We were squeezing each other with every jolt that this thing’s throwing at us. And we were huddled up, three grown men like three little boys, and I began to pray earnestly aloud for all of us. It appeared that the Japanese boy on my left was praying in Japanese, and we were standing just yards in front of this massive turbine and generator that was spinning at 1,500 rpm, being driven by the steam coming right off the Unit One reactor.
It was at a hundred percent power, and the sounds that began to come out of this turbine caught my attention. I start to realize that it sounds like it wants to come apart, and it’s going to explode and pepper us against the walls.
As if to confirm my fears, I hear my American co-worker from afar, in complete darkness, scream, “It’s gonna blow! It’s gonna blow!” And I recognize the terror in his voice.
I stopped praying, and I went to this Psalm, 23:4—though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil—but I couldn’t get through it. I broke down in the middle somewhere, and I just surrendered, and I asked, Just please make this quick.
So we rode it out in the darkness. We were frozen there. We could feel it, and we could hear it, and we could smell it. We could even taste it. We just couldn’t see it.
About five minutes into that first quake, we caught a break, and the light circuit came back on. There were only a handful of lights that had survived the quake, but it was enough light to see again. We were able to get the young man out of the crane, and he was in rough shape, but we headed for the door.
I made sure I was the last one out, because this was my crew, and I was responsible for them. I took one last look back at the millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and tooling that I had cared for since 2008, and I just knew I wasn’t going to see any of that again.
We finally get outside after many obstacles, and we’re jumping across cracks in the roadway, and we get to a point where we have to split up. I have to head up this long stairway up the hillside to where my rental car is parked.
When I get up there, I realize that the power of this quake has shifted all the parked cars and pinned mine in. I take a time-out, and realize that my heart is beating out of my chest, and I’m not breathing. And I start concentrating on getting my heart and lungs back in sync.
I’m looking down the hillside, and there’s a freighter in the harbor in front of Fukushima. There are deckhands running around it, and there’s black smoke coming out of it.
I remember thinking, Well, this must be their procedure during an event of this magnitude.
Then it struck me: are they taking precautions against a possible tsunami?
I watch them cast off, and get out of the harbor, and head out in the Pacific due east.
I’m on top of this hillside now, and I’m working on my breathing, and surveying the damage all around me, which was staggering.
These so-called aftershocks (which are actually earthquakes and high on the magnitude scale) were just ripping through and rattling my nerves. The earth around me was distorting like Jell-O, and I looked back out to sea to eyeball the freighter.
He was a mile or so out, and I saw this wall of water coming in from the horizon as far north and as far south as I could see, and it was just a perfect wall of water. I watched that freighter go up the face of it, and I thought he was going to roll and capsize to his starboard, but he cut over the top of it.
And I don’t know who I was talking to—I was alone up there—whether I was talking to Mother Nature or God himself, but they both heard me when I shouted across the Pacific at this thing, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
I watched the wave crash into the coastline below me and the four reactor buildings. I stood there in horror as the tremendous power and force of the thing just snapped everything, taking everything in its path with it.
When it hit the coastline, it had nowhere to go but uphill towards me, because there was a lot of water behind it. It continued to push up, and I started revisiting that feeling of doom I had twenty minutes earlier in the turbine building.
My thoughts shifted to all the low-lying communities north and south of me there, the ones I was so familiar with. I was on top of this hill, but somebody certainly must be in trouble. And it was a feeling of helplessness.
Then something happened to me. I went into shock. I felt like I was in this glass bowl. I could see through it, but the inside of it was filled with this gaseous fog of disbelief, and I watched two more, smaller tsunamis come in on top of the first one, bringing the water up even higher.
Then finally it all started to recede back down. It got to the shoreline, and continued out into the Pacific. It receded out to sea a quarter of a mile, and that harbor completely drained in front of my eyes, and I was looking at seabed as far north and as far south as I could see.
But with that came this wild weather front from the highlands behind me. These big, black, ominous clouds came rolling in, tumbling real low, and they just whipped across me.
And behind it was this—it wasn’t even a wind, it was like a vacuum. It was coming out to sea, and you could feel the temperature drop…
…And it began to snow.
I’m standing there thinking, Am I witnessing the end of our world? I truly pondered that.
I took this long, dazed walk off-site, and to this day I cannot remember the walk. But I got off-site to our office, and I started to recognize groups of my co-workers and familiar faces. And when I saw them, I stopped, and I turned around, and turned my back to them, and broke down.
We were eventually evacuated to this parking lot up in the hills, where we spent a very long night. The power was out, of course no water.
I tried in vain to call my wife for hours, but the network was busy. Around midnight I asked two friends to take me to town.
We slipped out of there, and I said, “Take me to the Chicken Lady’s.”
I wanted to check on her to see if she was there, if she needed help, if she was okay. We arrived, and her little building was cracked right down the face, and she wasn’t there. She was nowhere to be found.
I tried calling my wife again, and this time it rang. And when I said her name, she just screamed and kept screaming.
