I was woken up by a phone call from my boyfriend Dale that morning.
"You should go to the roof and look at the World Trade Center. It's burning."
I rubbed my dry eyes as I told him I would. Then, Mom called.
"I'm watching N.H.K. (Japan's version of the B.B.C.) and I can see the Twin Towers burning. Are you O.K.?" My Mom watches N.H.K. religiously, and she was in Los Angeles watching a news feed from New York via Japanese satellite T.V. from Tokyo. I told her that I was just on my way up to the roof to go watch, so I walked up one flight of stairs up to the roof. Up on the roof, my neighbors Susan, Rob and Rob's wife were already watching the Manhattan downtown skyline.
Susan, my neighbor from apartment 6D, was President Herbert Hoover's artist-rebel second-cousin (her father was a cousin to the Prez), who used to live up in the hills of Boulder, Colorado before relocating to New York City. She used to squat in the cabins up in the hills and shoot bullets into the sky to scare off any intruders. She's a short lady, but she wears platform sneakers (sneakers with five inch soles) everywhere, so she appears taller than she really is. To this day she's never told me how old she is - but the lovely deep wrinkles on her face don't lie - she's been there and back. A musical hippy of her time - Susan is a guitarist and a poet. Through the years, she'd taught me how to play guitar and write poetry. We'd been good friends ever since I moved into 6B five years ago, despite our age difference, because I guess we both knew a fellow artist-rebel when we saw one. We were Kindred Spirits, as Anne of Green Gables used to say.
Rob was Susan's Italian-American ex-boyfriend who lived downstairs - except theyd' broken up several decades ago when she was 40 and when he was 30. Since then, they'd both moved onto greener pastures and now Rob was married with a teenage son and a wife crammed into their small three bedroom Village Coop apartment on West 10th Street @ Bleecker. Our building was a short block north of Christopher Street between Seventh Ave. and Hudson St. It was a great place to watch the gay pride parade go by in the Summer, as it wound down those last several hundred feet towards Hudson.
Rob was videotaping the tower inferno - building number one - with his camcorder. I saw immediately that it wasn't just a fire - that there was a big fat hole in Building One, and everyone was talking about how the hole might have gotten there. "I hear there was an explosion." "I hear a plane went into it." No one knew for sure - but the number of neighbors on the roof had doubled after five minutes.
Suddenly - a powerful explosion rocked the building to the left of Building One. Building number two released a huge plume of gas and fire. I was still on the phone with my Mom, so I told her: "Mom - I don't know what's going on but I'll call you back later (in Japanese)." and hung up. Soon after, someone's radio delivered to us President Bush's message that this was most likely a terrorist attack on American soil. The radio informed us that two planes had crashed into the Towers.
The crowd of us had seen the explosion in Building Two - but not the plane, and we still stood in disbelief that it wasn't just an accident. I thought that maybe, the second explosion was caused by the first. But Rob, who had been videotaping the whole thing rewound his video and on his small camcorder, we all saw a shadow of a plane crash into Building Two. It was clear. It had been a plane and a terrorist attack. I looked at Building One, this time with binoculars that a neighbor had brought up. Our Coop was less than two miles away from Ground Zero. There were people in Building One, looking back at us. I could see them very clearly. And I saw some people jumping off of Building One. It was surreal.
And without warning, Building One started to crumble, as it created a plume of smoke that kept growing underneath it. We could see everything. At one point, the dark plume grew rapidly towards us, and we thought it might cover us too. Rob's wife went into a panic. Their teenage son attended Stuyvesant High School, which was across the street from Ground Zero. She left the roof to go find him.
It's all a blur from around there. I had gone downstairs to get a glass of water and by the time I went back to the roof, Building Two had crumbled too. Now - I could see from our rooftop that the towers were no longer. Before 9/11, I used to use the twin towers to help orient myself when I got out of the Subway. If I could see the twin towers, I knew I was facing South. Now with them gone, the skyline seemed lonely.
Those days, I was working in midtown Manhattan at a law firm. With the ensuing fiasco, I called into work and was told I didn't have to go in. Someone said that the subways had stopped running because of the explosions. There were people in suits walking up West Side Highway covered in ash from head to toe. Dazed, they walked their way uptown (presumably towards home), looking traumatized.
