Delirium Tremens NY
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Remember
those who climbed up, and kept going, while everyone you know was heading
down, trying their best to escape --
The enormous smoking pile stood like an huge hill covered by ants, hundreds of men climbing over it in long lines, handing buckets from one to the other, and joining together to overturn large pieces of debris. The work had been going on for days and there was still smoke coming up between the crevices. The man moved with a strange persistence – if you realized that they had been doing it since Tuesday afternoon. There were fireman of course, and policemen too, and professionals rescue workers, plus many volunteers who had simply been close by when everything happened, and they seemed to just keep going hour after hour, as if it were their duty to get the mountain out of there before the dawn. But the whole huge pile seemed unmoved – it was too vast. You could chip away but – to no end. Down below in the concourse in some spots the store windows had not even broken. The men were down there now, and they walked around in their heavy boots staring at all the signs of interrupted life – the cups on the counters, signs for a sale,beautifully cut bottles of cologne and perfume sitting on shelves like dignitaries, full of themselves. No one touched a thing – no one wanted to take anything out. The work seemed easier at the night. Perhaps the whole size of the disaster could be ignored then, and you could concentrate on the part of the hill right in front of you. The night brought a certain relief and tranquility. In the daytime you had to think about the politics, and how nothing good was going from this, that a few terrorists would be bombed back to the stone age, and then another generation would crop up, and once those thoughts started... In the morning the Pile became a smoking mirror, the sun flecking off the twisted metal and the whiteness of the dust that was still spreading everywhere. With the sun coming up in the east behind it, the site looked like an entrance to hell, full of sulfur smoke and hundreds of cave mouths. There was dust everywhere, on everything. Nearby at the Wintergarden, the Palm Court had survived but the palm trees were covered by the greyish dust - they looked like oversized and forgotten stage props, not real trees. On the West Street side an angry god had stuck his fist through the entrance to the Court, and pulled it away. It was gone. It was at this time on Friday that rumors were circulating that other buildings nearby – the Millenium Hotel and the black office building next to it – were about to collapse. An army of trucks had come roaring over the bridges from the boroughs Tuesday in the early evening and now they were engaged in dragging the debris away, a truck load or a flat bed at a time. The man went back again to the front lines, this time with a tray of coffee in white plastic cups and he was nearing run over by a huge tow with a piece of girder strapped down to the bed. It too was smoking, or looked to be. He went right up to the front lines – the men were happy to see him. An hour later, he strolled out again this time without his camera, with just a cigarette. He went as far as before, up to the barricade and then met a guy from the electrician’s union who was walking around with all the necessary badges hanging on his shirt with a camcorder on his shoulder, and not a soldier in sight. Where had they gone? The electrician filmed everything he saw. When, at what moment, did New York, allegedly the most libertine of American cities, become an armed camp? Ah, but you already know how it happened. Perhaps you have an opinion on what it means, and what should be done – who is really at fault. But
the photographer stood there amazed. It was hard to take it all in. Five days
into it, and it was hard to admit the reality of it. We are very tough in our
ordinariness.
At a few minutes before nine am on Tuesday, eleventh of September, a writer for one of the financial news sites was travelling downtown on the No. 1. At Fourteenth Street, the conductor announced that the train was continuing south but would not stop at Chambers, close by the World Trade. They wouldn’t say why. So the writer got off the train, thinking to herself, I can do a little shopping on 14th and then head down -- After a few minutes, she saw that policemen were no longer letting people enter the train station and she hailed a cab. I’m sorry, Miss, I can’t take you there. But why not? Now the police were blocking traffic south of Greenwich. But why can’t you take me there? I’m calling the cops, I’ll complain. Miss, Miss, a plane hit the Trade Tower, and she said, I don’t believe it, that’s the lamest excuse – Pissed off, the driver turned the car west, to the nearest intersection with the Drive along the river. They got there just as the second plane hit. Her father was going to meet her for lunch that day in the Winter Garden. A day later she was down near where her office had been, and saw the trucks going by loaded with bent girders and part of a hot dog stand and as it went by firemen were hosing it down. Why are you doing that? she asked them. Because it’s still on fire, honey, one of the men said to her. Until our souls burn like
that, O lord, in heaven or is it hell? Well, here we are.
