My 9/11
September 10th, 2001 was my 32nd birthday. I spent it in a jail on Rikers Island — New York City’s notorious complex of detention centers that mostly hold people awaiting criminal trials. Although, inmates can end up remaining on Rikers for years.
I was there to shoot a movie. I’d worked on film sets for a couple of years — as a production assistant on TV shows and an assistant director, or “A.D.”, on independent films, but this was my first time as the first A.D. — the director’s right hand person who plans out the shoot and runs the set each day.
Our first day on the island the week before, we chose which cells were going to be featured in the film, and as the crew loaded in and I talked with the director and cinematographer about our first shots, the producer asked our contact at Rikers if the cells we’d picked could be cleaned out of the accumulated debris we didn’t want to see onscreen.
The Electric department was dropping heavy cable to power our lights when a group of four inmates showed up, led by a corrections officer.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that prisoners would be cleaning out the cells, but their appearance caught me off-guard. Their loose fit Rikers-issued shirts, pants, and sneakers had a minor casual cool feel, but the clothes put them at a disadvantage. Like everyone’s dressed for the workday and you’re there in pajamas. Infantilized and kept.
The cinematographer was talking with his gaffer, while the director huddled with the lead actor and I answered a question on the walkie-talkie that the second assistant director had for me.
But as his concluding reply, “Copy that,” came through my earpiece, I barely heard it. I was arrested by the sight of the inmates.
Their heads were down. They made no sounds as they filled trash bags and mopped floors under the hyper-specific instructions of the officer. Their lips moved almost imperceptibly to indicate “yessir” ascents, not daring to look up even one time.
There was a scene in the script we were there to film, where a prisoner makes momentary eye contact with one of the guards — or “keepers,” as the inmates call them — and a group of officers pull the guy out of line and beat the hell out of him for “eyeballing” one of them.
The scene was something the writer/director saw play out several times while he was incarcerated in Attica, the maximum security prison a million miles away from Rikers, though somehow still in New York.
I guess I was seeing the fruit of however many unofficial rules designed to strip these peoples’ humanity were being brutally enforced on Rikers every day.
No one was noticing the men at all. Just the corrections officer — and me. The crew went about their work like the guys weren’t there. And it was easy to do, because there was a profound absence to everything about them. All four people of color. All eerily empty within their bodies. Even their knees didn’t bend much — they shuffled to take a step — as though just that level of presence would be noticed, punished.
There was something in their distant blankness that I recognized from when I was a kid. The responsibilities of my first big job slipped away from me. And a profound recognition came into my mind like it’d been sitting there all along. Just now glancing up at me —
Oh, I thought. This is what slavery must have looked like.
This is what encountering a group of enslaved people, as a white man who didn’t happen to know them, must have been like during that era. In terms of that felt absence made by brutality across time.
At lunch, they surprised me with a birthday cake. The director noticed September 10th on my start paperwork, he told me. It was a really nice gesture, as office parties are rare on film shoots. Made me feel good.
“Happy Fuckin’ Birthday!” it said on the cake, to highlight where we were. We all laughed.
September 11th was an early call time for the shoot. I got a blocking rehearsal up for our first scheduled scene on what was a particularly beautiful early autumn morning.
While the crew was lighting and the actors were going through makeup, the director, who was easy to work with, was hung up on some specific thought about the scene. His mind was grinding on it in a fixated way, and I let him get a little distance.
Dejan, the cinematographer, an experienced pro, didn’t want to deal with the slightly disturbed air around him either, and decided to give me an A.D. lesson.
“You gotta stick with him,” he said, raising his eyebrows to indicate the director in a ‘get going’ way.
It was annoying, but he was right. It was my job. And I didn’t mind deferring to Dejan anyway, since he knew what he was doing and was a nice guy besides.
I approached the director sitting on a little ledge protruding from the bottom of a wall, off by himself. He was bathed in sunlight coming in from a tall window — buried in his script. His spiky close cropped hair popped out from his head in needlepoints within the great stream of yellow light. But his face was twisted up. Agitated. Changed the meaning of the sunlight.
I asked how he was doing and he went over some small concern with me. But whatever he was really trying to solve was something he didn’t need help with.
It occurred to me again how little emotion the director had shown throughout the shoot — at being in an active jail, recreating memories from his own incarceration.
Back on set, I fell into a good groove as an A.D. The day was moving well. There was a nice vibe.
We were halfway through a scene when the second A.D. walkied me.
“A plane hit the World Trade Center,” he told me with urgency.
“Like, one of the buildings?” I asked.
“One of the towers,” he said. “Flew into it.”
When I was in high school, my father was a private pilot. Planes weren’t allowed to fly along the East River because of all the air traffic at LaGuardia and JFK, but you could zip down the Hudson at pretty low altitude without even a flight plan.
I’d gone down it a few times with my father in his little prop plane, and the buildings looked even more enormous from that perspective, looming over our mechanical imitation of the birds’ point-of-view.
Seemed like you could touch them. Especially the gigantic silver towers at the end of the island.
“A small plane?” I said, in a tone that asked for confirmation. I was kind of surprised it’d never happened.
“No. An airliner,” came back.
And now people in the prison were moving in an urgent way. We all walked over to the correction officers’ cafeteria, where the second A.D. had the coverage on the T.V.
