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A Somewhat Eventful Evening
Yesterday was interesting.
9:00 am Work
12:00 Still working
1:00 Post office: FUN!
2:00 Lunch at my desk
3:00 More of this working stuff
5:30 Duane Reade (where, apparently, I stood behind the Top Chef winner, who is a chatty fellow with many prescriptions in his life. Poor guy. But a happy guy, definitely. Jazzed about something in Vegas, so if you care about Top Chef, watch out: something in Vegas is coming.)
6:00 Watching Gilmore Girls rerun with Eric’s sister, Karen, who’s visiting New York this week
7:00 En route to San Gennaro
7:20 Meandering through Mulberry. Mini-lesson: This thing only makes sense if you attended as a kid. Pina coladas, margaritas, Tom’s BBQ, and techno-for-sale hardly make sense for Celebrating Italian Church Culture. Which explains why Eric and Karen kept making those faces at me.
8:00 Dinner outside at Da Gennaro
9:15 More meandering, and a game of cheat-your-ass Feast basketball, which netted Karen a stuffed blue monkey. No jokes, please. I exhausted them all last night.
9:30 Train to Astor
9:38 Walk to 1st and 11th: Veniero’s*
(*Why pay $5.00 for a crappy cannoli, when a delicious, cheaper one is available twenty blocks north?)
10:30 Still sipping cappuccino at Veniero’s, home of the slowest service known to man
10:40 Walking home, we can really see the Towers of Light; it was too foggy from downtown.
10:50 Home again, home again
11:08 Karen negotiates with Continental to rearrange her Ike-deflected flight. No dice. She departs for her friend’s apartment.
12:00 Decompression: watching an old Friends. But, what’s this, now? I’m not feeling so great. BURRRRP.
1:00 Same
2:00 Same
2:05 Attempt to go to bed. Same.
2:25 We hear the crinkling of metal and plastic and rubber on metal and plastic and rubber. Wait five seconds. The scaffolding at the corner of 17th and Union Square East comes tumbling down. Metal on metal on metal on wood on metal on concrete. It was nice and clangy for 2:00 am.
2:26 I’m feeling worse now, visibly shaking, partly thanks to the stomach, partly to my accident panic. (I don’t like car accidents. I know: who does? I really don’t like them. It was kind of like I just crashed. I was worried about the people down there like they’re my cousins.)
2:28 First responders: undercover cops in a silver Malibu
2:31 Ambulance, fire engine, police emergency unit, another ambulance, and so on, until eleven emergency vehicles arrive, lights blaring, engines roaring, sirens wailing. I’m glad we were already up.
2:37 HUGE crowd gathering on the street, those affected and not. A group of baby thugs run out from the shadows of Union Square park to scream and jump and peer into the cab caught beneath fallen scaffolding.
2:38 A fight breaks out, can’t tell between who or why.
2:40 NYPD shoos everyone away
2:41 Recovery is under way. Treatment of a girl who appears to have been hit, and removal of those trapped inside the cab on the sidewalk.
2:45 The cabbie from the other half of the accident stands around. Scant damage to his vehicle, none to him.
2:58 The sixth episode of Jessica’s Bathroom Fun since 2:00. (Who wants to read that in between all the action above? Not I, said the hen.)
3:30 Clean-up ongoing
3:50 Crowd dwindling
3:55 Stomach has drafted the entire corpus into rebellion
4:00 We close the window and attempt to “sleep”
5:00 I shake my fist at the sheep I’ve been trying to count for the last hour. Check the window to find two remaining police cars and the poor other-cabbie, who’s been there all night.
5:30ish SLEEP
6:00 Hello, stomach!
6:10 SLEEP
7:00 You again?
7:30 SLEEP
9:07 Time to wake up! late! for work! Hello, Friday!
9:07 Scaffolding crew on-site to rebuild; already on break
THURSDAY SUMMARY: not a lot of work done, lots of street fair mostly enjoyed, lots of wee-hours street drama, lots of body rebellion, and not a lot of sleep had
LESSONS: do not eat the garlic sauce at Da Gennaro. Or the calamari. Also, maybe don’t drink the cappuccino at 11:00.
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Remembering
Seven Augusts ago, my grandfather succumbed to a protracted struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s. It was late that month that we finally gathered as the family that once was, and stood in the grass on a sunny morning to say our last goodbyes. I had trouble finishing the eulogy.
Two weeks later, I was happy to go to New Jersey, walk in through a familiar door, greeted by Grams and baked ziti. We enjoyed a typical afternoon: the crossword, some chatting, reading the papers, and looking out the window at Kennedy Boulevard traffic.
