Memorial Service

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Part I

On Tuesday, the morning of 9/11/2001, I was at work doing tech support for a small DSL company in downtown Manhattan, a few hundred yards from the New York City Stock Exchange.

Normally, I would have gotten on the D-Train in the North Bronx at about 8 o'clock, switched to the A-Train at Washington Square, and emerged at Fulton Street at about 8:55. I would have been right on the scene just between the the time the first and second planes hit. Chances are I wouldn't have done anything particularly heroic. Most likely, I would have been herded north by the cops, gone back home, and spent the day in the Bronx watching the whole terrible day unfold on TV. That Tuesday, however, I had gotten up at 6 AM in order to fill in for a coworker, and had been in the office since 7AM.

At about 9 AM, I was on the phone with a client from Pittsburgh and overheard somebody in the background ask her "hey. Did a 747 just really hit the World Trade Center?" and I was like "er hey. I dunno. I'm about 5 blocks from the thing and I haven't heard anything."

I finished the call and went downstairs to the lobby of the building to have a look around. Secretaries and back office personnel were streaming into the building, coffee and newspapers in hand, rushing to get to work on time. At the same time, a huge crowd of people were gathered around the television set just behind the guard post looking at something. I tried to muscle my way in but no luck. There was no way that I was going to see anything on that TV set (the same TV set which, interestingly enough I had spent the summer noting out of the corner of my eye the way the stock market was inexorably continuing the slide which had begun the previous March).

"What's going on?" I said.

"A plane just hit the World Trade Center," somebody said.

Assuming it had been an accident, some small private plane which flew off course and smashed into one of the buildings, something that would be all over the Post the next morning, but wasn't going to affect me very much, I bought a Diet Coke from one of the machines, got on the elevator, and went back upstairs to my office on the 11th Floor. It was just as well, I thought. If some plane had hit the Trade Center, there wasn't much I could do about it. Thankfully, whatever mess it was going to cause with the subway system would be cleared up by the time I went home that night. I sat down at my desk, opened up a copy of "Ethereal" (a port scanner I had been playing around with), and spent a few minutes watching packets go by on my screen. I checked my e-mail, did some virtual window shopping, and corrected a few spelling mistakes on the front page of a web site I had been working on. I waited for the phone to ring but everything was eerily quiet. It was just after 9 o'clock and I was still the only person in the 11th Floor office. None of the sales reps were calling me up to hound me about "some client who needed immediate attention because he had the capability of bringing in additional business." Things were getting a little odd.

So I went downstairs to the corporate offices on the 5th floor and it was just as eerily quiet. Somebody had obviously unlocked the offices but as far as I could see, I was the only person around.

"Stupid plane probably fucked up the subways," I thought.

Just then one of the sales reps came running in through the main door, "disheveled and in tears." I put that in quotes because those were exactly the words that went through my mind when I saw her. Oh. There's Ms. X. She's "disheveled and in tears." And that was strange because she was almost always "perfectly coiffed and in control," contemptuous of all of the socially maladroit geeks who worked on the 11th floor, a cool, professional blond ice queen.

"Oh my God," she sobbed. "I just saw the most horrible thing I'll ever see in my life. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center."

Now I would like to say that, in the mythical spirit of that September day, I did my best to comfort my obviously distraught coworker, said some encouraging words, offered support. But I did nothing of the sort because, quite honestly, I really didn't like her.

"Oh yeah that," I said, turning to go back upstairs to my office. "I heard about that. What kind of dumbass rams his plane into a building? Heh. Heh. I bet he's really in trouble although he's probably dead."

"No," she sobbed. "Stop laughing you idiot. You don't understand. Another one just hit. And a plane just hit the Pentagon too. We're under attack."

"Under attack? We? Who's we?"

"We're under attack."

"Under attack. " I said. "By whom?"

"It was horrible," she sobbed. "It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life."

Then she went to her desk, picked up the phone, and frantically started trying to dial out.

Other people were starting to stream into the office and they were all saying the exact same thing. Something horrible was happening. Some kind of chaos was going on in lower Manhattan. Planes had hit both towers of the Trade Center, the Pentagon, also, quite possibly, the White House and the Capitol Building. Bombs were going off all over the city. Another plane was, quite possibly, headed straight for the New York City Stock Exchange. Bombs had exploded in the "Prete a Manger" across the street. Somebody had rammed an tnt filled Staten Island Ferry into the docks and took out most of Battery Park. The President and Rudi Guiliani were both missing. And, worst of all, our building, while not the Stock Exchange or the World Trade Center was, nevertheless, a fairly well known building in the city. It too was possibly a target. We were about to be bombed at any second.

