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 (18 page)

I got a lot of calls to attend annual galas where I would put on a monkey suit, sit, say nothing, stand up, wave, and be acknowledged for what I did. John and I were feted at the Waldorf–Astoria Hotel twice. The first time was at the annual Columbus Citizens Foundation Gala, where Charles Gargano, head of the New York State Economic Development Commission under Governor George Pataki, headed the event. On our second trip to the Waldorf, we were honored guests at the star-studded Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation for spinal cord injury and paralysis dinner hosted by actress Helen Hunt. They wanted to recognize our helping a
disabled, wheelchair-bound person. We stood up, waved, sat down. We shook every hand. Everyone was very nice.

I was deeply touched when Paul Morfogen’s father, Zachary Morfogen, asked if I would be his guest at a Brown University dinner given in his honor for his work in the arts. Mr. Morfogen graduated from Brown in 1950, and Paul was my roommate at Brown for two years. Mr. Morfogen was always a man I respected greatly, and it was an enormously fulfilling experience to be paid respect from him like that.

No “appearances” ever matched the feeling I had when the people I knew and loved did things to tell me how much they loved me back. During that busy October, the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, who run my old high school, were having their annual dinner at the Madison Hotel in Madison, New Jersey. My grade school principal asked me to be part of that dinner. They were already honoring former New York Yankee greats Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Gil McDougald. They apologized for asking at the last minute, but they wanted to put the picture of me and Tina from
People
on the back of their event program. Sister Sheila Holleran was adamant about it. Trust me, you don’t beat Sister Sheila in an argument. My whole family attended the event. They publicly acknowledged me. I said a few words, and I saw a lot of people I knew who gave me pats on the back and kisses and hugs. These were my people. These were moments I will never forget.

October was so busy that I couldn’t say yes to all the things I really wanted to say yes to.

Angelo had to accept an award given to me by Bergen County (NJ) Department of Disabilities while I was being honored elsewhere across the country.

Every day, my mailbox was full of notes. They came from both sides of the aisle (Ted Kennedy
and
Laura Bush, for
example), and from hundreds of complete strangers. I also received a note from my old high school football coach at Immaculate Conception, Lou Racioppe. Lou, who now coaches at Verona High School, handed a note to my mother in the Verona High School cafeteria, and she passed it along to me. In the handwritten note, my old coach told me how proud he was of me. A few months later, when I was inducted into the Immaculate Conception’s Sports Hall of Fame, I asked Lou, who is also a member of that Hall of Fame, to introduce me. In his introduction, he spoke about the contents of his note. It would be a mistake to say there wasn’t some of Lou Racioppe in me while I was carrying Tina. His words meant a lot to me.

October 2001 was a blur. But I vividly remember carrying my bags off the plane in Boston’s Logan Airport, to be honored at the 2001 CompTel awards, the annual expo for the telecom industry.

That Sunday afternoon, just before I flew out, I was with Joy, my parents, my brother and his wife, and my sister and her family, picking pumpkins. Driving back to Jersey City, Joy and I heard on the radio that the United States had declared war on Afghanistan. “Are you really going to fly out tonight?” Joy asked. “Must you?” Things in the world were tense enough as it was. Now this?

I flew into Boston and got to the Sheraton Boston Hotel about 9:30 p.m. I checked in, dragged my bags into the elevator, slid the key in the scanner, plunked my bags down, and turned around to leave the room and meet my Network Plus buddy Rob Norton in the lobby for a nightcap.

Exhausted, I noticed a gift basket on the table with a little card resting against the champagne bottle. I opened it and read the note:

Dear Mr. Benfante:

Since we opened our doors 36 years ago, we’ve had Presidents, Prime Ministers, Members of Congress, Medal of Honor winners, movie stars and many ordinary folks stay at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. We’ve never been more proud then we are today to welcome one of the true heroes of the September 11th tragedy.

If I or any member of the team at the Sheraton Boston Hotel can assist you during your brief stay, please let us know.

Doug Ridge
Hotel Manager

I just stared and stared at this little note.

