It was a beautiful day.
That is what I always remember first. That is what always comes up among friends of mine who, like me, were there on the island when it happened, when we tell each other stories about our experience of that day, to reassure ourselves that, yes, it happened. It didn't just happen on cable news documentaries and within presidential campaign rhetoric. It happened, and it happened all around us.
It was a beauitful day that felt like the first day of fall, with a beautiful blue sky, and none of the humidity that so mars the New York summers.
I slept in. I had been up that night until two in the morning, writing speeches that would never be given, for a primary election that would not be completed. People forget that -- it was a primary day. A few stories would trickle out over the weeks ahead, about a few people who saved their lives by delaying their arrival at work by stopping and voting. For many kids, it was also the first day of school, and so there were also stories about the parents who saved their lives by deciding to drop their children off that day before heading into work.
I woke up at 8:45 AM. I woke up without an alarm, and the only sign I had suggesting that something was wrong was just a distant sound of a police siren. I was at 73rd and Central Park, and I was a good six miles away.
I signed on to my dial-up, and read it on the news ticker a quick AP headline -- an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. There was no article linked to it yet. It was just a headline. Plane crashes into World Trade Center. Developing.
There was, after all, that brief half hour when we thought it could've been an accident, that it wasn't intentional, that it was a fluke.
I called the office of the mayoral campaign on which I was working. Someone picked up the phone and said, just get down here, the election's still on, just come down right now, and she then hung up. I did as told. I showered, dressed, and stopped in front of the television and watched the building with the gaping hole in the side.
I walked outside. The ACE train was closed. I could walk -- it wasn't that far to 45th and Lexington. I could walk through the Park. That would be pleasant, I thought. I could walk through the Park.
As I walked, I realized I was the only one walking south, and people, more and more people, were walking north through the park. At Central Park South, I stared down the Avenue of the Americas, and could see at the far end, at the other end of the island, just a wall of smoke.
Then I walked past Black Rock, the CBS building, as dozens of pedestrians just all stood, staring up at the large television screens on the building.
That is where and when I saw, on those screens. That is when I saw that one of the buildings had fallen down.
I walked further, and on the street, I ran into one of the other campaign workers. We looked at each other, and not knowing what else to do, we hugged, and slapped each other on the back the way that men often do when hugging other men. He was running to pick his daughter up out of her nursery school. He told me that the building on Lexington -- next door to Grand Central Station where within days National Guardsmen in their fatigues would become part of my daily commute -- where our campaign was headquartered had been evacuated.
We shook hands and parted. Take care, we both said. I realized I had not talked to anyone close to me, not my mother in Washington, DC, nor my father in Los Angeles, to say that I was fine. They knew that I was living far away from downtown. Still, I told myself that I needed to call them so they wouldn't worry. That is what I told myself. But of course, it had little to do with that. I needed to call them not for their comfort but for mine. I wanted to hear their voices, to tug on my mother's apron strings and sit at my father's side and hear that things would be fine, just fine.
My cell phone didn't work. (The tower, of course, took the cell phone coverage antenna that serviced most of the providers in the city down with it.) My mind worked mechanically, making a list, an assessment of simple tasks that I could check, check, check off. My cell phone did not work; fine, I could use a payphone. But to use a payphone, I needed coins. Good. I could get coins. But to get coins, I needed change, and to get change, I needed to buy something, and to buy something, I needed money.
That is how your mind works when you are standing eighty blocks from where two tall buildings fell.
I walked into a bodega. I used the ATM machine there; the bank networks somehow were still up and running. Took out forty dollars. And bought the first three things I could think of. A Peach Snapple. A box of Wheat Thins. A box of Frosted Strawberry Pop-Tarts. You would later remember almost every detail about that day, even, no, especially the mundane ones. You loved the mundane details because they were the ones that somehow suggested that normalcy could be found here in the very heart of abnormal.
I took the change and tried a payphone. It didn't work. So much for that. So I walked back in the direction of the apartment where I had been staying for the past four months. And crossed back into Central Park.
I walked into the Sheep's Meadow. It was full of people, the way I had often seen it on summer days, except now most of these people were in suits and business attire, just sitting on the lawn, as if they were enjoying the day, the beautiful day. Some of the people seemed to have ash or debris on their suit coats, looking like they were covered in baker's flour. I remember that.
I went back to the apartment. There was no long distance on the phone. I could make local calls. But then I was able to use dial-up on a local line. Signed onto my instant message program. Immediately, a friend IMed me -- "Thank God." And so I was now accounted for. He lived much farther south on the Island, on the Lower East Side, and heard sirens that morning, and went outside to stare at the towers in flames.
The next several hours, friends in Tribeca, friends in Brooklyn, friends in Astoria instant messaged each other, trying to account for everyone we all knew. A friend of mine in San Francisco was online. I asked him to call up my mother in DC and my father in LA and tell them I was okay. I was fine. I would call them as soon as I could. He called them and passed them the messages.
