I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places Read online

  And dear reader, it never happened again.

  In fact, it hasn’t happened in the entire time, since the day of her funeral.

  Recall that since, we’ve experienced very hard rains, very hard snows, and sometimes a little of both.

  At the same time.

  In other words, there’s been major weather.

  But my entrance hall never flooded again.

  Not even a drop.

  And so I think it’s a sign.

  Mother Mary wasn’t the type to send butterflies, rainbows, or hoot owls.

  Hurricane Mary sent a hurricane.

  And so we wouldn’t miss it, she put it in front of the front door.

  That was Mother Mary.

  She was a force of nature.

  And she still is, eternally.

  Now I’m a believer.

  Love you, Mom.

  You owe me a rug.

  Incident Report

  Francesca

  This book is meant to be fun, but it’s also about life’s real moments, light and dark. This summer included one of the darkest experiences of my life, when I was assaulted and mugged. The events of that night and their repercussions were difficult to process. I’ve learned that trauma has to metabolize and be absorbed into your emotional system. My recovery has been full of contradictions, revealed in stages through time and self-reflection. So, I think the only accurate way for me to write about it is in pieces.

  This piece is about what happened that night, the way I see it when my mind replays it, and it replays it often, with some moments in great sensory detail and other moments of infuriating blackness. If you are upset by violent crime, you may wish to skip this chapter.

  After something bad happens, it’s deceptively easy to retrace your decisions and wish you had made them differently. I wish I had left the party early with my friend who had a cold. I wish I had taken a cab home like I had intended. I wish I had asked one of the two guy friends I had ridden the subway with to walk me to my door instead of only accompanying me to my stop. I wish I had turned down any other street but that one.

  But none of these choices were mistakes or imprudent in their own right. They were just the choices I made before someone hurt me.

  I remember the rain splashing on the top steps of the Christopher Street subway stop as I emerged a little after 1 A.M., and wishing I had insisted my friends share a cab because this rain would ruin my new leather moccasins.

  I hurried down the sidewalk on the balls of my feet, jumping over puddles and the rivulets of rainwater flowing toward the gutters.

  I remember seeing a rat but not startling, and thinking that was brave of me.

  I am not a girl easily frightened.

  I had no idea that was to be tested at the very next turn.

  I took a left down the street that I live on, two short blocks from home. I had my umbrella open, a thin shield of pink blocking my peripheral vision. But maybe I wouldn’t have seen him anyway.

  I felt a body slam into mine and an arm pull across my neck. We collapsed together on the ground, my back flat on the sidewalk. Somehow my head didn’t hit the concrete, I guess because he was choking me from behind.

  There was no thought but the primal knowledge that I had to get off my back. I used all my adrenaline to somehow break from his grasp and hurl myself forward onto my hands and knees.

  I started to crawl away, the sensation of freedom gave me hope, but he was back on me before I had crossed a sidewalk square. He swarmed me with his body, I felt his arms all over me like an octopus, and I knelt in the tightest ball to protect myself, all the while screaming as loud as I possibly could.

  I surprised myself with my own volume. I told myself I only had to resist long enough before someone came to help. But as the seconds ticked by in my brain, I realized waiting was not a survival strategy.

  He got hold of me and tried to pull me toward the street. Feeling my bare knees scraping even an inch shot panic through me—I could not let him move me anywhere, least of all toward a car.

  I threw my arms out onto the sidewalk, straining at one point for the small fence around a tree but unable to reach it, instead digging my fingernails into the sidewalk. I believed my life depended on my ability to stay exactly where I was.

  He stopped pulling me, and again, I experienced a split second of relief—another tiny victory my spirit clung to so that I would keep fighting—before he kicked me under my chin. The impact under my jaw came as a shock. The shock made me slow to interpret the next sensation: a chain pulling taut around my waist.

  My purse.

  My purse?

  My purse!

  True elation as I realized I had a bargaining chip, something my attacker wanted that I was actually willing to give.

  But it was a cross-body bag, now somewhere near the ground, tangled around my limbs, not readily coming loose when he yanked on it. He must have thought I was resisting, or maybe he was driven mad with frustration, or anger, or fear. I can only speculate as to his emotion that made the violence escalate.

  Because before I could do anything, he started hitting me, hard. I think with his fists, I’m not sure. But he hit me again and again and again. Pummeled is a better word. On my head and neck and shoulders, but the most on my head. My skull rattled with every blow, whipping my cervical spine, crushing my tongue between my teeth.

  Another clear thought materialized in my battered brain:

  You have to figure out a way to make this stop fast, or one of these blows will cave your head in.

  I had been protecting my face with my hands as much as I could, but I realized that finding the bag was my only chance for getting rid of him. I lowered my hands to feel for the purse chain. This was when he got his best shots in.

  He hit me square on my right brow. Light exploded behind my squeezed-shut eyes.

  Keep feeling for it.

  Again, under my right eye, snapping my head to the left.

  I felt the cool metal, closed my fist around it, but now I had to lift it over my head.

  Again, in the center of my forehead, hard enough to send my head ricocheting backwards on my neck, hopefully hard enough to hurt his hand.

