Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He's Learned, How He's Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget (10 page)

There was no cover except for parked cars. I looked for one higher off the ground. I saw what looked like a welder’s truck, and I made a beeline for it. I cut right in front of someone to get to it. I don’t know who it was. I didn’t know where John was. All I knew was this stuff, this tornado of debris and crap, was literally
at my heels. I felt it. I had no choices left. I threw my torso under the truck with my feet hanging out curbside.

As I lay under the truck, a wave of dust and debris washed over me, consuming every free space of air. I braced myself for impact, for pain, for whatever would happen to me. The debris blew over me, pounding and nicking against the metal truck. People were screaming. Someone landed on top of me, on my backside and legs. Were they alive? I called out, but there was no answer. And then everything went black—completely black. I couldn’t breathe. I was gasping from running, so I needed air. I took a breath. It was like sucking ash from a fireplace. It choked me. It was like being underwater. I took tiny breaths, but that was no use either. All the air was gone. A minute ago it was a beautiful, clear day; and now I could not see my hand in front of my face. I couldn’t see any detail of anything. Just blackness.

This is the time I’d rather forget. This was my bottom. My mind jumped from one dark corner to another.
I’m in one piece, but I can’t breathe and I can’t see. No one knows where I am. None of my family. Not Joy. I can’t be here. How will they look for me? How would they find me?
I wasn’t accepting my own death yet. But brief and terrifying thoughts flashed in my head about things that could happen that I had no control over. My means of survival were cut off. Just like at the stairwell, I was stuck. I was at a total loss. I couldn’t run. Even if I could run, where to? It was pitch black! Mentally I tiptoed along the fine line of refusing to give in and fearing that something could hit me that I didn’t see coming. I hated the idea that nobody knew where I was and no one I knew was around. It was an empty feeling.
Is this how it ends? Alone?
I started blaming myself. I was too nonchalant when I got out of the building. I should’ve said, “We got her in the ambulance, now let’s get the hell out of here.”
What was I
thinking? If I had just gotten out of there then, I’d be farther away. I’d be out of this danger.

I searched for my old voice again.
Try to stay calm
.
Get back in survival mode. Get rational.
I still couldn’t breathe.
What
can
you do
?
OK, I’m in a fire, with smoke. You’re not supposed to breathe it in. Stay low. Stay calm. Wait to breathe again
. I called out for John with a short breath. “John!” I thought maybe it was him who landed on me. I wanted to know if he, whoever he was, was OK.

He didn’t answer. I said it again. “Hey, Johnny?” No answer. “Hey, Johnny?” Still no answer. I was thinking maybe he was dead or unconscious. Then I heard a strong, steady voice. “Just stay down,” the voice said. “It’ll pass. Just stay down.” The voice was right. The blackness started to dissipate. It went from black to dark gray, but I still didn’t move from under that truck. I tried to stay calm and hold my breath for as long as I could.

Then I heard someone call out, “Mike … Ben! Hey, Mike?” It was John, coughing uncontrollably. He got up way too soon. But he was behind a van where people were pulling at him and grabbing him, saying, “Help me, I’m dying.” He had to get away from there.

The person that landed on me turned out to be a firemen. He was aiming for the same spot under the truck, but I got there first. But he got his head down under the truck, lying on top of me. He was the one to tell me it would pass. He got up, tapped my back, and said, “Attaboy, you’ll be OK.
We’re
OK.”

I was under that truck for only a few minutes, but it felt like a lot longer. Still on all fours, I put my hand up to signal John. I couldn’t speak because I had all this crap in my throat. John was wearing something over his face. I didn’t want to touch my face because I thought it might make things worse.

A rescue worker seemed to be coming toward me. He had a helmet on and an oxygen tank on his back. I was down on my
hands and knees, coughing this stuff out of my lungs. I looked up wide-eyed at the rescue worker. Somebody pointed to me and yelled, “This guy needs oxygen!”

The rescue worker looked at me, but there was nothing behind his eyes. The poor guy was walking around in shock. He didn’t give me any oxygen. He didn’t give anyone any oxygen. He walked toward me with a vacant expression. I looked at him, and I didn’t really care about the oxygen. I understood. God knows what he went through.

