Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  I wanted to strangle him. He hadn’t seen any of the missing posters outside of St. Vincent’s, the news vans covered with flyers, the people holding up signs that said “thank you” to any cop or fire truck that drove past.

  I was like, “You really don’t get this, do you?”

  I knew that I couldn’t convince him, so I thought, this is someone who’s just trying to distract me. I said, “Thanks. Good to see you. I’m gonna go.” And I kept moving.

  When I got to the West Side Highway, I saw that tents had been set up all along the strip and people were bustling about, moving from the tent to the road and back again, handing out supplies to cars and trucks full of rescue workers driving past.

  I asked, “Hey, who’s in charge?” And someone said, “That girl over there in the baseball cap.”

  It was very organic, a real grassroots operation. The girl in charge wasn’t wearing some official hat or badge of office or anything. No sign that said, “Me In Charge.”

  So I approached her and said, “Who needs a hand? What can I help you with?”

  The tents basically had a large stock of bottled water, respirator masks, and sandwiches. There were people lined up at folding tables who were making more sandwiches. I said, “Hold on a second. Do you guys know about Fiddlesticks?”

  “What’s a Fiddlesticks?”

  I said, “Who’s got a truck?”

  Someone said, “Get a truck, someone go with this girl. She’s got a source.”

  They flagged down some guy in a van who was driving along the West Side Highway. The driver, who’d come to town from Connecticut or Massachusetts or something, had gone to a Home Depot and bought all the boots and respirators he could find, a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff. He’d thrown it all in his van and driven right down to Ground Zero thinking, this is what they’re gonna need, this is what they’re gonna get. After dropping off his load, he’d spent the rest of the day driving around town making himself available to anyone. “Who needs help moving stuff?”

  Somebody flagged him down and said, “This girl needs to go someplace to pick up food. Can you take her?” He said no problem.

  So there I was, sitting in the van with a perfect stranger who turned out to be the loveliest guy. We drove over to Fiddlesticks. I walked in and said, “I’ve got a van here to take some food over to the West Side Highway.”

  All I heard was, “Great. What do you need?”

  The bartenders hopped over the bars to help. The waitresses dropped their checks on their customers’ tables and said, “Dude, you’re gonna have to wait for your order, I’ve got something else to do.” Everyone took off their aprons and we formed a daisy chain, twenty people long. The dishwashers came out from the back and they helped, too, guys who didn’t speak even English.

  There was a door from the downstairs storage up to the sidewalk, and crates kept coming up. Water and juice, PowerBars, sandwiches, cans of soda, bags of ice. If it was portable, it went into the chain. Thankfully, people hadn’t donated things like deli platters, only individually packaged items like candy bars and potato chips.

  We filled up the van. I thanked the guys at Fiddlesticks, and they were like, “Hey. Great. Glad it’s all going someplace you can use it.”

  But as we were driving back to the West Side Highway, I started thinking, wait a minute. What would have happened if I hadn’t been there at Fiddlesticks and known all this stuff was there?

  Do you see what I’m saying? That chance circumstance set the tone for everything else that happened next.

  The rescue supply game became about being a pinball that made a connection between two points. “You guys need ice? I know somebody who has some.” That’s how the network developed, little by little. It wasn’t like someone handed out a roster and said, “If you need coffee, call here. If you need bandages, call the Red Cross.” It was more like, “Okay, I need 500 pounds of coffee in an hour. Who can I call? Let’s make this happen.” And all by itself, this fragile little network began to weave itself alive.

  We unloaded the Fiddlesticks hoard at the West Side Highway, and the people in charge said, “Oh my God! This is amazing! And the sandwiches are labeled!”

  Trucks were coming down the West Side Highway, and a lot of the guys on board were reporting to the Ground Zero site for the first time.61 They didn’t know what kind of ad hoc services were available to them, so we had to make hospitality part of our repertoire.

  We’d rush up to a truck and say, “How many guys do you have and what do you need?”

  You didn’t want to make them roll down their windows if they didn’t have to; the air was pretty bad, and we wanted to protect them. A lot of volunteers were wearing masks. So you learned to speak a quick, bastardized form of sign language. Water. Eat. Mask.

  Someone might sign back to us: Four masks. Three waters. Two sandwiches. We would collect everything in an armload and tap on the window. They’d roll down the window, we’d throw the supplies in, and they’d roll it right back up.

  After a couple more hours, someone approached the supply camp and said, “Hey, there’s another pick-up at this location. We’ve got lots of stuff over here that you can use.” But we still had food we weren’t going to be able to use that night, and we were upset our store would go bad because we weren’t going to be able to refrigerate it.

  The guy in the van was still driving around, so I corralled him and said, “Let’s bring some of our food over to the Armory,” which was where they were starting to bring relatives of the missing to get them processed and collect DNA samples.62 Off we went.

  It was a nightmare over there. Security was thick as thieves, and the cops weren’t letting anyone in.

  They asked, “Do you have identification?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  “Who are you with?”

  And I had to say, “I’m a New Yorker. Look in the back of the van. Sandwiches. Here’s what we have.”

