9/11/01 -- THE WEEK (part two of a trilogy)
(This is the second of three essays I've written about 9/11. The first is here.)
Giuliani declared southern Manhattan a “frozen zone” following the attacks - only rescue workers or residents allowed inside. During most of the cleanup, the northern border of that Frozen Zone was Canal Street - but for that first week, it was Fourteenth Street, and my neighborhood lay inside.
The city set up police barricades every six blocks or so - anyone coming from north to south had to have proof of residency, or the police would bar us. Jackie forgot her driver’s license one day and nearly couldn’t get home until she found a phone bill deep in her bag. She kept it on her for the rest of the week just in case.
I’d been working with The Metropolitan Playhouse that summer, a theater five blocks from home. They’d given me a key long before, as I’d offered to be the emergency “we got locked out accidentally” contact. But it too was inside the Frozen Zone, and since I was now the only person who could get to the place, that made me temporary company manager. Alex, the artistic director, asked me to check in each day that week - we had two shows in rep, but until they lifted the restriction, neither casts nor audience could get there. I went to the office each day, updated the voicemail message about whether we were open, and called the people who’d reserved tickets for the day’s performance, offering to re-schedule their reservations. A few people asked me how I was doing when I called them. After that, I’d go back home, reflecting how weird it was that police were waiting to card me on my block.
--
On the 13th, I remembered our local mosque. There were already rumblings of Islamaphobia; Jackie had told me the day before about a Muslim guy at her office, someone who had a distinctive full beard - but had come in that morning clean-shaven. She’d asked him why he shaved, but he smiled at her sadly, and didn’t say anything, and she knew.
I imagined the mosque was getting threats, and wanted to let them know they had friends too. The door was locked when I got there, so I sat down on the stoop to write them a note. A middle-aged guy, short and stocky, saw me sitting there as he passed. He wandered over, and when I looked up, he smirked and nodded up at the Mosque. “So this is where the snake pit is, huh?”
I jumped up. “This is a HOUSE of WORSHIP!” I screamed, right into his face. “HOW DARE YOU!”
“It’s a SNAKE PIT!” He screamed back. But he was already backing down the street, away from me.
“IT’S A HOUSE of WORSHIP!” I screamed again. “You are NO BETTER than the people who DID THIS!” We hollered at each other few more seconds before he fled.
Never in my life have I been that angry at any human. Never before, and never since.
While we were shouting, a younger guy came out of the mosque. I explained why I’d come and what the guy had said, and that I was sorry for screaming but dammit, he’d gotten me so angry…he thanked me. Then he ducked back inside a moment - I assumed he was telling other people inside what the commotion was. He came back out with an older black guy, pointed me out, and then went back inside again.
The older guy introduced himself as Issa. He did community outreach for the mosque, he explained, and also wanted to thank me. I instinctively offered Issa my hand; he hesitated, then explained he wasn’t supposed to touch a woman he wasn’t married to, but since I didn’t know about that he’d shake my hand to be polite. He waved my apology off. And offered to tell me about Islam.
I realized I was about to get a “sales pitch,” but figured it would be unsporting to say no. So I agreed to listen, but made clear I was satisfied with my own faith -I just also believed it was good to learn about other people.
For the next hour or so, Issa and I stood on Eleventh Street having one of the top ten best conversations of my life. He reiterated that violence wasn’t what Islam was about and I said that I knew that. Issa told me about his conversion story, he told me about why he preferred using the name “Allah” instead of “God” for the Supreme Being (“if you spell ‘Allah’ backwards, it’s ‘Halla,’ which is still kind of the same, but ‘God’ backwards is ‘Dog,’ and God ain’t a dog…”). And we laughed. We laughed a lot. Every so often I’d say something that would make Issa break into a big grin and say “I know I said I’m not supposed to, but damn I gotta shake your hand …” When we parted, he again said that he was going to pray I’d convert, just for the record, and I said that I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to, but didn’t mind that Issa wished that for me, so let’s leave it in Allah’s hands, eh? This time, Issa didn’t just shake my hand, but insisted on hugging me. We laughed again, and parted, wishing each other safe.
I realized what fueled that conversation for Issa. He’d probably been spending the aftermath of the attack desperately wanting to grab someone and say “please, please understand that this is not what Islam is about.” I was the first person willing to listen.
