9/11 into September 12th, 2001: The Williamsburg Bridge, Tiny's Giant Sandwich Shop, and Jogging in Gritty Air
I left off recalling 9/11 with my ex and his companion hurrying to the buildings that morning, thinking they could help in a situation they never imagined would be so horrific.
They were dusted in the destruction of the day and soon after, parted ways. My ex headed back to our apartment and met me there. As I said before, we had no preconceived disaster action plan or anything along those lines (Who did in those days? Who thought such a thing could possibly happen?) but we both instinctively got ourselves back to the apartment.
We had a television but no cable and somehow were able to catch the signal from a local Spanish-language TV station that was showing the planes slamming into the buildings over and over again. Our apartment on Attorney Street must have been built as a tenement, cheaply, hastily constructed multi-story housing for last century’s herds of European immigrants. We lived on the fifth floor, no elevator.
Erin, my co-worker from Kansas who was living in Brooklyn at the time, came home with me. When we evacuated the Flatiron building, all of us were together but, as we filtered downtown, most of my department headed off to the Red Cross or St. Vincent’s hospital in the naive attempt to give blood.
I don’t know why Erin decided to stick with me that day. I don’t think she even articulated why she wanted to. Different people react to shock in different ways.
She was quiet and stunned. I was a little too, if I can recapture those day’s emotions although I’m not really sure I want to. I think she had the impulse to go to a homey place and hole up and that was what I was aiming to do. We headed downtown together.
I remember feeling very vulnerable while we were still out in front of the Flatiron building as the fire trucks, ambulances, police cruisers, and HAZMAT trucks whizzed by. What if something happened up here in Midtown or above? What if some evil terrorist mastermind had rigged crazy explosives to the Empire State building to erupt once all of the emergency personnel fled south?
As Erin and I continued our walk downtown, after leaving the others, we passed through Union Square Park, so empty yet so prettily innocent in its final pre-fall glowing green. The trucks and sirens continued to pulse past us. We were heading in the same direction as them and that was disconcerting.
Erin and I finally arrived at the apartment, trudged up the five narrow flights of stairs and plopped down in front of the Spanish-language coverage of the day, the planes slamming into the towers over and over again.
By this time, it was nearly lunchtime and I think I felt faintly hungry but the desire to eat was somehow mixed with a nausea I thought would stay with me for awhile.
After an hour or two of just sitting stoically staring at the TV, we welcomed some neighbors into the apartment as they didn’t have a TV and what we had was better than nothing. During this time my dad got through to us on my ex’s cell phone.
I remember talking to my dad: He was calm and his voice strong. He said he knew we would be okay but to stay inside. He feared there would be looting, which, I think, I can proudly say there was very little of, as it turns out. He also suggested we store some water in pots in case our water supply was cut off.
My father said he had been home that morning, waiting for the delivery guys to bring the new dining room furniture. This was at what is now our old house, the house my brother and I grew up in, the house we were raised us in. The house Beanie, our first dog who was older than me, a raggedy Wire Haired Fox Terrier, white and brown and black, died in, in the living room, beneath the Christmas tree on December 18, 1987.
The delivery guys arrived and were jockeying the big oak pieces into what was a tiny dining room. The morning TV shows must have been on in the background. My dad says he and the delivery guys gradually picked up on some of the coverage and stopped what they were doing to tune in.
He knew neither my ex or I were in immediate danger thanks to where we worked but, as many of us thought that day, more bad things could be in the works.
Despite his wise warnings, once we heard that the city had opened the bridges to the outer boroughs to foot traffic, we took Erin down the street and over east a few blocks to the Williamsburg Bridge.
We had just moved to the apartment on Attorney Street ten days before so we were iffy about where exactly to go to get Erin where she needed to be but we proceeded, calmly, slowly.
At the foot of the bridge, we said goodbye to Erin. I have no idea how far after the bridge she had to walk. Probably pretty far. Brooklyn is a big borough. I offered that she stay at our apartment for the night. She declined; she said flatly that she really wanted to go home and just stay there for a long time.
As I said before, different people react differently to such things. For me, the thought of going to an empty apartment and passing what promised to be a long night was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be among people. To see life around me. Hearing my father’s voice was one of the best things that day even though it bleakly spoke of other dangers that still might be on their way.
After leaving Erin at the Williamsburg Bridge, my ex and I decided to go to a little sandwich shop near our apartment called Tiny’s Giant Sandwich Shop on Rivington and Norfolk Streets.
Most of the shops and store fronts were shut down and shuttered but Tiny’s was open, which is funny because, in the process of Googling just now to resurrect the name of this sandwich joint, I read some critical reviews of the place saying Tiny’s is good for its food but temperamental in terms of if it delivers, to where it does deliver if it decides to do so, and when it chooses to be open. I find it quite ironic that a restaurant that doesn’t steadily stay open was still open on the late afternoon of September 11, 2001.
Tiny’s is known for its Big Mack Daddy veggie patty on a brioche bun, topped with fakin’ bacon. (It’s all coming back to me now as a savory “taste memory.”) That Tuesday, however, I think I ordered some sort of fake turkey club (as you’ve probably deduced, Tiny’s specializes in a lot of veggie versions of “classic” deli/comfort fare). The sandwich, according to the menu, comes topped with some sort of alfalfa sprouts.
