Procrastinet

9/11

filed under: Stuff you never, ever needed to know

Before we get started: happy fifth birthday to Lily Jane, who almost exactly 5 years ago right now I dubbed "The One Good Thing."

Okay, so if a guy isn't allowed to be self-indulgently mawkish on his own blog on the anniversary of a major national tragedy, then when the heck *is* a guy allowed to be self-indulgently mawkish? Don't answer that.

In the interests of getting it down in complete form, and with the secondary goal of maybe being able to resist the compulsive telling of the whole story every time 9/11 comes up in conversation, here's how we spent the morning five years ago today:

We lived on Gold Street, three (cross-town) blocks from the WTC. Living so close, it had always hovered in the back of my mind - what if they fall. Stranged that it never occurred to me they'd fall straight down. I always sort of pictured them going sideways, like a tree.

Lisa had gotten up before me, and was doing Tae-Bo (this was 2001, remember). She heard a big bang, but there was constant construction on the street outside our building, so she assumed it was a truck going over a construction plate. When her tape was over, NY1 was on as always.

The first thing I remember is her shaking me awake, even though it wasn't time for me to get up yet. I was grumpy about this. "What?" I said.

"A plane hit the World Trade Center, and it's burning," she said. I lay there for a moment, grumpy about the face that this was too big for me to roll over and go back to sleep, which is what I really, really wanted to do.

All the news commentary said it was a single engine plane, a Cessna or something. "Some idiot amateur pilot," is what I was thinking.

We had watched about ten minutes of coverage when there was a tremendous bang that shook our windows. We both jumped, and the tv went blank for a moment. When the picture came back, there was a massive fireball billowing from the side of the south tower.

I guessed that the fire in the north tower had gotten hot enough to cause something in the south tower to explode - maybe a transformer or something. After a few minutes, the news anchor (we were jumping around between channels, trying to find someone who knew anything, so I don't remember if it was our beloved Pat Kiernan or someone else) said "All right, I know this sounds crazy... but we're starting to get reports that it was a second plane."

I was instantly furious. "Come on," I said. "Don't say that on the air, you're going to totally freak people out." Whichever channel we were watching, their camera angle didn't show the cause, just the explosion. They were talking about whether maybe there had been a horrible air traffic control mixup, and a whole flight path had been mistakenly re-routed into the WTC.

We changed channels. The new channel had the right angle, and their replay clearly showed a jet fly straight into the south side of the tower.

"Um..." said Lisa.

"Um..." said me. "I think we should maybe get farther away."

We worked three blocks away, towards the Seaport, so without any better ideas we headed towards work. On her way out the door, Lisa noticed that the cats didn't have much food or water in their bowls. This will, as you can guess, be a factor later.

I took my camera. Even then, I was torn about taking pictures - but I figure every major event needs to be documented, and since I couldn't think of anything more useful to do, that's what I decided to do.

We went out to the corner outside our building, on Fulton Street, and joined the crowd peering up at the north tower. "Holy god," I said, "that's a really big hole." The streets were full but in a weird kind of suspended animation - everyone was hushed, and nobody knew what to do but stare.

I kept thinking, "boy, that's a lot of damage. They aren't going to be able to fix that for a long time - like, maybe six months even."

We made our way down to work, picking our way through the sidewalks full of frozen people, everybody staring up at the burning towers. We met Scott there, and Rita (a secretary who sat next to me), and stood in front of the building watching.

Our HR coordinator was the daughter of the NYPD's head hostage negotiator, and she had gotten him on the phone. That's how we found out about the jumpers. We turned in sick horror towards the building, just in time to see something spin away from the side. I felt faint and nauseous, but realized that the falling thing was much bigger than a person. The metal sheeting that covered the girders of the tower and made it shine was peeling off in the fire, floating away like mylar confetti. Against the beautiful blue sky, it was perversely pretty.

Our second-hand connection to the NYPD is also how we found out about the Pentagon. We also heard the rumor that there were thirteen more planes unaccounted for. People began to freak out in earnest, and that's the when we started talking about Al Qaeda.

