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 (19 page)

But Mark was right. I should’ve listened.

I thought I was working it out my own way. I was speaking to kids, telling my good story to people. I was also being pulled in a lot of different directions. I know now that all that pulling prevented me from looking inward and thinking about how I felt, how I was affected by the experience. Maybe if I hadn’t had all the media attention, I would’ve done things differently. Maybe. As it was, I lived a strange dichotomy—talking about it publicly but coming home, shutting down, and being tormented by it. When I spoke, I spoke about saving someone else, never about my own fight for survival. The story I was telling people had nothing to do with my terror. I remember speaking to an audience of eight hundred people in an arena in Moline, Illinois, before a Quad City Mallards semi-pro hockey game. I got to the point in my story where I’d say, “Then I saw things you never want to see in your lifetime.” That’s how I would describe it. Later, in the Q&A, a man asked, “When you said ‘things you never want to see in your lifetime,’ are you talking about seeing the people jump?” I said yes, but I didn’t go into it. I never expanded farther than that. I felt that I shouldn’t. I felt that it was disrespectful to those who perished. Nothing stays with me like the memory of those people, the people who jumped. There are a lot of things about that day that make me angry, that I can’t get over. To think about the innocent people who were brought to the point of thinking,
Instead of sitting here burning to death, I must jump
. Oh my god. What was going through these people’s minds? The thought makes me angry enough to kill. But that’s not what I talked about in my speeches. I never talked about
that
with anybody, ever. Think about those people, what it takes to bring somebody to that point. Man, that is evil. I don’t mean this in a political way. I am just saying, if the word has any meaning at all, a situation like that is evil. These people just wanted to go to work and have a normal day, and next thing they knew, they’re hanging out a window saying a prayer, screaming out a loved one’s name or whatever, and jumping. I just wanted to go to work too. I didn’t ask for that day. I didn’t sign up for it. But I was not brought to the point of jumping out a window. I was there, in the burning building, and I got out.

What now? What was I supposed to do with my survival?

The phone kept ringing.

I went to every interview, every public appearance carrying all this anger and guilt around with me, even though I couldn’t identify those feelings as such or connect them to my experience at the time. Invariably, on every one of these appearances, they asked me the same basic question: “Why did you do it?” When they asked me on the CBS newsmagazine show
48 Hours
, I could no longer hide my
unease
with the question.

The
48 Hours
interviewer, Richard Schlesinger, was a great guy. He really was. But in the middle of a very long interview, he asked me what everyone had already asked. If you watch the video, you can see me shaking my head, like,
I can’t believe you’re even asking me this.
My response in previous interviews had been, “That’s how I was raised,” or some variation on that. But I looked at Schlesinger as he asked me the question I had been asked and had answered so many times, and I said, shaking my head, “Look, I acted in the only way I knew how. I don’t know
what else to say about it. I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself if I didn’t help her.”

Why was this not obvious? “Do you need help?” I asked her. She said, “Yes.” So I helped her. I guess I didn’t have to ask if she needed help. I could’ve been like, “Oh, you guys are hanging out here. That’s cool. I’m sure someone will be up to help you soon. Bye.” Nobody would’ve said I did anything wrong, I guess. Firemen handle these sorts of things. But something about the situation spoke to me, said,
There is imminent danger. She looks worried, and can I help?
So I just did it.

Sure, I had a choice.

Why’d I make the choice I made? I didn’t know any other way to be. What’s the big mystery? It’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? After 9/11, I participated in this BBC documentary on human instinct. Why did I have the instinct to help instead of ignore? Was it because my father was that way? Because I was raised that way? Some say the logical thing to do is run from trouble. It’s a safety thing. Self-preservation. But I didn’t see trouble or inconvenience. My mind worked like this:
How long have you guys been here? It’s sixty-eight floors. You need to get out of here. Let’s get going.
I didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis of my needs versus her needs. I saw myself in a situation
together with her.
We were in the same situation. I left it up to her. If she had said no, who knows what I would have done? But she said yes.

I should’ve asked my interviewers, “Why are you really asking me that? Is it because you believe that most people would not do what I did?” Maybe I felt that the question itself was cynical and counter to what I believe most people would do and what I saw many do on that day. At the moment of the
48 Hours
interview, I was finding it hard enough living in a world where I survived something so many had not. But I knew then, and I know now,
I would not have been able to live with myself at all if I passed her off and she didn’t make it.

Doing
48 Hours
was very different than the other media interviews in another respect. It was a taped show. The interview portion was fine with me, but then the producer, Joe Halderman (nice-enough guy then, he later claimed infamy by blackmailing David Letterman) started asking me to give him some B-roll. “We just want to shoot you walking along the river over here,” he’d say, or “Let’s film you like you’re looking for new office space.” It was staged. I felt that this wasn’t something I should be doing. I understand what it takes to make a show, but that was hard for me. For me, it wasn’t about making a show. For me it was about the message. That day and that moment, I started to feel a distance between what I was doing and the message. And that got me feeling queasy. 9/11 had taken place less than two months earlier. I asked them, “Do I really have to do this—the B-roll?”

The subject matter, 9/11, wasn’t entertainment. I didn’t want to be a celebrity. I just wanted to be useful. And so many people said my story was helping others. So every media call to me was akin to somebody saying “Can you help?” and me responding the only way I knew how, by saying “Yes.”
Sure, Joe, you can film me walking along the river.

My hectic media schedule had put an increasingly major strain on my relationship with Joy. The kind of public demand I was getting would be tough at any point in any relationship, but we were nine months away from our wedding date, and I had not been around to talk about that or much else. Joy’s frustration reached its limit. To make things right, I surprised her by booking a long weekend for us in the Cayman Islands.

