He didn’t answer. I said it again. “Hey, Johnny?” No answer. “Hey, Johnny?” Still no answer. I was thinking maybe he was dead or unconscious. Then I heard a strong, steady voice. “Just stay down,” the voice said. “It’ll pass. Just stay down.” The voice was right. The blackness started to dissipate. It went from black to dark gray, but I still didn’t move from under that truck. I tried to stay calm and hold my breath for as long as I could.
Then I heard someone call out, “Mike … Ben! Hey, Mike?” It was John, coughing uncontrollably. He got up way too soon. But he was behind a van where people were pulling at him and grabbing him, saying, “Help me, I’m dying.” He had to get away from there.
The person that landed on me turned out to be a firemen. He was aiming for the same spot under the truck, but I got there first. But he got his head down under the truck, lying on top of me. He was the one to tell me it would pass. He got up, tapped my back, and said, “Attaboy, you’ll be OK. We’re OK.”
I was under that truck for only a few minutes, but it felt like a lot longer. Still on all fours, I put my hand up to signal John. I couldn’t speak because I had all this crap in my throat. John was wearing something over his face. I didn’t want to touch my face because I thought it might make things worse.
A rescue worker seemed to be coming toward me. He had a helmet on and an oxygen tank on his back. I was down on my hands and knees, coughing this stuff out of my lungs. I looked up wide-eyed at the rescue worker. Somebody pointed to me and yelled, “This guy needs oxygen!”
The rescue worker looked at me, but there was nothing behind his eyes. The poor guy was walking around in shock. He didn’t give me any oxygen. He didn’t give anyone any oxygen. He walked toward me with a vacant expression. I looked at him, and I didn’t really care about the oxygen. I understood. God knows what he went through.
I stood up. John was OK. I was OK. We started to walk away.
When you watch the video of me trying to outrun the imploding North Tower, you can clearly see from a wider perspective the tremendous force of dust and rubble that knocked people down. You’ll see people literally flying, blown in the air across the street. Seeing that, I realize how close I was. Anything could have happened. I could’ve been mortally wounded in any number of ways. I could’ve gotten knocked forward and slammed my head into a fire hydrant or a car or whatever, and I’d be dead. I could have gotten pinned down under that truck, knocked unconscious and suffocated in the blackness. I could have simply tripped while running and never even made it to shelter of any kind. Who knows? I think of the people during the tsunami in Asia who were able to somehow survive the initial catastrophic tidal wave and were strong enough to handle the floodwaters but were killed by a snakebite. On 9/11 it didn’t matter that I was fast or strong or alert. I was lucky. That’s all it was.
Walking Uptown
We looked for water. The Red Cross had set up an emergency outpost truck in the middle of the West Side Highway, less than one hundred yards north of where I dove for cover. They stopped us, sat us down, and gave us some water. Many people stopped there. We couldn’t sit still. As we walked away, heading north, a woman who identified herself as a New York Times reporter started interviewing us. We must’ve looked like good subjects because the entire exteriors of our bodies—our clothes, hands, hair, and face were covered with ash and dust. A Hasidic man approached us, looking annoyed. He saw the way we looked and that nobody was helping us, yet this woman was pushing for an interview. He interrupted the interview. “Come over here,” he said to me. He pulled me aside. He grabbed a bottle of water, washed out my eyes, and cleaned my face. I don’t know who this man was, but if I saw him today, I’d give him a big, big hug. What a moment of perspective. He saw me. He saw that I obviously just came out of the mess. I’ve got crap all over my face. The man thinks, Why doesn’t someone help him clean up because as you can see, he can’t do it for himself? So he took the time to wash my face. It was a pure, kind, humane act—seeking nothing but the act itself. Kindness. In fact, it was the first time anyone had extended physical aid to me since I first felt the explosion on the 81st floor. And for the first time since the beginning of it all, I dropped my need for control and allowed someone else to offer me direction and aid.
