15 Years

By Gil Gross

If there is one thing no one seems to remember about 15 years ago it is the night of 9/10. There was a ferocious thunder and lightning storm, the sort you hope for when you are telling scary stories to sleepovers safe and secure in your home. I didn’t even think of it the next morning until my wife mentioned how different it was as we got our son ready for school. After the storm of the night before, the sky was cloudless the next morning, and such a sharp piercing blue it almost hurt to look at it. There was no trace in the sky of the night of 9/10 almost as if the earth has shifted on its axis and last night’s storm was now on the other side of the planet.

I had just taken Spencer to school, when I came home and Rhoda told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. You could not look at that sky and think even for a moment this was an accident though reporters were properly circumspect as to why this had happened. There was more than enough to report without going there yet, and anchors were in 2001 still a tad bit more interested in reporting what they knew, rather than what they guessed. At home, though, it was no problem to say out loud this was purposeful and probably terrorism. Almost on cue as I said that, we saw the second plane hit.

Everyone has their stories of the next couple of months in New York. We like to remember the stirring moments that gave people hope and purpose, but that was not the New York I walked those weeks. It was haunted.

There was the quiet. Few people were going to work, especially while the subways were shut down and most of the bridges and tunnels closed. People spoke in hushed tones, either because their usual New York ebullience had been so subdued or out of respect for the dead who were all around us. And they were.

Sometimes it would come crashing down upon you. There were tables of flowers in front of fire departments that had lost some, or in a few cases, most of its firefighters in the collapse. Lamp posts everywhere were quickly covered with pictures of the lost and the question “have you seen?” in hopes a loved one they hadn’t heard from might be walking around dazed somewhere, or might be with friends and out of touch. Phone service was out for days and cell phone service was out longer. There was always the hope they were alive and well and as frustrated as the rest of us were trying to use our phones to check on someone.

When the subways reopened, a wall on the mezzanine at Times Square station was covered in these posters with names and faces like the photos of the Holocaust dead at Yad Vashem. We all gave blood for the wounded, only to learn there had been no need. People either died on the planes or in the collapse of the Towers or they escaped. The falling concrete slabs that supported each and every floor of the Towers allowed no hairbreadth escapes.

At times you would be walking, and with the subways closed we were all walking, and almost have a sense of some normalcy until you would turn a corner and see flowers and candles piled up against the stoop of a brownstone or by the entrance to an apartment building and know that a victim had lived there and you would catch your breath all over again.

After a few days of reporting, anchoring and naps, I was given 12 hours off to regroup, but instead I went back downtown. I lived 19 years just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. I wasn’t a tour mecca for us. It was where my son’s Little League and soccer teams would meet before going across West Street to the fields. There was a Duane Reade in the basement which was the only pharmacy that far downtown open on weekends and where I would get medicine for my infant son’s ear infections on a Saturday. There was a Borders where you could hang out, and best of all, not long before the tragedy, a Krispy Kreme opened which gave us hope that our part of Manhattan was going to someday be an actual neighborhood.

At this point it wasn’t. The only restaurant open after 7PM was a Roy Rogers. Wall Street kept our neighborhood packed during the day on weekdays, but on the weekend and after 6pm, you could play touch football on Broad Street. When I first moved there the Village Voice was so fascinated with those of us who lingered in unknown lofts after dark that they did a piece on me carrying pillow cases of dirty clothes uptown on the subway to a Laundromat near CBS on 10th avenue where I’d do the wash before starting my shift. When my son set up a lemonade stand on Wall Street, people tried to figure out where the hell this kid had come from.

Heading downtown from ABC, I found the National Guard surrounded the neighborhood, stopping people, including reporters, from entering the area. I flashed my driver’s license with 26 Beaver Street and said I needed to check on things and they let me through. When I crossed Bowling Green, at Beaver and Broadway, there was a coffee cart. It surprised me that its owner was able to get it there, but I decided it made sense because the Guardsmen could use some coffee and bagels, of which there was a tall pile on the wagon.