I went back up to the 11th Floor and one of my coworkers in the Tech Support division (who was, ironically, Pakistani and a Muslim) was also hysterical. "Oh my God," he kept saying. "Oh my God. They're going to attack this building. Oh my God. This is an important building. They're going to attack it. They just hit the Pentagon. Oh my God. They're going to hit the stock exchange. Oh my God. We're right near the Stock Exchange."

Then he went back down to the 5th Floor. I remember trying to give him some advice about how a jetliner hitting a building was a lot like an earthquake and that the safest thing you could do was simply to calm down and stay where you were. I have no idea why I thought of this or even if it was good advice, but I decided to take it myself. I sat down at my computer and started to surf the web for news of what was happening.

Nobody else had made it in. The chief engineer was always late anyway. He lived in Brooklyn and just jumped on the F-Train at 9 o'clock the way he always did and quite obviously that train had been stopped before it got into Manhattan. The colleague whose early shift I was filling in for was out in Nassau County somewhere at a dentist's appointment with his kids. I had seen one of the interns on the fifth floor, and didn't really think much about everybody else.

I'm not sure exactly how much time had passed, but, a few seconds after he left, I heard a faint, then not so faint rumbling sound in the distance. I looked out of the window and a mass of black dust was literally oozing around Broad Street (thankfully I was in a high-rise and nobody opened the windows), and, a few seconds later the sky went pitch black. I looked up at the clock and it was a little after 10 o'clock in the morning but it was pitch black, as though it were midnight.

Obviously what I heard had been the first tower coming down.

Suddenly I wanted the company of other people. The site of the windows on the other side of Broad Street and of people coming out of the Au Bon Pain munching Krispy Kremes was how my subconscious noted that I was at work and things were normal But now I couldn't even see the street or the Au Bon Pain. I remember my jaw tightening and expecting some explosion right under my feet and I wanted to get off the 11th floor so I got back on the elevator and went back to the 5th Floor.

The company's Vice President had made it in and was now pretty much in charge. She seemed calm enough and she informed me that the NYPD wasn't letting anybody out of the building and that we were all being told to go one of two places, the basement or a conference room on the Third Floor. Now this, I thought, I didn't like. I never like my movements being restricted and being told that the cops weren't going to let me out of the building was irritating. I have very little trust in the judgment anybody in charge of a chaotic situation (they're usually just as confused as everybody else) and would much rather have had the option of just getting on a subway, going back up to the Bronx and watching the whole thing go down on TV (which showed you how little I knew about what was going on at that moment). My advice to my colleague on the 11th floor notwithstanding, I simply wanted to get out of the building and go back home to the Bronx where I knew, ironically, I would be a hell of a lot safer than I would be in downtown Manhattan. No terrorist in his right mind would attack Woodlawn. I wanted to get out of Manhattan badly but then again I also didn't relish the thought of walking through a black cloud of soot and astbestous so I reluctantly decided that the NYPD was probably doing the right thing block off the front of the building.

I chose the 3rd Floor conference room. Most of the other people in the office, for some reason, chose the basement. I got on the elevator, road it down to the Third Floor, and went into the big conference room with its ultra-modern, high-corporate wood decor and gigantic windows. A whole crowd of well-dressed yuppie types were sitting around in suits and a loose gaggle of New York City ethnic types in security guard uniforms was clumsily trying to reassure everybody that everything was going to be alright. The security guards were trying to get a TV up and running but weren't having much luck. The yuppies weren't their usually arrogant, pissy, contemptuous selves. Most looked about as scared as I was.

At that moment, I heard the sound again, a faint rumbling in the distance, which got louder, and then saw it, another huge mass of dust and debris barrelling around Broad Street turning the sky completely dark. There was a collective sigh and then a guttural "ooooh my God" in the room. To be quite honest, I wasn't terribly panicky this time because the very same thing had happened 20 minutes earlier when I was on the 11th floor and the only way I had been effected was to realize how happy I was that somebody had slammed shut all the windows. Also, my brain was beginning to click in and override my visceral sense of fear. I remembered speculation about the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. The goal of the terrorists had been to topple both the towers and that was obviously what I was hearing. As horrible as that was and as big as both towers were, neither was big enough to land anywhere near Broad Street and Beaver Street. No, I thought, in spite of the chaos, we were all quite safe. I guessed at the broad outlines of what had happened. Terrorists had crashed planes into the Trade Center and actually succeeded in toppling them but I was quite certain that it was simply a more successful replay of 1993. At that moment, to me, the talk about the Pentagon getting hit was just another hysterical rumor along the lines of somebody blowing up Battery Park. Of course, I was also a bit pissy that the idiot security guards couldn't quite figure out how to plug in a TV set. The lack of information was as frightening as anything else.

