I was growing up on the job too. Over ten years at the Ex, I pretty much covered every beat and every story. My Spanish was highly valued, especially since the city became a cradle of the sanctuary movement for undocumented immigrants escaping the American-financed wars in Central America. I got sent to Mexico City for the 1985 earthquake that killed ten thousand people, arriving early enough to experience terrifying aftershocks that leveled buildings. And I was almost killed in a road ambush when the Ex sent me to Nicaragua for a series of stories as the Sandinista government fought the American-financed contras.
That close call cured me from ever aspiring to be a foreign correspondent again. Some reporters feel a personal responsibility to tell war stories. They relate on a human level to the misery of others no matter where they are in the world. I realized I cared more about reporting about the problems at home. I wanted to expose and, I hoped, affect our own injustices—discrimination, racism, income inequality. Those were the stories that fed my commitment to journalism. The next time I would do any more war coverage, the war would find me—on a crisp September morning at home in New York City.
But by the late 1980s, I was at a career crossroads. I had taught college journalism classes but wasn’t interested in teaching full-time just yet. I had so much to learn myself. I still loved journalism but was young enough to pursue a whole new career if I wanted to. I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to school, this time on a yearlong journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It led me to renew my vows to journalism and pursue The New York Times, which I joined exactly ten years after I first walked into the newsroom at the Examiner.
I was sad to abandon my adopted tribe at the Ex and a tad scared about moving to New York. The only time I had lived there was a summer during college under a student program. I worked for the telephone company in New Jersey and lived in an NYU dorm on Fifth Avenue. I had loved the bustle of Washington Square Park, walking everywhere, shopping for earrings among street vendors, discovering the bizarre appeal of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Oh! Calcutta! But now I’d be returning as an adult with a sense of mission. New politics, new players, new weather (how do reporters cover news in the snow?), new bosses. You never know with new bosses.
Fortunately, my Times editors in Metro—the metropolitan news section that covered the city (along with its region and the state government upstate in Albany) and competed with the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headlines of the tabloids—were pretty great, as I had to prove myself all over again. They were supportive, smart, and, for the most part, white men in suits. The Times was not exactly multicultural back then.
But in the late 1980s, New York was a stark departure from the way it was in the 1940s, when mostly rural Puerto Ricans first began to leave the island in waves for manufacturing jobs in the city that soon disappeared, creating an underclass that persists in some pockets today. The city was different from the days when my Titi (Aunt) Lucy and Tío (Uncle) Luis had to pass themselves off as Italians to get their apartment in Ozone Park in Queens. Or when my cousin Mayrah lived in the urban war zone known as Alphabet City in the East Village, before it gentrified with bistros and cupcake shops. New York was a nicer city than the one my relatives survived—with the added benefit that it came with my Titi Lucy, Tío Luis, and my cousin Mayrah!
I needed an apartment, but the search was painful. I couldn’t tell prewar from postwar, and the massive brick buildings all looked equally ugly. But once inside the buildings, the trade-offs were more obvious. I held out for good light and a kitchen that could accommodate a normal-size refrigerator. In the buyer’s market of the late 1980s, there were good choices at prices I could afford. After months of looking and indecision, I moved into a bright and spacious rental on the Upper West Side two blocks from Central Park. I was doomed to hearing sirens and honking day and night, but I could at least see sky from the windows and jog around the reservoir.
I missed the Bay Area terribly, but I eventually found mini–New Yorks that were manageable, wonderful, and friendly. I remember the exact moment I realized I had ceased missing San Francisco and became a New Yorker. I was in the back of a cab on my way home, a little tipsy from a night out with friends, when we stopped at a light, right in front of the most beautiful produce and flower display on a sidewalk market. The oranges and reds, greens and yellows just popped, and in my daze, perhaps because the fruits and veggies reminded me of California, I thought, “I love New York.”
Then I moved.
I was happy in New York, had a boyfriend and close colleague friends and my Latina women’s group (LIPS) and the theater and Central Park and a gig as adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism. But the Times offered me the job of Miami bureau chief, and my mentor at the paper, Gerald Boyd, urged me to take it, wanting me to be strategic about my career. I couldn’t pass this assignment up, he told me. I was reluctant to move to Florida barely five years after settling in New York and adjusting to its craziness, but Miami had two big draws aside from the promotion: my sister, her husband, and their two boys lived there; and Puerto Rico would be part of my beat. Not only would I get to travel to the island frequently for stories, but I’d also live close to my family again, so close that I had the chance to hold my third nephew, Alexander, as a newborn, a joy I missed with the first two.
