Be Brave Project, Day 33: A Busy Day for Liquor Stores

It's impossible not to add to the 9/11 media onslaught: Last year the anniversary seemed to glide ghostlike by me, I felt only lightly brushed by tatters of fear and nervousness and memory. Twelve months ago I was less than a month sober and consequently a bit stunned; plus, I am fortunate enough not to have known anyone who had died that day. I'm sure people talked about it in the rooms of AA, but I simply do not remember.

This week the anniversary has loomed large, and it's been both interesting and unsurprising to hear the alcoholic's take on the day. One woman, Alice, has commemorated each year by holing up in her apartment and getting drunk while the name roll call has taken place--Alice is dark haired, smoky voiced, and from the outer boroughs, where many of the restaurants' employees and building operators and staff worked. She knows many people who died that morning. This is Alice's first year sober, and she went down to the liquor store on the ground floor of the building last week to talk to the owner, a guy who sold her a lot of booze over the last 15 years. "I quit, Tom. I'm in AA. And I'm scared about next Thursday, so please don't sell me anything." He hugged her, and said he wouldn't ever again, he was happy for her--and that he wanted to quit smoking but couldn't do it. Could she help?

Alice is still scared about this anniversary today, but as she keeps saying, "The people I know wouldn't like the fact that I was commemorating them by taking the day off to drink."

Christine was in the WTC that day. Christine is ash blonde with white skin that's so unwrinkled it's almost egglike; to me she looks more like an Upper East Sider, but she attends West Side meetings so I give her the benefit of the doubt. She was shaking as she spoke at the Women's meeting yesterday, she was shaking with rage. "All of my security in life was taken that day. I'd worked so hard to put it together, and in one day it was gone." She fought her way back uptown and, of course, into a liquor store. She bought a bottle of vodka and, with grim humor, a bottle of champagne. The clerk told her that she was mixing drinks, but she shoved them in her bag and went home to her high-rise studio, where she could see plumes of smoke rising from the south.

That night is when Christine turned to alcohol full-time. For the next three years she went back to that liquor store daily (unusual, because lushes usually will walk miles to get to a store where people don't know them). She drank, literally, until her bones began to soften and her teeth to loosen. She was attacking her own infrastructure.

Right now it is 9.17 in the morning, on another sunny early-autumn day. Wall Street is already reeling, Columbia University is on a deceptively casual alert, mid-town is as usual bluffing it out and pretending things are business as usual--but every siren is a moment for pause. Inwood's retreating to a safe pretense of suburbia, Dumbo's hipsters, who were still in high-school, look across the East River at a city that--to them--looks normal.