Gorgeous morning. Truck noise woke me up at 8.45 - some near collision on the street. Then a phone call. Nothing new. I pull myself together and go to breakfast at the usual. I’m eating and the radio is blaring. - Hey man, turn that damn thing off! I’m trying to eat. - What are you talking about. We’re being bombed! - Bombed what! Give me a break. - Go outside man if you don’t believe me. Crowds pressing around a TV set propped out on the street in front of the appliance store. Immediately over their backs, other side of Myrtle, billowing smoke rises up over the lower half of the city. But they are intent and keep their eyes on the sets. The reporters’ voices, unusually edgy, are telling them how the world came to an end, and if there is more coming. Developing story: Authorities fear the bridges are next. They are closed down except to fleeing pedestrians.
Pierre LaHavre, early riser, left for work before eight at the construction suite below Chambers. He biked over on the Brooklyn Bridge– looked out over the bay and its great sweeps of seamless blue sky – . A glorious day, the air was crisp and crystal clear -- Verrazano was the first to sail into that bay, parking the tricolor close to downtown Manhattan. The Algonquins rowed out to him, dressed in body paint and feathers, greeting him with joyful shouts. The two parties could not of course communicate except to shout at each other in a mad pantomime of language. It was only the first of many such encounters. Once at the office, LeHavre organized his papers, gave preliminary orders to his crew, went back to plan the afternoon. Second cup of coffee – bitter. The machine is no good. Say, when are we going to get another one of these. –Soon, soon. -Ok, well until then, I’m going out to the corner for some. I’ll be right back. Pierre goes to the corner and back. The day seems incredibly still, tranquil. Days like this New York, hard city full of men busy making abstractions, is in fact, lovely. He then climbs the six stories to the construction company offices and winded, decides on the sprawling roof deck that faces south. To get more organized relax a little, he says to himself with the ancient wisdom of the European. He sits down, stretches out. Looks through his papers. Well, between teams A & B they could finish clearing the basement by – five? That would be enough for today. And then the crash. A loud boom shook the windows all around him. His first reaction was that it’s a sonic boom of the type like he remembered hearing as a kid in France when military planes would break the sound barrier flying over cities. He didn’t move, and just thought it was a bit unusual but after all this is N.Y. – Anything is possible. A shout from the street below. Look! Look! Momentarily distracted from thinking and as if following the command, he looks up. Now the other workers are piling out onto the roof deck. The first plane has gouged a huge gaping hole in the northern face of the burning tower. Black smoke pours out. LeHavre couldn’t believe his eyes and kept thinking: this can't be. A medium size or small plane flies very low overhead – straight into the north tower of the World Trade. There is no way to think of it. He stares. Is it real? It is burning three quarters of the way up the building. It must be real, but it cannot be. It flew very low overhead. He stares at it and shouts to everyone who can hear him, Come out right away! He knew right away that it was a some sort of terrorist attack as the weather wasso clear and the visibility excellent. The slamming of the plane couldn’t be an accident. Someone turned the TV on, and the whole staff watched a fuzzy duplicate image of the burning tower on the screen and some caption talking about possible navigational error and then a few minutes later, for the first time the words "hijacked plane" and "terrorist attack." It is not yet nine a.m.
On the street after the first crash the crowds are dumbstruck, as if disengaged from their routine. All of a sudden they have nowhere to go. Something has happened – their lives thrown into suspension, if only for the time that it takes to wrest this fire under control. A great number of people on the streets to the north of the trade tower have cameras, still, video, convenience store one-use. They are a crowd out of a Hollywood film watching the spectacle on the lot, unmoving, trying to understand. The realization that this has happened before has not come about yet. They cannot move. Something is unfolding, before their eyes. No, they are in it. Ten minutes later a security guard on the 88th floor of one of the buildings urges people to go back to their desks. Everything is under control, he tells them. Some stare at him in disbelief, but many return to their desks.
