PonyOne
09-11-2002, 03:57 AM
I wrote this a little while ago. It's pretty long, I know, and don't worry, tihs isn't required reading. It just felt like something to do, and this seems like as good a place as any to post it....
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At the exact moment that the first plane struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I was listening to "For Tomorrow" by the band Blur. The frustration still gnaws at me, that while thousands were dying in a pretty horrible fashion, I was working at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, MA as a lowly register operator/bagboy.
17 at the time, I dropped out of school not quite 3 years earlier. An artist and, at the time, excessive introvert, I decided to strike out on my own, away from the various forces-that-were that made school seem more like Chinese water torture than a learning experience.
Yup. While thousands died, intrepidly at the screens of computers helping keep the gears that run the nation well oiled if you watch Fox News, I was wearing a Tool shirt, a pair of Doc Martens and some Levi's, waiting for 9:00 am to hit so I could brace the tide of nuvo-riche and old-money blue bloods who hadn't yet had their coffee.
8:44, I noted. Sweet. I just got the CD last night and had about, what, ten minutes after I got home to listen to it. I can knock back a few more tunes. I put the CD in the old Paasonic stereo that normally played pop froth throughout the day and hit the play button. Damon Albarn, Britain's favorite Britpop singer since 1989, said in prose recorded ten years earlier,
"He's a twentieth century boy,
with his hands on the rails
trying not to be sick again,
and holding on for tomorrow
London ice cracks on a seamless line
he's hanging on for dear life
so we hold eachother tightly
and hold on for tomorrow."
By the time the line was delivered and the chorus broke into twenty seconds of saying "la" at varying pitches and intervals, already a thousand were dead.
A coworker of whom I was not fond of came in. Now I was listening to "Chemical World." I'd also gone through "Sunday Sunday" as well. "Hey, did you guys hear?" she asked. We hadn't heard anything but Damon Albarn's cheery and oddly insightful vocals.
A plane, like a Cessna or something, hit the World Trade Center. Hmm. Interesting. I hit the stop button and put it on the FM setting; of course, I didn't need to scan the airwaves, it was all the same broadcast. We were getting an update on the happenings when there was a shriek that overloaded the microphone and almost made me drop the drink I was imbibing at the time.
"Oh my God, another one just hit! Another one just hit the towers."
I remember looking in a combination of confusion and fear at Daisy, my coworker, a young woman of Chinese descent who'd grown up in Texas and was very nice.
"Holy ****," was all I could manage to push out.
In hushed silence, we listened. An older gentlemen of the blue-blood assosication was about in the store, looking for his daily goods. I'd encountered him numerous times and wasn't fond of him. He was balding, but holding onto every sickened and thin brownish grey hair on his head. He looked like the type who would have enjoyed walking around the library in his twenty room mansion, puffing his pipe, and giving me superior looks from his old, once-costly green tweed jacket with leather elbow patches as I sat in an overstuffed chair in the cneter of the room. He would ask my opinion on various topics; politics, literature, the sciences, religion and the goods he had purchased earlier, wait for my answer, then, between puffs and gnarled chuckles, inform me just how stupid I was. Just like he'd done every time before when he came into the store.
This time, his question was much more difficult to refute.
"Is this for real?"
I looked at him from behind my register, looked at the face that was improperly aged with the lifetime security of money green as that damn jacket.
"Yeah," I said. I could have added words, I could have taken them away so that only a stark look remained, and this once, he would have made no snide remark.
People were jumping out of windows. One reporter said that he saw a flaming body land on a Police vehicle. You could hear the terror in the voices. To be human was to feel a slight ache in your eyes and feel yourself waver.
More people that had been waiting outside crowded the registers to listen. I remember thinking about how I'd seen images, acted out of course, of people crowded around old radios in December 1941, listening to broadcasts describing the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. Replace knickerbockers and floral dresses with polar fleece and linen, and make that soda boy with the white shirt look like he just got back from an all-night rock fest and you'd have the same image.
As the radio announcer broke up in tears, and screaming prevailed the sirens and the horns, and an occasional thump that disrupted the bed of glass at the foot of the tower that needed no explaination filled the room a mere four hours away, I recall feeling my mouth open and my face contort in what I can only describe as horror. It mirrored that of the older man in the tweed jacket right across from me.
Two generations, two social classes, searched eachother for answers. Why? Who? We wanted eachother's insight. But at such a moment, you can't really make any connection from your brain to your mouth.