  Basically, they had to take it all on good faith, and they did. I couldn’t get angry at anyone; I knew they were just trying to do their job in a situation that changed every ten minutes. “Let volunteers in. No! Don’t let volunteers in. Check them. Okay, only let them in if they’re Red Cross or Salvation Army.” I understood. It was a very difficult situation.

  So I just said, “Okay. Why don’t you tell me what you need and then I’ll give it to you.” I was trying to be patient, but it was really frustrating. The traffic, for instance. To go two city blocks, it sometimes took half an hour.

  At the Armory, the authorities rattled off a list of what they wanted and we said, “Really? Great. We’ve got all that. Food, toiletries, socks, and bottled water.”

  It took them aback, but they said, “Well … okay! Great!”

  Some of the workers came outside and started grabbing things, but I said, “It actually works faster if we make a daisy chain and hand things off. You guys know where the supplies should go and I don’t. Plus, we don’t want to get in your way. Can we try it my way?”

  They did, because my way was easier on security. No unauthorized people went into the building.

  So we set up the daisy chain. I remember there were three or four Japanese tourists standing outside. They’d obviously been in town during the attack and at one point, they started taking pictures. I stopped for a second and looked at them. Then I said, “You can take pictures or you can put your cameras down and help.”

  Someone had to translate for them, but when they understood what I said, they put their cameras down and moved in to lend a hand.

  That was the attitude I started developing. You could gawk at all this and you could say, “Wow, shit’s fucked up, man! Look at what’s happened to our city. It’s crazy, man! Isn’t it weird?” People were walking around on the streets with cell phones talking like this, trying to give their friends eyewitness accounts. Or you could be a part of it instead of watching it happen to other people. You could say, “Here’s how I got to know someone who I’d n
ever spoken to before. Here’s how I pitched in and became part of the solution.” Wouldn’t that be a more extraordinary story to tell?

  It was shocking to me how some people couldn’t understand that attitude or outright elected to take the other stance. I thought, my God. Look at how this one event has brought out the best, the worst, and the strangest in people.

  After the Armory, we were driving past one of the blockades on 14th Street, which, at that point, was still the official DMZ. We were trying to make our way back to the West Side Highway, but we got de-toured. Looking back, I know all this happened on Wednesday the twelfth or maybe Thursday the thirteenth. Around this point, I honestly began to lose track of time.

  On 14th Street, there were great crowds of people standing by stockpiles of donations. They didn’t have any idea where to bring their donations, so they’d brought them as far south as they could before running into security. I saw piles of fruit, batteries, bottled water, and junk food that stood twelve feet high. There were all sorts of nonperishable goods stacked in blocks, too: blankets, flashlights, pick-axes, helmets, goggles, saline solution, band-aids, medical supplies. Most of the goods looked like stuff that people had donated from their jobs, but there also seemed to be a lot that people must have literally gone out and collected. “Does anyone have any socks? I’m putting together a basket of socks.” The quality of goods ranged from factory-fresh items to second-hand.

  We drove past this and I remember sayin’, “Oh. My. God.” It was … it was unbelievable.

  Then a state trooper stopped us and asked if we needed to go below. I tried to explain that we’d just brought stuff over to the Armory, we didn’t have any sort of official ID, we were just trying to get back to the West Side Highway so we could pick up more food and make some more shipments.

  I nodded toward the giant stacks of donated goods and said, “What’s going to happen to all of this stuff?”

  The trooper said, “I don’t know. We need someone to bring it down to Ground Zero, but no one has clearance.”

  “Well, what do you need to get it down there?” There’s nothing I hate more than waste. I was looking at all this stuff piled up and thinking, we have a van but we don’t have clearance. What do we need to make this equation work?

  The trooper’s name was Tim and he came from upstate New York. He was this big, heavyset guy, and he said, “I’ll drive down with you. I can get anywhere. I’ll just show my badge.”

  “You’d do that?”

  He looked around. “They don’t really need me here. They’ve got enough guys guarding this place.”

  So I said, “All right. Let’s load her up.”

  We opened up the back doors and I stood in the back of the van, because it was the only way I’d be tall enough to talk and have people see me. I called out, “Can I have everybody’s attention? We can get all of this stuff down to the site.”

  People cheered. “Yeah! Great! Excellent!”

  I said, “What we’re gonna do is try to put all the items in together in a way that’s clear and easy to dispense when we get down there.” I didn’t know what kind of mess it was going to be at the site. “We’re gonna do shoes and boots first. Find all your shoes and boots and we’ll put those in the far corners of the van. After that, I want clothing items—all clothing items go in the back, then medical items next. Bottled water and emergency medical supplies toward the end so we can unload it in order.”

  This way, if someone else had to help us unpack, at least there’d be a layout to the van. Boots are here, helmets are there, pick-axes here, gloves and da da da da da. And if anyone needed med supplies right away, I wanted it in easy reach.

  So we started calling out types of material, and the load commenced. I’d yell out, “Now we’re doing batteries. Now we’re doing flashlights.” And there were twenty people or so who looked through everything and started calling out in response, “I’ve got batteries. Do you have batteries? Okay. All the batteries are done. Now we’re doing helmets.”

