My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (29 page)

“I’m writing my phone number down,” Laquisha said, tearing the corner off a page of her softcover psychology textbook and scribbling with a pen. “Here,” she said, passing me the torn scrap. “You’ll be in town for two weeks, right? Use it. You got to meet my little girl, Destiny. She’s the cutest.”

“I’d love that,” I said. “I feel really lucky we ended up sitting next to each other.”

“Me too,” she said with a smile. “And don’t worry about that crazy little ho you were tellin’ me about. You got bigger fish to fry. If I was ever gonna date a white boy, it’d be you.” Pleased with her own brashness, she swiped her phone number back from me, added a little black heart, filled it in, and passed it back.

“How soon is too soon to call you?” I said, glowing a little and flirting right back, still a little dazed from lack of sleep and our whole ragged journey.

Before Laquisha could answer, though, the Greyhound’s brakes let out a high, whining squeal, and everyone at the front of the bus began to gasp. We both sat up straight and craned forward to see what was going on. Through the windshield, as the bus came around a high, three-sixty curve leading to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel, the full Manhattan skyline had come into view, and the sight of it, just across the Hudson River, was one of the most awful and shocking things I’d ever seen. All of Lower Manhattan was engulfed in a yellowish haze, and at the far end, where the World Trade Center had been my whole life, there was simply nothing, only billowing plumes of black smoke rising all the way to the clouds.

Up front, the woman in the black coat and the pink scarf broke into sobs, and soon everyone on the bus was crying, too, me included. Nobody said a word, and as we wound our way around the ramp and the tunnel swallowed us up in a deep darkness, there was only the sounds of people whimpering and moaning in disbelief. Me and Laquisha squeezed each other’s hand. I still couldn’t wrap my head around what I’d just fucking seen—this wasn’t a
Godzilla
movie, this was my own naked eyes resting on the bombed shell of New York City. It somehow felt more shocking to see the city, the smoke, and the vanished towers now, through the windows of the bus, than it had been three days earlier, on TV, watching them fall. At last, the tunnel spat us out into Midtown’s seven-a.m. cacophony. We pulled into a dark underground bay at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and everyone numbly gathered their stuff and climbed down off the bus onto an oil-stained patch of pavement, where the driver unloaded our luggage a bag at a time and handed it off to whoever came forward to claim it.

Laquisha found her bags, gave me a long, meaningful hug, said goodbye and that she hoped to see me soon, and hurried off toward the subway to catch a train uptown. The woman in the black coat grabbed a small suitcase and disappeared, too. I never learned if her son was found alive or dead, assuming he was found at all—I’d never even learned her first name. The Amish kids, the old Somali woman, the Canadian couple, the Long Island cop, they all grabbed their things from the driver and melted away. These days, on a thousand-mile bus trip like that, after all those interviews and brief but intense conversations, I would’ve gathered a slew of e-mail addresses and made a dozen new Facebook friends. But that was another time, before the souls we cross paths with could be collected like passport stamps, and I never saw or heard from any of those people again.

On the subway platform, headed to my aunt and uncle’s place at the far end of Brooklyn, I reached into my pocket to give a dollar to a homeless guy playing “America the Beautiful” on a piccolo and a gust of wind from a passing Bronx-bound local snatched the scrap of paper with Laquisha’s number from my hand and sucked it away into oblivion. I spent a half hour scouring the tracks as trains came and went, sure I’d eventually spot it, but it was gone, gone, gone. I lashed myself for my carelessness, and for the fact that I hadn’t saved her number on my phone or at least asked her last name. Two days later, I even went to the Sbarro’s in Times Square to look for her, but nobody who worked there seemed to know who I was talking about and they all treated me like a weirdo when I asked if I could leave a note for her anyway. It wasn’t that I believed Laquisha was my soulmate exactly, but our friendship meant something to me, and it made me sad to imagine what she might make of the fact that I never called, if she might believe that our friendship had meant nothing to me, or was only temporary, when the truth is that Laquisha sticks with me and matters to me to this day.

