From September 11, 2011.
NOTE:
This piece is a splicing/revision of three previous entries on the
subject, and I intend for it to stand as my definitive statement of
experience and sentiment on the events in question. After this, I put
this one to bed once and for all.
It wasn't like something out of a Michael Bay cinematic confection.
I know today is the day to remember the dead, and while doing just that this classic John Berkey movie poster comes to mind:
If only a battle with a gigantic ape had been the worst thing to happen at the World Trade Center...
Today is the tenth anniversary of the cataclysmic Bin Laden-driven
terrorist attack, and I am filled with a great sense of trepidation and
near nausea when I think of the inevitable wave of phony patriotism and
jump-on-the-bandwagon “grief” that is certain to inundate the nation for
about a week. I guarantee you that the bulk of media will be devoted to
documentaries/tributes on the subject — all punctuated by somber
arrangements of classic patriotic standards — and there will be at least
one presidential address to the nation from our alleged Commander In
Chief, a badly read cue card performance that will politically and
emotionally push buttons and exploit/exacerbate the nation’s xenophobia
and jingoistic horseshit, which in turn will probably fuel yet more
American youth to throw away their lives in pointless and immoral wars
supposedly being fought in the name of Freedom with a capital F.
Across the nation but most flagrantly here in the Big Apple, there are
certain to be legions of thoughtless vendors out for no more than some
extra greenbacks, flogging mountains of 9/11 souvenirs and merchandise
to blindsided tourists and perhaps even a few locals who forgot exactly
how horrifying the events of that day were. The rest of the country may
have been genuinely shocked by what they witnessed on the news during
9/11 and the days that followed, but the images seen on a TV, secure in
the comfort of home and hearth, cannot convey the agonizing impact of
what happened here. Yes, other countries have endured nightmarish events
of similar caliber — on a daily basis, no less — but this was the first
time something of such international magnitude struck us here at home
in quite some time, and that’s what really kicked our long-held American
arrogance right up our collective ass, that feeling of “How could they
do this to us? How can this happen here?” and my absolute favorite, “But
we’re Americans! We’re the good guys!”
How soon we forget the atrocities committed by this country and its
various administrations, both within my own meager lifetime and since
the beginning of this nation. My ancestry includes both Native-American
and African blood among the other genetics that make up my own personal
stew, and both of those groups were famously fucked over by the US
government and its people, but many factions these days urge us ethnic
types to more or less shut up and forget it, and be happy about where we
are blessed enough to live.
I love my country but I am in no way blind to what has gone before or at
present, so the situation of ten years past did not necessarily
surprise me, but what does continue to surprise me is the extent to
which the American people — and to be honest, some New Yorkers as well —
have relegated the horrors of 9/11 to an oft-discussed tragedy, but one
that they are not really connected to in an actual, visceral way. It’s
one thing to have the media inform your opinion, but it’s a whole
different animal to have been there for a major catastrophe and relegate
it to the file of sensational events that evoke revulsion one day, only
to become a case of ”Yeah, that really sucked.” In essence, forgetting
it as another disposable news item rather than the globally connective
event that it was.
I, for one, will never forget it, and I hope that I never see anything
else like it for as long as I may be fortunate enough to draw breath.
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I reported to work at 7am at DC
Comics' Vertigo offices, an early start, yes, but one that facilitated
speaking to the company’s European freelancers without interrupting
their dinners or quality evening times with their families or loved
ones. I immediately got on the phone and called my favorite HELLBLAZER
scribe, Jamie Delano, to hash out the details of getting him a check
that had slipped through the cracks, an unfortunately common occurrence
at the company in question at the time. As I chatted with him and
assured him that I would remedy the situation once the payroll guys
showed up, one of the editors from the collected editions department
burst into my office and told me to switch my computer to the BBC News
live feed; an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center and one
of the towers was burning and in danger of imminent collapse. Stunned, I
filled Jamie in on what had happened and again promised to take care of
his check as soon as possible. I hung up the telephone and switched to
the online BBC news channel.
I gaped at the monitor as I watched the tower burn and immediately
thought of the people who were within the structure, frightened,
confused, in search of a safe exit, and in many cases flat out dead. As
those thoughts wrapped around my brain, a second plane hit the towers,
and at that moment one cold, jagged inkling leaped to the front of my
consciousness:
THIS IS NO ACCIDENT. THIS IS A TERRORIST ATTACK.
I had no experience with such matters other than through what I saw on
the news, and while I was willing to accept one plane slamming into the
Twin Towers as pilot error or some other such awful happenstance, two
planes making such a collision one after the other was too much of a
coincidence for me to write off as an unfortunate twist of fate, the
odds against such a fluke being beyond astronomical. Sure, I worked in
an industry that thrived from depictions of super-powered set-to’s and
endless scenes of mass destruction, but that shit’s fantasy and
entertainment. Here, for the first time in my life, I was faced with
wholesale devastation for real, and the gravity of the situation
completely rewrote my thinking on such things as the stuff of celluloid
or four-color diversion.