The auspices of my mind were imagining the scene. I'd been there in eighth grade, on a school trip. I have a photo, somewhere, of me in front of one of the towers where, three years later, so many lives ended. I remember trying to take a picture and having to run across the highway just to get enough space to move my Olympus up to take a photo. The slice I got at the Sbarro sucked just as much as it did in Boston, or Seattle, where I grew up.
What a ****ing load, I thought to myself as I scanned the jeans of the girl in front of me in a lecherous fashion. She was cute. Hot, too. Then one of my equally unreserved buds and I went and sat down, somewhere in the plaza.
"Damn dude, these things are huge." We looked up. "Man, I wonder if anyone's ever fallen off these? Imagine what woulda happened if those Arab dudes managed to blow the place up."
"Yeah," he said and looked over at the same girl I'd been looking at. Her name was Amy, a girl in our class from South Africa. "That woulda been cool."
Now, looking back at that past through another, a comment worth being stoned to death by all the free world. A 14-year-old narrow viewpoint of the world, fed by Southpark and movies with lots of fire. While my friend continued on, I was thinking how horrible it'd be, and that there was a game I'd played on my Sega Genesis, called Urban Strike, in which in one mission, a plane has stricken the WTC north tower and you must use your helicopter to pull survivors form the wreckage before it blows up or terrorist-run helicopters nail you with missiles.
Now as I listened to so many fantasies become reality, and at how sick it felt to listen to and to know of, I became angry. How the hell could this happen? Why would anyone do somethng so sickening? Nazis? Fundamentalist Muslims? There was another plane that had hit the Pentagon. The IRA? Basque Seperatists? People dying. Left & right. Conspiracy theroies come true? Armageddon? Why couldn't I have that helicopter and be there right now?
I could picture myself in the situation as more customers came in to tell others how they'd seen images of people jumping. Desks and computers blasing out windows. Another plane gone missing. F-18's dispatched to intercept it. The guests running back home to contact loved ones in New York and in the WTC. The plane crashed, no one ever noted the F-18's again.
I got a call from my girlfriend. Her brother was in the NYPD. He was there.
Somewhere between hearing that, and informing my boss that I was leaving due to familial issues, the towers collapsed.
If you've ever tried to run two miles in Doc Martens, you know it's not fun, in fact it sucks. Add to that that I weighed near 265 pounds at the time, and had only stopped eating meat and started exercizing and watching my intake weeks earlier, and you get the picture. I stopped at 7-11 and got a Gatorade in Harvard Square. The streets were eerily empty for that time of day, and every time a car did pass I could catch a snippet of the radio.
I got inside and my girlfriend was on the couch, with the TV on. I finally got to see the reality that went along with my imagination; a 767 slamming into a uniform skyscraper on a crystalline blue sky. It was surreal, the kind of thing you never expect to see outside of the movie theatre or on a Playstation. At least in those situations you can admire the strange, flower like beauty that happens after a half second of almost peace as the plane disappears into the building; the eye of the hurricane. In the movie world, that blossoming explosion, a thousand shades of crimson and yellow and grey, has no death behind it, just a skilled artist behind the screen of a Macintosh.
Arnold Shwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes and I rush to the scene. Arnold gets out of his Humvee, Wesley's Barracuda screeches to a halt and he races out to the triage, and I get out of my black, government Ford and survey the scene from behind a pair of ominous Oakleys.
The fire captain and police chief seem relieved. "Thank God you guys are here," they say in unison.
"No problem, chiefs," I say. I'm Jewish so of course I'm a member of Mossad. "Just relax, we'll handle this crap."
"Ja, do not worry. We shall take care of it," says Arnold. He's already saved the world a hundred times, this is nothing to him.
"Damn straight, yo," says Wesley. He's part vampire, he can't die.
"There are a thousand terrorists in there, and they're armed! They'll blow the place up! We can't get firefighters in; all the SWAT team is dead!"
"Just leave it to us," we say and dash inside, bristling with manly armor and exotic European firearms. We dash up the escalator and blast a few generic terrorists into red splotches on the wall. People run, freed from the grips of these evil neer-do-wells. The elevators don't work, duh, and then the terrorists flood the promenade, and drop from the cieling. Our guns blaze and we destroy most of them. The evil ninja one is about to do something awful when Jackie Chan busts down from the cieling.
"Ah, ho, sorry," he says while dodging grenades, shurikens and ladders. "Came here on jet. Almost too late!" With an angry face he punches the ninja off the promenade and onto Wesley's huge vampire sword.
