Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (16 page)

I learned that such a thing as interfaith ministry existed, that it did not object in the least to self-described Marxist Muggletonian Jews who spent much of their time in bars. I enrolled in a part-time two-year ordination program, quit my publishing job, and went to work as a community organizer for an antipoverty nonprofit organization, where I was charged with engaging faith leaders and their congregations all over the city to work harder and advocate more to address the needs and concerns of low-income New Yorkers. This work brought me to fiery worship services at storefront Pentecostal churches in Brownsville where hands were laid upon my head; to progressive Jewish congregations in Park Slope; to fancy high-church Episcopalians on the Upper East Side who fought for the homeless men who set up camp on their steps, to the endless and mean-spirited consternation of their neighbors; to meetings at which socially conservative Evangelists from Staten Island, openly gay rabbis, and Jesuit priests sat at the same table, cooperating in common cause, in service of the greater good, in service of God, in service of the poorest New Yorkers. It didn't always go smoothly, but we did manage to get some things done. And after these services and meetings and field visits, I had the Fish Bar. Among the bar staff, there were atheists and agnostics and Catholics, but if anybody there found my growing dedication to God and to service strange or foolish, they certainly didn't let on. If anything, I was sure I had their support.

•   •   •

O
n the morning of September 11, 2001, instead of heading straight to my office in the financial district, I went to a diner in my neighborhood to have a meeting with a local rabbi who was active in social justice circles. It was, as anyone who was in New York City that day will tell you, a gorgeous late summer blue-sky morning. I figured the rabbi and I would talk for an hour or so, then I'd amble over to the local middle school to vote in the local elections that were scheduled that day, then hop on the subway and get my ass to the office. Like any ordinary day, but sunnier, and maybe more promising.

The rabbi and I ordered breakfast and I showed her a pamphlet I'd drafted that congregations could use to advocate for easier food stamp applications. We'd only really just started talking when someone in the restaurant turned the radio up louder. A waitress came by to top off our coffee, and we asked her if she wouldn't mind maybe turning it down a little, since we were trying to have a meeting. She looked dazed. “Something's going on at the World Trade Center,” she told us. “Like, a plane crash.” It was not yet nine
A.M
.

We figured that this must have been caused by an inexperienced pilot accidentally flying his plane too low, straying off course, panicking, hitting the north tower. But as everyone in the diner fell silent and listened to the grave voices on the radio, the truth of what was going on sank in, and it was more horrifying than any of us could have imagined. I was grateful at least to be in the rabbi's company. Her presence was calming and comforting. Of course she'd have to get back to her office immediately. It was possible that some of her congregants, their friends, their loved ones, were in the tower. They would need her. We quickly settled our bill and went our separate ways. My first instinct was to get to work, but when I reached the train station on Seventh Avenue, it was cordoned off. The subways had been shut down.

I walked quickly back home, a little more than ten blocks. My neighborhood, usually busy and chatty even by Brooklyn standards, was silent. But what could we say? There were no words, just this alien speechlessness. Yet we could not stop looking at one another, looking right into each other's eyes. As I walked, I kept thinking of a passage from the lamentations of Jeremiah:
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

By the time I got home, the south tower had also been hit. I called my office. No one was there. It was close to the World Trade Center, and any of my colleagues who might have headed to work early, on trains that stopped at Cortlandt Street, in subway stations right below the towers, might have . . . who knew? It was still unclear how many were injured, how many had died. Frank and I watched, stunned. His instinctive response to this terrible event was to cook. It relaxed him and gave him a sense of purpose. In the afternoon, he got to work roasting a chicken, mashing potatoes, cranking out comfort food. E-mails came in from friends in California, Ireland, everywhere. Later on, my boss managed to get in touch and let me know that everyone from work was okay, but we wouldn't be able to get back into the office for at least a week. Lower Manhattan was no-go, inaccessible to all but police and emergency services and other essential personnel.

