Reluctant Hero

by Michael Benfante

  I called my mom from the garage to let her know I was running late. When I got off the phone with my mother, the phone rang. It was Lisa Kay Greissinger from People magazine. OK, here we go again. She started with “I’d like to commend you on the brave and heroic act you did. I think it was the greatest thing.” I half-listened while fumbling for my car keys. “Tina Hansen is fine, and she told me—”

  “What?” I said.

  “Yes, Tina said that—”

  “Who? Who did you say?”

  “Tina Hansen. The way I got your number is because my husband is friends with Tina. Tina Hansen? The woman whom you carried down in the wheelchair? You gave her your card. That’s how I got your name.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I … you didn’t know? I’m sorry. I can call you back. ”

  I hung up the phone. My throat began to tighten. Then my whole face pushed forward, and I burst out crying. I sat down in that parking garage and cried like a baby. All the sadness, the fear, the guilt—all of it—came to a head and came pouring out of me. I got so excited I ran back into the bar with tears in my eyes. It had already been an emotional day. My gang had had a few drinks by now. Somebody joked, “Oh, what’s he crying about?” I told them, and they bought me a drink. I called home and told them. I called John, and we shouted together like teammates who had just won the big game. Much of our rejoicing came from the relief of finally knowing that what we did—what the newspapers were saying we did—now meant so much more to us. We were, on a very powerful, personal level, liberated.

  The People magazine reporter called back a little later and asked if she could arrange a photo shoot for the magazine. How about Monday? She asked. Sure. We hung up. The phone rang again. It was Tina. I spoke to her. “I didn’t know if you were alive. I didn’t know your name. I remember giving you the card …” I can barely remember the conversation. I was so overcome with joy. Tina was matter-of-fact. She’d had this handicap since she was three, so she was no stranger to struggle. She was very independent, very strong-willed. “I didn’t know you didn’t know,” she said. “Thank you, Michael. I guess I’ll see you on Monday.” We hung up. That was the highest point. In the midst of so much pain and trauma and confusion, I felt some measure of redemption. For a moment the world seemed to come back to me. I had seen my friends from work. I was heading home to be with my family. And I knew, finally, that her name was Tina, and she was alive.

  PART IV

  A HERO’S WELCOME?

  SEPTEMBER 2001–SEPTEMBER 2002

  “Hey Mike, did President Bush call you today?”

  Angelo and I are the type of brothers who like to bust each other’s chops. That’s our rhythm. Having heard just a couple hours earlier that the woman in the wheelchair, Tina Hansen, was alive, and then promptly spilling my emotional guts all over the Newark Hilton parking garage, some levity across the dinner table from Angelo was all right with me.

  “Very funny, Anj.” I smirked at him and then kissed my mom on the cheek.

  But Angelo wasn’t joking.

  “No, seriously,” said Angelo. “He talked about you. Well, not you per se. But today, in his speech, he mentioned what you did.”

  I looked at my father. He nodded his head, gently saying without words, Your brother’s not kidding.

  The phone had been ringing all day. Actually, it had been ringing nonstop for four days straight since the moment I got reception back, walking uptown and out of the wreckage on 9/11. I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t want to keep up. I was all talked out about 9/11. No more interviews please. Not from media, family, friends—anybody. I started deleting messages from numbers I didn’t know.

  Could I have deleted the president?

  After dinner I sat on the couch with my parents and Joy and watched a replay of President Bush’s address from the National Cathedral on what was being called a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. And sure enough, he said it. President George W. Bush said,

  And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice: Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end and at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down 68 floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burned victims. In these acts and many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another and an abiding love for our country.

  I looked at Joy. I looked at my parents. This was all too much. First I find out about Tina Hansen. People magazine wanted to take our picture on Monday. Now this? Now the president of the United States?

  I can’t tell you it wasn’t an amazing thing. It was. But it was overwhelming. The totality of the events of that day and night pummeled me into a state of vertigo. None of it seemed real. I couldn’t feel myself anymore. Was I happy, embarrassed, fearful, grateful?

  Don’t feel a thing. Not one thing. You let in one feeling, you let them all in.

  I just wanted to lie down, go to sleep, and have my life back. I wanted it to be over. Maybe if I closed my eyes, something would show me the way out in the morning. Maybe there would be answers.

  People arranged to do the photo shoot with Tina at her apartment on the Lower East Side on Monday afternoon, September 17. Coincidentally, Network Plus arranged to move us to another one of their office locations in Manhattan, the Starrett-Lehigh Building on West 26th Street, that same day.

  I walked into the new office first thing Monday morning, ready to work, the first one in the office. I figured that was better than staying at home and thinking about everything. Well, I didn’t consciously figure it that way. Unconsciously, I was trying not to fully accept, or even acknowledge, all that had happened. The best way to handle this is to get back to work, prove that we were knocked down but now we’re back up. A truer statement of my state of mind would’ve been, I can fake it, distract myself, fool myself, act like I don’t feel the things I feel, and going to work is one way to do that.

