That morning a jet roared above the East Village. I opened my eyes. Lots of planes and helicopters flew over Manhattan. None of them ever this low or fast or loud. Thirty seconds later my apartment windows shook with a muffled thud that sounded more a boom than a crash.
The children from the day-care center screamed in the alley. There was no quiet in them and I dressed for breakfast at the Veselka diner on 2nd Avenue.
The telephone rang in the living room.
It could only be my Thai ex-girlfriend wanting money.
Pong didn't deserve a single baht after leaving me for a young Italian tourist and I left the apartment without answering the phone.
Yesterday rains had deluged Manhattan, but today not a cloud marred the sky and the temperature was ideal for September. The trees on East 10th Street were tinged by hues of red and yellow. Autumn was less than two weeks away.
My bank account had been sapped by six months in Thailand, but I wasn't too worried about being broke, since last week Manny, my boss, had offered my old job at the diamond exchange. Everything would work out for the best and I walked toward 1st Avenue. At the corner my downstairs neighbor, Jim, ran up to me and sputtered, "A plane crashed into the Trade Tower!"
"You’re kidding!"
"No, you can see the smoke from here!" Jim pointed to people staring downtown on the avenue.
"In World War II a bomber had slammed into the Empire State Building."
“During a storm. Not on a day like today.”
The clear sky was so blue that New York might have been atop the highest peak of heaven.
My neighbor said, "I'm going to the roof."
"I'll meet you in a minute."
We bounded up the stairs two at a time and I grabbed my binoculars from the apartment before climbing the remaining four flights in less than thirty seconds. The fire door was open and on the roof several neighbors gaped south with good reason. Flames gushed from the shattered northern World Trade Tower and an apocalyptic plume of smoke trailed east over Wall Street.
TV helicopters fluttered around the stricken building at a distance and sirens whined from all over Lower Manhattan.
Only last week I had attended to a concert at the base of the Trade Towers. The two steel sheaths defied gravity without any threat from man, beast, or an act of god. Now a two hundred foot wide gash scarred the north tower.
"I can’t believe this," Jim said with his ear to the radio. "The announcer said it was an accident."
A balding neighbor interjected without taking his eyes off the flames, "I live on the top floor and watched the jet plane fly right into the tower like it was on a suicide mission."
"Someone trying to finish it off," Jim referred to the 1993 World Trade bombing. "But it's still standing tall."
"Yes, it is." I brought the binoculars to my eyes.
Millions of sheets of A4 paper floated in the wind and debris rained to the ground, then a strange object shot from a window shrouded with smoke.
It was a man in a suit.
More people followed his plunge from other floors.
The last was on fire.
"There are people jumping!"
"Why don't those helicopters rescue them?" A girl from the fourth floor cried into the sleeve of her pajamas.
"Because there's too much smoke on the roof."
Jim pointed to a growing dot in the southern sky.
"There's another plane!"
"I can't believe a pilot is actually flying closer to give the passengers a better look of this," said our bald-headed neighbor.
"This isn't a fly-by," I replied and then an airliner struck the South Tower and an enormous fireball exploded from the other side like an erupting volcano.
Jim dropped his radio and everyone on the roofs of the East Village groaned in horror.
"Oh, my God."
The DJ confirmed a second hit.
Jim shook his head.
"This only happens in movies."
He was right, but no James Bond or Bruce Willis had stopped these planes.
I searched the sky for an F-16.
There was nothing in the air.
The city was defenseless.
"This isn't a movie. This is the real thing."
Over the last years we had been warned about New York's vulnerability to terrorist attack. None of us had ever anticipated such an extreme act and my mind crunched numbers of the two towers.
50,000 people worked in the WTC. Anyone on the top floors was trapped by the fire. Friends worked in those buildings. I borrowed a cell phone and tried to contact Andrew, who lived across the street from the Twin Towers.
There was no dial tone.
Someone screamed and I joined them and everyone else standing on the roofs of Lower Manhattan, as the South Tower collapsed in a fury of dust and smoke.
Within an hour the North Tower also crumbled to the ground. The tragedy vanquished any worries about rent or my Thai girlfriend. This country was at war, but the victims of this first attack needed our help and I declared to Jim, "I'm going to Beth Israel to give blood."
"Wait for me. I'll live a note for my wife."
By the time we arrived at the hospital, the police had cordoned off the street. Doctors and nurses had assembled triage stations on the sidewalks and orderlies wheeled in-patients from the hospital to accommodate the injured from the attacks.
Everyone froze fearfully, as a F-16 screeched over New York too late to prevent the attacks.
"Can we help?" I asked a guard.
"Not much you can do here." The ambulance bays were empty and he was at a loss to do anything more than protect this location.