But since they were obviously going to fumble around for a bit longer and since I was obviously going to be trapped here for awhile, I had to find something to do. OK, I thought. This was a conference room in a Wall Street high rise and, as I learned during the past several years of temping in various glass Manhattan towers for various evil corporations, there was bound to be free food lying about somewhere. Conference rooms were almost always booked solidly on a Tuesday morning, and, sure enough, I found a nice table full of cookies, bagels, and other snacks sitting on a table at the other end of the room. "Excellent," I thought. As callous as it sounds, all I wanted to do was eat, and, since I wasn't getting out of the building, I wanted first crack at the food before it was all gone. I had no idea how long I was going to be in the building. I hadn't gone to a bank machine yet that morning and I wasn't even going to have money to buy stuff from the vending machines. I grabbed a glass of orange juice, a croissant,a couple of "everything" bagels. I put a bunch of Diet Cokes in my knapsack then wrapped a couple of turkey sandwichs up in a couple of big napkins and put them in too. I had seen enough disaster movies and if we were going to be trapped in the conference room longer than a day, I was going to be the popular one with food. I sat down on the ledge in front of the window and watched as the buildings across the street once again became visible as the worst of the debris and soot settled down onto the street or was blown out onto the East River. I was on the opposite side of Broad Street this time and 1 Wall Street and Delmonicos were now becoming visible again. When people were getting vaporized a half mile north, I was cutting into a croissant and opening a carton of orange juice. But, then again, so were a lot of people in Chicago, California, and Atlanta and they probably had TV sets and were actually snacking away while they were looking at people jump off the 100th on their TV sets. All I could really see were a few rooftops and the fact that somebody was going to have a massive cleanup job ahead of him.

"Let's just kill them all," I heard a man with an accent, which could have been French, could have been German, could have been Israeli, could have been South American, but a well dressed man with a thick accent. "Let's just kill them all."

"Excuse me?" I said.

"I say let's nuke them all now. Let's kill them all now."

I had assumed that this was going to happen sooner or later and had already decided to act cynically and detached. Whatever community of hate and overwrought emotion was forming I wasn't going to join it.

"Kill who?" I said, munching on my croissant and sipping my orange juice. "Who are we going to kill?"

"Oh you know who."

"White Anglo Saxon Protestant Males? Radical Polish feminist lesbian bowlers. Who in God's name are you talking about?" I said.

"You know who. Let's just kill each and every one of them. Let's just drop the bomb on all of them."

"OK. You pick the target. Who gets bombed," I responded. "We don't even know who did it yet."

"You know exactly who did it," he hissed, then got disgusted with me and walked off.

Now, of course, I had assumed from the moment I knew it was a terrorist attack that they had been "Palestinians" (which is how I phrased it in my brain, "Arabs or Palestinians"). But, I still remembered Oklahoma City and how I had also assumed that that had been "Palestinians" and had, of course, been proven wrong, so, this time, I wasn't jumping to conclusions. And I have to confess that something about the man's foreignness or his accent might have put me off. Had he been a nondescript American with a flat Midwestern accent, I might have just decided to bond with him and join the kill em all crowd right there. Maybe my own xenophobia saved me. Whatever the case, I wasn't about to give Mr. "Kill em all" any satisfaction. I enjoyed the fact that I was more or less keeping my head and he was getting hysterical since, undoubtedly, Mr. Kill Em All earned more in a day or two than I did in a month. There was something about how all those well-dressed yuppies in that conference room had acted, fearful, hysterical even, full of hate and ready to jump to all sort of conclusions that I simply didn't want to be a part of, but, at the same time, I was enjoying. It made me feel superior, like some British army officer in a Monty Python skit who had just gotten his leg blown off but who simply said "oh that's alright. It's only a flesh wound."

"Some guy named McVeigh?" I called out after him.

