Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  I consider myself lucky to not have witnessed what he did.

  36 Not his actual name.

  37 Actual name of the firm withheld.

  DREW NEDERPELT

  Drew Nederpelt, thirty-four, went downtown to help his girlfriend—a noted television reporter—cover the news shortly after the second plane hit.

  They arrived at a distance three blocks from the North Tower as it began to fall.

  I SCREAMED AT her to move, but she just stood there. I’m not sure if she was just in awe or what—it was an unreal sight, this huge gray mountain just falling in on itself. Or maybe she couldn’t process what was happening. Whatever. It didn’t matter. We were only three blocks away. If we didn’t move, we’d be toast. That’s the only thought that was running through my mind.

  I grabbed her hand and we ran about forty yards down the street, where we rounded a corner and I threw her into a doorway on Murray. I guess I expected the debris to file nicely along the avenues and streets, like water pouring into the cubicles of an ice tray. But instead it came crashing overtop the thirty-story building we were hiding behind. The sound was incredible—just a great big unbelievable swooooosh—and suddenly, everything was pitch-black. I mean totally, unbelievably black.

  I screwed my eyes shut, but when I opened them again, there was no difference. Everything was black with them closed and black with them open. Then I started to cough. Breathing was nearly impossible. Which got me angry. I thought, I’m not just going to sit here and die in some dingy doorway. So I backed up and started kicking at the door we were standing next to, which was made of metal and glass. It was an outer door to an apartment building, I think, and not very strong.

  On the fourth kick the latch just popped out and the door flung open with a crash. We both ran inside, thinking we were clear. But there was another door in front of us, a large, sturdy solid metal thing with a thick glass window. And of course, in the blink of an eye, all the debris that was outside just whooshed in after us and there we were, in the same predicament, choking in this tiny, confined space. And I remember thinking, so this is it, huh?

  I really didn’t have a choice. I believed that if we wanted to live we had to get out of the debris. I had no idea how long the cloud was going to last, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. There was no way I was going to break down that inner door, it was too solid. So I started on the interior glass.

  I kicked it, but I had on a pair of rubber-soled sandals and my feet just kept bouncing off. I remember this all very vividly—knowing that my leg was eventually going to punch through that glass and shred my entire calf, being absolutely sure about it. And I’ve run marathons, I’m a runner; my legs are important to me. But I couldn’t have cared less. I kept kicking. It was one of those things where you figure a shredded leg is a small price to pay for being alive. So I just kept it up. Kick, kick, kick.

  We were both starting to choke pretty badly from the debris, and I was blindly wailing away on this door—fifteen, maybe sixteen kicks into it, now. Then, slowly, the glass began to tear away from the sides and the whole pane just folded down, leaving a hole in the bottom half of the door, which we crawled through.

  We found ourselves in a small anteroom, staring at an elevator. I hit the button and the elevator door opened with a cheerful bing—like it was saying, “I’m ready for you, thanks, today is business as usual.”

  I looked inside. It was a bright, clean elevator. Thinking back, I can hear peaceful elevator music but I know that isn’t possible. I think it just seemed so far removed from what was happening outside—so surreal—that my mind was playing tricks on me.

  I made the decision that we weren’t going into an elevator in a war zone. So instead I threw up on the floor.

  Then we heard banging.

  I looked down the antechamber we’d come through and saw the shadow of a person outside the first door. And I hate to say this, but I looked at this guy and my first thought was, you know what? We have our air and we had to fight for it. If I open that door again it’ll let all that stuff back in here.

  But then, you know, you remember that’s a human being out there.

  So I ducked through the hole I’d kicked in the second door and opened the latch on the outer door, and this cop staggered in. He was completely covered with the soot, like we were. He came in and just stood there, panting.

  I asked, “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t say a word, he just barely nodded. He was completely stunned. He stood there in a daze with his shoulders slouched, ghost-white from the debris—which was interesting because he was African American. You could see the word “POLICE” stenciled on his vest.

  Then there was another banging. This time, my girlfriend opened the door. Another man crawled in and he didn’t say a word either, he just stood in the corner, grabbed a hanky from his pocket and began wiping himself off in silence.

  This second guy was covered from head to foot in an inch of crap, and he was dusting himself off with a little checkered handkerchief. It was absurd. He reminded me of Lady Macbeth trying to scrub off the “damned spot”—like he was in shock, or denial. He didn’t realize he couldn’t make a dent in his appearance with his little hanky.

  As it turns out, he was a plainclothes policeman.

  I always carry my digital camera with me, and I took a few pictures.

  After four or five minutes, it looked as if things were getting clearer outside. So we all stepped out and went our separate ways without saying a word. The cops, I guess, went and did what they had to do, and we went to report the news.

  Every minute or so, you heard an explosion from somewhere close by. I thought at the time that they were bombs, but I later found out they were cars exploding from the heat of the fires.