This person went out of his way to write me a personal note. Some guy took his own time. It wasn’t in his job description. No boss told him to do it. He just did it. I was so humbled, so shrunk down in size. I said to myself,
I am going to save this note for the rest of my life.
Not because I wanted to show my kids someday: “Hey, look here, I’m compared to prime ministers.” Just the opposite. It was one regular guy writing to another regular guy. He wasn’t looking for extra points. He didn’t even know if he would ever meet me. I bet nobody, except him and me, knew he wrote it. I tried to find him the next day, but he was off. I never got the chance to properly thank him. I do so now. Doug Ridge, you reminded me of what and who matters, and how to act. Your selfless thoughtfulness carried me through the tensions, fear, and confusion of that evening in Boston, just weeks after it had all happened.

Since I had gotten out from under that truck down in the rubble, I had been reacting nonstop every minute—answering every phone call, every interview, flying, driving, talking, bowing, tipping my hat, asking my boss for another day off, Joy asking me not to leave. And then you get a note like that. It just right-sizes you, man. It made me stop and pause. This was no national media network, famous celebrity, or black-tie gala at a five-star hotel. This was a stranger honoring what I “did”— my act—with a simple act of unnecessary, unrequired kindness. That was the best of post-9/11—the thousands of little acts of kindness and relief that echoed the thousands of acts of kindness and relief on 9/11. No fame or wealth is needed to act like that. It’s just what you do when no one is asking you to and no one is looking. It just showed how much each of us can matter to each other, the difference we can make. That note that night made all the difference to me.

I had been running from place to place, plane to plane for weeks. So many kindnesses and generosities had been showered upon me. Many excellent words had come out of me, said to many fine people. Yet something inexpressible nagged at me. Something I couldn’t locate. There was a hole in me that seemed impossible to fill. Business unfinished.

I knew where I had to go. I just hadn’t put down the phone long enough to go there.

It had been five whole weeks since 9/11. With all that had happened, it seemed paradoxically like forever ago and at the same time something so near to me that I still felt it on my skin.

I had our new office at Network Plus reasonably under control. While I sat in my new office chair in our far West Side location in Chelsea, the collapsed Twin Towers still smoldered blocks away. I found myself bizarrely thinking about random items I’d lost on that old 81st-floor office—a sales trophy I used to give out, photographs I kept in my file cabinet, some books.
Whatever did become of Mike Wright’s copy of
Black Hawk Down
?
I snapped up from my office chair, told everyone I had a client to see, and walked myself down to Ground Zero.

You could only get so close to it, and then security had to pass you through. I got as far as I could, showed the police officer my old Network Plus ID, and said I was meeting my CEO across West Street at the pier behind the World Financial Center. He let me in.

I meandered down as far as I could. I got close to it, maybe thirty feet away. I could see all of the destruction. I could smell it. The ash, the cranes, men in masks with buckets. Contorted steel beams shot up from the debris as if a child had carelessly dropped the contents of his erector set all over a play space— some here and then there, not over there, but all the way back there. Tiny pockets of smoldering remains lay everywhere.
How the hell did I come out of here without a scratch?

The area and scope of destruction was massive. There was nothing left. The devastation was total. And
I
got out of
there
. Any little piece of anything could’ve hit me. I imagined fifty different ways, times, and places something could’ve crushed me. I felt weak thinking about it. I felt so tiny and vulnerable. But
I
made it
.
All of a sudden, my legs started to give way.
Should I be here? Am I being weird? Morbid?
I wanted to be near it, but the nearness made me less and less steady.

I had to see it. I had to go back. But being there took something big out of me. Because standing in front of it postmortem
was a different experience than being there while it happened. Incredibly, it was worse. I viewed it clinically and clear-eyed, and that made it more terrifying. During the day, we were moving. There was no time to assess the entirety of the situation. On the 5th floor, we had an objective: get out. When we got out, we had another objective: get Tina into an ambulance. The moment after I shut the ambulance doors closed and turned around to survey what had happened, there was a camera in my face. The next thing I knew, the building was coming down, and I ran. I didn’t get to watch it, focused and informed like the viewers did at home. I saw it all later on TV, of course, but those images didn’t connect to my images of that day or those moments.

