great serenity. I can now skip the lame justification that purchasing expensive shoes is a rite of passage into womanhood, and go straight to the medical excuse of, “But my doctor said I need them.”

The shoes listed below, are like souvenirs of another lifetime, a different person, someone who wasn’t quite a woman, but wasn’t a girl either. I had a delayed adolescents. I called being in my twenties. Here are a few of the good, the bad, and the really ugly:

Plastic jellies: Yes, they still make these relics from the 80’s, and I found a pair in the dollar store in Jersey City.

Black thongs with fake rhinestones and a pair of beige flats with a little brown flowers on the end of a Velcro strap: Oh I was so cute! That’s the problem. I was too cute for any guy to ask me out without feeling like he was molesting his little sister.

Indian slippers made from sequins: Bought from a street vendor. Feel like I should be clicking my heels together and chanting, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. A la the film “The Wizard of Oz”

Fuchsia pumps: I was in a deep deep depression when I bought these. Fuchsia is a happy color right? I thought they would inspire me to travel to tropical locations and do the tango with mysterious strangers. The truth is I felt guilted into the purchase by a pushy salesgirl. I took out my resentment on the shoes, and never worn them.

Classic black pumps, with weird triangular-heel and ankle strap: Purchased on my lunch break six years ago when I was an assistant buyer, from my boss’s favorite clothing retailer. I thought I’d impress her with my good taste. I was laid off along with 100 other employees, six weeks later. I told you I’ve bled for fashion.

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