But I didn’t need to see the terrible images to know it was a terror attack. Every New Yorker remembered the truck bombing at the Trade Center eight years before. Those guys seemed fixated on those buildings.
Corrections officers were going every which way now and a jarring alarm sounded. Rikers was in lockdown. The producer told me to head toward the exit. That the 15-passenger van would be pulling up.
I did what she asked. Suddenly I had no sense of being in charge at all. Went from my first job first’ing a film to passive follower without a beat.
The lead actor, who was somewhat well-known, had a few moments of insistence that he be seen-to first, as famous actors can do sometimes — but that faded quickly. The filmset caste system had blown away.
At the main security gate now, and they checked under the van with mirrors to make sure no one was trying to escape. Packed school bus-loads of inmates were already returning from the courts, which had closed immediately.
“Burn down Rikers!” one of the guys screamed out the window.
“Yeah, burn it down!” another person in the bus alongside us, heading the other direction, agreed as loudly, from deeper inside the vehicle.
It was intense getting out through the sudden lockdown, but I took note that the men who were kept in a state of vacancy when under close supervision inside, did have voices. Hurting, angry voices.
The subways stopped running — there were no cabs or anything — and we all went to someone on the crew’s house nearby in Queens. Maybe it was one of the camera assistant’s. Or maybe her parents’ place.
I heard a loud, pained, collective gasp from the room downstairs that stopped time for a moment. I think it was a replay of the second tower collapsing. None of us had seen that yet.
Dejan, the cinematographer, flew into action. Figured out food from a nearby Eastern European place he knew. It was a good meal, and his presence and care made all of us feel a little better. He’d become an instant dad to the whole group of young filmmakers huddled in that apartment in Queens. I’ll never forget it.
I waited my turn then got to use the landline. Got my father on the phone, who told me both of my brothers who worked downtown had made it out. My older brother’s building in the next-door World Financial Center had been hit with falling debris and was on fire. He’d run up the West Side Highway thinking the Empire State Building might be next.
The young woman in whose home I was a guest came upstairs to gently remind me there were other people who needed to use the phone. I didn’t realize I’d been on so long. Long past the point of knowing my relatives were safe.
Something about the day made me want to endlessly reassure my father, though to all the world he seemed like a powerful, confident man. I stayed on chatting with him, nervously concerned that he felt alright.
“Of course,” I said to her, and ended the call. Not sure how I’d allowed myself to be so inconsiderate.
Back home after a long subway trip — they were up and running again — some of the reality of what was happening began to sink in.
As I watched the footage in my small apartment, a terrible thought occurred to me: the Port Authority Police Department, not the NYPD, patrolled the World Trade Center. And I knew a lot of them.
Several years before, I’d left my job on Wall Street, and left my place in Manhattan to move to Dallas, Texas, where an old college friend lived. He thought I needed to get away from New York. And I did.
But after three years I came back to the city, determined to start a career on film sets. It was late 1998 and I crashed on my little brother’s couch in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, when I returned.
My typing speed was always more bankable than my college degree, so while I looked for a way onto a set, I did an intake at a temp agency, who assigned me a job right away — working at a police station inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, on the west side of Manhattan.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey operates the major NYC airports, the bridges and tunnels that cross the Hudson River border between both states, the World Trade Center, and a train system that runs beneath it. And it’s the Port Authority Police who patrol all those places.
When I entered the small police station inside the nation’s largest bus terminal, I was put to work doing administrative tasks in the little office area in the back — filing the officers’ timecards, plugging numbers into a spreadsheet — stuff like that.
The young woman who was the master of every administrative function in the office and the larger PAPD beurocracy, trained me up and introduced me to Lieutenant Kassimatis.
The lieutenant ran the day-to-day policing operation, and took a liking to me because I’d drag in a big copy of The Iliad that I was reading on the long subway rides from Brooklyn to work.
Lieutenant Kassimatis was rightly proud of his Greek heritage, and a handful of chats about The Iliad gave us a chance to talk about ancient and modern Greek culture, which I really enjoyed. He was an interesting, kind guy, and, it was obvious, a rock-solid leader.
Inspector Fields, the big boss of the station, who functioned in a close, veteran partnership with Lt. Kassimatis, was glad to know that I lived in Bay Ridge. He’d dated a girl from the neighborhood in his youth, and he fondly recalled the time to me, though his favorite thing about it was the cheesecake from a local bakery, the memory of which haunted him much more than the woman.
The place still existed, and I brought him a slice of the cheesecake one day, which in police station world would’ve made me an official suck-up if any of the patrol officers found out.
The second half of my days, though, were spent out front, alongside the desk sergeant behind the raised platform of a desk that looked out over the floor of the station. I’d answer the phones while finishing up any office work I needed to get done.
I became familiar with the rhythm of the cops’ communication over their radios. I learned that the elderly and escalators (‘motor stairs’ in police-speak) really don’t mix.
“B-T, post five,” would come in over the speaker.
“Post five, B-T,” (for ‘Bus Terminal’) the sergeant sitting next to me would respond.
“Injury/accident on motor stair three. Senior, male.” And the sergeant would dispatch an EMT.