I stood up. John was OK. I was OK. We started to walk away.

When you watch the video of me trying to outrun the imploding North Tower, you can clearly see from a wider perspective the tremendous force of dust and rubble that knocked people down. You’ll see people literally flying, blown in the air across the street. Seeing that, I realize how close I was. Anything could have happened. I could’ve been mortally wounded in any number of ways. I could’ve gotten knocked forward and slammed my head into a fire hydrant or a car or whatever, and I’d be dead. I could have gotten pinned down under that truck, knocked unconscious and suffocated in the blackness. I could have simply tripped while running and never even made it to shelter of any kind. Who knows? I think of the people during the tsunami in Asia who were able to somehow survive the initial catastrophic tidal wave and were strong enough to handle the floodwaters but were killed by a snakebite. On 9/11 it didn’t matter that I was fast or strong or alert. I was lucky. That’s all it was.

We looked for water. The Red Cross had set up an emergency outpost truck in the middle of the West Side Highway, less than one hundred yards north of where I dove for cover. They stopped
us, sat us down, and gave us some water. Many people stopped there. We couldn’t sit still. As we walked away, heading north, a woman who identified herself as a
New York Times
reporter started interviewing us. We must’ve looked like good subjects because the entire exteriors of our bodies—our clothes, hands, hair, and face were covered with ash and dust. A Hasidic man approached us, looking annoyed. He saw the way we looked and that nobody was helping us, yet this woman was pushing for an interview. He interrupted the interview. “Come over here,” he said to me. He pulled me aside. He grabbed a bottle of water, washed out my eyes, and cleaned my face. I don’t know who this man was, but if I saw him today, I’d give him a big, big hug. What a moment of perspective. He saw me. He saw that I obviously just came out of the mess. I’ve got crap all over my face. The man thinks,
Why doesn’t someone help him clean up because as you can see, he can’t do it for himself?
So he took the time to wash my face. It was a pure, kind, humane act—seeking nothing but the act itself.
Kindness.
In fact, it was the first time anyone had extended physical aid to me since I first felt the explosion on the 81st floor. And for the first time since the beginning of it all, I dropped my need for control and allowed someone else to offer me direction and aid.

The reporter continued with her interview. I got annoyed too, a little, but she was the first one to tell us anything.

The reporter asked, “Do you know what’s going on?” We said no.

I didn’t know either of the Towers had imploded. Even when I was running for my life and then dove under the truck, my mind was only thinking,
Survive, get out of this.
Now I learned that both towers were gone.

I thought back to just moments earlier when I had gotten out of the building. I didn’t really see the South Tower, did I?
I thought at the time that it was simply hard to see well with all the dust and debris and the smoke. Maybe it was just where I was standing at the time, I thought, so I wasn’t able to see the South Tower. I certainly wasn’t associating the façade debris I saw with a completely imploded South Tower. And nobody down near where we were—so close to the site—was talking about the South Tower imploding.

The reporter continued her explanation. There were “acts of terrorism.” She said she thought there was one or two more hijacked planes still up in the air, unaccounted for.

This altered my entire perspective.
This was an attack on our country, and we’re still not safe because there are two more planes up there?

My mind was racing.
I’ve got to find people. I have to talk to my family. I have to talk to Joy. I’ve got to make sure everybody is OK.
I still couldn’t entirely grasp what kinds of planes did this or what had really happened.

We needed to find phones. We left the reporter and continued walking along the West Side Highway to a sanitation building, four blocks from the site. People were constantly stopping and staring at us. We were a mess. We were covered in soot and partially wet, thanks to the kind man who washed our faces. We looked like we’d literally been through hell, if hell was covered in gray ash. The sanitation workers said we could use their bathrooms. What we really wanted was their office phones because our cell phones weren’t working. That was fine with them. John and I sat at desks on different sides of their office and dialed.

I called my parents. I couldn’t get through. John got through to his parents, and I heard him sob, getting bits and pieces of information to them.

On the third try, I got through. My brother, Angelo, picked up.