As my mind reeled from what I had just witnessed, before I proceeded any
further I called my mom in Connecticut. I knew that she was one of
those East Coasters who frequented Manhattan but did not really know its
geography, so for all she knew the Trade Center could have been across
the street from where I worked (it was at the bottom end of Manhattan
and my office was in Midtown, across the street from The David Letterman
Show, so it was approximately three miles away). She was still asleep
when I called and had no idea what the hell I was talking about, but I
told her not to worry about me and that communications in the city would
soon be overloaded by people attempting to reach their loved ones. I
then signed off and set about emailing all of the freelancers and anyone
else who might wonder if we’d been caught up in the attack.
Most of my co-workers made it in to work, arriving just before most mass
transit ground to a standstill. The majority of the subway lines shut
down, there were power outages, and then the predicted phone problems
happened, effectively rendering the city incommunicado for the better
part of twelve hours depending on where you were. Needless to say, work
did not happen that day and we all sat or paced in a nauseous, nervous
state of uncertainty, wondering if more planes would plummet from the
air.
After over six hours of being more or less stranded in Midtown, the
subways tentatively began to move once again and we all made our way
home. I entered the B train station right at the steps of where I worked
and found myself deep in a throng that crowded the platform, every one
of us eager to get home and escape the horror that spewed hellish black
smoke only a few dozen blocks away. Three or four trains slowly lurched
in an out of the station before the crowd thinned enough for me to
actually board one, and as I clung to the metal ceiling handle I
surveyed my fellow passengers and found each of them looking back at me
with the same silent question written on their faces: “What now?” That
brief musing came to an abrupt halt as the train shuddered roughly into
motion and bore us downtown, a destination that we dreaded since the
line ran close to what would later be known as Ground Zero.
As the B train approached the stop near the burning towers, there were
long delays as the preceding trains delicately inched their way toward
Brooklyn, gingerly advancing in hope that that the tunnel would not
collapse. Never in my life have I felt such out-of-my-control fear, and I
couldn’t help but flash back to my mother’s rampant claustrophobia, a
condition that has affected her since her father attempted to kidnap her
in a sack and through a window when she was three years old; if she had
been on that train, she would have begun hyperventilating, shaking, and
finally trying to claw her way out of the car like a rat trapped in a
box. (NOTE: the claustrophobia story about my mom is not a gag, but
that's a tale for another posting.)
Passing under the potentially unstable section of street took less time
than I would have thought, and as we left that foreboding underground
hell we emerged onto the elevated track that crossed the Manhattan
Bridge and sat stunned as an unspeakable tableau loomed to our
collective right. You see, the train passed right by the Twin Towers as
part of its route, which I rode every motherfucking day, and as we
surfaced all present beheld a vision straight out of Gustave Doré.
The pristine lower Manhattan cityscape that I had passed for four years
now had a black abscess smack dab in its center, a wound from which
protruded two smoldering stumps of iron and glass, both surrounded by a
multitude of police cars, ambulances, and assorted rescue vehicles, each
with lights blinking and swirling, forcing the onlooker’s attention to
the misery. Thick, blacker-than-black clouds of chemical smoke billowed
heavenward, making the scene look like the largest sacrificial pyre
imaginable (which, let’s face it, it kind of was).
The passengers craned their necks, pressed themselves against the
windows and sat agog, unwillingly mesmerized by the sight. Not a word
was said as we passed the inferno, but the view was reminiscent of a
drive-by attraction at Disneyworld if the designer had been a mass
murdering pussy of an arsonist. The chemical fumes somehow managed to
creep in through the car’s sealed doors and windows, filling us with the
dread certainty that what we were experiencing was so unreal that is
simply had to be real. Not soon enough, the nightmarish display faded
into the distance and we were once more underground in the safety (?) of
the MTA’s underground labyrinth. A commute that normally encompassed
about a half hour one way had been actually and subjectively transformed
into a three-hour trip along the River Styx, and I felt an edginess
that I had never known before.
Upon surfacing at my subway station, I looked northward in the direction
of the once flawless skyline of lower Manhattan — a key selling point
for homes and apartments in Park Slope — and saw the spewing columns
blotting out everything else within view, then noticed some form of
unusual precipitation; thanks to the strong winds debris, ashes, and
burnt office papers fell from the skies like morbid snowflakes,
festooning both sides of the Gowanus Canal with remains that settled all
over parked cars, houses, backyards and citizens on the street. When I
realized that at least some part of those ashes was all that was left of
some of the innocents removed from the human equation by a bunch of
cowardly hijackers, I became stiff as a board, staggered over to the
entrance of the local bath house turned performance space and voided the
contents of my stomach onto the sidewalk. After I had regained my
composure, I headed straight to the corner bodega and bought a case of
beer, then raced to the liquor store on Fifth Avenue for a bottle of the
reliable Jose Quervo tequila, and finally went home to my apartment.
