It’s a beautiful Friday. I just woke up from a nap. I slept very well last night and napped because I could. If someone is reading this, this could easily lead to you taking a nap. Go ahead. I wouldn’t be offended. I do love to sleep.
The first thought in my head when I wake up is that I just want to sleep more. That was not the case this morning. The alarm went off at 8AM but I silenced it and kept on sleeping to 9AM.
Bill is on the road. Mike has been waylaid with a cold and does not want to spread it to me or Bill. It’s a nice sentiment. I guess I would have done the same.
I did have a plan for today. Do laundry, go grocery shopping and head to Manhattan to purchase a gift for my grand niece, Shelby who is 6 years old. I had hoped to do that on Thursday after work but I was in the belly of the fruit stand and the toy store was right around the corner from the usual fruit stand but it was not to be.
It was an easy trip in and out of Manhattan. I had hoped Mike would have joined me since he still has that enthusiasm for New York City that I used to have, but when you go in and out Monday to Friday, that enthusiasm wanes. I plan on grocery shopping tomorrow.
It’s September 11. 25 years ago was when the tragedy occurred. I remember it all like it was yesterday. I remember the night before going to a restaurant on Tenth Avenue to celebrate Donna Kloepfer’s birthday. Bill and I made an appearance. A couple of familiar faces at a long table with many unknown faces.
Bill and I left and the skies opened up. We were very nearly soaked but I am sure we had good umbrellas that got me to the bus terminal and got Bill to the subway. I made it home to Weehawken that Monday night and was soon asleep ready to start the new day.
I had a charcoal gray pinstrip suit by Bill Blass, a nice shirt and tie and of course dress shoes. That was my thing back then. I remember walking to work at 10 east 40th Street for Staffmark, thinking to myself what a gorgeous day it was.
I was on time, and sat at my desk as the day began. A few minutes after 8:46 the friendly FedEx guy mentioned that a plane hit one of the Twin Towers. I thought it odd, it must’ve been a Cessna or a Piper Cub. I walked towards the windows where there was a view downtown and it looked like something took a bite out of the tower.
I went back to my desk. There was nothing I could do, I seemed like an accident. About 15 minutes later I heard a scream and ran back to the windows where I saw the fireball after the second plane hit the south tower. As I stood there, I thought to myself I had better get out of bed, this is just a bad dream.
It was no dream. There was no TV. No one had a radio. The internet in 2001 didn’t provide much, and if it did we had no speakers to hear anything. A woman I sat next to, Gerri Delaney came in after dropping off her son at school.
Gerri was on the subway and didn’t know anything. I advised her to go get her son and go home. She did not want to do that. Maybe she didn’t think it was so bad, maybe she didn’t want to miss out on getting paid for a day of work.
I sat at my desk and had a cigarette. I felt if the world was ending, who’s going to be mad at me for smoking at my desk? So many rumors were floating around. We heard the Washington Mall was under attack. We heard about the Pentagon and a plane going down in Shanksville, PA. Those were the only truths known.
Then I witnessed the towers collapse. More screaming. A guy I worked with mentioned his brother was in one of the towers. He did not make it out.
At one point I had the sense to slip out and run over to Duane Reade where I withdrew $200 from the ATM. I figured in a time like this cash would be good to have.
I made it back to my desk and we were told to go home. Gerri Delaney and I rode down the elevator to the street. On 40th Street there was a sonic boom. An Air Force fighter appeared creating the sonic boom which caused panic. We were across the street from a target, the public library and hundreds of people were running in our direction. I grabbed Gerri and we stood against the wall of 10 east 40th Street and watched as everyone ran past.
Looking up I noticed the wall we were up against was a glass facade and if anything should happen to that glass we’d be sliced up. We went back to the office to rethink our plans. Soon, Gerri was off to get her son and I headed west.
The buses were not running since the Lincoln Tunnel was shut down. I wandered under the Port Authority terminal realizing I was in another target, No one knew anything and just about anything was a target that day.
It was a beautiful day and I saw the line for the ferries was about 10 people deep and stretched about a half mile in the hot afternoon sun. My dear friend Rita lived nearby and I called to ask if I could come over. She was home and invited me up. Her boyfriend Jerry was there as well. The TV had the horrible stories coming out, a man helping someone in a wheelchair in the towers, trying to navigate the starways. They never made it out. That devastated me.
