Everything’s Broken

An astonishing and terrifying day. I was at home here on Staten Island on September 11th, working at my desk on my laptop, just after 9 a.m., when a carpenter who’s doing some work on my front porch called upstairs with word of the first jet crashing into the World Trade Center, which he’d heard about on the radio. I spent much of the rest of the day just watching and listening to this horror on TV, on Channel 2/CBS. (I don’t have cable, and apparently CBS is the only channel that wasn’t using antennae located on the WTC, since it was the only channel I could get). So I saw the ghastly footage of the second death plane, and then of the tower collapses, as soon as they were broadcast.

Early that evening, around 6:30, I walked down to a stretch of Bay Street near the ferry terminal, just across from the Cargo Café, and watched my city burn. Only a week before, on September 5, I’d sat for the first time in the Island’s new baseball stadium a few blocks away, watching the Staten Island Yankees in their last season game get whipped ignominously by the Jamestown Jammers, with a spectacular nighttime view of the harbor and lower Manhattan just past the outfield as consolation, the towers twinkling. This time, as I stood there, smoke still largely obscured that area of downtown; indeed, by then wisps of it had floated south to our shore, drifting lacily along the esplanade. But you could experience the absence of the twin towers already, the uptown buildings — the Chrysler Building, the Empire State — visible dimly through the smoke where once the WTC blocked the view. It will take time to get used to that radical shift in the visual scape, which from a distance now looks both oddly restored to the way it appeared before the towers were built and, in another of memory’s chambers, like a huge mouth with unexpected space where two extracted teeth once sat. Incongruously, it smouldered colorfully and even harmoniously against the backdrop of a lovely, cloudless, bright late-summer sky.

They’d long since halted all ferry service, and I didn’t know when they’d start them running again, nor when I’d go into Manhattan next. Indeed, there was a police roadblock between the terminal and the foot of Victory Boulevard, which made me feel safer for no particularly good reason. Living in the “forgotten borough” has its advantages, momentarily including an unrealistic but emotionally useful sense of insulation from this devastating carnage. Walking along Bay Street toward my sunset vantage point, I saw everyday life going on all around me: people talking animatedly about this catastrophe, of course, but also kids playing on slides and climbing bars, people eating pizzas . . . No man is an island, to be sure, but sometimes living on one offers some compensations, including the illusion of separation from what John Donne called “the Main.”

The fact that no one has any specific motive to bomb Staten Island reassured me irrationally in the face of this tragedy. But it didn’t leave me feeling foolishly invulnerable. I’d been across the harbor in SoHo on Monday afternoon, just the day before, in a café on Greene St., meeting with someone on a professional matter. I used to shop for CDs and computer equipment at J&R by City Hall, found clothing in the shops (such as Century 21 and the Burlington Coat Factory) around the WTC area. I buy condiments and such just north of that area in Chinatown, and eat there periodically, and I’m in and out of SoHo just a bit further north at least once a week on business. And of course I’m often at the Staten Island Ferry terminal at South Ferry. I could easily have gotten caught and even killed in this. On September 11th, it so happened that I stayed home. Pure chance.

So far as I know after ten days of phone calls and emails, I’ve lost no one close to me, nor even anyone I know, in this chaos. But I’m not distant from it, by any means. Here are my stories so far:

My UPS delivery man’s wife works in the World Trade Center’s Tower 7 (which has now come down). She got to work at 7:30 a.m. that day and, while eating a bagel, saw the first plane hit. Her boss immediately ordered everyone out of the building, probably saving her life and everyone’s else’s in that office. She got back to the Island on the 10:30 a.m. ferry, the last to leave Manhattan before they sealed that borough off.

One friend of mine who worked for a photography studio in the South Street Seaport area got her pink slip on Monday and stayed on the Island to go to the unemployment office — otherwise she’d have been in the thick of it the next day herself. She has a roommate who works in lower Manhattan and who got off the ferry to walk to her office just after the first plane hit — when people still thought it was an accident. She got as far as Bowling Green and then saw the second plane find its target. Slightly injured on the foot by flying debris, she got loaded onto a ferry coming back and ended up hospitalized on the South Shore, where it took her panicked sister and my friend hours to locate and then reach her.

Another friend of mine has four brothers in the Fire Department. Three were called in for this emergency; all emerged unhurt. But one of them, on the scene almost immediately, was supervising a group of firefighters heading into Tower 2 when a jumper fell on the fireman just ahead of him, killing him instantly. They tried to revive their fallen comrade, then loaded him into an ambulance, after which they went looking for another way into the building — at which time that tower began to come down, so they took shelter in a doorway across the street. Had the jumper not crushed their teammate, or had they stayed a minute longer to load the ambulance, they’d all have been in or under the tower when it fell.

Up to this point, that’s my degree of separation. When the final count becomes known, however, Staten Island may well take a disproportionate hit in the injuries and fatalities department, since many Islanders work in the Wall St. area (all those Working Girl secretaries, among so many others), and many more of them are police and firefighters and EMS personnel. And I have friends and acquaintances all over the city, many of whom I’ve yet to hear from or contact. So I may not get off as lightly as I have so far.

In any case, I have blessings to count, with no casualties or even injuries among my Island friends, nor anyone else I’ve called or heard from who lives or labors in that area. Even my son, Edward, who hasn’t spoken to me in some four years, phoned — just to tell me he was alive and okay, nothing more, but it was a relief and good to hear from him nonetheless. And of course I’ve had emails and phone calls myself, from friends and family and colleagues across the country and around the world — Germany, Israel, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria — making sure I’m okay and sending words of shock, grief, condolence, and support.

Like just about everyone I know, save for TV’s usual glib, spring-driven talking heads, I’m still dazed and sorting out what I think the “attack on America” signifies. At a later date, I’ll have more to say about all this — including the behavior of our duly appointed President Chauncey Gardener, whose total ineptitude at anything resembling intelligent spontaneous speech and utter inability to rise to this occasion terrify me more than anything. All I know for sure at the moment is that, on the face of this incontrovertible evidence, in the 21st century it’s very hard if not impossible to prevent anyone willing to die for his or her beliefs from doing terrible damage to the world and its occupants.

Tomorrow, September 21, I’m going into Manhattan for the first time since the disaster struck. I’ll report on that experience in a subsequent column.