After the fall

I can't remember how long it took to see my father in person.  Days, maybe weeks.

The day of, it took me hours to get a hold of my dad on the phone.  He worked on John St, just a few blocks away.  I would find out much later on that he was scheduled to attend a meeting in the towers that day: he was an engineer who dealt with the Port Authority routinely (and the PANYNJ had its main offices in the WTC on the high floors of one of the towers: sixty- or seventy-something).  He was running late that morning, and his tardiness likely saved his life.

It was early afternoon -- maybe.  The towers had been gone for hours now.

I watched as people passed me on the street, heading north.  Some covered in the ashy white dust.  The cellphones had been jammed since ten o'clock that morning.  Landlines were worse: calls to my dad's office didn't go to his message box, but rather to an automated message that seemed to imply the nonexistence of the number I was trying to dial.

I remember seeing live footage on the news: street scene from somewhere in the city.  Showed a guy on a Nextel, talking.  It woke me from my daze.  I stopped every guy in a suit.  "Do you have a Nextel phone?  Do you have a Nextel?  I need to make a call."

Finally one guy actually stopped.  Maybe he was talking to his wife or girlfriend.  "I gotta go, honey.  Yeah, I'm okay.  I gotta let someone use my phone for a second.  I love you.  Bye."  He handed the phone over to me, and I don't think we even said anything to each other.  He held my cigarette for me as I struggled to dial the numbers: my hands were shaking.

It took a couple of rings, but finally I heard my dad's voice.  I can't remember the first words we exchanged.  Maybe "Are you okay?" or "Thank god you're alive."  I don't know.  I remember cursing a lot.  "Jesus fucking Christ!  It's like a war zone down there!"  I remember my dad admonishing me for cursing, telling me to calm down.  "How the fuck am I supposed to calm down?!  They're trying to kill us!"  It irritated me.

I asked him where he was.  Chinatown, he told me.  He was walking north.  He heard someone say that there were buses that would take people off the island above 34th Street, so that's where he was walking.  He asked me where I was.  "Fourteenth Street," I told him, standing outside of an NYU dorm that had become a rally point for displaced NYU students who were living further south, below 14th Street.  He wanted me to get off the island -- find a way to mom's house on Staten Island.  I told him I was staying in the city.

It was a while before they re-opened lower Manhattan to civilians.  At least a week.  Maybe two.  My dad called and told me he was coming into the city to see if he could get to his office.  He wanted to know if I was interested in doing lunch.  He picked a seafood place in midtown: Dock's.

I was sitting on the train, headed to Grand Central.  We rumbled to a stop and sat there.  Nothing out-of-the-ordinary: just another train delay, and there were lots of those as of late.  The PA system in my car was jacked up: the conductor's voice came over garbled.  Suddenly people from the car behind us started coming into our car, pushing their way to the front.

Whoa whoa whoa.  What's going on?  They're saying we gotta evacuate.  What?  Go to the front of the train!  We hustled forward, and following the herd, gingerly made our way down onto the tracks, following a loose string of bobbing flashlights that were being wielded by subway workers.  We were just a couple hundred feet from the platform, but there was another train in front of ours.  I wondered if the third rail was electrified or if the emergency workers somehow disable it during evacuation scenarios.

As we approached the stairs at the end of the platform, we were greeted by cops, frantically waving their arms at the shoulder in a big circle, telling us to get the hell out.  Get up to street level now!  Oh my God, it's a bomb!  Go topside!


As I emerged from Grand Central onto the street, I had that feeling again.  That sensation of not being able to control anything; not being able to influence my fate.  We could all die at any given instant, and that wasn't rhetoric.  The threat was tangible, something that no one had ever felt before.  How many times was this going to happen?  How many times were we going to have to endure the singular feeling of someone trying to kill us?

I finally made my way into the restaurant probably 30 minutes late, and my dad was showing impatience.  "Dad, I just walked out of a fucking bomb scare in Grand Central."  Lunch was awkward.

I was never close to my father growing up.  He was not the good job, I'm proud of you, let's go in the backyard and play catch type of father.  He threw himself at his work to provide for me, and while I never went hungry, I also never really got to know my father.  I'm not sure which is the worse option.

Even today, I don't speak much with him.  In the nine years since, I graduated college and I graduated law school. My parents felt that I should be doing certain things with my life, and I deviated from their desired path for me by joining the Army.  I went to war and came back.  I came back hoping that I could finally bridge the gap with my parents -- that maybe the stress of having a son overseas in combat would allow them to drop the shields and just accept me and the choices I have made.

Instead I came back to a lot of dinner-table arguments, poorly informed by 20-second sound bites and the media.  Opinions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the president.  Doubts about our ability to accomplish the mission, and insensitive and ignorant generalizations of an entire culture and religion.

"Dad: I spent a year there.  I lived it every single day.  I think I might know what I'm talking about.  I think I might be more of a subject matter expert than some talking head on Channel 5 news or Newsweek magazine."  My parents could not accept my four-year-old decision to join the Army, and understood less about what I did in Iraq than my friends.  Hell, my friends were more family to me than my family.

So that's where it stands.  A lot of things can happen in nine years.  But a lot of things can stay the same.

If you have a good thing going, cherish it.  I look back and sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision.  I gave up a prosperous livelihood and any chance to sustain a normal relationship or start a family or just be a normal fucking person in order to serve this country and take care of soldiers.  Sometimes it drives me crazy.  But in the end, if I had to do anything differently, it would have been to sign on the dotted line earlier.