"We can give blood."
"Blood bank's over there on the third floor." He pointed to a building on 17th Street.
Jim and I ran to the entrance and up the stairs to the blood bank. More than twenty people filled the third-floor office. None of our fellow donors had seen the second plane hit and they were appalled by Jim's account of the buildings' collapse, which he ended by saying, "No one on those floors lived through that inferno of Hell."
"What kind of animals do this?" A Polish woman dabbed her tears with a Kleenex.
The list of suspects was small and everyone agreed that no American pilot could have been forced to commit such a heinous deed.
A harried nurse's aide emerged from the hallway and handed out medical history questionnaires. I checked off being free of AIDS, Hepatitis B, drug abuse, anemia, but marked 'Yes' to having lived outside the USA. My last ten years had been spent in South East Asia.
Giving blood isn't a fast procedure and the hospital staff asked for patience. Not everyone was listening and a white-haired man in his fifties fumed, "I don't understand why they can't give us the needles and bags, so we can take our own blood."
With his clean clothes, shaven face, and polished shoes, he could have passed for a normal citizen, if you ignored the pint of vodka sticking out of his jacket poclet.
"When can I give some blood?" His eyes sparkled with dementia. "Give me a razor blade and I'll drip it in a bowl."
"That won't be necessary." A female doctor read his file. "Bob, you mind me taking your blood pressure?"
"Just as long as you don't suck out all my blood." Bob glared around the room. "The old president of Nicaragua forced everyone in the country to give blood and he sold it to the good old USA. Vampire, that's what Somoza was!"
“Bob, that's old history." The doctor was used to humoring the mad of Manhattan.
"You think I'm crazy, but I saw it with my own eyes."
"You haven't written a last name here." The doctor brandished the form.
"They stole it away, when I was a POW in Afghanistan."
A young Asian nurse measured his blood pressure.
"I lost my family today. To people like you."
"I'm sorry, Bob, but you have low blood pressure," stated the doctor.
"Meaning what?" Bob wasn't buying her divine pronouncement.
"Meaning you can't give blood."
“You don't want my blood, because I'm an American, not like the rest of 'them'."
The faces in the waiting room were white, black, brown, and yellow. Most of the accents originated from overseas. Their need to help trumped their country of origin and I said, "Yo, this has been a bad day and you're frightening people with your talk."
"Who elected you group leader?"
Jim nudged my arm.
"Let it go, he'll be gone soon enough."
He was wrong.
"I'll tell you who's to blame for this? The mayor, fucking Ghouliani, because he made New York too safe for terrorists. You can't tell me that they wouldn't have come here, if people were getting shot by crackheads. Those terrorists would have taken out someplace easy like Disneyworld."
"Bob, I need to see someone else." A doctor motioned for him to leave the waiting room.
"I'm not going anywhere." Bob defiantly folded his arms.
I had heard enough.
"Bob, there's a lot of people wanting to give blood. Some of them can and some of them can't. Right now you're making a problem for everyone."
Bob rose from his chair. He was three inches taller than me and poked at my chest.
I knocked away his hand.
"Don't touch me, Frisky." Bob glowered menacingly down a crooked nose.
I forgot where I was, why I was here, and what had happened, until the doctor separated us.
"Not here."
"Sorry," I apologized and Bob went to the door, saying. "You're right. Not here, but I'll be seeing you around, Frisky."
The other donors sighed with relief and I did too, because I didn't want to fight Bob. The doctor wasn't so sure and she read my chart.
"What country were you living in?"
"Thailand."
"Thailand is one of the countries from which we don't accept blood."
"I suspected as much." AIDS ran rampant in Southeast Asia thanks to the DEA trying to stop the opium trade and all the tribespeople switching to heroin and needles.
"What else can I do?"
She recommended volunteering at the Emergency Ward and motioned for another donor.
I got up to leave. Jim was being drained of blood. He hadn't ever left the country.
"Where you going?"
"Someplace I can lend a hand." I grabbed a donut from a table. They were for donors, however I had skipped breakfast.
Outside hundreds of expectant donors jostled in a long queue down the stairs to the ground floor and out onto the street. At the emergency entrance the doctors and nurses searched the avenue for the ambulances. Hearing none was not a good sign.
Downtown needed help and I returned home to change into heavy work clothes and boots left over from a construction gig in the mid-90s. Before leaving I tried calling my friend, Andrew, again without anyone answering at his apartment a block from the World Trade Tower.
I prayed he had escaped injury and rode my bike through the Lower East Side.
The subways had been closed and tens of thousands of New Yorkers walked north on the car-less avenues. Very few of them spoke and those who were usually stopped upon turning their heads to the ghostly column of smoke masking the end of Manhattan.