The owner was nowhere about so I waited awhile before I realized the bagels, and in fact, the cart was covered in dust. It had been sitting there for days since the collapse with the owner fleeing as that cloud of concrete, metal, furniture, airplane and humanity exploded across Lower Manhattan. I shut off the burners and walked away.

That dust, for want of a better word, has settled on everything like a granulated pallor. Reality told you there was as much chance of breathing in bone as concrete, but there was no sense of reality yet. You couldn’t take it in and work, because when you did, and it happened several times to me, you would explode in tears. It’s different when it’s your home. I had covered terrorism first hand before, but never anything on this scale. What I had seen in Northern Ireland and the Mideast were attacks that were more personal and individual and though you can feel almost unbearable sadness when you are at a funeral for a noncombatant who got in the way of someone else’s insane political and religious fervor, nothing prepares you for the truly unbearable when it is your city, your neighborhood and your lungs are filling up with a mortar of lost souls.

And there was the smell of death. I don’t know how we know what that is. It is nothing most of us will ever smell in our lives, but it was different than anything any of us had experienced, except perhaps the firefighters and medical examiners at fire scenes. I’m not sure how we all knew that that smell was that of bodies in an inferno. It was almost instinctual as if carried in our DNA from human sacrifices and lands where bodies were set on funeral pyres. Despite the fact that such disposal of remains were used in religious ceremonies around the world, there was something unholy in the smell, and we were all grateful when the wind blew it away from us for even a few hours. If there was one aspect of those days that we might briefly acknowledge but not want to talk about, that was it. Even in sleep it crept into you. It hung in the air for weeks.

I walked all of Lower Manhattan which at that point was closed below Canal Street both to prevent more attacks and in hopes some shred of evidence might yet be collected. The fear of more attacks was warranted. One night years before we were in bed and heard a blast. I said that was a bomb. My wife hopefully said it was a truck backfiring or maybe thunder. It had been a bomb. Small and useless, it was still loud as it exploded against the Stock Exchange, a block and a half away.  This was apparently someone’s idea that this would bring independence to Puerto Rico, because votes by actual Puerto Ricans had failed to accomplish that goal.

Cordoned off, Lower Manhattan was empty but for one or two people allowed in to check their apartments of which there were few at that time and a Guardsman or two on patrol. I saw no sign of anyone collecting evidence yet. The streets were almost paved in some spots with memos and correspondence from firms that had been in the World Trade Center. I walked up to Fulton Street, just a few blocks in from the fish market and looked west. There was nothing to see which was stunning and horrific. It wasn’t what I was looking at which was simply sun and clouds. It was that every day I had ever stood there before you would see the Towers. And now there was the sky above where they had been and a view out across the Hudson to New Jersey. If you had not expected to see what you had seen each and every day before, it would have been a lovely vista of a beautiful late summer day. There was nothing I had seen that day that was as terrible as standing there seeing nothing at all.

There were better moments. The city was united in a way I had only seen once before under circumstances that could not have been more different. It was when the Mets won the 1969 World Series. People, including Yankee fans, were smiling and laughing and shaking hands on the subways. Some strangers even hugged. I hear when the Jets won it was similar, but I had been away at college when that happened. There was no joy this time, but there was a feeling of unity, however grim it might be.

There was pride in the police and firefighters, which wasn’t always the case even in 2001. I had been at dinner parties where people who owned brownstones in chic parts of the city complained loudly about people who would risk their lives to save them getting pensions. My wife and I got into an argument with several couples at one such affair in Brooklyn Heights for which we were rewarded with not having to regret further invitations which weren’t going to be forthcoming anyway.

When the Towers collapsed, firefighters who had been off duty on a training exercise in SoHo ran to the scene. They came from everywhere without needing to be called. In the collapse were brethren who had been trying to help people down dark and smoke filled stairs. On top of the pile while trying to find anyone who might have survived, they breathed in toxic dust that the Bush Administration EPA lied in saying was safe. Some died years later by those lies which those of us who honor first responders found treasonous.

