Month: September 2001

Smooth Operator

So I’m sitting in the front row at one of the conference sessions, and I realize that one of the speakers is a total babe. He gives his shpiel, and it becomes also obvious that he’s really smart and totally plays for the home team. So I’m sitting there trying to look all suave and intellectually engaged in the topic at hand, and I pop a contact. Suddenly, I’m a twitching, tearing mess who can’t see a damn thing. I have to race back to my hotel to get my glasses before the massive eyestrain headache sets in.

And people wonder why I can never land a fella.

Una Noche Divertida

Sexy Mexicans are good for morale. At least that’s what I felt last night. My friend Josh and I decided that we’ve been feeling so fucked up about this whole past week that we could use a little cheery distraction. After some hemming and hawing, we went ahead with out plan to go see El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, play with his band, the Memphis Mariachis, and singers, the Elvettes (Priscillita, Lisa Maria, y Qué Linda Thompson), in an intimate little show down at the Mercury Lounge. It was a good call, and did wonders for our addled minds. The basic idea is that he’s this guy from East L.A. who adds a whole South-of-the-border schtick to an amazing Elvis-themed cabaret act. This particular show is part of his “Boxing with God” tour, which actually gave him a good opportunity to plainly acknowledge how rough things have been this past week: he was able to express his sadness and sympathy and then seque right into the Gospel Elvis theme.

Not that it’s just Elvis songs with the lyrics changed for comic effect — oh no! El Rey and his entourage do a whole show pulling from all over the spectrum of rock and pop history: Elvis, George Michael, Iggy Pop, The Doors, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Naughty by Nature, and Simon and Garfunkel all appear in the reportoire. It was not unlike a Latino Kiki and Herb show without the pathos.

Lord knows there’s been enough pathos this week. I’ve had to stop watching the news altogether as the media coverage turns completely to publicizing everyone’s grief. It’s upsetting enough to walk around New York right now, passing makeshift vigils and memorials at every turn, without having to watch people on TV being badgered by reporters to talk about their shock and sorrow. I just want news about what’s going on now, whether or not we’re going to give in to the public bloodlust and embark on a massive campaign of revenge. I’m trying to sort through my own reactions to this — reactions that have been much, much more powerful than I would have expected — and make sense of the changes in the people and the cityscape around me. Watching the TV coverage constantly churn up newer, sadder aspects of the whole thing is just not helping.

I think it’ll be good to go to San Francisco next week and get a little distance from New York. Seeing all these candles and flyers and tributes, talking to people about what they’ve been through, and endless political discussions are really wearing me down. I don’t expect the issue to go away, but I need to get further from the epicenter of so much sorrow and rage.

Flight!

Not that I’m itching to get out of town or anything right now, but it looks like work is letting me go to San Francisco after all. I’m doing nerdy conference stuff during the weekdays, but I get in next Saturday afternoon and will have that weekend, the next, and all the weeknights in between to hang out and run around and do fun stuff and whatnot. If you want to hang out some time, let me know so we can see if we can work something out.

Also, I finally booked my ticket for England. If you’re in or around London sometime between November 17 and 26 and wanna hang out, let me know.

Days Gone By in NYC

Back in the summer of 1989, my dad gave me his old Pentax K-1000 and a few pointers, and I set out to try and capture a bit of my New York City. I took hundreds of pictures, and there would be no way to capture so many views around the city without getting a lot of the Twin Towers in there. So here are a bunch of views that no one will ever experience again:

Looking down at the World Financial Center from the rooftop observation deck of Tower 2. The waterfront park below was still being built at this point.

Looking down at Battery Park and the mouth of the Battery Tunnel from the rooftop observation deck. This is the southern tip of Manhattan.

Looking up from underneath a light pole in the plaza beneath the WTC. From that angle, it’s almost impossible to really appreciate the scale of the two towers.

Looking northwest at the transmitter tower (the main transmitter array is out of the frame), west midtown, the Hudson River, and New Jersey.

View of one of my favorite old office buildings from inside the marble-lined lobby of Tower 2.

