I was at home in Brooklyn Heights, getting ready for my third day of grad school at NYU. I was brushing my teeth when I heard on the radio that a small plane had hit the WTC. Turned on the TV, saw the gaping hole in the North Tower, thought how awful it looked for a commuter plane, and got my books together to leave the house, planning on stopping on the Promenade to see for myself what was going on at the Towers, which dominated the view from the Brooklyn Promenade.
As I walked toward the Promenade, I heard a tremendous hollow “thud.” The windows in the building I was passing were leaded, and I remember hearing them shake. This sounds melodramatic, but the closest I can come to describing the sound is the sound a kneeler makes when it hits the floor in an empty Cathedral, amplified by ten. The sound scared me, so I turned away from the Promenade, thinking that there had been some kind of explosion in the tower that was hit by the plane. Then I got my courage back up, walked to the Promenade, and saw both Towers engulfed in flames.
I think my brain stopped working rationally at that point. I turned to one of the hundred of people on the Promenade and asked him if the fire had somehow jumped buildings. He told me that they had all seen the second plane.
People always say that it looked like a scene from a movie; when you were there live it didn’t look like a movie at all. No special effects techie ever thought about all the paper in our major office buildings. The massive amounts of paper being sucked out of the flaming buildings, just floating southeast on the pitch black smoke against a deep blue sky, is still my most vivid memory of that day.
I called my parents to tell them that I had been running late for school — had I not been running late, I would have been on the N/R subway about a block away from the Trade Center when the first plane hit — and told them that I was going to come home to their house on Long Island when they told me that the Pentagon had just been hit as well. I jumped on a subway, thinking in my frazzled state that it was heading east toward the Long Island Rail Road station. But I had gotten on the wrong line, and it was headed west. The trains were, at that point, still running into Manhattan. Luckily, the trains stopped about 2 minutes after I got on, and everyone was told to get out of the subway, that the subway was closed.
So I went to a law officein downtown Brooklyn where I used to work, and where a vague acquaintance from law school still worked. I was in their conference room when I heard screams from the lawyers upstairs. There was one window in the building that we always used to gather around to watch the Twin Towers get hit by lightning during thunderstorms, and a bunch of attorneys had gathered around that window. They were screaming because the first tower had fallen. Twenty minutes later I heard them shouting “They’re gone! They’re gone!” when the second tower fell. We went upstairs, and the window through which we used to watch the Towers had a view of only sky - and the grey smoke billowing up.
Several minutes later, we had a light dust shower as the particles from the tower collapse descended on Brooklyn. It wasn’t has heavy where we were as it was in other places in Brooklyn, but it did pass over our neighbhorhood. And then another lawyer from Long Island offered to take those of us heading to LI home in his car.
We couldn’t get on the highway, so we drove on the surface streets, and I remember seeing the massive exodus of dust-covered people coming over the bridge and walking to the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Flatbush. I curse the LIRR every day of my life, but God bless em that day they never stopped running and they got people home.
I went out to my parents house for a week, NYU having been shut down for the rest of the week, and when I returned to Brooklyn the Sunday after 9/11 I could smell the acrid smell that lingered in the air for the next month whenever the wind was blowing in a certain direction. I got used to taking subways that slowed down and crept through the Cortlandt Street station, which was shut down for a year after the attacks, and was kept in a state of semi-darkness, but someone had managed within the first few days to tack a large American flag on the tile wall of the station. I never got used to the military jets that would occassionally fly overhead, and nearly died of fright when one buzzed Brooklyn at 4am in the morning one day, rattling the windows in my apartment.
And to this day, I hope that when our government does find Bin Laden, they cut off his genitals, wrap them with pork, stick them in his mouth, and string him up still alive at the WTC site, and everyone who was touched by 9/11 can beat that bastard with a NY Yankee baseball bat until all that remains is a bloody pulp, covered in bacon grease.
You were there, but hopefully outside of harm, thank goodness. America was reeling by the time you were a witness. I will never forget. The rage can be inspired on a moments notice.