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 (24 page)

Some mornings, I just sat myself down on a bench, debilitated. I was no political scientist, but when I saw what I saw, I couldn’t help but think,
It’s working. What the terrorists wanted to do is working. We are not rising above it.

What had we taken from 9/11? Did we become any less greedy, any less self-seeking, any less fame-obsessed?

They hate
our fireedom
? Well, what fireedom were we exercising exactly? The fireedom to siphon each other’s paychecks? The fireedom to share our most embarrassing secrets on television talk shows? The fireedom to obsess over Anna Nicole Smith?

And how are you using your freedom, Michael?

I had unwittingly become part of the carnival. I was a good story. Some people knew me as “the wheelchair guy.” In some telecom circles, they knew me as “the guy whose whole office made it out.” Some knew me as “the guy who ran from the collapsing building.” They saw the video. Some knew me from being on
Oprah
, but didn’t remember why.

I’d lost control of it. I always ran into people who wanted to hear my story. Every day I was out in the world, and I couldn’t help but meet people. I told my story in bits and pieces, but it never felt right. I didn’t see them walking away with the right message. I didn’t hear myself delivering the right message.

The
right message
was not only about what I did but about what tens of thousands of others did. It was the message of how we came together for each other in the middle of hell. And it was all being forgotten. No one would remember if this circus continued. Of course, by this point, I got it. There was 9/11 fatigue. How could there not be? It was understandable fatigue from all the wrong images and all the wrong messages being disseminated. It was fatigue from the constant, blaring magnification of division, destruction, inaction. What they showed over and over again, what they dwelled on was everything that is negative. But that was only half the story. On 9/11 there were thousands upon thousands of simple, unrecorded, unwittnessed yet unconquerable acts of strength, courage, and kindness.
Please remember. Please remember
. Maybe it was only a few days, or a few weeks, or a couple months. But there was a brief aftermath—a time after it all happened—where we froze and tried to see each other as people, not objects. We cared. And we comforted. We need to take from
that
and go forward. There are survivors. We
all
lived it, and we all survived it—all of us inside and outside the Towers that day, no matter how far outside you were. We cannot focus only on the worst of it, or that’s all we’ll ever think of it. That’s what everyone was taking from it now, what they were selling down there at Ground Zero and in the elections. That’s what they were shouting on TV. Epic confusion. Epic conflict. Nobody was talking about how good we were that day, and the next day, and the day after that. I don’t know when it happened, but it did happen. At some point, the seeping rot of conflict, selfishness, and self-seeking took over and wiped out what President Bush recognized as our “national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice,” and the scores of true heroes mentioned by name during the national 9/11 telethon, and the hugs from Chicagoans in a bar on Rush Street given to every survivor from my New York office, and the crayon-colored cards sent from Mrs. Toussaint’s fifth-grade class, and the ultimate, terminal, superheroic-yet-intensely-human sacrifice made by those firemen.
I’ve got to tell the whole story. I’ve got to set the record straight. I want to put down every fact I remember before this thing goes any farther. I can’t watch one more tourist walk away from Ground Zero and not get this message.

When I came home that night, Joy was chopping some vegetables on the kitchen counter. I put my hands softly on her shoulders. She turned around, and I said, “I know I don’t talk about it with you, and I know you think I need to get some professional help, but I think I want to write this out. I want to write a book and tell everything.”

Joy feared this new “project” would just take me to another level of obsession with 9/11. She wanted me to get away from it. She saw us as finally moving on—our new house, my new job. It had been two years of relative stability for us, even though “the old Michael” was still missing. She stared down at the kitchen floor, then raised her eyes to meet mine, looking at me semi-parentally with a mix of love and resignation, forcing a smile. “I’m all for it, honey,” she said. “Whatever works.” This was January 2006. It was five years later, but maybe I’d finally found a way to give meaning to my surviving 9/11.

