Time and time again I found myself in a room full of friends, feeling totally alone, totally detached. I couldn’t relate. Everybody was kicking back, having a drink, talking about the last episode of Desperate Housewives or something like that, and I was like, What?
March 2004, Sunday afternoon I was at a gathering at a buddy’s house when a newsflash scrolled across the bottom of a giant flat screen TV, updating us on the body count from the terrorist bombing in Madrid a few days earlier. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to it, but my buddy standing next to me does. Jangling the ice in his scotch glass, he leans in and smalltalks, “That was pretty crazy, huh?” Then he realizes it’s me, and we both feel awkward.
I was desperate to change the noise in my head. In May 2004, I gave in. I got a job on Wall Street with a telecom company I will call CityTel. It put me back in New York City, back downtown. I thought maybe it would be like Network Plus.
Much of my relationship with Joy remained unresolved. So much was still left unsaid and unsettled. But we decided that demonstrations of outward normalcy might help us through whatever was failing inside of our marriage. It was all about making life look good on paper. So in October of 2005, we bought a house in Bloomfield, New Jersey, near where I grew up. It was a huge arts and crafts with a Spanish-style roof, on the corner. The place was a handyman’s special. We’d really have to do a lot of work on it over time. Thus that house became the symbol of our new commitment to going forward together, an emblem of our new optimism. We can do this, we said.
But you know what’s coming, don’t you?
CityTel was less than an ideal situation. The guy who hired me hadn’t really consulted the CEO on it. I had been sold on the idea that I’d develop an in-house sales team, like I’d done at Network Plus, but CityTel had a culture of dealing with outside sales agents. Immediately, there was tension. I let it go. I was determined to make it work. This was my new beginning.
In short time, people at CityTel caught wind of my 9/11 story. I never mentioned it. Then one afternoon, after I’d been with the company for about a year, the CFO and the COO called me in and asked me to tell them my 9/11 story. I felt extremely reluctant to do so. I’m trying to move past it, I said, quietly. They really wanted to hear it, though. They appeared sincere. I thought that maybe this was a way to connect with them on a human level. But that’s not what happened. As I tried earnestly to tell what I remembered, they kept interrupting. It’s like they were kids toggling between Reverse and Fast Forward on their DVD player. “W-w-w-w-wait,” said the COO. “Tell us again about that body you saw coming out of the sky.” Then the CFO just had to know: “Like, did anybody die right in front of you?” It went on like this. They had no interest in the little acts of kindness and selflessness, the anonymous heroic things I saw people do for each other, the things that mattered to me. These guys were just bored and looking for some free entertainment on their coffee break.
It was disgusting. I felt gross.
I came home that night, and I told Joy how bad it was in the office. She rolled her eyes, thinking, Here we go again. She was frustrated from night after night of listening to me spew negativity, wishing I’d do something to help myself—talk to someone. “Until you do,” she’d say, “nothing is going to satisfy you, Michael.” I’d give her the universal “You just don’t understand” head shake. Yet it was still me who didn’t understand. I refused to say out loud how much I needed to work things out, still fearful to take the painful journey it would require to do so.
Something had to give. Because the journey I took each day to get to work was tearing me open in ways I could no longer ignore. My weekday commute took me right through Ground Zero. I exited the PATH at Chambers Street, walked up the subway steps outside, which puts you on a viewing platform that allowed you to look out over the devastated area. That platform, originally built as a simple area for mourners to pay their quiet respects, had become an all-out, albeit-makeshift, tourist attraction. People from all over the world were making pilgrimages, every day, to Ground Zero.
