The Moth (42 page)

So four years later, I’m working at the hotline. It’s just me and my shift partner, a guy named Adam. Adam’s a communist. Not relevant at all to the story, just a little detail. You’re welcome.

So me and Adam are working the overnight shift, from eleven o’clock at night to eight o’clock in the morning. You have to do one a month. And it’s busy till like 4
A.M
., till the bars close in New York, and then it gets slow.

And around four it was my turn to answer the phone, and the phone rings, and I pick it up.

“Hello, Humanitarians, can I help you?”

And this very young, cute, scared voice comes on the phone and says, “Hi. My name is Amy. I’d like to talk.”

And I say, “What’s up, Amy? What’s going on?”

She says, “Oh, nothing. I was just, you know, calling because I was feeling a little sad.”

And I was like, “Oh, what are you sad about?”

And she goes, “Ah, I don’t know, things are pretty good. I have good grades at school, and my parents don’t get it, but they love me, and, you know, I have a good friend back in Tennessee where I’m from, and NYU’s good. I have good friends here.”

She said she had two types of friends, which I thought was really funny. She had bar friends and then she had movie friends. I like that expression. I wish I had some movie friends, but so be it.

Right away I pictured her, the way you do when you talk to somebody on the phone. I pictured her in her dorm room, and I pictured a quilt, and I pictured her with long hair, sitting on her bed, and Rollerblades, and a Dr Pepper, you know what I mean? I got her figured out.

And so I said, “Well, that sounds good. But you said you were sad. What do you think about when that happens?”

She said, “I don’t know. I don’t understand what happens. I can’t control it. Sometimes when I have a great day, what I do the next day is I try to duplicate it. I wake up at the same time,
I try to eat the same food, try to have the same pattern, so that I can control the day, so that I don’t feel bad.”

But then, out of nowhere, she said, she felt what she described as a hand coming from behind her and sort of pushing her down.

And I said, “Okay, well, what, what’s going on when that happens? What are you thinking about?”

And she said, “Ah, everything, nothing, I don’t know. I just feel so stupid.” She started to sound uncomfortable. And then we started to flirt a little, not in an inappropriate way, but look, a lot of the callers I talked to over the years were crazy. This was different. She could have been a movie friend if I had met her in some other situation. I was talking to her, and we talked for a little while, and then she said she felt dumb because of depression.

She felt this crippling sadness, and that there
are
people who are clinically or socially or chemically depressed, but she thought maybe a lot of people overuse that word, or use it as an excuse, and she was worried she might be like that. And I could identify. I felt the same way.

I don’t think I get depressed. I mean, sure there are times where I don’t get out of bed for four days, but I’m not depressed, right?

So we were talking like that.

And then I noticed that it was about time to wrap it up, but Amy started telling me this story about going to some place with her family one day, and their father bought ice cream, and it was a great day.

I said, “Oh, that’s great.” And I looked at the clock.

But then Amy started to slur her speech a little bit.

I said, “Amy, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

And she goes, “Yeah. Look, I know it’s selfish, and I know it’s stupid, but I can’t do it anymore. I just want it to stop.”

And I said, “What do you mean? What do you mean by ‘it’?”

She goes, “I don’t know. I just
can’t
. I just want you to talk to me.”

I was like, “Well, when you said ‘it,’ what did you mean?”

She said, “Look, I don’t want to die. I just want the pain to stop.”

And I woke up.

I said, “Amy, do you feel so bad that you think about suicide?”

And she said, “Yes.”

I said, “Do you have a plan for how you would do it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you set a time for when you’re gonna do it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Amy, have you taken any steps today to kill yourself?”

And she said, “Yes.”

And I said, “Amy, what have you done?” And she told me she took twenty high-strength painkillers, and I said, “What kind of painkillers?” because that’s what you’re supposed to ask, and she told me, and I wrote it down. And I threw a pencil at Adam who was nodding off, and I handed him the piece of paper so he could call poison control, and I could have some information about what would happen, so I could pass it on to her.