The reporter continued with her interview. I got annoyed too, a little, but she was the first one to tell us anything.
The reporter asked, “Do you know what’s going on?” We said no.
I didn’t know either of the Towers had imploded. Even when I was running for my life and then dove under the truck, my mind was only thinking, Survive, get out of this. Now I learned that both towers were gone.
I thought back to just moments earlier when I had gotten out of the building. I didn’t really see the South Tower, did I? I thought at the time that it was simply hard to see well with all the dust and debris and the smoke. Maybe it was just where I was standing at the time, I thought, so I wasn’t able to see the South Tower. I certainly wasn’t associating the façade debris I saw with a completely imploded South Tower. And nobody down near where we were—so close to the site—was talking about the South Tower imploding.
The reporter continued her explanation. There were “acts of terrorism.” She said she thought there was one or two more hijacked planes still up in the air, unaccounted for.
This altered my entire perspective. This was an attack on our country, and we’re still not safe because there are two more planes up there?
My mind was racing. I’ve got to find people. I have to talk to my family. I have to talk to Joy. I’ve got to make sure everybody is OK. I still couldn’t entirely grasp what kinds of planes did this or what had really happened.
We needed to find phones. We left the reporter and continued walking along the West Side Highway to a sanitation building, four blocks from the site. People were constantly stopping and staring at us. We were a mess. We were covered in soot and partially wet, thanks to the kind man who washed our faces. We looked like we’d literally been through hell, if hell was covered in gray ash. The sanitation workers said we could use their bathrooms. What we really wanted was their office phones because our cell phones weren’t working. That was fine with them. John and I sat at desks on different sides of their office and dialed.
I called my parents. I couldn’t get through. John got through to his parents, and I heard him sob, getting bits and pieces of information to them.
On the third try, I got through. My brother, Angelo, picked up.
“Michael?” I heard a tinge of desperation and relief in his voice.
“Anj, it’s me.”
“Michael, are you OK?”
I could hear him, but he couldn’t hear me too well.
“Michael,” he spoke slowly and deliberately. “ARE YOU OK?”
“I’M FINE.”
I faintly heard a cheer in the background. Then it hit me. I was overcome with emotion. I did everything I could to hold back from pouring my emotions out all over the sanitation office floor. If I kept the conversation going, I would lose it.
“Anj, I’m fine. I’ll call you right back.”
The last time my family heard from me was when I called my dad from the 55th floor at approximately 9:15 a.m. I told him then I’d call when I got out. In the meantime, they saw both towers go down. They couldn’t get in touch because cell phones didn’t have signals. My tower, the North Tower, went down at 10:28 a.m., and I did not call them until about forty minutes later. God knows what they went through. Forty minutes became an eternity.
But what’s forty minutes? So many people did not know the fate of their loved ones for hours, days. And today, for many— far too many—there’s still no word, no finality, just speculation, absence, and utter loss.
It was around 11:15 a.m. when I hung up with my brother.
I called Joy next; I got through. “Hey sweets” was all we got out before the phone went dead. But she got it. She knew I was OK. And I knew that the most important pe
ople in my life knew I was OK.
No sooner had we walked out the door of the sanitation building than we saw a mob of people running toward us up the West Side Highway. Emergency vehicles, fire trucks, a police car zoomed north, racing past us. The chaos was back. Like a conditioned reflex, we started running. That was hard for John because he had injured his ankle earlier. This is crazy! When is it going to stop? Exasperated, I yelled to whoever was listening: “What the hell’s going on?” Someone shouted back that a gas leak was going to explode any minute. John said, “Mike, I can’t run anymore.”
“Enough!” I said. We got off the West Side Highway and started weaving our way in, toward the city’s interior. At Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, we saw people huddled outside a storefront window watching TV like people did when Neal Armstrong landed on the moon. We stopped to watch some of it. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What I saw was a huge airliner flying into the World Trade Center.
It had to be a movie clip. I still wasn’t completely buying everything I was hearing: terrorist attacks, the Pentagon, planes still out there.