I could hear them talking, their accents giving away where they might be from. I heard hundreds of conversations. They stood in awe, mostly. Silent. Respectful. They acted as if they were in a cemetery, or a holy place. Some prayed. Others gently placed flowers. I’d see many of them on my ride in, and I watched their reactions carefully as they viewed the entirety of Ground Zero for the first time from the train window. Sometimes I’d be walking behind a group onto the viewing platform and eavesdrop on their conversation. They’d ask questions of each other, tell each other what they knew, what they thought they knew, what they’d read or seen on TV. They hungered to know more. Where was the North Tower? Where was the South Tower? Didn’t that use to be where the fountain in the square used to be? If they only knew. I just about broke through my skin wanting to interrupt these people and share with them—not share my story but tell them simple things: where things were, what it used to be like for me and the friends who were my co-workers. Then I’d get distracted. I thought I heard singing off in the distance. More like chanting maybe. Then I saw it clearly. It was protesting. Protesters became a fixture outside of Ground Zero. There was always something to protest. I didn’t want any part of that, from whatever side it came from. I tried instead to focus on the photos of faces—faces of the missing, faces of the dead—thousands of them, fastened to the chain-link fence and posted on construction walls. Notes were taped to some, messages written next to others. Everywhere you looked there were flowers. They sold them, a dollar each, across the street. They sold a lot of things.
Street cart vendors peddled key chains and T-shirts. Knockoff FDNY junk over here, gruesome images over there. People bought this stuff. Are you going home to put a picture of the two planes crashing into World Trade Center up on your wall? Why would you want to do that? I tried to ignore it, just walk through it. I could hear people arguing. An old woman pointed her finger at one of the vendors, letting him know she thought it was wrong to do what he was doing. I saw those types of confrontations a lot. Oftentimes I had to hold back from laying into them myself. The disrespect, their callousness was appalling. They were hawking trinkets like they were souvenirs from a horror movie.
Monday through Friday, I took the train back and forth with the tourists. I heard them talking, and I could see what they were taking away from the experience. And my heart sank.
Either they don’t get it, or they’ve forgotten it.
The last time I was down at Ground Zero, before CityTel, was five weeks after the attacks. We were a united community then, a united country. We collectively felt terrible, collectively sought to heal each other, and stood collectively ready to serve.
Just three and a half years later, I stood in a carnival. Come see where the bodies burned! Where the jumpers jumped! Where the planes hit! The villains! The heroes! And while all of this was going on, they were arguing about what to build, where to build, if to build, who should build. And nothing was built. The entire two years I commuted through there, I never saw a crane move, a dump truck unloaded, or any work at all.
The site of the 9/11 terrorist attack had not yielded a single physical manifestation of united response. Instead, this “new” Ground Zero had become a crucible for a thousand different and discordant motivations and a thousand divergent and competing agendas. Some people were trying to love and heal, some were trying to learn and get it right, some were trying to call others to account, and some were clearly just trying to make a buck. In many ways, the five blocks of activity at Ground Zero represented, in microcosm, our national political discourse. The media was full of it. Divisiveness and bloody opportunism dominated. Just three and half years later, those seeking reelection were using 9/11 for whatever reason was most politically expedient. Some dropped it as an applause line, others as a throwaway line. Each claimed to know what 9/11 meant to America. This was not a mighty nation rebuilding itself but a 21st-century revival of the Tower of Babel.
Some mornings, I just sat myself down on a bench, debilitated. I was no political scientist, but when I saw what I saw, I couldn’t help but think, It’s working. What the terrorists wanted to do is working. We are not rising above it.
What had we taken from 9/11? Did we become any less greedy, any less self-seeking, any less fame-obsessed?
They hate our fireedom? Well, what fireedom were we exercising exactly? The fireedom to siphon each other’s paychecks? The fireedom to share our most embarrassing secrets on television talk shows? The fireedom to obsess over Anna Nicole Smith?
And how are you using your freedom, Michael?
I had unwittingly become part of the carnival. I was a good story. Some people knew me as “the wheelchair guy.” In some telecom circles, they knew me as “the guy whose whole office made it out.” Some knew me as “the guy who ran from the collapsing building.” They saw the video. Some knew me from being on Oprah, but didn’t remember why.
