I was in Los Angeles asleep in my bed when my wife woke me up with her eyes wide and her voice up in her head.
“The World Trade Towers. They’re gone. They’re not there anymore.”
She was pale and it was obvious she’d been crying. She must have gone to work, learned of what happened and been sent home. This was two years before our son was born so I was still doing things like sleeping until 8:00 which was the earliest my wife could have told me all this.
I truthfully remember very few details of the day beyond that. I spent most of it in front of the TV watching that same footage over and over, waiting for someone to figure out what the hell happened.
My wife and I both have numerous family members and friends in the DC and New York areas so we spent some time on the phone and e-mail making sure no one we knew was among the dead and injured.
Gradually we learned otherwise. One of my wife’s college professors was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon along with her husband and two young children. We have her memorial service on tape. To this day we haven’t watched it.
The mother of one of my best friends from high school was near the Trade Centers when they collapsed. She wasn’t killed but was knocked down and received a blow to the head that had her still seeing double when we visited New York about two weeks later.
We got off lucky. My sister was working near the Pentagon at the time. My wife and my dad fly in and out of Washington National Airport on business on a regular basis. Another good friend from high school lives to this day a few blocks north of the Trade Center site. My uncle has an office in the Graybar Building above Grand Central Station. He walked to New Jersey that afternoon with a lot of other people.
We got off lucky.
I remember Michael McCarthy, who at that time was my writing teacher at Second City Los Angeles, calling to tell me class was canceled that night and how weird it was to wake up in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Michael must have been dealing with his own worries, having been a New Yorker at one point. We‘ve since become good friends, but we’ve never discussed anyone he may have lost that day. It’s never come up.
I remember that night going to a spontaneous memorial gathering at a fountain near where I live. Candles all over the place. Some were doused by the spray. Older kids assumed the job of relighting them while the younger kids ran around, oblivious to anything other than a night out at the fountain. No singing, no organized prayer, just murmurs between some adults while the rest of us looked at the candles circling the edge of the fountain.
That’s really all I remember. Waking up, holding my wife, watching the news, calls, e-mails, standing by the fountain that night.
Other stuff followed that week. The long lines to give blood at the Red Cross on Vermont Avenue, the show we wrote at Second City, sticking a flag in our car window and walking everywhere with a tiny flag in one hand, getting honked at.
And there was the trip home to DC and the visit to New York within the first two weeks after the day. On a disc somewhere I’ve got pictures I took of Ground Zero and the Pentagon.
I remember rubbernecking at the Pentagon as I drove south on 395. I could see the black scorch marks on its side. Then the road dipped and took me out of view.
I walked and took pictures in New York with my friend Brian as white ash floated around us. I smelled a mixture of burnt plastic and spoiled food.
And I felt anger that has never really gone away, toward the dead bastards who did it and the idiot bastards who should have prevented it.
As a kid I stood on top of one of those towers and looked over the world.
As a young man I walked the halls of the Pentagon one weekend, unescorted, a civilian who just needed to use one of their hundreds of immaculately clean bathrooms.
Today I’m a husband and father who once seriously entertained the idea of keeping a gun handy and even explored my options for joining the military after my country had been attacked.
Fortunately for all concerned I’m a procrastinator. In this case it probably saved my life and soul. I didn’t throw my life away fighting wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan while the real enemies kicked back and laughed their madrassahs off in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Lucky me.
Five years later I’m still waiting for my country to re-grow its brain. Almost half of America believes (wrongly) that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11 and a major TV network is seriously trying to create a mythology in which Bill Clinton was soft on terrorism.
There is hope. The truth is beginning to seep out among the broader public and pretty much everyone except the hardcore crazy one-third have figured out that Bush and Company are ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag.
I just wish we had been onto our enemies, foreign and domestic, a little earlier. We lost 3000 people that first day and tens of thousands, Iraqi, Afghani, and American, in the five years since.
Tonight if I had to sum up everything I feel in one word it would be “Enough.”
Cue “Imagine” by John Lennon.
Fade out.