I called a college friend who also lived in the neighborhood, and asked if she wanted to come over. Who would want to be alone on such a day? She joined us, we watched the news, we ate, then headed to evening services at a progressive church just blocks away. It felt right and safe and necessary to be in a house of worship, to grieve collectively. But already the discourse of 9/11 started to worry me. The minister came uncomfortably close, to my mind, anyway, to blaming Israel for what had happened, which was not only premature of her, but facile. And besides that, it seemed counterintuitive and potentially dangerous for a pastor to do anything that might widen the gap between people of different faiths at such a time. Once again, mainstream church would not give me what I needed, especially now. But we stayed out the disappointing service, then went immediately to the nearest bar—a gay bar two blocks away. We saw familiar neighborhood faces there and had whiskey and greeted one another like survivors. The atmosphere was surreal, even if the sentiment in the room was both sweet and disconcertingly survivalist:
The city is burning. But we can drink. We can dance. We can love.

The next day, I signed up with the Red Cross. I'd do whatever needed to be done—but I mentioned that I was preparing for ordination and would most like to volunteer on the spiritual care track, if that was possible. “Can you make a spreadsheet?” the volunteer coordinator asked me. The truth is, I was—and am—terrible at spreadsheets. But sure I could. Fine. If that's what they needed. “We got all these pastors coming in from all over the place. Somebody better keep track of them.”

I was sent down to the Family Assistance Center, located first at the armory on Lexington and 26th Street. Chrissie, a cheerful college student—a proud member of Campus Crusade for Christ—and a Promise Keeper from Oregon named George and I were given a table and a stack of forms to go through. We made packets for the emergency volunteer chaplain trainings. If those two had any idea what my beliefs were—and I did make a halfhearted attempt to explain, but we had work to do, and it's not easy to explain—they probably would've been pretty sure I was going to hell. But we worked well and efficiently together, got along fine. At home that night I got a start on my visiting emergency chaplain database, and then showed up at the FAC the next morning. My first supervisor was a no-nonsense woman from the Midwest with years of experience ministering to victims of plane crashes and their families. She told me to go to the emergency chaplain training, even if I wasn't ordained yet. At least that way I'd get to meet a lot of the visiting volunteers, get their names, and start making schedules.

A group of more than a dozen Baptist pastors from Oklahoma had been sent to New York by the Lord to minister to its people for three days. That was all fine and good. I understood that even the Lord recognized that people do have jobs and families. But it was up to me to explain to them why, with a limited number of chaplains working the floor of the FAC on each shift, twelve of them could
not
be evangelical Baptist preachers from Oklahoma.

“Ma'am, we understand that everyone wants to serve. But we'd really like to be
together
,” one of them told me, baseball cap in hand, pressed close to his heart.

It wasn't just that I needed to fit in everyone who wanted—and was qualified—to serve. “The thing is, it takes a lot to scare New Yorkers,” I explained. “What happened a couple days ago scared us. And you know what else would scare us? A dozen Baptists from Oklahoma coming at us all at once.”

I'll never be sure that he got what I meant. But there had to be a mix—Christian clergy of various denominations, imams, rabbis—and no one might seem as foreign to New Yorkers than him and his colleagues, no matter the goodness of their intentions, which I did not doubt. The chaplains on the floor had to at least come close to reflecting the diversity of the people affected by the disaster who might want their services. And what a crew we had: the imposing long-bearded, black-robed Romanian Orthodox priest, the gruff joke-telling Bronx rabbi, the earnest young liberal seminarians from Union, the gentle and genial Jesuit pacifist, Protestants of mainline and charismatic persuasions. But the Red Cross instructions were simple and smart:
Be here for these people, listen to them, do your best to comfort them.
This was no time to argue doctrine or politics. This was no time to give answers, for there were none to give. This was no time to tell a mourning mother that her beloved son's death was part of God's plan, even if you believed that, which I sure didn't. Don't push. Don't preach. Pray with them only if they ask. Make yourself available. Show up. Be present.