After dropping off my book bag and putting away half of the beer, I went
to the roof of my building, camera at the ready, and found many of my
fellow dwellers at number 647 staring to the north, some in the throes
of great, wracking sobs while others just stood transfixed by something
inconceivable to those of us raised in the over-confident security of a
society that had kicked ass on all comers (yes, I’m leaving Vietnam out
of that one).
Zombified, I snapped pictures of the burning towers until I had
exhausted the disposable camera — pictures that I decided against
developing, and I chucked the disposable camera over the side of my
building — at which point I broke the seal on the Quervo, took a deep
burning swig, and passed the bottle to the others who stood on the roof
bearing witness. As the amber cactus squeezings incinerated their way
down my gullet, I washed them down with one beer, then another, and
ended up sitting cross-legged on the roof trying to make sense of the
whole thing. Then a huge joint was stuffed into my mouth by another
resident and I inhaled for all I was worth. “Fuck it,” I figured. ”This
is the first volley of the end of the world, and there’s NO FUCKING WAY
I’m facing it sober!” The other-than-nicotinal effects mingled with the
fermented goodness to create a feeling of hoodoo comfort and I willingly
surrendered, somehow eventually ending up safe in my bed, where I awoke
the next afternoon, which turned out to be a day off from work for
obvious travel and emotional reasons for the company’s entire staff.
The moment I awoke I turned on the TV and sifted my way through
countless takes on what had happened and a nearly endless amount of
video footage from Ground Zero and the surrounding areas. It was several
hours later when I caught up on all of my friends who lived and worked
in Manhattan and found all of them to be basically okay, although some
soon showed signs of post-event trauma such as a formerly brown head of
hair turning silver, and one healthy person in his early forties
developing the first sign of what would turn out to be testicular
cancer. Both people had made their way out of the great cloud of debris
when the second tower collapsed, so the gods only know what the fuck
they inhaled or absorbed through physical contact, but they are both
thankfully okay now.
When I returned to work, the morale of the whole place was quite
understandably fucked up and very little work was accomplished, but we
all were grateful for our own miserable lives and sickened that so many
innocents had senselessly perished in what was in my humble opinion a
clear case of the chickens coming home to roost. I resumed my usual
duties and checked in with the international talent who needed to be
called, and one of our artists, a guy who lives in Croatia, forever
cemented my understanding of how the rest of this world looks at such
events. As I told him of what I’d seen he didn’t say a word, and when I
had finished I was greeted with a very long silence. As the long
distance hush stretched on I said,”Goran? Dude, are you there?” He
cleared his throat after an audible drag on a smoke and said, “Bunche…I
know you’ve just seen something really, REALLY horrible, but I live in
Croatia, man. Similar shit happens all the time here, and the worst part
is, YOU GET USED TO IT.”
Sure as hell put me in my motherfucking place, let me tell you that fucking much.
So while we all take time out to remember and mourn for those lost or
affected by 9/11, let us also channel as much positive energy as we can
into the ether in hope of man someday overcoming his seemingly ingrained
need to kill his fellow man for what are more often than not the most
idiotic of reasons. Tolerance is a bitch thanks to the fact that we all
possess some attribute, belief or behavior that drives someone else
barking mad, but we've got to start trying to deal with each other if we
don't want to see all that our ancestors strove and bled for washed
away in a tsunami of ignorance and violence.
And that’s all I have to say on the subject. Hopefully I will not have
any need to bring this up again in the foreseeable future, but here’s my
multi-point, possibly bottom line on the subject, and then I’m out:
1. WAR FUCKING SUCKS. DO NOT FORGET THAT. It is wasteful of lives
and everything else, so avoid it whenever possible. When innocents,
women, and especially children are killed there is simply no excuse,
despite what your country’s administration may tell you.
2. THE DEHUMANIZATION OF OTHER PEOPLES AND CULTURES IS UNACCEPTABLE. See above.
3. THINK FOR YOURSELF AND DO NOT LET THE MEDIA — even well-meaning li’l ol’ me — OR YOUR GOVERNMENT TELL YOU OTHERWISE.
4. REMEMBER WHAT RICHARD PRYOR HAD TO SAY ON THE SUBJECT OF WAR IN GENERAL: “COMING BEATS HAVING A WAR.”
So get the hell out there, get your hump on, and stop all of this
madness, for fuck’s sake! In this world, you are just a guest, so make
the stay pleasant for all people.
Thank you for your time. And never forget to make love, not war. For all our sakes.
-Yer Bunche