There were probably sixty of us standing around in front of the building. We were right in front of the entrance, where the view of the north tower was just blocked by the building across the street. Some people were standing in the street on Maiden Lane, where they could see the tower.

The people in the street screamed. A few of them collapsed to the ground. Everyone pointed, screaming. It looked just like a Godzilla movie.

I jumped out into the street in time to see the top corner of the north tower, at a slight angle, drop from sight into the cloud.

That's when I felt my brain sprain. There was something so vast and wrong about that gigantic tower moving - so quickly, so gently - when its entire nature was not to move.

People who were still up on the sidewalked asked what was happening. "It's down," I said. "The north tower is down. It's gone."

"Oh my god," somebody said. "All those people."

Then we saw the dust coming. It was a solid wall, as high as the buildings. Everybody has seen all this on the footage by now. But that was the first time that we realized this wasn't an emergency that was happening over there somewhere, this was something we were in, that was coming our way. "Let's go, let's go!" I yelled, thinking we could get behind the building or something. "Cover your mouths!" I yelled. Even at the time, I felt half silly barking orders, but I couldn't help myself.

We got to the back of the building and it was clear we had to go farther - by this time the cloud was on us. It was somewhat diffuse, so we could still breath, though it smelled and tasted horrible. We crossed Front Street and I saw some people vaulting over the fence between the bus parking and the Seaport esplenade, even though there was a gap in it that you could walk through maybe ten feet to the left.

We ended up out on the pier that has the museum ships berthed on it, as far out as we could go. The light, in the dust cloud, was tan. When we'd gone as far as we could, we stopped. With nothing left to do, people - myself included - started to go to pieces. I went to my knees and cried, and Rita - who we had kept with us as we ran - was sobbing as well.

Once we had pulled ourselves together, and were just sort of standing around in the dust wondering what to do, we heard jets scream overhead. Lisa said later that's when she really started to freak out - we still thought there were as many as a dozen hijacked jets still in the air. I thought I recognized them as fighter jets.

There was a guy out at the end of the pier with us who was completely panicking, and acting like he was the center not only of the universe but of this particular tragedy. "Somebody call the Coast Guard!" he was shrieking, trying to get his cell phone to work. "Tell them where we are, tell them they have to come RESCUE US!!!"

With the overreaction of stress, I wanted to punch him in his disgusting face. The abhorrent selfishness, the self-centeredness of thinking that somehow, with untold thousands of people dead, we who were standing around dusty and scared on a pier had to be "rescued..." It still makes me seeth.

By this point, we were trying to figure out what to do and where to go. That's when Lisa remembered that the cats didn't have enough food and water. We didn't know when we would be able to get back to our apartment - plus, it was going to be handy to have some clothes. So I left Lisa with Scott and ran back up Fulton Street to our apartment.

Everything was covered in beige dust, like a snowstorm. As I ran, first along the cobblestone streets of the Seaport and then up the sidewalk, I kept looking at the ground and singing "Love Me or Kill Me," which PJ had just written for Pity (the show we were writing at the time). It played like a loop in my head, and I think I probably sang some of it out loud. I was trying to stay in the zone where I was courageous (with a side of foolhardy) and getting things done, rather than thinking about the fact that I was running back towards the towers.

I think I levitated up the stairs to our 6th floor apartment - I don't remember running up them. And I wasn't, even then, in that good shape. I found that our phone was still working, so I called some folks to let them know we were okay.

When I got my mom on the phone I said "Hi Mom, it's me. We're okay."

She said "...um. Okay...?"

I said "Oh. You're not watching tv, are you."

"No," she said.

"Turn on the tv," I said. "The country is under concerted terrorist attack."

(Now, I want to point out that while I *was* dorkily formal, when Mom retold it this past weekend she said it like I was shrieking. For the record, I was totally calm.)

I was in our bedroom, the closest point to the towers, trying to figure out what to pack, still on the phone with my Mom, when I heard a rumble. Mom was saying something, but I took the phone away from my ear and listened. I got back on the phone and said, "Well, now we find out if coming back here was a really stupid idea or not." It was the first time I thought maybe I'd done a really, really stupid thing.

The rumbling stopped, and of course now I know that I was still way too far away to be in any real danger.

