Sep '02 [Home]
Longer Draughts
Alexis Quinlan's Letters from the Front (Street)
(excerpts)
A New Headwaters/Hudson Press Release
Notes on Denial — The First Night
All Saints Day Wrap-Up
Twin Towers Charms in Wall St Jewelry Shops…
Photo: Sladja
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Sep '02 [Home] Longer Draughts Alexis Quinlan's Letters from the Front (Street) (excerpts) A New Headwaters/Hudson Press Release Notes on Denial — The First Night All Saints Day Wrap-Up Twin Towers Charms in Wall St Jewelry Shops… Photo: Sladja |
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Sunday, October 14, 2001 It was Fashion Week, after all, and it was the first week of classes at more than a few universities. And it was, oh, you know, a first date night for a couple of us, and plenty of others woke up late and hung over. (When will the damned phone stop ringing?) And Jesus it stank, and it canceled a lot of regular programming, and it was hell on traffic. Of course, New York traffic's a dream compared to LA, and, if truth be told, Houston's probably the worst in the country, but, well, you get the general.… Uh, I seem to be drifting. Ahem. I like the girl whose first thought was that the pilots were drunk: "This drinking and flying must stop!?" And the boy, my student, who kept thinking it was a dream. He rolls over from the radio, hoping to move into a new, happier dream, a dream of successful flight, towers overcome, dangers vaunted easily. (The true dream of America.) As for myself, I was in the process of faxing a press kit for review to Italy, patiently explaining how I needed comments back as soon as possible because, yes, the Trade Towers had been struck, but Fashion Week would go on. ('Come hell or high water,' I said or something equally mad.) I was also insisting that I had to get going to New Jersey, even as the frightened hordes came running past my building down Maiden Lane. It was the first day of classes at WPU. I wanted to be on time. Ever astute, I sensed automotive delay in the offing, crowded bridges, due to these… tumbling towers. Then there was the woman, my best friend, who sent me out for prosciutto and figs. I arrived at her doorstep at noon on the 11th, covered in the ashes and dust of God-knows-what, having been stuck in an evacuation line that reminded me of nothing more than a WWII movie. She handed me a lipstick and steered me back out the door to the deli around the corner for the aforementioned, along with scallops and Italian mineral water. She would hostess a dinner party for our friends coming up from Tribeca toting asbestos-strewn computers and a few cadged valuables. Seemed reasonable. Her only question for me didn't have to do with the evacuation line I was put in, the cops who had me in marching order, the family diamonds I was wearing on my fingers, but exactly what had happened with the guy I'd gone to dinner with the night before. ("A nice kiss." — "Good. What else?") The TV and radio therapists say that we all revert to automatic pilot during crises of this proportion. "It's a ten!" my uptown godmother kept saying, as if I hadn't noticed my own back yard. The last time I'd heard so much talk about terrorist attacks was when I was turning 26 and Newsweek magazine reported that I had about as much chance of marrying as being caught in a terrorist attack. (Wherever is that fiancé?) Furthermore, they say that in our "auto pilot," we don't recognize the gravity of the situation. In the days and weeks to come, the Red Cross would have the most trouble with people unsure they needed aid. But our crowd didn't need pop therapy. We were Manhattanites. Our hostess was the first to explain that when her father left her mother, her mother began madly and decadently entertaining in San Francisco. Thus, the gourmet deli. And Marcus, the first friend to come by that day, who sat with us for those first shocking hours, answering the phone, joining us in prayers, also joined us in the same pop analysis. He explained how he became his mother's little soldier when his father went away on long business trips, and that's why he was willing to stick with us and do whatever we said. Indeed, he was wonderfully willing. He probably would have married one of us, but we weren't being that practical. Later, we three took a stroll toward Hudson St for ice cream. Ice cream. On MacDougal we picked up a man we hardly know who owns the Italian restaurant at the corner. At 7th Av we glanced up to see the wreckage, shook our heads in shared befuddlement, went on. It was about then that WTC 7 fell, just a mile south. Someone announced it on the radio, repeated it on the street, and it was carried on the breeze to our ears. And on we trod, a little parade of 40-year-old's and one senior citizen, toward the ice cream. We had a big meal to make, many friends arriving soon, and we needed sustenance. It's meta-denial discussing your own denial while indulging in it. My own started right away. Upon hearing the blast, I snarled at the computer screen and ran to my window. I called to the rows of faces looking skyward past me, "What happened?" No answer. Sure, I noticed some of the people were