I tried to keep Amy talking. I was trying to ask her about other things, and she was again talking about that day her father bought her ice cream, and it was very confusing, and then Adam came back with the piece of paper.

He’d called poison control. I said, “Amy, given the fact that you took twenty high-strength painkillers, and that you drank,
and that you haven’t thrown up”—which she had told me—“do you understand that you could die, within an hour?”

And she started to cry.

And I was like, “Amy, look, do you want help? Do you want me to do something? I can do something, but I can only help you if you ask.”

Our policy was not to intervene unless people asked us to.

I said, “If you want help, I can do something.”

And she goes, “I do. I don’t want to do this.”

And I said, “Great, what’s your address?” She gave me her address, I handed it to Adam, and he went to call 911.

And I kept Amy talking. I was like, “Uh, Amy, what kind of ice cream was it that your father bought you? You mentioned that your father bought you ice cream. What
kind
of ice cream was it?”

But it was silent. And it was silent for two minutes. And it was silent for five minutes. And I’m supposed to hang up the phone, but who the hell could hang up the phone? So I didn’t.

And then around thirteen, fourteen minutes, I heard noises at the door, and I heard people knocking, and then I heard the door crash open. I heard footsteps, and then I heard the phone being picked up, and a voice said, “It’s okay. We’ve got her.”

Click.

I went home. I was supposed to go to class that day. I had classes at Queens College. But I didn’t go back to Queens College. I never went back to Queens College. I never graduated.

I was supposed to go back to the hotline for a debriefing based on that phone call. I called Glen and told him I quit, that I wasn’t coming back.

“Check it out…”
Click.

And then I did all the things you’re not supposed to do in
that situation. I obsessed about it. I stayed up, and I drank, and I smoked, and I drank coffee, and I searched. It was before the Internet, but I looked through the papers and listened to the radio, and finally, after three days, I found it. In the
Daily News
, page 23, a small paragraph that said that they had found the body of a nineteen-year-old NYU student named Amy Walters who had died of an accidental overdose.

And I know why they call it accidental. I get it. There’s insurance reasons, religious reasons, family. They don’t want an epidemic to start in a college. I get all that.

But what I didn’t know until that moment was that she was dead, and I was the last person to talk to her. Not her mom in Tennessee, or her best friend, or some boy at NYU that probably had a crush on her but never talked to her.

Me.

And I wanted to call her family, and I wanted to try to go down to the funeral, but I knew it was inappropriate, and so I didn’t.

And the thing of it is, I have had bigger personal tragedies over the years. I spoke to her for less than an hour twenty years ago. But I think about it every day. She’s me, in that car. If I had pulled the trigger, that would be me. And she never got to find out what I got to find out, which is it’s terrible sometimes, but there are these perfect life moments. And that’s enough.

Brian Finkelstein
(twitter.com/@bsfinkelstein) is a regular performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and is also the host of the LA Moth StorySLAMs. Because he is über self-indulgent, he has performed way too many solo shows in a variety of venues, from the HBO/US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen to the 2012 Summer Nights Festival in Perth, Australia. His solo
show,
First Day Off in a Long Time
(about working at a suicide hotline), was developed into a pilot script for Fox called
Blue
. Later he wrote for the
Ellen DeGeneres Show
. While at
Ellen
, Brian was nominated for two Emmys. Daytime Emmys… but still. Most recently, he has optioned (and reoptioned) his feature
Good Grief
with 72 Productions and has been working on his latest solo show,
Everything Is Everything
. Other than that, he watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of chocolate-mint-chip ice cream.

FAYE LANE

W
hat I always wanted as a little girl was to tell stories on the stage, because I wanted to be connected to something bigger than myself, and I wanted to be connected to other people.

And I believe that a really good performer takes a group of individuals and, through a shared emotional experience, turns it into a collective. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to do this.

