It has been six years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and for the first time the anniversary falls on a Tuesday. This morning the murdered were honored in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Shanksville, PA. As the years pass the cry gets more and more quiet, as they say that time heals all wounds. I sincerely hope that is only true in this instance only when we have defeated our enemies, and even then I hope the cry remains, however blunted. If folks are still traveling to Hawaii to visit the site of the submerged Arizona, then shall they be visiting Ground Zero sixty years hence. A Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, thankfully only comes around once in a generation, but these happenings should be remembered forever. With that in mind on this six year anniversary, I am going to lay out for the readers my own personal connection to the World Trade Center and 9/11.My then fiancé and I moved to Santa Barbara in the middle of August, 2001, from West Orange, NJ. She was a schoolteacher in northwest Jersey and I worked as an administrator in the Athletic Department of Pace University in downtown Manhattan. We both loved our jobs, but I had been living in NJ for 11 years and she had been there nine. Realizing we were not getting any younger, and that with age comes the reluctance to uproot, we decided to drop everything, pack up the cars, and migrate west to our little paradise here in Santa Barbara. We started driving the 3000 plus miles on August 13 and arrived here August 21, precisely two weeks prior to the attacks.
A little context helps here: I had commuted through the WTC every day for three years by the time I quit my job at the University. Getting that job at Pace University was the legitimizing moment of my career. Having moved from New Hampshire to New Jersey after graduating high school, getting work in the city was my number one goal, and I had achieved it. I walked amongst the Wall Street elite and the corner booksellers on Nassau and Park Row. I drank 19 thousand beers at the Blarney Stone on Fulton. I ate lunch in the park in front of City Hall and wandered amongst the 300 year old tombstones at the Trinity Church. I was certainly part of the culture of the melting pot that is New York City, and I loved it. I even loved the commute, via Path train from Harrison, New Jersey (where many of the scenes of the opening credits of the Sopranos were filmed). Along the way you could watch the skyline from across the river as you approached the city, a skyline dominated by the twin towers. Walk beneath them and you were in awe. So many times I said to myself on that commute, “you made it, man.” I was proud of those buildings, proud of my city. As a Yankee fan, I can tell you there is nothing like standing in the shadows of the towers, in the Canyon of Heroes, as the triumphant Yankees march up Broadway to City Hall in the years they win the World Series. Another image comes to mind, from Tim Levitch’s film “The Cruise,” where he says if you stand in the middle of the courtyard between the towers, look up, and spin around until you get a little dizzy, then lie down on the ground looking up, the towers will twist and intertwine themselves in your vision. It’s very trippy, and it works; I’ve tried it.
Fast forward: when we got here to SB we were put up by a friend for a couple of months until we secured our own housing. So it was that I was awoken that fateful morning by a roommate in time to see the second plane impact. Unemployed, I was glued to the news channels interminably. Unable to get any phone calls through to the area for weeks was devastating. The cell towers were on top of the trade center, so wireless was definitely out. They had no power in the neighborhood for weeks, so I couldn’t get through to anybody at Pace for awhile. I had 25 work-study employees and the entire men’s basketball team and coaching staff housed down there, and I couldn’t find out for weeks if anyone had survived the collapses. I didn’t know if Dave Butler the Irish bartender at the Blarney Stone, or Bernard the giant black guy that was my friend and partner-in-beer, had made it. The bar was two blocks from 5 WTC. There’s video of the collapse clouds blasting down Fulton St. right in front of the place. My stomach clenches every time I see that clip. I didn’t know if Frenchy the bookseller, with his simple “Any book a dollar” sign on cardboard, had set up his table on the corner of Broadway and Park Row yet. The Italian guy behind the counter at Ray Bari’s on Nassau, who served me my daily slice: did he step outside to take a look just before it all came down? The Korean kids that ran the video game shop right next door to Ray’s: how many of those kids who I had mashed buttons with on the house Soul Calibur machine were outside in the street when all the air got sucked out of the sky? During all this time of confusion I was tormented with nightmares of where I would have been at the time of the attacks. If I had not been on one of the Path trains on it’s way to the basement of the WTC at the very moments of the first impact, I would certainly have been standing right underneath the towers as they came crashing down. So my bullet missed me by two weeks precisely. Others were not so lucky.
