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 (23 page)

“Michael, have you heard about post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD?” They’d read it was common among people who had gone through what I had gone through. Joy would tell our friends that I was depressed. My friends would say, “He’s not the type.” But that’s what it was. I was depressed, extremely depressed. I was a portrait of untreated PTSD, though I denied it up and down.

It didn’t take a therapist to see how defensive I was. And the best defense is a good offense. So what did I do? I complained about Joy. “She just doesn’t understand me, and it’s
her
not understanding me that makes me act like this even more,” I’d say. “She’s always going against me,” I insisted.

“Look at me. This isn’t full-blown depression.”

“Joy’s no expert. She’s not a clinical psychologist.”

“She’s only thinking about herself—how it all affects her, not how it all affects me.”

“Why was she adding fuel to fire?” I’d say.

“Just have faith in me that I’ll correct myself,” I’d say to her, “rather than telling me that I’m fucked up, telling me to see somebody. I’m sick of this. How about standing by your fucking man?!”

You say anything and create any argument to avoid examining your own emotional, psychic pain.

One particularly strong argument I would fool myself with was to say that I didn’t want to talk about it with Joy and my family because it would upset
them
too much.
They knew what happened
.
They saw the films. They saw the people jump. They
knew it all factually. So why delve into such things? What purpose would it serve to talk about it? Why should I share with them the images of the bodies I saw falling from the sky? So they could have the same nightmares I was having?

If I did share that with them, I knew it meant I would have to go through it, through my feelings, to tell them. There was no way I was going to go there. Part of me felt that if I did open up and share my true feelings, they’d say, “Wow, he’s really messed up. He needs help.” This was true, but I didn’t want them to worry about me. And if I talked about it with them as often as I was thinking about it, I feared they’d think, “Listen to him. He constantly brings it up. He’s not moving on.” I wanted them to think I was getting over it.

When I got right down to it, could I accurately explain to them what I really, really felt? Could I describe to them what it really felt like when I heard that building go
pop
behind me and I was like,
Holy shit, I’m fucked. I’m going to die
? Could I really explain how scared I was or the ugliness I saw with my own eyes? I didn’t have the tools or the vocabulary to talk about it in terms that could give it its due. I knew—at least I thought I knew—it would eat my parents up to know that I thought I lost them forever and that there was a moment that I feared was my last moment. No, no, no. I didn’t want to dig around down there. I didn’t want to feel that vulnerability again.
That’s what those 9/11 terrorist motherfuckers did to me
.
They made me feel vulnerable. They took away my invincibility, my ability to see life whole, to see life as good, to simply talk with my parents, my brother, my sisters, my wife. I was forced into these feelings. They put me under that fucking van, scared to lose all of it.

My friends and my family wanted me to talk about this. So not only did the terrorists put me under that van, but because I survived, they forced me to go back under it and feel those feelings again in order to get past them. I was a thirty-eight-year-old man. I didn’t want to feel weak, helpless, scared, lost, or guilty. Talking about it forced me to relive it. Not talking about it forced me to live in fear of having to talk about it.

No, I didn’t die. So I had no right to feel that bad, or any bad. But dammit, I did, and it was making everyone else around me feel bad too.

It was often hardest around friends. It sat between us like an elephant in the room. I wanted them to understand what I was going through, and they wanted to understand it too, but how could they understand it if I refused to talk to them about it? Oftentimes, I would be with a friend whom I had not seen in a while, and I’d actually want to talk about it. They knew me. They could see there was something on my mind, but I always felt that whatever the time was that we were together was the wrong time to do it. How was I supposed to broach the subject? Say, “Hey, congratulations on your son’s first communion, but let me tell you how fucked up I am”? The frustration and awkwardness was palpable. In these situations, I felt painful distance from friends and from the friendly occasions that brought us together.

That is how alienation feels. You’re out with your buddies, and you remember your role in the relationship as the carefree, fun-loving guy, but you can’t plug in to it. Something’s blocking you. And everyone else is rocking and having a blast, and you say to yourself,
This doesn’t seem like so much fun anymore.
I wanted so badly to connect. I would ask Joy, “Why isn’t it the same with my friends anymore?” It was because I wasn’t the same.

Time and time again I found myself in a room full of friends, feeling totally alone, totally detached. I couldn’t relate. Everybody was kicking back, having a drink, talking about the last episode of
Desperate Housewives
or something like that, and I was like,
What
?

March 2004, Sunday afternoon I was at a gathering at a buddy’s house when a newsflash scrolled across the bottom of a giant flat screen TV, updating us on the body count from the terrorist bombing in Madrid a few days earlier. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to it, but my buddy standing next to me does. Jangling the ice in his scotch glass, he leans in and smalltalks, “That was pretty crazy, huh?” Then he realizes it’s me, and we both feel awkward.

I was desperate to change the noise in my head. In May 2004, I gave in. I got a job on Wall Street with a telecom company I will call CityTel. It put me back in New York City, back downtown. I thought maybe it would be like Network Plus.

Much of my relationship with Joy remained unresolved. So much was still left unsaid and unsettled. But we decided that demonstrations of outward normalcy might help us through whatever was failing inside of our marriage. It was all about making life look good on paper. So in October of 2005, we bought a house in Bloomfield, New Jersey, near where I grew up. It was a huge arts and crafts with a Spanish-style roof, on the corner. The place was a handyman’s special. We’d really have to do a lot of work on it over time. Thus that house became the symbol of our new commitment to going forward together, an emblem of our new optimism. We can do this, we said.

But you know what’s coming, don’t you?

