The Moth (41 page)

“Okay, great.”

We start walking. And we get to this corner with lots of lights, and the roads are getting wider and wider, and there are more cars. I see lots of stores—you know, Laundromats and dollar stores and EmergiCenters.

And then we cross over US-1, and she leads me to some place, and I think,
No.

But, yes.

Carl’s Efficiency Apartments. This girl lives here.

And it’s horrible, and it’s lit up so bright, just to illuminate the horribleness of it. It’s the kind of place where you drive your car right up, and the door’s right there, and there are fifty million cigarette butts outside. There are doors one through seven, and you just know behind every single door there’s some horrible misery going on. There’s someone crying or drunk or lonely or cruel.

And I think,
Oh, God, she lives here. How awful.

We go to the door—door number four—and she very, very quietly keys in. As soon as the door opens, I hear the blare of a television, and on the blue light of the television, the smoke of a hundred cigarettes in that little crack of light.

I hear a man, and he says, “Where were you?”

She says, “Never mind. I’m back.”

And he says, “You all right?”

And she says, “Yeah, I’m all right.”

And then she turns to me and says, “You want a beer?”

And he says, “Who the
fuck
is that?”

And she pulls me over, and he sees me, and he says, “Oh. Hey.”

I’m not a threat.

Just then he takes a drag off of his cigarette, a very hard drag—the kind that makes the end of it really heat up hot, hot, hot. And long. And it’s a little scary. And I follow the cigarette down, ’cause I’m afraid of that head falling off. And I’m surprised when I see, in the crook of his arm, a little boy, sleeping. A toddler. And I think, [
gasps
].

And just then the girl reaches under the bed and takes out a carton, and she taps out the last pack of cigarettes in there. On the way up, she kisses the little boy, and then she kisses the man.

And the man says again, “You all right?”

And she says, “Yeah. I’m just gonna go out and smoke with her.”

And so we go outside and sit amongst the cigarette butts and smoke.

I say, “Wow. That’s your little boy?”

“Yeah, isn’t he beautiful?”

“Yeah, he
is
. He is beautiful.”

“He’s my light. He keeps me going,” she says.

We finish our cigarettes. She finishes her beer. I don’t have a beer, ’cause I can’t go home with beer on my breath. She goes
inside to get the keys. She takes too long in there getting the keys, and I think something must be wrong.

She comes out, and she says, “Look, I’m really sorry but, um, like, we don’t have any gas in the car. It’s already on ‘E,’ and he needs to get to work in the morning. I’m gonna walk to work as it is. So what I did was, here, look, I drew out this map for you. You’re like a mile and a half from home. If you walk three streets over, you’ll be back on that pretty street, and you just take that and you’ll be fine.”

She also has wrapped up, in toilet paper, seven cigarettes for me—a third of her pack, I note. And a new pack of matches.

And she tells me, “Good-bye,” and “that was great to meet you,” and “how lucky,” and “that was fun,” and, you know, “let’s be friends.”

And I say, “Yeah, okay.” And I walk away.

But I kinda know we’re not gonna be friends. I might not ever see her again. And I kinda know I don’t think she’s ever gonna be a vet. And I cross, and I walk away.

And maybe this would have seemed like a visit from my possible future, and scary, but it kinda does the opposite. On the walk home I’m like,
Man, that was really grim over there. And I’m going home now to my nice boyfriend, and he’s gonna be so extra-happy to see me. And we have a one-bedroom apartment. And we have two trees, and there’s a yard. And we have this jar in the kitchen where there’s loose money that we can use for anything. We would never, ever run out of gas. And I don’t have a baby, you know? So I can leave whenever I want
.

I smoked all seven cigarettes on the way home. And people who have never smoked cigarettes just think,
Ick, disgusting and poison.
But unless you’ve had them and held them dear, you
don’t know how great they can be, and what friends and comfort and kinship they can bring.

It took me a long time to quit… that boyfriend. And then to quit smoking. But sometimes I still miss the smoking.

Jenifer Hixson
is a senior producer at The Moth, where she is best known for launching and developing The Moth StorySLAM.