Cell phone service came back. Joy and I traded phone calls as I slowly progressed north. I didn’t want to talk on the phone for long because there was too much going on. I had to keep moving. I told her I would find her later uptown. She had gone from Atlantic Records to her friend Robert Finkman’s place on the Upper East Side at 81st and 2nd avenues.
Then Boozer called. He said to come to his office, his exterminating business on 30th and Broadway. That was my next stop.
John and I continued up to 14th Street, moving east between 9th and 8th avenues, where we came upon an old but regal brown brick church, the Roman Catholic Church of St. Bernard. “Do you want to go in, Mike?” John said. I nodded in assent. John and I walked up the steps slowly. There were some people sitting on them. They were praying for their friends. Like so many others we’d passed on our walk so far, they could tell by looking at us where we’d been. “You were there,” someone in a red T-shirt said. We told them we were in Tower 1.
“We’re worried about our buddies. We are trying to figure out if they are OK.”’
“Where were they?” I asked
“They were in the North Tower too.”
“What company did they work for?”
“Cantor Fitzgerald.”
“What floor is that?”
They said 100th or 101st.
I searched for something to say, but I found nothing. I remembered the flames above my head on my 81st-floor corner office. And I certainly remembered seeing the top of the North Tower exploding. I looked at the group and didn’t say a word. The one in the red T-shirt looked me in the eyes. He knew. I didn’t know for sure what had happened to their friends, but I knew it couldn’t be good. What words could I say? I walked into the church.
The church was almost empty, and very quiet. A woman sat alone in the front pew to the left. We walked straight up the center aisle. There was an altar front and center and a cross to the right. John knelt down in front of the cross and was praying intensely. I went into a pew to my right. I was exhausted. I got down on my knees and said, “God, I don’t know what I did to be in your good graces, but thank you.” John came beside me, and we knelt there together in silence for a while.
I was raised Catholic, an altar boy for seven years, and received all the sacraments during that time. I went to church almost every Sunday in those days. As an adult, I practiced my faith infrequently. But I made myself a promise I would go every Sunday from that time on.
We left the church and headed to Boozer’s office. Along the way we passed various restaurants with outdoor seating, where, to my astonishment, people were sipping cocktails and snacking on hors d’oeuvres and, well, just eating lunch. What the hell? They were chatting and pulling at the waiter as if it was just another sunny September Tuesday in Manhattan. I think about that image today, and I still can’t believe it.
Boozer
Boozer is Brian Wenrich. He owns Quinn Exterminating on 30th and Broadway, located on the “penthouse” floor of an old eight-story building. His father was a high school football coach at Our Lady of the Valley in Orange, New Jersey. As a boy, Brian was a stocky kid with big calves. He hung around his dad’s football practices, anxious to participate with the older boys. The high school players nicknamed him after Emerson Boozer, a straight-ahead fullback for the New York Jets in the 1970s. As Boozer got older, the nickname became more apt, owing to his jovial consumption of alcoholic libations. I met Boozer in a softball league when I was twenty-six. I’m surprised we hadn’t met earlier. We are the same age, born twelve days apart. We grew up in neighboring towns, me in Montclair and he in Essex Fells. He went to public school, and I went to a Catholic school, and our paths didn’t cross. But we hit if off as soon as we met. Kindred spirits, we were. We bonded as single guys enjoying their run-and-gun years. We went to concerts, ball games, and bars. We became like brothers. For the two years I had been working in New York, I met him for lunch once or twice a week a block from his office at O’Reilly’s, a great old New York City drinking establishment. I also made Quinn Exterminating a customer, which was not only good business but also a convenient excuse to visit with him during the workweek.
Boozer would give you the shirt off his back. And on this day, that’s literally what I needed.
When John and I walked into Boozer’s building, the security guys gave us the What the hell you must’ve been through look everybody everywhere gave us. They stared at us like we were ghosts. We entered Quinn Exterminating, and Boozer’s assistant gave us the same look.