--
One day that week, there was a rumor about a bomb at the Empire State Building. I remembered that Alex worked near there, and panicked, I called his cell, babbling when he answered that I’d heard that there was a bomb in the Empire State Building and he was right across the street and was he okay, was he safe? “…Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, “there’s nothing. No police, nothing, really, it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because they’re saying on the news that there’s a bomb and that it’s being evacuated and that it…” I was babbling faster and faster, and then finally my asking if he was okay turned into babbling that I was scared and confused and then I started bawling. Alex listened to me sob out the fear and panic I’d suppressed thus far, every so often breaking in to say something soothing; sitting, listening, riding out my breakdown.
“You know what,” he finally cut in, “I was going to go after work to volunteer for one of the work crews down at the site. They’re recruiting over at the Javitts Center. Do you want to join me?”
“Maybe,” I sniffled.
“Why don’t you think about it, and call me in a half hour, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and hung up and burst into tears again. I sobbed through that whole half hour, getting everything out of my system. But I calmed down enough in time to call Alex back and say “I’ll meet you in 20 minutes.”
We walked to the Javitts Center - I think he figured walking might do me good - and learned they had a waiting list of volunteers, enough to last them several weeks. We added our names to the list, and wandered off. “Maybe there’s another place we can volunteer,” Alex said; he wanted to do something right away. We tried a Salvation Army on 14th Street, then a hospital; but they too were full up. We talked about where we’d been On The Day as we walked, and about how we were holding up. We also talked some shop. Alex wanted to have some kind of company gathering when the Zone was open -a chance for us all to get together in one place and lean on each other. I offered to get the food.
By then we were back at Avenue B and I was tired, ready to go home, but Alex still wanted to try to go help at the site. I told him the cops were strict about not letting people through, but he said he’d try sneaking past them by skirting along the East River - we parted company there, him wandering east, and me turning south, digging out my license to show the cop so they’d let me through.
--
We heard on Thursday that the Zone would lift on Saturday night. I got the food, while Alex told the company we’d gather that Sunday. When I got home, I’d just shut the door behind me and was going to put the groceries away - put the vegetables into the crisper, the crackers on the shelves, milk on the fridge door - but suddenly was paralyzed. I stood in the doorway, blinking at things. On the bookshelf to my right was the copy of Lord Of The Rings Cliona had sent me for my birthday that year. I turned to the fridge, threw the groceries inside - bags and all - and picked up that book and went into my room, climbed up to my bed, opened it, and started reading.
For the next several hours, I did not leave my room except to pee or eat. Even so, when I was hungry I brought the food straight back into my room, diving back into the book. When I was tired I simply put it down beside me - so when I woke I could start right where I left off.
When I had read the entire trilogy, I felt ready to come out of my room again. I think I’d reached a point when I’d seen enough of what was happening, and just needed to hide in Middle Earth a while.
--
By Friday I’d gotten stir-crazy, and called Colin, begging him to do something with me - a movie, a walk, something. He’d heard about a rally in Union Square that evening, and suggested a movie on 14th Street, then dinner and joining the rally. We saw Made - something light and funny, we thought. But during one scene, Vince Vaughn’s character was in a taxi in Soho, and I started tensing up; I noticed Colin was tensing beside me as well. We’d both had the same thought - what if they show the towers. But they didn’t, and then Vince went into a nightclub and we both relaxed.
We stopped at a drug store to get candles after dinner before heading to Union Square. They only had scented candles, and we cracked giddy nervous jokes with another couple on the same errand - was it weird, we wondered, to make a peace rally smell like eucalyptus or fresh linen? After debating the proper scent for a rally - I picked cinnamon - we head for the park.
The name “rally” was a misnomer; it was more like “a bunch of people hanging out.” Someone had set up a paper banner in one spot for people to write things on, and I wrote down the mosque story; Colin wrote something I don’t remember any more. We wandered a while, looking for a place to set our candles, listening people breaking into different songs. We’d talked during dinner about how we were uneasy about the hard edge to some people’s reactions. “I’m afraid that waving the flag is going to turn into waving the flag at someone,” I’d said. So hearing people starting up with “God Bless America” here and there made us flinch. Colin tried singing “New York, New York”, and I gamely joined in, but no one else joined us and that didn’t feel right either.