Florida was big and busy and meant constant travel. Who knew the state is big enough to have two time zones? Hurricanes. Fidel and the Cuban exiles. Cuba and Guantánamo. The ValuJet crash. Versace’s murder. The declawed lion that escaped from a zoo in Orlando. At some point my hair started falling out in clumps and I got shingles. When my Florida assignment drew to a close on the fifth year, I got to spend seven months covering Central America and the Caribbean for the foreign desk while they looked for a replacement for that beat. As I wrapped up, I was grateful for an amazing run. What a memorable five years of reporting. But when I was offered San Francisco next, a dream job had it come a decade earlier, all I wanted was to go back home—to New York. I didn’t want to live so far from my family again—a full day of travel from San Francisco to San Juan. I wanted to travel for work, but just occasionally. After I moved back to New York, I soon was headed for Houston for a six-month detour to follow three businessmen—black, white, and Latino—for the “How Race Is Lived in America” series, a collaboration by a team of writers that won a Pulitzer. I then decamped to Washington Heights at the upper tip of Manhattan, to a cozy apartment by the Hudson River, for good.
Then I met Jim.
Three
9/11: Taking Stock
Jim and I said good-bye in Phoenix and I didn’t hear from him again. I didn’t really expect to, since we were just colleagues who had run into each other by chance. But L.A. now beckoned like never before. I had welcomed my temporary assignment in Los Angeles as a chance to report on new subjects in an area of the country I didn’t really know. San Francisco and Los Angeles were so different in geography and zeitgeist that their two populations were notoriously oblivious to each other. In my many years in the Bay Area, I had been to L.A. twice at the most. If you lived in San Francisco, there was no reason to go to Los Angeles, and vice versa. Now I had two good reasons to brave the spread of what I used to know as la-la land. Jim awaited, or so I thought.
On my first day in the Times’s L.A. bureau, my dreamboat greeted me warmly. He offered me a tour of the office and introduced me to the eight other colleagues who worked there.
“Over here, the fax machine,” Jim said as I followed like a giddy puppy. With the flair of a magician, he opened an upper cabinet in the kitchen. Ta-da! The shelves were stuffed with snacks. “Here’s where we keep our stash of Oreos.” He grinned. “In the morning, the office manager buys doughnuts from Bob’s in the farmers’ market. Do you like glazed or jelly?”
Talk about sweet!
All correspondents had the luxury of their own private offices
, but Todd had not moved out yet, so I staked out a corner of the common area near the office manager’s desk by the front door. I soon got started on a couple stories, befriended the manager, Catherine, and forgot about my surroundings. I cared more about the apartment I had found just blocks from the ocean and the shopping promenade in Santa Monica. The sight of water felt like home. I woke up every day to impossibly perfect weather. Every single day. Driving against traffic (to my surprise, the bulk of commuters headed away from downtown Los Angeles toward the Pacific Coast Highway), I had a short commute to the Times bureau in the mid–Wilshire Boulevard area. No one came in before nine a.m. except for Andy, the biotech reporter, who typically was the first one in and the last one out no matter how bright the sun shone outside. I knew this because I was in the perfect spot to see the comings and goings of my colleagues. Jim and I saw each other every day, trading hellos, smiles, and stolen glances. I bode my time, waiting for my handsome office guide to ask me out to lunch. Then I waited some more. Then—nothing. The invitations never came. Camping? I wished.
Jim spent the days out on the street reporting or holed up in his office, and soon there was not even casual conversation. Even when we sat next to each other at Todd’s send-off over lunch at Morton’s, roasting our colleague and joking about a celebrity two tables over we couldn’t place (Judith Light)—nothing.
Much later Jim would explain that he was involved with someone at the time and didn’t want to complicate things. But, he asked, hadn’t I noticed that he had carved a path on the carpet from the many trips he took to the office pantry just so that he could walk by my desk and catch a glimpse of me? Frankly, I had not, distracted as I was by disappointment and desire.
I was crestfallen. My L.A. fantasy failed to materialize. I moved on. I spent some quality time with my friends Rose, a news editor with the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, and Gabriel, a Hollywood publicist who let me tag along for some fun red-carpet events. And I was busy at work. One story took me to the famous border fence between Mexico and the United States that ends in the ocean off the California shore. Driving there, I passed billboards showing the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and a little girl with pigtails clinging to her mother’s hand as they ran. It was a disconcerting warning: watch out for illegal immigrants attempting to cross the freeway. That certainly put my little personal disappointments in perspective.
Still, I flew back to New York deflated. A month—a whole month!—could have been used so productively. We could have had romantic dinners at Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga Canyon. We could have strolled around the Getty Museum and hiked the Santa Monica Mountains. We could have driven along the coast to the Santa Barbara wine country and stopped at the Hitching Post on the way back for a dinner of steak and grilled artichokes, downed with the restaurant’s own pinot noir. We could have fallen in love and planned a future together. I tried to shrug it off. His loss.
I was still moping two weeks later when, on a clear, picture-perfect Tuesday morning in New York, the phone woke me up.