Not knowing what to think, confused, and uncertain if they were trapped where they were, most of the crew went down to the street. Heading north at the corner of Reade and Church, they ran into the crowds of people looking at the towers and taking pictures. Superficially, it seemed to be a parade-like atmosphere but as they turned to look at the towers there was a huge clamor and the crowd began to stampede up the streets, screaming, “It's coming down.” And now the second tower, the second one hit, the one crippled with such precision, fell like a domino amid a billowing cloud of dust. LeHavre rushed onto a side street to avoid the mass heading away from the Towers. He leaned up against a wall near an alleyway and took a breath. The crowd raced by. He did not want to join them. Now the frantic, surging crowd was his enemy too. Where to go? He headed west toward Hudson street, where the company had another office on the 7th floor of a building a few blocks to the north. Everyone had thought the same thing and headed there – it was a few blocks further away from the towers and offered them some security. Everyone stood around trying to make sense of what they had seen The north tower, the first one hit, was still burning. A few minutes later the huge antenna tipped over and before anyone had a chance to say anything else, the chain reaction started and the building came down.
She had a lot of work to do to pull the show together and was on the point of leaving to go visit one of her artists when she realized that she had forgotten something and went back to the gallery at Mercer below Houston. There was some noise about something happening but she ignored it as she had trained herself to ignore most of what people talked about so that when she heard a plane had crashed into the World Trade she was amazed but went back to work – there were a lot of details to take care of. She kept busy until 10 a.m. when she looked out the window onto narrow Mercer Street and saw three stragglers, walking in a disoriented fashion, together in the middle of the street, all of them coated white from head to foot – their clothes, their faces, the briefcase that one man carried. They were just the first. After them it was a steady steam. She immediately put her things away and headed to Canal Street to get a better look.
We biked over to the bridge but we couldn’t get across. It was 2 in the afternoon now. There were policemen standing guard. They must have been glad to be there, but I couldn’t see what use they were. It was a pedestrian walkway. It didn’t occur to us that there could be more coming. We were sill too dazed by the newness of it. We stared at the cloud gathering at the sky like idiots. In any case we both pleaded that we had kids on the other side, school would let out soon – Sir, the schools are holding them – What do you mean, holding them – We’re both parents, we’ve got to get back. We had no briefcases or bags but it was no use. People were straggling over from the other side, and near the entrance was a photographer with a medium format on a tripod, talking to people, collecting their stories and their faces. Then Carl Watson came up, he’d just walked from Long Island City. They tell you to take another bus but there isn’t one. Transportation is shut down and everybody tells you a different story, he says. Since we couldn’t get over, we went to a bar down by the water. The place is hopping. Nobody can drink enough to get over it – and nobody can get drunk – it’s impossible. The woman next to me is insisting that a small plane did it. - I was coming over the Manhattan Bridge on a moving job and I saw it – it was just a tiny Cessna, nothing bigger. No matter how many times I tried to tell her it had to be something bigger, she wouldn’t believe it. The TV is howling but it really has nothing to say other than to show the same footage again and again, incomprehensible. I am getting very, very thirsty. This is my natural element but it is all wrong. We are deranged, held hostage, unable to leave – go get drunk. I’m afraid we are trapped there in Williamsburg– we will not be able to get back – while this immensity takes place immediately next door. One can neither help nor see for oneself. The TV drones on. “I see Buildings! Water! Omigod! Omigod!”
Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, on earth as it is in heaven. Thy will be done. These are Jesus’ words. Deep below the cobalt waters of the ocean and like the words of the mermaids they summon us to listen to their wisdom. Thank god this world is under his control. There is great peace in knowing it. Every single solitary detail of our lives – under his control – nothing catches him by surprise. Nothing happens by accident --” (radio sermon. September 15)
The photographer had a nine am in Jersey City. He took the subway in from Brooklyn, got out at Broadway, picked up some film and headed towards the Trade Center for the Path to New Jersey, and as he entered the concourse he was met by a surging crowd of people spilling out of the building, pressing, jostling, just starting to run. What’s happening, he asked one after another. and they replied – Just go! And: Out of my way. He looked up...The first plane had hit – it must have happened when he was buying film – the noise obscured by the drill in the street. The fire was spreading. And then as he stood there the second plane hit, and he heard the crunching sound of metal and the whoosh, the tremendous suck of air as the jet fuel burst into flames on the South Tower. Now he was running impossibly slowly as if in a dream, as if through water. Unreal. Did he really want to run? No. So he stopped, turned around. The crowd surged around him, heading north. Later reports would remark on how orderly the crowd was, on how no one pushed anyone else and everyone who could got out alive. But this was not what he saw: rather like a herd of zebras fleeing the lion, everyone as fast as they could. When he saw the first fire he still thought about catching the train, going down into the labyrinth and getting out – to Jersey – away from the what must have been a terrible accident, or – a target . A block away from the towers, the big pieces of metal began falling all around him and he looked up once more before he ran: small figures the size of a thumbnail, trapped by smoke and fire, leaping from the eighty first through ninetieth floors, falling, falling as if suspended or guided by strings, as if dazed, not spinning but simply descending. Couldn’t take his eyes off -- them. Impossible to say when he realized what was falling was not a chair or a partition or a --- what could it be? - nothing other than – but he could not stop watching. No time to load film, he grabbed his point-and-shoot and started pressing the button as soon as it was out of his pocket, hardly aware of what he was doing. The photos are nothing. What he saw will last.
Amazing:
for the first time in years and only for a moments at a time, TV becomes
essential. No ads, just the latest about which no one really knows anything.
No individual or organization takes credit for what is happening so the
talking heads can only tell us what bridges are open, the mayor’s escape
from his famous bunker, the other buildings that are tottering, the firemen
who went up in the towers in the minutes before they came down
- and then cut to showing the crash footage over and over again. Dead.
The well-coifed presenters repeat the same things endlessly. What would happen
if the one channel left went out suddenly? Where would we be then, any further
in the soup then we were already? Our last tie to that reality would be gone.
Nonetheless we stare at the screen, the two planes repeatedly crashing into
the towers, believing and not believing it at the same time. Later, as the days went by, and the number of stories increased, we began to see and hear and finally get to know the families of all the people who had vanished into thin air. The television walked up to them, into their homes, recorded their piteous stories. It was terrible, it was the absolute worst thing that the cameras could have done – and we could not take our eyes off it. For once television seemed to be giving us the truth, without the sauce. Here were the stricken families who faced something incomprehensible, and who shamelessly grieved for what they had lost. It is probably pathetic to say it, and I will be accused of sentimentalizing, but another New York came into being briefly in those days. Not the New York of flag waving, or public demonstrations, but the private realization that one was alive – as if by chance. That apart from everything else – you were alive. And the person standing next to you was as important and rare. Within a day of the bombing the newspapers and television stations decided we were too weak, too dazed, too much children in their ministry to see those truest images – the hand in the rubble with no body attached – and they disappeared down a hole, never to be seen again. (Everyone remembers what they are forbidden to see.)
Later that first day I got over the bridge and rode around. Security wasn’t tight yet – the police were spread thin - with a bit of persistence you could go where you wanted. I got very far south, close to City Hall. Park Place was filled with trucks, as if Martial Law had been declared. In Chinatown the crowds gathered at Confucius Square. Everywhere people milled around, talking, looking south. People were trapped where they lived, so if you could get around a checkpoint, you could go where you wanted. The closer you got, there was more and more dust everywhere. Cars looked like they had been hit by a sudden snow storm.
The volunteers had been at Chelsea Piers for hours. Soon it would be days, days that were one long blur of standing and waiting, and then being led to a location where blankets needed loading, or a huge delivery of water had come in and had to be unloaded. I went at night because that’s when I’m awake. At one point, I wandered over to the skating rink to smoke and found it full of piles of donated clothes. It was just the first round. The
city puts its best face on it but it is dazed, lost, mourning and digging -
Union Square, 14th Street and the hospitals and armories where the photos
cover the walls, images of the vanished placed there by searching relatives.
There in a hospital, somewhere! Have you seen them? They must be – they
can’t be. Where are they?