crying, some dropping to their knees, but I was still insisting on a response. "What happened?" Still no answer. Well, forget you then. I returned to my computer, where, I knew, I could get answers. Computers are much more gratifying than people. And there it was on CNN, in technicolor. And a bit of silver, glinting in the morning light, and lots of gray, all those things that were just beyond my back door, the wall through which I couldn't see. Black smoke and danger. This might have stopped another gal. But my first thought? I *&&*(^(* knew it. Yes, I swore I'd known it would happen. And I spent the next several days unshakably certain I'd known, talking about how I'd been to the Middle East (though I've only ever been to Egypt, which is so tourist-friendly it hardly counts), and how I've been reading up on it. (Bernard Lewis's The Middle East has been on my bedside table for six months, and Lewis is often cited as a foremost expert on the Middle East. So there!) I was sure I knew why it had happened. Was suddenly speechifying on the dangers of male monotheism, which breeds intolerance. Give me Ishtar or Hathor or Aphrodite and we wouldn't be in this bind. We might be sacrificing a handsome young man every vernal equinox, but he'd probably deserve it. Being a know-it-all is not only irritating, but is a form of denial too; after all, the world is so much more various than our little brains can ever make sense of. I admitted it, told them all I was playing my old big sister role to the country ("You should have known Daddy was dying, you idiots!") Soon (still on Day One), I've worked myself up into top pitch. By the time we serve the scallops, I am asking: "How is it that we act so high and mighty about a little terror from the skies?" I proclaim: "My country was founded on genocide." I say this more than once, though it would probably get me lynched anywhere but Lower Manhattan. (I wasn't wholly alone; one friend quoted Malcolm X all day, as in: "It's the chickens coming home to roost.") "Founded on genocide, and maybe that's the way it's going to end.""It's psychopathic," says Philip, who in the next 24 hours would actually cheat his way onto the Red Cross lines. Phil was so desperate to be a hero—or to brag about it at dinner parties—that he'd sneak through No Admit police lines with food for the rescue workers and end up being a rescue worker. Then a friend from the East Village looks at her toenails and wonders aloud if Neon Nails is still open and Jenni says, "Don't be ridiculous," and Miss EV snaps, "Just back off, sweetheart. We're all in a tense situation," and someone else butts in and says, "Now cool down, gals. Two towers falling is enough." Once the pedicure ponderer leaves, we begin to analyze denial: hers and our own. Becky admits to feeling partial toward the farmer's market, which gathered Tuesdays and Fridays on the west side of the buildings. Phil, the soon-to-be rescue worker pipes up that they had plenty of time to run… "But their stands! And all the flowers!" A couple of us begin crying for the flowers lost in the mess. Jen worries for her friends who work at Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the World Trade 2: "They didn't have a chance!" I fret for the firemen, since we've already heard about the horrid toll. My cousins!" I cry.Again, we analyze. It's too much to take in, so we have to grab onto little bits of it, little corners of loss, still too close, still shaking the dust of it off our shoes. Dinner? Weeks later we'd swear it was the best scallops pasta we'd ever eaten, though Jen and I didn't get any because there were so many guests. Eventually, it's time for people to head off to wherever they've arranged to spend the night. Before we part, we gather into a circle to pray again. There are eight of us; the youngest, a 35-year-old painter, has been crying softly and begins the prayers: Bring us to port on this crooked ship. Becky leads us in a silent Buddhist meditation. Jen apologizes for continuing to answer the phone: "We still don't know who is in there, after all, and who might be calling us, needing us," she explains. Someone gasps. The prayers continue. Finally it is my turn. I was angry and I'm angry still. I want America, my favorite topic, my bosom enemy, to reel herself in a bit, take care of home matters, stay out of other people's borders and properties and arguments. I hope America will go to therapy and get some boundaries. I wait for a laugh, but no, my friends are gazing at the flickering candles. I'm warming up, feeling Jefferson coming on, how all roads lead to truth, how maybe this is just another road our country must take to get to know the facts, when I remember the real, no-metaphor road, the first road trips across the Eastern seaboard with my parents in the back of the old Lark with my blanket and a stuffed turtle. (Child safety laws! Who knew?) Later, I drove across Texas with them, and then across the country with boyfriends or alone, many times; the obsession it became, the wild driving nights and days, the versions and visions I've seen on the road, the colors, the plains, the planes, the changes. Here, with my sophisticated friends in a Greenwich Village studio, the tune bubbles up from some childhood corner of my brain, chiseled out in long-ago mornings by a kindergarten or first-grade teacher, dredged up only for baseball games, a dozen maybe, in the past thirty years. If that many. I'd thought the words had no meaning at all, but here I am with those first quavering notes, me, true lover of anarchy, admirer of all rebels: Oh beautiful for spacious skies.