| My Sept 11 September, 2006 I'm not sure why I'm writing this now. I guess I'm being a little reactionary to some of the "commemorations" and recent essays I've been reading in the media regarding the fifth "anniversary" of September 11. (That word seems so vulgar in context) I guess I'm also reacting to the last couple movies to come out on the subject. I can't watch ABC's version or "United 93" or Oliver Stone's latest film, no matter how artful or sensitive they are to the tragedy. No matter much support from the victim's families they all claim to have. I'm sure they are well made, insightful films. But that's not the point for me. CNN is going to commemorate the tragedy by rebroadcasting their entire coverage from that day in real time. Why? I guess so that anyone who missed the excitement the first time can relive it as it's really unfolding? I don't know. I'm just glad I don't have cable. There are a couple reasons why I just can't participate in these reinterpretations of that awful day. The first reason is grief. I didn't lose anyone personally in the attack, but it's still too painful. For a year after 9/11 the NY Times ran obituaries of the 2800 who perished. Every day the paper ran as personalized obituaries as it could. I often found myself getting tearful as I read about the lives of complete strangers. Bankers, policemen, firemen, custodians, IT specialists, Windows on the World pastry chefs, bookkeepers, security guards, immigrant workers. I still see these faces in my mind, printed in black and white. At one point the paper ran photos of all the deceased it could find at once. On each page They were represented yearbook style, by row after row of postage-sized portraits above their names. It ran for 20 pages. They were my New York. The second reason is out of principle. It's related to what I read in a New York Magazine essay. It said anyone who was downtown and witnessed it first hand does not need "reminders". No anniversary or movie is needed to trigger vivid detail of what we saw or felt that day. But the rest of the country, motivated out of politics or guilt has appropriated the grief from us. And from there some have used the grief toward their own agendas. I've always felt that anyone who makes a film about that day should do so out of pure motives. If it is truly a step for "remembering" or " memorializing" then either don't take a profit personally or give all the proceeds back to the families who lost mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children. To take one dime from those productions is to belittle the memories of those 2800, rendering them novel tools for your own personal gain. (As I believe some of our leaders have, but I'll try not to get too political, otherwise I might be guilty of the same) Anyway I have never written down my own personal account of that day. But I guess I feel a need to purge those images in my head, if nothing else to illustrate how strongly I feel about the above notions Here is my September 11th. At that time I was living in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, just across the river from the downtown tip of Manhattan. Since we were on the top floor, my roommate Deborah and I had a roof to hang out on, our view of the towers nicely framed by neighborhood trees. At night you could sit on the roof and study the lights of the towers, wondering what sort of people were burning the midnight oil in those offices. What people were maintaining the reputation of New York. The morning of September 11th was the best kind of day New York could give you. There was not a cloud in the sky Tuesday morning. It was still effectively summer only without the burden of heat and humidity. I woke up next to my girlfriend ,Yuh, and studied her face for half a minute as she awoke, too. The room was bright from the sun. When her eyes finally opened we just lay in bed beside each other taking in a very pleasant morning. Seconds later it began for me. I heard a loud deep explosion which rumbled through the neighborhood and I swear momentarily made everything vibrate. It confused me, as I'd already lived in the city 10 years at that point, and knew all it's normal sounds well. I turned to Yuh and said " That was not an ordinary explosion. Something happened." We lingered in bed for another minute before there was a quick knock on my bedroom door. I answered "Yeah?" and Deb quickly peered in with a concerned look. "You've gotta come to the roof now." , she blurted. "Why? What's wrong?", I answered. "Just come." And at that she rushed back toward the hall stairway leading to the roof. I jumped up and grabbed a robe, wrapping it around me and bounded up after her. Yuh lingered behind and got dressed. When I reached the roof I saw what was the first of many surreal images I would experience that day. Our two towers, sitting between the trees were gushing black, black smoke. Gushing on a monumental scale. You could see a small line of orange where the flames spanned the whole midsection of the South tower, which was closer to us, and the North tower just next to it. Apparently because of the direction of the first plane hitting the North tower on the far side from us, we didn't hear the first impact. There was a blonde pony-tailed laborer on the roof with tattoos on his calves. He was stomping around the roof, freaking out as he repeatedly yelled, " I can't believe what I just saw! I can't believe what I just saw!" He said he had just seen maybe hundreds of people die. He had been watching the fire from the first impact when he saw the second jet arrive and slam into the South Tower. I was still trying to assess what was happening, putting bits and pieces together from his ranting until I realized two planes had hit the towers. Two jetliners. The notion of terrorism still hadn't gelled in my mind. The first coherent thought I remember thinking or saying was that I had once read about an air force bomber that had slammed into the Empire State building in the 1940's and the structure survived. So I reasoned at this point the buildings would stand. Over the next hour we watched as the smoke got thicker and darker. Since the fire line in the South Tower was two thirds up the building and spanned the entire width, I began to wonder out loud how the people in the upper floors were going to get out. How the fire department was going to save them. It was bewildering. The wind was carrying the smoke directly over us. A massive swatch of black starkly cut through the morning blue sky, trailing from the towers over our head and down toward more southern parts of Brooklyn. Strangely there was something perversely beautiful going on. Standing out vividly against the black smoke over our heads were thousands upon thousands of little glimmering points of white – paper documents floating through the air, released from the towers' offices and file cabinets by the fire and explosion. Eventually these began to float down into the neighborhood everywhere. Another surreal image. Then the air force jets showed up. They were loud, their engines ripping through the blue sky and the sun momentarily glistening off their wings as they circled the city. However fruitless their role at this point, it