I hated early morning bookings.
However, the money in doing radio/ T.V. voice-overs is good, and, if I could do enough chicken voices for L”Eggs Panty Hose, or express the weary wishes of enough Tide -deprived housewives, I could do little Off-Broadway plays that pay me nothing, but satisfy my soul. I therefore still got up at 7:00 A.M. in time to get to studios by 8:30, so when the client arrived, the “talent” would be ready to rock. I didn’t particularly enjoy the rush hour crush, but I’d settled into a routine of it, would drink my double Americano and bear up.
This particular morning, I slogged through the surly crowds at the 103rd Street station, and was on board a #1 train by 8:00, going down to East 42nd Street, where my Daily News radio spot was being recorded at the News Building itself. In fact, I was booked to record three spots, so I was in a good mood at the prospect of earning some nice pay for, maybe, two hours’ work, and having the rest of the day free to try some new dinner recipes for my husband and his visiting Mom., who was already at her first meeting of the morning down at the United Nations. Pat is a UN/Montessori Peace Educator. Something I found sadly ironical, later that day.
I was practically sleeping against the shoulder of some tall fellow strap-hanger, when I heard him say to another “Did’ja hear on the news this morning? Some idiot crashed his plane into the side of a building, downtown I think.. Did ‘ja hear about that?” Another voice said loudly “Asshole! Must have been drunk or somethin’.” I remember thinking Or blind as a bat…how could he have missed seeing an entire building?
“Really?”
“Naw! Must have been a fake story, y’know, like from the Onion. You know how they do those?’”
“The pilot must have been from New Jersey!!” New Jersey drivers are always good for an early morning joke.
“No, really.” The guy repeated. “Matt Lauer said some guy flew his plane into the side of a building downtown. The Trade Center, I think. Heard it just before I left the apartment. Seemed weird to me. “
By then we’d arrived at my transfer stop. I got off with the crowd and let its peristaltic motion carry me along .
On the next train, young women were mid-conversation. “Yeah, me too. Wonder what that’s all about. Some stupid pilot in a small plane. Gosh, I hope no one was hurt. I mean, the poor people in the…”
“Probably asleep and lost his way. Idiot guy.”
And then I thought, oddly, for the first time What if he did it on purpose? His way of killing himself. What if he meant to do it?
By the time I got to the entrance of the Daily News Building, I’d heard more: two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, and it looked like no accident.
It looked like it was planned. It looked like an event none of us had any way of wrapping our minds around, and that New York City was at its center. It looked, as the guy said “Weird.”
The security guards and long inspection lines to get into the building, confirmed that something odd was indeed happening. It took me 25 minutes to get up to the 3rd floor where it was eerily quiet. The entire newsroom was deserted, TV monitors on, but no picture or sound. My stomach started churning. I went to the sitting area outside the recording booth, and waited. It was so quiet., I wondered if I was on the right floor. I tried cell-phoning home, but no luck getting through.
Suddenly, doors burst open, and the newsroom staff poured out of meetings into the general area. I was told our recording session would be re-scheduled (“If the world doesn’t come to an end first”, said the media director), and I took the elevator back down to the lobby. But not before we’d all stood around watching the newsroom monitors as the second Tower fell. It didn’t seem even remotely real. It certainly did not feel like it was happening only a few blocks away.
It was then, in the newsroom I first heard the words “terrorist attack.”
Back on the street, I tried repeatedly to reach my husband at home and my mother-in-law at the UN, but cell lines were down Cut off from each other, with no way of communicating, at least I felt secure knowing, where they were. It dawned on me that my mother-in-law might be in some danger, since the United Nations was not beloved by all, but my strongest need was to get back home, so I started walking. I remember thinking Thank God I wore comfortable shoes.
Things on the usually busy East Side of Midtown were beginning to slow down as more people heard the news, and walking west along 42nd Street , I noticed more and more cars pulling over to find a place to park. Gradually, doors were being slowly opened, and people were sitting, slack-jawed, as they searched for a news station on their car radios. I began to feel like I was in the middle of one of those high-budget catastrophe movies, like The Towering Inferno, and that any minute a camera would edge around the corner and we’d all know it was part of a script being filmed.
Then, upon reaching Times Square, the movie abruptly turned into a large oil painting: crowded, colorful and very still, a landscape of humanity totally immobile, and ear-shatteringly quiet. Hundreds of human beings, from stopped busses, cabs, private cars, up from the subways, standing in Times Square, quietly looking up, each head at the exact same angle: looking up at the news ticker tape circling the top of Number One Times Square. I joined them for a moment, to watch as our world changed forever, and with the smell of smoke and fine black ashes floating up Broadway from Downtown , we all knew it would never be the same again.
I remember walking to 8th Avenue, picking my way between the many still people. I remember stopping to get a bottle of water, because I knew with no
transportation available, I had many blocks to walk.. And I remember the snatches of news reporting I heard along the way, as car radios told of the developing horrors:
“The Towers have fallen – the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are down, due to an attack from unknown terrorist organizations…”
“People are jumping from the highest floors, bodies falling through the smoke, with no hope of….”
“I’m here, on the 34th floor – I work at Carstairs and Carruthers, can anyone hear me, I’m calling from my cell…is anyone there….”
Can you help me…sir…I am looking for my husband Dennis Gersterman…he works on the 22nd floor of Building #1….do you have any way of finding…”
“All units of the New York City Fire Department Emergency Squads are now on the scene, and others from surrounding counties are pouring in , we’re told….”
And so the car radios blared, as I continued my walk up 8th Avenue.
By the time I got to 97th Street, everyone knew that it was useless for the City’s Emergency Rooms to have their supplies and doctors ready to help: there were no living bodies to bring them. Pathetically helpless, the best doctors in the world could do nothing. The only survivors would have psychic wounds that would take years to heal and with no one in authority seemingly able to give us warning, our sense of national trust was forever weakened.