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 (22 page)

I was now a married man. Joy and I had moved in together. This was the first day of our new life. No more 9/11 distractions. I was committed to a fresh start and a new career with
this company. They’d be my new family, like Network Plus had been.

These fucks.
Nobody had even hinted at this. I was with them for the first anniversary of 9/11, just two weeks earlier. Were they planning to fire me then? They wrote a press release using my name: “Look who’s working for us! A hero.” I thought,
Wow, thanks. Nice, guys.
I sat with them, gave them a bunch of information for the release. “Is it OK with you if we send around this release about you, Mike?”
Sure.
Sounded like a really nice public gesture of accepting me into their fold. It made me even more confident, eager to come back and begin anew.

So sneaky. So thoughtless. I have to tell this news to my new bride, on our first day back from our honeymoon? They
forgot
to tell me? So 9:00 a.m., Monday fucking morning, that’s when I fnd out? Unbelievable. They could’ve told me, “It’s not working.” All they had to do was talk to me like a human being.

I stuffed my shit in a box and walked out. That was it.

This
was day one of my new life.
This
was day one of putting everything behind me and starting again.

I waited for Joy to get home. She was shocked. I assured her it would be OK. I could work for my buddy Mac doing construction. We’d be fine with money. The situation would be temporary.

Anyway, I was fed up with the white-collar, roller-coaster, go-behind-your-back bullshit.
You can keep that world
. All you had to do was read the newspapers to see that the cascade of corporate scandals was not subsiding—Freddie Mac, Health-South. Every day it was something else, and thousands of poor people lost their shirts. I was having a hard time getting excited about participating in
that world.

I still went on interviews for telecom sales jobs, but it was tough for me. Hell, I used to be the one conducting the interviews.
Yet I’d throw on my suit, pack a folder full of résumés, and endure the transparent, phony, superficial textbook questions. “Michael, where do you see yourself in five years?”
With my wingtips pressing down on your throat.
“Would you say that you’re good under pressure?”
Gee, I don’t fucking know. Can I tell you a little story about a day called 9/11?

Did they know my story? I don’t know. I had National Public Speaker under the Specials Skills section of my résumé. That piqued no interest. Under Media/Public Appearances I listed
The Oprah Winfrey Show, 48 Hours
, U.S. Senate Special Committee,” etc. Not once did one person ask me about it. And I felt it was wrong for me to bring it up, to promote myself as some kind of … I don’t even know what.

The job interviews didn’t pan out. But I know now, looking back, I probably wasn’t making the best self-presentation.

I was angry. Everything I saw happening in the world made me crazy. Politics became more and more divisive. Everybody was taking hard lines. Civility was gone, replaced by blame and demonization. Unity had vanished, replaced by ubiquitous protests. Corporate scandals were being revealed left and right. News reports claimed that soldiers were dying because they weren’t supplied with sufficient armor. And why did everyone and anyone seem to have their own reality show?

I watched all of this on TV. I read about it in the newspapers. The shock and confusion that had been my mental state in the year following 9/11 had turned, in the subsequent two years, into impatience, rage, and cynicism. The state of the world became increasingly absurd to me. Nothing was making sense. I lost my temper all the time. I was short with Joy, with family members. I became more and more guarded about my 9/11 experience, which was now totally off-limits.

The phone had pretty much stopped ringing. I was done with the whole tour. And this left me without a purpose and desperate for some meaning. I had no idea where to find it.

Shepard Smith at FOX News called me to be on his show. I said OK. Maybe I’d feel better about things if I did it.

I got set up in the studio, we begin the interview, and all of a sudden he shouts, “WAIT! We have breaking news coming in.” It startled me. They cut to a report of an oil refinery explosion in Oklahoma. There was fire, a lot of it. They had good video. “Is it terrorism?” Shepard glowered menacingly into the camera. He spent the next forty minutes speculating. I sat there silent in a chair across from him. He never got back to me. That was it. I felt foolish.
Who am I, sitting here with makeup on my face in a television studio? How is this helping people remember the firemen?

Before and after several commercial breaks, they promoted a special segment airing later that night on Paris Hilton’s sex tape scandal. That’s what people wanted to hear about.

Two more 9/11’s would come and go in 2003 and 2004. Joy and I decided to start our own annual tradition to honor the coinciding anniversaries of 9/11 and our wedding day. We’d go away somewhere, take the day of 9/11 to reflect on 9/11, then celebrate our wedding anniversary. Inevitably, wherever we went on 9/11, we talked about it with people we met, and my story would come out in conversation. We met some truly wonderful people. But I still can’t forget, in those two years, overhearing some unsettling comments from people with whom I shared my story. Comments like, “C’mon, who the hell is this guy?” and “You really think
he
was there?” and “That’s a big load of bullshit.” Yes, it hurt. But what really got to me was that I could see clearly that most people wanted to be done talking about it. Around that time, a phrase had been coined: “9/11 fatigue.”

Yeah, that darn 9/11 was pretty inconvenient, wasn’t it? We were a couple years removed from it, but that pesky little 9/11 was getting in the way of our having a nice day. It was as if people were complaining,
I was planning a spa vacation over lattes with a friend, and somebody mentioned 9/11. What a bummer
. Well, I’m sorry to bother you, folks, but you can’t forget 9/11, and you sure as hell don’t piss on it. How often have I heard someone unconsciously clicking the remote control and saying, “Oh, it’s just something else on 9/11.” Don’t say that, and don’t say it
like that
. You don’t have any idea of the disrespect you’re showing people.

