To Omaha and Back

I went to Omaha yesterday. That's Omaha, Nebraska. I woke up at 5 a.m., when it was pitch black out, got dressed, ambled out to my Skyline car while I was still half-asleep, and closed my eyes all the way to Newark Airport. Newark, because there's only one direct flight to Omaha in the Tri-State area: Continental Airlines, out of Newark. (Yes, C.A.C.A.) The good news? I got there in 20 minutes. There was hardly any traffic.

I slept most of the flight, which was a little over three hours. Occasionally, I'd wake up and look out the window, where, on the ground below, a mosaic of colors and shapes, green and brown and yellow and red, covered the landscape. Here and there, the patchwork was broken by tufts of trees, tiny, isolated, and controlled forests. They looked out of place amid the surrounding flatlands. The further west we flew, the larger the shapes became. Dense, urban centers gave way to open fields dotted by a lonely house or grain silo. I thought to myself, people live here, people live their entire lives in these quiet towns. Then they die and they get buried somewhere, probably not far from where they were born. How many young kids from the small towns I'm flying over dream of living where I live, trying to make it in the big city? How many couldn't care less, and are perfectly happy to stay where they are? How many would rather go west, to California? Then I thought, this is America. How different we are, how different our outlooks, priorities, and goals.

The Midwest is as foreign to me as China. I know it's there, but I rarely think of it, until I'm forced to, like during an election, or when I'm passing over it.

I landed in Omaha. Walking through the airport, I felt self-conscious, like I stood out. I was a strange man in a strange land. Maybe it was the suit and tie I had on. People around wore jean shorts and t-shirts. They looked mellow. Sedate. It wasn't like Chicago or even Cleveland, where you might expect to see a few suits. There didn't seem to be too many businesspeople walking around. I flagged a taxi, which took me to the nondescript building on Pacific Street, that I'd reserved for my deposition. It was 25 minutes from the airport, a straight shot on the highway. There was no traffic to speak of. I thought how nice it must be to live in a place with so much space and so little aggravation on the road. Do they get traffic jams? Can't be. The place was flat. Pancake flat. Did I say that already? I saw next to nothing of Omaha itself. It was small, I know that. I'm not sure I'd even call it a city. But I can't judge because I was there for a total of five hours. Four of those hours were in a conference room, where I deposed a 64 year-old man about why he screwed my client over on his ERISA benefits.

When my deposition ended, I rushed back to the airport. I wouldn't have minded spending the night, just to check the place out and maybe try one o' dem famous Omaha steaks, but I didn't want the client to get stuck paying for it. So I called a taxi (you don't flag taxis in Omaha, you call and wait half an hour for one to arrive). Soon, I was back at the Omaha airport. Less than an hour after that, I was back on another small plane and headed to Newark.

I touched down in Newark after the sun had gone down. The sky was pitch black, just the way I remembered it from that morning. On the car ride back to NYC, I saw this light in the distance, a solid beam shooting straight up into the sky. At first, I thought it was one of those casino advertisements, you know, like at Luxor in Vegas, where they shoot a light straight up to try to get you to drive over and figure out what it is before you lose all your money. Or maybe a UFO was abducting someone. The light looked right out of X-Files.

Further along, I realized that there were actually two beams of light, and they were coming from downtown New York. We drove closer and closer to them, and they got bigger and bigger. Right before the Holland Tunnel, they loomed large above me, two enormous beacons directed to the heavens. Through the tunnel, exit on the other side, and there they were again, right in front of me. To my right was the street where the towers fell. Up close, they were these huge, electric lasers rocketing into the sky. They were the color of a gas flame, right before it catches fire. Outside my car window was the bustle of the city, so different from what I'd left in Omaha, people eating hot dogs, a couple kissing in the middle of the sidewalk, young girls cackling at each other. City noise, something that normally annoys me, suddenly felt familiar and warm. So close to where tragedy struck seven years ago. I thought, how different this city is now from the days and months that followed those cruel moments of death and destruction. How resilient it is, we are. We're back to being happy and carefree, even as those lights remind us once a year of what happened seven years ago and what could happen again. I thought how foreign our lives are compared to those of people who live in Omaha and other parts of the country, the people from small, quiet places where buildings and subways don't blow up, where terrorism is something that happens somewhere else, where foreign policy is more about the word "foreign" and less about the word "policy." And yet, we are all part of the same country. We are all Americans.