Buried under asbestos ruins. Even before we get down to Ground Zero, we see
the workers, firemen I mean, come in, humbled, like men digging an enormous
tunnel who can’t tell you about it. They
trudge into the food area covered in fiberglass, metal dirt, gray soot -
powder made of flesh and bones, asbestos, and steel – Now
we hear that the buildings around the WTC are slowly collapsing, the
makeshift morgue went down around ten or midnight
last night – that’s an hour ago. What about the subway tunnels?
someone asks. - 1 and 9 tunnels feared collapsed underneath, that's the
last best hope for any survivors – what about the stores underground –
gone too – someone said. The
morgue is rumored to be moving up to Chelsea Piers sometime tonight. They’ll
be the bodies on the ice in the hockey rink. There’s only one problem –
there are teeth, hands and feet, articles of clothing – but there are no
bodies. The
Empire State has been evacuated. A suspicious box was discovered in the lobby,
and the dogs are called in. At the same time, bomb threats target the
buildings around Grand Central and right this second arrests evidently at the
airports with more men trying to get on to flights posing as pilots. Hard to
tell if it's "Round Two" or simply nuts with a god-complex. Everyone
is on edge; everyone expects more. The Feds started to move in late last night, early this morning (Wednesday night), swarming in to Chelsea Piers and standing around, or sitting at the volunteer and medical supplies tables with their clipboards, saying very little. Typical government shits they don't answer any questions and just tell you what to do. Chapel near Ground Zero
No
lights. No power. A generator but it’s running low. Canisters
of coffee, work gloves, respirators, sandwiches, danishes, boxes and boxes of
cookies, blankets, shoes, batteries, eyes drops, lens cleaners, ponchos,
everything in a pile in the dark. A man sits in a chair with a view of the room talking on a cell phone, trying to get more supplies. Another watches over a table with coffee and sandwiches, directs traffic as the firemen come in. Not many do – they can’t bring themselves to leave the scene. The sandwiches are very good. I realize I haven’t eaten much today, so – The
whole place had to be organized – no one knew where anything was. The dust
wasn’t so bad here – we’re right on the water, and the wind is blowing
things uptown. Still we all wear respirators, indoors and out. A
fireman hobbled in, in heavy gear, almost comical, looking for foot pads and
eye wash. And yes, a place to sleep. When he asked for a cot, I said, No, we
don’t have those and then realized I was an idiot, he wanted to know where
he could sleep, and I thought that after three days I had no idea where the
beds were, or if there were any. I spent all night Friday dragging boxes from one place to another. I’m good at it. I used to organize my father’s medical supplies when I was a kid. When I find the box full of Nat Sherman’s I nearly break down and cry. Hot Damn, I yell, like I’ve discovered gold and I go on a smoking spree. But who donated all the crappy cookies in little bags and what were they thinking? Just outside the little chapel the Pile is glowing and malevolent in the darkness. It seems to be growing bigger not smaller, as if more and more were being dredged up from below. But no bodies. And if there aren’t any, what exactly are we doing? Ah yes, it’s a “crime scene” now – the Feds are going to put everything in plastic bags and introduce it as evidence later. But really we’re digging to try to find someone alive. A massive undertaking. No one is going to build on this spot for a very long time. I think the morning will have to be better. Then I can find one of those cots.
Now I can't sleep I wish someone was awake to talk to me. Ah well I'll stop. But if you wake up and see this call me I need to hear someone's voice.
With perfect pitch poetic justice, the Mafia soon started making hauls from the Fresh Kills dump on Staten Island, surreptitiously carrying out as much of the twisted skyscraper as they could, to sell as scrap metal.
The city – one great shuddering organism, one body breathing together – this is not New York. New York, which is always different lives lived differently, thank you – step to the back of the restaurant, into the bowels of the kitchen, where the other New York is washing the dishes, or walk across 96th Street at Park or Lexington, where two opposed universes sit cheek by jowl – thank you – other worlds which manage, unless there is a murder or a riot, or some similar outrage – to glide by each other miraculously without colliding on a daily basis – this is in fact the miracle of New York. And that it always has room for more, another community, another separate reality – not oneness. E Pluribus – that’s us. Unum – that’s the rest of the country, thanks. So this experience, which the newspapers find so heady and the speechwriters find so useful, is really unreal for New York, and once it goes away, once it slowly fades, it will be gone forever, and those who experienced it, who submerged themselves in it, will know that they experienced something far more precious than a political argument or men crowding around a bar watching a football and cheering in unison. They became an inspiration to everyone else – and in the process they created something different, a wholly new experience in an alienated city. This is what we are hungry for.