The next day, I made another trip to Jersey City, this one unplanned.
The reason I’m writing this today is that, as per usual, this anniversary makes people talk about it. All they seem to be able to do is talk about it. Where they were. What they were doing. How hurt they were by it. How affected they still are. We all have the right to our own ways, but I don’t like to see it used politically, I don’t like to see people who were not hurt by it act as if they can understand it emotionally. I don’t want to see it made smaller for the people who lost their lives and the families who now live without them. And personally, I don’t want to remember it anymore.
I woke up that morning, showered and dressed, tried to ignore the roommate gripes, thought about everything I had to do, and shoved my bag full with the things I’d need that day: long sleeved shirt and a pair of socks for my regular babysitting gig, two giant textbooks for the work I could get done after the kids were asleep, a five star notebook, and the necessaries (wallet, chapstick, tissues, inhaler).
My window on Water St. faced west. So when I heard the first crash, I looked up to find raging orange flames, unobscured, like a giant movie screen. I stared at it, horrified. But this was a small horror. I thought it was a helicopter, a big mistake, an awful loss of life, but a fixable error. The tower will probably be fixed within a year. I took a few photos with my little Olympus and threw it on my bed.
But as I stayed fixed on the brilliant blue sky and the orange and black against it, I saw the white silhouette of a plane, and the sun glinting against the windows made me squint. An actual fucking plane, much too close to the existing accident. What if those people got hurt? What if the plane caught fire too?
We all know what happened.
What I remember is the collective scream. It was as if my entire building gasped at the same time and knew. Time to go.
But I didn’t know where to go, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. None of us knew what to do with this. Under attack? What next, bombs from the sky? I kept looking up as we headed south. I had my father on my cell phone for a few minutes, but we didn’t make any kind of plan, and the next time I tried to reach him, there were no lines. Stranded in my own city. Terrified of what was next. Staring at strange faces, all contorted with fear. Lines around the block for payphones.
We ran down Front Street, where I dumped my books on a corner. Psychology and Art Through the Ages lay there in the gutter with the charred ruins of banking memos and non-disclosure agreements.
Lighter on the back, we ran south. My plan had been to get the fuck off Manhattan and board the ferry to Staten Island, but we arrived to watch it depart, overcrowded like an immigration boat, tipping like it was about to sink. That was the last boat. So there we stood in Battery Park, waiting, exhausted, among the other confused and nervous.
No phones. No news. Only the view of the flaming, smoking tips of the towers. We waited.
Then, there was the great sound of rumbling. And with it, a deluge of humans, running at us. So, like the bulls, we ran with them. South again, back toward the ferry, we ran for our lives, like lunatics, each of us in our own breed of panic. And we ran until we hit the south fence, where another group was running from the opposite direction.
Their mass was greater, so the entire group turned and ran back where we’d come from. If it weren’t what it was, it would have looked cartoonish. I’d never experienced mass hysteria before. The view of the sky was much like our Hollywood versions, like the sky over the White House in Independence Day.
By now the rumbling in the air had turned into something more terrifying: destruction, the crumbling of many millions of tons. And that mass was coming straight at us, falling on us, knocking some of us down. An old woman nearby fell out of her sensible shoe and then to the ground, while people eagerly jumped over her, stepping on her purse, her fallen hat. I held her hand, another man grabbed her, and we helped her up. But I lost her immediately, when the smoke came in.
All of a sudden, the black, billowing clouds that had chased us were all around us. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. There was utter silence. Minutes felt like hours. And eventually people started shouting, little pings in the blackness, trying to find each other through blindness.
The shards of fiberglass in the air stabbed our skin, turned our eyes bloody, and penetrated our lungs. I tied my extra shirt around my neck to create an air pocket, and breathed through my inhaler, while someone in the crowd shouted that they needed one. Too far away. How would I get it back?
It felt like an eternity, standing there. Where were they, those who would rescue us? Eventually, the black air around us faded to grey, and then to dense white, and twenty minutes later, it was merely foggy, the nuclear snow no longer suspended, but covering the ground. We were able to climb over the Hudson walls and board emergency boats. Halfway across the river, the top of the second tower started to wobble, and we watched it come down.
That’s how I ended up back in Jersey City, weaving my way through unfamiliar streets, covered in the debris of a fallen building, somehow ending up at Grams’. I slept in my father’s childhood bed that night.
And that’s why, on any other day, hearing wild fire engines go by my building wouldn’t be giving me the panic they do today. So please, twitterers, before you say how much it sucks that your husband’s on a plane today, remember that this was a real thing. And to many of us, it still is.