Bill called. He was going through similar drama and was done taking people to Staten Island on his bus. He somehow made it to Manhattan and over to Rita’s apartment. We talked and he had a moment where he was in Rita’s bedroom where he just let it all out and cried about the horror we were in.
At some point, Jerry, Bill and myself made it to the rooftop where we saw 7 World Trade Center collapse. Rita was working for a store on Sixth Avenue and they insisted that she come into work. Without a choice, Rita went to work.
Bill and I stayed for a little while then we too left. Bill was going to his parents in Stuyvesant Town and I got on a ferry back to NJ. I picked up some pizza on my way home and knocked on the door of my neighbor at 127 Jane St.
Fred Kleinke worked down in that area. I checked to see if he was OK and offered him some pizza. He seemed surprised, probably because he was on the spectrum and with his sister Pattie, always tried to kick me out of the apartment. His mother Adele Kleinke always stood up for me against her children. And here I was being concerned for his well being, concerned for someone who actively tried to throw me out.
I watched the TV, numb and eating mediocre pizza in my apartment. The next day was my 39th birthday. I spent the day crying.
In 2001, I watched the towers fall from an office in midtown Manhattan. In 2014 I began working for Fred Alger Management, a financial company that lost 35 employees in the towers. They were all still understandably damaged years later. A woman I reported to had a crushing burden of being alive due to a schedule change.
She needed to take that fateful Tuesday off and someone who had off swapped with her. That someone was supposed to be married that following Saturday. Survivors’ guilt. Fred Alger Management fired me in 2019.
In 2021 I worked for Barasch & McGarry, a law firm a block or so away from where the towers stood. Another company filled with damaged people working with people that were sick and dying from the after effects of the towers collapsing. A depressing job trying to assist sick and dying people. They let me go in 2024.
25 years later, it’s another beautiful day. I will be 64 tomorrow. The people that I worked with at Staffmark in 2001 are not in my life. Nor are the damaged people at Fred Alger Management. Some have passed away. The Barasch McGarry people are nonexistent to me.
A Google Gemini rewrite as a James Baldwin essay
One has to wonder at the sheer, miraculous audacity of a quiet afternoon. Here it is, a Friday bathed in a brilliant, indifferent sun, and I have surrendered to the luxury of sleep—a nap taken for no other reason than that the body demanded it, and the afternoon allowed it. If you, reading this, should feel the pull of your own eyelids, yield to it. I will not be offended. Lord knows, I love to sleep. It is the only time the mind stops its ceaseless, desperate accounting.
Usually, the first demand of consciousness is a plea for more absence, a desire to sink back into the dark. But this morning was different. The alarm rasped at eight, and I simply turned my back on it, stretching the silence out until nine. Outside, the world moves in its usual fractured rhythm. Bill is somewhere on the road. Mike is sequestered with a cold, choosing solitude over the risk of passing his misery along—a tender, decent gesture, the kind of quiet grace we extend to one another when we are at our best.
I had intended to move through the day with a simple, domestic purpose: the laundry, the groceries, a trip across the river into Manhattan to buy a gift for my grand-niece, Shelby, who is six. I had hoped to fetch it yesterday, but I found myself caught in the belly of the fruit stand, the toy store hovering just around the corner, tantalizing and out of reach. In the end, the city called me in and spat me out with an easy efficiency. I wished Mike could have come along; he still carries that wide-eyed, burning affection for New York that I used to possess. But when you make that pilgrimage Monday through Friday, year after year, the wonder is slowly ground into dust.
And then, the calendar forces its reckoning. It is the eleventh of September.
Twenty-five years have slipped away since the sky tore open, yet I remember it as clearly as if the wound were struck this morning. The night before, Bill and I went down to Tenth Avenue for Donna Kloepfer’s birthday. We were two familiar faces at a long table of strangers. When we left, the heavens broke. Rain poured over the city in sheets, but we had our heavy umbrellas—the kind that see you safely to the bus terminal or the subway stairs. I made it back home to Weehawken, falling into bed, completely innocent of the morning that awaited us.
I dressed carefully that Tuesday: a charcoal gray pinstripe suit by Bill Blass, a sharp tie, polished shoes. That was my armor back then. Walking to work at 10 East 40th Street, I remember looking up at the sky, astonished by its incredible, blue clarity.
I was at my desk, settling into the routine, when the FedEx man walked in around eight-forty-six and mentioned, almost offhandedly, that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers. I thought of some tiny, stray aircraft—a Cessna, perhaps, losing its way. I walked to the window facing downtown, and there it was: a jagged, smoking bite taken out of the sky.