It felt like it took me forever to pack, and I know I brought some random and useless stuff. I was thinking "Huh, I wonder if I should bring this, probably not, oh well let's pack it up anyway." I wasn't thinking very straight.

I finally got packed, put lots of supplies out for the cats, told them we'd be back for them as soon as we could (we have four, so there was no way to take them all right then), and headed out. In the hall, I passed the building maintenance guy, who just shook his head at me. "Was that the south tower?" I asked. He nodded.

There were lots of people in the lobby, and the dust outside was thick. It looked like nighttime. I had already kept Lisa waiting long enough that I knew she'd be worried, especially with the second tower falling, so I headed out.

As I rounded the corner from Gold Street onto Fulton Street, I realized two things: a) I couldn't see anything, and b) I couldn't breath. I started coughing and couldn't stop, even with my shirt up over my face, and that was the second time I worried that maybe I'd done a really truly stupid thing. "Most people who die in a fire die of smoke inhalation," I scolded myself, "and if you pass out here, ain't nobody gonna see you in time." I found my way to the corner of the building and felt my way along, unable to see farther than ten feet or so in front.

After a block it lightened up, and I ran down to the Seaport.

Still worried about the theoretical missing planes, we decided to take the Williamsburg Bridge instead of the Brooklyn. "No landmarks," we agreed, "nothing that would make an attractive target."

As we walked, we saw lots of people who'd been closer to it than we had. One man, wearing a three piece suit and holding a briefcase, was so covered with dust he looked like a frosted donut.

On the way up the ramp to the bridge, Scott told us his uncle worked in the north tower, on a high floor. He should have been at work by 8:30. Scott assumed he was dead. (It turned out later that he had been, as a rare fluke, late that day. He was standing at the elevator when it exploded into the lobby. He started running, and the next thing he knew he was at Union Square, still holding his bag and his coffee.)

We stopped halfway across the bridge and looked at the massive plume of smoke drifting over Brooklyn. It was such a beautiful day.

As we came down the ramp into Williamsburg, there were Hassidic men with big white beards, holding jugs of water and cups, giving water to everyone who was evacuating. The look of desperate compassion on their faces as they did the only thing they could think to do broke me down entirely, and it took me a while to get myself together. It still chokes me up.

Scott got his father on the cell and split off to a meet-up point which his father was driving to. Lisa and I found our way to Bea's in Williamsburg. We showered - it's hard to wash that stuff off, and it itched like hell - and drank and watched the news.

It was when I finally spoke to PJ later that afternoon that I found out about the One Good Thing - Lily had been born that morning.

We got back to our apartment the next day, and I think that's when we got the cats out, though it may have been Thursday. We put two of them in hard cases on the luggage cart, and two of them in soft cases which we carried. We had to walk to Union Square and get a subway to the LIRR from there. We also went back on Thursday, and security was much tighter - we were stopped at Canal Street, even though we were residents, and we had to sneak in through a loosely guarded intersection in the far eastern part of Chinatown.

We had been scheduled to fly to my parents' house on Friday, and instead we rented a car and drove down. Work didn't re-open for two weeks. I don't remember how long we were out of our apartment - a couple weeks, I think. It's funny how painstakingly vivid everything that morning remains and how totally fuzzy the weeks after were.

There's lots more to be said about the change that came over the city, which lasted months and months before it finally faded away. We never thought it would fade, incidentally, but I guess it'll take something even bigger than 9/11 to stick for good. (Which is not a price I want to pay) But that's for another rumination.

The first time we went to look at "the Pile," we turned the corner from Chambers Street and stopped in awe. "Oh, my god," I said.

"What?" said Lisa. "Where? Do you see it?" I was flummoxed, as the pile stretched three stories high and covered the entire end of the block.

"Right there," I said.

"Where, behind the trees?"

That's when I realized: it was night time, and the rubble was lit from the side by huge worklights, and it looked like the edge of a wooded park. And Lisa's mind refused to process it as anything but trees.

"That's not trees," I said. "That's the pile."

That's our 9/11. Thanks for listening.

Posted by rjt at September 11, 2006 02:26 PM