"Yeah, me too," says Brad Pitt, with his cop sunglasses and leather jacket with huge, floral collar. "I'm just here cause I'm sexy." The audience laughs. We eventually push our way up the stairs and past countless evildoers. We save babies that are there, for whatever reason. People with no legs from the floors that got blown up. We are the all-American, testosterone-pumped multinational force of dude-dom that cannot be stopped.
On the top floor we discover that Mohammed Atta (who survived the crash) and Osama bin Laden are at the top of the tower, waiting for the head badguy helicopter to airlift them to safety. We've already used our manly abilites to keep the tower from toppling and have made sure that no one died at all (Wesley infused the remains of the victims with his vampire blood and brought them all back to life forever) but Osama has these powers that could still wreck the towers.
The standoff is bloody. We all are wounded, and Osama and Atta put their magic evilrings together to make a huge evil blue burst of energy that blasts me off the side of the building. I'm about to die, when Jessica Alba in a tight spandex outfit catches me in the open cockpit of a Harrier jump jet.
"I knew you guys would need a woman's touch," she quips. I lower the Oakleys and eye her with my ice-blue eyes. The male audience members are totally turned on, imagining they are I; the girls swoon because the blast blew my shirt open, revealing my manly chest. She goes to kiss me but I stop her.
"Wait," I say and put my hand up. Violins and an upright bass fill the theatre as I put a clip in my MP5. "I've got some shish-kabob to make."
Guitars fueled by a merger of the best bands in the world wail. The bad guy helicopter is about to leave; the towers are about to fall, killing my compatriarts. Then, the Harrier comes into view. Close up of Atta, whose face recoils in terror. "No!!!"
Bin Laden: "YOU!!"
Me: "Say Allah Akhbar, mother****er." A missile blasts the chopper, and the ladder falls, about to dump Bin Laden and Atta to the ground a very long distance below. But before they fall I manage to fire three shots. One blasts through Atta's head, the other one gets Bin Laden's crotch and the other severs his head. The guitars wail as the bodies plunge toward the ground. A crescendo of drums, guitar, bass, and Axl Rose's screaming end all at once when the bodies hit the ground. Bin Laden's head rolls into a gutter in front of thousands, and an old dog walks over and barfs all over it.
The people cheer. The Harrier lands and the all-star cast claps and says cliche things as Jessica Alba and I kiss. THE END flashes over the screen and the audience leaves feeling vindicated in their $10 purchase of a ticket to this all star special effects extravaganza. Of course it's kinda hokey, but we all go about our lives knowing such a thing could never happen.
In reality, the highjacker was dead as everyone else, the mastermind was five thousand miles away in a cave, the movie stars and me and my girlfriend were all at our houses of varying greatness glued to our TV's, also of varying greatness. It seemed that divine intervention had allowed the cantankerous old Russian TV that my girlfriend's mom instisted worked great to show us the sharp, ugly, shocking reality that had taken place earlier that day and had the ability to make you feel bad for ever watching Die Hard.
If someone had made a movie about 9-11 on 9-10, no one would have paid to see it, it'd be too stupid. It'd be Deep Impact minus the asteroid. It'd be Volcano without the Volcano, Broken Arrow without the nuke, or Batman without Batman. If all those movie stars and me had been there what good would it have done? The count of dead would currently stand at 2,829 rather than 2,823. Nothing else.
As I sat there on the couch with my girlfriend, though, I still felt impotent. I'm sure she did too. She made pretend like it wasn't affecting her as much as it was. That's how her family deals with it. Me? I just watched and was traumatized.
Mongeese don't like Cobras. Bush's don't like Husseins. I don't like yuppies and office types and often thought to myself what fun I'd have if I met one of the people that enjoyed ridiculing me at work in a dark alleyway. They didn't like me, the high school dropout that they saw as stealing their money via taxes, somehow.
They started showing pictures of people falling from the towers. I felt sickened by myself, that I could have been at a point that morning where I could have wished ill upon the guy whose image was put across that Commiebox TV. He was in a suit, holding onto his briefcase. Against him a backdrop of the sky and the tower. You could see the red stripe of his tie flapping in the wind and barely make out the black dot that was his open mouth against his face.
Maybe the tie was tied, in fact, by his wife that morning. Maybe his kid left him a crayon drawing that said "I love you daddy" in barely legible drawing in that briefcase he refused to part with.
The woman that was in mid fall, her back toward the ground and facing the sky. Her skirt was almost transparent against the sky except where her legs blocked the sun from filtering through. Her arms were outstretched toward the sky, almost as though she was welcoming whatever deity she believed in, or had just started believing in. I wonder what religion she was; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Aetheist, or something else. I wonder if her family saw that and knew it was her, or if they will forever wonder how their beloved daughter, sister, wife, mother died.
