September 14, 2001: The Rose Tattoo

This story is typical. Many of my friends who were here at that time have similar stories. Articles were even written about such things. But this is my version of the story.

I was trapped in Hoboken for the couple of days following the day. I haven’t written about those days – but maybe someday I will. The people I met, the … the way it was … Surreal is one of the words that really comes, when I try to call up the feeling in Hoboken during those days.

Then Friday. September 14. The tunnel was back open for traffic. Maybe it was time to go back into the city, and go to work. Maybe it was time to start up life again.

But oh. How odd the feeling. How almost wrong.

It must be said that things did not feel “normal” here for months. Slowly but surely you would start to see reassuring signs of normal life … people eating at sidewalk cafes, people walking and laughing … even such moments as seeing two people laughing seemed like an enormous triumph back then. Literally everything else was put on hold for months. I’m just trying to set up the unreality of September 14. If months later life still felt stilted, and different from Before … then September 14 was truly Surreal Land. Crisis Mode. Panic Mode. Survival Mode. What have you. People were still hoping for rescues from the wreckage. The 14th was the day of President Bush’s visit to Ground Zero so there was, in general, a really panicked and yet focused energy in the city. Panicked and also focused? How can that be? I don’t know but that’s what it was like. Fighter jets swooped around the periphery of the city all day. So it felt extremely safe … but it also felt extremely precarious. The way it must feel in other war-torn countries all the time. We in Manhattan were enormous targets. And so we needed to be protected. Those fighter jets swooping by were alarming – because no other airplanes were in the sky yet. All commercial aircraft travel was stopped for three days … and the eeriness of having no planes flying over Manhattan was palpable. You didn’t even NOTICE how often planes fly overhead until there were none. The skies were blazingly empty. And now, I have to say, even years later – I am much more attuned to the air traffic overhead. I hear the planes. I am aware when they go by. My ears prick up if one sounds like it’s “too low”.

So September 14th was an eerie quiet day, except for the occasional roar of a fighter jet. These were the days of the Missing Person posters. The pictures, the smiling faces, the defining characteristics (which always slayed my heart: “Scar on stomach.” “Mole on lower back.” Like … there is such despair in these descriptions. There is an open acknowledgement that whatever will be found of this person, this beloved wife, daughter, family member, will be a fragment. And yet there is also such courage in these minute descriptions. The survivors, those searching for their beloved, know that they must be SPECIFIC, in this identification process, even though their hearts have shattered. They must be HELPFUL, and provide as much information as they can. And so they did. Over and over and over, plastered across every wall in Manhattan. “Topaz ring on pinky finger.” “Birthmark on right side of forehead.” “Scar on collarbone.” “Braces on upper row of teeth.” “Tattoo of rose on left hip.”) … and crowds of people standing before every Poster they passed. You had to look. It seemed like you were OBLIGATED to look. The faces called out from their snapshot blur. “Look. Look at me.” You could not go from Point A to Point B without looking at 20 posters. I have some pictures of those walls of posters. Hard to look at now. And eventually … at some point in October … in one fell swoop … all the posters disappeared. You never see any remnants of them now. Gone. As painful as it was to have to constantly walk by walls of smiling (now dead) faces … it was even more painful to have the posters NOT be there.

Smoke still billowed up into the air from downtown, and when the wind changed – everyone over in Hoboken felt it. Our eyes stung, our throats hurt – there was a reason we all had surgical masks in our backpacks.

I went to my busstop that morning. I did not at all feel ready to get back into a normal routine … I was still in Surreal Land and not ready to come out. But there I was, putting one foot in front of the other. Instead of going to the busstop I normally went to, on 7th … I went to the one on 9th … which was the busstop I had gone to on the morning of September 11, for no particular reason … but it was just odd that I would have broken my routine on that day, of all days. On September 14, I woke up early, and walked over to 9th Street, and now – in looking back on it – I think I can see that I not only was unwilling to go back into the routine I had Before, I knew that nothing could “go back” to being the way it was. So Before that day I had always waited for the bus on 7th. But on that day, on the day it happened, I had been at 9th. So from then on out, I would wait for the bus at 9th Street.

My heart was in my throat. Unlike many others, I was not in Manhattan on that day – I had been trying to get into Manhattan when they closed all the tunnels and turned all our busses around. I know we all felt trapped. And there were those in Manhattan who were trapped, in reverse, and could not get home. My friend’s husband basically hitched a ride back to Jersey in some guy’s motorboat on September 11. People with boats were basically just motoring over to lower Manhattan, and picking people up there … all on their own. It brings a lump to my throat, even today. “You need a ride back to Jersey? Hop on!” Dust-covered financial executives clambering onto the deck of a motor boat, trying over and over and over again to get through to their wives, their husbands, on cell phones.

