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I woke up on 9/11 in New Brunswick, NJ, where I attended college — I was supposed to cover a Jim McGreevey campaign event that morning — and immediately felt an awful sense of anguish over not being physically present in the city I grew up in. Accordingly, I got high as hell that night with a friend and colleague who now reports for the New York Post while a friend of a friend of a friend who worked at the Newark airport paced the room and anxiously talked about the ways in which someone could sneak a bomb onto a plane.
But I didn’t get to New York until Friday, when I had no more classes, had already given blood in New Jersey, and figured the best thing I could do would be to volunteer at Ground Zero. At the school paper we came to the odd and self-justifying conclusion that we shouldn’t drop everything for the recovery effort but instead cover a very confusing situation as best we could. (What can I say? We were college students and didn’t think clearly.) So I made my way to the Javits Center on Friday morning, the relief-effort collection point where would-be volunteers confusedly gaggled around, trying to figure out how to be useful. It was lightly raining and humid. A man in an orange plastic vest bellowed that unless we had military, medical or union-certified construction training, we should go home and not get in the way. It was not a message we wanted to hear.
So I asked the guy what I could do if I didn’t have any of that experience. He said there was a food collection point for the relief effort near the Fashion Institute of Technology, which is about half a mile southeast of the Javits Center, and maybe they needed a hand over there boxing lunches or wrapping up donated food for the Ground Zero workers. When I walked down to the collection point, a small high school in the armpit of F.I.T., the place was swarming with volunteers, everyone busily bucket-brigading wrapped food or canned goods onto a bread truck. Fuck! I thought. These selfish pricks! Won’t they let anyone else help?
I calmed down, checked myself, located a woman who was directing the effort and asked what I could do. Not much, she replied, but if I waited, maybe they could find something for me. I found a nearby chair-desk, one of the uncomfortable plastic and metal backbreakers they give you in high school, and sat down, useless as a child, feeling somehow reprimanded.
Then she came back and said there was something I could do. The producers of Chicago had set aside a bloc of tickets for the evening’s performance just for Ground Zero relief workers. Could I go pick those up?
Why, it would be my patriotic obligation.
So I walked up to 45th Street or wherever. On the way, I got a call from an EMS technician who I had talked to for a New York Press piece a couple weeks before. (Unfortunately, because the tech was complaining about the Fire Department that had absorbed EMS under the screenname FDNYSucks@aol.com, Andrey Slivka headlined the piece "FDNYSucks," which was an awful thing so close before 9/11.)I don’t know why he called me. But he told me he was at Ground Zero on 9/11 and two of his partners were dead. As he spoke, we both started crying, and he ended the call right before I got the tickets and so, red-eyed, I received some look of sympathy from the box office worker, the two of us ashamed that this was all we were able to do.
May Usama bin Laden die in the Hague.
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You may not have been able to be as useful as you wanted to be, but hey, at least you weren’t beating up random Muslims and Sikhs or vandalizing mosques, so your response was still pretty good.
As for bin Laden, I’d agree with you, generally speaking, but I don’t think we should risk a significant number of troops in an effort to capture him if a missile strike will do nor do I think there is a chance in hell that the United States would defer to any international tribunals. Ideally, a long, slow death in the Hague, but I’d happily accept a missile attack on his villa in Lahore (if it happens in late October of 2010 or 2012, so be it).
Thanks for telling your story, Spencer. Something about the combination of the personal and the communal of those days, that was different and universally picked up on and powerful, is worth remembering.
Here is mine:
I had moved with a woman from NYC, up to Vermont. The night of September 10, we loaded the last stuff from her apartment into a U-Haul and headed north. I wanted to avoid traffic.
The sky was clear that night. Leaving New York is emotional. The view of the towers from the BQE can be stunning. There is only one thing to say about it, not even knowing the next day’s events. “I will never forget this view.”
The next morning we were on the Barre-Montpelier road, returning the truck, her car in front. She suddenly pulled over, set the flashers on, and came out in tears. The first tower had just fallen.
We went into Barre to find a bar with a TV. She was crying on the street. People had not heard yet, or didn’t make the connection, and looked at me suspicious.
I can’t help but like the Sleater-Kinney song about it. That it happened in a city far away, but that feels so close.
at least you weren’t beating up random Muslims and Sikhs or vandalizing mosques
I think Chris Rock had the definitive word about trying to take credit for stuff like this.
I have always been a loner. I dunno, it’s always worked for me, trudging my own circuitous route across half the globe, observing without joining, commenting without committing, collecting without sharing.
So it was odd, that September morning in Los Gatos, California, watching with rapt fascination and bloodcurdling horror the events unfolding 3000 miles away, shaking my head and turning away from the screen, only to be drawn back to gaze hopelessly at the destruction once again.
The phone kept ringing, and yet no one knew what to say. I’d simply tell them all “get over here” and we’d hang up. By early afternoon there were a dozen people there, mostly strangers to each other, the only common denominator was they were somehow part of my life, and for some inexplicable reason that day I was the den mother. Former employers shared the couch with an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend. Vendors sat with competitors, sharing pain and tears. Somebody brought pizza – nobody could eat much. Somebody else brought beer. We opened them, and they sat, warming on the tables. We’d turn to one another, draw breath to speak, but then surrender to the immensity and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness and say nothing.
People stayed all day, and into the next. We could do nothing, but we didn’t feel we could abandon our posts. Or each other…
mikey
I don’t recall it. I Googled. I Googled hard, but to no avail. I’ll take your word for it.