As images continued to flash across the screen, of people frozen in time in a moment of unimaginable terror, or of clips of people plummeting toward egress, I no longer hated anyone. I grew up in a nighborhood where life was cheap, and it was fueled by hate. I'd seen people die, and known people who died.
At that moment thoguh I got to witness with my own eyes, the sheer level to which hate can destroy lives. The ten friends I lost, times three hundred, times a thousand for the famaily, times a hundred million for those watching.
I don't flip people off when they almost hit me anymore. I will vocalize my frustration at the dumb middle aged blonde woman in her SUV on her cell phone, but omit the "go get yourself killed" remark. I don't remember the events that frustrate me on a day to day basis as much, and try to just let it be.
My girlfriend, Gaby, told me she wanted to be alone and walked toward her room with a copy of the Chumash and the Siddur, Jewish texts. She'd told me not a week before, when I asked her why she didn't read them, that she didn't experience religion like that.
She sat on her bed and started flipping through the Siddur. It's red leather and has gold text on the binding, a bat mitzvah present. I'm a convert and so I have no such gifts. "What are you looking for?" I asked.
She paused for a moment. She rarely pauses for any degree of time.
"A prayer for the dead." She looked at me and then back at the book. "I'm worried about Uri."
Her brother, the NYPD cop, had gotten there minutes after the first plane hit, as we found out. He helped to pull people out, and also to organize the evacuation. He saw all the terror firsthand. He was there when the second plane hit. He got ordered out becaus ehe didn't have a breathing apparatus, so he went to the triage to get one so he could continue to help. Uri, on the upper third of six feet tall, managed to run clear of the tower collapse that flattened the triage. He then helped at the second tower. That tower collapsed, and he stayed on through the night, trying to find survivors. He didn't.
We then went and got some tortilla chips & salsa and a couple drinks and sat at a park along the Charles River, happy to be there, together.
In the weeks after the 11th, I made the resolution not to get an American flag sticker for my 1986 Saab. I didn't have one on before and I felt as though it was selfish and shameful for me to get one after the attacks, since I didn't help anyone out. I'm not NYPD or NYFD, so I didn't jump on the bandwagon of buying shirts and hats.
I picked up my pencil, and I wrote poetry, and drew pictures. My birthday was thirteen days later, on the twenty fourth, and my friend Owen got me a really awesome distortion pedal for my guitar. I rock hard with it now as then. I was hurt with all the nation, and I was crushed with those in the tower, and like the nation, my flag still flies.
I got my GED, and I moved to LA with that girlfriend. I am a better guitarist, a better musician. I lost a lot of weight and have a positive self image. Things have changed for me and for the world. I am still angered every time I hear about the latest aggression toward Israel. And tonight, on September 11, 2002, I wrote an obituary online for a woman I never met, named Gabriela Waisman, who died in the WTC, whose name is perilously close to my fiance's name, Gabrielle Weiss. To me, it is another all-too-close link to a day I'd like to wish never happened. One family never got their Gaby back; what if never got mine?
This last weekend, my Gaby and I said prayers over our Shabbat candles for the first time as a couple, in our new apartment in Los Angeles. A year later, and I sit here thinking to myself, that Damon Albarn's lyrics were very, very appropriate for that day, in which it'd seem the twenty first century really began.
He's a twentieth century boy
With his hands on the rails
Trying not to be sick again
And holding on for tomorrow
London ice cracks on a seamless line
He's hanging on for dear life
So we hold each other tightly
And hold on for tomorrow
Singing - La la, la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
Holding on for tomorrow...oh, oh, oh, oh, oh...
She's a twentieth century girl
With her hands on the wheel
Trying not to make him sick again
Seeing what she can borrow
London's so nice back in your seamless rhymes
But we're we're lost on the Westway
So we hold each other tightly
And hold on for tomorrow
Singing - La la, la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
Holding on for tomorrow
Trying not to be sick again
And holding for tomorrow
She's a twentieth century girl
Hanging on for dear life
So we hold each other tightly
And hold on for tomorrow
Singing - La la, la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
Holding on for tomorrow
Jim stops and gets out the car,
goes to a house in Emperor's gate,
Through the door and to his room,
Then he puts the TV on,
Turns it off and makes some tea,
Says Modern Life Is Rubbish I'm
Holding on for tomorrow,
Then Susan comes into the room,
She's a naughty girl with a lovely smile,
Says let's take a drive to Primrose Hill,
It's windy there and the view's so nice,
London ice can freeze your toes
Like anyone I suppose
I'm Holding on for tomorrow
[Edited by PonyOne on 09-11-2002 at 12:12 PM]
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At the exact moment that the first plane struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I was listening to "For Tomorrow" by the band Blur. The frustration still gnaws at me, that while thousands were dying in a pretty horrible fashion, I was working at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, MA as a lowly register operator/bagboy.
