For some reason, I never tried to publish my story of September 11, 2001. As the years have gone by, I feel that so many other writers and artists who were impacted on that day have published or shared their reflections in some creative form.
I was 26-years-old when the Towers were attacked. I lived on Allen Street in Chinatown. I was working as a freelance writer. From my 5th-floor walk-up apartment, I could enough to be changed forever. On the days that followed, I wrote two stories. One is an account of the events of the day from my perspective in some sort of chronological order. The other piece I wrote was my reaction to the articles written in the New York Times. Last fall, I read my account of the events in my English class at Santa Monica College. The story is called, Allen Street, and I plan to publish it on this site when I finish the final edits.
This year marked the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. The New York Times included a special section in their Sunday paper called "The Reckoning." It was described as: "A special report on the decade's costs and consequences, measured in thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and countless challenges to the human spirit."
In the first article, N.B. Kleinfield writes an article called "Getting Here from There." He writes:
"It was called the saddest day in American history. The memories remain fresh and overwhelming. The trembling ground, the wall of smoke that shut off the sun, the choking dust, the ghastliness of the jumping people - the grievous loss of life and the epic acts of heroism. Exhausted phone lines that wouldn't connect to those who might have answers. People listening to car radios, reports of more planes in the sky, fears of more killers to come.
Also, the aching days and weeks and months after.
In Lower Manhattan, cordoned off with sawhorses for blocks around the smothering World Trade Center, the odious scent that persisted for months and wafted through the city. Was it burning tires? Unsettled souls?
Residents moving about in dust masks. The rats dislodged from their homes. The flatbed trucks and garbage trucks panting back and forth, loading the seemingly limitless detritus.
People buying parachutes and canoes, a way to get out next time. Buying bulletproof vests and ammunition. The prolonged hunt for remains. Funeral after funeral.
And Gary Condit and Chandra Levy and the past tumble of news excised from the nation's front pages, because the news - all the news was 9/11, everything twisting and turning out of that day."
I appreciate this section, the article by Kleinfield, and the coverage by the New York Times, especially since I felt the special section called, "The Fragile City," published on September 16, 2001, was covered by reporters who were "removed" from Lower Manhattan. The piece below was my raw reaction to the New York Times' coverage of September 11, 2001, just five days after the attacks.
I Don't Know Woody
September 16, 2001
On the News there was the same news. The war News. The new News. Industrial trucks rolled down Allen Street. The newspapers were tough to find in my neighborhood and even harder to digest. I read the words over and over again, but none of them caused the magnitude of the event failed to stimulate my emotional reserves. I must have been numb.
I read the News. There was an impulse to remind myself that horrible event that had happened. I hated myself for letting the story of my lifetime fall before me. I was too busy to report the news. On September 11, I had to write about farmers, wine vineyards, and movie stars -- the bounty that a selfish society used to want to read about. Suddenly, these topics seemed two days too old.
When the Times was delivered below Houston Street, I got to read the personal stories; the ones written by renown authors who already have book contracts and salaries that stem solely from writing. The writers who where contracted by the newspaper to write reflections on the terror got the chance of a lifetime to archive their memories and shape the way we see our new skyline.In the Sunday, September 17 issue of the New York Times staff writer Daphne Merkin writes in her article, “No Shortage of Heart Here”:
“The Upper East Side looked remarkably normal. A young woman and her mother were huddled over invitation samples in a tony stationary store, while the social X-ray ladies who hadn’t escaped to their country homes were out in full maquillage, strolling along Madison Avenue in their elegant post-luncheon dress or getting their hair blown in their favorite salons”
From the sounds of the passage, daily regimens on the Upper East Side seemed to have gone unfettered by the Financial District’s misfortune on September 11. Was Merkin suggesting that things were fine for real New Yorkers, more poignantly, established New Yorkers?
In another passage, Merkin unabashedly unveils to the reader that, yes indeed, she grew up in New York. The author’s seventh grader is also a true New Yorker. And, according to Merkin, New Yorker’s are unlike non-New Yorkers:
“If you grow up in the city, as I did and my daughter is doing, you learn at a young age not to be fazed by much. … New Yorkers, however, insist on being New Yorkers: Even during unprecedented catastrophes, they take things in stride in a way that one can’t imagine anywhere else…Call it admirable resilience or hardened indifference, it is a refusal to yield that right way to an adversary. Or perhaps it is an inextricable part of that capacious quality – that curious admixture of broadminded tolerance, gritty determination and genuine responsiveness – that characterizes New Yorkers and has always been wonderingly remarked upon by non-New Yorkers.”
Now, I haven’t lived here my whole life, and no matter how I spin it, I come in one shade: suburban white. Since my college graduation, I have been here trying make something of myself in the world’s greatest city. Granted I haven’t been in the city long enough to accurately judge most of its facets, but from my own experience, I know that for every glittering moment that I have experienced here, I have also experienced rejection, loss of confidence, and continual trips into manholes filled of frustration. I have been employed by the New York Times, scooped poop at a dog boarding facility, bussed tables and worked “for free” at more magazines than I care to share. Some successful people tell me that making it in New York is a matter of putting in time.
