Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  “We’ll get you some help.” And they brought over a bunch of guys.

  Guys. That was the moment I realized that it was really all men down at the site. So few women, except for a handful—rescue workers, mostly, and ambulance drivers and some police officers. At least from what I saw, it was the Planet of No Women. Some sort of sci-fi movie where everyone female had been bombed out of Manhattan and only the men had stayed behind.

  We unloaded everything, then Tim said he had to get back up to 14th Street. The van driver said he had to get back home, too, but he’d bring me back to the West Side Highway or wherever I wanted. I said I’d like to have a moment to quietly pay my respects before we left.

  Of course, by now, everyone’s seen the site on television, but very few people have actually been that close. I stood at the base of Ground Zero, ten feet away from where the rubble began. The remains of the building, the façade, jutted up like big pick-up sticks. There was so much activity going on around it, like a noisy beehive. And yet there was also a sense of quiet, sort of like a drone. A background noise that drowned out everything else.

  I stood there for a good, long moment because I knew that, in a little while, it wouldn’t look like that anymore. And I kept trying to understand the weight of it, what it all meant. It was the kind of thing you can’t really write down or explain to someone else. I wanted to take a mental picture, which is what I do in situations when I know a photograph will never capture a moment. I literally look at something for a couple of seconds and then close my eyes. I did this.

  Before I left, I also asked Tim if I could have my photograph taken with him. Not a celebratory picture: “This is us at Ground Zero.” He’d been showing me pictures of his wife and his kids, and I wanted him to have something to show his family when he returned. So I took a picture of the two of us standing by a fire truck. There was already a sense that “you don’t take pictures down here” permeating the air. I got that unspoken vibe very quickly. For some people on 9/11, snapping pictures was like going after big game, but not at the Pit. I explained to Tim that I didn’t want a picture of the site. “I want a picture of you. Because I want to remember your face and what you did.”

  I took our photo, very low-key, and then I put my camera away.

  We drove back to the West Side Highway and I checked in with everyone at the volunteer stations. I told them their deliveries had gotten where they needed to go and everyone was greatly relieved. By now, they had shifts of people working for a couple of hours all through the evening. Essentially, they had a round-the-clock operation going and I said to myself, okay. Time to take a break. I need to go home and absorb this.

  I walked from 8th Avenue all the way over to 1st and caught the L train back to Brooklyn.

  When I got home, I called Sue and told her what I’d been doing. She said,” Well, if you’re really into this, I hear the relief services further over on Chambers Street could use some help. Let’s go down together tomorrow.”

  “The remains of the building, the façade, jutted up like big pick-up sticks. There was so much activity going on around it, like a noisy beehive. And yet there was also a sense of quiet, sort of like a drone. A background noise that drowned out everything else.”

  “Fine.”

  The next day, I was more prepared. I understood, for instance, that my clothes were going to get destroyed, so I wore a crappy watch—an old one I wouldn’t care so much about if it got scuffed up. I brought a cell phone, too. Instead of a bag, I wore a pair of camouflage pants that had pockets where I could put identification, cash, an ATM card, my house keys, eye drops. And I think that’s what really did the trick, those camouflage pants. When Sue and I approached the barricades on Chambers Street, the military men positioned there saw me and waved me right in. I must have been a novelty for them.

  Sue’s a model, by the way. She’s tall and blonde and has no trouble getting in anywhere she wants to go.

  From Chambers, we walked over to Stuyvesant High School, where most of the relief services were stationed. A school crossing guard was pulling security at the front door, stopping everyone and asking for ID. She wasn’t doing a very good job, though; Sue and I walked right on in and she started chasing us. “Hey! Hey!” We went down some hallways and hid until she gave up trying to find us.

  Stuyvesant High had essentially become base command for non-medical relief services at Ground Zero. By the time we arrived that morning, organizers had already determined that medical supplies would be on the first floor; chiropractors, short-term sleep beds, and massage tables would sprawl out on the balcony. The second floor had a clothing and cantina area for food in a triangular-shaped locker area, and more cots for short-term sleep. The next floor up had classrooms where you could go in, close a door and get long-term sleep. The locker rooms and showers were all stocked up with grooming supplies—towels, soap, shampoo—ready for use.

  Basically, it worked like this: any rescue worker who’d been out on the Pile could come in, swap out all his gear, get a chiropractic adjustment, talk to a therapist, eat, grab a cup of coffee, and take a nap. We set the place up to facilitate an assembly line process. “We’ll put the counseling center over here so they can get coffee and eat, then go talk to someone and take a nap. Put all that on one floor.” We wanted to make things easy for the workers because we found that it took tremendous inspiration for them to climb a simple flight of stairs. They were too exhausted. If only we could’ve relocated the showers! As it turns out, they were up on one of the higher floors, and we really had to plug them heavily to get workers to use them. Everything else was situated as low as possible to promote accessibility.

  When Sue and I walked in that first day, Stuyvesant High was very disorganized, a really haphazard system. There were no official directions to anything—more like paper plates taped to walls on which someone had written “FOOD ON 2” with a magic marker.

