Steve had a real blue-collar background. His father and mother were cooks. They never earned a lot, so Steve never learned how to deal with money. He’d struggled all his life to make ends meet. He would always tell me that it wasn’t that he didn’t know how to handle money, it was just that he’d never made enough to have any to handle. Day in and day out, he was always robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s a whole way of being when you’re broke all the time, and it’s not fun. It’s not easy.
I remember I thought, well, this isn’t so bad. I’ve always been successful, I can help him out. I can fix him right up in a heartbeat.
See, I come from an upper middle-class background. I never had money trouble; I’ve always made enough. It’s all about habits you learn from a young age. I’ve never spent a dime if I’m not making money. So … you know, I just knew how to do it. Steve didn’t.
As years went by, I realized this was a major problem. We were really starting to get our relationship together, but I found myself getting pissed off more and more. Steve was living in Massachusetts and I was in New York. One winter, he was riding his bike to work, fifteen miles each way, to earn six bucks an hour as a meat cutter. It was the worst kind of job at the worst kind of pay. Here he was, badly in debt and sinking further fast, and what was he doing? Threatening his life every day to keep the whole ridiculous cycle going. I’d go up to visit him and he’d come home from work with icicles hanging off his mustache. It was pathetic.
I cared so much about him, so I said, “You can’t do this anymore. You’re going to get yourself killed.” And with that, he let me take over.
He came to New York, moved in with me, and ended up staying six months without ever getting a job. But I couldn’t get angry with him because he was the most humane person I’d ever met.
Like our first Christmas, which was great. I’d never done Christmas before because I’m Jewish. I was so excited. Steve: my first Catholic boyfriend. We had a wreath and a tree. He got me lots of presents, things I really needed though I’d never said a word. It was hard to not be happy with Steve.
Finally, he got a paralegal job and started making real money. Things got better. We both said, “We’re gonna try living together for two years. After that, we’re either gonna get married or bag it.” See, I’d lived with people for upwards of five and seven years. I know that if you don’t make the commitment, you never will. And by this time we were older. Myself? I wanted a kid, although I was having serious doubts about having a kid with Steve.
When two years rolled around, I have to say, I still had my doubts. But I said, “I’m not gonna be the one to end it, so yeah. Let’s get married.” No, it wasn’t the best way to get married, but there are worse ways, I suppose.
Steve Adams, shown here in the midst of a Morris dance.
I was in such a state of terror the night before the wedding, I almost bagged it. That morning, Steve and I had a long talk. Typical Steve. He said, “Look, I know you’re afraid. You think I’m not gonna get myself together. Well, don’t worry about it. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just say forget it.” That sounded pretty good to me.
We went to France on our honeymoon, and for the first three days I was gonna leave him. I thought, this is the most horrible thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m fast-lane. I speak French. Steve was lost in France, a country bumpkin. I found myself apologizing to everyone I knew for my husband.
At that point, I thought we were doomed.
The next couple of years were interesting. Steve kept working at the law office and I lucked out—I got a job mixing sound for an off-Broadway show. That sent me off on a career path I had no idea was coming. I wound up mixing Smokey Joe’s Café on Broadway, and suddenly everything started feeling pretty good. I began to feel like I didn’t need this guy I was married to anymore.
Plus I met someone at the show who knocked me out. A fast-lane jazz guy. Real smooth. Real gorgeous. And I didn’t resist. Physical things in my marriage had deteriorated. So, to make a long story short, I ended up with this other guy, and Steve was heartbroken. He went back to Massachusetts two years into our marriage.
Sure, we had our problems. But through it all, Steve had been such a sweet man. I remember him standing in our living room saying, “You’re making a huge mistake. We’re meant to be. This is a good thing for both of us.”
I told him he was wrong. I was a fucking flake. I hadn’t grown up. So Steve took off. I filed papers and just like that, Steve and I were separated.
I hung out with this other guy, but it fell apart after two years. Mark dumped me in a pretty hard way; I freaked. And Steve? He was right there. He came back, stood by me, and saved my life. And we rode that out. It was crazy, but we did it.
I have this cousin who’s very practical. And one time, I was pining away over Steve, not knowing what to do. I kept saying, “I want a good marriage. Why can’t I have a good marriage?”
She looked at me like I was a complete idiot and said, “Open your eyes. You’ve got one.”
I mean, what is marriage? You make the commitment. You say, “Okay, we get along, we like each other, let’s do it.”
I don’t know any couple that doesn’t struggle in one way or the other. But just like Steve wasn’t very good with the whole money thing, I guess I had my weak spots, too.
Steve loved to cook. Back when we were still married, I’d come home to these great meals, really incredible spreads. And I’d go off to work the next day with my little lunch bag of leftovers. He’d have made me tapenade and people would stare at me while I was eating. I’d smile and say, “Oh, this? It’s nothing. My husband made a little something for me.”
My parents could see what Steve was interested in—it was written all over him. They said they’d pay for him to go to French culinary school. So he went, and he was in heaven. He was on a roll.