I watched the cops bring in everyone who was put under arrest while I was working at the desk. I saw countless kids who were runaways helped by a detective-sergeant whose job was exclusively to work with the continuous stream of young people who’d decided their home was no longer tolerable, and got on a bus for New York.
I don’t even know how many times I saw that detective-sergeant pay for a bus ticket, or something one of the young people needed, out of his own pocket.
Mostly, I just kept my head down and did my work. I probably seemed pretty distant. Back in New York — and on edge because nearly everyone in my family lived in the city somewhere.
I had grown up in a violent home. But to all the world we looked like a together family. College-bound kids. Good sailors, skiers. Everyone knew how much my dad’s four boys meant to him.
But there was an inverse reality at night, that went totally unacknowledged during the day. Not one word.
And now I was back surrounded by these people — who shared my last name and all it’s painful secrets. Even crashing on my little brother’s couch — not that it wasn’t nice of him. All my stuff in a cruddy storage place way out in Brooklyn.
I felt unmoored. But worse than that — uneasy all the time. Scrambling to make sure I was safe from something I couldn’t see. Something I was back in the middle of in a way that felt inevitable. A grim darkness I’d never be free from.
A couple of the police asked me what my deal was. A lieutenant with an angular mustache and square jaw showed me the Bus Terminal’s antique, abandoned technology center down in the basement, when I’d told him I thought I could clear up a problem with their local network.
Something about how I fixed the system glitch unsettled his cursory understanding of me.
“How do you know how to do this?” he asked curiously.
“I used to work in technology,” I said. “In the finance world,” I added, trying to be specific enough to satisfy the interaction. But he persisted.
“Like, LAN’s and that kind of thing?” his eyes just squinting with the question.
“More like a management consultant,” I said. “I don’t really know the machines all that well,” I answered in mild confession.
His face screwed up. And standing in the dark, low-ceiling windowless basement, among chairs no one had sat in since the 80’s, in front of old-time monitors attached to chugging CPU’s that were somehow keeping all the busses running on-time, he asked — in a mix of trying to make sense for himself and vague genuine concern for me — “What are you doing here?”
Christmas, 1998 was a few days out and the police gave each other gifts. It was expected. Made for a kind of family atmosphere. When the tour that worked from 7 a.m. to 3 came in, and the 3 to 11 p.m. officers went out, there was a great exchange of presents — even as the one group lockered their weapons while the other retrieved theirs.
A lot of fishing gear was unwrapped.
It was only a little uncomfortable for me. I was a newcomer. Had no expectation of being a part of that, but I was sitting right in the middle of it — like some random dude behind a desk that’s in front of your family’s Christmas tree for some reason.
But at the height of it, an officer I’d interacted with only a handful of times walked over to the desk and handed me up a small, rectangular, wrapped box.
“Merry Christmas,” she said to me, as I received it pleasantly surprised.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” I answered, not able to help smiling, and opened it.
I was expected to wear something like khakis, with a long-sleeved shirt and a tie to the station. I had a bunch of them from my Wall Street days, but they were all in storage. I’d been working with a borrowed, two-tie rotation.
I opened the box to find a green and blue necktie. By far the best one I’d be wearing from then on.
But more than the need for some new gear, it was clear to me that Lieutenant Mazza had noticed a need in me for some small measure of inclusion. Some slight, safe nod that I was seen.
I don’t know what sadness there’d been in her life, but she was able to discern some amount of mine — the temp who sat next to the desk sergeant.
“Sharp!” one of the patrol officers said, as I finished a half-windsor, and I smiled back.
“Thank you again Lieutenant,” I repeated.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you,” and she went back to her job.
There have been a handful of times in my life when someone’s done a small kindness for me, the timing of which was so impactful — arriving at the bottom of a sorrow that’s been there so long, so silently, that you’re deflated to find that it’s actually gotten worse — that they seemed divinely ordained.
Like God bent the rules of normal to literally send you an angel, and the fact that such an event happened for your benefit means much more than the kind gesture itself.
That necktie was one of those times.
And it changed the vibe around me in the station. The cops started breaking my chops, which was their way of saying you’re with us.
Any time someone came in hot with complaints that weren’t too serious, one of the desk sergeants took to indicating me in my tie — that conveyed an authority of which I had none — and saying, “I can’t help you. You gotta talk to my lieutenant,” which would be immediately followed by —
“Lou! .. Lou! .. you gotta take care of this!” while the sergeant chuckled to himself for the minute he let it go on.
A couple days after the gift exchange, Officer Eddie Rodriguez of the day tour confronted me about my having mixed up his timecard with Officer Eddie Rodriguez of the night tour.
There was no mistaking them in life. Night tour Eddie Rodriguez was really young. Went about his business without much chatter. Day tour Eddie Rodriguez was confident, with a big personality. A born leader.
“I’m really sorry. I know you worked a lot of overtime. I already put in the call and they’re gonna correct it next pay period,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?” officer Rodriguez said, his eyebrows raising up in severity, in a way that gathered a bunch of other cops’ attention.
“Well, how about you come apologize to my kids on Christmas morning?” he added. “They’re why I worked all those hours,” and he paused.
“How about you explain to them that I couldn’t afford the gifts they wanted because you screwed up my pay?”
