The Coalition of the Swilling

I picked him up at his hotel at 7:30 or so and we caught the 7:55 ferry out of Highlands, which is tucked in behind Sandy Hook, bound for Manhattan. Gosh, did I mention it was a glorious day? We sat on the roof of the ferry, laughing and joking on the cell phone with friends in Brazil as we sped along at 35 knots, the breeze rippling across our clothes. As we neared going under the Verrazano Bridge my friend said "That plane is awfully low."

And so indeed it was, crossing the mouth of the harbor from west to east at a slow, leisurely pace and turning up the East river. But then we saw another jet follow it a few minutes later and I thought, well, if there were two planes then the controllers must be routing them that way because of the wind. One can rationalize anything, at least then. And yes, I've seen all the diagrams and maps of how the various experts say the planes flew that day and none of them mention this, but that's what I saw.

We got to my office on the very end of Maiden Lane around 8:45 or so. I started looking through my emails and the first one I always read was from my friend Sylvia San Pio, who was a coffee broker at Carr Futures. Her husband, John Resta, also worked at Carr. They had gotten married in August of 2000, and man did we have a blast at their wedding. Sylvia was seven months pregnant with their first child, a boy they were going to name Dylan. I would always kid her that she was condemning him to a life of whiskey drinking, and she would laugh and say that at least they'd get some good poetry out of him.

Carr Futures was on the 92nd floor of the North Tower.

Flight 11 hit the 94th floor.

A few minutes after the first plane hit word came out that a plane had crashed into the WTC. That's all we heard. Since the weather was so perfect we knew it wasn't an accident; I figured some guy in a Piper Cub had committed suicide, as none of the initial reports said 'airliner'.

I remember when the Mets (yes, the Mets) won the World Series in 1986. I worked in an office on Lower Broadway at the time, so I got to see the ticker tape parade from our windows. And at that late date, as the computer era was just starting to take hold it was still ticker tape; that, and all those millions of tiny paper dots that that all the multitudinous Telex machines that were in every office had produced. Fine, fine particles of paper cascading slowly down, like the crystalline snow you get on a January day when the temperature is in the low teens.

As I looked out the window on September 11th I saw it snowing again.

Except this time instead of small paper bits it was entire sheets of paper, whole sheets of deals and agreements and lives fluttering about like the first fat flakes on a Fall day.

We turned on the small portable tv in the office and saw pictures of the smoke pouring out of the towers just a few block away. I had tried to call Sylvia but had gotten only a busy signal, which for some reason I took as a positive sign. Then the tv signal went blank, and we got word that a second plane had hit the South Tower. One of the oddities of that day is that the huge tv antenna was on the North Tower, but we only lost the signal when the South Tower was hit.

Anyhow, by this point the phone lines were a mess and the internet had gotten extremely overloaded, piggish and slow; the only way I was able to get any outside information (aside from the radio) was when I could get a line to Tree Hugging Sister in Pensacola, who would then tell me what the tv was saying. No one had any idea what was going on. Obviously, there had been multible hijackings, but whether it was 3 or 30 no one, least of all the media, knew. I truly want unedited transcripts of the broadcasts of, say, CNN and Newsradio88 from 8 am until, oh, 5 pm or so from that day. I think it is a critical piece of our history, to show the evolution from bliss to fear to resolve.

I leaned out my window and looked up Maiden Lane at the two beautiful smoking towers that had always seemed so strong and sure. The paper continued to flutter down.

I called my wife in her car and got a hold of her on the Garden State Parkway as she was driving to work. I said "Honey, don't worry; I'm ok". I could tell by the tone of her "Uh, ok, I'm glad" reply that she had no ideas what was going on (the KC and the Sunshine Band I heard blaring in the backround was another clue that I picked up upon). "Turn on the radio," I said, "Planes have crashed into the World Trade Center."

I really can't recall when we started using the word "terrorist" that day, much as I can't recall a day since when I haven't used it, but it certainly gained prominence early on in the many reports, many of which were false, that were broadcast during the day of explosions and crashes about the country.

We sat in our office wondering what to do. Obviously no work was possible, as our market was in the WTC and had been evacuated. Thousands of people were milling about in the street below staring mutely at the glorious towers as they burned and belched out thick columns of black smoke and rained paper down upon everyone and everything.

What could we do? What should we do? As we nervously looked at the tall green skyscraper across the street we hadn't a clue. How would we get home? Hell, would we get home? We had no idea.

And then I heard incredibly high pitched screams of terror from the street. I ran to the open window and looked up the street. I saw people sprinting frantically towards the river, running a desperate race to escape this huge roiling khaki-colored cloud that was bursting down the street between the Federal Reserve Castle and the Chase building. I shouted for everyone in the office to close the windows, and they did so just in time, for immediately the cloud enveloped us in its dark dusty shroud of fear. Where seconds before one could literally have seen for miles one could now not see a foot through a mantle barely illumined by a diffuse gray/green/khaki glow that eliminated all reference points. We were isolated. Alone.

The radio crackled that the South Tower had collapsed. Dear God. And just as the air was clearing it happened again as the North Tower fell. Shock and numbness doesn't begin to describe how we were or whay we felt. We assumed that thousands were dead, and we saw thousands more shuffling about in the street, ash covered and heading ever north and east like so many souls on Judgement Day.

There seemed little point in leaving just then: where would we go? So we waited. Eventually the air cleared and we could see that the ferries were loading people for the trip back to the Highlands, so I grabbed a pack of coffee filters and handed them out to people to use as a mask (my only useful act of the day. Well, that and the many bottles of wine I opened that night at home).

I can't say I've ever been sadder than on that ride home, retracing our happy path of the morning, only this time the brilliant blue sky was marred by an enormous black cloud that headed up and south east out over the harbor.

The usual crowd from the morning was missing many members, lost in the ruins, and they had been replaced by scores of people, many ash-covered from head to toe, all dazed and uncomprehending, who had gotten on the boat simply to get away.

My Brazilian friend ended up staying an extra week until he was able to get a flight back home.

With regard to Sylvia, John and Dylan...

all that was ever recovered were a few of John's teeth.