  I went up to the second floor and found piles of boxes, garbage bags, shopping bags, and crates jumbled all over the place. I had no idea where they’d come from. There were a couple of card tables in the middle of the room and a couple of round picnic tables off in one corner. It looked like a ramshackle AA meeting-slash-tornado relief camp.

  A woman was taking a break at one of the picnic tables. She looked as if she’d been through the wringer. So I introduced myself and said, “I’m here in case you need help.”

  She said, “Okay. Well. Workers basically come in and get what they need to eat, and then they go back down.”

  I saw some aluminum-and-steel shelving racks that had probably been rolled up from the cafeteria standing against one wall, and said, “Um, how ’bout if I organize this for you?” I figured we could use the racks to store things so that, at a glance, we could see what we were almost out of. “I could make this work nicely.”

  She said, “Hey, if you want to do that? Yeah. Great.”

  Basically, I’d given myself a job.

  It took two hours for the place to look like D’Agostino’s.63 I used my own system and organized things according to categories in case we needed to put together shipments for Ground Zero: this many of this thing, this many of that thing, and so forth.

  When the supervisor’s shift ended, she said, “Okay, I’m going home. How long are you staying?”

  I said, “I don’t know, I thought I’d work for about six hours. I’m not really tired yet, I’ll just keep going.”

  “All right,” she said, and started out.

  I said, “Oh. Ah. Wait. Who’s the next, you know, supervisor in charge?”

  She said, “I don’t know. But they should be here shortly.”

  “Oh. All right. I’ll just … try to keep everything rolling.”

  It was kind of quiet now, around eleven o’clock. And no one ever came. Seventy-two hours later, I was running the place, the person in charge of all food services. I thought, how difficult could this be?

  Very soon, I had volunteers showing up asking me, “Do
you need help?”

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “You can start over there.”

  The Guardian Angels came in and we put them on duty in the pantry.64 We stored all the stuff we’d need during the next four hours on the ground floor; long-term storage was upstairs in the cafeteria’s walk-in coolers. We’d lost power on the lower floors, so in order to keep drinks cold, we had to get big garbage cans, line them with plastic, and fill them with ice.

  I put one of the Angels in charge of making coffee, which sounds like a menial task but it was actually a huge undertaking. Water had to be heated in huge vats that took from one to four hours to boil. We worked up a system where we’d heat four vats simultaneously in staggered stages so that one vat would be ready each hour.

  Sue worked with me for a few hours that first evening at Stuyve-sant, then she went home. She came back the next day to put in a few hours more and said, “You’re still here?”

  I said, “Yeah. Listen. I need …” And I rattled off my wish list.

  By that point, we’d pretty much figured out what the main problem was. There was no real shortage of supplies; people from around the country were making massive donations. Food was largely being stockpiled at the Chelsea Market. Medicine, clothing, sundries, construction equipment, and so forth were being collected at other sites like the Javits Center, Pier 40, and a few others. Each site was run by volunteer crews who were doing a great job, but who all faced the same essential problem: how to get all the goods they were stockpiling past the security blockades and into Ground Zero.

  So we solved that problem. In the first couple days after the attack, we developed a sort of hourglass pattern by encouraging all the stockpile sites to ship their goods to Stuyvesant High. From there, thanks to our proximity, we could warehouse it for incoming relief workers or redistribute it as needed to satellite areas around the perimeter of Ground Zero. The redistribution system was especially necessary, because a lot of workers couldn’t make the journey a few blocks uptown to Stuyvesant. They were that tired.

  Shuttles started coming in from the perimeter sites. A lot of people drove up to the high school in Gators—those little military golf carts? They’d dismount and approach us, saying, “Hey, I’m EMS services from blah blah blah and I need socks,” or “I’m from this site and I need thirty sandwiches, thirty bottles of Gatorade, eye drops, and gloves.”

  “Okay.” I’d assign them a volunteer and say, “Take them shopping.”

  Whatever you needed, you came to Stuyvesant. Like I said, I was in charge of food and this girl, Karen, who’s a very well-known fashion stylist, took charge of clothing. All the bags and bales of clothing that came to Stuyvesant got handled by Karen and her teams. They took over individual classrooms and laid them out like wholesale outlets. T-shirts here, sweatshirts there, sweatpants and underwear in the next room, and so forth. Everything got organized on racks by order of size. Shoes were set out in rows with size numbers taped on the bottom and laces tied together. Essentially, we’d created the Walmart of tragedy.

  I remember walking one firefighter through the whole system. I was outside getting some air and he approached Stuyvesant, totally covered in debris, totally shell-shocked. I could see in his eyes that he couldn’t make sense of anything, so I took his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Nicole. You’ve never been to Stuyvesant, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Well. We have these services available to you.” I ticked them off slowly so he could follow me. Then I said, “Why don’t we get you a change of clothes, take you upstairs to the showers, and get you clean so you can get some rest. How much time do you have on your break?”

  I had to help him make decisions, because he was long past that.

