My crew had all sorts of battle gear. Tools and pry bars and the like. And this couple with the pickup, all we heard out of them was, “Watch the paint! Watch the paint! Watch the paint!”
So we got down there, and I’m trying to lead the guys back to where I was the day before. But by this time they had the whole thing barricaded off; we couldn’t go in. Then all of a sudden this group of guys—there was about a dozen of them wearing those orange reflective road crew vests that say “CONTRACTOR” on the back? They had some kind of pass. I think they were being brought in to adjust for safety. They looked like engineering types. But the orange vests were being let through, so this crew I was with, we immediately piled in behind them to get through the barricades.
This national guardsman stops us and says, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” We said, “We’re the burn crew, we’re with the contractors! We’re supposed to go through with the contractors!”
The guard’s standing there, about to give us a hard time, when the contractor turns around and realizes all of a sudden that he’s got a lot more guys than he came with. He grins and says, “Oh yeah. They’re with us. Let them through.”
The guard’s like, “Yeah. Uh—okay. Sure. Bring them through.”
And that’s how we got in the second day.
I took over an acetylene torch from a fireman crew. These firemen were not leaving, right? Their battalion chief would tell them, “Go home. Get some sleep.” They would stand up and shuffle off to somewhere until the battalion chief left. Then they would go back in. They were bringing in trucks from welding suppliers because nobody had proper acetylene gear.
And there was this one fireman who I found slumped up against a wall, wearing his burn clothes. I went up to him and said, “Listen, I’m here with a burn crew but I don’t got the appropriate stuff. Can I …?”
The guy started to get up. He said, “I’ll go. I’ll go back in.”
I said, “Look. I’m an ironworker. Let me take care of this for you. Get some sleep.”
So the guy gave me his stuff, and I wore his gear and went back out into the Pile. A leather jacket so the sparks don’t bother you. The goggles. Heavy-duty gloves that don’t burn. And my Carhartts.
See, you couldn’t burn a hole through a twenty-foot I-beam, whatever the dimension is, and jerk it out with a crane. There might be somebody trapped underneath. So you cut it off here, cut it off there, have three or four guys lift it out and put it on something, haul it away. Build another cavity, start all over again. I put in twelve hours on Thursday, September 13.
I didn’t go back down on Friday because I knew it was gonna be ridiculous getting back through security. We got lucky those two days. But late Saturday night the Javits Center called me, saying they needed more burn people. Because I’d filled in that form on Thursday, they said, “We gotcha down as a torch guy. Can you come in?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
I was back down at Javits by six on Sunday morning. And it was the same thing all over again.
I was so proud of my city. This is my home. The way everybody stood up. There wasn’t any crying, there wasn’t any weeping, there wasn’t any pulling of hair. It was just, “We’re gonna deal with this.” And nothing was gonna stop anybody. If anybody wanted to see what this city is truly all about, it was down there.
My wife’s manicurist is from Russia; she’s lived here about eight years. She says to me just the other day, “I’ve never seen Americans be like this. I never knew this is how Americans could be. Especially in New York.”
I think that’s what a lot of people think. And that’s a shame.
UPDATE
Tony Rasemus still resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after thirty-one years in the neighborhood. I bumped into him in mid-September of 2006, and we headed for a local bar. Over draft beers, I brought up the results of recent polls, which indicated that approximately half the U.S. population surveyed believe that the federal government participated in or allowed 9/11 to transpire. What, I wondered, were Tony’s feelings on that?
“Totally ludicrous,” he said. “Anybody who believes that needs massive doses of serious therapy.”
Then he sprung a bomber on me. In 2005, Tony was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of prostate cancer. “Guys my age are prone to it,” he said. “But I got myself screened over at the VA, just to make sure. Turns out I tested positive for Agent Orange.”
Agent Orange was a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam so that American troops could better flush out the enemy. It took over twenty-five years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that the high incidence of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, rashes, violent behaviors, and cancers found in many Vietnam veterans were linked to this substance.
I pointed out to Tony the eerie parallel between Agent Orange and the recent outbreak of Ground Zero workers who suffered from untreatable respiratory diseases. In recent months, the EPA and other government agencies had come under fire. Surely, people said, they must have known how toxic Ground Zero was? Reports from several independent experts conducted in late 2001 contradicted the “all clear” given by the EPA. I wondered aloud if Tony felt angry. The evidence indicates that his own government exposed him to health-damaging chemicals.
“Not angry in the least,” he said. “[The government] doesn’t owe me anything. I got a free education from them, and benefits. If I’d wanted a house years ago, they’d have helped me pay for it. That’s a part of my service.
“By the way, we should clarify something here. There’s no scientific proof that a link exists between Agent Orange and vets dying, vets getting cancer, and children being born with birth defects. No proof at all. Just an extraordinarily high statistical probability.”
I asked Tony, “When does an ‘extraordinarily high statistical probability’ cross the line and become bona fide proof?”