Things went quiet. My heart sank. There was no fixing this. I kinda wanted to cry.
But then — just a little glint in his eye, and I decided to risk it.
“Well yeah,” I said, conceding. “I’m good with kids.” And as I nodded my head in quick succession for effect, I said matter-of-factly, “I could break it to ‘em.”
Officer Rodriguez broke character and all the other officers broke out laughing.
“I had you!” he said in triumph. “I had you!” he said again pointing and laughing.
He sure did.
Inspector Fields asked if I’d be willing to come in on New Year’s Eve night, because they needed the help. He asked it almost apologetically, but as an aspiring writer, and someone just interested in unique experiences — working behind the desk of a police station a block from Times Square on New Year’s Eve was too good.
“Yes. Absolutely,” I said.
It was an intense night. Even the officers I was used to seeing purely as administrators went out in their riot gear — “hats and bats,” as they called it.
Sometime after 11 p.m., Lieutenant Kassimatis came in, helmeted, with a string of guys — mostly shirtless — handcuffed to one another in a line behind him. They’d clearly partied way too much and were now being led around like a drunken class of kindergartners on an ill-conceived field trip.
He pushed his way through the packed station loaded with the mildly injured, with victims and perpetrators of minor and significant offenses, and every kind of emergency responder. And this person I’d known only in an office setting, revealed himself as an imposing, powerful, veteran police officer.
He passed in front of the desk and looked up at me from under his raised plastic face shield — his bushy mustache barely grinning — and slammed down a two-thirds-empty full-gallon bottle of Jack Daniels on the counter in front of me, that he’d confiscated from the guys trailing him. The whiskey inside still sloshing back and forth, the lieutenant let out a hearty —
“There ya go Jimmy — Don’t say I never gave you nothin’” in a voice loud enough to cut through all the noise, and I laughed to myself as he and his group moved on.
At one point that night, I looked out over the packed crowd in front of me, from the desk’s height advantage. The ball had probably dropped a few minutes ago, but the din and activity in here didn’t notice.
From just above them, I saw a sea of every kind of first responder hat. Port Authority police and NYPD distinctive polygonal caps with silver badges on front bobbed up and down with their wearers’ movements. There were EMT’s in dark blue baseball caps with yellow and red hospital insignia on the front, crouched down to assist someone — occasionally surfacing. To my left was a group of city firefighters’ iconic headgear in a concentrated huddle as the men beneath them made some kind of a plan. And, of course, there were the scuffed up, round white hard plastic tops of the riot helmets sprinkled throughout — moving according to their own determined currents.
I took a few seconds to record the extraordinary image in my mind. If I were a photographer, this would’ve been a signature piece — but subtracting the motion would have ruined it.
Then some guy in handcuffs threw up all over the place, and it parted a big circle in the sea of hats.
“Ohhh!” a couple of NYPD and Port Authority cops called out.
I spent two straight days after the attacks crying.
The towers told you which way was south in Manhattan. My father’s office was in them when I was in college. I’d go to the bank in the underground mall to cash his checks.
I had a poster of them being built hanging on my wall when I was in high school and had zoomed right past them racing up Church Street in a car service the morning of the 11th, since I’d woken up late.
I was three years old when they went up, and 32 when they fell.
Everyone knew someone who was missing. All of us were in shock.
I laid down to sleep the night of the 13th with my windows open. I don’t know why I needed them open. Maybe it was unseasonably warm? I don’t remember.
The smoke from the towers had been carried out over Brooklyn for a couple of days. It smelled like a tire fire. Noxious. But that night, the wind carried a different scent. Something tragic and anguish-inducing. Something I recognized from when I was a kid.
Someone from the movie had called that day and asked me to come in to help load-out the equipment we’d abandoned at Rikers.
I felt terrible for all the money and effort that went into the movie. There were only two shoot days left. But loading out wasn’t something I normally did, and it was a light equipment package anyway.
They’d spoken on the phone in the mode of the bubble-world of a movie shoot, but that was still broken for me.
I told them I’d try to make it, and dutifully went to meet the crew van at Union Square on the morning of the 14th. But I knew I was too late for it by the time I emerged from the N Train stop.
I wandered around looking for the van, in a sham effort for no one’s benefit, and felt relief when I was satisfied it had gone by now. I wanted to do something to help directly with the terrible crises we were still in the middle of.
The news kept saying how the first responders needed T-shirts and socks to change into. And that they were collecting it all at the Javits Convention Center on the West Side. So, I walked over to Paragon Sports, a little north on Broadway, and bought a bunch of white T-shirts I couldn’t really afford. I carried them off in a bag and stuffed the socks I’d bought into the inner pocket of my shell/jacket.
The Javits was a mob scene. There were donated clothes piled up in huge mounds. A volunteer coordinator told me they were overwhelmed with people who wanted to help, and kindly let me know they really didn’t need the t-shirts either, indicating the great piles of them over her shoulder. I walked off.
But I still needed to do something. It was a pressing drive inside. I know that everyone felt that way, but I’d spent the last couple years of my life transforming into a very particular kind of professional — a New York City set P.A.
The production assistants who work on set are a high-energy, service-oriented group. Even impressive crews from L.A. that come into town for a shoot can be overwhelmed by filming in the streets here.