I just kept saying, “Bad, very bad.”
I eventually got home on March 16, five days later, and you would think that getting home would cure all that ails you. But it was there that everything started to manifest.
I learned about the loss of life in Japan. I saw the footage on TV. I learned about the reactors that I had serviced for twenty years exploding.
I was tired, and I was exhausted, and I had no energy, but I couldn’t sleep. I was depressed, heartbroken, and guilty. And even though I was surrounded by my family, I was alone with these emotions. I found myself in my recliner like a vegetable for a month before I even realized a month had passed. And nothing was important. Nothing.
I was out of work for five months, and then I learned of a program set up by the Japanese government allowing residents back into their homes and apartments.
That was it—it was absolutely necessary that I go back. I needed to go back.
So a few months later, I returned to the Exclusion Zone, and after several checkpoints I was given protective clothing from head to toe again—not to go to work but to enter the community and neighborhood where I lived.
I asked my escort to take me to the restaurant first, and when I pulled her door open this time, I was tearing cobwebs with it, and that was unsettling to me, because it was clear that no one had opened that door in nine months. It made me wonder and worry more about what had happened to her.
From there we went to my apartment. I opened that door for the first time since the morning of March 11 when I left for work, and it was in shambles. Everything was on the floor, and all the contents of the cabinets had been thrown out. The fridge was on its side. There were cracks in the wall. Even my fiberglass bathtub was shattered.
I started to clean up, and my
escort said, “You don’t have to do this.”
But I said, “Yes, I do. I’m responsible for this space and this mess,” and I cleaned it all up from end to end.
I found what I was hoping to find, which was my wedding ring. I also picked up my alarm clock, the one that woke me up that morning. The battery had popped out of the back, and the hands were frozen at 2:47, the same time as the earthquake. Time had stood still in that apartment for nine months.
When I finished there, I backed my way out and closed that door, literally closing that door behind me. And it was therapeutic, to say the least, and I had some relief, some closure.
But I still had one thing I needed to find out. I needed to learn the fate of the Chicken Lady.
That night I reached out to the Japan Times and asked them if they could help me find her. Is she with family, is she going to be okay, can I help her?
And eventually they did find her, and for the first time I learned her name. It was Owada. Owada is her family name, Mrs. Owada-san. And they told me the name of her restaurant was Ikoi and that ikoi in Japanese means “rest, relax, and relief.”
And I’m thinking, What a wonderful name for a little place. I used to stop there so often after work to rest and relax. Now I had this relief in knowing that these disasters didn’t take her, and that she was alive.
And then finally, on February 19, 2012, Mrs. Owada-san sent me a letter:
I have escaped from the disasters and have been doing fine every day. Pillitteri-san, please take care of yourself. I know your work must be important. I hope you enjoy a happy life like you seemed to have when you came to my restaurant. Although I won’t be seeing you, I will always pray for the best for you.
CARL PILLITTERI has spent over thirty years working hard servicing nuclear generating stations around the world. After the events in Japan, he took a short sabbatical, trying to regain focus and find a new path. Carl attempted a start-up company installing residential-size wind turbines in the archipelago off the western coast of Taiwan, but those efforts have been thwarted by the Taiwan Power Company (TPC). While Carl waits for the TPC to see value in his project, he is back on the road, working hard servicing nuclear generating stations in the United States.
This story was told on November 6, 2013, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Duck and Cover: Stories of Fallout. Director: Meg Bowles.
On December 21, 2007, at 2:15 p.m., a colleague at my job told me the boss wanted to see me, and I should brace myself, because the boss wasn’t pleased.
Now, when I say “my job,” what y’all should know is this was a temporary job. And when I say it was a temporary job, what you should know is that my performance today determined whether I would be asked back tomorrow.
So when I went in the boss’s office, here’s what she said: “Hi, Chenjerai. Yesterday I asked you to make two hundred Gilmore Girls Thanksgiving Day Special DVDs. But the Excel spreadsheet that you made ordered more than that.”
“Okay. How many more?”
“One million Gilmore Girls Thanksgiving Day Special DVDs. Can you explain that, please?”
I could. I have no idea how to use Microsoft Excel. And I lied about my skills to get this job. And, uh, my solution to the first two problems had been when in doubt, hit ENTER.
What I’m trying to explain to you is, on December 21, 2007, at 2:15 p.m., my life sucked.
And it didn’t just suck because I had a job that I was no good at, and that few people wanted. It sucked because only two years ago I had a job that I was much better at, and that everyone wanted. I was a full-time hip-hop artist.
You see, in 1995 four friends and I decided that the music industry was missing something. What the game needed was a group that was kind of like the Fugees, but not quite as talented. Kind of like the Roots, but not quite as creative.
So we formed the Spooks. And after years of grinding out demos and everybody telling us we were never going to make it, we finally did the impossible. We came up to New York, and we signed a record deal.
One day the CEO of our record label called us into his office, and his assistant said he was very excited.