She was excited. A vacation meant we could finally be alone uninterrupted, undivided. Away from the media calls, she could see whether the old Michael was still around. She could see
whether I still had the ability to focus on her. She needed answers to these questions, and she was looking forward to getting them.

A day later, I got a call from a producer in Germany asking me if I’d consent to being a featured guest on
Menschen 2001
, Germany’s enormously popular annual People of the Year program. I called Joy to see if she’d like to change our plans. She hung up on me.

Eventually, Joy’s brother talked her into the trip to Germany. We couldn’t have had a nicer time. We got there on a Thursday, and our hosts, the production company ZDF, really rolled out the red carpet for us. The shoot was live on Sunday night. We were to fly back on Monday. On Monday morning, we were taking it slow, going out to buy gifts for everyone at home. I don’t know when it did, but at some point it dawned on me that I had been reading our return flight information wrong. Standing in a toy store on Friedrichstrasse, I realized we had less than an hour to get to the airport. We were late.

Actually, we were too late. We moved as fast as we could but missed our connecting flight. We’d have to stay the night. I was stressing. I had already missed a day of work and had to get back. Our first-class tickets, purchased by ZDF, were no longer available. I’d have to pay $300 extra to get new tickets, plus pay for a hotel. Nobody at the flight desk could do anything about it. Sorry. Joy was stressed too. She went out to grab a cab while I was still trying to haggle with the airline. Eventually, I gave up and went out to the cab, starting to load our bags in the trunk. I say to Joy, “Wait, I just want to make sure I have my boarding passes for both Berlin and Frankfurt.” I go back into the airport and get the guy at the desk to reduce the $300 cost to $150. In the middle of our conversation, he jerks his head up as though someone cattle-prodded him in his ass and stares me straight in the face.

“Mr. Benfante?” he says.

“Yes, Benfante.
B-E—
”

“Wait a moment please,” he says.
Christ, they’re gonna nail for me the other $150.
An official-looking woman in a different version of the airline’s uniform came out with another guy.

“Mr. Benfante,” she says. “This gentlemen over here will take care of you. I am so sorry. I did not see the show last night, but I heard it was marvelous.” The fee to change both flights was waived. They rebooked us first class and paid for our hotel. “We are honored to have you flying on Lufthansa Airlines. We didn’t realize it was you until one of our staff back there who saw the program recognized you.”

I am in Germany. Not Chicago, not Boston—Germany. What is happening?

Back in New York, as we headed into December, the flood of national media recognition reached a peak. A&E’s
Biography
with Harry Smith broadcast their Top Ten Biographies of 2001. Bush was number 1, Giuliani number 2, followed by the NYFD/NYPD at 3, me and John at 4, then Osama bin Laden at 5. What an honor. That list generated a ton of additional attention and media requests. I seriously considered shutting off my phone after that.

Later that month, we reached the pinnacle. Marvel Comics put out a 9/11 collector’s edition of
Spider-Man
with an all-black cover. Tina told me about it. They didn’t use our names, but they drew two guys carrying a woman in a wheelchair down the tower stairwells. I had to go to Bayonne to get a copy. Unbelievable. It was us. We were in
Spider-Man
.

By the time Christmas arrived, my glorious national profile bore little resemblance to my tense private life. I took off from
work the week of Christmas through New Year’s. Work had almost become an annoying obstacle in the way of the rest of my life. No longer a private company, Network Plus’s stock was tanking. Pressure to meet our numbers no longer came from my CEO but from anxious shareholders and ominous investment banks. The company was no longer like a family but more like a chain gang with no hope of ever pleasing its pit boss. Morale was low.

At home, I had become farther and farther removed from our wedding planning. Joy took it all on her shoulders. That was not easy. She was from Michigan. She didn’t know her way around New Jersey like I did. But I was 9/11-consumed. I knew about the wedding checklist items—the band, the deposit, the menu—but I had no real feeling for them. The wedding became
her
thing. The extent that I was available was to whatever extent a wedding plan item was 9/11-related. We were pulling at each other, but in opposite directions. I was always trying to get her to understand what I had to deal with. She would plead with me to understand what she had to deal with. Both of us charged that what the other was dealing with was ultimately only about him or her. Arguments. Strain. Anxiety. Distance. Day by day, the gap in our communication widened. Small rifts enlarged into major differences.

My
fiancée
. How she must’ve looked at me and thought,
Here we are. I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this guy. We’re going to be a team. We’re going to start a life together. Planning a wedding together is the first step of our new partnership, which will lead to a family, and this guy is not here for any of it.
Something else completely took over our lives. Well, it took over my life, and she became an involuntary passenger. How many times did I tell her “You just don’t understand”? But it is impossible to comprehend that which is not communicated. I was giving her
nothing to understand. What about what
she
was going through? I should’ve made our wedding the priority. I didn’t. Joy looked at me and saw a wall, the same one she saw when our eyes first met in the lobby of Robert’s Upper East Side apartment building on 9/11; still up but stronger, more layered. I insisted there was no “wall.” I argued that people needed to hear my positive story, and that if I was asked, I had to tell it. But I went too far. Joy understood what I had to do, but I went too far. She held in her hurt and did not speak it. But it built up inside of her.

By Christmas 2001, we were two people separately holding in their frustration, confusion, and rage. I was unable to share my pain. She was unable to help me heal that which I did not share. We had to plan a wedding and pay for it. We thanked God on Christmas that I made it out of that tower, but our gratitude competed with our silent frustration. And the phone never stopped ringing.