Blockades had been erected on Canal Street to prevent pedestrians from proceeding any closer to the collapsed towers. Every few minutes they were opened for incoming fire trucks and ambulances. A stunned onlooker stated, "Nobody escaped alive. Supposedly they're taking the bodies over to Jersey. More than two thousand already."
"People got out," a man in a business suit heavily covered with soot contradicted him. "I was on the eight-second floor in the south tower. As soon as the first plane hit, we ran down the stairs."
"Where were you, when the second plane hit?" a young bicyclist with dreadlocks asked and people gathered around the survivor.
"Something like the twentieth floor. I heard this explosion and then the entire building shook. When I got outside stuff was hitting the ground. Glass and big pieces of concrete, then bodies. One of them almost got me. It was bad."
He choked and the bicyclist comforted him. There would be a lot of that today. I asked the nearest policeman. "Where are they accepting volunteers?"
"Volunteers?" The young Latino officer had been dazed by the horrors of the morning. This was his precinct. He re-focused on the task at hand and said, "Go over to West Street. Supposedly they're taking people there."
After another futile call to Andrew, I pedaled my bike toward the Hudson, grateful that that ominous cloud from the wreckage wasn't blowing north.
On West Street several hundred people had gathered to help. Mostly construction workers with heavy tools, but also a good number were men and women from ordinary walks of life desperate to aid the rescue effort.
"Write your names on your clothing," a volunteer shouted from the sidewalk.
"What for?" I asked a young man in jeans.
"So they have someplace to send your body in case you die." A bearded ironworker Magic-Markered a name and phone number on his jeans.
"Die?" The young man squinted like he hadn't heard right.
"Over two hundred firefighters have supposedly died so far."
"A lot of cops too," a beer-bellied welder raised his eyes to the sky.
"And they're professional rescue teams, so someone like yourself has gotta be real careful, because down there isn't any place for someone not knowin' what they're doin'," the ironworker commented for the benefit of the civilians.
Several blocks to the south was a scene of unimaginable danger, but no one walked away. We were New Yorkers. We had tolerated years of crime, bad subways, noise, dirt, rats, cockroaches, the disparity between the poor and the rich, and a thousand other petty annoyances, because the million other reasons to live in the city outweighed the bad. They would after today too, only an hour went by, then two.
Not a single ambulance headed uptown and the ironworker said sadly, "I'm not feelin' good about this."
"What?" a welder re-arranged the equipment at his feet.
"I think anyone who had a chance to be out is out."
"That’s really negative." The welder spat on the sidewalk.
"Not negative. If there were people livin', then they would have us in there right now tearin' the place apart, but____you saw the thing come down. Ain’t no way anyone lived through that. Maybe one or two, but not a couple of hundred."
"So you saying you want to leave?"
“No, I wanna say a prayer.” The ironworker lowered his head.
Everyone joined him, because he was telling the truth.
I waited another hour, listening to heated accusations about who was to blame and how we as a nation should punish the perpetrators of this infamy. Some called for the immediate bombing of Iraq, while others condoned a-bombing Lebanon and Libya. I kept my suspicions to myself. No one wanted to hear any conspiracy theories.
I borrowed a phone and discovered that Andrew was at a friend's apartment in Little Italy. Safe, but like many people in possession of a tale he would have preferred to have seen from someplace not so close to Ground Zero. The other volunteers were glad my friend was okay and the ironworker said, "Go, man, now's the time to be with friends and family."
"I don’t know."
"Man, ain't nothing good going to happen here. Good luck and stay safe."
I felt like the deserter in THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but the sight of Andrew, Alia, and my other friends at Billy O’s penthouse assuaged my dishonor.
"It h-h-h-had been a near-thing," Andrew stuttered on the balcony. "I mean my apartment is across the street. I heard an explosion and saw this paper floating in the air and I thought there was a parade, then the second plane crashed and I r-r-ran for my life."
"You’re lucky to be here." Billy opened another bottle of wine and his eight-year old daughter sheepishly demanded of her mother, "Do I have to go to school tomorrow?"
"I don't think so."
Gee-Gee clapped her hands and danced out of the room.
Hers was the first laughter of the day and Andrew lit a cigarette.
"G-g-glad someone's happy."
We drank wine and told stories.
Billy had dined at Windows of the World with his parents, Andrew had drunk at the Greatest Bar in the World with his wife, and I had driven a motorcycle around the desolate landfill, which would become Battery Park City. The sunset on the fumes rising from the ruins and even Billy/s wife patting my hand couldn’t stop my tears.
I was drunk.
