That elevated things. It became clear to me that our story was circulating in the national oxygen. It started to sink in. First, President Bush, and now this. My story was positive. It carried a positive message that we—the country, the victims, the survivors—could all be proud of. I sat there on the couch with my fiancée and my parents, and I felt proud of it. This is who we really are. That’s what I really saw in the Tower and on the ground. That worked for me. It released a good feeling in me.
You see, as much as everyone was patting me on the back, I was not having too many good feelings on Friday, September 21, 2001. I was having nightmares. I said nothing about it to anyone, but underneath my stony silence, I was shaky. Hearing the president refer to me seven days after 9/11, and then being singled out during a national telethon three days after that gave me hope. I had no answers, but those two things pushed open a door, letting in some daylight of belief in me that maybe there was some meaning to what I went through. Amid all the twisted and fucked-up feelings, this feeling was OK. If the White House and the producers of a nationally broadcast telethon feel good about it, maybe I should feel good about it too. Feel good instead of feel anger and sorrow and guilt. Those two things let me feel that I did something right, instead of feeling that I did something wrong. Friends called me that night, saying, “Hey, did I just hear Jim Carrey say your name?” I said, “Yeah. I can’t believe it.” I smiled. That show gave me permission to smile. It made me want to personally thank Jim Carrey for my first truly solid good feeling in ten days.
Maybe I’m really OK. Maybe it’s OK to talk about this publicly, with other people.
Up until that moment, I couldn’t hold one good thought in my head. I looked at others, and they always seemed to know something I didn’t. On 9/12, after my CEO, Rob Hale, saw the CBS feed and led the USA Today reporter to me, he said, “Mike, you’ve got to understand—you’re a national hero.” I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m still trying to figure shit out. I don’t even know if she’s alive. I’m checking to see if I still have my nuts attached. I’m making sure I didn’t lose anybody from our office. Man, I was choking to death with my face against the pavement and my ass in the air, halfway under a goddamn truck. I’m just pulling my head together. I saw bodies coming down from the sky. The firemen. The firemen. The firemen!” But nobody wants to know that. The TV’s on, didn’t you know? I’m standing amid death, dust, and rubble; I’ve just witnessed horrors unimaginable; and all of a sudden, a camera is in my face. And I spew out what happened. I had no idea, nor did I care that it was being fed by CBS to the world. And because of that, the next conversation that afternoon, maybe two hours later, is with my CEO, who says, “You are a national hero.” What? That made absolutely no sense to me. I just saw a person and then another person jump—fucking jump—from the top of the World Trade Center. That’s why maybe the only purely true thing I said to that CBS cameraman was “This is chaos,” referring to everything, including the camera people documenting the chaos. Hero of fucking what? Madness, that’s what.
I guess that’s how things happen. I told a CBS cameraman that I had just carried a woman down sixty-eight floors, not realizing that I was in the middle of some national media moment. If that cameraman had walked ten feet to the left, he’d have met a woman who saved somebody else. Ten feet to the right, he’d have met a man who made sure his friend stopped crying so they could walk the last ten floors. I just happened to be standing where someone needed me. That’s all. But national hero? Say those words, and boom, people are on it. They’re on me. The media buzz is instant, immediate. And ten days later, I’ve got to navigate it?
The president and a nationwide emergency telethon recognized me on national television. What do I do about this? Do I have a responsibility of some kind? Should I be doing more? Should I be doing less? You try to wrap your head around it. People are saying you should get an agent. I’m getting offers sent to me from Hollywood for “my story.” I’m getting offers to speak at all kinds of public functions. It’s crazy. I still have a fulltime job with Network Plus. Yet I’m starting to see it. After the president and the telethon, I am coming to believe that people can take something good from what happened that day. They need to. Because there was good to take. All my reps made it. Tina made it. Yet how do you appropriately express that good? There were too many people who didn’t make it, too many people in mourning. So much pain everywhere. You couldn’t help but feel that by talking about the good that happened— about surviving—that you were doing something wrong.