  I took a tally of who was there and who was not. Many were not there. My people were not ready to come back yet. No one was being forced to come back immediately. John had gone back to North Carolina. So there was at least one salesperson who wouldn’t be returning.

  And with John not physically in New York, I became the point of focus for the media. It seemed like everybody had my phone number. They asked for both of us, and after a while, they started asking only for me. Maybe it was because of the story—I managed the office, I found Tina, I put things in motion on the 68th floor. But let’s be clear. If it wasn’t for John, neither Tina nor I might be here.

  As boxes were being unpacked, I left the office in the hands of electricians and IT people and ran downtown for the photo shoot.

  I was nervous. Being in People magazine, doing a photo shoot—this was weird for me. Also, heading in a downtown direction made me queasy. Walking around Manhattan, less than a week after the attacks, you felt it—the lack of a basic sense of security. The wound was still fresh. We were just getting off the mat. It was in the air, and the tension got thicker as you moved nearer in the direction of what they were calling Ground Zero.

  Most of all, this would be the first time I’d see Tina since closing those ambulance doors.

  I got there on time and knocked on the apartment door, which was slightly ajar. Voices carried into the hallway. A People staffer pulled the door open while I was in mid-knock. My eyes darted through several other unfamiliar bodies until they rested on Tina. I wanted to see her. That whole day carrying her down, I was just carrying a body, some person. I didn’t get to know her at all. I didn’t know her name. In the last four days, I had gone from not knowing if she was alive to learning that she was, and now seeing her.

  This is a happy thing. This is something I can feel good about.

  We talked a little. I was cautious. I wasn’t comfortable wit
h how much I should mention. I sensed caution in her too. But we needed to know things. We had questions for each other: What do you remember? Do you remember when this happened? Did you see that? How did you get out? I wanted to go back over it in my head to make sure I had things right—if my experience matched hers. She told me the ambulance took right off. Had it not, she would not be here. With that, we broke eye contact and looked down. There were prolonged silences between us, but neither of us seemed to mind. We stayed close to each other in the room. She asked what happened to me. Did she see the footage of me running? Had she heard other survival stories? There was so much I wanted to talk about, but there was too little time and too many people in the room.

  It was all so sudden. 9/11 was Tuesday. Less than a week later, Monday, 9/17, I’m in her apartment doing a photo shoot. I found it difficult to fully take it all in. I figured the only reason I was in there was because Tina worked with the husband of Lisa Kay Greissinger, who worked for People, who contacted me. That’s the way things happen sometimes. I didn’t think of myself as anything special, as a national hero. I saw myself as disoriented, grasping for anything that offered clarity and balance. And other than John, Tina was my only other human link to what went on inside those stairwells. She was the one person, I thought, who could really understand me. Everyone else, to me, required an unloading—a wrenching, painfully long explanation. Tina just knew. It felt good to be around her.

  When it came time to finally pose for the shoot, both of us felt strange. What are we posing for anyway? The people from People were very kind, gently imparting instructions while the photographer clicked away. I guess we seemed stiff. Finally, the photographer pulled his face back from behind the camera and broke through the seriousness: “Just give her a hug!” I reached over and clutched Tina, and a huge smile broke out across my face. That’s the picture they used.

  They wrapped the shoot. I had to get back to work. Tina and I exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses. I left her apartment, good-byes all around. And that was the second time I met Tina Hansen.

  In the year to follow, Tina and I would do a lot more media together. We had a full 9/11 reunion when John came into town some weeks after the People shoot, and we all went to lunch. Tina was never comfortable with the media attention. She had once even said, “Try not to mention me when they interview you.” It was suggested to me that perhaps her reticence had to do with her working for the Port Authority. The fact that she was on the 68th floor and it took someone from the 81st floor to carry her out might not have looked too good for her employer. Tina was always gracious and grateful with the media, but could not fully indulge in the idea of celebrating our story. The way I see it, she is a woman who had sustained a dignified battle with rheumatoid arthritis since age three. She worked daily to eliminate dependence. In our story, on 9/11, she was the very thing she’d spent her whole life trying not to be: a victim. Why would she want to celebrate her victimhood?

  As the newspapers continued to count the “victims” of 9/11, I found it near impossible to celebrate anything, even being alive.

  I can’t go there. I can’t get stuck in feelings like that.

  As if I was still trying to get down the stairs in the North Tower, the voice in my head directed me to shut down any thoughts that hurt, or could hurt—thoughts that could hurtle me backward.

  The best thing for me to do was go back to the office, dive back into work, dive back into life. Start forgetting about 9/11. But 9/11 wouldn’t let me. The office phone, my cell phone, my parents’ phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show—every show, every magazine, every reporter, writer, and producer wanted to talk to me. I wasn’t answering. I had an office to put back together. No, thank you.

  Before 9/11, I had forty-five people working in our World Trade Center North Tower office. Twenty-eight of them were in the office on 9/11. Now it became my job to get everyone who went through the experience back to work. We had begun to hire many of our people straight out of college. They were young. Now they were scared. They were not coming in. If they did, it would be for a day or an hour, and then they’d go home “sick.” Some were taking prescription Valium and other sedatives. Some were drinking heavily. I guess we all were drinking more heavily. I noticed many were losing sleep. People were having a hard time dealing with it. A couple of reps decided they could no longer be in the city. I understood. So I devised a plan.