Reviewing
Lit
, the third book in Mary Karr’s autobiographical trilogy,
The New York Times
columnist Michiko Kakutani commented critically on the “memoir craze of the late ’90s,” lamenting that “lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.”

Let me state clearly right now: What follows here is neither intended to be art, nor will it be a confession. There are things that happened between me and my wife that I will not share. There are places I went and things I did that just aren’t worth mentioning. Telling you about it—about every dirty little secret—will help no one. It will only hurt. I’ve hurt enough people already. I’ve hurt myself. And,
I
did these things. Nobody else did. I did. I take responsibility. What I want you to know, what I want you to take my word on, is that things got dark. That I can tell you.

I was feeling pretty good. The CityTel job wasn’t perfect, but it was steady. We were working bit by bit on the new house we’d bought four months prior. With this new idea to write a book, I believed I’d found a way to constructively channel my 9/11 experience-slash-trauma.

I looked around the house at some unopened boxes that contained all kinds of stuff from 9/11—video tapes, newspaper clippings, the ash-covered clothes Boozer had rescued from the trash. I wasn’t scared of those boxes now.

This will be a good year
.

On Saturday, February 4, we threw my parents a fiftieth anniversary party. It was a plan we’d had in the works for some time. We rented a hall, hired a band, invited everybody they ever knew. It was like a second wedding for them. I have to say, it was about as proud and as happy of a moment as we’ve had as a family. My parents were beaming. Angelo pulled up next me, put his hand on my back, and said, “I’ve been thinking, Mike. This book—it’s going to help you work through things. I really believe it will.”

This will be a good year.

On Monday morning, February 6, CityTel let me go. I was fired. Just when I thought I was back in gear, riding high, my life returning to a semblance of normalcy, the rug was pulled out from under me. I figured I had money for the house, for my parents’ anniversary party, for moving forward. How could I go home and tell Joy?

Here we go again
, she thought. Joy was only human. When I met her, everything was in order. I had a great job. Continuing professional advancement and increasingly greater financial security seemed assured. As soon as we got engaged, 9/11 happened, and everything started going in the opposite direction. Suddenly I had no security, my future was uncertain, and I was financially unstable.

It was as if as soon as I’d asked her to marry me, it all went downhill. I started thinking about that.
What happened?
I started to doubt. I began doubting my relationship. I know Joy did too.

I wasn’t just questioning my relationship. I was now questioning everything. I mean
everything
—big, fundamental things.

I questioned the way the world works, the way people treat each other, the way corporate America works, the person I chose to live with, the decision I made to work for Network Plus, which put me in the World Trade Center in the first place. Every move I ever made was under review.
Why? Why? Why?

My facile conclusion?
Fuck everybody. I don’t deserve this shit.

I kept my firing from CityTel a secret. I didn’t tell my family. I relied on the old
Why make them worry?
rationale, a simple disguise for not wanting to face the pain of my own shame, the shame that was built on the deeper, unexamined pain—guilt, fear, trauma—of 9/11. But you can’t hide that much pain. Isolation only makes it worse.

I projected anger more fiercely than ever. The few friends I thought might be able to help with a job saw I wasn’t myself. At job interviews they sensed my disgust and my isolationist world-view.
I didn’t want that job with those idiots, anyway.

It was all getting to me. I couldn’t talk to another jerk in a tie behind a desk asking stupid questions. I couldn’t be a “manager,” then a “sales manager,” then a “regional manager.” These things meant nothing to me (as if the only thing that had meaning was what I experienced on 9/11, the meaning of which I had still yet to comprehend). I went back to that old way of thinking and back to construction, where I could get lost, where I was not required to think too much about the past, the future, or even the present. Instead it was work and Miller time, and some days nothing at all.
So what?
I had an excuse. I was still looking for meaning.

Three months passed. I woke up to yet another meaningless morning, a morning in late April. Joy was already at work. I got a call from Angelo. My dad was being rushed to the hospital.

“It doesn’t look good, Mike,” Angelo said. “It doesn’t look good.”