But all those phone calls I had been ignoring, they weren’t going to end. President Bush and Jim Carrey saw to that. They also got me believing that maybe I could help others.
I should pick up the phone.
So I said yes to Good Morning America. Was I thinking I’m a hero? No. But If I could tell my story and maybe somebody somewhere would feel better, then I’d do it. I was very conflicted about it. The nation was in mourning. I was in mourning. The nation was hurting. I was hurting. And I was nervous as hell.
Tuesday, September 25, 2001
Charlie Gibson was a cool guy. A guy’s guy. He made John and me feel calm. He was professional and sensitive. He saw we were TV rookies, and he explained to us how things would go. He said, “Just talk to me like we’re buddies on the street.” And that’s exactly how he conducted things when the cameras started to roll. This feels wrong. My mouth is moving, but I feel like I’m in somebody else’s skin. I was feeling that alien feeling I had in the bar the night of 9/11.
The interview was short. They ask questions. You answer questions. And that’s the story you tell. But in my head, it was, Yes, I carried this woman down, but just after that, I ran from this exploding building, man. I heard the thing explode behind me. I ran for my life. I understood the woman-in-the-wheelchair story was what they wanted. But what I wanted someone to know was that three minutes after I put her in an ambulance, I was really close to dying in an atmosphere of overwhelming terror. I never felt that I was ever really getting across what happened that day and how I felt. Carrying Tina out was a great thing. She made it. But what raged in my memory was seeing the firemen, the bodies, the things that happened after I got out of the building. That’s what consumed me. What the hell was I going to say about that? I couldn’t bring up the horror, could I? I was angry. I just wanted to scream into the camera. I wanted to tell everyone who lost something that I felt them. I feel your loss. I feel your loss. I feel your loss.
When I got into the office that morning, I took a good ribbing from everybody. My family and Joy saw the show too. But all they saw was the distance in my eyes. They were thinking, What’s wrong with him? Maybe he should be concentrating more on himself. Should he really be doing this?
That was the paradox. I get kudos on national TV, but my family can see I’m not healthy. Wherever I go they’re calling me a hero and clapping their hands, but the nation is in mourning, crying. They show my face on television and in magazines, and I walk outside to see thousands of faces of the missing on photographs posted everywhere.
“Great job this morning, Mike,” my CEO told me over the phone. “Now, up next, I really want to make sure you’re fully on board for this Oprah thing.”
“I am, Rob,” I reassured him. And then I asked again, “But seriously, is she really that popular?”
OPRAH
I didn’t know Oprah Winfrey was that big of a deal. It just wasn’t something I was aware of. Calls from the media came into our office all the time. I hung up on so many producers. Some calls I just didn’t take at all. A producer from The Oprah Winfrey Show had called every day since 9/12 asking me to be on the show. He called me, and he called our home office in Massachusetts trying to get to me. I wasn’t interested. The producers were shocked that I wouldn’t do it, that I didn’t scream into the telephone like a schoolgirl. I guess they didn’t hear “no” too often. Plus, their approach wasn’t entirely sensitive. It was all business. They were abru
pt. And I get it. They’ve got a job to do. They’re trying to put a show together. I didn’t expect them to be my therapist. I just had no interest in selling my story like it was processed food. Plus, to go all the way out to Chicago didn’t sound like a good use of my time.
They put another producer on it. Let’s call him Roy. His approach was not much different than that of the other producers. He got to my CEO, who urged me to take the call. Roy said he wanted to do a “survivor story.”
“I don’t know, Roy,” I said. “I’m really not sure this is for me.”
He wasn’t listening. “Now, Michael,” he said, “I need you to send in personal photos, write up a short summary …” E-mail this, fax that, make a list of this … He just kept going. I looked incredulously at the phone in my hand. Finally, I got a little irritated. “You want to do a survivor’s story, Roy? I’ve got forty survivors outside my office door. You want me to be on the show? Get them on the show.” There was a pause on the other line. Roy spoke: “Maybe that can be arranged,” he said. Then he said he’d call me right back.