I didn't see the lights again until tonight, when I exited the subway on Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg after work, looked up, and there they were, just over the short townhouses in front of me. They loomed so large, it looked like they were just around the corner. I couldn't stop looking at them. That's the effect they have. No matter where you are in New York, they compel your attention. When it's cloudy, as it was tonight, the twin lights hit the clouds with two small circles that look like vampire bites. When the wind shifts, the circles combine together into what looks like a passageway to another world. It's as if those lights took all the people who suffered and died on 9/11, all the people on the planes, all the people in the buildings and transported them to a place without pain, without hate, without physical cares. Those beautiful, ethereal lights remind us of what we are at our core: not mortal bodies that decay and die, but light, spirit, and love, all of which are eternal and live forever.

Alive Day

September 11th is here again, and it's interesting how far removed this day feels to me from six years ago. The wound is scabbed over, the emotional rawness is gone. I suppose that's a good thing. The only time it comes back to me is when unexpected shit happens in the city and people do the confused mass exodus dance. Like when an 80 year-old steam pipe explodes, for example. Or when there's a blackout. Oh yeah, I'm forgetting the daily subway ride. That's a bit different now. The background paranoia, the Is-This-The-Day feeling that sometimes taps you on the shoulder while you're busy listening to your iPod or reading a book. Would I even see it coming? I wonder sometimes. I don't suppose that feeling's going anywhere anytime soon. I have a feeling the New York subway is going to get smacked one day, it's just a question of when and whether I'll be on the wrong train at the wrong time. Morbid, oh yes. But you either give in to the bullshit and never leave your house, or you live your life. Nobody lives forever. When they call the number on your ticket, all you can do is hand it over.

I have the sense that most of the country moved on from 9/11 a few years ago. If you weren't in New York or Washington, D.C., or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, or didn't suffer a personal loss on that day, you likely didn't feel the impact as greatly. That makes sense, it's natural. But what surprises me a little, six years later, is that most people, even people in NYC, seem to want to put 9/11 behind them. Now it seems that it's only the people who lost loved ones, or who spent weeks after 9/11 digging through the mountains of rubble trying to find survivors or human remains, who still have a deep connection to the emotion of that day. I have a firefighter friend who lost many people he knew, and who is now sick from the toxins that were in the air after the buildings fell. He sent me an email tonight that reminded me that a lot of people still feel the pain of 9/11 every day. A lot of people.

The rest of us? I am writing this in the early morning of 9/11/07, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think we feel it like we did before. I don't think many of us will be inspired to get up in a few hours to hear all the names be read like we did before. Each year, it seems, the readers of the names inject more and more personal comments into their readings, as if it's about them. I don't think we'll watch those videos of the planes hitting, over and over and over again, like we did before. I don't think we'll want to rehash the events of that terrible day. We'll probably pay our respects, give a moment of silence, maybe watch some snippets of historical news footage, and then we'll go about our business.

When I ask myself why 9/11 feels like ancient history to me after only six years, I really think it's because of the carnage of Iraq. The Iraq War is the deformed twin brother of 9/11. Over 3700 American soldiers have been killed. And how many Iraqis? Is anyone counting? It has to be over 100,000, at least. And over 27,000 wounded soldiers. That's 27,000 men and women who likely would be dead if we'd been fighting this war a decade or two ago. The Pentagon -- with the media's obscene cooperation and acquiescence -- has done a very good job of hiding from us footage of our dead and injured soldiers in Iraq. It's been a very "clean" war from that perspective. I have this theory that if the media was doing its job and the average American could see what was really happening over there, if we had clear pictures and video of the dead and dying, of people being shot and blown up, we'd be able to see the reality of war for ourselves. Then maybe more people would be asking WHY a lot more loudly and with greater persistence. Then maybe our soldiers would have come home by now. I also think that if we had a draft, El Commandante Bush wouldn't have had the balls to start this war of opportunism in the first place.