17 at the time, I dropped out of school not quite 3 years earlier. An artist and, at the time, excessive introvert, I decided to strike out on my own, away from the various forces-that-were that made school seem more like Chinese water torture than a learning experience.
Yup. While thousands died, intrepidly at the screens of computers helping keep the gears that run the nation well oiled if you watch Fox News, I was wearing a Tool shirt, a pair of Doc Martens and some Levi's, waiting for 9:00 am to hit so I could brace the tide of nuvo-riche and old-money blue bloods who hadn't yet had their coffee.
8:44, I noted. Sweet. I just got the CD last night and had about, what, ten minutes after I got home to listen to it. I can knock back a few more tunes. I put the CD in the old Paasonic stereo that normally played pop froth throughout the day and hit the play button. Damon Albarn, Britain's favorite Britpop singer since 1989, said in prose recorded ten years earlier,
"He's a twentieth century boy,
with his hands on the rails
trying not to be sick again,
and holding on for tomorrow
London ice cracks on a seamless line
he's hanging on for dear life
so we hold eachother tightly
and hold on for tomorrow."
By the time the line was delivered and the chorus broke into twenty seconds of saying "la" at varying pitches and intervals, already a thousand were dead.
A coworker of whom I was not fond of came in. Now I was listening to "Chemical World." I'd also gone through "Sunday Sunday" as well. "Hey, did you guys hear?" she asked. We hadn't heard anything but Damon Albarn's cheery and oddly insightful vocals.
A plane, like a Cessna or something, hit the World Trade Center. Hmm. Interesting. I hit the stop button and put it on the FM setting; of course, I didn't need to scan the airwaves, it was all the same broadcast. We were getting an update on the happenings when there was a shriek that overloaded the microphone and almost made me drop the drink I was imbibing at the time.
"Oh my God, another one just hit! Another one just hit the towers."
I remember looking in a combination of confusion and fear at Daisy, my coworker, a young woman of Chinese descent who'd grown up in Texas and was very nice.
"Holy ****," was all I could manage to push out.
In hushed silence, we listened. An older gentlemen of the blue-blood assosication was about in the store, looking for his daily goods. I'd encountered him numerous times and wasn't fond of him. He was balding, but holding onto every sickened and thin brownish grey hair on his head. He looked like the type who would have enjoyed walking around the library in his twenty room mansion, puffing his pipe, and giving me superior looks from his old, once-costly green tweed jacket with leather elbow patches as I sat in an overstuffed chair in the cneter of the room. He would ask my opinion on various topics; politics, literature, the sciences, religion and the goods he had purchased earlier, wait for my answer, then, between puffs and gnarled chuckles, inform me just how stupid I was. Just like he'd done every time before when he came into the store.
This time, his question was much more difficult to refute.
"Is this for real?"
I looked at him from behind my register, looked at the face that was improperly aged with the lifetime security of money green as that damn jacket.
"Yeah," I said. I could have added words, I could have taken them away so that only a stark look remained, and this once, he would have made no snide remark.
People were jumping out of windows. One reporter said that he saw a flaming body land on a Police vehicle. You could hear the terror in the voices. To be human was to feel a slight ache in your eyes and feel yourself waver.
More people that had been waiting outside crowded the registers to listen. I remember thinking about how I'd seen images, acted out of course, of people crowded around old radios in December 1941, listening to broadcasts describing the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. Replace knickerbockers and floral dresses with polar fleece and linen, and make that soda boy with the white shirt look like he just got back from an all-night rock fest and you'd have the same image.
As the radio announcer broke up in tears, and screaming prevailed the sirens and the horns, and an occasional thump that disrupted the bed of glass at the foot of the tower that needed no explaination filled the room a mere four hours away, I recall feeling my mouth open and my face contort in what I can only describe as horror. It mirrored that of the older man in the tweed jacket right across from me.
Two generations, two social classes, searched eachother for answers. Why? Who? We wanted eachother's insight. But at such a moment, you can't really make any connection from your brain to your mouth.
The auspices of my mind were imagining the scene. I'd been there in eighth grade, on a school trip. I have a photo, somewhere, of me in front of one of the towers where, three years later, so many lives ended. I remember trying to take a picture and having to run across the highway just to get enough space to move my Olympus up to take a photo. The slice I got at the Sbarro sucked just as much as it did in Boston, or Seattle, where I grew up.