After stamping herself with an official NY stamp of approval, the author states:
“Right after my daughter and I passed the long line of blood donors outside Lenox Hill Hospital, we ran into Woody Allen, a friend of mine, who was crossing Madison Avenue with his wife. We stopped to talk about the terrorist attacks, but then we moved on to the life-must-go-on kind of things, apartments and schools and the Terrible Two’s. We left, Woody turned around and pointed a finger at my daughter: ‘I’ll call you for lunch,’ he said. She laughed politely, as if to humor him. Now, that could have never happened in Kansas.”
Christ! Dorothy, this city sure is not Kansas. And, is this really the time to name drop? Did Merkin have to say that Woody was a friend of hers? And where does her seventh-grade daughter get so much mojo, anyway? Woody Allen wanted to have lunch with her. Rather than feeling flattered thanking him, she laughed, “as if to humor him.” Nice kid.
It’s good to know that Woody Allen, one of the most renown new Yorkers were out and about the town on this day of terror. Merkin’s “Terrible Two’s” thing is sort of clever, I think? Was the day after the tragedy the right time to get back to the daily grind of “life-must-go-on kind of things?” I mean, those “kind of things” simply have to go on.
In another article that was published on September 16 as part of the New York Times, “After the Attacks” section, Mary Gordon wrote:
“I live uptown, at the other end of the city from the World Trade Center. No one I knew was hurt or lost or killed. I didn’t see the flames, the clouds or smoke, the toppling towers. The skies were blue, cloudless.”
My first thought was: Why did this woman bother to write an article. Was there a shortage, New York-based writers available? I seriously doubt they all were too busy writing about farmers and science fiction movies. Gordon writes:
“Walking around the streets of the Upper West Side, I saw no weeping. There were no sounds of lamentation. People seemed in a daze. What I kept hearing was: ‘I don’t know what to feel.’ Friends gathered in my living room to watch television all day. One friend, who had moved to New York from Philadelphia, only last week, phoned to say she just wanted to be with people. Just not to be alone. Everyone kept remarking on a sense of unreality, their suspicion that this was a virtual event, a hyperrealistic terror movie.”
For someone who knew no person in the towers, her comments were satisfactory. The author continues:
“I had an impulse to buy lots of food, to feed everyone gathered around the television. I expected that people would be stocking up on bottled water and flashlight batteries, but they were not. What, I wondered, was the appropriate cuisine for disaster? I chose high protein, high fat, nonperishable food. Cans of tuna and beans in case of war.”
Is she kidding? On this cloudless day, did she really serve her friends tuna and beans “in case of war?” I mean, the author didn’t even see the terror and yet, she was rationing portions and dictating diets as though she were going to write the next Martha Stewart: “Entertaining in the midst of terrorism.”
Gordon wrote:
“Everyone was calm. It was New York, so people made grim jokes; one woman reached for the regular Hellmann’s and said, ‘If this is the end of the world, I’m not using light mayonnaise.’ We kept saying to one another: ‘I’m not feeling much. I don’t know what I should be feeling.’”
Um, I don’t think the fact that “it was New York” has anything to do with people making grim jokes. In front of my apartment, waves of workers were walking up the street. Most of them were dust-covered. A lot of them had facemasks. Plenty of them probably eat full-fat mayo and tuna sandwiches every day.
The author concludes,
“What our enemies have in mind is a permanent destabilization, a cloud of unknowing as thick as the smoke that has surrounded Lower Manhattan. And so we feel we must act as if we knew the enemy, as if we knew what could be done against him. But we don’t know whether to live as if we were at war, focusing obsessively on the details of attack, on plans of retribution or as if the best thing to do were to go on with our ordinary lives.”
My guess is that after eating a meal of leftover beans and tuna, Gordon decided to go on with her ordinary life. The next day she went to buy fresh fruit, no doubt, to counterbalance her system after gorging on nonperishables. Gordon writes:
“Yesterday morning, the farmers market was set up as usual on the street where I live. Purple, white and striped eggplants, yellow squash, red tomatoes, bunches of ruby-colored radishes were spread out in profusion, as if it were any other September. Last night, the wind changed, and for the first time, I smelled burning.”
Did Gordon have to list all of the produce by name, strategically allotting at least one adjective to each veggie? Was she filling space, stalling or not sure what else to say? Of course the framers were set up. Their livelihood depends on the city-dwellers’ craving for veggies and organic produce.
That night, perhaps after an organic salad, Gordon smelled the burning. Her article ends. Maybe life as usual will continue for her. However, I doubt the grim jokes evoked much laughter. Wait. Was the mayo comment grim? Nah. Probably not to a born and breed New Yorker.
Joel and I talk about whether to stay here or to leave. It’s not that we are cowards; it’s just that everyone seems to be talking this way. We will probably stay. It seems wimpy to leave. Other times it seems to be the only intelligent option. I suggested we buy a canoe or a raft so that we can get off the island if need be.