The rest of the day was pretty mundane. The bumbling security guards, after about 30 minutes, finally managed to find a TV, and I spent the rest of the day looking at what I had heard (both towers collapsing) on TV over and over again and learning that the Pentagon had indeed been attacked. It was a seriously bad TV day. Change channel. Buildings collapse. Big haired newsman declares "WE ARE AT WAR." Change channel. Buildings collapse. Peroxide blond declares "WE ARE AT WAR." Yuppie says "kill em all." Big-haired newsman says "WE ARE AT WAR." Chunky Latino security guy tries to be useful comes in and announces "the police still aren't letting us out of the building" then bumbles around some more. Kill em all. We are at war. Kill em all. Kill em all. No. You can't leave the building. Kill em all. Kill em all. WE ARE AT WAR. "Oh just turn the fucking TV off already. I'm sick of it."

At about 4 o'clock, the cops finally let everybody out of the building. I walked north and east until I cleared Canal Street, then walked up Broadway until I got to 57th Street, jumped on the D-train (which was running) and went back home to the Bronx. I must have had 4 or 5 glasses of orange juice and a whole bunch of Diet Cokes in that conference room because the only thing I remember after getting on the train was hoping it wouldn't break down when I had to take such a wicked piss. I remember thinking that if the train broke down and I was trapped underground for any length of time the way I had been trapped in that damned conference room that I was going to open the door between cars and urinate on the tracks. This time nobody would stop me. If I had to piss, I was going to piss right outside on the tracks and nobody was going to fuck with me if they knew what was good for them. Fuck the man. Just try and stop me.

Part II

Don't get me wrong. It appears that I was rather cool, calm and collected on the morning of September 11th, blase even, I had actually spent the entire day in a state of nail biting anxiety and fear, although it was almost certainly not the fear you're assuming. I wasn't afraid of getting killed by terrorists, blown up by a suitcase nuke, murdered stealthily with a vial of anthrax or smallpox. I was afraid of something entirely different.

I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to pay my rent that month.

As I said, I was working as a "Technical Support Engineer" for a small DSL Company/ISP in the Fall of 2001. As anybody who follows the telecom industry knows 2001 was not a good year for small DSL companies, the telecom, or anything connected to the tech industry. Verizon was busy driving Covad into bankruptcy. One by one, smaller DSL providers were going down for the count. Most of Internet startups and dotcoms had gone under that previous year. And, as anybody who has once clicked through Fuckedcompany.com knows, many, if not most of these tech companies were shady, run by incompetent management. They tended to fire half their staff on short notice, and escort them out of the building with rent a cops just to make sure they didn't steal any company property in retaliation for not getting severance or even their checks for the last few weeks.

The company I was working for that 9/11 was no exception. They were a very shady outfit, living pretty much check to check, paying their creditors late, scamming spare parts from Cisco when they couldn't afford to buy them, pirating copies of MS Office, strong arming customers into paying a year in advance for Northpoint or Covad DSL, but, most importantly, slowly and steadily converting their workforce over from American citizens (like myself) to people in the country on somewhat dubious terms, and, thus, people who would be more vulnerable to not getting severance pay and people for whom you wouldn't have to pay unemployment if you decided to lay them off. Indeed, out of 6 people in the tech support/systems division, two were American citizens, one was an Indian immigrant with a Green Card and the other three were illegal immigrants on tourist Visas hoping to be sponsored for H1-Bs.

So, after spending the next few days at home in the Bronx browsing the web and watching a succession of big haired news drones on TV telling me "WE ARE AT WAR," I got back to work on the next Monday along with everybody else. The Stock Market was back open. The trains were running, and the whole city had done a pretty remarkable job of cleaning up after itself. Ground Zero itself, of course, was still a smoldering ruin, but, for the most part, nobody I spoke to anyway, really believed there would be any more terrorist attacks that fall or that anything other than a slow process of getting back to normal was going to take place. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the whole incident is that my Internet access at home (Covad DSL through XO Communications) had never gone down for even a few seconds. The designers of the Internet had done their job well and the whole concept of the packet switching network (which was, of course, designed to survive in the case of a nuclear war) had worked exactly as it was supposed to have worked. Yes, 5 World Trade Center had collapsed in a heap of rubble and flooded the gigantic downtown Manhattan Verizon CO right behind it and, yes, phone service and Internet access in lower Manhattan was pretty much in a state of disaster, but, up in the Bronx, and even down on Broad Street by that Monday, we had working telephones and a working T-1.

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