Main Street

This fall we will all pause to reflect on the decade that’s
passed since the events of September, 11, 2001, but for some, the
anniversary is now, with the death of Osama bin Laden. It sure
feels that way for me. On the morning of 9-11 I was sitting at the
editor’s desk at the Tribune, trying to get the paper off to the
printer on time. We listened to the radio and checked the web, but
had no time to really cover it in the few short hours before press
time.
Marc Bojanowski, a Healdsburg Greyhound and former sports editor
of the Trib, was in New York that day, and I begged/bullied him
into writing a first person piece on his reaction to the event,
which we ran the following week on Page 1, along with coverage of
an impromptu gathering in the Plaza the weekend after the
attacks.
I reread Marc’s haunting piece the other night, after the
announcement of bin Laden’s assassination, and want to share it
with you again. He starts it with an excerpt from a poem by W.H.
Auden:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along
I was lying in bed half-asleep. Across the room my girlfriend
was putting on make-up before going to work in Manhattan. A friend
of ours was sleeping off a hangover on the living room couch
without a pillow. From the sunlight in the leaves outside our
bedroom window I knew it was a sunny, cloudless day. I closed my
eyes again and drifted. Then the phone rang. I heard my girlfriend
run down the hall barefoot and answer, and moments later I heard
her yell, “What!”
My friend and I quickly dressed and ran the two blocks north to
Metropolitan Avenue. The avenue leads downhill towards the East
River, and from many points along its stretch through Brooklyn the
view of southern Manhattan is open and beautiful. Already there was
a gathering of people at the corner, traffic was stopped in the
intersection. Those filing up from the dark of the subway wondered
at the commotion. We all looked to the West.
The tops of the towers were enveloped in a lazy, horizontal
column of black smoke. They were tall and gray, and the sky behind
was a clear, somber blue. People had brought out cameras and video
cameras; one young man rushed down the avenue with a tripod. We
stared at the towers and we watched each other in wonder. It was
awesome, in the old sense of the word, stirring awe and dread. A
woman ran to the nearest payphone, and with the phone still at her
ear she turned to the person next to her and said, “They’re not
working.” Over the river the towers were on fire. Sooner or later I
am sure everyone put a hand to their mouth.
We ducked into a laundromat a block down where I knew there was
a television. A crowd had assembled there. The clothes in the
dryers whorled along the walls absently while we spoke fervently
over the drone. No one knew anything. People were jumping.
Newscasters were sensationalizing. There were children in school
down there.
A surly older woman with a 16-ounce beverage in a small brown
bag came in and made herself comfortable on one of the washing
machines. “Look at that,” she said when it got quiet, and we all
looked at her looking at it. She sipped from her bag through a
straw. “Will you just look at that.”
It was difficult not to. When the first one fell we were
watching what most people were watching, but when it began to go I
sprinted for the door. What I saw was no longer on television but
two or so miles away and half-done. But I saw it, and when the
cloud of dust and smoke rose around the base of the remaining tower
I turned to find my friend. He was sitting on a bench shaking his
head. A man we had been watching the television with inside began
to cry. He was the first person I saw crying in what has become a
week full of haggard faces. Several of us went to stand near him,
but no one said a word. There were no, “it’ll be all rights.” No,
“you’ll be fines.” In the laundromat the surly woman was unmoved,
she was by herself watching the television, drinking her beer
through a straw.
We went back inside. We could not believe what we had just seen
and needed it to be verified by a newscaster, a camera. Among us
there were theories of an explosion. Speculations as to what
brought it down. There were the horrible expectations hinging on
all those “other planes” that had yet to be accounted for. The
Pentagon was hit. The Mall was on fire. Outside, one of the most
recognized skyscrapers in the world had just been toppled. In the
back of our minds not one of us wanted to accept that it could just
collapse like that. That it could fall.
“At the end of World War II, a bomber,” one man said.
“The Empire State Building,” said another.
“And it’s still standing.”
Knotted by disbelief and horror, we finished each other’s
sentences.
I did not agree with what I was watching on television so I
walked back out to look at the remaining tower. She was tall and
alone and suddenly very fragile. The dust below rolled like the
unsettled folds of a some surreal night gown. Traffic was moving
again up and down Metropolitan, but slowly. No one honked and those
who were behind tall trucks hugged the double yellow line for a
better view.
I went back inside the laundromat. Another channel on another
television was now broadcasting street-level footage from the
collapse. Down the glass and steel canyons a great roiling wall of
dust and soot pursued men in suits and women in business skirts and
running shoes. This was nothing like the slow descent I had just
witnessed from Brooklyn. There was none of the safety that distance
allows. Only two women cowering behind the trunk of a car,
screaming, then the darkness and ensuing television fuzz.
The patience of that cloud settling over lower Manhattan, over
the bay, is haunting.
Then the second one went. I ran outside and her head leaned
gently to the side like someone who is in the act of fainting. A
slender woman. Her hips give to the side, knees buckle and her back
arches slightly. Her fingers flatten at her side with an eerie
grace. She just collapses.
The next day, the rubble left behind was reported to be 10 to 14
stories high. Watching it happen, a truck driver, standing in the
door-crotch of his semi gave a nervous laugh. “No shit,” I heard
him laugh. No shit. The man from the laundromat was crying again,
he was on the bench with several others who were crying now as
well.
The skyline was empty. The dust and soot hovered along the ridge
of skyscrapers but far beneath where the blank column of smoke had
been when we first rounded the corner onto Metropolitan: the cloud
was testament to their enormous height and stature.
The Avenue was crowded now and everyone was sharing what they’d
seen with everyone else who was sharing the same thing. There was
the smoke in the distance. You could hear phones ringing inside
walls of four story walk-ups where the half-hearted breeze swayed
forgotten, hastily opened front doors. Young men and women with
cell phones tapped them uselessly at their sides. A delivery man on
a bicycle rang his bell to clear a lane and none of us could turn
back to whatever it was we were doing just Before.
Ray Holley is glad the bastard is finally dead. He can be
reached at [email protected].