I’ve wanted to be a performer… slash STEWARDESS!

I grew up in my mama’s beauty shop in Texas. It was this old A-frame house with big mirrors and swivel chairs in the front room and shampoo bowls in what had been the back bedroom.

My mama had this long line of hood dryers on one wall, and I would wait until all the ladies were held captive under the dryers and give mandatory concerts. That was my very first stage.

When I wasn’t telling stories and doing shows for the ladies, I would play stewardess, and I would push this little manicure cart around the beauty shop.

[
with thick Southern drawl
] “Miss Helen, Miss Melba, would y’all like a magazine? Would y’all like a cocktail?”

And the ladies would say, “Baby, you just give great customer service.”

I was
all about
customer service.

And sometimes I’d sit on the porch playing with my Barbie’s Friend Ship airplane, and I would wear this long, silk scarf tied on the side (and it’s
hot
in Texas in the summer). But I loved playing stewardess.

Well, about ten years ago, I was living in New York City, working as a performer, telling stories and singing songs on the stage. Bad pay, no job security, no benefits. I really needed a job. And I very randomly met this lovely girl with a long, silk scarf tied on the side, who said nine words that changed my life forever:

She said, “Have you ever thought about being a flight attendant?”

I had!

Three weeks later, I was in Miami training. Training was so exciting. It was a brand-new airline. They had seven airplanes, a handful of destinations, and a lot of great buzz. They had buzz around the fact that there was live TV at every seat. And they had blue potato chips and designer uniforms. But most of the buzz was around the fact that they had amazing customer service.

Perfect! I was all about customer service back at the beauty shop.

And when the founder and CEO of the airline came into our training class and gave this amazing, uplifting speech, I knew I was in the right place.

He said, “Every one of you is here for a reason, and that reason is your ability to smile and be kind. We can teach you how to evacuate an airplane. We can teach you how to handle a
medical emergency. We can teach you how to serve. But we cannot teach you to smile and be kind. Your mother did that. Please thank her for me.”

So beautiful. He said he saw this not as an airline, not as a corporation, but as a humanitarian experiment. He said his goal was to bring humanity back to air travel. I was right on board with this vision. I was so caught up in it. And when I graduated, they made me president of my class, and they even gave me this special certificate called the Spirit Award.

I couldn’t wait to get out there on the line—to surprise people with kindness and, in the process of moving people from Point A to Point B, really, actually move people.

And then I graduated. And then I started the job. Maybe you see where this is going.

I had this epiphany almost right away: This job is hard, and
people are horrible
. Really horrible.

First of all, the job was physically exhausting. In the beginning I was on reserve, which meant that I was on call and had to be within two hours of Kennedy Airport at all times. So I was either running to get to the airport or waiting for the phone call to run to get to the airport, constantly on edge.

And then the actual commute to the airport was extremely hard. I had to take the subway to the bus to the shuttle to the terminal. Even before I got on the plane, I was exhausted. And then when I did get on the plane, there was a whole world of hurt.

My feet hurt. There’s this thing that happens where you get bruises on the bottom of your feet from turbulence, and it was horrible. And new flight attendants are sick a lot, because it’s kind of like being a kindergarten teacher—you’re exposed to a lot of germs. At one point I had pinkeye in both eyes, a sinus infection, a double ear infection, and strep throat all at the
same time. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t talk. And it was mainly because I was taking garbage from everyone all day. And saying “thank you” for it!

“Thank you. Thank you for your garbage. Thank you.”

They actually made us stop calling it trash. We had to call it “service items,” because some of the really bitter girls would say, “Sir… you(’re) trash,” “Ma’am… your whole family’s trash.”

But I understand why they were jaded, because I was kind of getting jaded too. I just couldn’t believe how horrible people could be.

It’s really hard to be mean when someone is smiling at you and handing you a cup of coffee and a cookie, but people are. Because a lot of times they don’t see you—they just see a uniform.