We thought, he’ll get a job as a chef and he’ll rise quickly. But it didn’t happen like that. Steve was a great cook at home, no question. But in a fast kitchen with a million people running in and out and a chef screaming and ten guys chopping celery? Steve was not a fast person. He hates people who multitask. He thinks multitasking is rude.
So he quit the chef’s job and got a job as a steward. He did all the ordering for the restaurant. The head chef really liked him, so he put Steve in charge of hiring. Everything looked fine on the surface, but I could see that Steve was starting to fail. Every night, I’d come back home to find him sitting on the couch drinking beer. He couldn’t take the grind.
One day he said, “That’s it. I’m through. I’m going back to Massachusetts and I’m gonna write about food and wine.”
I had never seen him write anything, not so much as a letter. I said, “Steve, what are you talking about?”
He said, “This isn’t working, this is not my thing.”
I was exasperated, after all we’d been through. So I said, “Fine. Go up there. Get a job. Make money. Buy a house. Make payments. When you do that—call me.”
So he went.
He took a couple of jobs where they treated him like a dog. Again, he was making practically nothing, eight bucks an hour. He worked in a huge wine store that featured thousands of labels. And working there, reading, studying hard, he taught himself about wine.
Not that his employers knew that. His employers thought he was lazy. Their approach to wine was very different than Steve’s. They’d put two Burgundies together in a rack just because they looked the same, and Steve would say, “Look, you can’t do that. This is a $25 bottle and this is a bottle for $8.99. See? They don’t go together.”
His boss just said, “You know what the trouble is with you? You don’t put enough bottles on the shelves every day.” They wouldn’t give him a raise.
Steve and I started seeing each other again. I loved driving up to visit. But we weren’t making enough money to do both—to live in New York and have a place up there. That’s when he started to apply for jobs in the city again.
On a whim, Steve wrote to the French Culinary Institute and they immediately hooked him up with Windows on the World. Windows was looking for a wine cellar master, and they hired him the day after he interviewed.
The guys at Windows went, “We love you! You’re exactly what we’re looking for!” Steven was ecstatic. After all the shit he’d been through with people treating him like shit and me treating him like shit … life suddenly made sense for him. Within two months, he was sommelier once a week at Wild Blue, Windows’ smaller restaurant. Then he was made the beverage manager.
Things were going well for us all around. I went off to a summer music camp so I could fall back in love with the oboe, and I remember Steve calling me with such joy in his voice. “Can you believe it? After only two months!”
I said, “Does this mean we’re gonna open one of those special bottles of champagne when I get home?”
He said, “You bet!”
We were so happy. When I came home, he cooked something great. He seemed like a different person, the way he walked, the way he talked.
And that was September 4. We had seven days like that.
September 10 was our anniversary. I was going to cook a great meal for Steve and sort of turn the tables on him, but I got really sick. I could tell he was disappointed. But he said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” He never let the small stuff get to him.
Outside, it started pouring sheets of rain. He was wearing these nice, new shoes that I’d bought him, and I said in this little girl voice I do, “Steve, you can’t go out. You’ll ruin your shoooos.”
And he wheeled around and said, “I’m not going to ruin my shoes! I mean, ‘shooooos’!”
We both cracked up. So stupid and silly. He went out to buy a steak, but I knew he’d be disappointed because he was always going on about how there’s no good cuts of meat available at 8:00 P.M. Sure enough, he comes back moaning, explaining to me, “This one’s not so bad. The fat is in the meat, so you can cook it slowly and it’ll melt in. Bad cuts of meat, you have to sear really fast. The fat’s on the outside and it won’t permeate the texture, you won’t get the flavor.”
I remember sitting there thinking, this guy really knows his stuff. It was the first time I’d really understood that.
See, all those years I’d been admiring other people who I thought were fancy and bright and talented. People who were really good at what they did. All along, I felt that that’s what I wanted all along, a man like that. And the night before it all happened, that’s when it hit me: he’d been right here in my own backyard all the time.
We weren’t wearing our wedding rings that night. I remember wanting to say, “Let’s put our rings on.” But I felt so sick. I told myself, I’ll put it on tomorrow, and I went to bed.
He was gone the next morning when I woke up to the ringing phone.
It was Steve’s mother. She’d seen everything happen on the news while I was still asleep, and she asked, “Did Steve go to work today?”
I said, “Yeah. Why?”
“Oh no.”
I turned on the TV and saw what was happening. Then I said, “I’ll call you back.”
I called my brother, who lives four blocks away. He already knew, and he said, “I’ll be there in two minutes.”
He came over, and we sat here watching as Steve’s Tower fell.
I’m not sure how it happened for him. If he was knocked out right away. If he survived the impact of the plane. Sometimes I imagine it was the smoke that got him before the building collapsed. But I still don’t know. I guess I’ll never know.
Later on I was told that one of the general managers at Windows got a call on his answering machine at home. A woman on the recording said, “There’s been a huge explosion. All the windows have blown out and there’s tons of smoke. The fire marshal told us to wait. We don’t know what to do.” That’s the only clue I have to what they all went through up there.