“Michael?” I heard a tinge of desperation and relief in his voice.

“Anj, it’s me.”

“Michael, are you OK?”

I could hear him, but he couldn’t hear me too well.

“Michael,” he spoke slowly and deliberately. “
ARE YOU OK
?”

“
I’M FINE
.”

I faintly heard a cheer in the background. Then it hit me. I was overcome with emotion. I did everything I could to hold back from pouring my emotions out all over the sanitation office floor. If I kept the conversation going, I would lose it.

“Anj, I’m fine. I’ll call you right back.”

The last time my family heard from me was when I called my dad from the 55th floor at approximately 9:15 a.m. I told him then I’d call when I got out. In the meantime, they saw both towers go down. They couldn’t get in touch because cell phones didn’t have signals. My tower, the North Tower, went down at 10:28 a.m., and I did not call them until about forty minutes later. God knows what they went through. Forty minutes became an eternity.

But what’s forty minutes? So many people did not know the fate of their loved ones for hours, days. And today, for many— far too many—there’s still no word, no finality, just speculation, absence, and utter loss.

It was around 11:15 a.m. when I hung up with my brother.

I called Joy next; I got through. “Hey sweets” was all we got out before the phone went dead. But she got it. She knew I was OK. And I knew that the most important people in my life knew I was OK.

No sooner had we walked out the door of the sanitation building than we saw a mob of people running toward us up the West Side Highway. Emergency vehicles, fire trucks, a police
car zoomed north, racing past us. The chaos was back. Like a conditioned reflex, we started running. That was hard for John because he had injured his ankle earlier.
This is crazy! When is it going to stop?
Exasperated, I yelled to whoever was listening: “What the hell’s going on?” Someone shouted back that a gas leak was going to explode any minute. John said, “Mike, I can’t run anymore.”

“Enough!” I said. We got off the West Side Highway and started weaving our way in, toward the city’s interior. At Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, we saw people huddled outside a storefront window watching TV like people did when Neal Armstrong landed on the moon. We stopped to watch some of it. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What I saw was a huge airliner flying into the World Trade Center.

It had to be a movie clip. I still wasn’t completely buying everything I was hearing: terrorist attacks, the Pentagon, planes still out there.

Cell phone service came back. Joy and I traded phone calls as I slowly progressed north. I didn’t want to talk on the phone for long because there was too much going on. I had to keep moving. I told her I would find her later uptown. She had gone from Atlantic Records to her friend Robert Finkman’s place on the Upper East Side at 81st and 2nd avenues.

Then Boozer called. He said to come to his office, his exterminating business on 30th and Broadway. That was my next stop.

John and I continued up to 14th Street, moving east between 9th and 8th avenues, where we came upon an old but regal brown brick church, the Roman Catholic Church of St. Bernard. “Do you want to go in, Mike?” John said. I nodded in assent. John and I walked up the steps slowly. There were some people sitting on them. They were praying for their friends. Like so many others we’d passed on our walk so far, they could tell by
looking at us where we’d been. “You were there,” someone in a red T-shirt said. We told them we were in Tower 1.

“We’re worried about our buddies. We are trying to figure out if they are OK.”’

“Where were they?” I asked

“They were in the North Tower too.”

“What company did they work for?”

“Cantor Fitzgerald.”

“What floor is that?”

They said 100th or 101st.

I searched for something to say, but I found nothing. I remembered the flames above my head on my 81st-floor corner office. And I certainly remembered seeing the top of the North Tower exploding. I looked at the group and didn’t say a word. The one in the red T-shirt looked me in the eyes. He knew. I didn’t know for sure what had happened to their friends, but I knew it couldn’t be good. What words could I say? I walked into the church.

The church was almost empty, and very quiet. A woman sat alone in the front pew to the left. We walked straight up the center aisle. There was an altar front and center and a cross to the right. John knelt down in front of the cross and was praying intensely. I went into a pew to my right. I was exhausted. I got down on my knees and said, “God, I don’t know what I did to be in your good graces, but thank you.” John came beside me, and we knelt there together in silence for a while.