I’d kind of expected to see a lot of disjointed people milling about the square, but this wasn’t the case. I knew the Buddhists had organized the vigil. They’d had only a day to organize their whole congregation, and this huge gathering was the result, in such a short amount of time. I thought it was pretty amazing. See, I’m not talking about a short line of people; there were tons. It was like being at a party. Kinda like a conga line.
I saw all these placards and posters, you know, people leaving messages of peace. More images of missing people. Several quotes. There was one long quote from Gandhi … I mean, it was long. They had to write it on a white bed sheet with black acrylic paint. I started feeling heady. It was difficult to stop and read them all.
I’m telling you, it was like being in a crowded party, being shoulder to shoulder.
Directly following the attacks of September 11, some citizens saw war as the ultimate and only solution.
At the center of the square, three Buddhist monks were handing out candles, lighting them for people going by. Just simple, long white candles. The monks stayed completely silent as they went about their work. They wore orange and yellow or red sashes, and they had their eyes down, somber. It was like the whole park was a funeral, and the monks were trying to be deferential to the people who were hurting. There were no smiles. There was no laughing and there was no conversation.
Things were different on the south side of the square. A number of people sat in drum circles, where three or four guys played bongos while everybody else sang, “Give Peace a Chance.” Guys in the center were dancing. If you’ve ever gone to a Grateful Dead concert, you know what I’m talking about. They were dancing like that. Spastic. Reaching up toward the sky, looking up, looking tripped out, singing very loudly, like they were in church.
This one girl in particular I remember was singing between the pauses. While everyone else was singing “Give Peace a Chance,” she was singing “One Love” by Bob Marley. Her voice was quite bad, but you know. The words. It was a point well taken.
The next circle I got to had a couple people sitting with guitars and another bongo drum. Here they were singing “Kumbaya” over and over and over again. It was nice and it was soothing, but that’s kinda when I got a little distracted by the sound of people arguing.
One person shouting, “You’re fucking crazy! We should bomb these people! There’s no other response!”
Other people shouting back: “There’s gotta be a peaceful response to this. There’s gotta be another way to go about it. We can’t let them goad us into a violent response!”
I could feel the tension building.
One argument broke out between this African American guy, who was very tall and had full dreadlocks, and this Young Girl, probably an NYU college student who wore a red, white, and blue bandana and an American flag shirt. He called her a bimbo, and she lost it. She called him “a fuckin’ asshole.”
People chimed in from all sides. People shouted flack. A couple more guys got involved, I guess to defend the Young Girl’s honor. “You shouldn’t talk to her like that, man,” they said. “You definitely shouldn’t talk to her like that.”
The Dreadlock Dude retorted, “Hey! She called me stupid.”
I started to get nervous. This gathering had started out peacefully, and now it was turning into a mob.
But the Dreadlock Dude stood up and apologized to the Young Girl. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you a bimbo. But you shouldn’t have called me stupid. Obviously we have different views on this.”
A guy from the crowd thanked the Dreadlock Dude: “That was very big of you to say, man.”
The Young Girl was silent for a moment. Then she called Dreadlock Dude “a fuckin’ asshole” again and walked away. But it wasn’t over.
A Latino man standing nearby said, “How could you say that America has done things that pushed these people to the point where they’re willing to lay down their lives to kill us? How could you say that?”
Right then, it all broke open. People started talking over each other; the crowd surged and gathered strength. But Dreadlock Dude held up his hands and cried out, “Okay! Hold it! There has to be some kind of forum here!”
He had a piece of poster board that he’d rolled into a kind of baton and he held it up. “Whoever wants to speak should come up here and hold up this roll of poster board to signify you are the speaker.”
Now he had the attention of all the people in area. People behind me started yelling, “Speak up! Speak up!”
The first person stepped forward and grabbed the baton. He started talking, but the crowd yelled over him. So Dreadlock Dude said, “Whoever’s speaking should be able to speak. I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t have anywhere to go tonight. Everyone will get their chance.”
Then another Latino guy came up and started talking. He said, “We should all love one another,” which didn’t get the best reception.
Then this other guy came up and asked for the baton. He was a Big Dude, well over six feet tall. His head was shaved bald like a neo-Nazi. He wore a skin-tight T-shirt, tight jeans, and suspenders. His arms were real thick, and covered with tattoos. When the baton was handed to him, he said, “Listen. In 1983, I lost eighteen of my friends to the terrorist bombing in Beirut. Really close friends of mine. After that, America did bad things. But my philosophy in life is peace through superior firepower. And that’s all I’m gonna say.” He gave back the baton.
“Other people shouting back: ‘There’s gotta be a peaceful response to this. There’s gotta be another way to go about it. We can’t let them goad us into a violent response!’”
In counterpoint to those citizens urging politicians to move America toward war, peace vigils were held across the country during the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.