I threw on some clothes and rushed to the hospital. I got there before the ambulance did, so I waited outside the ER doors. I saw them take my dad out of the ambulance. My pop. He was unconscious. They wheeled him in.
Not now. Not now. Not now
.
I still haven’t done … haven’t become … haven’t said …
Angelo is there. He tells me again, “It doesn’t look good.”

It’s happening too fast. He was just at my house the day before. Ever since he retired, he would just show up like that. It was a great thing. I had just gotten a Fisher-Price slide for my niece Angelina, and he was coming to pick it up. He came over. He didn’t know I was out of work. Maybe he did and pretended he didn’t. He looked out at my deck, nodded his head, and said, “This is going to work for you, Mike. This will be OK.” It was almost as if he knew what was coming, and he wanted to let me know I’d be OK.

The next morning, my father was gone. Just like that. No last words. No anything. Boom.

I watched them in the hospital working on him for a while, then calling it. My dad was gone. He was right next to me, but gone.

I cannot have this
.
This is not real
. I spent the last five years walling off real feelings
—
redirecting them, ignoring them. But this was real. I couldn’t
not
feel this. Like an avalanche, like a tidal wave, like I don’t know what, it overpowered me. The weak, puny wall I’d built to keep feelings out and others in was no match for this. I had never felt such a loss. And I was feeling every bit of it.

I no longer had my dad there to talk to, to take to lunch. I realized it now, but too late, just how much of what I did was connected to making my father happy and how much making him happy meant to me. It gave me meaning; it endowed me with gravity. It made me happy. So much of what I did was to make him proud. And he was proud. I never recognized how much of that made me, me.

My father: He was my rock. He was my ally. I understood him, and he understood me. He was the guy I admired the most. He was the one thing I could always come back to. Thinking of my dad made me know there was one sure thing in the world. He was the one thing on whom I could rely. He was the last thing in my life that made sense. Without him, the whole equation did not compute.

That was it. I was down—down for the count and completely unmoored. Whatever fuck-this-fuck-everybody approach to living I’d been working on, well, it was about to be taken to a frightening new level.

My father’s absence heightened every anxiety in me. I had never realized how much I stood on his shoulders. It wasn’t about needing him. It was about enjoying his love. It was a love that simplified things. It gave me sense and order. It gave me a base. No more. The chair got kicked out from under me.

The suddenness of his passing made for a chaotic time. I bucked up for the preparations, helped organized the funeral and the wake, helped my mom. I did what had to be done. And then, after there was nothing more to do and nowhere else to be, it was all-out emptiness. Just all-out
I don’t give a shit about anything—not one single thing—anymore
. I walked the path of least resistance. Self-medication. I mean alcohol. A lot of it. Other things too. Whatever it took. Wherever it took me. Reaching for anything that would kill my feelings. I wanted out of my skin. And I got out. For days sometimes. Sometimes longer. I didn’t want to think or feel anything.

Fuck it.

Somebody told me around that time, when you lose a parent for the first time is when you truly become an adult. Really? I felt that when I lost him I was becoming less of me than I’d ever been. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I could not see what made me, me. I disbelieved that there ever were any positive pieces of me.
Was I a good person? Did I do a good thing on 9/11? It was all a bunch of bullshit. The whole thing was just coincidence—an accident that put a useless fuck like me in a situation where I did something, not really thinking too much about it, and it made me look like someone I’m not. I’m no hero, I’m a fraud. I was never—even before 9/11—never the son, the athlete, the student I thought I was.
You want to know what self-loathing looks like?

Selfish, self-absorbed, self-loathing.

My wife? My family? I had no conflict with them now, because I had no presence. I simply was not there. I didn’t disagree or fight with anyone because I just didn’t care. But that just led to more conflicts. My pat answer to everything was “I don’t want to be bothered.” Nothing
bothers
someone who cares about you more than you saying that. In truth, everything bothered me.