I’ve held back Wednesday matinee crowds by the thousands on lockups in Times Square. I’ve asked federal judges to hold up going into work for a minute while we finished a shot — and jumped fences in Brooklyn to sprint back with the next day’s call sheets in time for wrap. When the first A.D. asks for someone to lose the traffic cone that’s at the edge of frame because that’s what’s keeping them from rolling, I blurt “I got it!” into my mic and fly into frame to eliminate it because the stedi-cam’s up and the actors and background are at one, and that thing has to go.
Being Johnny, or Joni-on-the-spot is everything. And I’m particularly good at it. Particularly here — in this city. And I want to be Johnny-on-the-spot now, when my town needs it most.
I decide to walk toward ground zero and just turn back whenever someone tells me to. I knew I’d be out for a while longer, so I ditched the bag of useless t-shirts through the slot opening of a street trash bin.
New Yorkers don’t have cars, whose function as traveling storage lockers most Americans take for granted. Bags like that always felt like a burden when I knew I’d be on foot for a while, so I got rid of it.
I walked along the West Side Highway — the Husdon River on my right, and the World Trade Center ahead in the distance.
I saw a sheriff’s car from Missouri closing off a street and an ambulance from Ohio running down the highway with its lights flashing. There were squad cars from Chicago at one intersection and F-16’s streaking across the sky now and then. I’d read that a German AWAC’s was coordinating things up in the atmosphere.
It was strange to have all this outside help inside our city. Made me feel a little helpless, really. We’re used to being seen as powerful and self-sufficient by non-New Yorkers. Even being resented for it.
But the tragedy had broken all that down. New Yorkers were crying openly now, which almost never happened before. We were being softened by the intense acknowledgement of our pain pouring in from every corner of the world.
A group of guys in hardhats carrying heavy equipment walked past me on their way out to one of the piers, and I began to notice there was a staging area set up on the large dock complex floating out on the Hudson.
“What are you guys here for?” I asked matter-of-factly.
“We’re pipe fitters,” one of them answered from under his black hardhat.
“They’re putting us on a boat to head to the pile,” another one said, which is what people working there were sometimes calling Ground Zero.
“Ah,” I said. “Where are you from?” And the first guy answered back.
“Dallas, Texas,” he said.
“Well. Thank you for being here,” I replied, with some solemnity.
“You got it,” he said, and his group trooped off toward the docks.
I had arrived at the Chelsea Piers, an eclectic collection of driving ranges, office space, and even an indoor ice rink built out onto a huge structure floating on the river.
I’d spent a lot of time here in recent years, because one of the little-known tenants of an upper floor was the sound stages for the television show Law & Order.
The courtroom set, a jail cell made to look like Rikers Island, (I could confirm now they matched the look pretty well) the police station, and all the prosecutors’ offices were just upstairs.
I was a production assistant on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit since the first season, and we’d come in from our own stages across the river in New Jersey to shoot courtroom stuff sometimes.
The parking garage at the base of the structure was a hive of activity. Not drowning in supplies like the Javits, but more purposeful due to the proximity to Ground Zero.
I was looking around for someone to approach about how I could pitch in — people hectically passing this way and that all around me — when a city police officer crossed in front in a state of mild confusion.
A tall guy, about my age, he was covered in gypsum dust, bisected by trails of sweat down his face and neck that came to an end in coagulated beads. His full uniform and loaded utility belt seemed burdensome. His cap was missing, and he blinked his eyes hard a couple of times against the debris surrounding them.
He’d clearly just come from the pile.
I looked up at him with an automatic expression of “need something?” that was habitual for me in the context of the building housing the L&O stages, and he stopped his searching progress.
“Know where I can find a pair of socks?” he asked a little exacerbated. “Mine are soaked.”
My eyes darted right and left as I realized I had no idea the lay of the land here, and he began to realize I was no better informed than him.
But in the first instant of his breaking contact, my eyes popped wide open in recognition — I have socks inside my jacket!
I shoved my arm into the lining pocket of my shell, my hand shaking in a mad rush to get hold of them before the policeman had a chance to fully disengage — and I quickly produced two pairs of brand-new cotton socks from Paragon Sports on Lower Broadway.
“Thanks,” the officer said with an exhale of relief and I returned a smile as he moved off.
There it was. Jimmy-on-the-spot. And I felt a great satisfaction — and a whole new purpose now.
I was put in a pool of volunteers waiting to be assigned to groups — there weren’t nearly as many people looking to help down here as at the Javits — when they asked if anyone would be willing to go down and work on the pile.
About fifteen of us put up our hands and we were pulled out into a single file line where we waited to be interviewed by two psychologists sitting side by side in plastic folding chairs at a plastic folding table.
The operation had a pulse to it. Boats were moving in and out from the dock, on and offloading people, equipment, and supplies. Walkies were squelching out needs from the Trade Center site that folks on the pier scrambled in every direction to meet. Still, it felt ordered. Urgent.
Across from where I stood waiting in line I could see some fold-out tables where the coordinators of the entire Chelsea Pier volunteer operation were running everything.
I recognized one of the two people in charge. She was the production officer coordinator from the regular Law & Order show — sitting behind an open walkie talkie and tidy stacks of administrative paper, much as she appeared upstairs at her regular job.