“I’m not qualified to say that,” he said. “I can only tell you what I know. You got exposed to Orange? You got problems. That’s the practical point of view.”
He returned to the subject of 9/11. “In the case of volunteers down at Ground Zero? The fact that all these formerly-healthy firefighters, thirty years old, all of a sudden have lungs like they’re ninety? There’s no scientific proof there, either, far as I’ve read in the news. But again: what’s the practical point of view. We all know what’s going [on]. You don’t need a test to figure it out.
“I remember all those college students down there, crawling over the I-beams in their Doc Martens right after the Towers came down. They were digging up rubble, handing out water, handing out sandwiches. They were bright enough to know that wasn’t a good idea. We all were. So what? Thank God we had them. Thank God someone was there.
“Something definitely has to be done about these people. I don’t know what we can really do now except shovel money at the problem, put them in programs, try and find cures. But we have to do something. The way we’re treating these people? It makes me wonder. Who do we think’s going to risk their neck the next time something like this happens?”
65 Iron and construction workers were in high demand because of all the metal debris that had to be cut away in order to check for survivors.
66 Referring to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, called the “Marketplace for the World,” located at 34th Street and the West Side Highway. A positively mammoth center that can be adapted to fit any sort of gathering imaginable.
67 Carhartts is a well-known brand of heavy-duty work pants.
68 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
CASSANDRA MEDLEY
Cassandra Medley has been a staff writer for an ABC soap opera, a Walt Disney screenwriting fellow, and an award-winning playwright. Her work has garnered her an Outer Critics Drama Circle Desk Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a playwriting grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Like many other New Yorkers,
Cassandra refused to be denied a chance to help at Ground Zero.
LET ME SET the tone of what I’m about to tell you. Last week, I was in Union Square—this was a week after the attack. And I overheard two men talking. One of them said, “My office is down on 20th, and there’s this hot dog vendor who I always buy lunch from. He looks like one of them.”
The other guy said, “I knew it, they’re everywhere.”
The first guy said, “Yeah, and just two days before the attack this vendor says to me, ‘You know what? Saddam Hussein does not like America.’”
The other guy said, “You’re kidding me.”
And the first guy said, “Nope. That’s what he said, that’s just what he said. So you think I should call the FBI and report him?”
That’s the vibe in this city right now. Blind, unreasonable, paranoid fear.
Or is it?
On September 12, I went down to visit a very close friend who lives on Laight Street in TriBeCa. She’d been evacuated the day before and had just got back into her apartment. I went so we could comfort each other.
I made it down to 8th Street by train, but from there I had to walk further down since the subways were all shut down further south. I walked as far as Houston Street, where I ran into a total blockade. The police had set up blue sawhorses and wouldn’t let you go any further south unless you lived in the neighborhood or you were an aid worker. They determined if you matched either of these criteria from your ID. Now I was stuck. I didn’t fit the qualifications. But ironically, I ran into somebody I hadn’t seen in years: Pat, a painter who lived on the next block.
We hugged and I said, “Would you say that I’m visiting you so I can get through the barriers?”
We got in line and this one policeman—a big, big guy—had seen that I’d been on line before, and he knew that I’d been refused. When we reached him, I pointed to Pat and said, “I’m visiting her.”
The policeman kinda looked at me. Then at Pat. Then at me. Then he shrugged and he let us through.
After you crossed Houston and Canal, you got hit by the smell; it was like tire rubber combined with bitter tobacco. A sickening sweetness. Pat had an extra painter’s mask with her, and she gave it to me to wear because the reek was so overpowering.
I walked up to Canal Street and over to Laight, where I hung out at my friend’s place. Across the street from her, a gourmet caterer had opened up his shop and was cooking all the food he had—these huge meals—for rescue workers. We joined the owner’s two teenage daughters and a couple of neighbors in this troop of people volunteering to deliver food.
There was a police station and a triage center a short block away, and we figured the workers there would be hungry. But to reach these places, we’d have to cross the blockade again. Same burly guys, same strict faces. We figured we’d risk it. It was interesting: the moment the security people saw we had food, we had no problems, no problems at all.
We stopped at another deli to pick up more provisions, and here were these tall teenage boys on the corner, I’d say they were seventeen or eighteen years old, watching us.
One of them approached and said, “Hey. How’re you doing? You all delivering food? And they let you through, is that right?”
I said yes, that was the case.
“Well, we want to get through, too,” he said. “We want to go down to Ground Zero and help pick up the bodies.”
I said, “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
And this boy said, “We want to get some training. You know how graveyard workers get paid really well? We want to get some training in the field, something we can put on our resumes … that we helped pick up bodies.”
We recommended that they go further down Canal Street. And after we’d passed them by, my friend said to me, “You know? There’s some things you just can’t make up.”
