Tower Stories

  Alan brought me back into New York once the George Washington Bridge opened and delivered me to my home on the Upper East Side. I received hundreds of phone calls from family and friends, people from around the world, a huge outpouring of concern and support. It was all very moving.

  In the days after it all happened, a friend called and we talked about the state that the city was in.

  He said, “Walter, we’ve got to do something about this. We can’t just sit back and do nothing.”

  “We thought that so many items had been donated for humans, food and so forth, but no one had really thought about the rescue dogs who were being used to sniff for survivors at Ground Zero.”

  I agreed, so we went out to some of the local pet stores and bought up all the dog food and supplies we could find. We thought that so many items had been donated for humans, food and so forth, but no one had really thought about the rescue dogs who were being used to sniff for survivors at Ground Zero.

  We loaded up the car with everything it could carry and I drove. We made it all the way downtown, stopping here and there at various checkpoints. For the most part, the officers pulling security duty would wave us on when they saw that we were carrying supplies. We basically made it to the base of the site, which, by that point, had been sealed off rather heavily.

  I suppose we were allowed to get down that far because the food we were carrying was sorely needed, as were the dog “shoes” that we had. Many of the rescue animals had gravely injured their paws by walking over shrapnel and debris to look for people.

  One thing I’d like to point out: New Yorkers became a far gentler group of people in their behavior toward one another during and following the time of the attack. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. I wonder if it ever does. Sooner or later, we all seem to go back to our ways.

  Those men who stayed with me? They did so at the risk of their own life and limb. These people have families themselves. I think that’s what I’ll always remember the most. How they willingly put themselves at risk on my behalf.

  I’d like to get those men together and take a snapshot of all of us together as a remembrance. Just a simple shot with all of us together in one picture. I will never forget what they did for me that day, and I’d like to keep a photo like that as a reminder.

  43 An area at the base of Manhattan below the Financial District, now the site of Battery Park, which is visited by thousands of people daily. The Battery gets its name from the fort that was built there during the War of 1812, later named Castle Clinton in 1817 after DeWitt Clinton, who was mayor of New York City at that time. After the army left the site, it served as an entertainment center, an opera house, and an immigration landing depot. It even served as the NYC Aquarium until the site was closed in 1941. The Battery currently serves as a dock site for boats to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

  NELL MOONEY

  Nell Mooney, twenty-three, lives in Astoria, Queens. Picture a strawberry-blonde spitfire with a pixie grin as big as the moon. She sometimes gets so involved in what she’s saying that she hops up and down in her seat.

  I HATED MY temp job on Wall Street! I worked in the check processing department of a major firm with a woman who was the most miserable human being on the face of the planet. Don’t get me wrong, all the other women I worked with were great—I loved them. My boss, for instance, was fantastic. She was the Buddha, one of those strong women who have their college degrees and their master’s, but was perfectly happy to spend her days in the check processing department of a major firm. But that one woman made it hell.

  She would come to work in the morning and everyone would say in a sing-songy voice: “Good mooooorrrrnnnnnning, Rosaria!”

  And Rosaria’d say, “Hrrrum! What’s good about it?” And she was serious.

  She suffered from diabetes, but she’d bring in Krispy Kreme do-nuts and Italian pastries. God only knows what kind of see-sawing was going on with her glucose levels. I’m telling you, she was not a happy woman. Rosaria was the epitome of unhappy. The devil was her playmate. And on that job, we weren’t at desks, we were all in bullpens.44 And, naturally, I had to share my bullpen with—guess who? You got it. Rosaria.

  See, some temp jobs are perfectly fine, but that Wall Street job was a temp job where I actually had to work, which I found unacceptable. Jot that down as a historical note on the state of the economy in 2001. Dear People of the Future: at the start of the twenty-first century, it was common for major corporations to employ boatloads of people who’d do nothing but hang around all day and get paid to do nothing while waiting for other pursuits in their lives to take root.

  When somebody from the temp agency called and said, “We have a different job for you, if you want to nix the Wall Street job,” I said, “Fine! Yes! I’ll take it!”

  I left Wall Street on a Friday and started a new job on Monday, September 10. To this day, I wonder how many artists pulling day gigs as temp workers had the dumb luck to get stuck in the Towers that day.

  My new job was at Reader’s Digest on 35th and 5th. I was hired to help them move office locations. This was also kind of a lousy job, but at least there was no Rosaria.

  I actually saw the first Tower on fire as I took the subway into Manhattan from Queens on the morning of the eleventh. Nobody knew what had happened, but everybody kept saying things like, “What stupid ass set the World Trade Center on fire?” Nobody knew it was a plane. Nobody knew it was terrorism.

  As everybody on the train stared out the windows and talked about what we were seeing, the usual boundaries between people fell away in an instant. Very soon, we had our own little train car community going, and everyone had a hypothesis.

  “Must’ve been a kitchen fire in Windows on the World. What jerk could have done that?”

  My mom called just before the train went into the tunnel and said, “Are you all right?”45

  I said, “I’m fine. How are you?”