The entire city had not yet bounced back into autonomous individuals, wrapped up in our own private concerns. Everyone just talked to each other. You would turn to the person sitting next to you and say, “How you doin’? You holding up?” Strangers conversed. We all had horror stories – it wasn’t so much about sharing horror stories yet. It was more about a truthful: How are you? You doing okay? Hang in there. The bus was filled with conversations like that. Many of us were going into the city for the first time since that day, and you could sense the anxiety. Instead of just sitting alone with the anxiety, which is what you normally do in this town where we are all on top of each other, you would share it. You would blurt out to your seatmate, “I’m feeling so anxious right now.” And your seatmate would say, “Yeah, me too. It’s so weird, right?” The guy sitting next to me on the bus was a pudgy young guy, in his early 30s, wearing a baseball hat. He had black circles under his eyes. As we approached the causeway – the causeway where we all saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center – my anxiety started to affect my breathing. I wanted to shout, “STOP THE BUS. Lemme off. I’m not ready for this!” Pudgy-baseball boy turned to me and said, “This is kind of freaky, huh?” I said, “Totally. I’m quietly freaking out right now.” No separation between us. A two-way flow of energy. We were together. I said, going right to the heart of the matter (that was also what it was like in those days following – everyone just went right to the heart of the matter), “You okay?” Unlike normal life, where when someone asks, “How are you doing?” you are EXPECTED to say, “Fine” – in those heightened days – the question “How are you doing?” was actually a valid question. You actually wanted to know how someone was doing. It was a heart-of-the-matter question, not just bullshit politeness where you are expected to LIE, even if you are NOT doing okay. He said, “My best friend’s missing.” “Oh my God. I’m so so sorry.” He said, “Yeah. I’m going to meet his mom – who’s arriving this morning at Port Authority – and we’re gonna go around to all the hospitals. See if we can find him.” “Oh God. Good luck.” Those were the days when you still could believe that there might be some injured unidentified person at a hospital somewhere.

We approached the entrance to the Tunnel. Now nobody on the bus began jibbering like a lunatic – or openly panicking – but the FEELING was there, you could tell. Everyone was just gritting teeth, hanging on, sucking it up, and moving forward. We will not be stopped. It is just a Tunnel. It is OUR city. And we are going to go back into OUR city.

Over the entrances to the Tunnel – 3 in all – were massive American flags. I had never seen them up there before – maybe they had always been there, but I had never perceived them. It was so so reassuring to see them. Especially because the entrance to the Tunnel was swarming with National Guardsmen, cops, and military vehicles. Every vehicle was being stopped. There was a sense of, again, panicked focus. Everyone buckling down, doing what needed to be done.

We entered the gleaming Tunnel, and as we moved slowly through – I closed my eyes. I don’t really get that freaky feeling going underwater that some people do – I try not to think about it – but that day was different. Every moment felt precarious. We had seen those towers come down. We had watched planes crash into the gleaming glass. Those were the days of bomb scares, and the Brooklyn Bridge being threatened, and it felt like, at any moment, anything could happen. Because … 3 days before … something unthinkable had occurred. Everyone had to readjust their assumptions about reality. Again, those who live in war-torn countries already have a much better grasp on the ephemeral nature of steel and brick, they know that nothing is forever, they know that at any second the air around you can burst into flame. Well, we were now learning that first-hand.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is is that I started to feel a bit of panic as we descended into the tunnel. It was like a gleaming coffin. At any second it could blow up. OR – even worse … for the 3 minutes that we were underwater, something horrible could happen up on land … the Empire State Building could blow up, a suicide bomber could detonate Port Authority … what would happen during those 3 minutes of being out of contact with the above-water world?? I just wanted to get to the other side. Just get me to the other side. Get me to the other side. Get me to the other side. Get me to the other side.

And I know this sounds weird and far-fetched (but just wait … September 14 is just beginning) – but the moment we left the world behind and entered the tunnel, Pudgy Baseball Cap man reached out and took my hand. His hands were ice-cold, and yet also sweaty. The man was not well. I could feel his broken heart through his hand. Somehow I knew that he didn’t reach out for my hand because he sensed I needed it. He reached out for my hand because he needed it. He could not be alone in that moment. He needed human contact.

I know in my heart (at least now I know it) that this man’s best friend was never found. Or at least he wasn’t found in any hospital. This man’s best friend was dead. Killed either in the collapse of the building, or when the planes first hit. Entire medical teams had set up tents along the West Side Highway, thinking that soon they would be overrun with injured. A friend of mine volunteered in those tents, making coffee and sandwiches for the doctors and nurses. And nobody ever showed up. The tents remained empty. The doctors and nurses would stand outside, staring downtown at the mushroom cloud coming up from where the towers used to be, smoking cigarettes, pacing, and waiting. Waiting for all the bloody people to come. Nobody came. So now I can look back and I know that the poor mother who had just taken a bus to Port Authority, in order to wander around the city with her son’s best friend, looking for their missing person … never got her son back. But on that morning, on that morning of panic and focus and energy … I still had hope. We all did. It had only happened three days before. People could TOTALLY still be alive in that wreckage. People could TOTALLY be in a coma at St. Vincent’s and just be waiting to be identified! Tattoo of rose on left hip.

I have no idea if Pudgy Baseball Cap man was embarrassed about reaching out for me. I don’t think so. I don’t think he went over it in his mind: “Should I …? Is it totally weak or pathetic-looking if I want to hold her hand …?” I think he just did it. It was not weak. It was strong. It was a moment of humanity in the middle of those crazy days. I held his hand, his sweaty clammy hand, and closed my eyes, and just waited for the tunnel to end.

Once we shot out on the other side – he let my hand go. And then – totally as one – we both turned all the way around, to peer out the window for the spire of the Empire State Building. It was instinctive. So strange. It was like we were one being. Neither of us had said to the other, “I am just scared that something is going to explode while we are under water” but obviously it had been on his mind too. There was the spire, the beautiful spire, looking foreshortened from our perspective at the Lincoln Tunnel. It was just an odd moment – how he let go of my hand – and then, like we had choreographed it, we both turned around in our seats, and looked up, up, up.

He glanced at me and grinned in a pale kind of way, a grin that didn’t reach his bleak eyes, and said, “It’s still there.”