I enjoyed a good relationship with her. I was the “first team P.A.” on Special Vic — the person who walks the actors through their day in terms of where to be and when — and when our scrappy spin-off would invade “the mothership,” as our crew referred to the original show, to shoot courtroom scenes, I’d go out of my way to be a decent guest in their space, which she and the production office staff appreciated.
I handled their concerns with the same weight as my bosses’, and made sure to follow-up so the L&O folks didn’t have to wonder if I’d taken care of the request.
I was also pretty good with the actors at that point, I like to think, which is its own skill — not only because it can be rough sometimes, but also because not everyone knows how to behave around people who are asked to access their deepest emotions and lay them bare in front of millions of people, as well as a tired, sweaty shooting crew.
I took my part in creating a present, but non-invasive environment where the cast could feel comfortable to do their thing seriously, and the L&O folks appreciated people who could keep their cool.
The production office coordinator looked up from her work and her eyes darted over to me in surprised recognition. She pointed her right finger at me, full arm extension, excited to have a familiar at hand, and exclaimed —
“That guy’s a bad ass!”
The people buzzing around her table took note.
“Hell yeah I am!” I said back with a laugh, though the weight of the tragedy made true levity impossible.
They pulled me out of line and sat me down with one of the psychologists.
A few basic questions, and then the woman interviewing me got to the heart of it.
“You might be asked to handle some things that are difficult to encounter down there,” she said, and I looked back at her sincerely.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded. “Yes. I do.”
“Recovery is a lot of what they’re doing right now, and it’s important that when you’re asked to help with that, that you know ahead of time if it’s going to be too upsetting for you.”
I kept eye contact with her.
“It’s too upsetting for most people,” she said in a kind tone, with a gentle nod and permission-giving eyes.
“I have no interest in wasting your guys’ time,” I replied, with respect and solemnity. “If you want me to move heavy boxes up here — that’s what I’ll do,” I said.
But I knew from my youth that I could help with what was needed right now. I was a practiced dissociator in a highly functional way in those circumstances. I knew I could pay any price for it later. After the work was done.
“But I can tell you,” I went on. “I’m certain I can help with that. And do what’s asked of me.”
They picked me and one other person to head down to Ground Zero. Gave us head-to-toe hazmat suits. Silver all over with a square see-through piece of plastic sown in above the face.
We tied the arms of the suits around our waists and walked over to the dock where a boat would take us down.
A guy coming the other way with a walkie-talkie held up to his face broke off coordinating something to wish us well.
“Good luck down there,” he said with respect. “Be safe.”
And me and the other person looked at one another a little ashamed of receiving a kind of reverence we’d done nothing yet to earn.
Standing on a dock bobbing gently in the water, small boats came in and out. All of them bringing equipment for now. The ones to carry people like us were still down at the site.
Most of them were NYPD boats, but other small vessels from the United States Merchant Marine Academy out at Kings Point, Long Island, also docked and departed.
My father and older brother had both gone to the Merchant Marine Academy for college. Both men had inflicted such punishing harm on me when I was young. I have clear memories of my father torturing me in specific ways he said had been done to him at the academy. He wasn’t eight years old, though. And Kings Point’s version wasn’t so twisted.
The cadets crewing the boats looked like babies, and I wondered if a breech in the timeline that would allow me to see my dad as a plebe milling about the deck among them, would show me someone who looked so young and innocent.
I hoped it’d be an NYPD boat to take me down there, but if the Merchant Marine Academy were to be the ones to bring me to Ground Zero — so be it.
The wait dragged on, and the sense that something was off grew within me and the other volunteer.
A police boat pulled in, and one of the officers announced to us and the first responders all waiting for a ride, that the president had decided to stay at the site longer than expected, and that the Secret Service were stopping any new arrivals to the area for the rest of the day.
This was George Bush standing on the pile with a bullhorn and his arm around a fire chief, saying “I hear you! The rest of the world hears you …”
He was supposed to be at Ground Zero for a half hour or something, but once he got there, he didn’t want to leave those folks. He was standing on the site of the nation’s worst terror attack, and it made sense that the Secret Service wanted to button things up as much as they could.
There was a warehouse space up above the dock that had been sending supplies down to some of the boats. I climbed up there, got out of the silver suit, and asked the person in charge if I could help.
Right away I saw a guy I’d worked with on TV shows moving boxes around. He was a grip. Just starting out. Always a day-player when I’d worked with him. Never on staff. But a really good guy.
I nodded to him and we shook hands. The supervisor sent me back down to the dock to load the boats.
There were a lot of film and TV production people pitching in in the days after September 11th. It made sense — we moved huge amounts of material to novel locations in the city every day. Sometimes two or three times a day.
Grip and Electric members of the film and TV craft union were among the first to set lights at the Ground Zero site itself. Getting power to big lights that need to be moved and aimed is their literal expertise.
And — there’s just a mindset. Film crews function logistically, with fairly rigid hierarchies much more than most people would imagine. They’re efficient, little self-contained art armies more than anything else.
Night fell and I was still catching boxes full of saline bottles from my fellow volunteers dropping them a short way into my arms from up on the pier. Then loading them onto the boats piloted by cadets and police.