BRIAN FINKELSTEIN

S
o the standard commitment to work at the Humanitarian Suicide Hotline is six months. Most people work six months, and then they leave, quickly. A few make it a year. Nobody really goes beyond a year. I was a volunteer there for four years.

It started when I was twenty-two years old, and I was young, and I believed in things. I thought maybe I could help the world. I was that age.

And so I decided I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but the problem was, I was a twenty-two-year-old freshman at Queens College, which is not a great school, and my GPA was a two point… zero.

And so I was gonna have some problems getting into a master’s program, which is very competitive for clinical psychology, so I needed an internship—something to help me out, some leverage. I decided to volunteer at the Humanitarian Suicide Hotline.

So I show up one Saturday morning at 8
A.M.
, and I walk into this church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And there’s a bunch of people milling about, but I see this guy that’s
clearly in charge. He’s sitting on the desk. He’s sort of an ex-hippie turned a little corporate. He’s got a flannel shirt tucked into khaki pants, you know what I mean? He’s dipping a chamomile tea bag into an NPR cup. I know who this guy is. I get it. He’s a vegan who drives a BMW. I know it.

He tells us his name is Glen. He’s like, “Hey, check it out, all right. My name’s Glen.” And then he thanks us all for coming and says, “Hey, even though we’re in a church, you know, I just want you to know we’re not affiliated with any sort of religion or God, so let me just tell you straight-out, if you’re here for God, or any sort of politics or religion, you should leave now.” And right then, some old dude in the back just goes, “See ya,” and walks out the door.

And then Glen sits down, and even though he’s got this corporate Jewish metrosexual hippie thing going on, he’s also got a little bit of a Louis Gossett, Jr., drill sergeant thing going on, because as soon as he starts the training class, he’s starting to weed people out. People start dropping.

There was this one guy who was sitting in the back of the class drinking a forty of beer. The class, I should remind you, was at 8
A.M.
So he was gone.

There were these two teenage dudes from Queens who every time they talked were like, “Hey, douche bag,” and then they’d high-five. They were gone.

There was a woman who did a mock phone call with Glen, ’cause in the two-week training class he did mock phone calls where he pretended to be callers. And Glen was pretending to be this seventy-year-old dude who was HIV positive and had just found out he had AIDS and was very upset. And he was talking to this potential volunteer, Nancy, who was doing the phone call.

And she said, “Well, I just want you to know that’s very upsetting. I’m very sorry for you, but you did choose this lifestyle, so—”

Gone.

One of the most important things Glen weeded out was people who were there because they were either suicide survivors, meaning they’d lost somebody because of suicide, or because they themselves, the volunteer, had contemplated or tried to commit suicide.

And as Glen would say, “Yeah, check it out. You’re really not a good fit.” Gone.

At the end of two weeks of training, out of fifty-eight people who came to volunteer, there were only four of us left, because Glen was really good. But I will tell you right now, I was better.

Because what Glen didn’t know about me was that about four years before this, I lived in San Diego, California, and I was dating this girl Tracy. Tracy was addicted to meth, and I was addicted to Tracy. So Tracy would try to do the meth, I would try to do her; neither one of us would ever be satisfied. That’s addiction.

One day Tracy slept with my best friend, Baby Face, this guy who looked like Morrissey, ’cause she was into that.

I’d had it. And I bet you Glen didn’t know that I then jumped in my five-speed puke-orange VW Fastback, an awesome car, and I drove up to my dad’s house in Del Mar, California, ’cause my father’s a retired cop, and I went into his garage, and I took his .38. And I bet you Glen has no idea that a .38 doesn’t have one of those clips that you put in. You put the bullets in, then you snap it, and it’s really easy, even if you don’t know how to use guns.

I grabbed a bottle of tequila out of my father’s liquor
cabinet, and I got in my car, and I drove to Torrey Pines Beach. I took the gun, and I drank about a half a bottle of tequila. And a gun like that is really easy, because if you pull the hammer back, it has a hairpin. You can just tap it, and it’s gonna go off.

