Flatiron District, Manhattan
Got up late, finally able to really sleep. Completely unconscious. It rained much of last night, starting just after nightfall with some pretty serious thunder and lightning. I wonder what the next highest buildings are down there, to draw the lightning down. All day Wednesday, Bayard’s switchboard was closed, referring people to the Long Island office. I couldn’t get through this morning until about noon, when I finally reached Lou at the switchboard, and then to George, who sounded very subdued, with good reason, I discovered later.This is from an e-mail I sent to a bunch of my friends Thursday night:
I went to work today at the ad agency, hoping to distract myself, and found that I was just exhausted and depressed. I’m not really looking forward to more stories on Monday, when I go back to AKRF.
As we were going over the bridge, people were glued to the windows, looking at what wasn’t there anymore. I managed to avoid the sight, at least until I got up to Broadway. I looked back from there, where you can usually see the upper halves of the towers, and there was only grey smog against the very blue sky we’ve been having. I can’t really grasp it yet, but the city looks smaller, somehow.
When I got out of the train this afternoon at Union Square, we were stopped by cops who had cordoned the area off because of a suspicious package. There have been 90 bomb threats since this started. Sirens are everywhere like I’ve never heard them. Traffic on the main avenues and cross streets—where traffic cops are stationed as a matter of policy—occasionally grinds to a halt to let emergency vehicles through. Cops are everywhere in the reflective vests and NYPD baseball caps they wear for raids, and on my way home I saw two (I assume) National Guardsmen in full combat fatigues humping backpacks at Union Square, where a slow drum was beating in some sort of quiet rally. Half the entrances in the subways are closed. There were two cops on the train itself—something you rarely see anymore.
The overall mood of the city is . . . weird. Equal parts angry, tense, grieving, defiant, exhausted, sad, frantic, stunned, patriotic. People are trying to get back to business as usual, some more successfully than others. People are eating outside in the acrid air at the sidewalk cafes, though the restaurants are very empty, when they’re open at all. And the conversation is always the same. We can’t stop talking about it. If there’s a radio on, it’s a call-in show or the news. Nobody wants music. In my neighborhood, the Puerto Rican flags have been swapped for American flags. Immigrants are suddenly aggressively, defiantly American, not [ethnic-background-of-your-choice]-American.
Where band flyers should be plastered on the walls of bus shelters and light poles are color print-outs bearing the likenesses of the missing, with the heading “HELP FIND THIS PERSON!” So many faces, all smiling, probably dead now.
Everyone at Bayard seems to be okay, but George Rodriguez nearly lost his pregnant wife who was working in the tower, and Micheli Yamka nearly lost her brother, who is a Port Authority cop/Fire Marshall for Newark Airport who was one of the first on the scene and was standing beside the cop who was killed by the falling body when it happened. I learned from yet another friend, Lily Recanati, whom I used to work with at AIP, that her son Maurice was also in the first building hit and got out only moments before it began to collapse. Mandy Josephs, one of the woman in my writing group, is biting her nails over her welder husband volunteering at the disaster site. Another friend, Tim, who’s a musician, was telling me he went last night to hang out with John Scofield while they were mixing his new album, just to get a breather, and found, suddenly, that music didn’t matter at all to him, for the first time in his life. Chris Costa’s cousin by marriage was on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. Chris thinks he was probably one of the guys who jumped the hijackers, mostly because he was a big guy and an ex-football player. Charlie Marcano has called up his old reserve unit to volunteer and was pleased they wanted him. This terrifies me more than anything. During the course of conversation, Steve Kur firmly declared he wanted war. I wanted to slap him, especially since, unlike Charlie, it won’t be his ass in the line of fire. Enough innocent people are dead.
In the middle of this, the office was buzzing with rumors that Whitney Houston was dead. She wasn’t. Go figure. Distraction, maybe?
I wish I had a useful skill to offer, besides handing out Gatorade, even if it were only shoveling. If I thought they’d let me do that, I’d go down and volunteer. I want to do something. The air is still acrid with the smell of electrical fires and there are people wearing dust masks all over the city. Picking up prescriptions in the drug store today, I heard 5 different people asking for them. The store was sold out. I wish I’d brought one of mine. I spent most of the day sneezing and my eyes are burning from the dust and smoke.
I must have looked fairly shell-shocked in the drug store because the sweet little Indian woman who took my prescriptions was using that kind of very gentle manner that nurses usually use when you hobble into the emergency room cradling your injuries. “Let me just see what we can do for you. Just wait right here. I’ll be back in just a minute.” The only thing that was missing was the endearment. I have to say I appreciated her kindness.
The grocery store at Union Square (below which everything was closed) was relatively bare, no deliveries making it over the bridges or tunnels, but I was able to stock up on veggies and staples. I’m going to buy a big bag of dog food tomorrow for the sniffer hounds and take that and some other stuff they’re requesting that I’ve got—alcohol swabs, dust masks, raingear—up to the volunteer center at Javits Center. Since I don’t have a useful skill and don’t give blood, I can at least do this. Screw work. This is far more important.
Apparently there was a lot of asbestos in the WTC, but it’s only getting into the air at the site, not downwind, according to the EPA. They’re using hazmat gear at the site. They don’t seem to be expecting biohazard problems, firstly because the bodies are so thoroughly buried, and secondly because we get our water from out of the city. There are six stories of basement and subbasement below the towers, and the land from those two holes is now sitting under the World Financial Center across the street—so we’re talking about thousands of tons of earth and two really big holes holding the debris.
We’re reopening down to Canal Street tomorrow, and the financial markets will be reopened on Monday. Everyone I know is safe, thank God, sincerely.
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