Those first couple of years after 9/11 were tough for a lot us here in New York City. On the second anniversary, I met up with a friend and we rode our bikes down to Ground Zero to pay our respects. But by the third year, the area around the disaster zone had turned into a repellent circus of politicized shouting matches between sign-carrying war lovers, bullhorn-screaming conspiracy theorists and an assortment of other freaks who all sounded as if they were filled with self serving certitude, rage and delusion.
I was barely awake, hungover and headed to my job at World Financial Center when it all went down on September 11, 2001. I lived in Stuyvesant Town, right on the corner of 14th Street and 1st Ave. I hadn’t turned on my TV. After a night of frozen margaritas, the chatter of a morning show had no appeal. When I got outside, there were people pointing towards the towers. I looked and saw the smoke. Someone said a plane had hit the building. I thought maybe it was a small cessna or something. I figured I would watch from my cube on the 28th floor of the American Express building.
I got on a N or R train, I honestly can’t remember which one, at Union Square after the first plane had hit. The car was crowded ― some eating bagels, drinking coffee. A lot of people were reading the Daily News, the New York Post, mostly I remember blaring headlines about Chandra Levy, the federal intern who had disappeared in D.C.
Somewhere just past Canal street, the train stopped. We sat there for a few minutes until the conductor said trains were apparently backed up. Several more minutes turned into at least an hour, then what felt like two. The conductor said: Please, ladies and gentlemen, the Twin Towers, something has happened, people are walking on the tracks, do not leave the train. There is an emergency situation at the World Trade Center.
A large woman with a baby crying started to scream, “I have to pee.” Normally stoic subway riders were looking about, we all made eye contact at one time or another, clearly we had no idea what had happened up above. Finally, the conductor told us that a few trains would be backed together, so we could evacuate by walking through the cars to the city hall stop. Evacuate was the word he used, and it has been stuck in my memory since that day.
When we came out, smoke and dust filled the air. It hit me that whatever plowed into that building was bigger than a cessna. I joined the now familiar dust-covered masses and marched uptown. A man on a bullhorn shouted walk uptown, “Do not use your cell phones, do not use your cell phones! Keep walking.”
My cell phone was out of whack, anyway. I made it as far as LaGuardia before my phone would work. I was thinking, I have to find somebody that I know. I listened to voicemail, there were several frantic sounding messages. Friends, family, everyone calling, crying and screaming literally begging me to call them now. To this day, I think my reaction to those calls was, why are they so upset?
I do not remember how or when I learned the towers actually fell. It is a mystery to me when that image became part of my conscience. I don’t remember when it entered my brain, how it came to haunt me so, to make me cry each time I watched it. For weeks afterwards, I was glued to the TV watching them fall, over and over again.
Maybe my obsession with the footage was my brain’s way of coping. Later that day, I found friends and we went to the foot of Christopher street and hugged each other. Everyone was in a state of shock. We looked south, and we saw this big gap in our skyline. Our twin towers were gone.
Even later that afternoon, a friend and I walked down through Tribeca and tried to get a close view of what happened.. We made it pretty far downtown on Greenwich. Thousands of people were in the streets. By around 5:20 p.m., we were standing there watching. People all around us were saying it was going to fall. Minutes earlier, my mom had called from Alabama. She was hysterical. And, as we talked, the 45 (or so) story 7 World Trade Center building came tumbling down. My mom screamed: Cody go home! Go home, those buildings are going to fall on you! I can only imagine my mother’s fear. My friend, clearly in some sort of shock, just kept saying, “Come on, man, run. I don’t want to get that shit all over me.” We took off running. People were screaming. My reality felt off the hook.
That night, ashes rained down on the East Village. A putrid smell of something burning filled the air. I was still with my friend. We found another group of friends at a small bar that had managed to open on 2nd Avenue, and we all shared our stories. My friend stayed over. At some point, my roommate came in my room and asked me to close my window. The smell from outside had permeated the apartment. By then, I was resigned to the idea that anything—absolutely anything at all—is possible. This was our apocalypse. We were living it. Chaos was normal. It wasn’t until the next day that another sort of pain, an awful haunting pain, hit me in my stomach.
I lived near Beth Israel Hospital and all the street lamp posts, in fact, any sort of open space were covered with handmade flyers or posters of people, smiling, happy moments ― maybe weddings, parties, graduation.
Mostly 8x10 copied photos of the missing, the people unaccounted for, of which there were almost 3,000 of them. They each had details about the person, height, weight, other traits. They had been created by families, friends or loved ones of those people who were buried in that smoldering rubble downtown.
On the third day after the towers fell, my boss from my job called me. He was making certain that everyone from our company was accounted for. I let him know I was okay. At some point during the aftermath, Union Square park had been turned into a makeshift memorial filled with posters and flyers of the missing, now increasingly assumed dead. As I was walking through all the posters, photos and other memorabilia, I saw a friend and we stood there and then we held each other for a good five minutes and wept. We didn’t say a word, we just looked at each other and cried, sharing our love and connection, our devotion to this city we call home. And then, we simply walked away.
I often think about that awful time. Lately, I think about all those who died in a more personal way. Would I have met any of them? What great things might they have done for the city? How many beautiful or special children might have been born? How many holidays would they have gone home for? Maybe I passed them on the street, or at a bar, perhaps I should have said hello.
Since 9/11, I’ve met grief that has come close to pushing me over the edge. In 2010, I lost my only sister, unexpectedly to an aortic aneurysm. Then, in 2014, my mother died from a stroke. To this day I believe a broken heart played a role in her death. And now, when I consider all the heartache the families of those 9/11 victims, who bless their sweet hearts, held onto hope until the very last minute as mothers, fathers or brothers picked out pictures from a family album or a frame on the wall, then took it down to the copy store, wrote some text and Xeroxed off... they took those hundreds of posters and flyers and pasted them on lamp posts or walls all across town, hoping that someone might recognize their missing loved one and that they were still alive.
Much of what 9/11 came to stand for got co-opted by politics. Perhaps the most awful thing was the way it got used was as an excuse for the invasion of Iraq. More lives lost, and for what? Over time, the events of that day have been further cheapened by the branding of the event—the deep, personal and real pain has in some ways been numbed out by trivialization— slogans. When we cite the thousands who died, or when we instruct people to never forget, do we even begin to try and process the absolute horror the victims went through as those towers fell or those planes crashed or the everlasting heartbreak—the cruel grief survivors live with daily?
I’d like to think most of us in New York City have processed much of what happened here on 9/11. The World Trade Center site has been rebuilt, and there is a powerful memorial and museum. Millions from around the world visit Ground Zero each year, and they connect to the tragedy but also, the hope. New York City is moving along, it is stronger than ever, this brilliant city is a testament to mankind’s resilience.
I think the ultimate life lesson I’ve personally taken in those 16 years since 9/11 is that the world is not pretty. Yes, there is beauty all around us, and if you take a minute to stop and absorb it, life’s worth is reaffirmed. But the world is really just a combination of the ugly awful and the splendid good. Somewhere between the two, there is a middle place— it’s the place we all strive to find.