I’ve spent hours upon hours of scouring the lists of the dead online over the course of the last six years. There are some very comprehensive databases out there with pictures of the victims. Click, load the next profile, don’t know him; click, load the next profile, don’t know her; click, load the next profile, it’s Jemal DeSantis. Jemal was just one of the guys I recognized as killed in the attacks. He and three full basketball teams of Cantor Fitzgerald employees perished. We ran a corporate basketball league out of our gym, and I would officiate the games. The bulk of the people I knew that died on 9/11 would come from this group.
When it was all said and done, I locked down 36 names. There could be more but I haven’t pored over those sites for years. I lost no Pace employees, and nobody from our basketball team was killed or injured. My friend Jeff Ruggiero worked up high in the Trade Center, but he decided to stay home from work that day to take care of his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time. Small miracles like that buoy me when I feel down about 9/11.
Whenever I go back to the tri-state I go to Ground Zero. I shed a few tears at the site, thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t there that day, and head over to Ray Bari’s for a slice. From there I proceed to Frenchy’s table and pick up a paperback for the train ride back, for which he never charges me that dollar. He knows he’s going to get it from me when I buy him a beer or three at the Blarney Stone after the lunch hour rush has subsided. If it’s before noon, Bernard is almost definitely going to be in there to quaff a pre-lunch beer with his old buddy.
When it’s time to leave, it’s a round of hugs and back on the train for another ride back to Jersey. These days it’s a cathartic ride, and I don’t get to do it very often, but when I do it’s really easy for me to look back on the city as I’m hurtling across the river back toward the Garden State. A part of me will always reside there, 9/11 or not.
This American will never forget his generation’s Pearl Harbor.
7 comments:
Thanks for sharing that - it makes it so very real to hear about the individual characters you know.
Uh, I think you mean our generation's Pearl Harbor, when we were attacked, though, not D-Day, when we invaded France to wipe out the Nazi's. I do believe people will still be commemorating the towers 60 years from now, though, and beyond. Who knows what will transpire between now and then?
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Holy cow what a dumb mistake. I did it not once but twice! Thanks for the heads up.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and recollections of 9/11. I lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and moved to Santa Barbara a couple of years later - I understand and can fully relate to the thoughts and feelings you describe, both upon watching the events of 9/11 unfold, in searching for news of your friends, acquaintances and familiar faces, and upon returning to NY and NJ in the months and years since then, something I also do every chance I get - there is nothing like it, an energy and a richness to life there that is difficult to fully understand and appreciate without having lived there.
I too hope people will "never forget" and am particularly appalled when I hear or read people telling others they need to simply "move on" and "get over it", or far worse, pushing absurd conspiracy theories about the events of 9/11. Over time, most events begin to recede into the past but it is as important that succeeding generations be reminded of and taught about the events of 9/11, just as it was and is that we teach them about the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations and the other events that mark critical moments or turning points in history.
In fact, I think the 9/11 events were wildly over-hyped. I too have lived in NYC, and have a friend who watched the second plane hit from his rooftop.
The Bush administration chose to use the attack as a excuse for their seizure of new presidential powers. The terrorists used it to for propaganda. In calling it an act of war rather than a criminal act, Bush actually handed them the propaganda victory. In fact its importance is symbolic. Crime, disease, war, famine, environmental degradation and so on dwarf the event of 9/11 both in human suffering and in societal effect. In other words 9/11 was important precisely because it was hyped and used by both sides to justify the unjustifiable, not because it had a an inherent radical impact on the nation.
Let's also mourn the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, the victims of Darfur, the millions dead in the Congo, the 30,000 American casualties in a pointless war. Let's start paying attention to the fact that the EPA told rescue workers that the WTC dust was safe to breathe. Many are already coming down with lung diseases. The list of more important events goes on and on.
Come on people, grow up!
nameless 955: I would argue that it had an inherent radical impact on our society. I don't know what hole your head is buried in. I am going to guess that you are against this war on terror? Do you think that 9/11 had nothing to do with us deposing the Taliban? Or deciding to depose Saddam Hussein because intelligence estimated he was capable of producing WMD's and providing them to proxies to use against American interests, be they domestic or international?
I do also mourn the deaths of innocent Iraqis, especially ones who were caught in the crossfire of a war between Coalition forces and a ruthless insurgency. The Congo, Darfur, limbless American soldiers, I feel for them all. But as an American, nothing stabs me in the heart like a good old fashioned terrorist attack on our soil, killing thousands of innocent American civilians. Maybe it's just me.
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