… Everyone picks it up right away: —for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain's majesty.… As a kid, when I learned those words, I'd not seen much majesty, but now I know. And I know the fruited plain. And what both coasts look like. And I know a good part of the life and beauty in between, and it is rich. America, America, God shed his grace on thee,And we sing into the night, and we have hope. ~ . All Saints Day Wrap-Up 11/3/2001 12:25:35 PM Eastern Standard Time How fast does a strong young man shoot up from his seat in surprise when surprise is real? It scared me. On November 1, a cousin arrived from Boston for a quick spin around the WTC. We began at the head of Wall Street on Broadway, Trinity Church, with its many mementos and flowers, and circled north. Broadway had just been opened to tourists and non-emergency traffic, or its West side, so a whole new group of tourists and denizens are eager to get a look. Linda had a camera, of course: When in Rome… (Or at its fall.) Two blocks up, at the Rescue Worker HQ at St. Pauląs, we could just see the sweat- and filth-streaked firemen removing jackets, getting bottled water, lining up for buffets. Linda pulled out her camera, but was quickly and pretty dramatically stopped by a guard at the gate. No pictures of the rescue workers. We agreed that it made sense, and continued north. I did get a picture of her in front of a poster that read ŚCOURAGE,ą which hangs next to my favorite thing along that wall: a now-filthy T-shirt that reads ŚGOD LOVES NY.ą A red heart for loves. At Worth, we turned east. It was only my second trip to the site, but we were far closer than civilians had yet been allowed. Unfortunately, the wire gates, nine or ten feet high, are covered by dark green netting, and it's impossible to see through them except at a few spots where the insatiable have made spy holes. There are occasional vantage points where groups are gathered, solemn, often tearful, angry. A group of inured residents passes talking about the market (it was four-ish, the market close) and the solemn huddle parts and re-forms, all concentration. At one spot, sharp-eyed Linda warned me against recently painted orange stripes on a wooden gate, but another woman wasn't so lucky. We laughed together—a day late for Halloween—then began talking. She lives nearby too and was able to back me up that the smell was incredibly diminished on All Saints Day. (I'd been worried Linda would tell the family I was a liar.) She also confirmed the eerie confusion: she can't tell her visitors where the towers stood in relation to the rest of the blasted out buildings down here. Linda had been asking me where exactly the towers had stood and I couldnąt say. It seems that none of us knows. I only know I got off the subway, looked up, and if I saw them, I walked the other way, toward the Seaport. Now I don't know which way to go. Afterward, Linda dawdled at the workers' gates, reading with some amusement a Health Department posting about nuisances. She called me over, assuming we were the nuisances. But that wasnąt it at all: Itąs the Ground Zero workers who leave the site without removing their soiled clothing. They are the nuisances. Hmmm. This was a little disturbing, considering my recent air pollution fears. I contemplated stealing the posting, only to type up for your edification, then remembered that I don't do that kind of thing any more. Seconds later, three rescue workers emerged. I called, "Wait a minute! Aren't you supposed to remove your clothing so you aren't a nuisance!" For response? One look of irritation, one of amusement, one of leering hope. Linda asked where they were going. "Coffee break," one said. She offered to buy. Pretty soon, we were taking Amusement (mid-20's gal) and Leering Hope (early 30's guy) to Starbucks at West Broadway and Chambers. Irritation went off for tea and promised to rejoin us later. I immediately took Amusement aside to ask about her female cycles. Mine have been severely disrupted, and on late nights when I couldnąt sleep, when I wasnąt pecking away at emails complaining about the smell, I worried about what all that burning stench was doing to my hormonal balance. I still worry. Burning plastics emit dioxin. But this young ladyąs were right on track, or rather, she hadnąt noticed anything, and hadnąt heard talk about it from other on-site gals. She looked a little dubious, however, like Iąd just given her one more thing to worry about, one more thing she didnąt want to even know about. A supervisor on World Trade 5, she admitted she wore a mask every day. A big heavy one dangled from her slim brown neck, with green filters on either side.
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