I went topside to get a water and the grip I knew told me with some surprise and a little pride in his voice that they’d asked him to run the loading operation when the previous supervisor had finally gone home just a few minutes earlier.
It was a minor role reversal. He was used to me at least working in the department that coordinated things on set, while he purely took orders all day.
“No surprise.” I said, smiled and drank some water. “Where do you want me?”
He put me to work shifting some of the inventory while he got an impressive forklift operation sorted out. Eventually sent me back down to the dock to catch boxes again.
“I got it …” I’d reassure each new person who’d drop them to me — and then quickly find a groove with my new workmate.
End of a long night and I saw the young grip one last time as I headed out.
“They asked me to come back tomorrow,” he said. “Want me to run this again,” kind of amazed, though he shouldn’t have been.
“You rocked it today,” I said, shaking my head in confirmation.
He and another coordinator asked me to come back the next day too, and I should have. I like to think I’m a person who does, but I walked off toward the N train, found my bed but found no sleep in it, and spent the next day crying pretty much non-stop.
One reason a day like 9/11 was so uniquely powerful is that you couldn’t look away from it — in the emotional sense.
It’s overwhelming horror and violence concentrated in time insists on being seen and experienced all at once — and the mitigations we normally employ to keep awareness of acute suffering at bay just fail in the face of it.
Some people tried to deny away the dangers of the world we’ve made for one another by taking shelter in ‘inside job’ theories in the aftermath of the attack. Others sought to externalize the realities of our fallen natures by demonizing their two billion fellow human beings who are Muslim.
But for most of us — the towers and the destruction, the loss of life and lost sense of normalcy — couldn’t be ignored.
Not so for the impacts on those who worked on the pile though. Those harms ended up playing out over years. And that kind of thing can most certainly be ignored. With shocking ease.
Even the people we’d rightly lauded as heroes at the time, were put out of mind when cancer and lung maladies began claiming their lives and health. Our society wasn’t there for them because refusal to acknowledge difficult truths also cuts off our ability to act. How can we help when we’ve blinded ourselves to the problem itself?
Organizations and individuals stepped up to champion the first responders in the face of it. The film & TV union fought for their members who had lit Ground Zero and worked the recovery.
But what would have happened to me if I’d made it onto one of those boats? I wasn’t in a union. Wasn’t a first responder either. And they abandoned even those folks.
And I know that awkward hazmat suit would’ve ended up tied at the waist — or discarded. I know how I am that way. And if I didn’t come back to the Chelsea Piers, I’m certain I would have come back to Ground Zero.
In a strange way, George Bush probably saved my life that day.
Next day after crying out and my friend Marina calls me to work on a concert/telethon to benefit the 9/11 fund. She’s moved from the film world to live televised music events, and pretty much every big music act wants to use their gifts to help out — like all of us.
I run around the city driving a cube truck and picking up endless amounts of fire-retardant fabric for the set that’ll be lit by thousands of candles, but then I get to work at the stage. Strap on a walkie and find my rhythm.
Marina calls me to set with gravity at one point, and I respond “Flying in!” But when I arrive she throws her eyes over to where Dave Matthews is rehearsing his song in a look that says “I wanted you to see this,” since she knows I’m a fan, and I listen to the guy’s music, which is more audible coming from his mouth and guitar strings than the speakers at this distance.
Wyclef Jean and Jon Bon Jovi reveal themselves as the nicest people involved in show business before Billy Joel and Paul Simon walk out of my childhood and onto the stage to rehearse.
And as the latter is coming off after, I happen to be in his path and my mouth parts to say something — My father would sing me to sleep with Simon & Garfunkel tunes on his guitar, only to return a few hours later in a whole different mode of being.
But the words of the songs still weaved their way into my heart unstained, along pathways made by their melodies, and my lips and tongue have the idea to say all of that and more in a few words, but Paul Simon just sees a guy in a headset a few feet away, clearly involved in the show, who’s trying to catch his attention to give some needed information or guidance and his look hangs on me in “ok .. what is it?” until he at last realizes he’s dealing with a dumbstruck idiot, rolls his eyes in minor annoyance and brushes harmlessly past me.
That was my big Paul Simon moment. Though our real relationship played out in the distanced intimacy of listening to his tunes over decades.
I buddy up with one of the other PA’s who really should come out on movies with us, but he likes the concert stuff.
I call in my friend Vanessa, who’s the best, most competent production assistant in New York City right now, and we go about our business.
And that’s what starts to make us all feel better. Doing our thing. What we’re good at. And it’s such a bonus that it’s directly about pitching in in some small way. We even manage to laugh, like it’s okay to do that, a couple of times.
My father died of skin cancer five months after September 11th and I spend most of my free time crying for about a year — a mix of sorrow for what’s happened in my city and unpaid grief from when I was little.
I don’t look at almost anything to do with that day for a long time. Can’t stand to see the images of the buildings before or after they fell that the news loves to show all the time — for a long time.
I did another movie with Dejan a couple of years later — the cinematographer who put everyone in our crew under his wing that morning — but we never talked about September 11th. I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we should, even once.
A few years out, and I finally bring myself to check the names of the fallen among the Port Authority Police. I’d been vaguely reassuring myself that the Bus Terminal officers wouldn’t have been at the towers.