Last Sunday night, I watched an HBO documentary where James Gandolfini interviewed ten American soldiers, nine amputees and one PTSD victim, from the Iraq War. You can see their pictures and stories here. Many of the interviews begin with real time video footage of the ambush or incident that nearly killed the soldier being interviewed. The footage was released by the insurgents who set the IEDs. You see a Humvee in a convoy of four other Humvees rolling down a street or dirt road. You're watching and waiting. You know something bad is coming, just like in the movies where the killer is hiding in a closet and you've got your hands over your face because Jamie Lee Curtis is about to open the closet door. You wait. You wait some more. Wait. Then BOOM!!! A loud crackle and a huge orange and white fireball the size of a small building incinerates the truck. A black, billowing smoke cloud rises into the air and you wonder how the fuck anyone could have survived an explosion like that. It's beyond overkill. Then you learn that two, three, four people in the Humvee were killed and the only survivor is the triple amputee sitting in the chair across from Jim Gandolfini. The guy's saying that if he lost both arms and both legs, it wouldn't be worth living anymore because he wouldn't be able to do anything on his own. He's just happy he still has his right arm. A female military policewoman whose right shoulder and arm were torn off by a rocket propelled grenade says she hates her prosthesis and refuses to wear it most of the time. They show her on the metro in Washington, holding on to a pole with her good arm. A few moments later, she appears wistful, looking off in the distance, and Gandolfini asks her what she's thinking about. On the verge of tears, she says she's thinking that she'll never be able to hold her own baby in her arms. She wonders what her children -- if she ever has any -- will think of her. A soldier blinded by shrapnel from an IED is missing both his eyes. He has one fake one, in his right eye socket. It's a dark blue orb with eight diamonds grafted onto it. He says when he came back from Iraq without his eyes his wife left him. So he took her wedding ring and had a jeweler set the ring's diamonds into a fake eye. His left eye, by contrast, is entirely empty, and it's shocking at first to see that there's nothing there except a sutured flap of skin. He says the doctors told him that the scarring was too thick to hold a fake eye, so he goes with only one. Besides his missing eyes and the scars on his skull, the rest of his body is pristine and wholly intact. He has both arms and both legs. He can walk, he can dance, he can feed himself. But he can't see, and he never will again. Another Marine sits with his mother, who holds his hand. His bald head has deep, ridged scars, and he has an unrecognizing look in his eyes. He took two bullets to the head and suffered injuries to 2/3 of his brain. He's in a wheelchair and barely speaks. He sometimes laughs for no apparent reason. He's 22. They show a video of the same guy dancing and joking before his injury and it tears your heart open.

They call it "Alive Day." The day they didn't die. Some of them celebrate it like a birthday, happily commemorating the day of their survival. Others consider it the worst day of their life and don't celebrate it at all.

9/11 Redux

My day was pretty uneventful until about 6:10 p.m. tonight, when, out of nowhere, I heard this long, dark rumble come from somewhere outside my office, which is located very close to Grand Central. The noise was low, deep, and noticeable. It sounded like an overactive air conditioner or a loud train coming into a station. Then the AC in my office felt like it kicked up a notch, which I thought was strange because normally the building knocks the AC down a level around 6:30 p.m. But I kept working, thinking that maybe they were fixing a generator in the building or something.

A few seconds later, I heard G. -- an attorney who was working on the 65th floor of the South Tower of The World Trade Center when the second plane hit on 9/11 -- proclaim quite loudly from three doors down that there had been an explosion in a nearby building. A bunch of us then walked into a partner's office that faces east, where, through the window, you could see a huge amount of white smoke that appeared to be billowing out of a building right next door to us. The rumbling was noticeably louder on the east side of our office.

Someone surmised that a boiler had blown out. Someone else thought that a fire had started and gotten out of control. G. didn't give a shit what it was. "We need to get out of here, guys. Now." I thought he was kidding, because he loves to joke around, but when I looked at his face, he was dead serious. His eyes showed a combination of fear, borderline panic, and imploring authority. You could tell he was reliving a really bad experience. We all listened, and after rounding some people up, we got the fuck out of there. Before leaving of course, I grabbed my murse, inside of which I threw some work to do this evening. Couldn't leave the murse.

