THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE
On September 11, 2001 I woke up, rolled over in my bed and turned on News Radio 88 to catch up on the city’s nightly drama. I always found it strangely comforting that despite shootings, lawsuits and a generally bad-tempered populace, New York always was still there in the morning. Frantic reports of two planes crashing into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers sounded like Steven Spielberg run amok. I threw on some clothes and went outside to look for smoke in the sky. I saw none. What I did see were streams of people walking east on Fulton Street away from Flatbush Avenue, the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, and lower Manhattan. Brooklyn’s work force – the cashiers, accountants, messengers and personal assistants, etc – were heading home to worried families.
My sister Andrea called. My youngest niece Jade was at a day care center on Atlantic Avenue, and I needed to pick her up. I went across Hanson Place to Atlantic and made a right to the center. Jade was one of the last kids there. Round faced and her black hair in barrettes, my little niece was not only blissfully unaware of the tragedy, but was hungry.
I took her to Juniors, just a few blocks from the Manhattan Bridge on Flatbush Avenue. The deli was filled with people tired and traumatized. Many had clothes sprinkled with gray dust from the towers. Jade and I squeezed into a table near the door. All around us voices talked about what they’d seen, what rumors they’d heard, and the long journey home ahead of them. All Jade wanted to know if she was getting a bike for her birthday.
That afternoon, after Andrea picked up Jade, I sat with filmmaker Lee Davis under a stunningly clear blue sky at a French bistro on South Portland. I don’t know what we talked about. Escape? More attacks? Fear? Conspiracies? Don’t remember. Doesn’t matter. I do remember what I smelled. As a native New Yorker I’d never really paid attention to the city’s wind currents. But on September 11th, and for countless days to come, when the wind shifted there was the metallic scent of steel, ash and human remains filled my nose.
I’ve never been a big herb smoker but in the weeks after the attack I’d take the J train (one of the only subway lines unaffected by the attack) to the Lower East Side to an apartment of a woman who was holding. There I’d smoke and hang out with her other customers in an ad hoc support group. New York City had been told to drop dead in the ‘70s. People thought the crack epidemic in the ‘80s was a death blow. Was the fall of the Twin Towers finally the end of the Big Apple? Surely there were more attacks to come. Where did I fit in now? My long time hood in Brooklyn was shifting and my future, as a renter, was uncertain. I’d missed the window to buy cheap in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Maybe I could finally start over in L.A.? What about the Bay Area?
One night in late September I stumbled out of the dealer’s LES apartment and, after some twists and turns, ended up walking across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, occasionally looking back at the beams rising from the attack site like ghosts in purgatory. By the time I arrived on Flatbush Avenue, my feet were sore, my right knee was wobbly, and my head hurt. Still, I was home. I was back in Brooklyn. Who was I fooling? Where was I really gonna go? I was where I was supposed to be. Ten toes down. The city had to transform. So did I.