After I ordered, the guy behind the counter sheepishly beckoned me over and apologetically said, “Hey, is it okay if there’re no sprouts on your sandwich? It’s been a tough day and the delivery truck didn’t get through today.”
What an odd thing to apologize for and what a very understated way of describing the day. But, in a way, apologizing for the sprouts and stating with no apparent emotion that it’s been a bad day calmed me, steadied me. Maybe his statement affected me because he was the first person to assess the situation verbally to me. To look at the mess we were in and say something about it.
Everything that had happened that day had just been stunned silence and a stilted discussion of practical things. Can I get home to my apartment? What about Erin, marching east into Brooklyn? Should we donate blood? Where? What’ll happen next? What’s happening?
We got our Tiny’s to go and headed home. We stopped at a mom & pop video store. We rented some sort of saccharine women’s movie; the selection epitomizing my need to puddy over the doubts, questions, and fears of the day’s tragedy with someone else’s fictional woes.
I fell asleep watching the movie. Was Holly Hunter in it? I have no idea. I think the phone startled me awake. It was a call from my work, snaking through an ad hoc phone chain our bosses had set up based simply on who had someone else’s phone number. It was Ellen, my co-worker. Ellen worked in Marketing at the publishing house, not in my department but over my years there, we had become good friends. Talk about a driven person. Whew!
Ellen lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, and told me about her struggle that day along the West Side highway to get a lift north on some sort of flatbed truck. She was calling from home but the journey had taken her hours and had been taxing. While I was thinking of sprouts, she was forging the Hudson River.
She said there would be no work the next day as the police wanted people to stay put and many areas on Manhattan Island south of 14th Street were without power.
I can’t remember who I passed this message on to but I did so stoically, no one really exclaiming anything akin to “Fuck! What the hell is happening? Those people were crushed, vaporized, pulverized in those towers! What’s happening? Are we gonna even make it through the night?!?” We just tentatively said good-bye. Calmly. I remember having these phone conversations within our snug bedroom, a room just big enough for our full-sized bed, sun-faded curtains, and some dirty clothes.
We had a pretty good-sized window in that room or perhaps it only seemed large relative to the tinyness of the room. I remember staring blankly out the window as I sat listless on the bed, legs intertwined Indian style, not ready to let myself start feeling again.
We went to bed unceremoniously that night. Just kind of stopped moving until our eyelids met and formed a soft seal. Our breath slowed to a steady rmmm.
The next morning my ex must have woken up before me. I left the bedroom and headed out to our narrow runway of a living room. He had the TV on and was watching Guiliani speak. This was when we still thought people might have survived within the towers. This is when we still hoped there’d be survivors.
Guiliani said something simple like, “It’s the next day and we’re still here.” That comforted me as I didn’t know if we’d make it through the night as we drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
Living pretty far south but, thankfully much east of the site that became known as Ground Zero, our air was bad but not stifling. My ex and I decided to leave the apartment that Wednesday after eating something and venture to Central Park where the trees and grass would filter the air and insulate us or so we thought.
As we walked a few feet north on our street, Attorney, to where it intersects with Houston, we noticed police and barricades. Before we passed the policeman, he asked if we lived on this block. We said yes and he advised, “If I were you, I’d take my ID with me cuz we’re not letting anyone back onto this block who can’t prove they’re supposed to be here.”
We headed back to the apartment to fetch some sort of ID. Having just moved in on September 1, we didn’t have the apartment’s address on either of our licenses. In fact, I still had my Pennsylvania ID. In order to connect us with this place, the only thing we had was our lease. ConEd hadn’t even billed us yet.
Off we went, IDs and lease in hand. We hadn’t walked too far before we saw a young woman jogging in place as she waited to cross the street. I run for exercise and have run in many places, through tons of storms, in the midst of personal troubles and what not since I was 12 but something about this woman jogging in place, impatient for the light to change, made me cringe.
I wasn’t thinking of her personal safety being imperiled by the gritty air nor how her running would prompt her body to gulp in more of it than the rest of us; I just didn’t like how what she was doing was so “everyday,” so run-of-the-mill on a very exceptional day.
Many people who were at that place at that moment looked at her askance as I did, I noticed as I swiveled to survey the scene. All of this took place in probably less than a minute but a policeman who was nearby approached her and started speaking to her. She snatched the iPod earbuds out of her ears to hear what the officer was saying. I couldn’t catch all of his words but I could tell that he had told her to stop running because she immediately stopped trotting in place and stood, ashamed and motionless on the sidewalk.
He must have cautioned her about the air quality although something in his face and body movements made me think that he too felt that what she was doing wasn’t appropriate. It’s like the anthropologist cum Buddhist monk, Colin Turnbull, who, when studying the Ik in Uganda in the midst of a famine during which many of their people were starving, would take to his VW bus to eat. He was hungry, he wanted to eat, but he was ashamed. Is it the same sort of thing? Is the parallel there? It’s like, me jogging in the sludge in the wooden Belarussian village of Syndin to burn off excess calories that many of the village’s denizens would be thrilled to have. Something’s not right. The contrast is discomforting and borderline grotesque. After this, I did my running for the next few weeks almost exclusively on a treadmill at the old McBurney YMCA on Chelsea’s 23rd Street.
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