  She said, “Nell, the World Trade Center’s on fire.”

  “I know, I can see it.”

  Then she said, “A plane flew into it.”

  I got off my cell phone and looked at everyone in the subway car and said out loud, “A plane flew into the Tower!”

  Everyone was like, “Oh my God.”

  And the train went into the tunnel.

  I got to work at about 9:30 A.M. and watched the second plane hit the second Tower. I watched the first Tower fall as it was happening on the office TV. Next thought: Forget this, I’m getting out of here.

  That day, I hung around Manhattan longer than most because I was waiting for my boyfriend. He was working a temp job, too, at 47th and Madison. We met on a street corner and he took the time to go get the new Bob Dylan album, which had just come out that day. I remember telling him, “The world is crumbling, the world is in fetters, and you’re buying the new Bob Dylan album? Okay. That makes sense.”

  Afterwards, he was guilt-ridden over that. “I can’t believe that the world was dying and I had to go get Bob.”

  The subways weren’t working, so we walked along the streets all afternoon. People were on their cell phones, and we’d stop and ask them to give us news.

  “The second Tower has fallen,” they said. “There are still planes in the air. They bombed the Pentagon.”

  And then a bunch of other things. Rumors. “The Capitol was hit. The Supreme Court, too.” By this time, we could see the F-16s raking the sky overhead. You could hear their screech as they tore through the air, and there was mad panic in the streets.

  My boyfriend and I live in Queens, and it seemed that the only way we’d be able to get there was to walk over the 59th Street Bridge. So we started out for it. Along the way, we saw many strange things. One man gave another guy $100 to take him home on his motorbike. It was nothing unusual, though. We were seeing things like this all over the place.

  It was a long hike, but we finally got to the bridge. At this point, we didn’t know whether we were trapped in Manhatt
an or not, whether authorities would actually allow us to cross over to Queens.

  I said, “Okay, if we’re trapped, we’re gonna go get a late brunch in style with champagne. ’Cause if we’re gonna die, I’m gonna get drunk. Either that, or we’ll have sex in an alley.” But the bridge was open. So we started walking across.

  It was really hot, I remember. And there was this mass exodus of people. It looked like the New York Marathon, where the 59th Street Bridge is littered with people—so many that they look like a colorful torrent of ants. There was one lane open for cars going back to Queens, and one lane for pedestrians. No cars were allowed into the city.

  We kept seeing dump trucks rolling by, full of people. The truck drivers were evidently letting people climb up and ride. There was an empty one cruising past us, and this guy walking about two or three lengths ahead of us called out in this heavy New York accent, “Hey! Why wonchoo let us on?”

  The truck had some lumber and debris in it, but it stopped. I made a run for it, jumping the lane island, while my boyfriend was like, “Ah … sweetheart? Ah … I don’t think we should do that…”

  Well. We hopped in the back of that dump truck. And I swear to you, inside it was like the demographic from The Stand.46

  It could have been a Showtime movie. Back to Queens: The Long Walk Home. There was a social rainbow of escapees from Manhattan. We had the nice white couple. A little Korean girl. The driver of the truck was Latino. There was this black woman, a construction worker who must have been the size of Hulk Hogan, who reached down and lifted a skinny Chinese man into the truck’s payload compartment. I remember the construction lady laughed and said, “You guys just aren’t used to this, are you?” Meaning the dirty conditions of the truck. We were all in our business casual outfits. By way of comparison, I was wearing a skirt; she was wearing heavy-duty overalls.

  The construction worker woman was massively strong. She reached down and lifted everyone into the back of the truck and we all sat there, huddled together, this motley crew, getting bounced around on top of each other, dirty and crazy while the truck rumbled across the Queens Borough Bridge. We talked here and there about what had happened, and I guess we were trying to convince each other to believe it all. The normal boundaries that would have existed between blacks and whites, Asians and Hispanics, economic distinctions, gender distinctions … they fell away and disappeared. Between us, there stood nothing but what we had seen and what we hoped it all meant.

  We got off the truck at the end of the bridge. My boyfriend and I live at least five miles from that point in Astoria Park. Geographically, Astoria runs parallel to the beginning of the Bronx. So, if you think about that, we walked from 34th Street in Manhattan, drove over the bridge, and then we hiked all the way up to the Bronx. People had their radios on outside as we walked along the streets, and we’d stop every once in a while to listen. It was a pretty amazing day.

  The whole journey took us about four hours. We got home around 2:00 P.M. We ended up listening to that Bob Dylan album all day long while watching the news. I don’t think I’ll ever listen to it again.

  I know how awful it is, what happened. But what upset me the most is the thought that there were artists temping in the World Trade Center that day, people who weren’t there doing the thing they loved, they were there working to finance it. And they died. All that sacrifice they’d made for their art … it came to naught. The whole incident disturbs me, of course, but that aspect strikes me as a special tragedy.