  But I’d done it. I got the chain over my head and shoved the bag in his direction.

  He bolted one way and I scrambled to my feet and ran the other. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder until I was halfway down the street. By the time I turned around, he had disappeared.

  My glasses were long gone, and the world was a bleary mess of dark shadows and orange streetlight. The relief of the attack being over hadn’t hit me yet. Instead, the fear that I’d suppressed in order to survive came crashing over me at once.

  I screamed a final time and the sound echoed down the street, ringing in my ears as if it weren’t coming from my own body.

  She sounded terrified and fierce.

  Laugh at My Pain

  Francesca

  They say that tragedy plus time equals comedy. But the night I was assaulted, I found, through virtue of shock, divine intervention, or head trauma, I was able to appreciate the humor in a terrible situation while it was happening.

  Well, not when the assault itself was happening. That wasn’t that funny. So let’s skip that part:

  [Intermission music while a bad thing happens.]

  Fast-forward to my attacker running away with my bag and me screaming loud enough to make people living in thirteen-million-dollar town houses feel like they need more gentrification.

  A group of about six young people heard me and came running to help. A blond woman led the pack. “We heard you, are you okay? What happened?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said.

  In retrospect, a pretty inaccurate self-assessment. But when you think you might die, and then you end up not dead, anything short of a gunshot wound is “fine.”

  I told them what happened, that I needed help finding my glasses, and I needed someone to call the police. They were incredibly
helpful, somehow finding my glasses in the wet leaves. I put them on my face.

  The world looked dirty, squashed, and very crooked, but that seemed appropriate.

  “My friend is calling 911 now. Do you want to use my phone to call someone else, maybe your mom?”

  “No way,” I answered. “I have to calm down first.”

  While we waited, the blond girl introduced herself, which was so nice and normal, it actually did calm me down. Then she asked something very sweet: “Can I give you a hug?”

  Boy, did I need one. The girl’s name was Natalie. I only wish I had gotten her last name so I could find her and thank her.

  In the next minute, the police car pulled up. The officer rolled down the window and shouted, “Get in the back, we’re going to look for him!”

  I hopped in like an obedient dog.

  I had never been in the back of a police vehicle before. My first thought, for real?

  There’s not a lot of knee room.

  I’m only five-five, and I winced as my bloody knees knocked the partition on every turn.

  Seriously, tall people, rethink a life of crime. It’s very uncomfortable.

  One of the officers turned around and said, “Now I know this is difficult, but I want you to look out the window and see if you see the guy who did this.”

  I tried to look out the window, but it was streaked with rainwater. I pushed the button to lower it, and nothing happened. I jammed my finger in it a few more times.

  Oh, duh, I thought. The back windows are locked.

  To keep those criminal children from hurting themselves.

  Rainwater aside, the main issue with finding the perp was that I hardly caught a glimpse of him. He came up behind me, knocked off my glasses, and pummeled my face in, so you know, not ideal eyewitness conditions. I told the officer as much.

  “Just look for a guy holding your purse!”

  My brain provided the amusing image of a thug strolling along with my fashionable tan handbag.

  Reality has no such sense of humor.

  After several fruitless tours around the surrounding blocks, we circled back to the street where it happened, so that I could try to give them an exact address of the crime site. And then I realized …

  This happened right outside of the Sex and the City house—the brownstone HBO used for exteriors of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment!

  As a fan, my emotions were mixed.

  When Carrie was mugged in Season 3 of SATC, the criminal stole her shoes.

  I was wearing cute shoes, and he didn’t even notice.

  We gave up on finding the guy and they drove me to the police station to “take my statement” or do whatever official crime-victim stuff they skip over on Law & Order.

  As soon as we walked in, one of the policemen with me, Officer Green, piped up. “You know, you should cancel your credit cards.”

  I was shivering, bleeding, and soaking wet—canceling my cards was low on my priority list. “Um, okay, but I don’t have my phone or my account number or anything.”

  He asked me what bank it was with and I told him.

  Meanwhile, the other, Officer Moon, gave me a form to record everything that was stolen and its value. My hand was shaking so badly, I could barely hold the pen. He gently walked me through each question, holding a finger down on the line like an elementary-school teacher.

  On the first item, I wrote “purse.” Next to that it read, “Model,” which my concussed brain failed to compute. I looked helplessly at Officer Moon.

  “Brand,” Moon translated.

  I nodded and wrote “Gucci.”

  New item: Wallet. Model: Gucci.

  Officer Green peered over my shoulder. “You’re a Gucci girl, eh?”

  “Yes, they were gifts,” I said. “Up until tonight, my life was very good.”

  He chuckled and handed me his own cell phone. “I got your bank on the line. You just have to tell ’em your social and they can cancel the card.”

  I thought it was so nice of him to call them for me. I hate customer-service trees almost as much as I hate getting mugged. I thanked him and gave the info to the representative.

  Then I was introduced to two detectives who asked all the same questions the police had. The detectives were perfectly nice and professional, but the process of being asked the same questions several times, to someone who isn’t used to it like me, inadvertently communicated skepticism. As a result, I felt I wasn’t coming off as believable, so I became very concerned with accuracy.