Then in a corner of the park we heard “Give Peace A Chance.” Two guys on guitars were leading the singing, the two of them the only ones who knew all the words. A bigger cluster of people around them all joined on the chorus - “All we are saying, is give peace a chance….”
When they got to the end they went right back to the first verse once more, the crowd joining every chorus. After the second round of the song, they kept playing as we repeated the chorus again and again. And for a good few minutes, with more and more people joining us, we sang - “All we are saying is give peace a chance….all we are saying is give peace a chance….”
We all burst into cheers when the guitars stopped. But they shushed us and pointed behind us - to a statue, George Washington on a horse. People had drawn on it all day, writing messages of peace and drawing hearts and peace signs. Some people had also left their candles there. There was someone sitting at the top, with a book in his hand, hollering that he wanted to read a poem to us. I have been looking for that poem for the past ten years -- it wasn’t about war, or terror; it was a eulogy, a memorial to people dead before their time. An acceptance that sometimes people died young; but how dare we say someone’s life was too short, because did people ever say that a poem was too short? Sometimes the shortest lives, like the shortest poems, had the most power.
We cheered wildly when he finished. He tried reading a second poem, but the guitarists started another song, and Colin and I were spent anyway. We lit our candles and left them at the base of the statue, and each went back to our own apartments.
--
Everyone who showed up at the Metropolitan gathering was someone I knew, some of whom even worked at the Towers, and we all hugged and leaned on each other. One actress who turned up had a day job as a massage therapist. She was volunteering at the site, giving medical massages to the rescue crew; when I saw the huge bags under her eyes and her drawn face, I grabbed her into a big hug before either of us could say anything.
Alex and I lingered a while afterward, chatting in the office. I’d brought a poem to read, I told him, but the chance hadn’t come up. It was Auden’s September 1, 1939, which I’d heard for the first time on the radio a few days before. I handed it to him and sat, letting him read it. He looked at the paper a long time - so long that I started thinking “Wow, I didn’t know Alex read so slowly.”
But as I was thinking that, Alex suddenly started speaking, in a thick, choked voice. It was a turnabout of earlier that week; this time he was the one who needed to unload, and it was my turn to just be there to listen. So we sat, him speaking through tears, and I rested my hand on his shoulder and I listened.
Giuliani declared southern Manhattan a “frozen zone” following the attacks - only rescue workers or residents allowed inside. During most of the cleanup, the northern border of that Frozen Zone was Canal Street - but for that first week, it was Fourteenth Street, and my neighborhood lay inside.
The city set up police barricades every six blocks or so - anyone coming from north to south had to have proof of residency, or the police would bar us. Jackie forgot her driver’s license one day and nearly couldn’t get home until she found a phone bill deep in her bag. She kept it on her for the rest of the week just in case.
I’d been working with The Metropolitan Playhouse that summer, a theater five blocks from home. They’d given me a key long before, as I’d offered to be the emergency “we got locked out accidentally” contact. But it too was inside the Frozen Zone, and since I was now the only person who could get to the place, that made me temporary company manager. Alex, the artistic director, asked me to check in each day that week - we had two shows in rep, but until they lifted the restriction, neither casts nor audience could get there. I went to the office each day, updated the voicemail message about whether we were open, and called the people who’d reserved tickets for the day’s performance, offering to re-schedule their reservations. A few people asked me how I was doing when I called them. After that, I’d go back home, reflecting how weird it was that police were waiting to card me on my block.
--
On the 13th, I remembered our local mosque. There were already rumblings of Islamaphobia; Jackie had told me the day before about a Muslim guy at her office, someone who had a distinctive full beard - but had come in that morning clean-shaven. She’d asked him why he shaved, but he smiled at her sadly, and didn’t say anything, and she knew.
I imagined the mosque was getting threats, and wanted to let them know they had friends too. The door was locked when I got there, so I sat down on the stoop to write them a note. A middle-aged guy, short and stocky, saw me sitting there as he passed. He wandered over, and when I looked up, he smirked and nodded up at the Mosque. “So this is where the snake pit is, huh?”
I jumped up. “This is a HOUSE of WORSHIP!” I screamed, right into his face. “HOW DARE YOU!”
“It’s a SNAKE PIT!” He screamed back. But he was already backing down the street, away from me.