  We loaded it all up and headed toward Ground Zero. I was sitting up on top of the equipment in the back. Tim and the driver were up front.

  It took us a long time to make it downtown, because we were stopped at every checkpoint. Tim had to show his badge each time and say, “I’m bringing them down. We’ve got all this stuff for the rescue effort.” And we’d have to open the doors so security personnel could take a look. Apart from that, though, no problems.

  As we got further and further down Manhattan Island, there were less people but more checkpoints, and a lot more smoke. It got blacker as we went down. The effect was as if, little by little, everyone in this part of the city had said, “Okay, on this block, ten people: turn out your lights. On this block: twenty people. On the next block: fifty people turn out your lights.” We were literally sucked into a black hole.

  We weren’t stopping for red lights because there were no red lights. In fact, there was no traffic at all. Occasionally, we’d run into a fire engine parked across the street and we might have to wait for it to move. Or we’d wait for rescue services to go through. Whenever that happened, I’d ask the van driver, “Do we have thirty seconds?” If I heard him say, “Yeah,” I’d hop out with my respirator on, a big, plastic full-face mask, and I’d run along the line of fire trucks and ambulances.

  Liberty Park Plaza, directly across from the WTC, became a staging area for rescue operations. For a while, the Brooks Brothers menswear store was impressed into service as a morgue.

  These people—they’d obviously been down there since the beginning. They were exhausted. They had holes for eyes. They were smoking inside the cars and trucks, and a couple guys would always be asleep in the back, holding on to each other as they slept.

  I’d run up to each one and tap on the window. I’d mime: Water? Face masks? Food? They’d nod and I’d do the sign for how many? The numbers came back: one, two, three. I’d run back to the van to pull their order.

  At this point, you could feel the dust that permeated everything, making the air thicker. I had to stop often and wipe stuff out of my eyes. I was only wearing a tank top and jeans; I never thought I’d get that far south. I was completely unprepared.

  When I’d collected their order, I’d go back to the rescue workers’ vehicles and throw it in through their windows. Same routine as before: roll down the window, throw it all in, roll it back up. I worked the line. I would do about a dozen cars and trucks at every stop, and then go back to the van. We’d start moving and I’d use the downtime to load myself up again. Then, the moment we stopped, I’d repeat the process, approaching cop cars and fire trucks. Same thing: Food? Water? Masks? Eye drops?

  We developed hand signals for everything. At one point, someone said, “Do you have any aspirin?”

  I mimed like this: Headache?

  It got to be so I was like a flight attendant. Whatever they needed, I got them.

  The thing that struck me most is how I would hand somebody something and they’d always say thank you. And I would say thank you back. No one in three weeks ever said you’re welcome, I guess because none of us felt worthy of what everyone else was doing.

  The firefighters were like, “Listen, we have to be here. But you don’t. You’re giving up your lives and your families to be here. Thank you for that.”

  But I was like, “I’m handing out medical supplies and sandwiches. I’m not doing anything. You’re down on your hands and knees picking up bodies. You’re picking up pieces. I hand you a cup of coffee and you say thank you to me? Please stop.”

  That was when I realized how we’d entered a different culture. Nothing was normal. The usual manners didn’t apply. The situation could bring out things in you that you never knew were there, both good things and bad. A lack of patience, for instance, or an extreme reserve of patience. Or ingenuity. Or organizational ability.

  I was astonished to see what came out of me and what came out of other people. Especially when we got to the Pit.
r />   How can I describe it? Huge bales of smoke. Shit everywhere. It was so dark you couldn’t see, despite the emergency lights they’d hung up everywhere. All of Lower Manhattan was painted black. No light permeated the gloom except for the beams of wandering flashlights or the headlights of your car. No televisions were heard along the streets. No salsa music blaring from somebody’s car stereo. There was nothing. It was as if someone had literally burned up New York and painted everything—the buildings, the sidewalks, the gutters, the sky—black, and people were walking around with candles.

  Down there, it was all pretty much rescue and relief workers with badges and walkie-talkies. Everyone had big boots on. I remember thinking, I’m gonna get thrown out of here really quickly, I’m obviously not supposed to be here so I’d better do my job fast.

  We pulled the van up. I honestly can’t tell you where we were because I wasn’t really looking. Geography had ceased to mean much down there—everything had changed so much. Already, we found supply piles lined up on the sidewalk: boots in size order, helmets, and axes. Someone had set it up so that, if you needed anything, you didn’t have to go inside a building; you just dropped your old gear, picked up what you needed, and went back down to the Pit.

  We started unloading our haul. A couple of people came over and asked Tim, since he was a state trooper, “Who’s in charge here?”

  He pointed at me and said, “This little girl right here.”

  I was like, I am? My mask was covering my face and I felt really funny. I think I said something like, “Hi.” The looks everyone gave me weren’t supportive. But then I thought, hey! What have I been doing for the past day and a half? I have to show them I can do this. So I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Here’s what we have.” And I ticked through the list of supplies in the van. “How do you want us to unload it?”