9/11

Ugh....   I... didn't want to do this.



But due to the continuous media coverage of the anniversary, I can't help but think about it.  And to be honest, I don't care what almost anybody else's experience was, and I know from experience that no one cares what my experience was.  So let me just let you off the hook now; you don't want to read this, I just feel like I have to say it.

I don't have anything horrible to say, I've just never had anyone listen all the way through my story, and more often than not, the would-be listener glazed over and started thinking about something else before I got to the mid-day recounting of my September, 11, 2001.  And- this is the worst thing I have to say about the whole thing- screw every person who did that.  And that feeling is why I've only talked about it a handful of times.

I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.  Ok, so... I moved the Brooklyn, New York on July 17, 2001, about 6 weeks after I graduated from High School.  My sister, Rachel, had a studio apartment on Carroll street, at the Franklin Avenue stop on the green line.  Its an express stop, second from the end of the line.  I had just gotten a new job at Fishs Eddy, a dish store on 19th street on Broadway, where I had spent the last 3 work days learning how to use the register and enter dish codes for bake ware and glass that comes out of people's attics and from airlines that go bankrupt.

I was supposed to be at work at 10:00.  I crawled out of bed, my blowup mattress that slid under the futon during the day, and headed up the 3 blocks to the subway where there were a LOT of people in the street, even for Brooklyn.  There were loud announcements that I could barely understand over the speakers on the subway platform, and I feel like I remember orange paper on the columns saying that nothing was running- although those may have come in the days that followed.  I remember feeling relieved, like it was a snow day, and I didn't have to go to school, only today I didn't have to go to work.  The only way from my area to Manhattan was  the green line- and it was a 40 minute ride, so I wasn't going anywhere.

Our neighborhood was (still is) part of Little Jamaica, and full of culture that I don't understand.  Also full of people who watched out for me because I stuck out so much, but who also never talked to me.  I sortof sashayed on my way back home with my excuse to at least be late to work, and was completely struck by the panic on every one's faces and the number of people walking around using their cell phones.  I thought it was hilarious.  I was so unconnected from these people that whatever was going on with them, was certainly not associated with me.

I ran up the stairs to the 4th floor where Rachel was still in bed, and laughing, I said, "All hell has broken loose outside!  Everyone is going crazy!  EVERYONE is on their cell phones!"  She laughed we talked for a few minutes about what we thought it was, and I explained that the subway wasn't running.  "Jungle Boogie" began to chirp out from my cell phone, and I went to answer it, still with a smile on my face.  It was my Dad, and he, clearly upset, blurted out, "Are you ok?!"  "Yeah, of course, what do you mean?"  and all he said was, "The twin towers are gone!"

I saw it immediately in my head.  I don't know why I was given an exact moving picture in my mind of what had happened, but I saw them crumble in my mind as my Dad was trying to explain, and I was trying to relay the information to Rachel.  She was starting to go into shock. 

We didn't have TV, so we turned on the radio, but they were only telling us what Dad had already told us.  He also said that they had been trying to get through to us for a while but that the call wouldn't go through, and I began to feel a sickness, that I can feel even now, that I had been smiling, amused by the people in the street who were trying to call their families and couldn't get through.

After we hung up with him, we realized that the alarm for the door to the roof was going off, so we went up there and the door was open, but no one was outside.  We stepped out onto the gravely uneven rooftop, and looked out toward Manhattan.  All we could see was smoke.  We needed answers.  Everyone did- the whole country- the whole world.  I wrote in my journal early that day about all the things that had happened and some of the information isn't right.  Or maybe we don't report all of it anymore.  But I had some of the locations wrong, and we thought that it was a strike that was going to continue all day all over the east coast.

Well there wasn't much to do at that point but try to get the answers that we needed, and the only way to do that was to talk it out, and later, to walk.  Rachel was panicked for a while.  She couldn't understand what my Dad had meant when he said "The Twin Towers are gone."  It seemed like she couldn't see the picture in her head of them falling, like I had, and at the time I couldn't understand why she was so confused.  But it didn't seem like long before we were discussing what had to be done.

We went on a walk to the Brooklyn Library, and the Museum that had pieces of Greek sculpture outside behind a fence.  We said that we would join the Army- that we were ready- if that was necessary.  We really meant that.  We headed to the Western Meat Company that was just a regular grocery store down the street from us that had a smiling Cactus for a Mascot, and got stuff for hamburgers.  That was the day that Rachel and I decided that there was no use for anything but sharp cheddar.  They were the best food I've ever had- and that is no exaggeration.  The extremity we were facing made us need something we could feel and taste- that made us and our bodies and our neighborhood real.  The store was packed.  We waited in line for about 45 minutes to buy those ingredients, and I remember our checker, Cinnamon, had her name tattooed on her arm.  Everyone had to get out and do something, trying to pretend that it wasn't to stock up... in case.

Our phones started working after that, and our friends Tony, Diane, and Mickey called and asked if we wanted to come with them to walk down to the Brooklyn Promenade, and see what we could see.  Its across the river just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking out at lower Manhattan.  And it was a long walk, but when we got there...  See, this is one of the things that no one cares about, that is so hard for me to express.  What we saw from the promenade was so terrible and telling, that I don't trust anyone to care enough, much less understand, when I say it.