had an impact on me. It was the first moment I thought "We live in a different world now." However abstract and ill-informed, I began to understand then that the world had gotten smaller and that large scale death and destruction were no longer the distant domain of tv images from overseas. We began to shuttle back and forth between the living room tv and the roof, comparing news coverage with the real image in our backyard. At one point I saw little dark specs begin to drift from the upper floors, emerging from the fireline and dropping toward the ground. I remember thinking, "God I hope that's not what I think it is." When I later watched closer news footage, it confirmed what I feared: people leaping. I was still wondering how rescue efforts would begin around 10 am when one of the worst moments I have ever experienced arrived. It began at the fireline of the South Tower. Little bits of charred debris began to suddenly crumble away from the building at a faster rate. With that the building began to buckle. The entire upper half leaned out a few degrees toward us, then collapsed straight down, imploding on itself. Massive amounts of dust and debris billowed up into the sky as a sickening rumbling sound filled the air, vibrating the neighborhood. It felt like someone was rolling giant boulders through the city. I dropped to ground suddenly sick to my stomach. I KNEW there were bound to be many people trapped in the upper floors and now they were gone. I stared at the ground, breathing heavy and not sure whether to get sick or cry. I had never felt a sudden wave of queasiness like that. The others around me lost themselves in their own shock. I met Deb's eyes for a moment who mirrored my own wide-eyed confusion of emotions. We had just seen many people perish. We had seen the literal iconic face of a city vanish like we never expected. We were witnessing the epicenter of societal change in this country. But mostly we had seen helpless people perish. It was difficult to process this all at once. I also began to panic as I knew my friend Tony lived only two blocks south of the towers. From where I stood it looked as though all of lower Manhattan could have been flattened by the collapse. I retrieved my cell phone and repeatedly tried to call Tony to see if he was okay. The phone network was overloaded and I was unable to get through. A minute after the collapse, the cloud of debris made its way across the East river and filled the air around us. There was a beige snow drifting through Brooklyn. I was still grappling with what I just witnessed when thousands of tiny balls of cement began to dance around my face. We squinted and kept our mouths closed as a haze of debris crawled through the neighborhood. It smelled of burnt plastic and chemicals. The blue sky became obliterated behind a sheet of ash. More documents landed around us, some in tatters. I picked up one piece that was singed from fire. It had a signature on it. I wondered if the owner of that signature had made it out. I continued to try and call Tony. Since we could no longer see Manhattan through the dust and debris we moved downstairs to watch the news coverage. Not having cable, we only had one tv channel from New Jersey . All the other local stations had been transmitted via the antenna on the North tower, which went out with the first impact. It was while I was downstairs that my parents finally got through to me on my cell to place my whereabouts and make sure I was safe. As I was talking to my father on the phone I saw the North tower collapse on tv, Peter Jenning's voice saying somberly "It's gone." About thirty minutes later I got a call from Tony. He was disoriented and shaken, finding himself at the Brooklyn side of the Battery Park tunnel with hundreds of other Manhattan refugees. Apparently he had slept through both the initial impacts until his worried girlfriend, Sam, finally woke him up with a call and pleaded with him to get out of his building. Tony, unaware of what was going on, got dressed and passively made his way down to the street. When he got outside he looked up and finally saw what was transpiring. About 45 seconds later the first tower began to crumble. Tony said he ran in the opposite direction with everyone else, but looked back to see the debris overtake people closer to the collapse. The crowd surged toward the entrance of the tunnel where the cloud of debris finally caught up with them. Tony said it was apocalyptic. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. People were banging on cars to be let in while others were abandoning cars to run. Eventually he found his way through to the other side of the tunnel where he called me. At this point several of Deb's friends had gathered at our place, unable to take the subways to work. One of her friends gave Tony directions to my house. A half hour later he appeared at my door, covered in ash and dust. The first thing he said was "I'm so happy you live in Brooklyn". I took him inside, let him shower, and gave him a change of clothes. For the next month he wasn't allowed back to his building as it was technically part of a crime scene. Eventually he was allowed 10 minutes to gather his things under escort by a National Guard. Tony promptly and understandably moved back to Los Angeles. The rest of the day (and for the week) there was a continuous trail of smoke over Brooklyn. The city shut down. We turned into zombies as the intense images of collapsing buildings were joined by round the clock footage of grieving people bearing photos of missing loved ones, which we all knew to be dead. After a day or two we had to turn the tv off. It was overload. Then the flyers of the missing began showing up everywhere, posted on street corners, in store windows. Pictures of the lost in happier times, at dinners, at parties, smiling. These images were paired with phone numbers in case they were alive but incapacitated at some hospital. A last effort at hope. (What saved many WTC workers that day, without irony, was that it was election day for local government. Many people were late to work because they stopped at voting booths in the morning. Had it been any other normal day, there would have been many more people at their offices when the planes impacted. ) For a few months afterward, when I would ride a taxi over the Brooklyn Bridge at night, I would see the disaster zone. With fires still burning deep and rising smoke illuminated by bright work lights, it looked for a long time like the entrance to hell was found in the tip of Manhattan. Over the next year I had a reoccurring nightmare, about 6 or 7 times. It was always the same. I was on a street a half mile away from a burning skyscraper, watching flames engulf it until it weakened and collapsed. But every time I had the dream I was closer and closer to the building until the final time, when I was yards away and could see people running for their lives inside the building as it collapsed. After that, the dreams stopped. My memories are vivid and seared into my head. I do not need nor want interpretations to heighten the drama of what happened that day. I do not need assistance in "remembering". 
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