A woman in African garb wasn’t about to let that pass. She started yelling at the Big Dude. She said she’d lived in Jamaica and used to tour as a backup singer for Bob Marley. She kept calling Bob Marley “the Prophet.” As in, “the Prophet Bob Marley said we should all live as one! We need to change our view of the world! It has to be done by loving each other!” Then she broke into “One Love” while holding the baton, and everyone started singing along with her.
It’s kinda funny describing it now, but it was very powerful at the time. At the time, I thought this was all wonderful, the kind of discourse people should be engaged in all the time. Obviously, this won’t occur on a daily basis. But to really sit back and challenge your own belief system, or to try to bring about change? To engage in dialogue—honest dialogue—about what’s working and what isn’t, about where we’ve been and where we need to go? That’s one of the beauties of living in this country. It’s one of our rights as American citizens. For some people who started talking to one another that evening, however, that was as far as they’d ever gone with it.
It was getting dark quickly and the air quality was deteriorating. The wind had shifted north, and the smoke from the Towers was blowing into the park. You could hear it in people’s voices; they started to get raspy. At that point, a lot of folks put on those surgical masks. Then, the people who’d been singing “Kumbaya” started singing “New York, New York” over and over again.
It all happened so quickly. Suddenly, a Rockette’s line of people from all walks of life linked themselves arm-in-arm and started doing this absurd version of a kick line. It was insane, but it made me smile. It takes strength to do something so odd. There was truth in the musical number.
One more thing I want to recall. As I left the square, two sculptors were at work, sitting on the ground, a man and a woman. They were working on a gold and silver plating in the shape of an American flag, four feet wide and a few feet high. It was two-dimensional but made to look fluid, like it was blowing in the breeze. Each plate alternated gold and silver.
As they fashioned this piece, they inscribed names from the posters of missing people right into the metal p
lating. It was a very intricate task. And as these artists worked, people stood around and watched them in complete silence. The artists never looked up. They were utterly absorbed in their work. Two days later, I know they auctioned the piece off. I have no idea what they did with the proceeds.
It was something I was glad to have seen, but something I hope I’ll never see again. A funeral for the entire city.
82 The smell of the burning Towers laced the air of downtown Manhattan for months after the eleventh.
PATRICK CHARLES WELSH
Patrick Charles Welsh, forty-four, is a man of tall carriage with salt-and-pepper hair and ruddy cheeks. He exudes the natural charm of a gifted raconteur.
Patrick’s story begins as an American fable. How it ends is open to interpretation.
I’M AMAZED that I actually survived the ’80s in New York.
I struggled when I came here in 1981. Got caught up in the bartending scene. Back then, everybody was riding the wave of Republican funny money. Father Reagan was protecting us all from the Evil Empire, and everything was, “Ain’t life great? Gimme another line of cocaine! America’s Number One!”
New York has always been a great place to live, but it’s a love/hate relationship. If you’re not financially independent, it can be extremely difficult. The guy who takes a town car back and forth and rides an elevator up to his penthouse isn’t seeing the homeless person who vomits on his steps. But that’s the daily reality I knew back then—the street-level view, I guess you might say.
It can be a bit abrupt. A bit shocking. But you get a little numb to it after a while. And that’s when you find your niche.
I was going through a series of different bartending jobs and found a new one at a place called Boxer’s down in the Village. It was St. Patrick’s Day in ’87 or ’88, and the following day, I met this new waitress named Debbie.
You couldn’t miss her. She lit up the room like a psychedelic Auntie Mame. When she walked in, everyone knew she was there. We hit it off right away, driving each other insane across the service bar like Diane and Sam Malone from Cheers.
For our first date, we went out and saw The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Then we polished off a fifth of tequila at a bar I used to work at called the You’re It. It was a hell of a first date.
Debbie was wild. She had this incredible zest for life. She embraced it fully. We hit it off and never looked back.
Four or five years later, I proposed on New Year’s Eve.
We lived in a studio on Bleecker Street, between Charles and Perry Streets. We got a Dalmatian named Dylan that was like our kid, and Debbie found this coat in a thrift store window—a black-and-white spotted coat that was awful, just awful. I used to imagine how every other customer in the thrift store had walked past that coat, saw it hanging on the rack, and said, “I won’t go near that thing with a ten-foot pole.”
But Debbie said, “Oh my God! That’s perfect!” Of course she did, she was ecstatic about this treasure. She brought it home and showed it off for me, and what else could I say? “Baby, it’s you.”
A black-and-white spotted coat for when she walked our black-and-white spotted dog. Deb had a great appreciation for the ridiculous and the absurd.
She was unafraid to talk to anybody. That was another thing about her. Back then I called her The Mayor because she knew everyone in our neighborhood. Everyone.
As we spent our lives together, I learned so much more about her. She couldn’t read music, so she’d taught herself to play the piano by ear. She could play Rhapsody in Blue like a professional—it was amazing.
I would say, “How on earth did you learn that?”
