Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

“I’m following the sign—I’m following the sign!” said the one guy.

  And the other guy said: “You do what you want. I’m going this way.”

  They were very angry and I didn’t recognize either of them.

  I was in the front of our group at this point. Somehow we’d lost the people from Kosmo Services, so there were just the five from our office and the elderly gentleman. I said, “I’m following this guy if he says this door leads to the ground.” Not the guy who followed the sign, but the guy who said, “I’ve done this before.”

  And that’s the way we went.

  We entered another stairwell, but this one was flooded. Water was rushing ankle-deep in a constant flow down the stairs from the sprinklers, or maybe from broken pipes. At some points the flow was so heavy, you had to hold on tight to the railing. It was incredibly hot and we were soaking wet.

  In the stairwells, you’d see items that had been discarded by fleeing people. A pair of shoes, a tie, a briefcase. As if someone had said, “Screw this, I don’t need this tie anymore,” and tossed it.

  We encountered a lot more people around floor 50. Before that, we’d seen small groups here and there, but there were actual crowds on 50. People were yelling out their floor number as they went down in order to let people know who was evacuating. Not once did we hear any number higher than our floor.

  A few people were stopping to drink Cokes, soft drinks, and water from jugs. I heard someone call out, “Does anyone want a Dr. Pepper?” Uh-uh. Were they kidding? We didn’t stop for anything or anybody. Actually, that’s not true. A couple of elderly women were having trouble getting down the stairs at one point where the water was serious. We helped them get past that area.

  We weren’t abandoning anyone, but we also weren’t allowing how tired we felt to affect our mission, which was to get the five of us the hell out of there.

  We’d been walking down the stairwell two by two all along. But this started to break up around the 50th floor since, occasionally, someone would come up the stairs—a building manager or an occasional EMT. When this happened, we had to shuffle ourselves around to make room so they could pass. By the 30th floor, so many people were coming up that we were down to proceeding single file.

  And on the 30th floor, we saw the first fireman. He had his full gear on and a hose over his shoulder. I couldn’t believe he had the energy to walk up the steps with a load like that. He looked exhausted, ready to drop. He took his helmet off and someone poured water into it. Then he put the helmet back on his head with the water still in it and kept climbing.

  It was devastatingly hot.

  People weren’t panicked on the stairs. No one was pushing. Everyone seemed friendly and calm. I guess we all thought that, by getting to the stairs, we’d be safe. We’d get out. After all, the fire was behind us. It was just a matter of keep walking, keep walking. At that point, we still didn’t know what kind of devastation had taken place.

  The line was moving slow, but the water was moving fast. As we got lower and lower, you had to hold onto the brackets that held the banister to the wall. The force of the water was that powerful.

  At about the 3rd floor, we found a woman sitting in a chair by the stairwell doorway. She had two firemen by her side and she was in hysterics, saying that she couldn’t go any more, she absolutely could not walk anymore.

  Fish Out of Water by Tom Haddad. Tom says that none of his drawings have anything to do with his experience on 9/11.

  The firemen were saying to her, “Please. You have to keep walking. You only have three floors to go…”

  Two regular office guys moved past us carrying a person in a wheelchair via a board slung between the wheels.

  A door opened out onto the plaza level. Technically, this was floor two, the courtyard between the two Towers. The Trade Center really had two ground levels: this plaza level and the true ground level at the bottom of the escalators.

  I saw that the huge glass windows of the plaza were still intact, and there was a line of police officers stretching all the way back. The police were shouting to us, “Don’t look out the window! Just keep walking! Go!”

  And at this point, the five of us got separated. Frances and Sabrina had gotten ahead of us in the stairwell and were lost from sight, but I was still with Lynn and Evan.

  A guy walked past me and started through the plaza. He was bald and had a massive head wound that stretched all the way over his skull from temple to temple. It was pouring blood onto his white dress shirt.