I replay it a hundred million thousand times in my head. Did he try to call me? Did he try to make it to the roof? Did he suffer? I’ve never seen Steve afraid. He was a rock.
I’m the crazy one. I’m the one who weird things happen to. Not him. Not my husband.
I used to say, “Promise me I’ll die first.”
He always just shrugged. “Okay.”
When we first broke up, I’ll never forget how angry he was, how hurt. He screamed at me, “Do you still have to die first?”
It turns out that the FBI or FEMA or whoever it was comes to your door and officially tells you when they find them. “He’s been identified,” they said. So I went down to Pier 94, where the morgue is set up, to get Steve’s remains.
I wanted to take him home with me but the people there said, “You’re not allowed to take them.” I was angry at that, but they explained, “You have to call a funeral director, who will get the remains. This is a homicide. There’s no other process you can follow.”
I told them, “I’m not religious. I don’t want a ceremony. I just want this little piece of my husband back so I can dispose of it the way he would have wanted.” But they were adamant. So I got out the yellow pages and picked a funeral home that seemed innocuous enough, and went down there with a friend the next day.
The funeral director wrote out a bill, which I didn’t have money enough to pay for. Some agency stepped in and took care of it, I’m not sure which one. I know that the maximum allowance for funeral arrangements was $6,000, and I was presented with a check to cover Steve’s expenses. These words were written on the check: “For the Victims of the World Trade Center.”
Since then, I’ve gotten two other checks, one to help pay the rent and one for cash to get by. The funny thing is, I’m still working. I was always the money-maker. I know the money’s there if I want to claim it. But in the end, what difference does money make?
UPDATE
Jessica Murrow became very frustrated by the fact that no one in the news media—her own field—would allow her to go on record stating her true feelings about the Bush Administration’s response to 9/11.
From the World Socialist Web Site:
“In the first weeks after the tragedy, [Jessica’s] network did a report on Windows on the World, where seventy-three employees, including Steve, were killed…. Looking into the camera, she said that her husband would have been ‘mortified’ if he knew that the U.S. government was preparing to take military action on the pretext of avenging his death. ‘Are you going to kill someone else because my husband is dead?’ she said…. Her next sentence, however, was edited out of the broadcast. ‘What evil have we created that would bring people from another nation to do this to us?’ she asked. ‘Don’t we need to look at our own actions?’”81
In subsequent interviews for television, Jessica’s pieces were cut down to showcase her relationship with Steve without touching on her political viewpoints in the slightest. During one of these broadcasts, Jessica noted, the first portion of the show was dedicated to trumpeting how George W. Bush’s Q rating had soared after 9/11.
Over the ensuing months, Jessica became very outspoken about the incredible inequities she perceived were afoot in the survivor benefit program, the gross mismanagement perpetrated by the American intelligence community, and the Bush Administration’s invocation of 9/11 as a pretext for war. This last development was, as Jessica put it, “the most hateful thing that could ever happen to [Americans].”
79 The ancient art form of Morris dancing arose from the primeval mists of England as a form of harvest celebration and agrarian ritual. Over the centuries, participation in the dance dwindled until it found a home on academic campuses in England, Canada, and America. Morris dancers are a colorful sight, with their bells and waving hankies; they move to simple tunes played on fiddles, melodeons, or pipes and tabors.
80 Steven joined the Vermont-based Marlboro Morris team in 1980. His friend, Christoffer Carstanjen, danced with the team for ten years. These two friends were strangely reunited by the tragedy of 9
/11. Shortly before 9:00 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175, flying from Boston to Los Angeles, struck the South Tower with Christoffer on board. Within half an hour, the North Tower was struck by a second hijacked plane. Sadly, Steven was working on the 107th floor. Neither man was seen alive again.
81 Bill Vann, “September 11 Widow Condemns US War Plans,” the World Socialist Web Site, December 2, 2002.
VINCENT FALIVENE
Vincent Falivene, twenty-eight. On the evening of September 14, feeling disconsolate and under-utilized, Vincent walked seventy blocks from his job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Union Square Park. That night, a candlelight vigil had been scheduled, and all of New York was invited.
As he walked down Fifth Avenue, Vincent took in the lampposts papered with color computer printouts of missing persons. “You’d often see copies of the same image,” he says. “There was a guy I went to college with, and I remember another picture that showed twins—apparently both had been lost. It was overwhelming.”
When he arrived at Union Square, the entire plaza was covered with mourners.
IT WAS STARTING to get dark. As I got further and further downtown, closer to the square, I started noticing the smell of—well, it smelled like burning hair to me.82
There was a line of Buddhists with orange robes and shaved heads walking through the park with candles. Some people in the line were dressed regularly … jeans, T-shirts, that kind of thing. The people in the line were predominantly Asian, and everyone was chanting. The words they were saying weren’t English, so I have no idea what they were saying. But you got the idea from their mood. I didn’t join the line, but I did follow them through the crowd and into the park.
Tower Stories Page 35