“IT’S A HOUSE of WORSHIP!” I screamed again. “You are NO BETTER than the people who DID THIS!” We hollered at each other few more seconds before he fled.
Never in my life have I been that angry at any human. Never before, and never since.
While we were shouting, a younger guy came out of the mosque. I explained why I’d come and what the guy had said, and that I was sorry for screaming but dammit, he’d gotten me so angry…he thanked me. Then he ducked back inside a moment - I assumed he was telling other people inside what the commotion was. He came back out with an older black guy, pointed me out, and then went back inside again.
The older guy introduced himself as Issa. He did community outreach for the mosque, he explained, and also wanted to thank me. I instinctively offered Issa my hand; he hesitated, then explained he wasn’t supposed to touch a woman he wasn’t married to, but since I didn’t know about that he’d shake my hand to be polite. He waved my apology off. And offered to tell me about Islam.
I realized I was about to get a “sales pitch,” but figured it would be unsporting to say no. So I agreed to listen, but made clear I was satisfied with my own faith -I just also believed it was good to learn about other people.
For the next hour or so, Issa and I stood on Eleventh Street having one of the top ten best conversations of my life. He reiterated that violence wasn’t what Islam was about and I said that I knew that. Issa told me about his conversion story, he told me about why he preferred using the name “Allah” instead of “God” for the Supreme Being (“if you spell ‘Allah’ backwards, it’s ‘Halla,’ which is still kind of the same, but ‘God’ backwards is ‘Dog,’ and God ain’t a dog…”). And we laughed. We laughed a lot. Every so often I’d say something that would make Issa break into a big grin and say “I know I said I’m not supposed to, but damn I gotta shake your hand …” When we parted, he again said that he was going to pray I’d convert, just for the record, and I said that I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to, but didn’t mind that Issa wished that for me, so let’s leave it in Allah’s hands, eh? This time, Issa didn’t just shake my hand, but insisted on hugging me. We laughed again, and parted, wishing each other safe.
I realized what fueled that conversation for Issa. He’d probably been spending the aftermath of the attack desperately wanting to grab someone and say “please, please understand that this is not what Islam is about.” I was the first person willing to listen.
--
One day that week, there was a rumor about a bomb at the Empire State Building. I remembered that Alex worked near there, and panicked, I called his cell, babbling when he answered that I’d heard that there was a bomb in the Empire State Building and he was right across the street and was he okay, was he safe? “…Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, “there’s nothing. No police, nothing, really, it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because they’re saying on the news that there’s a bomb and that it’s being evacuated and that it…” I was babbling faster and faster, and then finally my asking if he was okay turned into babbling that I was scared and confused and then I started bawling. Alex listened to me sob out the fear and panic I’d suppressed thus far, every so often breaking in to say something soothing; sitting, listening, riding out my breakdown.
“You know what,” he finally cut in, “I was going to go after work to volunteer for one of the work crews down at the site. They’re recruiting over at the Javitts Center. Do you want to join me?”
“Maybe,” I sniffled.
“Why don’t you think about it, and call me in a half hour, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and hung up and burst into tears again. I sobbed through that whole half hour, getting everything out of my system. But I calmed down enough in time to call Alex back and say “I’ll meet you in 20 minutes.”
We walked to the Javitts Center - I think he figured walking might do me good - and learned they had a waiting list of volunteers, enough to last them several weeks. We added our names to the list, and wandered off. “Maybe there’s another place we can volunteer,” Alex said; he wanted to do something right away. We tried a Salvation Army on 14th Street, then a hospital; but they too were full up. We talked about where we’d been On The Day as we walked, and about how we were holding up. We also talked some shop. Alex wanted to have some kind of company gathering when the Zone was open -a chance for us all to get together in one place and lean on each other. I offered to get the food.
By then we were back at Avenue B and I was tired, ready to go home, but Alex still wanted to try to go help at the site. I told him the cops were strict about not letting people through, but he said he’d try sneaking past them by skirting along the East River - we parted company there, him wandering east, and me turning south, digging out my license to show the cop so they’d let me through.
--
We heard on Thursday that the Zone would lift on Saturday night. I got the food, while Alex told the company we’d gather that Sunday. When I got home, I’d just shut the door behind me and was going to put the groceries away - put the vegetables into the crisper, the crackers on the shelves, milk on the fridge door - but suddenly was paralyzed. I stood in the doorway, blinking at things. On the bookshelf to my right was the copy of Lord Of The Rings Cliona had sent me for my birthday that year. I turned to the fridge, threw the groceries inside - bags and all - and picked up that book and went into my room, climbed up to my bed, opened it, and started reading.