The door to Boozer’s office was open. I edged a few feet away from the door and watched him without saying a word. He stood there, focused intently on a little TV set, propped up on an office chair, that showed the catastrophe—the planes hitting, the Towers imploding—over and over again. Sensing eyes on him, he wheeled around and gave me a big bear hug.
“Boozer, I’m a mess.”
“Man, I don’t care. You’re fucking alive.”
The little TV set drew me in. I watched a clip of the second plane crashing into Tower 2. It was the first time that day I really saw what happened. I know people had told me about the terrorists and the planes, but it was all still inexplicable to me. “Boozer, what’s going on?”
Boozer explained to me all that he knew. It was a lot to take in.
As Boozer told me the tale of two planes and how the Towers were no more, my cell phone regained service. From then on it would ring nonstop. Things got hectic. I was working two phones at once. I took calls on the cell phone with one hand and made calls on Boozer’s office phone with the other.
I got through to my CEO around 1:00 p.m. The Network Plus home office was making a head count. No one had spoken to me yet. I told him John Cerqueira was with me. John looked up quizzically. Then Tom Sullivan called. Sully is a college buddy who lives out in Colorado. He was very upset, crying. He said he saw me on TV. He saw me running up the West Side Highway live on the news, and then everything turned to black on the screen. He thought I didn’t make it. He had been trying to reach me for the past hour and a half. “I thought you were gone,” he said.
I talked to Joy again. I called my parents’ house again. Apparently, a lot of people were calling my parents’ house.
“We got to get you out of those clothes,” Boozer said.
Boozer gave me and John exterminator outfits—gray pants, a gray shirt with the Quinn Exterminating logo, and some sneakers. I peeled off everything: shirt, tie, T-shirt, pants. I threw all of it in the trash. I learned later that Boozer took it out of the trash and put it in a plastic bag for me. He gave it to me a couple weeks later. I did not open that bag until I began to write this book. That gray ashlike dust, and that smell—that acrid burning scent that I’d never smelled before and never smelled since—are still on those clothes. I still don’t know quite what to do with them.
I felt better sitting in Booze
r’s office in clean clothes. I had also been brought up to speed. I understood what had happened at the World Trade Center. I knew about the Pentagon. I knew there was still one plane unaccounted for. That’s the story we were following. The phone continued to ring.
Joy was waiting for me uptown. I was at 30th and Broadway. She was at 82th and 2nd. But I knew she was OK, and she knew I was OK. The overwhelming sense of urgency that dominated the last three hours—the longest three hours of my life—had left me. As long as I knew everybody was OK, I relaxed, mentally. Or maybe that was the feeling I wanted to have, so I gave it to myself, just temporarily. How long could I stay in emergency mode?
“Let’s get you something to eat and drink,” Boozer recommended. So John, Boozer, and I walked over to O’Reilly’s. Normally, we sat at the bar to eat, but the bar was packed. The whole place was packed. Boozer found us some space in the back, in the dining area where patrons enjoy the frill of white tablecloths. This was the first time I’d sat anywhere but at the bar at O’Reilly’s. Boozer ordered us beers and a ton of food. I didn’t realize it, but I was starving. I was insatiable. I had beers in each hand. I was so keyed up, so intense and full of energy that I could’ve consumed anything and I wouldn’t have felt it at all. I was full of adrenaline, antsy, unable to sit still. I guzzled beer, not to escape or get drunk, but to simply feel the liquid. I devoured one cheeseburger and then another. Boozer continued to fetch food for us from the front bar.
I was inhaling a fistful of fries when Boozer called to me to come to the front. And there I was, on TV. I watched the clip of me running for my life up the West Side Highway. It’s about 2:30 p.m. Four hours earlier, this was all actually happening. Now I’m watching it on TV! This was hard to process. “That’s me,” I said sotto voce with some disbelief. It was surreal, and it was frightening all over again.
Reluctant Hero Page 8