  A cop yelled out to him, “Hey, buddy, are you okay?” and ran forward from the line.

  The bald guy had a heavy, matter-of-fact New York accent, and he said, “Yeah. I’ve had better days.”

  Then the cops suddenly started yelling, “If you have the energy, run! If you can, you gotta run!”

  Lynn took off running down toward the escalator.

  I turned my head and looked, just like they’d told us not to. And time stopped dead for me, like it had immediately after the plane’s impact. It’s tough to describe. I was still walking, but I was completely hypnotized by what I saw going on through the windows in the plaza outside the building.

  The Sphere3 had been smashed. It had a huge dent in it and a piece of the building on top of it. A large chunk of the building façade had landed right outside the window and was blazing fire. And occasionally you’d hear these devastatingly loud thumps. At the time, I thought they came from more falling pieces of the building. It didn’t register, but there were hunks and piles of meat all over the ground … nothing I recognized as body parts. Later on, I found out they were the remains of jumpers.

  Somehow I kept walking and got to the top of the escalator leading down to the concourse level.

  The escalator wasn’t working; it had stopped. So we climbed down as if it were a flight of stairs. The bottom steps were knee-deep with water. All the glass leading out of the concourse was broken. All the revolving doors? Broken. The floor was covered in glass.

  Here, the staggered line of police officers was directing traffic past the PATH4 station, around a corner by the A train to another escalator up to the plaza level. We exited to the Trade Center campus. I think we were on Church Street, just Lynn, Evan, and myself.

  And here there were more police officers, and they were yelling, “Don’t look up, just keep going!” Which is, of course, exactly when I decided to look up. I hadn’t even thought to do it until they’d said not to. That’s when I saw we were standing directly in front of Building 2. I was looking straight up at a gaping hole with fire coming out of it, the same thing you’ve probably seen on the news.

  We decided to walk across the street. In front of an iron gate surrounding a church, Lynn said, “Whatever you guys do, don’t leave me. I don’t have any money or identification. I left my purse upstairs.”5 She was very nervous. We all were. At this point, Evan hadn’t really said anything, but he’s a pretty quiet guy.

  Then I heard a sound, like a creaking. Almost like when you have an upstairs neighbor and they’re walking around, the beams in the ceiling squeak and squeal. Sort of like that, but really, really loud. And then it was thunder. I turned around and saw the building was coming down. We were only a block away.

  The three of us ran in different directions.

  I ran straight up Dey Street and passed a 4/5/6 subway station. I turned to go in there, thinking I’d be okay underground, but then I got confused. Should I go down? Or try to find a building to get into—or a car to crawl under?

  In that split second of indecision, the debris cloud engulfed me. It came from the north, south, east, west. It came from above, swirled up from below; it slammed in from every possible direction. I was standing in the middle of the street, there was nowhere to go, and the cloud hit me like a sledgehammer. Since it came from all directions, I didn’t fall over.

  Total blackness. No air at all. Panic.

  Then something hit me on the head and I pulled my shirt up over my head. I couldn’t
see anyway, so what did it matter? I remember thinking, I can’t believe it. After walking down eighty flights of stairs, I’m going to die right here in the street.

  I was so tired. My knees hurt. Anytime I stopped moving, my legs would shake. I wanted to just sit down and let it happen.

  But you know, it’s funny. Just a couple of days before, I’d made a promise to my wife that I’d never leave her alone. How could I do that to her? I said to myself, I love Kim, so I’m gonna keep walking.

  And that’s what I did.

  I remembered there’d been a building right in front of me before the cloud came down. I started toward it, but ended up walking straight into a parked car. I felt my way around the car, kicking for the curb with my foot. Then I got up over the curb and onto the sidewalk. I was walking like Frankenstein with my shirt over my head and my hands out in front of me.

  I walked into somebody who grabbed my hands and spun me around and said, “Go this way!” Then they let go and disappeared.