Mayor Giuliani performed magnificently, saving his reputation from two terms that were close to ending his career. The police and firefighters despised him. He had gotten rid of William Bratton as Police Chief because he couldn’t stand Bratton’s techniques getting the credit for lower crime. The Chief at the time of 9-11 was Bernard Kerik who would eventually go to prison and used a shuttered Battery Park City apartment as a love nest with two separate mistresses in the wake of the disaster. The year before Giuliani had let his wife know he was leaving her for another woman by holding a press conference which the First Lady of New York watched on TV with their children. Later Giuliani’s lawyer gleefully described Giuliani’s wife, a much liked former TV anchor, as “howling like a stuck pig.” No one liked him at all on 9-10. On 9-12 he was, for awhile, beloved.

Now at 15 years, we look back and at where we are. The souls lost on 9-11 in New York are still thought of often, and despite a movie and the documented story of their bravery, the people who died on Flight 93 are thought of somewhat less. For some reason, those who died at the Pentagon plane crash are almost never mentioned at all. The French fell in love with an idiotic theory that the Pentagon crash did not happen at all and that the people who died on the plane never existed, despite eyewitnesses. The fact that these nonexistent people were in phone books and had decades of family pictures and birth certificates were taken as just proof of how good the CIA really was. The French have a way of falling in love with false information that justifies the satire of Pepe LePew’s passion for every black cat with a white stripe being, in fact, a skunk. Amazingly, we’ve heard little of this French “false flag” BS since France has suffered a series of attacks. Apparently, their terrorists are quite real.

There are still those who believe the World Trade Center Towers were not brought down by the plane crashes and the column free design that led to the floors pancaking down upon one another in the collapse, but by bombs planted by the Bush Administration, because after Iraq and Afghanistan we desperately need another reason to hate the people who wasted lives and treasure on wars in parts of the world, that administration understood about as well as I understand the rules of Cricket. 

I also still get hate mail from people who think World Trade Center 7 must have been blown up by the Bush Administration because it was not hit by a plane. “No,” I explain knowing it is to no avail. “It was hit by the collapsing North Tower which took out about a third of the thankfully evacuated building.” This does not suffice for people who still need to believe after everything else that has happened around the world that terrorists do not exist, but that Dick Cheney was actually competent at something.

Finally, there is the lingering story, though events in Brussels and Paris are diminishing it day by day, that the 9-11 attacks were somehow brilliantly planned by a handful of people, who once destroyed, can be permanently prevented from engendering more carnage. The news media has helped in this by using the term “mastermind” for its planners, as if they fully emerged from a Marvel comic.

Years after 9-11, when we were in the midst of a trip to a relative’s wedding in Phoenix, my wife was in Los Angeles getting a house there ready for sale, and our son and I were in San Francisco. We told her that we’d meet her in Phoenix, but secretly planned our flights so we’d be on the same L.A. to Phoenix flight in adjoining seats. When she got to the gate where we were lining up to get on board, there were the two men in her life. Her shock and happiness were evident enough that a guy on line behind us said, “Well, I guess she was surprised.” I tell you that silly little story, because that’s exactly how much planning it took to coordinate 9-11. That much and little more. My wife called me several endearing things. She did not and has not yet called me a “mastermind.”

In fact, the lesson in these 15 years that we have had the hardest time dealing with is that any gang of hapless idiots can commit just about any previously unimaginable crime especially if they are willing to die doing it. Living, and doing so happily, takes a particular kind of genius we too often take for granted. Terror apparently just means finding some guys who are in desperate need of dead virgins who, having nothing to compare it with, would have no idea how bad these guys are at sex. Finding such people doesn’t take a mastermind, only someone who has become expert on the care and cultivation of sociopaths who will have no second thoughts on seeing a child on a plane.

Seeing them and meeting them as a reporter when they fail at their tasks, I get that same deep dread I got looking down Fulton Street 15 years ago. What fills me with fear when I look in their eyes is not what I see. It’s what so plainly isn’t there.