What a ****ing load, I thought to myself as I scanned the jeans of the girl in front of me in a lecherous fashion. She was cute. Hot, too. Then one of my equally unreserved buds and I went and sat down, somewhere in the plaza.
"Damn dude, these things are huge." We looked up. "Man, I wonder if anyone's ever fallen off these? Imagine what woulda happened if those Arab dudes managed to blow the place up."
"Yeah," he said and looked over at the same girl I'd been looking at. Her name was Amy, a girl in our class from South Africa. "That woulda been cool."
Now, looking back at that past through another, a comment worth being stoned to death by all the free world. A 14-year-old narrow viewpoint of the world, fed by Southpark and movies with lots of fire. While my friend continued on, I was thinking how horrible it'd be, and that there was a game I'd played on my Sega Genesis, called Urban Strike, in which in one mission, a plane has stricken the WTC north tower and you must use your helicopter to pull survivors form the wreckage before it blows up or terrorist-run helicopters nail you with missiles.
Now as I listened to so many fantasies become reality, and at how sick it felt to listen to and to know of, I became angry. How the hell could this happen? Why would anyone do somethng so sickening? Nazis? Fundamentalist Muslims? There was another plane that had hit the Pentagon. The IRA? Basque Seperatists? People dying. Left & right. Conspiracy theroies come true? Armageddon? Why couldn't I have that helicopter and be there right now?
I could picture myself in the situation as more customers came in to tell others how they'd seen images of people jumping. Desks and computers blasing out windows. Another plane gone missing. F-18's dispatched to intercept it. The guests running back home to contact loved ones in New York and in the WTC. The plane crashed, no one ever noted the F-18's again.
I got a call from my girlfriend. Her brother was in the NYPD. He was there.
Somewhere between hearing that, and informing my boss that I was leaving due to familial issues, the towers collapsed.
If you've ever tried to run two miles in Doc Martens, you know it's not fun, in fact it sucks. Add to that that I weighed near 265 pounds at the time, and had only stopped eating meat and started exercizing and watching my intake weeks earlier, and you get the picture. I stopped at 7-11 and got a Gatorade in Harvard Square. The streets were eerily empty for that time of day, and every time a car did pass I could catch a snippet of the radio.
I got inside and my girlfriend was on the couch, with the TV on. I finally got to see the reality that went along with my imagination; a 767 slamming into a uniform skyscraper on a crystalline blue sky. It was surreal, the kind of thing you never expect to see outside of the movie theatre or on a Playstation. At least in those situations you can admire the strange, flower like beauty that happens after a half second of almost peace as the plane disappears into the building; the eye of the hurricane. In the movie world, that blossoming explosion, a thousand shades of crimson and yellow and grey, has no death behind it, just a skilled artist behind the screen of a Macintosh.
Arnold Shwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes and I rush to the scene. Arnold gets out of his Humvee, Wesley's Barracuda screeches to a halt and he races out to the triage, and I get out of my black, government Ford and survey the scene from behind a pair of ominous Oakleys.
The fire captain and police chief seem relieved. "Thank God you guys are here," they say in unison.
"No problem, chiefs," I say. I'm Jewish so of course I'm a member of Mossad. "Just relax, we'll handle this crap."
"Ja, do not worry. We shall take care of it," says Arnold. He's already saved the world a hundred times, this is nothing to him.
"Damn straight, yo," says Wesley. He's part vampire, he can't die.
"There are a thousand terrorists in there, and they're armed! They'll blow the place up! We can't get firefighters in; all the SWAT team is dead!"
"Just leave it to us," we say and dash inside, bristling with manly armor and exotic European firearms. We dash up the escalator and blast a few generic terrorists into red splotches on the wall. People run, freed from the grips of these evil neer-do-wells. The elevators don't work, duh, and then the terrorists flood the promenade, and drop from the cieling. Our guns blaze and we destroy most of them. The evil ninja one is about to do something awful when Jackie Chan busts down from the cieling.
"Ah, ho, sorry," he says while dodging grenades, shurikens and ladders. "Came here on jet. Almost too late!" With an angry face he punches the ninja off the promenade and onto Wesley's huge vampire sword.
"Yeah, me too," says Brad Pitt, with his cop sunglasses and leather jacket with huge, floral collar. "I'm just here cause I'm sexy." The audience laughs. We eventually push our way up the stairs and past countless evildoers. We save babies that are there, for whatever reason. People with no legs from the floors that got blown up. We are the all-American, testosterone-pumped multinational force of dude-dom that cannot be stopped.