My part of town was closed down by the authorities immediately, except to those that lived or worked there. The police created a check point at 14th Street. 7th Avenue and Hudson St. were closed down for the ambulances to bring the injured survivors back to St. Vincent's hospital, which was at 7th Avenue and 12th St. Except no ambulance came carrying any survivors. The destruction had been complete. Doctors and medical attendants lined the sidewalk outside the hospital eagerly awaiting for survivors to arrive. People started to post "Have you seen ___" along side the South-side wall of St. Vincent's hospital.
My Mom had a hard time reaching me for the rest of the day, since our phone lines were maxed to capacity with everyone calling in from all over the World to check up on their beloved New Yorkers. My friends John and Amy, who lived in Battery Park across the street from Ground Zero, suddenly found themselves homeless, and they came to stay at my apartment. They had to go buy some clothes because they had nothing to change into. All we did that evening was get drunk. We were all in our late twenties, self-medicating our pain, not knowing what was happening or what else we could do. The local liquor store attendant told me that on 9/11/2001, a lot of people were flocking to his store in the Village to get some hard liquor. My guests and I imbibed Southern Comfort that evening.
In the days that ensued, we saw an increase in police and military presence in the West Village. There was an outpouring of volunteer police officers from all over to help out (I remember talking to this one officer that had driven up from Florida overnight), and everyone else seemed to be willing to help each other. Soldiers in full fatigue marched up and down Hudson Street. My car was parked in a City-owned parking lot that was turned into the Military Staging Area, so getting my car out was not possible for two months. The number of "Have You Seen ___?" posters and pictures grew along the South-side wall of St. Vincent's Hospital. The number of the missing kept growing. The air smelled funny, like burnt plastic, for many days. Ground Zero continued to smoulder for weeks. Some said the air was toxic. Banana trucks eerily lined the West Side Highway. They used the portable refrigeration facilities to store the bodies of the deceased, until family members could identify and claim the bodies. My boyfriend Dale found papers that clearly had originated from the Twin Towers strewn all over the yard of his Dad's house in Brooklyn. The wind had blown the papers deep into Brooklyn. My other friend Chia was downtown that day and reported seeing large chunks of the planes on the ground near City Hall.
The out-pouring of help was amazing. Everyone gave blood, and everyone wanted to help out with the clean up and rescue efforts. There was too much blood being donated and too many volunteers. So many of us who wanted to help didn't know how to. Some friends and I decided to get together the next day at a Cafe above 14th St. on 7th Ave. It was right outside the military zone, so that we could all get there without having to prove our identity. We gathered at the basement of the Cafe that day looking for community - something humans naturally do in times of crisis - to talk with each other about the unspeakable events that had unfolded around us. My friends were quite diverse - there were several Swiss nationals (one journalist, one human rights activist, one graduate student), a Jamaican-American lawyer / teacher, a Jewish-American accountant turned paparazzi journalist, a Long Island-Italian-American spa business owner, a Taiwanese NYU film school Ph.D. candidate, a White-American documentary film maker, etc. - some Gay, some Straight. We loved each other and our life in New York. We collectively asked ourselves, "Why did this happen?"
After 9/11, I developed a phobia for going into sky scrapers. It was especially uncomfortable the first year. I still don't like going into tall buildings or getting into claustrophobic elevators. It pretty much killed my desire to ever work in a traditional law firm, because that meant I would probably work in a sky scraper. This also made me realize that my time in Manhattan was ending. When I moved back to California a year later, I bought a cabin in Placerville, far away from the City - because I had imagined that I would need a place to escape to if something like 9/11 ever happened in my life again. (It was also because I couldn't yet afford to buy a house in Berkeley.) I was traumatized by the trailers on T.V. for the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" when the trailer showed the Golden Gate Bridge collapsing. To me, it was too uncomfortably close to reality and was incensed by its insensitivity. I think I stopped watching network T.V. around the same time.
9/11 helped me come back to Berkeley, the city I most loved. I chose Berkeley because of its progressive (thus forwarding thinking) values, amazing weather, and accessibility to nature. I chose Berkeley over Los Angeles (where my family lives) because the events of that day taught me that life is too short to live in a manner that did not reflect my ethics and values. And I guess I knew enough to know that if I lived here, I would find the person I'd want to become within me. I needed to become a student of change, before I could become the change I wanted to be.
As I search within for the change I want to see in the World, I am reminded of what began my process towards change: It was 9/11. Because of what I saw that day, I have a firm conviction that I would do anything in my power to create a better World than to not have tried at all.
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