“All the political jockeying is taking place far away, in some other universe from here. But the moving ones here are taken by the politicos to be their shadow figures, their demonstration tin types, arguments for why we must bomb. When for us duty and grief have not yet been overcome by anger. The firemen raising the flag on the ruins – that first great moment – was not to say, “We Kill,” but rather “We live,” – You have not killed all of us.” (The morgue did not collapse and wasn’t evacuated to Chelsea Piers. Like so much else, it was only rumor.)
Anyway in we went to the Turkey Rest’s and in between playing pool badly we talked. The war wasn’t on their minds but it was on mine: I would have plenty of time to think about it. It’ll all be surgical, covert, unrecorded, Jim – you watch. The Leprechaun goes back to tormenting women. But just the same everybody felt there was more coming. Why should the terrorists stop now? Great efforts were being expended to tell the country to go back to work, go to a game, to the theatre – go shopping. It’s patriotic. But there’s more coming isn’t there? Who is going to put the brakes on now? Certainly not the terrorists, whoever they might be. Who exactly is living in the shadow of whom? We
sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
If you want to know, Sal said, leaning over confidentially – we’re all holding our breath, whether we admit it or not. Everybody’s waiting on it. Doesn’t matter where it happens, or how big it is – could be a pizzeria in Seattle that blows, a TV station in Philly that has to be evacuated – the whole country will go crazy. They’ll lose it. Panic will set in. You watch. Ok Kiddo, I will. Just as there are no innocent pleasures, the aggressor also envies his victim – the unknown. America now lives like an artist – sleepless, anxious, wondering what our next move is – all certainties stripped away.
James Graham thanks everyone who talked to him, Urania Mylonas, Mercedes Vicente and especially Pierre Louaver, whose account appears in altered form in this story. Pictures and story by James Graham Pictures: 1. Lefayette St Sunset, September 14th 2001 2. A Moment's Rest 3.
Ksenia, Ground Zero, September 14th 2001
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The
man walked nonchalantly up to the barricade and pulling his camera out from
under his unbuttoned shirt focussed and went to work. He was standing near the
barricade, almost immediately under the walkway that crossed the road into the
residential part of the complex. Directly across West Street was now being
called – after fifty years of laughing it off - Ground Zero. The camera was
out and he went to work as quickly as he could. National Guard were milling
around everywhere- as impressive as green plastic bushes in a lunar landscape
and just as busy – a few shouts went up and then they charged him. They
surrounded him but he started to backpedal and got the camera away. Fifteen
seconds later he was back near the kiosk and he tried again, posing one of his
coworkers against the ruins but the lieutenant pointed him out again and the
soldiers followed orders, walking towards him and this time he pulled the film
from the camera, just to be safe.
LeHavre
went back to the deck to watch the tower as it burned. Now and then debris
would loosen and plummet down like feathers, and then what looked like at
first, heavier debris falling faster straight down. The entire staff was
dumbstruck, and fought back tears.
I
would ride my bike to Williamsburg to catch the L to Eighth Avenue, and then
go to the Piers to report for duty around midnight. I got into the habit of
having a shot or two at one of the bars near the station before I went, just
for fortification. It wasn’t gruesome but the hours were long and just when
I was about to go home something would happen, a truck would arrive or a
couple of men come up from the Pile caked in the white dust, and I would stay
longer. I ran into the Boys coming up north 8th one night, playing
tag in the street, the cops being unusually tolerant and just telling them to
act like grown-ups. These are the one who are going to get their shoes dirty
in Afghanistan or wherever the gray geniuses who built up the terrorists in
the first place decide they should go. It seemed an impossibility: the
restless Bohemians, chasing women and playing tag in the street at midnight,
all high spirits and a hearty fuck you to any kind of seriousness, in battle
dress. But anything was possible now.Back to Contents