  I think any type of huge upheaval makes you re-evaluate what you’re doing with your life and how you’re living it. So I decided right then that there were other ways, other jobs I could work to support myself financially without having to compromise my artistic integrity.

  When my temp job ended with Reader’s Digest, I went on unemployment. I haven’t been back to the temp office. But then, wouldn’t you know? I landed this great job. I’m training to be a certified teacher of ballroom dancing in the New York public school system. I love to dance, and the job leaves me just enough time to audition for acting roles. And it pays well.

  I’m just training right now. I haven’t been in to teach a class yet, and the thought terrifies me! But at least now I’m doing something for a living that doesn’t suck my soul.

  44 Office cubicles.

  45 Many subway trains that run to the outer boroughs do so above ground at certain intervals, which makes cell phone reception possible.

  46 A novel by Stephen King, In the story, the government accidentally releases a biochemical weapon that destroys most of the earth’s population save for a small group of survivors, who come from all walks of life and who begin a final battle with one another to survive.

  “JOSEPH” AFSE

  “Joseph” Afse, thirty-six, from Bombay, India, says he’s proud to be an American citizen after immigrating to the United States twenty-six years ago.

  His parents have owned and operated a small luggage and leather goods outlet called India Bazaar on Church Street for many years.47

  Joseph has worked there nearly every day of his life, greeting customers and getting to know the unique menagerie of people who worked, ate, shopped, and thrived in this vital district four blocks under the massive shadow cast by the Towers.

  Now those Towers are gone. When I spoke to Joseph in 2002, India Bazaar was still in operation. But the neighborhood, he noted back then, had changed forever.

  Note: Joseph’s English is quite good. Nonetheless, he’ll occasionally mix up verb tenses, idioms, and so forth. Additionally, it should be noted that “Joseph,” while not Mr. Afse’s given name, is the nickname he now uses here in the U.S.

  THE BUSINESS IS dead now. Dead. September 10 was a great day. I earned a whole month’s rent on a Monday! Then the eleventh came, and now everything is gone.

  September 11, I saw on the news that everything was gonna be sunshine. So I came to the store early, opened up like 7:30 A.M., and fixed everything up real nice. It was a beautiful day, a lot of people walking around.

  Then, at 8:45, I heard too much sound, like a plane was landing right here in the street.

  When I look up, it was a plane, all right. I could see it coming through the sky. It hit the building. I saw the flames, the windows shatter, everything. All the people walking here thought it was an accident. A lot of us thought that the pilot is a drunk.

  Then the ambulances coming, police running. People are scared, watching the Twin Towers like we was all in a movie theater. Two news people from Channel 7 came out fast and set up a movie camera right here, taking pictures.

  Then? After fifteen minutes, I hear the next one. Boom! That looked like a big bomb. There was smoke.

  The police came by and told all the merchants on this street, “Close up, close up, close up!”

  I called 911 and said, “This looks like an attack on the United States. This is like a war is starting!”

  So I’m trying to close up. Almost, I’m done. I put the shutter down over the storefront, I put the lock on. I am putting on the second lock when I saw this thing, like a hurricane coming. Darkness. I’m Suddenly, you can’t see nothing. Everything is gone.

  Smoke gets in your eyes, your hair. I am like a blind person, can’t see nothing. I try to run, but on Warren Street, everything is a dark cloud.

  When I was running, I hit the fire bumper since I couldn’t see, and I fell down.48 And this is a natural, human thing: when I fall down, I put out both hands. See what happens to both hands? I rip it up. Knees, too. Rip it up.49

  I thought maybe I was gone. I thought maybe I should just lie down and go to sleep. Then I thought of my wife, my daughters, my sons. I have seven children. My mother is too old to have me die. At that time, I called God and said, “I don’t want to die now. If I’m going to die, my mother is going to die too from a heart attack.”

  I stood up after two or three minutes—too much pain, but I had no choice. And I walked up to the Municipal Building.

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sp; I saw a lot of fire officers, police officers, and they put me in an ambulance. I told them I had too much pain in my foot, so they cut my pants off, and checked. The doctor is expert, so he moved my leg and said it was good, not broken. Then he looked at my hands.

  This one? He said it had too much crystals in the wound. Like dirt and glass and whatever. He washed them out.

  The doctors dropped me off at my house and told my wife what medicine I should take. They gave me tablets, capsules, liquid medicines. Too much medicine.

  See how they are now? The skin has come back seven times and they still look like this. It hurts. The blood comes back in, and the skin cracks open again. But it’s still much better than it was.

  My business! My business was covered in dirt. And I lost a lot of merchandise. I tried to clean it off but some of it is ruined. A lot of business I lost.

  You know, 90 percent of my business was from the Twin Towers. A lot of my customers worked there, coming in from all over New York, Connecticut, Long Island, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens. They all died. Their bodies burned inside the Towers. Or they’re missing. Or they don’t want to come around here now.

  No one buys my merchandise now.

  The Red Cross people! God bless these Red Cross people! The Salvation Army. FEMA. Safe Horizons. They have helped with my home apartment rent.