I spent the next week and a half in New York, wandering the streets and interviewing people. I saw plenty of reporters and TV crews badgering folks in Union Square who were putting up flyers of their missing loved ones, and firemen sitting in front of their local fire stations with their heads in their hands, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. Instead, I sought out stories from those who’d been less directly affected—a gyro vendor outside Madison Square Garden, two Dominican teenagers who met every afternoon in a park to play NFL Blitz on a Game Boy, an elderly Danish tourist who was on his first visit to the U.S. and had landed in the city on September 10. I started each little interview by asking folks where they’d been when the towers had been struck, but the conversations quickly spilled over into the rest of their lives—where they were from, how they’d first come to New York, what they most wanted, what they were most afraid of. Basically, the disaster, and the fact that the city was crawling with so many reporters, gave me an excuse to accost anyone I chose to and ask for their life story.

Anyone who’s ever gotten into photography for a minute knows that when you start taking a lot of pictures, you start seeing the world in a different way. Your awareness of your surroundings shifts and deepens, and even when you don’t have your camera in your hands, you become constantly struck by the lyricism of passing visuals. It’s the same way with audio gear. When you’ve got your headphones on all day and are always armed with a microphone, you grow more attuned to the infinite range of voices and accents, the inflections and cadences of speech, quick intakes of breath, the struggle to find the right word, the little barbed pause when someone’s about to choke up. And after a while you don’t need to be wearing headphones or recording someone for your conversation with them to have the same potency, and affect you on the same profound level.

I never pieced together any story about September 11 for
This American Life
, but I still have the tapes of all the interviews I did that week and a half, including one with my aunt and uncle in Coney Island, who’ve both died in the years since, and sometimes on long drives I’ll listen to that one, and remember the hot air in the living room of their apartment and the damaged looks on their faces as they tried to make sense of what had happened, weeping for all the lives that were lost, and for the end of a certain time of peace. Other times I’ll listen to the tapes of Laquisha dissing one late-nineties rapper, then lavishing praise on another and wondering what the future held in store for her, her baby sister, and all New Yorkers. I can almost remember the specific moments where I’d thought to myself, “Oh my God, wait till I get back to Chicago and play this part for Susannah,” but of course by the time I’d made it back to Chicago two weeks later, Susannah had hooked up with a handsome writer named Todd Bell, and it wasn’t long before they’d moved to Birmingham, Alabama, for teaching jobs, and eventually married and had kids, whose Olan Mills portraits I get to see from time to time in Picasa albums online.

The whole time I was in New York, I’d steered clear of the World Trade Center district—not because it was cordoned off and guarded by police and soldiers, but simply because it seemed too horrible to face in person, and I was afraid I’d only be in the way. My last night in town, though, at around two in the morning, I took my tape recorder and microphone, slipped past an unwatched barricade, and headed deep downtown on foot.

The streets were eerily calm, with no cars, no people, and no lights. I’d been in ghost towns out west, but the ghost
city
—where the only sounds were street signs creaking in the wind and rats pattering from one storm drain to the next—was chilling. Past Canal Street, dark empty skyscrapers towered like the grand remnants of an ancient civilization. I knew I was getting close to where the Twin Towers had stood from the singeing, metallic odor in the air, and the thousands of loose sheets of paper carpeting the streets and sidewalks—paper, apparently, had somehow survived the fall of the towers, while iron, stone, and concrete had been turned to dust.

I came around the corner of Church Street and Chambers, and the sight took my breath away—four short blocks south, the remains of the World Trades smoldered in a massive, smoking, tangled heap, glowing orange and red, like the last embers of an eighteen-story campfire. This was what, at the time, people called “the Mound” or “the Pile,” and on all sides of it, hundreds of firemen scrambled around, shining zillion-watt spotlights, and aiming long, powerful hoses into the fray. The steaming wreckage was so mighty and oversized, it made the firefighters look like ants, their trucks and cranes like Lego toys. I sat on the hood of an abandoned taxicab layered in gray, powdery bits of rubble and took in the scene, in all its transfixing, surreal, and terrible splendor. This, I realized, as one hour hazily passed, and then another, was why I’d boarded the bus from Chicago—not to impress a girl, but to be there and see things with my own eyes, and to try to understand.