  So I did. I walked in the direction that person had pointed me in, toward the left, where I collided with the rough stone wall of a building. And I thought, okay, I’ll just keep walking to the left and maybe I’ll get to a door.

  I kept going, feeling my way inch by inch, and I came to a corner. Turn the corner, I thought, and follow the line of the building. Eventually there has to be a door.

  Fuck it, I thought. I’m gonna walk forward.

  And boom! I walked right through a revolving door and into the building.

  I pulled my head out from inside my shirt and saw what must’ve been a thousand screaming people.

  I was standing in the building’s lobby. Right at my feet, there was a fireman on his hands and knees in his bunker gear. He was throwing up blood all over the floor, and he looked up at me. His eyes were blood red and he looked at me like I was nuts. Then he handed me a Gatorade. He was still on his hands and knees.

  “Hey, buddy. Are you okay?” Tom Haddad’s self-portrait. The line of police officers in the North Tower lobby broke and he saw the bodies of victims lying beyond them in the courtyard.

  I was confused. I couldn’t believe I was alive and here was this fireman down on the floor vomiting blood and handing me a bottle of Gatorade.

  And he said, “Just fucking drink it.”

  I had so much soot and ash in my mouth and nose. I took the bottle to take a swig but I hesitated, weird shit going through my head. A stranger hands me a drink after throwing up and I’m worried about germs? I decided to wash my mouth out with the juice rather than drink it. I swirled the Gatorade around and spat it out on the floor and that’s when I noticed that the fireman hadn’t really been throwing up blood at all. Like me, he’d spat out red Gatorade.

  That’s also when I noticed I was covered with a layer of ash one inch thick. I’d gotten wet from the sprinklers in the tower and because of that, everything stuck to me, the dirt, the soot, the ash. Everything.

  A guy walked up to me, saying, “Hey, are you okay? Are you okay?” He was totally clean. I handed him the bottle of Gatorade.

  Then a policeman got on a bullhorn and said, “If there’s anyone here with any disability or asthma, follow my hand.” And though there were a thousand people in the lobby, I saw this one hand poke up.

  I thought, I don’t have a disability or asthma, but I’m gonna follow that hand.

  So I worked my way through the crowd. People saw me and made a path. The mob split right down the middle, and I went through a back door and into an Au Bon Pain where I found about ten police officers trying to figure out what to do next.

  When I was running from that building, I felt like Carl Lewis. That’s the fastest I’ve ever run in my life. In retrospect, I had no idea where I was. Even now, looking back, I can’t pinpoint the location of that building. I haven’t wanted to revisit downtown but, after seeing that special on CBS, I think that maybe I’ll change my mind.6 The brothers captured some of the most extraordinary footage ever taken on that day. The film aired on CBS in March of 2002.

  I want to find the street again. I want to know how far away I got from the Towers.

  In the Au Bon Pain, there was a case of Poland Spring water bottles and I took one of them along with a handful of napkins. I wiped all the debris from my eyes and face. And that’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had no idea whether the people I’d escaped with were alive or dead. I’ve known Evan since our freshman year in college; we were roommates together. And Lynn? She’s been such a special friend to me at my job, like a confidante. Where were they now? What had happened to them?

  I thought, how could they have survived? I started to panic. Sitting there in the Au Bon Pain with my bottle of water, I started to hyperventilate.

  A police officer sat down next to me and took my hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “Just let it out. You’re experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

  I thought, post? No way I’m post. I think I’m still in the trauma. But she was very kind to me, very soothing. With a little work on both our parts, I was able to calm down.

  Then another officer got on a bullhorn and said, “We’re evacuating this building. Please proceed in an orderly fashion toward the door. When you reach the door, an officer there will tell you to walk right or left. Follow the directions you’re given.”

  I got up and started walking. When I reached the door, the police officer told me to exit and walk right, so I did. I started down the street through calf-deep piles of sand-colored building debris. Everything was weirdly quiet, almost as if my brain had shut down from taking in too much information. When the building had fallen, there’d been so much sound, it was almost like having no sound at all. My ears had only registered a white noise, like a drone.

