For Kenneth Van Auken and Jeff Hardy
I grew up listening every day to the body counts on the news, and staring at the glow of the Empire State Building out my bedroom window every night. Green lights flooded the building on St. Patrick’s Day; red on Valentine’s Day; red, white, and blue on July 4th; it was shrouded in black when the city was in mourning, which was a lot in the 1960s.
On Halloween night in 1968, the year that the Marine captain who lived down our street didn’t come home to visit his mother, my friends and I sat in my bedroom and listened to War of the Worlds for the first time. Most of us could tell, by the dull crackle of the broadcast, that it was a hoax. But my next door neighbor, hearing the world faintly crumble around him as his parents talked about Kennedy and Chicago, and the War, and King around the dinner table every night, thought it was real: Phillip, an adenoidal, portly eight year old built a lot like Piggy from Lord of the Flies turned off my tiny brown Xenith transistor radio, and, staring out my window, wondered out loud if they’ll blow up the Empire State Building.
He pushed his thick plastic glasses up matter-of-factly as he lay on my comforter, his abundant chins resting on the back of his hands.
His older brother sat up and smacked him on the back of the head.
They can’t, you moron. This is New York City.
But at some unfathomable place deep inside us, filed somewhere between irrational childhood nightmares and a paralyzing worry about the creature under the bed, we all wondered the same thing.
Could they?
I was born in Manhattan and lived in New York City for 34 years; I felt safe for every one of those 34 years. I loved the city, and I never thought I’d ever leave it. I imagined its place in the world along the lines of that famous Steinberg cartoon that puts it at the center of the universe, and all of its provinces (like New Jersey and Kansas) in the background. Eventually, though, I did leave, moving to Connecticut for that age-old reason that makes people do all sorts of interesting things: love. I also moved for a job that worked out terribly, that lasted, ironically, for nine months, and that got progressively worse and more nauseating towards the end of my third trimester. I left New York behind me in the way that a young wife, desperately in love with her new husband and wanting to begin her life, weeps for what she must leave behind in order to begin her future. But no matter where she goes or how old she gets, she will always be the child of her parents. No matter where I go, I’ll always be a New Yorker.
My leaving the city coincided with the snowiest winter that Connecticut had had in years. Driving back and forth, 80 miles every day from Litchfield to my office in Fairfield county and back again, I had sharp moments of wondering whether or not I’d done the right thing, leaving my friends, my family, my home, for love. I was safe in New York, alone as I was, in my cramped, dark apartment in a building filled with hundreds of other similarly alone New Yorkers just like me. I wasn’t out on the roads in blinding snowstorms, or driving large distances every day on an interstate packed with maniacal, angry drivers. I walked to work in Manhattan, every day for eighteen years.
The most terrifying thing that ever happened to me was getting stuck in an elevator one night when I was leaving my office; there had been a fire drill that afternoon in response to a heightened security alert a few days before, likewise, in response to our publishing Newt Gingrich’s autobiography. For some reason, I didn’t panic. Instead, I pulled out my cell phone, called my local Chinese food takeout place, and had Szechuan chicken and dumplings waiting for me in my lobby when I finally got home. The next day, sitting in my office on the 18th floor amidst manuscripts and books, looking out at the gothic spires of St Patrick’s Cathedral, I remembered that Halloween night in 1968 and our response to what we thought were Phillip’s young paranoid ravings: Nothing could ever happen here. Even after Oklahoma City, even after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, I continued to feel safe, as most Americans, certainly, as most New Yorkers, did. I was a frequent Amtrak rider, a constant subway rider, a Long Island Railroad rider, a Greyhound bus taker, an unenthusiastic but nevertheless regular flyer, and looking back, the biggest risk I ever took in my life as a New Yorker, oddly, was leaving New York.
In late 2000, I moved to a rural area with a population of around 3,500 mostly Republican, mostly Polish Catholic conservatives, the kind of people who make my mother nervous, the kind of hard workers who haven’t been to the city in years and don’t necessarily care if they ever see it again.
As a New Yorker in their midst, I knew that I would always be looked on as being different to them. Perceived with gross suspicion as coarse malcontents who tell the truth perhaps a bit too often and maybe a bit too directly, New Yorkers were not to be trusted. We talk funny, maybe a bit too much, maybe too loudly. We wear too much black, we’re too damned smart for our own good; we have no patience, we have an edge; we have no time. We tend to be neurotic. We don’t take crap from anyone, ever. We’re not particularly well-liked, as a group. We are outsiders.
On the morning of September 11th, as I unsuccessfully searched my office for a radio or a television or a computer with a sound card so that I could hear what was happening to my former home, I once again found myself on the outside: after trying to reach my family while simultaneously fighting off a befuddled panic at the fact that the unthinkable was happening — had happened — I raced down my office hallway, past a lineup of colleagues who watched my terror from the safe vantage point of emotional, professional, and geographical detachment. I drove home to Litchfield at eighty miles an hour, watched the news, slack-jawed, in tears; and from a distance of nearly 200 miles, I felt the bitter gnash of survivor’s guilt that only a person caught between two different homes can feel.
Less than a week later, just as I was beginning to make it beyond page two of the newspaper every day, my company and I came to a parting of the ways, and I found myself shaken off my foundation once again. As I reeled from the terror and violence that filled the news; as more mind-numbing stories came in about last phone calls from planes and offices; as the television played the attacks over and over again and we relived them over and over again from a variety of different angles; as I realized I’d lost three people I knew well and countless others I didn’t; as my stepbrother told us how he, at more than 240 pounds, ran down steps and steps and more steps so that he could see his family again; as it began to sink in that, no, we’re not safe in New York City, I found myself feeling guilty about going on with my day-to-day and the frivolities of worrying about my job when I had my life, and my family had theirs, and thousands of others now had neither. I had something new to grieve over and worry about, even as I realized that the fact of danger–the creature under the bed–was not only real, but living with us, every single day.
On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I didn’t want my mother anywhere near Penn Station or Port Authority, and so I drove in to New York to pick her up and bring her back to Connecticut for a dinner of brisket, vegetables, and the traditional apples and honey that offer the promise of a sweet New Year. As I traveled down Route 4 towards the interstate, petrified about my own reaction to the city once I saw it for the first time since the attack, I drove through one of the most conservative parts of the state. Every house, storefront, car, and bank flew a flag. At the corner of the road, on a lawn across from the local Agway, someone had placed a sign that I last saw in the 1970s, that was as familiar a sight then as the World Trade Center: I ♥ NEW YORK.
And I realized, for the first time since I left it that I wasn’t that far from home; in fact, I was just around the corner.
October 2001