  I remember hearing that the Pentagon had been hit. At the time, there were all these rumors: the Sears Tower was in flames; the UN had been hit. And I remember thinking very clearly as these explosions were going off around me that, if the news feeds were reporting buildings across the country going up in flames, this must be what it’s like to feel under siege. Like London in 1941, or Dresden. To feel like everything that is near and familiar and yours is being destroyed by people who don’t know you and don’t appreciate you, who don’t care what you do or who you are.

  I wanted to grab hold of whoever was responsible for all this and shout, “Don’t you understand? You’ve got the wrong place, the wrong people! There’s been some misunderstanding!”

  I think that most of history’s conflicts have really been about misunderstandings.

  Later that night, my girlfriend used her media clout and convinced a couple of cops from NYPD intelligence to drive us through Ground Zero.

  I’ll never forget it. The jagged shards of the Towers loomed up into the sky like fangs sprouting from the ground, fangs that were lit by hundreds of spotlights as thousands of firemen and rescue workers climbed over them, picking through what had already become known as the Pile.

  We were the only car on the streets. As we trolled along, the driver gave little bleeps on his horn to move the Hazmat units out of the way.

  I was bothered that we were disrupting the rescue efforts to indulge in our personal guided tour of the area. But my girlfriend made a bargain. These cops were with intel and wanted to know more about what had happened just before the attacks. So my girlfriend promised to put out a call over the airwaves for any video that had been shot in the hours before the attacks. That’s what she bartered to get us into Ground Zero.

  The media exists for quid pro quo.

  At one point, a cop with a gas mask banged on the window of our car and yelled, “What the hell are you doing?” He peered in at the two of us in the backseat while our driver rolled the window down.

  “We’re with Intel,” the driver said, and showed him a badge.

  The cop looked at the badge, looked at the driver, and said, “You’re a fucking asshole.” And he walked off.

  We di
dn’t turn back, I guess because my girlfriend didn’t offer and these cops felt they owed her—a deal was a deal. But not one minute later, another cop ran up to our car. I mean this literally when I say that we were the only vehicle moving on the streets. Everything else had been pulled off to the side of the road and here we were cruising around in a white Crown Victoria in the middle of Ground Zero at nine o’clock on the night of the eleventh.

  This second cop started banging on the window, screaming, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Our driver rolled his window down again and started to explain: “We’re with Intel, and …”

  But this new cop screamed at the top of his lungs, “I don’t care who the fuck you are! Turn this fucking thing around and get the fuck out of here! Now!”

  So we did a six-point turn in the middle of the road, which sent all the poor rescue workers who we’d just beeped with the siren scrambling for the sidewalks again. And we left Ground Zero.

  My girlfriend managed to do a live phone report on network television. She called what she had just seen “the face of hell.”

  Here’s my bottom-line assessment:

  In a lot of ways, the media did some great things that day. They provided a lot of value, and often acted heroically. But there was a lot of terrible stuff, too.

  For instance, several journalists we know managed to “acquire” some hazmat suits and helmets, and they snuck into Ground Zero and videotaped everything going on for hours. Thankfully, our network didn’t use any of the footage. They knew they’d have to answer for how their reporters had managed to get footage from inside Ground Zero.

  I remember another incident where my girlfriend and the host from a very popular network morning show got into a screaming match about using some ex-NYPD bigwig for a guided tour of the Pile. They went toe-to-toe, if you can imagine it, right there in front of 200 people, tearing at each other about who had the right to tell the story, while 300 yards away, thousands of missing people lay buried.

  And there were assistant producers crawling all over the place who’d been dispatched to help out their TV stations. Without many exceptions, assistant producers in TV are all young twenty-somethings trying to get their start in the business. On 9/11 and the days after, their idea of getting an interview with a rescue worker was to walk out from the bullpen where reporters were kept tethered, grab a subject, and literally hang onto their sleeves, physically dragging them to the sidelines. It was really unbelievable.

  I remember seeing dozens of firemen shaking their arms while these APs hung off them like rabid schnauzers. All these girls and boys who’d never been out of a studio in their professional lives and whose idea of convincing someone to do an interview was to scour Lower Manhattan for anyone in uniform and forcefully yank them aside. It was sad.

  And more than a few on-camera reporters who’d been caught under the debris refused to have anyone brush them off. On September 11, my girlfriend physically fought off a dozen people—producers, friends, bystanders, anyone who walked up to her and tried to dust her off. She was proud of the fact that she’d been there from the beginning. That debris was her badge of courage.

  I remember seeing tape of one news anchor who’d been under the North Tower when it collapsed. Reporting from the studio two hours later, he still had the dust in his hair and all over his shoulders. The makeup department must have gone to extremes to do his face without disturbing the soot that covered him.

  But there were bright spots, too.

  I remember two cops who asked me to take a picture of them. They were smiling and so proud to be together, to have survived, to be helping. I saw so many examples of utter selflessness, a level of human compassion that was staggering, just staggering.

  The owners of The Square diner opened their doors to everyone and gave out all their food for free. They literally refused to take any money—even from the expense account-laden media. I managed to hide twenty bucks under a cake stand on my way out that they hopefully found long after we’d all gone.