And I took the gun, and I stuck it in my mouth. And I’ll bet you Glen has no idea how good it feels to stick a loaded gun in your mouth. It feels incredibly good. Things weren’t going good for me, and I’m just pointing it out, just saying it right now in front of all of you—it felt good to have control. To say,
I’m gonna put a gun in my mouth, and I’m gonna have some control over something.

And I sat there, and I was trying to contemplate doing it, and then…

Tequila makes me a little dramatic. And I threw up.

I’m not a good drinker. I want to be. I want to be the guy that drinks a bottle of tequila, but it’s not me. I’m not Bukowski, I’m Dr. Phil. And I threw up all over the gun. And there’s nothing that sort of snaps you out of a suicide impulse more than throwing up on a gun. It really clears your head.

And I took the gun out, and I thought to myself,
Well, at least I know I’m not the type of person that’s gonna pull the trigger
, which is something I had to find out that way. It snapped me out of the suicide, and I felt really good, and I felt this moment of clarity. I wiped the throw up off me, and I got out of my car. I was at Torrey Pines—a beautiful beach—and I went into the water.

It was late at night. Beautiful full moon. And I went in the water, and it was perfect. I had what, for me, was the perfect life moment. I sat there under the full moon, in the water, just feeling really good, the waves sort of washing over me, and I realized that’s what life is. There are these moments of beauty, like
moons and oceans, and then there are moments of horror. And then it’s good again. And then it’s horrible and kicks you in the face. And then it’s good again. And then it’s horrible and a pigsty, because that’s what life is. But then for a moment it’s good. And for me that was enough.

But I bet you Glen didn’t know any of that, because I never told him.

So at the end of two weeks of training class we walk out of the training room, and there’s the hotline room. There are three desks with phones and a couple of plants, and there’s a list of phone numbers hanging on the wall. There’s Glen’s home number in case you need him. There’s poison control, and then there’s 911, in case you forget the number for 911.

And then there’s a sign that hangs on the wall that says the motto of the hotline, which is
SHUT UP AND LISTEN
. Big block letters,
SHUT UP AND LISTEN
. And that is an amazing expression to me. That is exactly why I stayed there for four years. Because after six months, I got my certificate, I was free to leave. But I ended up staying for four years because it made me feel good to work there, for two reasons.

One, listening to people’s problems on the phone, you start to think to yourself,
You know what, I don’t have it so bad. These people have it a lot worse.
It’s like if you go to the park, and you sit on a bench, and you look down, and you see a squirrel, and you think,
Well, at least I’m not a squirrel
. You know what I mean? It’s something.

And two, seeing the sign, shut up and listen, it’s how you
do
prevent suicides—by listening to people.

We don’t listen to each other. We have agendas. Whether it’s somebody you love, or just casual, we all have agendas. We’re all trying to get something, and we like to talk. I clearly
like to talk a lot about myself. I’m up here. But the idea of sitting and listening to somebody else talk made me feel good. It made me feel like I was helping. And that’s why I stayed for four years.

Now, the training basically says that what you do is you answer the call. You say, “Humanitarian Suicide Hotline. Thanks for calling.” You then listen. You have to be an active listener. Glen said not to get scared of silence if there was silence on the phone because “Check it out… Silence is a form of communication. Right on.” He also said that you can’t get manipulated by silence, so if it lasts five minutes, you gotta hang up the phone. At the end of twelve minutes, end the call anyway, because that’s the allotted time. But before you end the call, you have to evaluate the person’s level of suicide. And the way you do that is you ask a series of four questions.

1. Do you feel so bad that you think about suicide?

2. Do you have a plan for how you would do it?

3. Have you set a time for when you’re gonna do that?

4. Have you taken any steps today to kill yourself?

Now, in the four years I worked there, 99.9 percent of all calls were YES, NO, NO, NO. A lot of people think about suicide, but most people don’t really go the next step.

Glen said the closest thing to a warning sign that you can have for suicide is if somebody says something like “I don’t want to die. I just want the pain to stop.” And if you hear somebody say that—that they want the pain to stop—a bell should go off. That’s a person who’s on the edge.