A Brief Respite

Let’s take a quick break from all this stress and appreciate a few things. First, you absolutely must see this beautiful record of WTC views taken by a friend from her bedroom window. Second, and this is really a matter of making believe that nothing is wrong at all, is something pretty:

To keep things in perspective, though:

I’m speechless

This is one of the scariest views of the collapse I’ve seen yet

I’m pretty sure I know who the guy in the bandana is

There’s No Normal

It’s horrible being back at work today. It’s a complete farce. My boss is telling me that we really ought to be getting back to our duties, but it’s ridiculous. I’m so agitated I feel sick to my stomach. It’s just too distracting for me to concentrate on anything. Everyone I talk to has their own horror stories to tell, there are still sirens down in the streets, and people keep calling to see how we all are. We can’t escape it yet, and it’s much more difficult than being cocooned at home with the TV news. I desperately need to stop thinking about all of this now, but I’m too close. I’m pacing around the office like a caged animal at the zoo.

I was thinking as I walked up Park Avenue this morning that it was fascinating to see daily life creep back. People were walking to work, there was traffic again, everyone wasn’t staring at the sky any more. It was a little subdud, sure, and there were cops and cadets and military personnel everywhere, but it seemed much more normal. It’s not, though. Start talking to anyone and you find that Tuesday’s massacre is still a visceral presence. Everyone knows someone who was down there, everyone is worried about someone who hasn’t turned up yet. Everyone else seems to be as distracted as I am.

Also, I just got this story from my old childhood friend, Lynn:

Dear Family and Friends,

This is the first time I have been able to get access to email so I wanted to give you all an update. Let me start by saying that what I saw and experienced was life-altering and I haven’t even begun to deal with the psychological effects yet. This is what happened.

I had an 8 a.m. meeting at City Hall with the Mayor. When we heard the first boom it shook the building but we assumed that it was due to the construction next door in the Tweed Courthouse. However when the Mayor’s staff and an exec from the Port Authority ran out of the room, we knew that something was up. We ran to the windows and saw the top of the WTC on fire. Within minutes I watched another plane crash into the second tower. Panic ensued but we were told to stay in City Hall as [something missing here]

I made it across the street (about 200 yards away) to Park Row and got a call from my Dad on my cell. I told him that I was fine and that I was walking with my boss back to the office because they wanted all employees to check in. At that very moment I heard a loud boom and watched the first tower collapse into itself. There was a giant cloud of swirling dust, bricks, steel and smoke moving at lighting speed in my direction. The crowds on the street were screaming. I cried to my Dad [something missing here]

They gave us water and masks as they dealt with the severe casualties. I then heard another loud boom and saw the second tower collapse. I ran out of the lobby (which had all glass windows) into a windowless men’s room (the nearest safety I could find). I scared the crap out of two guys peeing but who cares. After the second collapse everything was worse: more screaming, more debris, more wounded, more chaos. Eventually I ended up on the floor of a first floor hallway [something missing here]

In the late PM, the hospital organized walking groups and I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to my girlfriend’s house in Brooklyn Heights (about 1.5 miles away). I had to stop because I was throwing up, felt faint, had difficulty breathing, had diarrhea and was dizzy. She helped me out, cleaned me up and around 5 pm I began to walk home to Park Slope (another 2M).

Yesterday I went to an emergency facility. I had several tests done, including a chest scan, and the doctor confirmed that I have smoke/debris inhalation. My oxygen capacity is below normal but not to worry. It’s not bad, but enough to be uncomfortable. My symptoms come and go as I get better. I’m on meds and hope to be okay very soon.

My office is closed. We do not know when we will open as the building has been damaged. If I am feeling better tomorrow, I plan on assisting my colleagues who are at work in Brooklyn. My company, the NYC Economic Development Corporation, is trying to find temporary offices for all the displaced companies (including us). So far everyone in my department, Real Estate Development, is accounted for, including my boss.

I happy to report that my good friend of 13 years, “Ziggy,” made it out alive from the 72nd floor. He is a broker at Morgan Stanley and reported to work today at a temporary office in midtown. I am blown away by his bravery and commitment to help others.

The skyline looks very eerie now. I doesn’t look like NY. It doesn’t look like home. However, I have no doubt in my mind that NY will come back because we are tough people who deal with tough situations all the time without blinking an eye.

My love and sympathy goes out to anyone who may be affected by this tragedy.

Love and BIG BIG thanks to you all — L

If you don’t live here it may be hard to imagine that we are all hearing stories like this all day long. I can’t wait for things to settle down some more, because it’s so exhausting to keep processing all of these experiences.

Anti-Arab Sentiments

I get a sick feeling whenever I hear reports of people blindly, stupidly lashing out against any Arab they come across. The entire Arab world does not hate the United States. Those people who do wouldn’t necessarily wish that thousands of people would be killed over political, economic, ideological disagreements. Do you know what Arab-Americans are? Americans. Who came here to live and work and love and have families and get to know their neighbors and interact with all of us. And even get jobs in or near the World trade Center or the Pentagon. Anger and frustration and wounded pride over all this is starting to give way to blind racism, and I hope others have the fucking decency to try and stop it, or at least keep it in check as much as possible.