On the top floor we discover that Mohammed Atta (who survived the crash) and Osama bin Laden are at the top of the tower, waiting for the head badguy helicopter to airlift them to safety. We've already used our manly abilites to keep the tower from toppling and have made sure that no one died at all (Wesley infused the remains of the victims with his vampire blood and brought them all back to life forever) but Osama has these powers that could still wreck the towers.
The standoff is bloody. We all are wounded, and Osama and Atta put their magic evilrings together to make a huge evil blue burst of energy that blasts me off the side of the building. I'm about to die, when Jessica Alba in a tight spandex outfit catches me in the open cockpit of a Harrier jump jet.
"I knew you guys would need a woman's touch," she quips. I lower the Oakleys and eye her with my ice-blue eyes. The male audience members are totally turned on, imagining they are I; the girls swoon because the blast blew my shirt open, revealing my manly chest. She goes to kiss me but I stop her.
"Wait," I say and put my hand up. Violins and an upright bass fill the theatre as I put a clip in my MP5. "I've got some shish-kabob to make."
Guitars fueled by a merger of the best bands in the world wail. The bad guy helicopter is about to leave; the towers are about to fall, killing my compatriarts. Then, the Harrier comes into view. Close up of Atta, whose face recoils in terror. "No!!!"
Bin Laden: "YOU!!"
Me: "Say Allah Akhbar, mother****er." A missile blasts the chopper, and the ladder falls, about to dump Bin Laden and Atta to the ground a very long distance below. But before they fall I manage to fire three shots. One blasts through Atta's head, the other one gets Bin Laden's crotch and the other severs his head. The guitars wail as the bodies plunge toward the ground. A crescendo of drums, guitar, bass, and Axl Rose's screaming end all at once when the bodies hit the ground. Bin Laden's head rolls into a gutter in front of thousands, and an old dog walks over and barfs all over it.
The people cheer. The Harrier lands and the all-star cast claps and says cliche things as Jessica Alba and I kiss. THE END flashes over the screen and the audience leaves feeling vindicated in their $10 purchase of a ticket to this all star special effects extravaganza. Of course it's kinda hokey, but we all go about our lives knowing such a thing could never happen.
In reality, the highjacker was dead as everyone else, the mastermind was five thousand miles away in a cave, the movie stars and me and my girlfriend were all at our houses of varying greatness glued to our TV's, also of varying greatness. It seemed that divine intervention had allowed the cantankerous old Russian TV that my girlfriend's mom instisted worked great to show us the sharp, ugly, shocking reality that had taken place earlier that day and had the ability to make you feel bad for ever watching Die Hard.
If someone had made a movie about 9-11 on 9-10, no one would have paid to see it, it'd be too stupid. It'd be Deep Impact minus the asteroid. It'd be Volcano without the Volcano, Broken Arrow without the nuke, or Batman without Batman. If all those movie stars and me had been there what good would it have done? The count of dead would currently stand at 2,829 rather than 2,823. Nothing else.
As I sat there on the couch with my girlfriend, though, I still felt impotent. I'm sure she did too. She made pretend like it wasn't affecting her as much as it was. That's how her family deals with it. Me? I just watched and was traumatized.
Mongeese don't like Cobras. Bush's don't like Husseins. I don't like yuppies and office types and often thought to myself what fun I'd have if I met one of the people that enjoyed ridiculing me at work in a dark alleyway. They didn't like me, the high school dropout that they saw as stealing their money via taxes, somehow.
They started showing pictures of people falling from the towers. I felt sickened by myself, that I could have been at a point that morning where I could have wished ill upon the guy whose image was put across that Commiebox TV. He was in a suit, holding onto his briefcase. Against him a backdrop of the sky and the tower. You could see the red stripe of his tie flapping in the wind and barely make out the black dot that was his open mouth against his face.
Maybe the tie was tied, in fact, by his wife that morning. Maybe his kid left him a crayon drawing that said "I love you daddy" in barely legible drawing in that briefcase he refused to part with.
The woman that was in mid fall, her back toward the ground and facing the sky. Her skirt was almost transparent against the sky except where her legs blocked the sun from filtering through. Her arms were outstretched toward the sky, almost as though she was welcoming whatever deity she believed in, or had just started believing in. I wonder what religion she was; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Aetheist, or something else. I wonder if her family saw that and knew it was her, or if they will forever wonder how their beloved daughter, sister, wife, mother died.