  We got him up to Clothing, where incoming workers undressed and threw their old clothes into trash bags. We made no effort to clean them; clothes from the Pit were considered hazmat. We got this fireman into sweatpants so he could lounge around a bit and got him a stack of brand-new gear. By that point, Karen and her volunteer assistants had the routine down so pat. They could just ask you, “Size? Extra-large? Long-sleeve? You want jeans? How are your socks doing? Do you want something to sleep in? High boots, low boots, how do you like your boots? Underwear: briefs, boxers, boxer-briefs?”

  The girls would run off and fill the order while the relief workers just stood there, dumbfounded.

  The showers were laid out the same way. Single-serve portions of shampoos, soaps, washcloths, towels, eye drops, and deodorant were laid out in baskets, with a garbage can set up at the end of the line for when you were finished—you could just dump your trash and move on. The supplies were lined up to be immaculate, and every hour, I sent a volunteer to the bathrooms to straighten things up.

  I said, “I don’t want anyone to look at this place and frown. I want this to look like the Happy Delicatessen of Plenty. There is never to be one of any item left. If we only have one of something, take it off the table and hand it to someone because, if this is the last soup spoon, no one will take it.”

  They wouldn’t take it because every relief worker thought that someone else deserved it more than they did. I saw this happen more than once. So there was never one toothbrush. Never one sandwich. Never one PowerBar. As soon as we saw our stock get lower than six of anything, we replenished.

  I often found myself asking workers, “Do you have time for a nap? Can you sleep for a couple of hours?” I would write Post-it notes reminding me of the time I was supposed to wake up volunteers dozing in the short-term sleep bay and stick the notes over their heads. Then I would set the timer on my cell phone for twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, an hour and a half, and so forth. The timer would go off and I’d start down the line. “Barry, you said you wanted me to wake you up. Rhonda, how about it? You wanted me to wake you. Do you want to sleep a little more?”

  Usually, they’d say, “No, no. I have to—I have to get up.”

  But sometimes I convinced them. “Look. Sleep for half an hour more. I’ll come wake you up. Trust me.”

  In half an hour, these guys were so deep in dreams, it was hard to pull them out again. I didn’t want to wake them, but I knew they’d be upset and wouldn’t trust me anymore if I didn’t. So I’d try to wake them like my mom used to wake me, really gently.

  A lot of times, they wouldn’t know where they were when they came to, and it was strange to have them look at me like they did. It broke my heart every time they’d open their eyes and realize it wasn’t a dream. Sleep had been their escape. My job was to bring them back. It was so hard to do that.

  At one point, the Board of Education came in and said, “Do you want our lunch ladies to help you out?”

  I said, “Why, yes. We would love to have your lunch ladies help us out.”

  It was getting to be absurd, all these people asking me what to do. But of course, the only people I ever mentioned that to were people like Sue. To everyone else it was, “We need 600 pounds of ice a day, three times a day, because I have no refrigeration. How can we make this work? To everyone else, I guess they saw that my food services team was putting out 3,000 to 6,000 meals every day, and they just said, “Okay. Guess she’s got it under control. No questions asked.”

  I realized I’d really taken ownership of my system when, at one point, a police captain approached me about two weeks after the attacks and said, “’Scuse me, who’s in charge here?”

  I thought, oh jeez. That’s it. I’m screwed.

  But I raised my hand and said, “Me. Over here. I’m in charge.”

  He said, “Ma’am, my name is Captain So-and-So. I want to bring some of my officers in for breakfast. They’re relieving a number of officers who’ve been here a few weeks, but we’ve never been down to the site before. I wanted to find out about your outfit. How many of my people can you handle all at once, for instance? We’ve got 600 on our team. How would you like us to stagger their meal shifts?”

  I was stunned. But instead of going, holy shit! He’s
asking me! I thought, bluff! Bluff!

  I said, “Six hundred’s too many all at once, but we can comfortably handle 100 to 120. If we stagger them in twenty-minute eating shifts, I think that might work.”

  He said, “All right. We’ll do it by hundreds. We’d like to take six of your shifts.”

  Just like that, we had a reservation. Breakfast for 600.

  We didn’t have vitamins at Ground Zero early on, so I started buying them on my own. I would go into GNC and say, “What do you have?” and I’d buy the biggest Centrum maxi-container I could find, the $180 one. I’d get six of them.

  Every time I talked to the people running the distribution sites, I always asked if they had vitamins and they’d say, “Hang on, let me see if we have that.” They never did.

  I made sure to go around the cafeteria tables to give workers their vitamins. A lot of guys didn’t want to take their pill, so I’d make a game of it. “Okay. Who hasn’t taken their vitamin today?”

  “Well, I don’t need one.”

  “I don’t take those.”

  “Well,” I’d say, “Centrum is complete, from A to Z. Complete with Vitamin V: Viagra!”

  “Oh, I don’t need that!”

  “Oh, buddy,” I’d hoot. “That’s not what your wife said.”

  And everybody would go, “Ooooooooh!” But they would take their vitamins. After three days of this, they’d see me coming and go, “C‘mon, Nicole. Gimme my vitamin, gimme my vitamin.” And no one got sick on any of my shifts. I made sure they got antioxidants and milk thistle, which is very helpful for clearing out lungs and for treating liver toxicity. There was so much crap in the air, it became a matter of doing anything we could to try and help the workers clear their lungs.