My 9/11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was staring at lower Manhattan, trying to wrap my mind around the improbable idea that a plane was lodged inside 1 World Trade Center. Scorched trading-floor papers were blowing across the harbor toward South Brooklyn when the sound of an engine redlining, struggling like it was about to blow up, began to dominate. It was all sound.

Then came the slowest-moving “black” airborne object I've ever seen, arcing low and slow over my head. It seemed almost to stop in midair, hanging just above me as it changed direction, the engines straining and roaring before suddenly catching hold and flinging it back toward Manhattan. I could feel it disrupting the air around me.

It looked black to me, like a plane without markings, and I assumed it was a reconnaissance or rescue plane. It turned out to be United Airlines Flight 175. An instant later, with unimaginable force, it slammed into the South Tower, and I almost jumped out of my skin, backing quickly, instinctively, against a wall. My first thought was: whatever is happening, I'm way too close. My second thought was Osama bin Laden. And I'm no genius.

The fireball caused by the strike of UA 175 was so vibrant and immediate it was like I was watching a movie. My eyes felt untrustworthy, and I even asked a Jamaican dude standing next to me, “Did I just see that?” I wasn't prepared to process what had happened. No one is.

Watching those buildings tumble with the naked eye was beyond surreal. The dust and debris quickly followed, accompanied by a sound like Godzilla tearfully roaring across New York Harbor. At the time I didn't have a TV, so for weeks I would have nothing with which to compare my almost psychedelic experience.

That evening, as I was sitting by the radio, staring at the hole in the sky and breathing in the wretched stench, my old pal Stephen Schubert suggested we go see the site for ourselves. I jumped on my bike and rode over the Brooklyn Bridge toward the site, as nervous as I've ever been.

The nights of September 11 and 12, 2001, we spent probably 16 hours exploring and trying to help in the area around Lower Manhattan. You could go anywhere at that time. It was like a George Romero movie: pulverized debris, fires, and a host of zombied emergency workers. But mostly abandonment. Quiet. Ghastly. No reporters, no sightseers, no homeless. We drank beer and wandered, wondering innocently how all the buildings could have fallen down so completely. It seemed even a movie couldn't have come off that perfect. People are still wondering. Me? I can't wrap my head around any of it.

Schubert always contended that mischief was afoot. But today he's dead, the towers that so dominated this city are gone, and Osama, too, has vanished like a puff of devilish smoke.

At times, I dream of Schubert lying in wait for Osama Bin Laden in some otherworldly way station, ready to rip his turban off and lay a “flying ham sandwich” on the so-called Sheikh. The thought of his hairy white ass flying through the air and knocking that tower of a Muslim phony flat on his back is one of the few things that makes the memories bearable.

Linked below is the most personal footage of 9/11 I've ever seen.

11:45 into the video, United 175 strikes the South Tower—the very moment I experienced from Brooklyn. The camera wobbles noticeably. Her reaction is palpable: “Oh my God, what is going on?” Then, trying to make sense of what they've just seen, she says, “It was a military plane,” and someone else in the room repeats it. But then you realize there is no turning back, and somehow that is still the most unimaginable thing of all. ~ What We Saw.

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