  I called each one of them in the morning and said, “Look, I don’t care if you stay at work. You just come down here, see me, and if you want to go back home, go back home. But all I want you to do is get up and come see me in this office. After that, the day is yours.” Eventually, I got everyone to come back to work full-time.

  By October, I had a sales force again. We had a good October too. New York City was a nerve-racking place in those first days and weeks after 9/11. I remember going out to have a smoke, hearing sirens, and getting an uneasy feeling, thinking, Is it terrorism? Then they said anthrax was traveling through the mail. Then a plane went down in Rockaway Beach.

  Life pre- and post-9/11 were entirely different in every way.

  My pre-9/11 Network Plus mind-set was all about the public offering, the stock value, growing the company. My post-9/11 mind-set on Network Plus? I had little concern with long-term business goals. I was going day by day. Get up. Go to work. Get through the day. My drug of choice was bravado. Bravado can keep you from facing yourself in a lot of ways.

  But there was another pre-9/11 preoccupation I had more trouble navigating. Pre-9/11, I had just gotten engaged. The morning of 9/11, wedding plans dominated my life. Two weeks before 9/11, we booked the place where we were going to get married. Now the wedding barely registered for me. It was secondary. How unfair to Joy. Not only was the wedding no longer the biggest thing in our lives, but I wasn’t the same. Pre-9/11, all we talked about was the wedding, the fun things we would do that day, our lives together. Post-9/11, she’s dealing with my distracted and haphazard “Oh, right … the wedding.” She’s engaged to a guy who is no longer emotionally or psychologically available. She looks over at her fiancé and sees a person in a state of shock. She doesn’t see the same guy she planned to marry. When you watch tapes of my television appearances, you can see it in my eyes. I’m just not there. That’s what Joy always said. She could tell that night—the night of 9/11—the moment we first and finally saw each other. I just wasn’t there. I was gone.

  That was the hardest thing. I wasn’t there because I didn’t want to accept a lot of things. I was afraid. I was afraid to delve into the effect those things had on me—the things I saw, what I went through. My pre-9/11 personality for dealing with life’s little adversities was to handle it, put it aside, and move on. But this thing—9/11—could not simply be put aside. You can’t move on from it without facing it, fully. To be my old self, I’d have to eat it up, chew it up, re-taste it, and re-digest it—all of it and what it really was to me. Deep down, I knew that’s what it would take. There was no way I could do it.

  I look back now, and I can see myself in those early days. Joy wanted to discuss the wedding, but I was no help. I sat there, physically present in conversations—in our kitchen or in our living room or at a Home Depot—talking about it, but not present. My mouth was moving, and words were coming out, but I wasn’t feeling it. I’d respond with dismissive brevity. “Yeah, sure, OK. You take care of it.”

  In those days, it was also not lost on either of us that the date of our wedding—September 13, 2002—was right around the one-year anniversary of 9/11. The intertwining of those events was inescapable. Is this a message? we’d ask ourselves. Should we save the money and just run off to Vegas? We seriously considered it. I said we might regret it. I think Joy knew better but didn’t say it. We stuck to our plan. We’d get married two days after the first anniversary of 9/11.

  “You sure this is the right thing for us?” she asked me. The phone rang again. This time
I picked it up. A call from the media should require less real feelings than talking about the wedding. This is how I was operating.

  Friday, September 21, 2001

  I got through my first full week in the new office.

  On Friday night, September 21, I’m sitting on the couch with Joy at my parents’ house. We’re watching TV. I’m tense, mind racing, saying little. We flip through channels, but every network is showing this huge, live telethon called America: A Tribute to Heroes. The event was raising money for victims and families of victims of 9/11. In America, the telethon was simulcast by over thirty-five network and cable channels, broadcast on over eight thousand radio stations, and streaming on the Internet. You couldn’t turn on any device you owned without seeing or hearing it.

  My phone rings again. It’s the people from the telethon. They don’t want money. They want permission to use my name. I didn’t know what they were asking, exactly. Did they want to mention it when they called people for donations? Did they think I needed money? But yeah, sure, OK, I said.

  Joy and I were enjoying the show. Various celebrities came on, one after the other, telling about different poignant and powerful things that happened on the day, and then a song was performed after the telling of each inspiring story. I was gripped by it. I felt connected to every story they told. It was really beautifully done. Then Jim Carrey came on. He told my story. He said my name and John Cerqueira’s name. He spoke about selflessness and being a hero and acts of kindness, how we put our lives at risk to save someone else. Enrique Iglesias followed him and sang “Hero.”

  I was blown away. This was different from USA Today or the CBS news footage, which to me was all about news reporting. This wasn’t People magazine, where the writer knew Tina Hansen’s husband. This was ten days later. To be singled out on this kind of show, running on every network—I mean, the words “Oh my god” flew out of my mouth.