“Are you okay?” It was my sister, calling from Puerto Rico.
“Yes, why?”
“Turn on the TV and call me back.”
I made it to the living room in time to watch the World Trade Center being swallowed up by dust. God help us. I sat frozen, weirdly fixated on how the towers fell. I don’t know how long it took me to come to and realize that on clear days I could see the buildings from my roof. I lived by the Hudson River on the top floor of a thirteen-floor co-op in Washington Heights. I raced one flight up the stairs. A few neighbors were already gathered on the southern side of the roof, watching the spectacle in silence.
After I don’t know how long, I suddenly remembered. “Shit. The Times!” The newsroom must have been going nuts, and here I was, one of their metropolitan news reporters, watching the tragedy unfold in my bathrobe. I rushed down the stairs and got a strangely calm Metro deputy editor on the line.
“Just find your way there,” he said, Zenlike.
I dressed quickly and headed out on foot. With no car or bike to my name, and no yellow cabs or town cars in sight and all public transportation shut down, I would have to walk twelve miles south to get to what would soon become known as Ground Zero. I started walking but I never made it to the disaster site. Half a block from my apartment I saw small huddles of people on street corners talking, some of them crying. I opened my notebook and started taking notes. A few blocks south, a crowd of hundreds had gathered at the foot of the George Washington Bridge, many of them men and women in work clothes and holding briefcases.
These commuters from New Jersey were not going to wait around for the city to shake itself back to normal. They had walked uptown and now wanted to walk some more, over the Hudson, to go back home to safety and hug a loved one tight. It all felt dreamlike. There was the bar with overhead TV sets packed with people drinking hard liquor at ten in the morning. There was the Arab convenience store owner in tense conversation with a customer about who had done it. Lines of residents crowded grocery stores and ATMs as if they were preparing for a hurricane. And I heard the name Osama bin Laden more than a few times out of New Yorkers’ lips from day one.
I had not advanced even a mile when I called the newsroom again. “I’m still uptown, but there’s so much going on I think I should stay here.”
“Start filing,” an editor said.
Which I did, along with hundreds of my colleagues. Nothing went to waste. We put in the paper everything we heard and saw. Our vignettes ran under the headline: “A Day of Terror: The Voices; Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush That Became the Unthinkable.” After that day, we stayed on overdrive for months and months, in my case covering funerals and reporting and writing short profiles of the missing and the dead. Known as Portraits of Grief, these mini-profiles were solely based on the remembrances of relatives, friends, and coworkers. These mini-eulogies were not traditional journalism. We didn’t do much digging. But 9/11 was not a traditional story. We were acknowledging each and every victim among the thousands of lives lost.
I wrote two or three profiles a day. These interviews put me in the midst of the horror as it unfolded. Some stories were more horrible than others. A young husband who worked in one of the towers along with his wife told me that when the first plane hit, his wife had panicked and wanted to leave the building. As they stood by the elevators trying to decide what to do, the voice from a loudspeaker said that everybody should return to their offices. She still wanted to go, but he convinced her to stay. The young husband cried his tale into the phone as I told him how sorry I was and took notes and wondered how this widower in his twenties could ever be happy again.
And since traditional journalism was out the window, I said yes when a widow from Stamford, Connecticut, asked me if we could please run the portrait of her husband, a broker-dealer named Randolph Scott, on the day of what would have been their wedding anniversary, which was coming up shortly. I remember going to Stamford one weekend to visit my friend Celia and how I froze at the scene at the train station: the parking lot was filled with unclaimed cars belonging to commuters who never returned home. I wrote the portrait of Randolph Scott and arranged for it to run on the specified day. Except, that Saturday, when I opened the paper, the name of the wife had been changed from Denise to Nancy. What the hell?!!!
I called the office in a panic, but no one could explain what had happened. All I could do was call Denise Scott and self-flagellate. She was extremely nice about it. In fact, she said, she had been hearing jokes about her husband’s “other wife” all day long and the laughter helped her get through her painful anniversary. I sent her flowers on behalf of the Times and the paper republished the portrait with the correct name. I chalked up these strange mistakes to the fact that although journalists are supposed to behave like detached, objective automatons in the face of unspeakable acts, we sometimes crack. We were all deeply affected, not always in ob
vious ways, in the newsroom, just like everybody else. From the relative safety of our office many blocks away, near Times Square (I now worried the Times could be a likely target for another terrorist attack), I wrote portrait after portrait through the end of 2001.
As reporters, we often don’t know how our stories land, what impact they may have on individual readers. One late night, as I absentmindedly flipped TV channels, I stumbled upon a local talk show where a father was talking about his son, another 9/11 casualty. The name sounded familiar, and then I realized I had written about the son. The father mentioned the portrait and the interviewer asked how he had liked it.
“It was beautiful,” he said, bursting into tears.
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