I spent the afternoon in my bedroom, IMing with friends in the city, where sometimes the most nuanced things coming from our keystrokes were, "WHAT THE FUCK?" We exclaimed, we consoled, we joked. We had to joke. Instant message was a wonderful medium. You could communicate with your friends, and they did not have to know that you couldn't actually talk right then because you were crying.
A friend of mine said that it was a night where you did not want to sleep alone, that ever there was a night that you wanted someone close to you, it was this one. That was the case. I called up a woman I had been out on a few dates with a few months before. She was up in the west 90s. I don't know what I was thinking. No, of course, I do. It was like buying the Pop-tarts and Peach Snapple. It was clinging to some mundane details or normalcy. And I did not want to be alone.
We met up for drinks with another friend of hers at some Brazilian restaurant on Columbus. We then went back to her place. But instead of making out, or sleeping together, or whatever people do in normalcy after having had several drinks, we watched Giuliani give a press conference while we sat at the foot of her bed. I excused myself after it was done, and walked the twenty-five blocks back to my apartment.
I didn't go out the next day.
Thursday, I met at the campaign offices with the rest of the campaign staff. Afterwards, a group of us walked over to the 34th Street Armory, where counseling was being provided to grieving loved ones. To see if we could help. We were turned away. They had all the help they could handle right now.
That was when I started seeing the fliers. You would see them everywhere over the next few weeks. eight and a half by eleven, the photocopies one could make at Kinkos for five cents a pop, fliers of loved ones missing. They multiplied exponentially over the next few days. The photos were always from happy occasions. Someone's wedding. Someone's college graduation, wearing the mortarboard and gown. Someone holding his baby.
So we walked west, over to the Javits Center, where the volunteer effort was headquartered. The line of New Yorkers eager to help, eager to do something, was around the block. Literally, a line of more than a thousand people. There to see if there was anything they could do.
I had spent the past four or five months as a speechwriter in a mayoral campaign where I often wrote cliched, ham-fisted boilerplate about how New York was the greatest city in the world and how New Yorkers were unlike people from any other city.
I would write about the beating heart of New York, and the can-do attitude, and so many more slogans of hyperbole and hack cliches that could have been ripped out of an Ed Koch quotebook. I didn't buy it, but I could fake it.
But there at the Javits Center, seeing those hundreds upon hundreds of people lining up to help, I finally began to get it.
The volunteer coordinators turned us away -- they had enough people for the day. So we walked back north to the Upper West Side, and did what we all did a lot of the next few months. We drank.
It was four in the afternoon. I had a schooner of beer.
Like I said, the details you hold onto are the mundane ones. A schooner of beer, a purchase at a Bodega, a receipt from a burrito place. What moves me beyond no end is that the memories from five years ago are more vivid than my memories from a day last week.
I will remember the smell of ash -- there were days after that Tuesday when the wind would blow northward, and that acrid, foul scent was everywhere you turned on the island. I remember how one's eyes could become so irritated and you didn't even want to think about what was now resting in your lungs, your lungs that tightened up when you tried to take a deep breath.
I remember opening up the Times every morning, and before turning to the Sports Pages, or the movie reviews, or the articles about campaigns and elections, I would turn to the Portraits of Grief. A friend of mine once said that she read them every morning first, out of obligation and respect. She was right. There are worse reasons to do something than obligation and respect.
And I remember the music -- is that strange? The songs I listened to over and over and over again during the next month, at home, at work, when I ran my morning mile or two around the Central Park Reservoir. U2's "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," Ryan Adams' "New York New York." "Mississippi" off the Bob Dylan record that had been released that week -- "Stick with me, baby, stick with me, anyway, things'll start getting interesting right about now."
I remember people smiling at each other on subway cars. I remember people saying, Take care, with great frequency. I'd never heard strangers in New York say take care to each other. They sounded like they meant it.
And I remember, so well, that uncharacteristic silence the week after that Tuesday, when there were no airplanes flying overhead. You become so used to the white noise that surrounds you, that when the airplanes were now gone, there was an uncomfortable quiet all around the town. And how when a military jet flew overhead, all the pedestrians around you would stop walking, say nothing, and just stare up to watch the jet pass. And then, once it had passed over, just continue on their way.
Now I live in a city where the disasters we expect are more the ones of Mother Nature, the ones of fault lines and Richter scales. We even console ourselves with the idea (borne from denial, of course) that somehow the sprawl of where we live somehow makes us a less desirable target for a future attack.
The deal one makes in living in Los Angeles is that tacit understanding that any second, one 7.0 or 8.0 or larger earthquake can completely push any notion of a status quo out the window. Perhaps we kid ourselves that our city can't be a target of terrorism, because we can't handle now making a separate deal or understanding with ourselves that has nothing to do with the expectation of earthquakes.
This morning, I heard from a friend of mine in New York, who said that today was a beautiful day. "Same weather," he said, and left it at that.
This morning, I woke up in Los Angeles at 5:45 AM, without an alarm clock.
It was 8:45 in New York, the same time I woke up in Manhattan five years ago.
I couldn't get back to sleep. I stayed in bed, and stared out the window, and watched night slowly give in to day.