A 9/11 Memory: A Historic Day, and Just Another One

Whenever this day arrives, I think of how popular culture usually depicts momentous days in history as ones where ordinary life stands still, and the way it really is: the momentous thing happens, but there are also all of these ordinary things that have to occur as if it were a day like any other.

The day began with me waking up at 7 AM at our apartment in downtown Brooklyn (actually two rented floors of a brownstone) planning to throw on some clothes, wolf down breakfast and trek to Newark, where I was a television critic for the Star-Ledger, and get started early on a piece that was due to be filed that afternoon. My regular route began on the A train, which I boarded at a stop near our home, and continued through the World Trade Center, a major hub for the PATH trains that carried commuters underneath the Hudson River separating New York and New Jersey. But I’d been up quite late the previous night and made a snap decision to sleep in instead. If I’d gone with my original plan, I might’ve been inside the subway station at the World Trade Center when one of the planes struck a tower — there are thousands and thousands of these sorts of stories about that day.

I was awaken by my colleague Alan Sepinwall, now the TV critic of Rolling Stone, calling me and waking me up to tell me that I should turn on my TV because a plane had just struck one of the towers. The rest of the day was a bizarre mix of the horrific and the mundane. I stayed glued to the TV making notes on the coverage and trying to get in touch with my editors at the paper to see what they wanted me to write and when to file it, which wasn’t easy because both landline service and cell phone service were spotty at best thanks to all the people checking in on loved ones. (I ended up doing a column about the personal experience of that day in New York, which appeared in the following day’s edition).

Meanwhile, my wife Jennifer walked Hannah to the elementary school about a mile from our house (classes weren’t canceled because nobody knew it was terrorism yet, or how bad things were about to get) and returned home to watch the coverage with me. We were also anticipating having a get-together with friends that night at the house, a dinner that ended up not happening, and there were discussions about whether to preemptively cancel that, because we couldn’t get in touch with the guests. It’s odd recalling these details knowing now that people were dying in the burning towers and that more of them would die when the buildings collapsed, as well as when another plane struck the Pentagon and yet another went down in a field in Pennsylvania after passenger rebelled. This eerie, dislocated feeling is probably a thing that most people struggle with when something huge and awful is happening in their city or country or somewhere else in the world and it doesn’t affect them directly and life has to go on in some form while the news is unfolding.

After the second tower collapsed, ash-covered citizens who’d been in downtown Manhattan came over the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges into Brooklyn to escape the disaster. Our neighborhood was not too far from the off-ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge. That meant that we began seeing people covered in ash wandering the sidewalks of our little block. One of them rang our doorbell while Jen was across the street commiserating with neighbors. He was a young man in a suit carrying a briefcase. He said his name was Peter and he worked downtown and lived in New Jersey now but used to live on this block, in the large apartment complex next door to the house Jen and Hannah and I were staying in. Peter asked if he could come inside and use the landline to try to call his fiancée across the river. Of course I said yes, and he sat at the kitchen table and told me about the experience of being downtown during that hell, periodically interrupting the narrative to use the wireless landline receiver to try to reach his fiancée but never succeeding.

Then he went outside and continued trying to reach his fiancée on his flip phone. He kept calling and calling but none of the calls went through because the grid had gone haywire from all the communications traffic. I watched more of the coverage and wrote a bit and kept trying to reach my editors, or just get online to send an email (those were the dial-up modem days), and never had any luck. Then I’d go downstairs or outside to see what was going on with Peter. He was pacing around, obsessively trying his flip phone. He paused to tell me he still hadn’t had any luck when suddenly his ringer went off. He pulled his phone from his pocket, flipped it open and answered, “I’m alive.” It was his fiancée.

Meanwhile, by this point, thousands of people were dead from the worst terrorist attacks ever to occur on US soil. Families who were expecting a day trader or a police officer or a sanitation worker or a firefighter or a secretary or just some random civilian who’d been downtown that morning to return home as always hadn’t gotten the call yet telling them that there was going to be an empty seat at the table.

I think Jen ended up picking up Hannah from school early, probably midday, and I think she got the information that the school was being closed from another neighbor who’d somehow managed to get onto the grid or through the phone system, though I can’t remember for sure because it was so long ago. I do remember Jen leaving the house and going back to the school to pick Hannah up and saying that she didn’t know what to tell her about what had happened that day besides the facts of it.

Nobody really knew the full extent of it yet. We certainly couldn’t have imagined that two entire wars plus a sort of global secret third war (consisting of intelligence work) would be fought over the events of that day, or that civil liberties would be drastically rolled back in the name of security, or that life as we’d all known it would be substantially reconfigured very quickly, also in the name of security. And we didn’t know how poisonous the air was in greater New York City as a result of the attacks and the months-long unending smolder at Ground Zero because public officials at first didn’t know and later lied to the public about it, to keep the local economy going. (Sound familiar?)

My brother Jeremy had a Dotcom business in a building six blocks from the World Trade Center that had miraculously survived the Dotcom bust of a year earlier and was struggling along. He and his colleagues continued to work there because they’d been assured its was safe. Jeremy developed a horrible cough, the worst I’d ever heard from him, and eventually suffered what he feared was a heart attack, only to discover later after a doctor’s examination that the force of his coughing had torn the cartilage around his heart.

I walked down to Brooklyn Bridge Park with a film camera to take a look at the changed skyline. I still have the photos somewhere, in storage. People were leaning on the railing, taking pictures. Some of them were crying. Plumes of gray smoke and ash were rising from lower Manhattan. I remember seeing an aerial photo of lower Manhattan later that week where you could see the plume expanding as it rose above the city. Something about the perspective made it seem as if a mighty funnel cloud was touching down on Manhattan and tearing that part of the city to shreds.

We ate dinner that night at the house as if it was just another Tuesday evening in September. There were people on the 24-hour news stations calling for war (even though we didn’t really know for sure who did it yet) and also for the legalization of torture to get information on the perpetrators. There were news reporters on TV and on the radio talking about all the people who were “lost,” i.e. unaccounted for. Hannah put her favorite lovely, a tiny beanbag squirrel, inside of an empty Pringles can and put the can under her bed because she didn’t want the squirrel to get lost. We read bedtime stories to her that night, same as always.