As images continued to flash across the screen, of people frozen in time in a moment of unimaginable terror, or of clips of people plummeting toward egress, I no longer hated anyone. I grew up in a nighborhood where life was cheap, and it was fueled by hate. I'd seen people die, and known people who died.
At that moment thoguh I got to witness with my own eyes, the sheer level to which hate can destroy lives. The ten friends I lost, times three hundred, times a thousand for the famaily, times a hundred million for those watching.
I don't flip people off when they almost hit me anymore. I will vocalize my frustration at the dumb middle aged blonde woman in her SUV on her cell phone, but omit the "go get yourself killed" remark. I don't remember the events that frustrate me on a day to day basis as much, and try to just let it be.
My girlfriend, Gaby, told me she wanted to be alone and walked toward her room with a copy of the Chumash and the Siddur, Jewish texts. She'd told me not a week before, when I asked her why she didn't read them, that she didn't experience religion like that.
She sat on her bed and started flipping through the Siddur. It's red leather and has gold text on the binding, a bat mitzvah present. I'm a convert and so I have no such gifts. "What are you looking for?" I asked.
She paused for a moment. She rarely pauses for any degree of time.
"A prayer for the dead." She looked at me and then back at the book. "I'm worried about Uri."
Her brother, the NYPD cop, had gotten there minutes after the first plane hit, as we found out. He helped to pull people out, and also to organize the evacuation. He saw all the terror firsthand. He was there when the second plane hit. He got ordered out becaus ehe didn't have a breathing apparatus, so he went to the triage to get one so he could continue to help. Uri, on the upper third of six feet tall, managed to run clear of the tower collapse that flattened the triage. He then helped at the second tower. That tower collapsed, and he stayed on through the night, trying to find survivors. He didn't.
We then went and got some tortilla chips & salsa and a couple drinks and sat at a park along the Charles River, happy to be there, together.
In the weeks after the 11th, I made the resolution not to get an American flag sticker for my 1986 Saab. I didn't have one on before and I felt as though it was selfish and shameful for me to get one after the attacks, since I didn't help anyone out. I'm not NYPD or NYFD, so I didn't jump on the bandwagon of buying shirts and hats.
I picked up my pencil, and I wrote poetry, and drew pictures. My birthday was thirteen days later, on the twenty fourth, and my friend Owen got me a really awesome distortion pedal for my guitar. I rock hard with it now as then. I was hurt with all the nation, and I was crushed with those in the tower, and like the nation, my flag still flies.
I got my GED, and I moved to LA with that girlfriend. I am a better guitarist, a better musician. I lost a lot of weight and have a positive self image. Things have changed for me and for the world. I am still angered every time I hear about the latest aggression toward Israel. And tonight, on September 11, 2002, I wrote an obituary online for a woman I never met, named Gabriela Waisman, who died in the WTC, whose name is perilously close to my fiance's name, Gabrielle Weiss. To me, it is another all-too-close link to a day I'd like to wish never happened. One family never got their Gaby back; what if never got mine?
This last weekend, my Gaby and I said prayers over our Shabbat candles for the first time as a couple, in our new apartment in Los Angeles. A year later, and I sit here thinking to myself, that Damon Albarn's lyrics were very, very appropriate for that day, in which it'd seem the twenty first century really began.
He's a twentieth century boy
With his hands on the rails
Trying not to be sick again
And holding on for tomorrow
London ice cracks on a seamless line
He's hanging on for dear life
So we hold each other tightly
And hold on for tomorrow
Singing - La la, la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
Holding on for tomorrow...oh, oh, oh, oh, oh...
She's a twentieth century girl
With her hands on the wheel
Trying not to make him sick again
Seeing what she can borrow
London's so nice back in your seamless rhymes
But we're we're lost on the Westway
So we hold each other tightly
And hold on for tomorrow
Singing - La la, la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
Holding on for tomorrow
Trying not to be sick again
And holding for tomorrow
She's a twentieth century girl
Hanging on for dear life
So we hold each other tightly
And hold on for tomorrow
Singing - La la, la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
Holding on for tomorrow
Jim stops and gets out the car,
goes to a house in Emperor's gate,
Through the door and to his room,
Then he puts the TV on,
Turns it off and makes some tea,
Says Modern Life Is Rubbish I'm
Holding on for tomorrow,
Then Susan comes into the room,
She's a naughty girl with a lovely smile,
Says let's take a drive to Primrose Hill,
It's windy there and the view's so nice,
London ice can freeze your toes
Like anyone I suppose
I'm Holding on for tomorrow
[Edited by PonyOne on 09-11-2002 at 12:12 PM]