  And I befriended a firefighter from Connecticut; a few months later, I was able to get some media for a 100-mile bike rally he was planning to Ground Zero to benefit the victims.

  I became very close with the camera and the sound guy I’d worked with at Ground Zero. When I ran into them unexpectedly several months later, I was so happy to see them, we hugged. It was great. They told me they still worked as a team. In many ways, the event had brought them together.

  In retrospect, when I think back to all that happened, I prefer to remember these other things. These bright spots. I think they tell me so much more about what that day could potentially mean for our future.

  It was quite a day. I don’t know how else to say it. It was flat-out on the go, from the moment I got up that morning and went for a run in the park until I hitched a ride home on the back of a fire truck after midnight. I went all day on a Powerbar. Food was nothing. Food was a joke.

  I remember I didn’t cry that day, but I think I shook for most of the morning. I didn’t cry until I was standing in my shower at 1:00 A.M. on September 12. All alone in the silence, I watched the black and the soot and the God-knows-what stream off my body and swirl down the drain.

  UPDATE

  Drew Nederpelt and his girlfriend broke up shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. Sensing that his talents were better suited to a different field, Drew switched careers and founded his own publishing company, Sterling & Ross, “a commercial trade publisher of current affairs, celebrity, pop culture, and other media-centric, compelling books for mass consumption.”

  Drew’s publishing philosophy holds that “the literary wasteland is populated with great and valuable books that died on the vine because they were not given the proper publicity to achieve success.” Sterling & Ross takes on ambitious book projects that deserve a wide readership and works closely with its authors in ways that larger publishing companies can’t.

  Some of Sterling & Ross’s titles include Scout’s Honor: The Bravest Way to Build a Winning Team by Atlanta Braves TV host Bill Shanks and Beneath the Pleasuredome: Designing the Playboy Mystique by Ron Dirsmith.

  THE TURNER FAMILY

  The Turner family: Jake, forty-eight; his wife, Sean, forty-five; their daughter, Madeline, eleven; and their new boy, James, eighteen months.

  By sheer luck, the Turners moved from an apartment on Warren Street to a space further away on Greenwich Street on September 1, 2001.38 The shift in location spared them from being directly beneath the Towers and the collapse of the buildings during the attack.

  Jake: THE GREENWICH STREET location was an empty warehouse when we bought it. The renovation took over two years of planning. We gutted the place and converted it to livable quarters from scratch. We had to install everything: heating, ventilation, plumbing, electricity, the works.

  The byzantine city bureaucracy held us up for a long time. We had to get permits and papers; there were codes and statutes. We’d already moved into the space by the eleventh, but it was far from finished. We still had workmen going full tilt every day.

  I was shaving in the bathroom when one of the Chinese workmen came in. He couldn’t speak much English but he said, “Come out here. Come, come, come!” He took me out into the street, and together we looked up at this big, gaping hole in the Tower.

  The first thought I had was, well. We can fix that. You know? That can be fixed.

  Jake: I keep going over the sequence of events because I want to remember everything. I think in my old age I’m going to forget the minutia.

  Sean: I knew right away. I said, “That’s terrorism.”

  Jake: Sean yelled, “Go get the camera.” And there I was, standing out there in the street videotaping this gaping hole … and that’s when the second plane hit. The explosion shot out fire that covered several blocks, which is when I dropped the camera and said, “Shit. This is terrorism. I’d better go get Madeline.” She was at her school, which is about two blocks north of the
Towers.

  Sean: It was her fourth day at a brand-new school in Battery Park. She’s at IS 89,39 which is right next to Stuyvesant High School. She’d just started middle school, sixth grade.

  Jake: We’d actually gone through this whole process because in New York, to enroll a child in a city school, you have to go through an interview. You have to pick your school location, and you have to be accepted at the school. Some of her friends went to a place over on the East Side, but we thought, well, we’re in this new neighborhood and IS 89 is a brand-new school. It’s a beautiful facility, and she can walk there.

  So after the second plane hit, I grabbed my bicycle and jumped on. I rode down West Street, heading south. Meanwhile, people were streaming in the opposite direction, running, walking—it was hard to ride the bike, there were so many people coming at me head on. Plus sirens were wailing and trucks were going south.

  I get to the school and was surprised to find everything was very calm. I didn’t have a clue as to where Madeline was—she was new there, so I didn’t know her homeroom or anything. I ran through the school, sprinting up floors, looking in doors. Finally I ran into a teacher, who said, “They’re all down in the cafeteria.”

  Jake: I went back downstairs, found the cafeteria, and sure enough, the students were massing. They didn’t know what was going on. Some of them had heard the explosions, but none of them had actually seen them, I don’t think.

  I found Madeline and grabbed her. She said, “What’s going on?”

  And this is where it started to fall apart for me because I said, “Oh. Well …” And I didn’t know what to tell her. I just looked at her.