My 9/11 Story
To avoid sounding trite and tone deaf on such a somber date, I chose not to post this on the recent 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. We all have our 9/11 stories. Some of them are horrific on an unimaginable scale. Most of them are much smaller and indirect but still affecting on a personal scale– “I saw this”, “I knew her,” that kind of thing. For instance, in 2004 I met a woman who would have been on Flight 11, strapped into the seat beside her closest work friend, had it not been for a fortuitous job change just a week or two before. She had a small shrine on a bookshelf in her home memorializing her beautiful young colleague. Chances are, if you lived or worked anywhere near Boston at the time (where two of the four doomed flights originated), or in New York or Washington DC, you or somebody you know has a story like that.
Because my own small 9/11 story is a layered one, for me, the hellish events of that day became the second act of a three-part tragedy. You see, two weeks before that brilliant Tuesday morning, my soon-to-be ex-wife and I stood in front of a judge in a crowded courtroom and in hushed, almost whispered voices answered the few simple questions that would end our marriage. The guilty funk that I dipped into that afternoon would linger for years, but “married in Australia, divorced in Cambridge” would be how I eventually was able to CliffNote the story of my second shot at happily-ever-after.
What can I say? For such a nice guy, I suppose I can be a bit of a pant-load sometimes.
Like a handful of other catastrophic events in our lifetimes, one of the ways we all try to come to grips with the unfathomable is to make a big deal about where we were the moment we first heard the news. I don’t really care to do that here in any kind of detail because it pales in the face of the enormity of the event. I will simply say I was at my job in Boston’s Downtown Crossing, wedged into a spot in front of a TV with easily more than a hundred others in the 8th floor employee cafeteria. For the next hour, gasps and soft sobs punctuated each rerun of United Flight 175 immolating itself in the intricate façade of the South Tower. When the first building collapsed, someone from HR announced that if anyone felt uncomfortable it was OK to leave, and over half the room bolted for the stairways. A few of us stuck around a bit longer, but when the second tower fell at 10:30, we all knew it was time to seek lower ground.
But I’ll never forget the subway ride home because, whatever we are today, in this imbecilic age of legitimized incompetence, mediocrity, hate, selfishness and flat-out stupidity, on the Red Line that morning we were not. It was as if the entire trainload had all known each other for years, with strangers talking to strangers sharing their stories, rumors, fears, paranoia and above all else, resilience. For one brief, shining moment, or at least for the time it took to get from Park Street to Harvard Square, one packed-to-the-gills subway car was united, defiant and indivisible.
When I finally made it back to the quirky old rented house that my ex-wife and I had settled into years before, I was met at the front door by the best friend I’d ever had: Mack, our ball-busting little white terrier. He gave me his standard “welcome home” greeting, grabbing my hand firmly in his mouth with his tail spinning like a propeller, panting and pulling me into the kitchen, the living room, all around the house, as if to show me that nobody had swiped the silverware while I was gone.
I ventured back into the city with my cameras that Thursday, and it was there that I shot what I still consider to be one of the best pictures I’ve ever made. Less than a block from my job, a woman in what appeared to be Islamic garb stood staring at a display of small American flags stuck on the tacky façade of a very familiar bodega I’d passed every morning for 11 years on my way in to work. On my website and in gallery shows I’ve always titled the image “Pretty Much How Things Stand, September 13, 2001”, and to this day, it still seems to represent pretty much how things stand.
For the next several days, the skies over Boston were eerily quiet, interrupted occasionally by the dull roar of the combat air patrol high above the city. Mack trotted busily around the house and the yard as usual on his various reconnaissance missions. I sat glued to the TV as the sheer horror of exactly what had happened became painfully clear. I watched incredulously as President Bush, standing atop the still-smoldering pile in New York with bullhorn in hand, vowed that the people who had knocked the twin towers down would “hear all of us soon”. Standing discretely to his left was the head of his Secret Service protective detail, a guy I had gone to high school with 30 years earlier. So many connections…
The final layer of my shit sandwich that year was slapped into place one night about three weeks later. My four-legged friend greeted me at the door, tail wagging as usual, but something was different. Now, I know dogs don’t sweat, but believe me– Mack was sweating. With sheer terror in his eyes, he tried to take my hand in his mouth. I stared past him into the hallway, which looked like someone had tossed a hand grenade into the house. All of the woodwork up to as high as he could reach had been chewed to splinters. I sat down on the sofa and emptied out in that moment, as the realization of all that had happened over the previous weeks hit me like a rock in the forehead.
In a desperate attempt to help my little friend, I consulted an animal trainer. He said that the sudden absence of my wife had most likely caused a disruption in his “pack” and the poor little guy suffered an existential freakout, one that he would repeat whenever I left him home by himself. It soon became obvious I would no longer be able to care for him on my own unless I quit my job and stayed home with him all day. I made the excruciatingly difficult decision to give him up for adoption shortly thereafter.
To this day, when we refer to the days and weeks surrounding 9/11, we use it as kind of a BC/AD demarcation point, the time when the old world changed into a new one. I see it that way too, but my own old world changed back into one with which I was all too familiar. Once again, my stable life had pancaked and collapsed, and once again, I was on my own.
I was 44 years old.
from Negative Thoughts: A Photographer's Life , In Pictures