CityTel was less than an ideal situation. The guy who hired me hadn’t really consulted the CEO on it. I had been sold on the idea that I’d develop an in-house sales team, like I’d done at Network Plus, but CityTel had a culture of dealing with outside sales agents. Immediately, there was tension. I let it go. I was determined to make it work. This was my new beginning.

In short time, people at CityTel caught wind of my 9/11 story. I never mentioned it. Then one afternoon, after I’d been with the company for about a year, the CFO and the COO called me in and asked me to tell them my 9/11 story. I felt extremely reluctant to do so. I’m trying to move past it, I said, quietly. They really wanted to hear it, though. They appeared sincere. I thought that maybe this was a way to connect with them on a human level. But that’s not what happened. As I tried earnestly to tell what I remembered, they kept interrupting. It’s like they were kids toggling between Reverse and Fast Forward on their DVD player. “W-w-w-w-wait,” said the COO. “Tell us again about that body you saw coming out of the sky.” Then the CFO just had to know: “Like, did anybody die right in front of you?” It went on like this. They had no interest in the little acts of kindness and selflessness, the anonymous heroic things I saw people do for each other, the things that mattered to me. These guys were just bored and looking for some free entertainment on their coffee break.

It was disgusting. I felt gross.

I came home that night, and I told Joy how bad it was in the office. She rolled her eyes, thinking,
Here we go again.
She was frustrated from night after night of listening to me spew negativity, wishing I’d do something to help myself—talk to someone. “Until you do,” she’d say, “nothing is going to satisfy you, Michael.” I’d give her the universal “You just don’t understand” head shake. Yet it was still me who didn’t understand. I refused to say out loud how much I needed to work things out, still fearful to take the painful journey it would require to do so.

Something had to give. Because the journey I took each day to get to work was tearing me open in ways I could no longer ignore. My weekday commute took me right through Ground Zero. I exited the PATH at Chambers Street, walked up the subway steps outside, which puts you on a viewing platform that allowed you to look out over the devastated area. That platform, originally built as a simple area for mourners to pay their quiet respects, had become an all-out, albeit-makeshift, tourist attraction. People from all over the world were making pilgrimages, every day, to Ground Zero.

I could hear them talking, their accents giving away where they might be from. I heard hundreds of conversations. They stood in awe, mostly. Silent. Respectful. They acted as if they were in a cemetery, or a holy place. Some prayed. Others gently placed flowers. I’d see many of them on my ride in, and I watched their reactions carefully as they viewed the entirety of Ground Zero for the first time from the train window. Sometimes I’d be walking behind a group onto the viewing platform and eavesdrop on their conversation. They’d ask questions of each other, tell each other what they knew, what they thought they knew, what they’d read or seen on TV. They hungered to know more. Where was the North Tower? Where was the South Tower? Didn’t that use to be where the fountain in the square used to be?
If they only knew.
I just about broke through my skin wanting to interrupt these people and share with them—not share
my
story but tell them simple things: where things were, what it used to be like for me and the friends who were my co-workers. Then I’d get distracted. I thought I heard singing off in the distance. More like chanting maybe. Then I saw it clearly. It was protesting. Protesters became a fixture outside of Ground Zero. There was always something to protest. I didn’t want any part of that, from whatever side it came from. I tried instead to focus on the photos of faces—faces of the missing, faces of the dead—thousands of them, fastened to the chain-link fence and posted on construction walls. Notes were taped to some, messages written next to others. Everywhere you looked there were flowers. They sold them, a dollar each, across the street. They sold a lot of things.

Street cart vendors peddled key chains and T-shirts. Knockoff FDNY junk over here, gruesome images over there. People bought this stuff.
Are you going home to put a picture of the two planes crashing into World Trade Center up on your wall? Why would you want to do that?
I tried to ignore it, just walk through it. I could hear people arguing. An old woman pointed her finger at one of the vendors, letting him know she thought it was wrong to do what he was doing. I saw those types of confrontations a lot. Oftentimes I had to hold back from laying into them myself. The disrespect, their callousness was appalling. They were hawking trinkets like they were souvenirs from a horror movie.

Monday through Friday, I took the train back and forth with the tourists. I heard them talking, and I could see what they were taking away from the experience. And my heart sank.

Either they don’t get it, or they’ve forgotten it
.

The last time I was down at Ground Zero, before CityTel, was five weeks after the attacks. We were a united community then, a united country. We collectively felt terrible, collectively sought to heal each other, and stood collectively ready to serve.

Just three and a half years later, I stood in a carnival.
Come see where the bodies burned! Where the jumpers jumped! Where the planes hit! The villains! The heroes!
And while all of this was going on, they were arguing about what to build, where to build, if to build, who should build. And nothing was built. The entire two years I commuted through there, I never saw a crane move, a dump truck unloaded, or any work at all.

The site of the 9/11 terrorist attack had not yielded a single physical manifestation of united response. Instead, this “new” Ground Zero had become a crucible for a thousand different and discordant motivations and a thousand divergent and competing agendas. Some people were trying to love and heal, some were trying to learn and get it right, some were trying to call others to account, and some were clearly just trying to make a buck. In many ways, the five blocks of activity at Ground Zero represented, in microcosm, our national political discourse. The media was full of it. Divisiveness and bloody opportunism dominated. Just three and half years later, those seeking reelection were using 9/11 for whatever reason was most politically expedient. Some dropped it as an applause line, others as a throwaway line. Each claimed to know what 9/11 meant to America. This was not a mighty nation rebuilding itself but a 21st-century revival of the Tower of Babel.