The elevators were working, so we took one to the ground floor. Once we hit bottom and the doors opened, you could hear the fire alarms in the lobby going off and there were masses of people quickly evacuating the building. It was organized confusion. No one was panicking but you could tell people were very jittery and no one really knew where to go. There was no one directing people, which I found a little troubling. Also disturbing was the fact that since there are no stairs down to the ground floor, only a small escalator, we all had to wait in a deep line just to get outside. It's ridiculous to have to wait for a fucking escalator when something like this happens. I also wondered why there had been no fire alarm on my floor, directing us to leave the building.

Once outside, I was shocked at the number of people who were standing on the street, milling around, looking up, and watching the mess unfold. It was wall-to-wall gawkers. Very few people were actually trying to leave the area. I started walking towards Madison Avenue, which was west and away from where the smoke was coming from. Some people were walking away, but i saw more people standing on street corners gawking at the smoke and talking on their cell phones. Police and fire sirens wailed by, and I just kept walking south, towards Union Square, and hopefully, the L Train to Williamsburg. The only time I stopped was for about three seconds, around 41st Street. I looked east and saw a thick haze with a dark brown core of dirty smoke pumping out of the ground and billowing high into the air, past the tops of surrounding buildings.

I tried to call K. on my cell to find out what the hell had happened, whether it was terrorism, a bad boiler, or something else. My phone didn't work, another echo of 9/11, so I sent her a message on my Blackberry, telling her to call me, which she did a few seconds later. She said that reports were saying that a blown manhole cover had caused the explosion; it wasn't terrorism. Good news, though I suspect that there are a lot more manhole covers in New York City than terrorists at the moment. Fortunately, the subway was running at 33rd Street, so I jumped on a downtown 6 train, got on the L at Union Square, and 20 minutes later, walked in my door, sweaty, tired, and relieved.

Pretty screwed up night. Here are some observations I'd like to share regarding this evening's events:

1. This felt eerily like 9/11. From the evacuations, to the people on the streets, to the scenes of billowing smoke. Even moreso now that I'm home, watching some of the street scenes on the news. One of them shows people frantically running down the street, panic covering their faces, as a huge wave of cloudy smoke chases them from behind. It looked just like the scenes of people running away from the WTC as the buildings fell six years ago. We've been through a couple of scares in this city since then, including a serious blackout a few years ago, but this one felt the most like that day to me.

2. People are fucking stupid, even "savvy" New Yorkers. Maybe we're too confident for our own good. Maybe we've gotten complacent. It's going to cost us, eventually. Tonight, I saw way too many people standing around watching this whole thing happen instead of getting out of the way and leaving the scene. As people were watching everything go down, no one had a clue what that gray smoke may have been hiding. There could have been cyanide, ricin, or some radioactive material in that dirty cloud for all they knew. Yet, most people acted like they were watching a Cirque du Soleil show. They just stood around gawking and calling their friends, as they tried to get a better look at all that exciting smoke! It was unbelievable. When -- not if, when -- we get hit with a dirty bomb, or worse, in this city, a lot of people are going to get sick and/or die needlessly because they'd prefer to gratify their curiosity, rather than get out of danger.

Now Bloomberg is saying that there may have been asbestos in the brown soot that everyone found so interesting. Nice.

3. It's every man for himself, baby! During this entire incident, I didn't hear a single announcement from anyone in authority. Not by the people in my law office. Not by the security staff in the building I work in. Not by the cops outside. It was total chaos. It's amazing how little we've learned from 9/11. We are incredibly unprepared and extremely vulnerable in this city. And yet, we have a ginormous target on our back. My advice, if you happen to find yourself in a situation like this: Don't expect to be told what to do or where to go. The initial moments are total confusion, no one will know what the hell is going on. Ultimately, the only counsel you will have to rely on is your own. Use it wisely, Grasshopper.

4. If this was really caused by a faulty steam pipe that was originally installed in 1924, eighty-three years ago, exactly how decrepit IS the infrastructure in my beloved city? I'm guessing that today's culprit isn't the only suicidal steam pipe living under New York's streets. How bad is it down there? First, we hear stories of electrified metal plates that have killed several dogs and even a person, Jodie Lane, in 2004. And every so often, we get an exploding manhole cover. Now this. Hmmmmm. Maybe we should stop invading other countries for a little while and spend some of those billions on our cities, which are falling apart.

5. I'm really happy I live in Brooklyn now. No further explanation required.