I’d lost control of it. I always ran into people who wanted to hear my story. Every day I was out in the world, and I couldn’t help but meet people. I told my story in bits and pieces, but it never felt right. I didn’t see them walking away with the right message. I didn’t hear myself delivering the right message.
The right message was not only about what I did but about what tens of thousands of others did. It was the message of how we came together for each other in the middle of hell. And it was all being forgotten. No one would remember if this circus continued. Of course, by this point, I got it. There was 9/11 fatigue. How could there not be? It was understandable fatigue from all the wrong images and all the wrong messages being disseminated. It was fatigue from the constant, blaring magnification of division, destruction, inaction. What they showed over and over again, what they dwelled on was everything that is negative. But that was only half the story. On 9/11 there were thousands upon thousands of simple, unrecorded, unwittnessed yet unconquerable acts of strength, courage, and kindness. Please remember. Please remember. Maybe it was only a few days, or a few weeks, or a couple months. But there was a brief aftermath—a time after it all happened—where we froze and tried to see each other as people, not objects. We cared. And we comforted. We need to take from that and go forward. There are survivors. We all lived it, and we all survived it—all of us inside and outside the Towers that day, no matter how far outside you were. We cannot focus only on the worst of it, or that’s all we’ll ever think of it. That’s what everyone was taking from it now, what they were selling down there at Ground Zero and in the elections. That’s what they were shouting on TV. Epic confusion. Epic conflict. Nobody was talking about how good we were that day, and the next day, and the day after that. I don’t know when it happened, but it did happen. At some point, the seeping rot of conflict, selfishness, and self-seeking took over and wiped out what President Bush recognized as our “national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice,” and the scores of true heroes mentioned by name during the national 9/11 telethon, and the hugs from Chicagoans in a bar on Rush Street given to every survivor from my New York office, and the crayon-colored cards sent from Mrs. Toussaint’s fifth-grade class, and the ultimate, terminal, superheroic-yet-intensely-human sacrifice made by those firemen. I’ve got to tell the whole story. I’ve got to set the record straight. I want to put down every fact I remember before this thing goes any farther. I can’t watch one more tourist walk away from Ground Zero and not get this message.
When I came home that night, Joy was chopping some vegetables on the kitchen counter. I put my hands softly on her shoulders. She turned around, and I said, “I know I don’t talk about it with you, and I know you think I need to get some professional help, but I think I want to write this out. I want to write a book and tell everything.”
Joy feared this new “project” would just take me to another level of obsession with 9/11. She wanted me to get away from it. She saw us as finally moving on—our new house, my new job. It had been two years of relative stability for us, even though “the old Michael” was still missing. She stared down at the kitchen floor, then raised her eyes to meet mine, looking at me semi-parentally with a mix of love and resignation, forcing a smile. “I’m all for it, honey,” she said. “Whatever works.” This was January 2006. It was five years later, but maybe I’d finally found a way to give meaning to my surviving 9/11.
PART VI
DEPTH
2006-2008
Reviewing Lit, the third book in Mary Karr’s autobiographical trilogy, The New York Times columnist Michiko Kakutani commented critically on the “memoir craze of the late ’90s,” lamenting that “lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.”
Let me state clearly right now: What follows here is neither intended to be art, nor will it be a confession. There are things that happened between me and my wife that I will not share. There are places I went and things I did that just aren’t worth mentioning. Telling you about it—about every dirty little secret—will help no one. It will only hurt. I’ve hurt enough people already. I’ve hurt myself. And, I did these things. Nobody else did. I did. I take responsibility. What I want you to know, what I want you to take my word on, is that things got dark. That I can tell you.
February 4, 2006
I was feeling pretty good. The CityTel job wasn’t perfect, but it was steady. We were working bit by bit on the new house we’d bought four months prior. With this new idea to write a book, I believed I’d found a way to constructively channel my 9/11 experience-slash-trauma.