For the next several hours, I did not leave my room except to pee or eat. Even so, when I was hungry I brought the food straight back into my room, diving back into the book. When I was tired I simply put it down beside me - so when I woke I could start right where I left off.
When I had read the entire trilogy, I felt ready to come out of my room again. I think I’d reached a point when I’d seen enough of what was happening, and just needed to hide in Middle Earth a while.
--
By Friday I’d gotten stir-crazy, and called Colin, begging him to do something with me - a movie, a walk, something. He’d heard about a rally in Union Square that evening, and suggested a movie on 14th Street, then dinner and joining the rally. We saw Made - something light and funny, we thought. But during one scene, Vince Vaughn’s character was in a taxi in Soho, and I started tensing up; I noticed Colin was tensing beside me as well. We’d both had the same thought - what if they show the towers. But they didn’t, and then Vince went into a nightclub and we both relaxed.
We stopped at a drug store to get candles after dinner before heading to Union Square. They only had scented candles, and we cracked giddy nervous jokes with another couple on the same errand - was it weird, we wondered, to make a peace rally smell like eucalyptus or fresh linen? After debating the proper scent for a rally - I picked cinnamon - we head for the park.
The name “rally” was a misnomer; it was more like “a bunch of people hanging out.” Someone had set up a paper banner in one spot for people to write things on, and I wrote down the mosque story; Colin wrote something I don’t remember any more. We wandered a while, looking for a place to set our candles, listening people breaking into different songs. We’d talked during dinner about how we were uneasy about the hard edge to some people’s reactions. “I’m afraid that waving the flag is going to turn into waving the flag at someone,” I’d said. So hearing people starting up with “God Bless America” here and there made us flinch. Colin tried singing “New York, New York”, and I gamely joined in, but no one else joined us and that didn’t feel right either.
Then in a corner of the park we heard “Give Peace A Chance.” Two guys on guitars were leading the singing, the two of them the only ones who knew all the words. A bigger cluster of people around them all joined on the chorus - “All we are saying, is give peace a chance….”
When they got to the end they went right back to the first verse once more, the crowd joining every chorus. After the second round of the song, they kept playing as we repeated the chorus again and again. And for a good few minutes, with more and more people joining us, we sang - “All we are saying is give peace a chance….all we are saying is give peace a chance….”
We all burst into cheers when the guitars stopped. But they shushed us and pointed behind us - to a statue, George Washington on a horse. People had drawn on it all day, writing messages of peace and drawing hearts and peace signs. Some people had also left their candles there. There was someone sitting at the top, with a book in his hand, hollering that he wanted to read a poem to us. I have been looking for that poem for the past ten years -- it wasn’t about war, or terror; it was a eulogy, a memorial to people dead before their time. An acceptance that sometimes people died young; but how dare we say someone’s life was too short, because did people ever say that a poem was too short? Sometimes the shortest lives, like the shortest poems, had the most power.
We cheered wildly when he finished. He tried reading a second poem, but the guitarists started another song, and Colin and I were spent anyway. We lit our candles and left them at the base of the statue, and each went back to our own apartments.
--
Everyone who showed up at the Metropolitan gathering was someone I knew, some of whom even worked at the Towers, and we all hugged and leaned on each other. One actress who turned up had a day job as a massage therapist. She was volunteering at the site, giving medical massages to the rescue crew; when I saw the huge bags under her eyes and her drawn face, I grabbed her into a big hug before either of us could say anything.
Alex and I lingered a while afterward, chatting in the office. I’d brought a poem to read, I told him, but the chance hadn’t come up. It was Auden’s September 1, 1939, which I’d heard for the first time on the radio a few days before. I handed it to him and sat, letting him read it. He looked at the paper a long time - so long that I started thinking “Wow, I didn’t know Alex read so slowly.”
But as I was thinking that, Alex suddenly started speaking, in a thick, choked voice. It was a turnabout of earlier that week; this time he was the one who needed to unload, and it was my turn to just be there to listen. So we sat, him speaking through tears, and I rested my hand on his shoulder and I listened.