My eyes get to Lieutenant Mazza’s name — she’d been promoted to Captain apparently by the time of the attacks — and I can go no further. I break down in an anguished cry that won’t relent.
I didn’t even really know her. But when she gave me that tie that Christmas — it would have been one of the divine interventions of my life, more powerful for its seeming smallness, even if the towers had never fallen.
That whoever was important to that woman was without her now was unbearable.
More than a decade after that and I sit down to write up my experience of the day and its aftermath on the eve of the 20th anniversary.
I finally read about the incredible heroics of Lieutenant Kassimatis, who’d been made Captain by then also, and Inspector Fields — along with a bunch of the officers I had the chance to glimpse in their work for a handful of months when I’d returned to New York like an escapee who’d been found and dragged back, but nonetheless harbored dreams of a new life in the old context.
The veteran cop who’d plunked down a gallon of Jack Daniels to give me a smile in the first few moments of 1999, had a city bus commandeered on 9th avenue minutes after the first impact, and used it to get a host of Bus Terminal officers to the scene on that day in 2001.
Captain Mazza relieved a bottleneck at a set of escalators by shooting out the floor-to-ceiling glass panels alongside. She was last seen helping to carry an injured woman down the stairs when she lost her life.
Captain Kassimatis got people out when they froze in shock at the bottom of an escalator bank, and miraculously survived the collapse of the first tower when he was barely sheltered between two tall elevator shafts.
He and others made a desperate climb out of the buried darkness by forming a human chain of themselves, their way lit by a solitary flashlight.
He dragged a wounded woman he was too injured to carry to an SUV and piled in other survivors — only to have the vehicle completely buried by debris when the second tower came down.
Kassimatis threw the vehicle into low four-wheel drive and rocked it ’til it at last broke out into daylight.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. But if anyone was going to keep their heads in that mayhem, it was those folks.
Oliver Stone made a movie about the Bus Terminal cops’ actions on that day, apparently. I knew it existed, but didn’t know what it was about.
Actors recreated what they were doing at the time that I was being evacuated from Rikers.
Some people are asked to step right into the middle of the nightmare.
And now we’re memorializing September 11th on the 20th anniversary of that terrible day. And it’s right that we do.
Ritual, remembrance, and acknowledgement around one of the most traumatic shared experiences in our nation’s history is beneficial. And its absence would come at a cost.
9/11 was too much reality — all at once. I haven’t been able to look at a lot of it for decades. That’s why the shared grieving rituals.
Because inside of us, even 20 years later — even for those of us who didn’t personally lose someone — part of us still can’t believe it really happened. So we go out of our way to reassure ourselves that it did. That horrible as it was, the violent events are over now.
With gentleness toward ourselves. With solemnity for the dead. With compassion for those they left behind, here with us — we acknowledge the past so that it won’t dominate our present.
And on September 11th, 2021, we find ourselves in a devastating pandemic. And despite its stubborn persistence and orders of magnitude greater cost of human life — we’re able to look away much more than we could from the burning buildings 20 years ago.
The trauma of the virus is slower moving. More diffuse. The fallen struggle and die where only hospital staff are forced to confront it.
We hold no collective grieving rituals. Reassure ourselves daily that those who succumbed were vulnerable in ways that we are not. Won’t tolerate even a few images from the ICUs on our news. We trivialize the tragedy and take shelter in ‘inside job’ theories — or demonize foreigners in an attempt to externalize the source of our anxiety.
But our unwillingness to meaningfully acknowledge the current tragedy will come at a generational cost. And there’s so much support available when we step into the light of its terrible reality.
New Yorkers softened after late 2001. Because we’d grieved together.
A couple years later there was a total blackout all night in the city. But people didn’t panic. They were supportive. They remembered strangers handing out bottles of water on that horrible day, and wanted to be part of something like that.
And as we live through the groaning birth-pains of great movements for collective acknowledgements currently emerging in our society, that challenge us to confront, rather than deny, the shared legacies of slavery — who’s straight lines run to those dehumanized inmates I encountered a few days before the planes struck the towers — and the millennia of turning away from rather than toward, the sexual exploitation and abuse of children that we still can’t bear to even glimpse in the context where it’s most pervasive – the home —
In the midst of that, we must look for moments where we can be of help to one of those who’s been asked to step right into the middle of the nightmare. Or be open to receiving them if that is us.
Because when I think back on September 11th, I think always of September 14th.
My mind darts right to that moment when I was Johnny-on-the-spot for that police officer caked in the debris of the fallen buildings. My hands wrapping around the clean new socks, and holding them out in the smallest gesture possible for someone who needed exactly that right then.
Being momentarily useful to that person was the only thing that had really comforted me since I first heard the unbelievable news.
Maybe you’re buried in the debris right now. Maybe you have a clean pair of socks you forgot were in your coat pocket. Or maybe you have the gift to notice another who’s walking inside the nightmare in silence. And you have the courage to extend yourself just a little. To bring them some small gift when you can see they’re feeling left out. A necktie maybe. Doesn’t matter.
But I can tell you — that glancing acknowledgement will mean more than you can know. Will be received because it’s safe. And will stay with them for the rest of their life.
I promise.