I went back to my desk. What else was there to do? It felt like a terrible, isolated accident. But fifteen minutes later, a scream shattered the office. I ran back to the glass just in time to see the brilliant, horrifying fireball of the second plane tearing through the South Tower. Standing there, frozen, a desperate voice inside me whispered: *Wake up. You must get out of bed. This is only a nightmare.*
It was no dream.
We had no televisions, no radios, no speakers on our primitive computers to translate the terror into words. Gerri Delaney, who sat next to me, arrived late after dropping her son at school, having ridden the subway in total ignorance. I urged her to go back, to grab her boy and run home. But she hesitated—perhaps paralyzed by disbelief, or perhaps simply bound to the cruel, ordinary necessity of not losing a day’s wage.
I sat back down at my desk and lit a cigarette. It struck me then: if the world is coming to an end, who on earth is going to judge a man for smoking indoors?
The air filled with rumors, monstrous and mutating. They said the Washington Mall was burning. They spoke of the Pentagon, of a field in Shanksville. Truth was a scarce, terrified thing. Then came the sound, and the sight, of the towers coming down. More screams. A colleague beside me whispered that his brother was in those buildings. He never came home.
A sudden instinct took hold of me. I slipped out, ran down to the Duane Reade, and pulled two hundred dollars from the ATM. In the apocalypse, I reasoned, cash is the only tangible key left.
When they finally told us to clear out, Gerri and I took the elevator to 40th Street. The moment we stepped outside, a violent sonic boom cracked the air—an Air Force jet screaming low overhead. Panic erupted. We were standing across from the Public Library, a prime target in everyone’s terrified imagination, and hundreds of people came stampeding toward us. I grabbed Gerri, pinned us both against the wall of 10 East 40th, and watched the desperate tide rush past.
Then I looked up. The wall behind us was a massive facade of glass. If a blast came, we would be shredded. We retreated back into the building to survive another moment, until Gerri finally braved the streets for her son, and I began walking west.
The Lincoln Tunnel was sealed; the buses were dead. I wandered into the dark belly of the Port Authority, fully aware that I was standing inside another bullseye. Outside, under the hot, merciless sun, the line for the ferry stretched half a mile long. I called my dear friend Rita, who lived nearby, and she welcomed me up. Her boyfriend, Jerry, was there. The television was on, vomiting horror into the living room—stories of men guiding wheelchairs down smoky stairwells, never making it out. The sheer cruelty of it broke something inside me.
When Bill finally arrived, having driven his bus through his own nightmare, he walked straight into Rita’s bedroom, closed the door, and wept. It was the deep, uncontainable weeping of a man who has looked directly into the abyss. Later, Jerry, Bill, and I stood on the roof and watched 7 World Trade Center fold in on itself and collapse into ash.
I eventually made it onto a ferry back to New Jersey, picked up a pizza, and knocked on the door of 127 Jane Street. My neighbor, Fred Kleinke, worked down near the site. I wanted to see if he was alive, to offer him a slice. He looked at me with a strange, stunned surprise. He was a man who, along with his sister, spent half his life trying to have me evicted, while his late mother, Adele, had always fought to keep me there. Yet there I stood, offering him bread, deeply concerned for the life of a man who wished me gone.
I sat in my apartment alone, eating mediocre pizza, staring numbly at the screen. The next day was my thirty-ninth birthday. I spent every hour of it crying.
The disaster did not end when the dust settled; it merely burrowed into the flesh of the survivors. Years later, in 2014, I went to work for Fred Alger Management—a firm that had lost thirty-five souls in the collapse. The ghost of that day haunted every hallway. A woman I reported to carried the crushing, unbearable guilt of simply being alive; she had traded her Tuesday shift with a colleague so she could take the day off. The colleague who took her place was scheduled to be married that Saturday. He died; she lived. How does one forgive oneself for surviving?
Later still, in 2021, I worked for a law firm just a block from Ground Zero, representing the sick and the dying, people whose lungs were ruined by the poisoned air of that beautiful Tuesday. It was a suffocating, heartbreaking pilgrimage to sorrow every single day.
Now, twenty-five years later, the sun rises on another pristine Friday. Tomorrow I turn sixty-four. The people from that office on 40th Street, the broken souls from the financial firm, the lawyers and the victims—they have all drifted away into the fog of history. Some are dead. Most are ghosts.
I am still here. The sky is still blue. And the afternoon still offers its quiet, fragile invitation to rest.