We were about 4,500 feet from the towers.  Less than a mile.  The FDR is the highway that runs along the edge of the island.  We stood there watching smoke rise from behind the buildings and as we watched, ambulances raced out to the FDR carrying victims, leaving a trail of dust gathered while parked, like a toy truck playing in the bottom of a fireplace.  Debris floated across the river and came to rest on the rail that separated us from the river, on the arms of the people around us, in our hair.

We watched for as long as we could.  And we walked back to Tony's place, pretty near ours in (but in a considerably nicer part of) Brooklyn.  He had TV, and Rachel and I saw our first real images of the events of the morning.  We saw that picture of the first plane in the top of the tower, its tail sticking out and all that smoke, and then the second, and finally I saw actual video coverage of what I had already seen in my mind.  It was so horrible to see it on a screen- those big gray buildings, just crumbling to dust.  And we saw the people running in the streets, and the people jumping from windows- screaming in my mind "Why do windows that high up even open?!" but thinking I might have done the same thing.

And then something very strange happened.  It had been a long, long day already, and the sun was still up.  It was fraught with anxiety and guilt and confusion and nationalist fury.  And as our small group of friends were sitting there watching the news people try to send something hopeful out to the citizens of New York, they showed a picture of a car window, coated in thick heavy dust.  With their finger, someone had written in the dust, "This won't stop New York."  And we sat there for a curious moment before Mickey said, "Its a good thing there was no comma in there."

We laughed so hard, a couple of us started coughing and hacking and wiping away tears.

It was a Tuesday, of course, and by Thursday, breathing it, and smelling it, and walking past Missing signs, we couldn't talk about it anymore.  It was months of a new Subway route every day to get around ground zero, and trying not to breathe at the stops that were near as the weeks went by and the smell got more acrid.  And enough time passing that the missing signs were taken down because... there wasn't hope now, but the families making more signs and taping them back up.  It was strangers kneeling and praying together in the streets, and people standing in line to buy our glasses that had the New York Skyline on them, including the now beloved towers, and the Mayor begging people to go out and spend money, and the bosses thanking God that they ordered those Skyline glasses or we'd all be out of a job.  It became whispered jokes between friends to be more respectful of that dust on the camera because, "That's some body's relatives", and being frozen with reality again when gym contracts were cancelled with death certificates from Sep-11-01.  There was free grief counseling, and later when I worked for a PR company, events giving the families of the victims huge gifts of free tickets to the Opera and the Zoo and the Ballet and Broadway Shows.  Even people like me, who didn't know until it was all over, couldn't sleep at night for months.  An airplane dropped an engine in Queens a few months later- just an accident- but I heard a woman crying and saying, "Not again... It can't be happening again..."

Those months were heavy with- things.  I wrote poetry about the sadness I couldn't kick.  And my best friend Gary, who lived in Midtown and had left his window open just a crack that day, telling me about how Swiffer Wet was the only thing that could get the inch thick of dense grey dust off of all of his stuff.  The Red Cross measures the amount of blood they have available in how many days of use it would take to run out.  They usually have about a week of blood.  In those months they had 17 days of blood because when all of the millions of people in this country, and especially in Manhattan, could do nothing for the people around them, they gave their own blood, just to be helping someone.

There are memorials all over town, that were built outside of fire stations and in the subways in the weeks that followed, for the first responders who died helping.  They were piled with flowers, and as the flowers began to wilt, more flowers were just piled on top, because no one could bear to throw away people's anguish.

My friend Nichole had been away in September- sailing across the Atlantic- and when she came back, she said the city was a different city.  She didn't know her way around- didn't recognize the people.  I had tried to get on that ship  and was really glad that I had failed to find a sponsor.  Because I feel like if something like this had to happen, I want to have tangible experience with it.  Like the papers that landed in the street out on our side of the river with the letterhead from the companies on the top floors of the towers.  And watching Rachel reach into her wallet and pull out the tickets that we had meant to use, and realized that now we couldn't, to go to the observation deck of the 102nd floor. 

I've lied on occasion about when I knew, and what I saw.  'Don't know of you know, but I struggle with "the lying" here and there.  I feel guilty that I didn't know until both towers had fallen and all of those people had died or were trapped.  I feel guilty that I was "there", and can't give a better account.  I feel angry that I didn't know earlier, because I feel unjustified in having a very emotional response to the anniversary every year, not just this one, and when I hear stupid songs on the radio like "Have You Forgotten" by Alan Jackson or something and have to change the station, and when they're talking about terrorists on NPR this morning and I nearly burst out in tears in the post office when I get stamps with the Statue of Liberty on them.  I'm angry that I feel so much about it, when I found out last.  I'm angry that my Home Teacher back then treated me like my feelings didn't matter because I wasn't "from New York", so even though I was there, it wasn't real for me- I didn't get it. 

I'm mad because they keep talking about that morning here in Utah, and what it was like to experience it from here, and I feel like my reaction doesn't count so why should theirs?  I wasn't in the street when the planes hit.  I'm not in the pictures of the people fleeing in the amid cars.  I didn't know anyone who died.  So I don't talk about it because I don't know where my grief fits.  So if you read this, I'm kinda mad at you because I'm afraid to trust you to feel for me, because I feel like no one does- and no one should.  Because it happened to all of us, and there's no room to feel for me when every one is going through something like it.

So that's what I have to say about September 11, 2001.