The praying part aside, it's not so different, really, from how one should behave in a bar, no matter what kind of bar it is. And in the days after 9/11, the Fish Bar was exactly the kind of bar I needed. No pushing, no preaching—like a family, really, but a calmer and kinder family than many of us join when we are born. After the shock of the first few days, we spoke little of the event itself, using our time together to try to relax as much as we could, to talk about the things we normally talked about. In the best of times, New York is a pretty chaotic place. Now, that chaos had multiplied—even if an eerie calm had settled on the surface. No one knew what would happen next, but some of us expected the worst. One morning on the B train, crossing the Manhattan Bridge about a week after the attack, the subway suddenly halted, there in the middle of the river, and the lights went out. My fellow straphangers and I looked at one another purposefully, and I am sure I was not alone in thinking the worst, that maybe another attack was happening, maybe to the subway system, maybe right here on our train. Nothing was certain. And when it jolted back into motion and the lights came back on, you could practically hear a great chorus of relief following the few anxious minutes of fear and resignation.

•   •   •

N
ot long after the attack, the Family Assistance Center was moved from the armory to larger quarters in huge tents on the piers on the West Side. It was like a makeshift city: Dozens of booths had been set up to offer all kinds of assistance and services—financial, spiritual, medical, psychological—to victims and their families. There were resting areas, dining areas, volunteer masseurs and masseuses with tables set up behind curtains, volunteers with therapy dogs making the rounds. It was bigger and busier and harder to navigate than the armory space. After one of my first shifts over at the pier, I called Frank from the Times Square subway station to let him know I was wiped out and would be heading home instead of to the Fish Bar. That night, I needed sleep even more than I needed whiskey. And sleep in those days did not come easily.

“Maybe you should go to Lenox Hill instead,” he said tentatively, then continued, telling me that something was wrong and my father was very sick. He had gone into the hospital just after 9/11 for hip replacement surgery. He'd had the other hip operated on a few years earlier; that had gone well, making it possible for him to play golf and stay active and get on with it. This was supposed to be pretty routine surgery. I hadn't even bothered to check on how he was doing—partly because I expected it to play out exactly as his previous hip replacement had, and partly, I admit, because I was pissed off at him.

After the attack, he hadn't called to see if I was okay. It sounds miserably petty to me now, but back then it seemed to me that the natural order of things was for the parent to make sure that the child—even if the child in question was thirty—was alive and well, not the other way around. But 9/11 came in the midst of one of our not-speaking-to-each-other jags, the circumstances around which I do not even remember, but were probably no different from the causes of any of our other estranged and angry spells: There had been a misunderstanding, there had been an argument, we just kind of didn't get each other, and I think that caused us both a lot more pain than we were able to deal with, and it sucked, and so we'd just steer clear of each other for a time. Our timing, in this case, was spectacularly bad.

I went to the hospital. My father was in intensive care, hooked up by tubes to numerous machines, able to speak, but uneasily. I sat beside him and held his hand. Very slowly, he said, almost laughing, “Maybe this is what we needed to bring us together.” And I told him I loved him, which, until then, had never been easy to say. And it was true.

•   •   •

F
or a spell life looked like this: I'd put in a few hours of work as a community organizer, a few more at the Red Cross Family Assistance Center, a few more at Lenox Hill Hospital where my father lay dying, and then at night, when all of that was done, I'd meet Frank down at the Fish Bar, to drink and decompress, to be someplace where no demands were made of me, where the grieving and the sick, the sad, the inconsolable, the shocked, and the angry existed on the other side of the door. That was the way it was, every day, every night. For something like three months, I could not have gotten more than five hours of sleep a night. If that. Did I sleep at all? I do not recall that I did. Looking back, I barely remember even
thinking
during all that time. It was all going, all doing.