I had been feeling guilty about all the attention focused on me. Damn it, my guys were survivors. They were on the 81st floor, and every one of them made it out. They all have stories. They’re all hurting. They all experienced horrific things and did amazing things, and nobody’s calling them. I’m not the only survivor.
Roy called back. He actually called my CEO, Rob Hale. The next thing you know, we’re all going out to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Thursday, September 27. John and I would be on the couch with Oprah. The rest of the office would be in the audience. A couple guys in the office would be featured from their seats. Oprah paid for my ticket, John’s ticket, and my CEO’s ticket. My CEO bought flights for all the reps.
I had three simple objectives/conditions for this trip:
1. I wanted to get my guys out of New York and have a night on the town together, as an office, in Chicago before the show. But they wanted to fly us out late Wednesday night before the 9:00 a.m. Thursday CT taping, and put us back on a plane right after the show. I said no way. I made them change the plans so we could fly out Wednesday morning and have a day together in Chicago. After we made the final flight arrangements, I heard from Oprah’s staff that she got wind of our plan to be there the day before. You know what Oprah did? In addition to putting us all up on her dime at the Omni Chicago Hotel, she gave each one of us $100 per diem to spend at the hotel. Her generosity left me speechless. What class. So my first objective was achieved by the grace of Oprah Winfrey.
2. I wanted to make sure I mentioned the name of our regional manager, Kevin Nichols, on air. Though I had started the process, Kevin was really instrumental in organizing everyone to go down the stairwells while I stayed behind to check the bathrooms and elevators.
3. I wanted to thank, on air, Mrs. Toussaint’s fifth-grade class from Heights Elementary School in Sharon, Massachusetts. Those kids sent me postcards that kept me glued together at a time when I was, minute by minute, nearly falling apart. I still have every one of those cards, and they still heal me when I hold them.
I came home after work one night, during that first mind-blurring week after 9/11. I was exhausted from sleepless nights—stomach knotted, nerves jangled, phone ringing—and there among a pile of mail was this manila envelope with twenty crayoned cards in it. The kids drew pictures of me. One had me in a Superman costume. One had me standing on the Towers. One depicted a man carrying a woman in a building with flames coming out of it. I sat down, held these cards in my hands, and I felt … stillness.
I did not know it then, but what was to come, starting with Oprah, was a journey of nonstop formal public appearances and high-profile media engagements. And when those cards arrived, it was the beginning of the most consistently good feeling I had doing such things, and that feeling always had to do with kids. When kids were involved, it touched me in a way that let me be me again. Kids—like when I sat holding my nephew the day after 9/11 and I was able to feel my feelings, even though they were very difficult feelings to feel. Kids somehow defrosted me. I could not articulate it, but when kids were part of the plans, the noise in my head—the million discordant voices of guilt, anger, fear, grief, imbalance, loss—quieted, and I felt peace. And though my thoughts remained nearly impossible to articulate, among kids my mind seemed ordered, my perspective seemed sensible, my balance was temporarily restored instead of constantly careening from one unwanted feeling to another. After 9/11, the only time I found that equilibrium was with kids, and the first time after 9/11 I felt it was when I was holding those cards from Mrs. Toussaint’s fifth-grade class.
I hold notes like these more dear than any national attention I received. There’s so much honesty to them. I look at these cards, and they bring me back to when I was a kid doing something like that in class, filling my head with imaginings of what a grown-up person like the one I was thinking about felt like. These kids were trying to understand what was going on as their TVs at home played it back relentlessly. Then they hear about it from their teacher who knows “the guy.” (Mrs. Angela Toussaint married Jeff Toussaint, my Theta Delta Chi fraternity brother and roommate my senior year at Brown.) They feel especially connected. I sat there holding those cards, man, thinking about those kids sitting at their desks, creating each one and addressing them to me. So creative, truthful, sensitive in saying “Thank you.” I wanted them to know how much that meant to me. I wanted to thank them on national television, on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Truth is, by the time I went on Oprah, I had gotten so many e-mails and cards from so many people, every day. Cards from total strangers saying the kindest things. I wanted to show proper appreciation to every single one of them. I wanted to read a list of every name on the next national TV show I went on. There were just so, so many. Beautiful words, so caringly expressed to me about what I did and how it connected to them, whether because they had a child with a disability or loved someone in a wheelchair or someone with a debilitating disease, or they knew someone in the building, or they lost someone in the fire. These notes, which nobody but me alone saw or read, when nobody was looking, went straight to my core. These notes kept me going. If there was a medicine I was supposed to take in the early days just after, these notes were it. They also reinforced to me that maybe what I did shouldn’t be kept quiet. Maybe it should be shared.
