NINE/ELEVEN

Remembering A City Under Siege

It began like a pretty good day. Gorgeous September day, almost exactly like today in New York. Bright sun, warm but not hot, little humidity. I had a job that I had started a year earlier, the first full-time, salary-man position in the five years since I had taken a buyout when new corporate management shut down New York Newsday in 1995, the rising city edition of the superb suburban newspaper at which I'd started 20 years earlier.

The job was at Editor & Publisher, the flagship weekly trade magazine of the newspaper industry. It was top of the line, and always profitable because it owned the newspaper classified franchise. Since college I read E&P and its classifieds, page after page after page of jobs available at newspapers all over the country, all over the world. You could read these ads and decide where you wanted to work, if a small paper in a small town, or a reputable paper in a middle sized town, appealed to your wanderlust, or just your imagination: in the 20th century, newspaper people could be a transient lot, and if you had burned out in Cleveland, there was a pretty good paper in Hilton Head, S.C., to try.

The magazine was at 770 Broadway at East Ninth Street, a felicitous location, the border of the East and West Village. There was a bounty of bookstores, new and used record shops, restaurants and bars. I had gotten to know them well again a few years earlier, when I had been given a fellowship for a master's degree from NYU's graduate school of journalism, in a division that could not have been more to my liking: Cultural Reporting and Criticism, a new section started by Ellen Willis, the late feminist writer, thinker, inconoclast, and rock critic. Since I was 47 years old when I entered the program, with 25 years of experience, I understood the blueprint for the program, the teachers were familiar with my work at New York Newsday, and I was not at all self-conscious at being a generation older than my fellow students.

I was never a morning person, never worked a nine-to-five job, though E&P was roughly that. I usually was accommodated by working 10 am to 6 pm. I was an associate editor at E&P, part of a solid staff of 16. Many were specialists, but I was kind of a feature generalist, with one busy beat: how print newspapers were adapting to the new online world. (The answer, in short, was not well.) Web sites were primitive, graphic design limited, ideas for how to keep readers who had fallen in love with their computers unruly and ambitious: One Sunday newspaper in a midsized midwestern city decided to include a CD-Rom of that day's publication along with home delivery of the print edition, in case readers wanted that option. But newspapers had already begun giving away their news for free online, and the business was stumbling towards extinction.

My commute from northeast Queens was done by Express Bus, "express" often being a serious misnomer. It could take an hour or more to get to my office, getting on the bus at my corner, having a few more pickups, and then taking the Long Island Expressway through the Midtown Tunnel across 34th Street. Usually, I'd get off at either Third Avenue or Madison Avenue, and take the 6 train from Park Avenue and 33rd Street to Astor Place/Eighth Street.

I took the 8:48 AM express bus, which certainly would get me in by 10 AM. I was particularly pleased with myself that morning, since for the first time in a number of years, I had a high-profile piece of music writing published: My review of Bob Dylan's "'Love and Theft'" had posted just after midnight on its release date, September 11, 2001, on MSNBC.com, aka MSNBC On the Internet. I became a contract writer for this new online news hybrid between Microsft and NBC (there was no MSNBC TV channel yet) almost since it began circa 1995, writing essays about family life in a column called Raising Daddy. I hadn't been writing about music for MSNBC, but I had a copy of the album that their assigned reviewer didn't. I was ready for the assignment, since my independent study at NYU was intermittent conversation with the author and educator Todd Gitlin about the 19th century roots of American popular culture featuring a text I had chosen, the Eric Lott book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993).

After our last pickup on the Express Bus, it was taking longer than usual to merge onto the Long Island Expressway. There weren't many people on the bus, and this was before the widespread use of cell phones. People had Blackberries in those days, but one guy on the bus had a radio, and said a plane had hit a tower at the World Trade Center. People figured, wow, unfortunate accident. We imagined it was something like a news helicopter or single engine private plane, but as the vista to downtown opened up near College Point Boulevard, the black smoke indicated no small accident.

The bus driver turned up the instructions from the dispatcher. The first message was that the Midtown Tunnel was not moving, and to stand by for instructions about alternate routes. Then, the announcement that the tunnel was closed. Then, for the driver to get off the L.I.E. and offer to drop passengers at the nearest subway station.

Then the second plane hit the second tower. The driver was told to get off the expressway, and to take the passengers who wanted to go home back to their original stops. No one would be getting into the city that day.