Views from Brooklyn Heights

I had to get out of the house today, get away from the TV and see something with my own eyes again. I took my bike down to Brooklyn Heights so I could see the view from the Promenade that faces lower Manhattan, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. I also wanted to stop in on my friends Jason and Holly, since Holly, a teacher at a high school right by the World Trade Center, was settling down from an all-day ordeal of getting 20 students and herself home from ground zero.

All the views from across the East River were odd, but not horrific, since all the damage was west, along the Hudson River. You could see smoke but no wreckage. And the skyline was wrong. The dominant feature that was always taken for granted, sometimes appreciated, was just plain gone. People were out checking the scene, and it was odd mix: some people were enjoying a sunny day, some were taking tourist photos just as if the buildings were still there, and here and there people just sat crying or sitting silently.

The view from the water by the landing of the Brooklyn Bridge

Jason, Holly, and I watched the news for a while, but we had to get away for a while. We immersed ourselves at the movies for a spell, then returned to the Promenade for sunset.

It’s CRAZY to see those large black spots in the skyline view. Everything ought to be lit up like Christmas, with the Towers topping it all off. The darkness is VERY eerie.

Life is returning to normal in some ways. I go back to work tomorrow, and the restaurants and streets of Brooklyn were full of people, even if they were a little subdued. I’m very curious to see how the next few days go. People here have an incredible ability to adapt and reassert their daily lives. I wonder how long it will take for daily life to conform to this new set of circumstances.

News from Abroad

It’s fascinating to get first-hand accounts of how people abroad are reacting. Mark has been either shellshocked or weepy over in Italy, and people there have been coming up and just giving him hugs when they realize he’s American. They don’t get the full sense on the shock this has to a New Yorker, especially one who used to work in the WTC, but they really get the sense of gravity about the whole thing.

My friend Terry called from London, all full of flashbacks of growing up in Belfast and and seeing outburst of terrorism periodically. There, the IRA managed to get the attention of the government, but the scale was so completely different. I could never really appreciate living through the kind of ongoing apprehension thay have, but I wonder if they can appreciate the newness of all of this to us.

People from all over have been adding comments to my entries here, reminding me that this is as big a shock to everyone else, not just those of us staring at the big clouds where the shape of the skyline has totally changed.

The Trip Home

Of course, this was the ONE DAY that I left my camera at home. The site of the Towers from the street and from work was fiction, surrealism, completely impossible to really accept. If you’ve ever been to New York, you know that you can see the Towers from all over the place. They’re like a pair of compass needles for the whole city. My whole trip back to Brooklyn was punctuated by hundreds of views of the smoke rising from the rubble where I’d otherwise be seeing the Towers themselves.

Midtown was completely insane. From the office, I could see people swarming all over the streets, and people standing on the roofs of every building around, staring fixedly at the plume. Down on the street, it was mayhem. People were rushing everywhere, generally north. Tempers were flaring in the panic — especially in the fights over cabs. Paranoia was out of control. I passed an SUV on 3rd Avenue whose engine caught fire, and people were just flipping out when they saw the smoke. Every time an F16 flew overhead, every head around looked up — everyone is afraid of planes today. I joined a throng of people heading to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel after seeing cardboard signs go up saying the tunnel was open and every car around was taking people out of Manhattan. It really was an effective evacuation of the area. I caught a cab with a few other people, then walked home from Long Island City — a long, hot, weird journey filled with other refugees from a day that started out like any other.

I can’t turn away from the news. The jingoism is driving me crazy. This is an attack against US, for God’s sake, not democracy itself. Can the rhetoric, because no one’s good enough to get it right. I actually prefer watching Adolph Guiliani and Governor Pataki talk about it, because they’re shying away from the “threat to American ideals” bit (for the most part) and concentrating on the massive, massive rescue effort that is underway to control the chaos and the disaster in lower Manhattan.

When the dust settles (literally), I just know that Shrub is gonna do something stupid. Yes, we’re going to have to do something, but he’s not the person I want to call the shots right now. Even worse, he might come out of this as some kind of hero, just because he’s in office right now. Whatever peope are able to do to handle the situation, he’ll be able to claim credit for his leadership. Man, I bet they couldn’t get Colin Powell on the phone fast enough this morning.