My reps got out to Chicago late Wednesday morning. The idea of flying was scary in those days. 9/11 was only two weeks prior. Consequently, a few of my reps didn’t make the trip. The thought of flying was too nerve-racking for them. One of my reps backed out practically before boarding. That’s how it was then.
I took a separate flight, which got me into Chicago in the late afternoon. A limo picked me up at O’Hare Airport. I made quick use of the limo bar. My gang was waiting for me at the hotel, and we headed out to paint the town red. We arrived at Tavern On Rush.
When a group of fortysome people pile into a bar, the rest of the place is like, Who are these guys? The Tavern On Rush manager found out that night exactly who we were and why we were there. And he rolled out the red carpet. It was more than I could’ve asked for. The manager cordoned off our own private section. Other patrons came in to talk to us. Every single one of my guys was being treated for a night like a national hero. Everybody was giving and getting hugs from Chicagoans we did not know who just wanted to show unity between Chicago and New York. On top of everything, my best friend, Jeff Fernandez, who was living in Indianapolis, drove in and met me there. It was my first time seeing him since 9/11 took place. I soaked in this dream night for every minute it lasted. Then I checked my watch, and it was 2:00 a.m. There was a limo coming at 7:00 a.m. to take me to Harpo Studios.
Roy met us in the production room at Harpo. Time to match names with faces. Roy greeted us by checking off who was who, taking attendance. “From Network Plus: Rob Hale, CEO, uh-huh. Mike Wright, uh-huh. Adam Andrews, uh-huh. John Cerqueira, uh-huh.” And th
en he stops at me and sniffs. “Oh. Who’s this? Mike Benfante?” Staring down his clipboard at me. “Oh yes, you’re exactly how I pictured you.” He clearly wasn’t meaning it as a compliment. That’s how Roy and I started off that morning.
I will say it now: Roy and I did not have the best relationship. Even before the day of the shoot, our dialogue was always challenging. I didn’t think he was very sensitive to the whole situation, and he probably thought I didn’t express the requisite gratitude for the opportunity. It takes two to tango, so I’ll take responsibility for my part. But this is how I recall how that day went down:
As soon as we got into the greenroom, we had been given a bunch of releases to sign. I suppose I was being overcautious, but I didn’t want to sign one of those releases. Rob Hale nudged me nervously. “Mike,” he said, “what are you doing? C’mon, let’s move this along.” But I wouldn’t do it. Then John wouldn’t do it, either. They had to have a verbal agreement for me to show my image on TV. So John goes along with me down to a sound room, and we verbally record our assent. I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with Roy’s treatment of us, and Roy can’t believe my behavior. The tension is building. Roy comes out and lets us know how the show will proceed: First, the Rudy Giuliani segment. Then a segment on Flight 93 with Lisa Beamer, who lost her husband; Alice Hoagland, who lost her son; and the United Airlines air phone operator, Lisa D. Jefferson, who tried to comfort the passengers. Then us. Any questions? I raise my hand. “Yes, Roy,” I say. “I have a question. I got these cards from fifth graders in Sharon, Massachusetts, and I’d just like to quickly thank them during the show.” He bounces the index and middle fingers of his right hand against his pursed lips, feigning consideration. “Uhhhhh, I don’t think so. We’re pretty pressed for time. In fact, we’re already behind. Besides, isn’t this something you can just do over the phone?” I was livid. “Jesus, Roy! Screw you!”
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