Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  He made his way down the steps of his building on 147th Street with the sturdiness of someone decades younger. As Charles walked downtown through the familiar neighborhood, there was no time to notice the newly planted trees lining the streets in front of regallooking brownstones. Despite his average build and graying afro, his quickened steps and determined gaze gave a sense of toughness built up from the inside, like the concentric rings inside a tree.

  All public transportation was at a standstill, so the subway was not an option. Charles proceeded to make his way down by foot from 147th Street. Just south of Harlem, his journey took him through Central Park, where he saw people scampering in every direction except south. Then a police officer approached him. “Everybody’s coming uptown!” exclaimed the officer.

  “Yes, I know,” Charles replied. “I’m going downtown.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to work.”

  “You are going to work?” the officer asked in disbelief.

  To which Charles stated, “Yeah, I’m going to the World Trade Center.”

  Before reaching the site, Charles made sure to stop at the bank to get some cash, never one to be caught unprepared. He foresaw needing to buy boots to get through the rubble, but he would have to get them later. He had to get down there as quickly as possible.

  The scene where the Twin Towers once stood was chaotic and surreal. He saw haze, papers, an entire universe dismantled. He saw ash, the lost, the broken. Charles knew how odd it was to be reminded of Coney Island, but the street was nothing but gray sand, an ersatz beach. He took in the terror of the men and women running from the rubble. Their tears made tracks on their dust-covered faces.

  Charles had arrived in the afternoon, just as firefighters were being evacuated from 7 World Trade Center, another building that had caught fire upon the North Tower’s collapse. About twenty minutes after five p.m., Charles was a live witness to this third building’s collapse.

  The giant cloud of smoke lingered up above the site, its reach stretching gradually along the city and beyond the Hudson River. Charles watched a group of rescue workers at street level do the unimaginable—find life among the death and destruction. The hope of finding any more survivors waned as Charles saw body bag after body bag zipped up.

  His attention was then drawn to “the hole,” where pockets formed amid the rubble would hopefully yield stranded victims holding on to life. Charles knew he’d have no use for his claustrophobia. The energy of the numerous volunteers already there gave him the confidence to do his part: If these guys can do it, I can do it! And that was how it began for Charles: He picked up a pail of water and made his way into the lion’s mouth, down into “the hole.”

  Says Vicky of her father, Charles, “9/11 totally transformed him. Prior to that, he had aged physically but was still very much a young man.” Now, with newfound purpose and maturity, she says his focus is on giving to others.

  At first, Charles had even hesitated to let his family know that he was volunteering at Ground Zero. “I wasn’t gonna tell no one,” he says. “I didn’t want nobody worrying about me.” But days into his service in September of 2001, Charles ran into Vicky on the subway. She had been in Queens, comforting a friend who lost her husband in the attacks. Charles had made his way to midtown to clear his mind and his lungs and to buy some disposable cameras for fellow volunteers.

  While on the platform, Charles was writing his name on the tag of his jacket when he heard a familiar woman’s voice say, “Why are you writing your name on your jacket?”

  Once he recognized her, he explained what he had been doing and that there was nothing that would keep him from heading back to that hole.

  “But why do you have to go back down there?” she asked.

  “You just can’t leave,” was the only answer Charles could muster. He felt as if every volunteer at Ground Zero had become his brother and sister. Vicky went on to her job with the New York State Department of Health, but not before Charles urged her to use a respirator. She remembers asking him, “But what about you?” He just shrugged his shoulders and boarded the train.

  Charles walked uptown, cash in pocket, to buy a pair of much-needed boots after it became clear—in his first twenty-four hours on-site—that he would need them amid all the rubble. Just moments after diving back into work, new boots gleaming in the autumn sun, a beam fell on Charles’s foot and fractured his big toe. The pain shot through his spine. Blinding pain. He was offered medical treatment by a worried volunteer. “For a toe?” he asked, eyes wide. “Nah. Ain’t nothing. Pain is good. It means that I’m alive.” Truth be told, the pain was too much. His swollen toe had turned black and Charles soon needed medical attention.

  Back at Ground Zero after a quick visit to the hospital, Charles took a break from tough manual labor and joined a team that was dispensing clothing. He slept on the street that night with other volunteers in front of the Brooks Brothers store at One Liberty Plaza. The store’s welcome mat was their only padding. The next day they were offered a change of clothes inside the store. The fancy-suited mannequins were cleared from the destruction. The building was about to be turned into a morgue.

  They could hear the movement of cranes above lifting the overlaid ruins of the fallen towers with utmost caution. Dislodging any piece could cause the rest of the pile to crumble, a risk the volunteers were well aware of. Charles could feel the rubble shifting once in a while, releasing more and more dust.

  That was a moment that Charles would never forget in those early days right after the attacks, when he first felt the dust filling his lungs. He turned to a fellow responder beside him and said, “We fucked!” That was a fact, and they all knew it. Charles coughed and could not clear his throat—just the beginning of the sticky feeling in his chest, like glass cutting through him with every breath.

  The first responders didn’t need doctors or researchers to tell them what they already knew: The dust would make them sick. And yet they could not walk away.