It was a waking dream. Every once in a while, a dozen firemen, rescue workers, or soldiers emerged from the tableau and trooped past me, their faces dark and haunted, and another dozen clattered from behind me, toward the blazing Mound, pulling on helmets and buckling gear to their belts, ready to start a fresh shift. Giant flatbed haulers carried rubble away, past me up Church Street, one after another, each rig straining under the weight of a single sixty-foot iron girder. Tears stung my eyes. I felt invisible; I felt made of air; I felt consumed by grief and marvel.

At some point I pulled my headphones on, and with my microphone pointed straight ahead, I could make out the sounds of the firemen’s voices, shouting out to one another, maneuvering ladders and hoses and winches and ropes; I could even hear a sound I took to be the hiss and crackle of the dying blaze itself. Then, another sound flowed into my ears, but it was so faint and so odd that I took it at first to be my imagination—it was the sound of someone singing.

After a few minutes, I slid off my taxicab perch, and with the mic held out in front of me like a divining rod, I followed the strange, delirious voice, up Church Street, toward the action at Ground Zero. One block up, at Church and Warren, around the corner from a boarded-up pharmacy, two old black men in tattered coats and lumpy knit hats stood scratching their backs on a street pole, facing the Mound. The shorter one stared straight ahead, while the taller one, with a salt-and-pepper beard, had his head tilted to the side and his eyes closed, having just finished a song.

I made a motion with my microphone to indicate my question to the shorter of the two: Would it be all right if I recorded this? He nodded and waved me closer. I stepped right next to them, at arm’s length, catching the hard scent of peppermint schnapps on their breath, mixed with the acrid burn of melted copper wire from smoke off the Mound. The taller man smiled, eyes still closed but aware of my presence, and lifted his voice again in song. I closed my eyes to listen in, and felt immediately overcome with emotion, ripped with sadness, fear, and hope. I believed in that moment, and still do, that if me and those two hobos could stand together on that four-a.m. street corner and love one another, then there was still hope for our world.

This, then, is the most miraculous, piercing, and devastating two minutes of tape I’ve ever recorded—the song that old dude sang with great, half-drunken, gravelly abandon, his voice smoky, textured, and resonant as any legendary bluesman, while the junk trucks continued to grind past in the background, ratcheting from first to second gear, laden with debris. The song? I think it’s a Frank Sinatra song. It’s called “New York, New York.” I’m sure you know it.

My cousin called the teams—me and him versus his roommate Bauer and Bauer’s girlfriend, Tessa. This was down in the raw stink of a crumbling frat house basement on the Drexel University campus in West Philly. My cousin was a college junior; I was a high-school freshman, deposited with him for the weekend while my dad made sales calls in the area. I’d never played beer pong before, and had hardly ever tasted alcohol.

The game, as they explained it, was simple: two plastic cups of beer perched at either end of the table. You played with paddles and everything, like regular Ping-Pong, but if you plunked the ball against the other team’s cup, both of them had to drink. Land the ball inside the cup, they had to down the whole beer. Win the game, they had to down two.

Within a half hour, we were all fucked up. Now, twenty years and a thousand drinking sessions later, I can recognize the types of drinkers each of us were. There was my cousin, the jolly, rambunctious sort of drinker who just wants to get everyone wasted, especially the shy, the officious, or the kid who’s never been drunk before. That was me, the newbie who doesn’t know how to measure his level of drunkenness and just keeps laughing and saying shit that doesn’t make any sense, before eventually throwing up and passing out in an alleyway or on the bathroom floor. There was Bauer, the guy who turns wicked with drink, full of torn-up fury, whose only outlet is to pop someone in the eye or crack a pool cue over some poor sap’s head. And then there was Tessa, the kind of beautiful girl who downs drinks in long pulls, who smiles sad smiles and plays with her jewelry and looks lost and big-eyed and at the end of the night targets a stranger to make out with to keep her seeping darkness at bay. These days I could take one glance into a basement like that and tell you how shit was about to go down. But I was fourteen then and I had no idea.