$40,000 of credit remained on my credit cards. Thailand was only a day's flight away. Pong would be happy to see me. I didn't inform my friends of these plans and left the penthouse for my apartment, bicycling slowly up the Bowery. People walked in the eerie silence created by the traffic ban. Some spoke and some were even laughing. I pedaled harder to get home, so I could inform my family in Boston that I was all right.
A block past CBGBs a white-haired man sat on the curb, holding an empty vodka bottle and singing GOD BLESS AMERICA off-key. It was Bob from the blood bank.
I should have ignored him, but I was mad at the cruel genius who had destroyed the future and even madder knowing that I would never personally wreak revenge, but Bob, well, Bob was right at hand and I rolled up to the curb.
"Remember me?"
"Yeah, long time no see, Frisky." Bob jumped to his feet more skillfully than expected from a man who had drunk an entire bottle of vodka, though he slurred with a gummy tongue, "I was wondering when you would show up."
He short-circuited any further conversation with a roundhouse right. I ducked the wild blow and Bob followed the flow of his punch to the pavement. His head clonked on the curb.
I hopped off my bike.
His eyelids fluttered like butterflies and he asked, "Where am I?"
"On the Bowery." I reached down to upright Bob.
He pressed his hand to his forehead and blood seeped through his fingers to drip onto the asphalt.
"The Bowery, how the hell did I get here? Shit, I remember."
He didn't speak for a second and looked downtown. The deadly flume of smoke glowed in the night.
"Hey, I'm sorry about today. Sorry about everything. I'm a fuck-up, but I was someone once. Shit, a soldier. For this country. No bullshit, Frisky. I really was, then something went wrong in my head after I got shot in Afghanistan. I shouldn't have been there with the Hazarah, but I was." He lifted his hair to reveal a wicked scar.
"Damn."
"See, I wasn't lying, but now all I am is an ornery drunk. What's the sense? Where's the pay-off?"
These were questions Bob asked too often and I probably did too.
"It was a real bad day today."
"Maybe it would be better, if there was no tomorrow. Like if I could let a car hit me."
He struggled to stand and I stopped him.
"Bob, there aren't any cars in the Village and you're not in any condition to walk to 14th Street to get hit by one."
"Then do the world a favor and kill me. Hell, no one would notice in all the confusion."
"I’m not killing anyone."
"Then I'll go over to the bridge and jump into the river." Bob wasn't kidding about killing himself and I couldn't leave him alone. "You're not going anywhere."
"Well, what the sense? You tell me." His index finger aimed at the funereal specter over Lower Manhattan. "What's the sense?"
"I'll tell a story about why you have to go on living."
"I hope it isn't a long story. My attention span is on short-rations."
"Less than a minute."
"Okay." He raised the empty vodka bottle like he expected it to have been miraculously filled, and then released it into the gutter. "I'm all ears."
"A long time ago I was traveling in Mexico. This shitty bus stops in a nowhere town. I ate a potato taco. Nothing happened until back in Texas, where I got sick. Almost like I was dying. I lay in bed hallucinating and had a dream about being chased by zombies. The filthy dead trapped me in this cottage and scratched at the screen door with dirty fingers. I was scared and even more so when one of them asked, "What's the secret of human life?"
"And what did you tell them?" Bob checked his cut, which had stopped bleeding.
"I didn't know what to tell them, until a voice said, "If you tell us the secret of human life, we'll let you live for another minute." At that moment I knew the secret, but woke before I told them."
"Thank God, you saved mankind from the dream zombies!"
"I guess I did."
"So can you tell me the secret of human life?"
"The secret was that no matter how bad things were or what awaited me at the end of that minute, I still wanted to live."
"Maybe you do, but not me. I don't have a place to stay. No one to take care of me. Nothing, so even if I had known the secret, I would have told the zombies to start eating.
Despite being the world's leading failurologist, I believed in my eventual triumph and asked the older man, "You really think it's hopeless?"
"If you gave me enough money for a room, maybe I could forget the despair long enough to find me some hope." Telling my story had excluded any refusal and I handed him a twenty. Jim made a face. "Where can I stay for twenty bucks in this city?"
"I think you know." I steadied him on his feet and glanced at the Palace Hotel.
"I guess I do." He touched my shoulder. "You're not such a bad guy, Frisky."
"And neither are you."
"Yes, I am, but that's another story. Be safe."
He staggered off to an SRO hotel like a sailor on land after a long sea voyage and I rode my bike to East 10th Street. While I hadn't saved any victims of the crash, having helped someone in need felt good.
Maybe not enough to forget the day's horror, but I wasn't going to run away from New York.
Not today.
Not any day.
The city was my home.
Maybe not forever, but I knew its streets, its bars, its people and tomorrow was another day and if those words worked for Scarlet O'Hara, then they certainly would for New York.
This city was tough and it was tough every day of the year.
Especially after a day far from normal.