  “They slapped us in the face!” Charles often states emphatically when asked to explain his actions on September 11. Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist with a keen eye for examining the research on the biological basis for personality traits, seems to be describing Charles when she writes, “Individuals with high levels of testosterone are more likely than other types to dash into a burning building to save a stranger, attack an armed bully with nothing but their fists, or brave a hurricane or tornado to save an abandoned dog. And when asked what prompted them to perform their act of courage, these heroes often say they were barely thinking.”

  Charles, however, finds that his courage that day was in part due to his strict upbringing in the hands of a father who “did not spare the rod.” His father made him take a bold, fighting stance in the face of an attack and keep a stiff upper lip.

  As a schoolboy in Harlem’s St. Aloysius Catholic School, Charles would often get into fights. “Well, my father encouraged it,” he explains with some reticence. “He said, ‘I wanna make sure when you get older, you don’t fear nobody,’ and I fear no man.” His father also used to box, and he taught the young Charles, who then went on to box in amateur leagues during his army years.

  His father’s unconventional parenting style, however, sometimes went to extremes, like when Charles was sent to school wearing shorts during the freezing cold of winter. He was old and tall enough for knickers, and it wasn’t that his family couldn’t afford them, but he was expected to forgo momentary comfort in pursuit of larger goals, in this case his father’s regimen of making strong men out of his two boys.

  His younger brother sought shelter in his mother’s arms. Charles’s mother was from Jamaica and a long line of fierce, rebellious women. Charles realized he was not her favorite and so turned to Tana when he needed comfort or advice. Tana, after all, commanded the most respect from him. Charles had seen her slap her own son, his father, who used to whip him. It was clear who was at the top of the C
ook hierarchy. That, and the fact that Tana always bought good, comfortable shoes for the flat-footed Charles made her the absolute best.

  “The first couple of days,” Charles recounts, “until they got all the body parts that were lying around—people who had jumped from the buildings, people who had jumped from the plane—that was . . .” He pauses, trying not to reanimate the images in his mind. “It was more graphic aboveground than down in the hole.”

  How many names did they have for it? The hole, the pile, Ground Zero . . . sometimes Charles just called it “9/11”—I’m going back down to 9/11!—as if going into a time warp, trying to find trapped survivors and bring them back to the present. During the weeks that the work was actually a rescue, the mission of the responders was crystal clear. But then the focus shifted toward recovery—of things, not people—because the people were gone. Then the rubble was shipped out to be searched through elsewhere, and access to Ground Zero was largely restricted.

  But Charles was not done volunteering. Come December, he had started working directly with the victims’ families through the efforts of the Red Cross. “That’s when I got hooked!” he exclaims. “I became a fool for causes.” He distributed supplies and signed over checks at the Family Assistance Center, then located at Pier 94. The help he was providing felt more palpable, face to face with those in need, but so was their sorrow.

  By the first week of January 2002, after 117 days of selfless giving, Charles would finally burn out emotionally. On his way back to the offices of the Red Cross, he stopped by the Port Authority to buy a meal. A 9/11 exhibit graced the hallways of the building. Hundreds upon hundreds of photographs of loved ones lost were posted over the walls. He knew they were all gone.

  Images from Ground Zero that Charles managed to suppress had come rushing back to his attention: A woman’s red purse lay on the floor, her driver’s license inside. He wondered who had lost a daughter, and maybe a wife or a mother. What was really getting to him was how the actual people lost to this tragedy were becoming a vivid presence in his mind, as he asked himself, Who were they? Who had they left behind?

  He just lost it. Tears filled Charles’s eyes. It became too personal, and he couldn’t keep compartmentalizing. The past long 117 days were composed of so many painful experiences, so many bonechilling sights and sounds. Tears of deep, raw grief and pain. As the tears flowed, he resolved that he was done for a while: I can’t go there no more, he thought.

  The last time that Charles cried was a few years back, when his Tana passed away. She had asked Charles to take her to Mount Sinai Medical Center. “She wasn’t feeling well,” he recalls, but he wasn’t worried, since Helen Cook had made it well into her nineties despite her beer-drinking and smoking habits. Sadly, her body shut down just a couple of hours past midnight on that Thanksgiving, right after Charles left her side.

  Charles has been separated from his wife for years, yet they remain good friends. She recalls the joyous times the family shared at their Brooklyn home, with Tana joining her great-grandchildren for dinner, then whipping their dad at pinochle over raucous laughter. Carol describes how Charles “loves to joke” and how when playing pinochle, “he tries to psyche the other person out.” At times like Thanksgiving, when they all get together, it is clear that Charles is cut from the same cloth as his grandmother. Most important, Carol sums up, “She gave him the love that he needed.”

  Tana also gave her grandson a lot of confidence navigating the streets of Manhattan. She established her own independence when her family forced her out at the age of sixteen, pregnant with Charles’s father. By the age of seven, Charles was riding the subway on his own from Harlem, picking up his younger brother Dan at school and bringing him along to visit Tana at her apartment smackdab in the Garment District, where she worked as a seamstress.