I looked around the house at some unopened boxes that contained all kinds of stuff from 9/11—video tapes, newspaper clippings, the ash-covered clothes Boozer had rescued from the trash. I wasn’t scared of those boxes now.
This will be a good year.
On Saturday, February 4, we threw my parents a fiftieth anniversary party. It was a plan we’d had in the works for some time. We rented a hall, hired a band, invited everybody they ever knew. It was like a second wedding for them. I have to say, it was about as proud and as happy of a moment as we’ve had as a family. My parents were beaming. Angelo pulled up next me, put his hand on my back, and said, “I’ve been thinking, Mike. This book—it’s going to help you work through things. I really believe it will.”
This will be a good year.
On Monday morning, February 6, CityTel let me go. I was fired. Just when I thought I was back in gear, riding high, my life returning to a semblance of normalcy, the rug was pulled out from under me. I figured I had money for the house, for my parents’ anniversary party, for moving forward. How could I go home and tell Joy?
Here we go again, she thought. Joy was only human. When I met her, everything was in order. I had a great job. Continuing professional advancement and increasingly greater financial security seemed assured. As soon as we got engaged, 9/11 happened, and everything started going in the opposite direction. Suddenly I had no security, my future was uncertain, and I was financially unstable.
It was as if as soon as I’d asked her to marry me, it all went downhill. I started thinking about that. What happened? I started to doubt. I began doubting my relationship. I know Joy did too.
I wasn’t just questioning my relationship. I was now questioning everything. I mean everything—big, fundamental things.
I questioned the way the world works, the way people treat each other, the way corporate America works, the person I chose to live with, the decision I made to work for Network Plus, which put me in the World Trade Center in the first place. Every move I ever made was under review. Why? Why? Why?
My facile conclusion? Fuck everybody. I don’t deserve this shit.
I kept my firing from CityTel a secret. I didn’t tell my family. I relied on the old Why make them worry? rationale, a simple disguise for not wanting to face the pain of my own shame, the shame that was built on the deeper, unexamined pain—guilt, fear, trauma—of 9/11. But you ca
n’t hide that much pain. Isolation only makes it worse.
I projected anger more fiercely than ever. The few friends I thought might be able to help with a job saw I wasn’t myself. At job interviews they sensed my disgust and my isolationist world-view. I didn’t want that job with those idiots, anyway.
It was all getting to me. I couldn’t talk to another jerk in a tie behind a desk asking stupid questions. I couldn’t be a “manager,” then a “sales manager,” then a “regional manager.” These things meant nothing to me (as if the only thing that had meaning was what I experienced on 9/11, the meaning of which I had still yet to comprehend). I went back to that old way of thinking and back to construction, where I could get lost, where I was not required to think too much about the past, the future, or even the present. Instead it was work and Miller time, and some days nothing at all. So what? I had an excuse. I was still looking for meaning.
The Abyss
Three months passed. I woke up to yet another meaningless morning, a morning in late April. Joy was already at work. I got a call from Angelo. My dad was being rushed to the hospital.
“It doesn’t look good, Mike,” Angelo said. “It doesn’t look good.”
I threw on some clothes and rushed to the hospital. I got there before the ambulance did, so I waited outside the ER doors. I saw them take my dad out of the ambulance. My pop. He was unconscious. They wheeled him in. Not now. Not now. Not now. I still haven’t done … haven’t become … haven’t said … Angelo is there. He tells me again, “It doesn’t look good.”
It’s happening too fast. He was just at my house the day before. Ever since he retired, he would just show up like that. It was a great thing. I had just gotten a Fisher-Price slide for my niece Angelina, and he was coming to pick it up. He came over. He didn’t know I was out of work. Maybe he did and pretended he didn’t. He looked out at my deck, nodded his head, and said, “This is going to work for you, Mike. This will be OK.” It was almost as if he knew what was coming, and he wanted to let me know I’d be OK.
Reluctant Hero Page 18