My wife had been in a meeting at the Department of Education (DOE) building that day on Linden Place in Queens, about three miles from our home. She was going to leave to pick up the kids at school, but her mother had already gone to PS 209 to her house. I was back at home, talking to the office at Editor & Publisher. I had a TV near my computer, so I had an assignment: To write an essay about how the internet, newspapers, and TV covered this monumental tragedy, the strength and weakness of each medium's coverage. It wasn't really a fair comparison, since TV had the cameras, the repeated, incomprehensible shots of the World Trade Center buildings, which dominated the lower Manhattan landscape, exploding into fire, collapsing, and melting, and long view shots of what seemed like debris falling out of broken windows. The mind reeled, and reeled again, when it was clear that what was escaping from those windows were human beings jumping to their deaths.

But it is the days and weeks that followed that stayed with me most. A few days later when it was OK to enter Manhattan, there was an eerie quiet, and when the wind blew from the south, a smell unlike any other, for weeks and weeks. There were phone conversations and emails and meeting for drinks with people one had not seen for a while. Everyone I knew felt terribly lonely.

            Everything was gray, it was limp and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else, under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin. --Don DeLillo, Falling Man

I remember the bus being stopped every morning and evening before we entered the Midtown Tunnel. Armed soldiers entered, walked down the aisle, looked around, and exited, waving the bus on. It was uncertain what they were looking for, or if they would know it when they saw it. But for many weeks, I could not go through that tunnel without thinking of a suicide bomber on any bus, car, or truck, trapping hundreds or thousands with no means of escape. (It was only somewhat reassuring that there were officials visible inside the tunnel, near exit doors, ready to lead evacuations in case of such an event.)

Relief upon getting through the tunnel was only temporary. On the streets, every few blocks, were large posters with hundreds of photos and names of the "missing." Hopeful families had posted pictures of those who had not come home from the World Trade Center that day, clinging to the hope that their loved ones were wandering around somewhere, in an amnesiac daze. The soldiers and National Guardsmen and police officers gathered at every corner, long guns and automatic rifles at the ready. One remembers reading about the long line of ambulances that raced towards the World Trade Center that day, sirens blaring, ready to take survivors to local hospitals. They mostly sat empty.

The sound of the city had been altered: there was no music, no laughter in the streets, or behind closed doors. There was a Hugh Hefner roast at the Friar's Club, the venerable lair of old school comedians, a few days after 9/11, and Gilbert Gottfried launched into what legend describes as the dirtyest long joke ever told: "The Aristocrats." Gottfried was pilloried: Too soon!

            But it wasn't "The Aristocrats" that had the crowd of comics offended. In The Vulture's "Good One Podcast" two years ago, Gottfried says he opened with:

“I have to leave early tonight. I have to catch a flight to L.A. I couldn’t get a direct flight. We have to make a stop at the Empire State Building.” And forget it. I lost an audience bigger than anybody has ever lost an audience. People were booing and hissing. One guy yelled out, “Too soon,” which I thought meant I didn’t take a long enough pause between the setup and the punch line."

Many these last few days are talking about writing about Mike Piazza's home run at Shea Stadium against the Atlanta Braves on September 21, 2001, when baseball returned to New York for the first time since the attacks. Something about the crack of the bat, the distance of the home run, Piazza’s stature as Mets’ leader, the need for something to cheer about, the fact that the stands and the field were full of invited families of the fallen, the tributes to the NYPD and FDNY. It was a great moment; it will be played and replayed on TV all weekend.

But for music? I had gotten used to the sound of bagpipes, traditionally played at police and fire department funerals. Every day for almost year, another fireman's funeral, so many in my neighborhood, which had once been populated by city employees who by law had to live inside the city limits. Firemen, cops, and teachers. When I first heard live music after 9/11, the sound, the time, and the place took me by surprise. I sent an email to Greil Marcus, who was kind enough to put my message into one of his Real Life Rock columns, then for Salon, now collected in book form:

10) Wayne Robins writes:

"20 Oct: I'm riding the subway this afternoon down from Times Square. Three black men with plenty of mileage on them get on unobtrusively at 34th St. One of them says to a woman in a loud voice: "Ma'am, do you know what time it is?" The elderly man sitting across from me looks at his watch and yells back, 'One o'clock.' 'No!' one of the trio shouts gleefully. 'It's doo-wop time!' At which time the three men begin singing one of the most beautiful a cappella versions of 'In the Still of the Night' I've ever heard. As I reach into my wallet to put a dollar in the contribution bag, I realize my face feels turned inside out from smiling. It was the happiest I've been for 60 seconds in the last five weeks."

Twenty years later, we still mourn. We have to be our own Mike Piazzas, sing the Five Satins' "In the Still of the Night" for each other, try to be the country that, for just a few days, did not turn on each other. That stayed together even when faced with a pandemic of pain that for those who lost loved ones, never goes away.