“Spooks!” (He liked saying it a little too much for a white guy—I’m just saying.) “I figured out how we’re all going to make millions, and it comes down to two words: Laurence Fishburne.”
I was like, “Wait a minute, you mean like the movie star Laurence Fishburne? Like Apocalypse Now Laurence Fishburne? Morpheus in The Matrix Laurence Fishburne?”
According to our CEO, the Laurence Fishburne had agreed to make our song the main theme song of the first film he ever directed. All we had to do was go to dinner with him and solidify the deal. Pfft. No problem.
We went up to New York, waited out in front of a restaurant, and sure enough, the Laurence Fishburne pulled up on a scooter.
Not only did he agree to put our song in his film, but he agreed to be in our music video. We figured the film was gonna be a hit, and when the film was a hit, our song would be a hit, launching us into hip-hop superstardom.
Awesome.
Things didn’t go quite like that. We struggled in the US. But like many genius artists before us—Jimi Hendrix, James Baldwin…the Spice Girls—we blew up in Europe first. We got a gold album in the UK, then we got a gold single in France, then we got a gold single in Belgium, and we got a gold single in Sweden.
I was telling this to a friend of mine the other day, kind of bragging, and he said, “Wait a minute, doesn’t it only take like three thousand albums to go gold in Belgium?”
I was like, “Well, yeah, that’s true. But I mean, how many gold albums you got? Fuck you. Don’t be a hater.”
We were Top 10, you know what I’m saying? We were Top 10 all over Europe.
That meant we did all the TV shows. We did Viva MTV, Jools Holland, Top of the Pops—you name it. We were flying all over doing concerts and festivals.
I finally felt like we had made it the day my manager told me we had a problem. We had to do two shows in two different countries on the same day. The solution was simple: Sony rented a private jet. Eight-o’clock show in Berlin, eleven thirty show in London.
As we were flying across Europe from one set of screaming fans to another in a private jet, drinking specially procured Scandinavian pear ciders, I was sitting next to a record exec who I felt was kind of becoming my friend. Because a lot of people around us at this time were just telling us what we wanted to hear. They had a financial incentive to do that.
But this person was somebody I was starting to trust.
So I was like, “Susan, I got an idea. When we finish touring, let’s all of us just meet up somewhere in Europe. In fact, maybe we could make it a yearly thing, pick a place somewhere in the world and just kick it.”
We had been laughing up to that point. But suddenly she got really serious.
And she took my hand, and she said, “Listen, Chenjerai, I have to be honest with you. I don’t know where you’re going to be next year. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
She kind of knocked the wind out of me with that one.
I was like, “What do you mean? We’re going to be making music next year. We’re good at this, and people like our songs. I like doing this. I thought we were finally part of the club. Look at this private jet. Look at these specially procured Scandinavian pear ciders.”
But she was right. Two months later another marketing exec called us into his office, and said that, due to a poorly chosen third single, they had run out of money to promote our album, and it was over. We did make one more album, but a young UK record exec informed us that most of the singles weren’t “gangster” enough, and that album died on the vine.
I moved to Los Angeles. I got married. And eventually I found myself in a cubicle producing Gilmore Girls DVDs.
But even then, I felt like I still had a foot in the game, and apparently my wife did, too, because she was like, “Honey, I have a job for you working with
celebrities. Are you interested?”
I was like, “Of course. But if I’m going to be around my people, I’m probably going to need to go shopping.”
She reached in her purse, pulled out the JCPenney card, and she said, “Get a suit. Not the most expensive one. You’ll be working security.”
I went to the gig. Now, this was a gathering of the black filmmaking elite. Spike Lee was there, Tyler Perry was there, the whole cast from The Wire was there. And then, coming out of a limousine, was the Laurence Fishburne.
Now, I’m not going to lie. At that point people weren’t treating me too well as the security guard.
But I thought, Now they’re going to see.
You know what I’m saying? I didn’t just get Laurence Fishburne’s autograph. He was in my video.
But as he got closer, I started to second-guess myself a little bit.
I thought, Wait a minute now. What if he wants me to go in? I can’t. I’m working. How am I going to explain that?
And actually, He’s not going to ask me to go in. I’m sitting here in a JCPenney suit.
I didn’t even have dress socks on. I had sweat socks on.
And come to think of it, I haven’t made music in months. I’m not really an artist anymore. I’m not in the rap game. I make Gilmore Girls DVDs.
And I’m not even good at that.
I got more and more nervous. And as Laurence Fishburne headed toward me, I actually turned my head to the side so he wouldn’t see my face, because I just didn’t want to have to explain what my situation was. He walked right by me without seeing me. I don’t know if I felt more depressed or relieved at that moment.
I knew at that point that I had to face the reality of my life. A few weeks later, I interviewed for a full-time job as an administrative assistant. Now, this firm was in a cramped office, dimly lit—the kind of place where there’s insidious pop music leaking out of the radio, but nobody hears it because they’re hopelessly staring into their computer screens.
The Moth Presents All These Wonders Page 6