  I walked down the street, not knowing where to go, thinking that everybody I’d been with had died. I barely knew who I was, I was dizzy and disoriented, my speech was slurred. Looking back, it makes perfect sense: I’d been hit twice on the head, once in the office and once on the street. The wall of my office had knocked me on my right temple, and whatever hit me in the street had caught my left.

  All I wanted to do was get uptown and find my wife. I knew where she worked and I said to myself, I don’t care if I have to walk all the way, I’ll get there eventually. Just go.

  So I started walking.

  I heard someone in the street yell, “Hey, these buses are going uptown.”

  I looked. There were three MTA buses waiting. The first two were jam-packed with people but the third bus was one of those newer jobs, like the type you’d take on a cross-country tour. There was nobody on it, so I got in line—I was maybe the third person. When they opened the door, I looked at the driver and said, “If you’re going uptown, that’s where I’m going.”

  I climbed on board and walked to the back and sat down. I was numb. People were filing on. Some were dirty and some were normal-looking. A guy sat down in the seat right in front of mine and slumped down so I couldn’t see the top of his head. I figured he was tired. After all that had happened, he had a right to be. But then, suddenly, he sat back up again and started pounding on the window, yelling nonsense at the top of his lungs.

  I remember thinking, here we go, this guy’s lost it.

  Then he slumped down in his seat again and I noticed his reflection in the window glass—the guy was Evan!

  I got up, moved to his seat, and sat down next to him. He said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. After all of this, here you are.”

  Then I asked him what the commotion had been all about and he said, “This is crazy, but I saw a guy walking past the bus just now with a mustache like yours and the same build. I thought it was you, so I wanted to get his attention.”

  I said, “Well, you got it.” We hugged each other and I said, “Listen. For the rest of the day, we stick together, okay?”

  Evan was fine with that. The bus pulled out into the street and headed uptown.

  Building 2 fell a
s we were making the turn off Park Row. We heard the roar and everybody went nuts, and just like that—poof!—the bus was completely consumed in the debris cloud. We had to stop for a while and wait for the cloud to settle. It was bizarre watching it this time from under glass. Like being some kind of fish in a bowl watching the world go by outside. Pretty soon, we were driving again.

  We got to the UN7 and found the street completely blocked by security. The bus couldn’t go north anymore so it turned to head cross-town. I looked at Evan and said, “Let’s get out here and walk to Rockefeller Center.”

  When we got to NBC, a security guard looked me over and said, “Who you looking for?”

  I said, “My wife.” I told the guard her name.

  “Well,” he said. “They evacuated the building.”

  I felt like, now what? Where could she possibly be? New York City is huge. And I’d already tried borrowing a cell phone from someone on the bus to call her, but the cell phone wasn’t working. I fumbled with it over and over while another guy on the bus insisted on giving everyone an in-depth account of all the people he’d seen jumping from the Towers.

  So I was standing there at NBC, completely at a loss. I barely knew who I was, and Evan wasn’t much better off. Then I said, “Well, I’d better get to a hospital. I should really have someone take a look at me.” And we started walking west, away from Rockefeller Center. I don’t really know why.

  While we walked, Evan was able to fill in some blanks. When the first Tower collapsed, he hadn’t been out in the dust cloud like me, he’d been running down the street. The door to some building had opened and someone had grabbed him and pulled him in just before the impact.

  I wanted to know what had happened to Lynn, but he didn’t know much. We both fell silent. Later on, we found out that she was alive, too. She told us she hadn’t gotten very far when the first Tower fell. The impact of the collapse had thrown her into the gate of the church we’d been standing by and people had trampled her. They ran right over her as if she were a pizza box or something, and the whole left side of her body was a giant bruise. But somehow she managed to survive.