  For instance, when they asked me how many times I was hit, I had to clarify: “Well, I was kicked once for sure, and I think the rest were with his fists…”

  “Yes, you were punched,” the detective interrupted. I didn’t know how he was so sure of that, but he continued. “How many times?”

  “Multiple times,” I answered, sounding like a nervous witness on the stand.

  “Can you give me a number?”

  “Between five and eight times? No more than ten.”

  Looking back, I have no idea why I was so intent on making sure that I didn’t overstate things. It was like I wanted to be fair to my attacker.

  It was the least I could do if I was going to get him in trouble.

  The detective finished his notes and added, “Oh, and one more thing. Don’t cancel those credit cards for a couple days. They’re usually where we get the best leads.”

  I looked at Officer Green, like, dude? He avoided my gaze.

  Finally the EMTs arrived. I was helped into the back of an ambulance where a paramedic took inventory of my injuries.

  “Abrasions on legs, arms, foot, laceration on chin, contusions on neck and face. And you got choked, kicked”—he glanced at me—“punched.”

  “He kicked me once, I think, and then punched? I’m not really sure, it was hard to tell.”

  He glanced up at me. “Yeah, punched.”

  Why does everyone keep saying that?

  Then he spoke with less certainty. “And, um, were you … did the guy try anything, you know, um…?” He made a face.

  “You mean, was I sexually assaulted?”

  He nodded, looking embarrassed.

  I didn’t realize EMTs were so delicate. “No, nothing untoward.”

  He laughed in relief. “Good, because that’s a whole ’nother kit.”

  Despite my judging him just a little bit for not being able to say the word “rape” in a professional capacity, we became buds. He told me I should walk with a dog for protection. I told him I had one, but he could only kill you with cuteness. He said he had two Rhodesian ridgebacks, and I impressed him with my Westminster-nerd knowledge of the breed.

  “So can you just clean me up, and I can go home?” I asked.

  “You got clocked. Head trauma means you should really go to the hospital.”

  I was more scared of going to the ER than of having a concussion. In seven years living here, I had carefully and intentionally avoided needing emergency care. I always imagined a New York City emergency room on a Saturday night would be a horror show of gunshot victims, cyclists struck by taxicabs, and mugged joggers.

  It occurred to me that, basically, I was afraid of seeing other crime victims.

  But I knew my mom would kill me if she heard I refused medical treatment, so I took my first ever ambulance ride to the urgent-care center three minutes away.

  My cop friends met me at the hospital. I say friends genuinely, because when you’re so supremely disconnected as I felt that night, any familiar face is your new best friend. I was happy to see them.

  “Hey, what are you guys doing here?”

  “If we leave you, technically the call is over, and we could get sent somewhere else. We want to make sure we can drive you home when you’re done here.”

  I was so touched, it was the closest I came to crying all night.

  They continued to go above and beyond the call of kindness. Officer Moon let me use his personal phone to call my mom.

/>   When her groggy voice came on the line, I spoke with robotic calm: “Hello, Mom, it’s me. First off, I’m fine, and you know that I’m fine, because I’m calling you. Unfortunately, I’m calling you from the hospital, but remember, I’m fine. But I was mugged, not with a weapon, and now I’m here with police and hospital staff and I’m fine. Really.”

  “I’m getting up and getting in the car,” she said.

  “What, why? That’s crazy, it’s too late. Drive up tomorrow.”

  That I thought for one minute that my mom would stay in bed after this call proves I was definitely concussed.

  She later told me I sounded like a lawyer.

  Before I settled in my room, I had to use the ladies’ room. The bathroom mirror was the first time I got a look at myself.

  I was stunned.

  My head was misshapen. Swelling had puffed out my entire jawline and one eye. The length of my neck was purple, and the bottom of my chin split. My face was covered in cartoonish welts—fat, red knuckle marks across my forehead, temple, cheek, and mouth.

  I should’ve been horrified, but I was actually pretty impressed with myself. I looked badass.

  And no wonder everyone knew I had been punched. Above my eyebrow, there was a fist print so clearly embossed, if the punk had been wearing a class ring, you could’ve read the year.

  Then again, maybe if he’d had a class ring, he wouldn’t be beating the crap out of women to steal their purses.

  The officers kept me company in my curtained-off “room.” Eventually the doctor cleaned up my wounds and bandaged the deep ones. She smeared bacitracin antibiotic ointment all over my face, like a boxing coach smearing Vaseline. She complimented my shoes, which only had a little blood on them.

  I thought she was awesome.

  But while my cop bros thought my lack of tears was superchill, the hospital staff thought I was in complete denial. My doctor didn’t want to discharge me from the ER for my emotional well-being.

  “Don’t you have anyone to call?”

  I tried to explain that I’m not a weird loner, I just don’t have anyone’s number memorized except my mom’s.

  The doctor urged me to sleep there the rest of the night until someone could come pick me up.

  The ER wasn’t quite as bad as I thought, but it was not exactly conducive to sleep. A sheet of fabric separated me from a chorus of unsettling human groans and mechanical beeps. Also, the entire back of my dress was soaked and gritty from grappling on the wet ground. Even my underwear was wet.