As we got closer to Chambers Street, the landscape began to resemble a war zone more and more. You could see smoke and rubble everywhere—in the streets, on the sidewalks. We were suddenly surrounded by Army jeeps and soldiers and national guardsmen. Sniffing dogs. Doctors and medics standing around. Waiting. Volunteering. Personnel in blue hospital scrubs had set up all these spaces with IV stands. There were hundreds of empty beds with clean, white sheets, waiting for people. But nobody was in them. They’d set up this ultimate reception and treatment center for survivors they couldn’t find.
I heard somebody on the phone saying, “No, I didn’t get their name, I just told them to keep breathing. I think they’re at Roosevelt or Beth Israel Hospital, but I didn’t get their name. I told them to relax.” It sounded like someone had been rescued and they’d had trouble identifying that person.
The vibe was spooky at this triage center. You had total efficiency and total silence at the same time. And now a crowd of rescue workers started coming in off the Pit, firemen and policemen. They were dusty and sweaty. Beleaguered. Men and women both. They were asking for sandwiches and lots of ice, because it was a hot day. We scurried out to get as much ice as we could find from area restaurants with their doors open. We put the ice in large plastic bags and brought it back to the triage centers.
It was so important for me to experience that human contact and to feel that change in my experience. For me, it was mutual empathy and sympathy of that kind that let everyone know we were all in this together.”
For us, it was all catch-as-catch-can that day. We wandered the streets, creating jobs for ourselves and helping out whomever and wherever we could.
When we got back to the gourmet place, they were already making sandwiches—some vegetarian, some with cold cuts. We took up the duty of wrapping them in plastic. It felt so good to be doing something. Through all the checkpoints we passed, we began to learn what the true currency for passage was: if you had food to offer, you were waved through. All you had to do was appear with a cake or something.
Later that day, we were making our rounds again and everyone started yelling, “Get down!” We hit the ground. It turns out, the commotion was caused by additional parts of 7 World Trade Center falling down.
I’m telling you, Lower Manhattan was like a war zone. A battlefield after the battle.
I think what moved me the most … see, I’ve always had an ambivalent attitude toward the police. As a black woman, I have relatives and friends who’ve been the victims of racial incidents. You’ve heard about profiling on the news? Well, I’ve lived through situations like that. It changes your attitude toward law enforcement. It changes your attitude about a lot of things. But what I saw that day was a complete change.
We’d be in the process of delivering food, and neighborhood people would approach us saying, “You know what? The policemen and firemen around the corner don’t have anything to eat.” So off we’d go to find them something and bring it to them.
There was a phalanx of uniforms all along North Moore Street, policemen—women and men, white and black—running in and out in shifts, standing guard. We gathered up some food and brought it to them. Their faces! Such glowing appreciation. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!” Real, personal, eye-to-eye contact.
At the mere mention of food, more police and firemen would emerge from the backs of station houses. They’d start to gush. “Oh, this is so great! Wonderful! Thank you!”
It was so important for me to experience that human contact and to feel that change in my experience. For me, it was mutual empathy and sympathy of that kind that let everyone know we were all in this together. I experienced the most profound and unexpected shifts in my perception whenever a person said, “Oh my God! A salad! Thank you!”
See, everyone was broken. And everyone was tired. Overwhelmed. It was the day after, we were all still in shock, and the folks in uniform had been down there since it happened, working round the clock. They needed us as much as we needed them.
I feel that times like these call for us to look at our collective humanity, and that’s the reason why some of the current flag-waving di
sturbs me. The way that public figures are speaking about the attack on America, the attack on this country. They’re going on and on without any empathic acknowledgement that we’re all in this. The whole world. Every nation has been wounded by September 11.
For myself? I would prefer … well. If there were an international flag? If there were a flag for the Planet Earth? That’s what I’d be waving right now.
UPDATE
Cassandra Medley’s latest play, Relativity, opened at the legendary Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan in the spring of 2006. The New York Times Theater section reviewed the piece as “guaranteed to send audiences out with plenty to think about … the production offers … two dazzling performances and two especially dazzling scenes.”
Relativity focuses on the story of Kalima, a brilliant young African American geneticist who must choose between her love for pure science and her love for her mother, Claire. Claire has founded an institute supporting melanin theory, the notion that black people are genetically superior to other races because of the melanin content in their skin pigmentation. Kalima, proud of her mother’s work and her African American heritage, can nonetheless find no scientific proof that melanin science is valid.
In the ensuing two-act drama, all that Kalima cares about is placed on the scales of judgment. Which will win out? Her ethnic pride or her training as a geneticist? Her love for her mother or her belief in the scientific method?
Medley’s writing draws Claire’s viewpoints liberally from the works of Frances Cress Welsing, Carol Barnes, and Leonard Jeffries, and crackles with the authentic pain Kalima experiences as she makes one choice after another, hoping to arrive at a position she can believe in with both her large, willing heart and her incredibly bright mind.
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