And she’d say, “Oh, I just banged it out on my own.”
She played the keys by memory and picked up the guitar this way, too.
She was older than me, born in Darby, Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia. She went to Notre Dame High School. For a brief time, she was a Flyerette for the Philadelphia Flyers—not really a cheerleader, but a staff member for promotional things, in the press box at the games, that kind of thing. Debbie was very rah rah rah, so it was a perfect job for her. Shortly after that, she got a job as a flight attendant with Eastern Airlines and did that for a very long time.
Prior to my meeting Debbie, Eastern went on strike, which is when she got the job waiting tables at Boxer’s. If it weren’t for that strike, she would have still been flying and I would never have met her. I think about that sometimes.
Well, the airline industry eventually became a big part of my life because it was such a big part of hers. Debbie was very pro-union. She was a people person. She had no tolerance whatsoever for financial or political tyrants. In fact, she had tremendous vehemence toward Frank Lorenzo, the guy who tried to dismantle Eastern Airlines, cut it up, and sell it off to Continental. That guy was a real bastard. According to Deb, he ruined the lives of people who’d worked for that company for years.83
She was based in New York but traveled the world on her time off. She went to Peru and learned the customs and the language; she hiked the Inca Trail all the way up to Machu Picchu. Then she went to Bali, where she survived a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. After that, it was Hong Kong, Malaysia, Germany, and Greece using only a Fodor’s book.
She always traveled by herself. She was fearless like that, a person who embraced different cultures. And in terms of her demise, this was the most ironic thing, to me. She wasn’t isolationist, she was a worldly person, always down to earth. Lots of humor, no stuffiness. She was a beautiful and accepting American, quite the opposite of what many people in the world think of our people today.
By the time we met at Boxer’s, Debbie’d worked her way through a series of different restaurants. She didn’t know if she was ready to go back to the airlines. They’d broken her heart. At first she took work at the Amazon Club over by Chelsea Piers, where part of their proceeds went to save the rain forests—it was a famous place in the late ’80s. Then she was at Boxer’s for a while. But for the sake of better benefits, she finally decided to go back to work as a flight attendant.
Some former Eastern Airlines people had put together Kiwi International Airline, a small company based out of New York which flew routes up and down the East Coast and as far west as Chicago. It was a fledgling airline, so they named the company after a flightless bird. The people who started it felt that their wings had been clipped by Eastern. It was a tight-knit group, and Debbie loved the notion of it.
She explained to me how, when a flight attendant leaves a company, she loses all seniority. Even though you may have years and years of experience, if you change companies you have to start back at zero as a buck private and go through the whole process all over again. And seniority is what you leveraged to arrange your work schedule. What it all meant was that she’d be the low gal on the totem pole for a long time to come, but despite all this, Debbie was thrilled to get back to work.
I remember going to her graduation from Kiwi’s training program. I was so proud. Each graduating class put a skit together. Her class took the music from Kriss Kross’s “Jump” and changed the words. I helped her write the lyrics. Debbie coordinated this whole hip-hop dance routine, and it was hysterical to see these flight attendants breakdancing in their uniforms.
Well, Kiwi hit bad times when the airline industry struggled, and faltered through the early ’90s. The company was going into a burnout phase, and Debbie began to get overscheduled because the airline was losing people. Doing a job like that every night is like being a baseball pitcher and having to throw several nights in a row; you just can’t do it. You’ll hurt yourself.
Debbie found out United was hiring and said, “I think I’m gonna make a move. Even though I’ll have to start all over—again—my benefits and schedule will be a lot better.” And that’s what she did. She started training with United and was truly happy.
In fact, both of our lives started to take off. I started to have great success as a commercial actor. Finally,
I didn’t have to take bartending jobs anymore; I was living off my craft. In fact, I vowed that I’d never set foot behind a bar again unless it was for a friend.
Debbie and I had more time together now, and we got to travel a little. After all our years of struggling in New York, we were starting to get some payoff.
Debbie’s mother confided something in me once. She said, “You know, I have tremendous admiration for your marriage. You two just laugh from your heels.”
She had us pegged. The night prior to the eleventh, we’d gone to a comedy club where a client of my manager was performing. I thank God for that because our last moments together, we were laughing uproariously, just like we did through most of our marriage.
The eleventh wasn’t a normally scheduled workday for Deb. She’d gotten an email from another flight attendant who asked, “Would you cover this shift for me? I have a special event I’d like to attend.”
Debbie said, “Fine. I’ll take yours if you can take this shift for me.” It was a normal swap.
The woman actually emailed her back later, saying, “My plans fell through, if you want to switch back.”
But Debbie said, “No, that’s fine. Take the day off. I’ll cover it.”
In a lot of ways—to her friends, her family, and me … we figure it was destiny. The way Deb was, I know she would have been doing her best to comfort the people on board that plane. She would have been inspirational to a great many people. I know this for a fact.
Tower Stories Page 36