After reading the newspapers that tried to reflect upon the events of September 11, I realized that perspective depends on a physical distance from the awfulness. For example, if a person has a house in the Hamptons or is able to take a ferryboat away from the island, he or she will process the terror differently from those who have no choice but to reside near the site of destruction. In a city we never claim to have come from, many who live and work in the city are stuck in Manhattan. For us, there is no easy way off the island. There is no shelter on a more distant shore.
Life in New York isn't exactly normal. People are leaving the city. The radio talk shows are in constant conversation around biological warfare, the psychological backlash, and the ramifications this act of terror already have had on our economy. I wonder why I stay here. I guess I should continue to try, to apply to graduate schools and try to break free, once and for all, from the food service industry.
Since the towers fell, I think about making my life useful, about becoming a nurse. I want so much to be useful. I am not sure I can become a freelance writer. Perhaps I survived on September 11 because I do not have a profession of influence; all of the heroes were working that day.
Only the air and parcels that I share with those who are important are of risk to me. And, I wish to be a target. I wish to have that influence, that responsibility of being accountable for other people’s lives. Instead, I make sure people get perfect espressos. I have enough for myself, it’s those who are lost and the life’s of those around that I wonder about.
In the past few weeks, a few known authors have published articles that pronounce their love for the city. The “I love New York more than ever” motto supposedly speaks for all of us who live here. Some of the authors who professed their love actually left the city just days after the attack: Ralph Gardner Jr. wrote an article for the New York Observer called, “Safe in the Country, Too Far from Home.” In his story, the Upper East Side father received phone calls of concern from people in Los Angeles and elsewhere. He writes:
“People seemed to bee turning to each other to gain what little perspective was possible in a situation without precedent, trying to distinguish hysteria from legitimate concern. We decided to leave out kids in school. They seemed as safe there as anywhere else.”
That decision made by Gardner Jr. and his wife on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the author’s disposition has altered significantly. Regardless of whether or not he deciphered legitimate concern from the rippling hysteria that was working its way upward through the city, the author reports his decision of September 12:
“We decided to leave around six. I felt foolish, if conned by fear, as we got on the West Side Highway, our normal escape route from the city.”
Gardener Jr. is blessed with a “normal escape route.” Just the thought of an escape route could resonate comfort. Knowing there is a way out is nice enough at a time like this. Granted, the normal route presented its own stream of problems, which consequently caused the family to take a detour. Subsequently, the author and his family had to drive “in confusion around Harlem.”
After reading the article, it seemed that leaving the city seemed less of a remedy than eating a warm bowl of soup and e-mailing loved ones from a box-sized apartment with a beeline view of that looming cloud of emptiness and ash.
Gardener Jr. reports:
“When we finally arrived in the country, my relief -- if you could call it that -- was tempered by something like embarrassment, as if I’d been disloyal by leaving at her moment of greatest peril the city in which I was born, grew up in, and have lived most my life.”
The author goes on to wonder if the new norm would embrace citydwellers “fleeing in the face of every new threat.”
Well, only some of us can flee. For those of us who have nowhere to go, we will not flee. Instead, we will go to work, as usual. On particularly scary days, we may sit and read, or perhaps some of us will order gas masks. Others will take comfort in editorials that pronounce threats of small pox and anthrax as ludicrous or seemingly too difficult to infiltrate onto this island.
As for the cultured life of upstate, Gardener Jr. admits there are attractions:
“There are galleries upstate, and playhouses, and even a couple of decent restaurants. But, ultimately it isn’t the food or the arts that makes New York exceptional. That’s a myth. It’s the people, their proximity, the cross-pollination that comes merely from breathing the same air and riding the subways. The sweet and sometimes beautiful unpredictability of life. That can happen nowhere else but a great city. … We returned home Thursday morning.”
To gain such insight from such distance suggests privilege. I am convinced that this type of processed thought can only be derived from a safe spot that exists farther from, let’s say, the refigured skyline I see from my bedroom window. Assuming one’s hide-away is outside of Manhattan, it is safe to presume that his or her skyline is postcard perfect.
Loving New York is one thing. Living in it, knowing that if something happens, I will be one of the last off the Island is an entirely different concept that makes New York less likable.
Joel and I sort of laughed about my canoe idea. Joel said a canoe would be too heavy to carry to the East River. He didn't say I was ridiculous, though. He said we should get an inflatable boat with an automatic pump. Where would we go? Who knows? It's just an idea; sort of like the idea of having lunch with Woody Allen.
“If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” This doesn’t sound so true to me anymore. As disillusioned post-college graduate, I realize that only those who “make it here” are the ones who like to sing that song. To the rest of us, who are still sending out resume and query letters, the lyrics sting like a slap in the face.
Maybe I have grown impatient. When the towers crumbled, it seemed like we all got our game board hourglass tipped. It is time for a second round. Some force seemed to be telling us all that “Time is running out.” What we all thought was invincible fell, too easily.
For the time being, I plan to focus on making myself useful. The first step will involve applying to nursing schools. And while I, once again, wait for someone to approve my application, I will do my damn best to remain content. I plan to wake up each day and go to work. For me, there is no escape route or place from which I can safely process politics and the reconfiguration of the world’s greatest city. I suppose I will have to be content to carry on - all the while, never knowing Woody.
(author's note: some names were changed in this story)