Standing at Ground Zero five weeks later—surrounded point-blank by the enormity of it and with no objective other than to take it all in—chillingly bridged my singular, subjective journey with the entire, collective 9/11 experience. And it all added up to one simple and overwhelming conclusion: death. What I was looking at was a graveyard, yet, somehow I’d wormed out. More so than any other time, I saw how close to death I had been that day, even more than when I was gagging, terrified under that truck. I didn’t like what I was seeing. It gutted me and my sense of self. I felt that I had no armor anymore. The whole world was unsafe, unfair. My identity—I’m strong, I’m fast, I’m smart, I’m a running back—was stripped from me. In an instant my new worldview was fear not strength, mistrust not faith.
The world cannot be counted on
. Everything—my existence—is a crapshoot.

I came to believe that my life to that point had been a myth of control. I thought about everything that happened that morning, starting on the 81st floor. I thought about the thirty or forty things on 9/11 that if I had done instead of not done, or not done instead of done would’ve left me dead. I thought about
all the other lives that started that day, wherever they were, in or around Ground Zero, and how they were not as fortunate as me. I took a few steps back from the makeshift railing girding the construction platform. And I smelled it. It was the same smell of that day, a smell that smelled like nothing else—like many things burning together. Things I did not want to think too much about.

I now understood in my core that the only forces of the universe that held sway were randomness, luck, and indifference. And that it was, above all, beyond my meek powers to control any of it. I could feel myself strangely emptying out on that construction platform. I saw myself not as myself but as a shell, a casing that looked like me but was absent my uniqueness, my purpose.

I caught a couple workers in masks looking up at me. Time to move
.
I walked the perimeter of the secured area. I passed where Borders used to be. I walked beside Century 21. I wanted to see everything that was there and everything that wasn’t. I walked for a good half hour.
Maybe this is the last time I’ll come down here
. I picked up my pace, no longer observing but searching. Searching for what, I don’t know. I visualized physical things I remembered. Street carts. Newspaper stands. Tables and chairs in the courtyard. The globe fountain. They were all symbols of a time before, when the world still made sense. When I was invincible. When I felt free, not guilty. Clear, not conflicted. Forward-moving, not imbalanced. Mighty, not frail. Meant to be, not accidentally and unjustly, here. I saw none of those symbols down at Ground Zero that day.

I stopped walking and hung myself over the railing, catching my breath. This was surrender. This was where I belonged. I was suddenly hit by the urge to walk down into the pit and dig, shoulder to shoulder, with the men in masks. I could help.
I didn’t want to go back to an office or anything separate from this.
This is me
.
I should do anything I can to give comfort. Maybe it can comfort me
? I shrunk into powerlessness again.
What purpose could I possibly serve here? What purpose am I serving in telecom?
Let’s face it, I was selling telephone systems and T1 lines and Internet service.
What am I doing? What am I supposed to do?
I returned to the office that day but told no one where I’d been. Looking around the office, and having been where I’d just been, it was hard to be there. It was getting hard to be anywhere.

These are the feelings I kept from Joy and from my family. Sometimes I would say to Joy, “It’s hard to think I got out of there without a scratch.” And she would look at me straight-faced as if I was the last one to figure it out. “Yes, Michael. No kidding,” she’d say, thinking to herself,
I realize it. You don’t. Buddy, you don’t even know the trouble you’re in.
But I didn’t want to hear that from her or anybody. I killed any conversations going there. And most of the conversations going there were started by people who cared about me. I was walling them off, just when I needed them most. Joy wanted me to tell her more. She begged me. But that was all I could share. How it must have hurt her, day after day, conversation after conversation like that. She just wanted me to do whatever it was I had to do to get me back to who I used to be. She thought talking about it would help get me there. She wanted me to see someone. That was the biggest issue. But I never did. That Friday, 9/14, when our office met in New Jersey, they strongly recommended it. They had therapists right there. It was easy to get started. A lot of guys were doing it. Joy knew it would be good for me. I needed to release the guilt and pain I was feeling somehow. Marc Reinstein was seeing a therapist. I’ll never forget what he said to me: “Mike, not for nothing, but the reason I want to go now is because I don’t want to have to go later.” He said he didn’t feel like it, or really even so
much as want to do it. I kind of laughed it off. “Good for you, bro,” I said.
What’s he mean “go later”? Later I’ll be feeling better.
Time heals all wounds, I was taught.
I just need to get through the now, and I’ll be OK.