9/12: And the Day Dims Again
When all roads lead to the same place does it even make sense to take one over another?
You can take the boy out of the city but taking the city out of the boy? Harder than it sounds. Especially when the boy in question hails from New York. Because it’s not really even about the boy at this point. It’s about the city.
“Oh you live in East Palo Alto?” Her voice dripped with a sort of pseudo-cosmopolitan contempt for, not so much the former Murder Capital of America and home of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Dangerous Minds, but the idea of the ‘burbs. “You should really move to San Francisco.”
“Where are you from…originally, I mean?”
“Davis.”
“Well, see, that’s your problem right there.” I’d not have gone this way on that but I was talking to Andrea Juno, she of RE/Search Books, and I had not asked for this. She brought it to me. “You still think San Francisco is a real city. If I had wanted THAT, I’d have gone back to New York. Where I’m from.”
Game, set, match.
I liked San Francisco well enough but New York gets in your bones. For good or ill. So it goes when walking down an alley behind San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe and I stumble into a New York moment.
The occasion? A poetry reading. Which with its Beat history, San Francisco was a perfect place for: Ginsberg, Kerouac and Corso dancing in my head. But trying to find someplace to get a slice of pizza that was cheaper than Zuni? A challenge, however spying a parlor across the street at alley end I wait for the cars to slow before seeing, in what seemed like slow motion, a car barreling out of the alley kitty corner to the one behind Zuni.
It screeched into the middle of the street where it struck another car that spun around like some crazy, angry top and came to a rest after taking out a fire hydrant, six feet in front of me, the driver slumped over the steering wheel. Slumped over and pressed into the horn that now screamed. Dead, or unconscious, largely unknown by me.
[A]s the Twin Towers imbroglio started to unfold I could feel things start to crystallize in both my thinking and feeling. Around something I had never said before or, would likely, not ever say again: Rollins was right.
I’m not sure what I was thinking at that very moment but still being ambulatory and in sound body what I did then was very much along the lines of what might have been said if your line of thought had been interrupted by some sort of minor annoyance.
By which I mean I didn’t say it but I might as well have: “well…anyway…” And I turned to cross the street. Because: I wanted a slice of pizza.
As I make my way across the street I see people running from the alley I just stepped out of and another thought: “where the hell are they running off to?”
But they weren’t running off to. They were running to…apparently help the guy slumped over the wheel. An idea that had not even occurred to me.
So I look at them now ministering aid to this erstwhile victim, and while I first imagined they were trying to get his seat belt loose, what I saw? Guys trying to steal his wallet. Which really, in full consideration of all that had occurred, also had nothing to do with me.
San Francisco though, gets to you too, in its own ways, and so, out of character, I turn and return. To? Help? I’m not sure and so I stand there, not especially effectively, though it doesn’t take much to stand, and register some sort of community…concern?
And then: the people in uniforms show up.
“Well…anyway….” I walked off to get the pizza, did the reading, and drove back to East Palo Alto where getting dressed for work some time later I watched the Twin Towers collapse after being hit by planes.
I shrugged, and headed off to work.
The thought at the time? “I never liked those buildings anyway.” Which was true.
Outside of Spiderman George Willig who I saw climb the Towers and tight rope walker Philippe Petit, who I did not, having immortalized them, actually being up in the Towers was always creepy. They swayed. So you always felt vaguely seasick.
Then another thought: “this is really going to screw up the skyline.” And I had loved that skyline.
Later I showed up at work and the building, which sat in the flight path of San Jose Airport was dark and a notice had gone out that workers at work should return home. The airport was silent as well, all flights having been grounded. I sat there in the building and decided to work anyway.
But at another time in another place I was having a heated conversation with former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. He was on the couch in the garage I used to call home. I was trying to explain…religion to him in a burst of acid-fueled reasoning. And not succeeding.
“It’s the mind that makes the hammer a weapon versus a tool that you can build something with…” I wasn’t an atheist and had just come off of a jag of reading a bunch of esoteric religious stuff. Beautiful in a way. But not part of any really widely understood or appreciated canon.
He wasn’t swayed.
“All I know is that no matter what road you take here, it’s always covered in blood.”
Yeah: game, set, match, indeed.
And as the Twin Towers imbroglio started to unfold I could feel things start to crystallize in both my thinking and feeling. Around something I had never said before or, would likely, not ever say again: Rollins was right.
Yeah yeah…Bin Laden, the Taliban, Mecca, Islam, Israel, Middle Eastern agita, the Iraq redirect, weapons of mass destruction/distraction…whatever: I was now blaming the hammer. Still not an atheist but people and their belief systems are to be hated and feared.
Then another shoe, significant in an unexpected way: Daniel Bergstein, a married and young father, and a friend from high school, never made it out of the building. A scholarship was started in his name and there were ways to get money to his now-widowed wife and kids.
“All I know is that no matter what road you take here, it’s always covered in blood.” — Henry Rollins
OXBOW soon showed up in New York the October right after that September to play a show at Brownies with Michael Gira’s girlfriend’s band. I don’t know why this was significant or remembered by me but it was. And then this: the club owners were freaked out by the promo package we had sent pre-show because it had a business card in it that one of my bouncer friends used to hand out when they ejected someone: You have just received the business. Please tell your friends about it, is what it said on its fluorescent orange face.
This scared them, so they called the Feds, then told us that they called the Feds. We cleared this up before we showed up and when we showed up all of Lower Manhattan smelled like wet plaster and fire. Just like every bad neighborhood I remember from the ‘70s.
Now, the shittily named Freedom Tower stands where the Twin Towers once had. The lies that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan have been uncovered, and both countries are in our rear view mirror. Bin Laden is dead though. Giuliani has been dismasted. America is at war with phantoms both real and unreal, foreign and domestic.
And now this: every g-ddamned September we now have to remember and re-repeat the memorializing of a day — quick: what day was Pearl Harbor bombed? — that suggests that horror is somehow the exception and not the rule. Do you think that any but the most well-acquitted of us believes otherwise? Do you think being reminded of it is less likely to lead to us to being doomed to repeat it like those who don’t learn their history?
It marches on, inexorably, and without pause, and it’s this sense that New York, among all others has gotten right: horror, insofar as it is like really bad weather, rolls on, and if you can manage to avoid it? Count a blessing.
And if not?
Then your troubles are over. Or just beginning. Hats off to the people who gave their lives to save the lives of others. And to the surviving families of the dead. But I’m still keenly aware of the fact that there’s not much you can do to stop the roulette wheel of misery. So while this is the first time in any kind of coherent way I’ve talked about September 11th, it’s also the last.
Well….Anyway….
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