  She held night jobs at times but also loved to live it up, befriending jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, at all the raucous Harlem clubs that didn’t charge a cover. On occasion, she’d bring the boy too. Charles would sit by his Tana and sip his Shirley Temple. The child clung to her every expression, doting and attentive.

  Charles cried inconsolably at Tana’s funeral, as if he had been saving all the tears he hadn’t shed for all who had passed before (both of his parents, actually). “She was a friend, not just a grandmother,” Charles explains. He did not expect Tana to ever leave his side, even at such an old age, and there was nothing that could have prepared him for that kind of grief.

  Charles has not celebrated Thanksgiving since Tana passed away. However, his coughing fits and chest pains finally forced him, in 2005, to visit the place where he last saw his grandmother. During his first visit, he was tested for possible side effects from his time at Ground Zero. It was only then that he started to seriously commit to his medical treatment.

  A friend prompted him to go, suggesting that he might be able to sing again if the doctors cleared up his throat. Charles has a deep voice that is still beautifully mellow but at least an octave lower since 9/11. He can’t hold his notes as long as he used to when singing his favorite doo-wop songs or spirituals at church. He is just one of many first responders suffering the effects of the poisonous dust cloud that slowed down their rescue efforts and now threatens to speed up their deaths.

  The doctor at Mount Sinai handed Charles a folded sheet of paper. “That has your next appointment written down on it,” the doctor said, smiling. Charles took a look. It was a threefold flyer, one of many informative bulletins for first responders consistently printed by Mount Sinai, as the hospital continued to monitor their health. “I’m famous now,” Charles joked, wondering why they put that ugly picture of him on the front flap.

  Charles’s doctors are pleased with his progress so far. They tell him to keep doing whatever he’s doing. “I drink vinegar cider sometimes,” he explains, a recommendation from an herbalist in Brooklyn. “It cleans my lungs. I still feel like I can’t clear my throat, but I’ve been exercising a lot. I ride bikes, walk eight flights of stairs. So it’s working out.”

  Charles is not alone in his physical struggles post–September 11th; almost all of the rescue workers who pitched in at that time have dealt with long-term difficulties. The debris that remained after the collapse of the towers was “wildly toxic,” according to Professor Thomas Cahill, a pollution expert. The debris consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants, many of them carcinogenic. Dr. Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital believes there is a 70 percent illness rate among first responders. In a 2010 study of 5,000 rescue workers, Dr. David J. Prezant found that all the workers had impaired lung functions, presenting early on with little improvement with time. Thirty to 40 percent of workers were reporting persistent symptoms and one out of five studied were on “permanent respiratory disability.”

  The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a police officer who died of a respiratory disease he contracted during the 9/11 rescue operations, received final Congressional approval on December 22, 2010, and was enacted by President Barack Obama on January 2, 2011. The act will funnel $2.5 billion into a Victims Compensation Fund that will provide aid to first responders and construction workers who were exposed to the World Trade Center dust, as well as some residents in and around Ground Zero. The Zadroga Act also more than quadrupled the funding for health clinics and other programs that screen and treat people for 9/11-related illness. In 2010, these programs received $70 million. They will get $300 million for each of the next five years.

  Friends and family continue to question Charles’s altruism. If he was aware of the damage to his body, what made him stay so long? “We all chose the way we were gonna go,” he says. “But no one need to worry ’bout me.” His sickness is his sickness.

  Charles’s retirement from recovery efforts was fairly brief. By 2003, he started taking courses in emergency preparedness in order to enhance his already wide range of survival and rescue skills. In August of 2005, he watched as another disaster u
nfolded on television: the flooding and devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina. A young African American child was pleading to the camera for help; his sick grandmother was going to die if she didn’t get her medicine. Charles was moved. He knew the time had come once again to leap into action.

  In order to receive his assignment from the American Red Cross, Charles had to take a train to D.C., then switch over to the local for Silver Springs, Maryland. There he was told he was being deployed to Montgomery, Alabama. Charles’s tinnitus, a debilitating ringing in the ears he developed after a traffic accident, prevented him from traveling by plane. No matter—a group of volunteers who were already planning to drive down offered him a ride.

  The nonstop drive extended into the night, and Charles fell asleep in the car. When he awoke, they were in Mississippi. The sun had yet to come up, but even in the darkness he could see what looked to him like a junkyard surrounding them. The “junkyard,” he soon realized, was actually the ruins left by the hurricane winds and the floods. The debris stretched for miles and miles.

  To make matters worse, Hurricane Rita was now nipping at their heels. The group was forced to stop at a naval base in Gulfport in order to stay safe as the second hurricane in weeks passed over the region. The rain was not heavy, and yet when he went outside, Charles could feel the wet up to his knees. Water pooled quickly in these parts, and he now understood why he saw so many boats caught on tree branches.

  Charles had some experience driving large vehicles, as well as operating heavy machinery during his army service, so he was assigned to Emergency Response Vehicle duty. When that didn’t work out, he was put in charge of a cargo truck. During the nineties he owned his own van service and provided transportation for performers such as Diana Ross, Jackson Browne, and U2. If Bono could see me now, Charles thought.