I was appalled that for some the visceral reaction to 9/11 was not “Oh my god, how awful,” but a cold, analytical “Well, you could’ve predicted this. That’s what you get when nations act a certain way.” That’s what they
felt
. That was their primary response. No sympathy. No empathy. No feelings of loss. No sense of tragedy.
Thousands of human beings died. Don’t you get it?

“9/11 fatigue.” How could it come so soon? Fatigued from what? Did you lose somebody? Were you there? Does watching a segment on Paris Hilton, delighting in the polarizing sound bites of CNN’s
Crossfire
, or reading about the plundering of pension funds relieve your fatigue?

The President implored the nation to “Go shopping!” as a meaningful national response to the attack. Is that what 9/11 did—get in the way of our addictive consumerism? Would spending our paychecks at the Gap really be the best way to fight terrorism and honor our dead?

The world was making absolutely no sense to me.

So what did I do? Did I try to resolve anything in my own head? Did I try to progress? No. I decided to get lost.

It’s easy to get lost working construction. You’re outside. There are no offices, no phones ringing, no e-mail. Just hammers, wood, concrete, jokes, beer, and cash. No shower until after work, maybe, if I wasn’t too tired.

I was quick to rationalize my new lifestyle.
I mean, where exactly is the great meaning in the corporate world? People getting so serious with each other over what? Getting a quota met? That’s meaning?
This was my fearful and angry mind at work. I could look at any job and say dismissively, “Where is the meaning?” I could make any excuse not to look at the job listings. The truth was I just didn’t want to look at myself. I didn’t want to go to the center of my trauma and work my way back to balance. I didn’t want to find meaning. I didn’t want to rebuild my life. It was easier to tear apart everything and everyone else.

This way of thinking gave me no peace. Soon it dawned on me that even after a year of speaking about it publicly and almost three years since it all happened, I still had not really found the meaning in or made any sense of my 9/11 experience. And that tormented me. The defiant but confounding aimlessness of my external life was nothing more than a reflection of my unshared and unresolved internal anguish.

Internalized and unspoken—three years later—I still held on to unhealthy, immobilizing emotions: anger toward the perpetrators, guilt for surviving what others did not, trauma from the fear of imminent death when I was under that truck, and a pervasive feeling that it was all so unfair.

It’s three years later. What do I do with this experience? What does it mean?

Some days I would slow it all down.
I’m grateful
.
I’m alive. I’m not injured. My whole office made it. The woman in the wheelchair made it. It all worked out
. I was supposed to feel thankful, humble, blessed—and I did feel all that—but at same time I was angry.
Yes, I’m alive, but look what it did to me. It brought me to
my knees. It made me run for my life. It made me feel as though I was going to die.
Then I’d think about the firemen going up the stairs and that knowing look in their eyes. And I’d imagine every family who lost somebody they loved, and then I’d become angry again—angrier than I was before.

So
WHAT
are
YOU
doing about it?

Self-loathing kicked in. It crippled me. I got so fed up with everything going on in the world and in my life and in my crazy head that I was blocked from growing as a human being, from becoming a better person. It hit me like a kidney punch:
Look at me. I’m not making the most of my second chance at life. And I have no idea how to even do it.
Nothing paralyzed me more than that feeling. My survival on 9/11 was all reaction, reaction, reaction. Now, three years later, there was nothing to react to. I just had to live with it, slowly, day by day, hour by hour. How would I move on, move forward?

My wife just wished I would go back to being the person she knew before it all happened. That’s who I truly am,
truly was. Because it’s not how I was acting
.

And I hated myself for it. I was blowing my second chance. The chance to live that others had died for, that others never got. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, my second chance. The world I saw, the world I once inhabited so easily seemed foreign and difficult to navigate. And that made me feel that I was doing something wrong, or that there was something wrong with me. The pain of sitting secretly mired in my shame became unbearable.

So I woke up every day and got lost. I got lost working construction. I put myself as far out and away from myself and my feelings as I could. But I went out too far. Way too far.

This idea of not facing myself as a way to alleviate my pain only made the pain worse. It had nowhere to go. It festered and metastasized and snowballed to the point where no one really wanted to be around me.

It hurt me to hurt others. So I isolated myself. But here’s the thing about isolation: It’s not just about being alone, by yourself with nobody else there. It’s also about feeling alone in a room full of people, people you know, people you love. And there’s no lonelier feeling than that. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t hide it. My friends, my family, my wife—they all saw it. And they knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t going to pull out of this by myself. I needed help. But there was no way anybody was going to tell me this, not unless they wanted an earful of harshness.

Joy saw it in my ever-shortening temper. I was negative all the time. She’d ask me what I thought about something—anything— and she’d get glass-half-empty.
Fuck this
view of things. She saw me look at life with contempt. I’d come home from a job interview—which had become fewer and far between—saying “Screw them anyway” before I knew if I had an offer or not. She kept trying. She’d say, let’s go do something fun. I’d think,
Why bother?

My family tried to give me space. They’d ask Joy, “How’s he doing?” All my life they figured I could figure things out and work through them. My mother used to say I always worked best when I was under pressure. But this was a different kind of pressure. This was not a deadline or a game clock running out. This was the pressure of simply being alive and seeing life as a tremendous, negative burden. They wanted to help, but I gave them no openings. My famous line was “I’ll figure it out.” I made it difficult for them to even bring it up. They always knew me to be a strong-minded person, but a strong-minded person with a confident and get-up-and-go attitude. Now I was strong-minded with anger and cynicism. That’s a hard person to talk to.

They urged me to go talk to somebody else, then.
Why?
I felt that I already knew what happened to me. Sure, I was angry about it, but I didn’t believe I was in any trouble.