My 9/11 Story; Pt 1
Remembrances of a horror I never imagined and how I dealt with (or failed to deal with) my constant panic.
I was in Manhattan for the summer of 2001, working on a recording project for 6 months or more. I recall that it was a grueling summer between the extreme heat and humidity - the subway tunnels were like kilns - and there was a lot of work to be done on this album and it seemed like I would be stuck in the city forever. I also recall that, prior to the WTC attacks, it was going down as the summer of shark attacks, socialite Lizzie Grubman running over people at a party in the Hamptons, Aaliyah’s plane crash, the hype of The Strokes and Mariah Carey losing her mind.
We had just finished our allotted time at one studio on 12th street, near Union Square where we were doing overdubs for months and on Monday night, we packed up our gear, awaiting transportation to another studio where we would finish the last touches on Wednesday. We had a day off on Tuesday.
I was sharing a sublet apartment on the Upper-West Side with my friend, David, who was producing the album. I was sleeping-in that morning until my phone rang shortly after the first plane hit. My girlfriend back home was listening to Howard Stern and heard that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I turned the TV on to NY1, the 24-hour local news channel, to see smoke billowing from the North Tower. We stayed on the phone, watching the footage and speculating what happened, thinking there was still a chance it was a small plane or a freak accident until we watched the second plane hit. My stomach and heart dropped. I instantly felt so sick. I called up to the other room where David was. "Are you seeing this?" "Yeah," he said.
I called my parents to let them know I was okay. I would call a few other friends to reach out as well, but it got harder and harder to get calls to go through as the day went on, as I'm sure millions of people in metropolitan NYC were also making those calls, taxing the system, but also because, after the Twin Towers fell, so did many cell towers and whatever else communication towers that were on the roof.
One phone call I remember with a chill was to my fellow The Curtain Society member, Duncan, in which he said, "you know this is World War III." As someone who had a lifelong major anxiety about the doom of war (growing up in the 80s, it was a constant baseline to be terrified that we would be nuclear-bombed by the Russians at any minute). Whenever some kind of military action happened on the other side of the planet that no one else around me seemed to care about, I would go into a deep depression and panic. Grenada, Falkland Islands, the airstrikes on Tripoli...
This was literally happening approximately 3 miles straight down Broadway from me. I was terrified and I was so far from home and the people I loved.
I recall panicking, thinking, "Oh my god! Who is watching the west coast? Who is watching Chicago and Los Angeles?" I felt like we were under a full-on attack and it was just starting. I had visions of the water supply of NY being poisoned and the electrical grid being shut down and all internet communications being cut. It was the end of the world.
David had a few years on me (I was just 30 at the time) and was much more calm than I was. He suggested we go out and get some air and food, and stop at the grocery store a few blocks up and get provisions, as we would probably be stuck for a few days.
We walked a few blocks up to a diner that was open, business as usual. One thing I noticed as we walked was that there was a constant stream of people walking north. No one going south. They looked like zombies, staring straight ahead, expressionless, shocked. The subways had stopped running and I'm sure the taxis were in a state of chaos, so walking was the best way to get home for anyone who was working in lower Manhattan.
The TVs were all on the news in the Diner. People were buzzing and there was nothing else to talk about. I remember not really being able to eat because my stomach was in knots. We finished lunch and walked to a mid-block Grocery store on Broadway, which had way more people in it than you'd expect at 1pm on a Tuesday. We both had baskets that we were filling up with whatever we thought we might need for the next several days. We had no idea if stores would be closed or whether the water would be safe. I saw David standing at a stand full of apples, picking one up and leisurely examining it for ripeness and asked me if I would eat some apples if we bought some. Panicked, I said, "Yes, and what are you doing, sniffing it? Just take them!" and I grabbed several and hurriedly tossed them into his basket as if I was on one of those Supermarket Sweep game shows. Apparently I was being so dramatic (who, me?) and ridiculous that he had to walk over to another aisle immediately afterward to laugh about it. (In hindsight, I was ridiculous).
It wasn't until the next day that the wind shifted. Until then, the smoke from Ground Zero was blowing east, over Brooklyn. Wednesday afternoon, it started blowing north, uptown. I could then smell the smoke and it was a real, undeniable connection to the event, which, even though it was only a few miles south of me, it was something I watched on TV. I hadn't made a real personal connection to it. I will never forget the acrid smell. It was nothing like, say the smoke from a house fire, which would be mostly wood burning. It was a dusty and almost leathery scent. It smelled like heat.
Manhattan pretty much closed down for a few days. No one was allowed in or out of the city. The subways were down. The bridges and tunnels were blocked and heavily guarded by the police and National Guard. I couldn't leave no matter what. No one was allowed south of 14th street without proof of residency. They started to ease these restrictions a bit on Friday and we were able to reorganize ourselves in the interest of finishing this recording project that was the whole reason we were in the city in the first place. We had a courier deliver our gear to another midtown studio and we made our way there around noon.
I had decided that I had to go home. They could finish the last few overdubs without me and I would come back in a few weeks to mix. I rented a U-Haul to take my gear back home. I went to the new studio and got a tour from it's infamous and curmudgeonly owner. It was yet one more legendary studio that I was lucky to work in that summer and I was able to distract myself from my apocalyptic panic long enough to gawk at the beautiful rooms and mixing consoles in the various rooms. The owner was well-known for being extremely outspoken and opinionated. He was a veteran of the music business since the 50s and he had seen it all and knew it all. When the inevitable subject of what happened came up, his reaction was to say that the towers falling was the best thing to happen to his studio. "Those towers were a terrible source of RF interference in the city. My studio should sound even BETTER now." My jaw just dropped.
I drove home that night and got back to Worcester around midnight. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief, which was impossible for me to do in the city. For the next month or two, I started to get things set back up at Tremolo Lounge, the studio I was working in back home. Meanwhile, I always seemed to have to have a radio on WBZ news constantly, just in case something else happened. It took a long time for me to decompress and start to get used to the new life as we knew it.