Number Three found my boarding pass and said, “Yes, we have a window seat available. I’ll change it for you.” By now, we are over forty minutes late. It was ten o’clock and we hadn’t even gotten on the plane.
More PA announcements came in: “We’re sorry, we’re sorry.”
Finally, they called my chunk of rows and I got on the plane with my laptop and my backpack.
Now, prior to going to the airport, I had—for whatever reason—pulled a note card out of my drawer at home and scribbled a few lines to the crew of the flight I was going to be on: “Dear Crew, I know we’ve all had this horrendous week and I just wanted to share my sympathies with you, your company, and your fellow workers. This is a tragedy of epic proportions, blah blah blah …” You know what I mean? It was just a sympathy note to let them know that some passengers care about them and what they do for a living.
I’d never written a note like that before in my life. Why did I do it? I just wanted the employees to know that they were appreciated. We still don’t know what happened to that one plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, but it could very well have been that the crew and passengers worked together to stop any further disaster from happening.
I walked down the gangway to get on board, and as soon as I hit the threshold of the airplane, there were two flight attendants who were all smiles. “Welcome! Welcome! Hello!” And the first one I saw, I just reached in my pocket and shoved the envelope into her hands. I barely even made eye contact with her. I just mumbled, “This is for you.” Then I hiked my bag up onto my shoulder and walked off down the aisle. Didn’t want to make a big production out of it.
I went toward my seat, looked down the fuselage of the plane, and there, sitting in the seat next to mine was—well, for lack of a better word—“Abdul.”
I don’t know what the proper phrase is. A Middle Eastern man? An Arab-looking guy? He had olive skin, brown eyes, black hair, and a mustache—a fairly nondescript man, but most definitely of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern origin.
So I did the airplane nod, that piece of body language that says, “Hi, I’m going to be living in that seat right there, and you need to get out so I can get in.” He understood. He stood up right away and I threw my laptop in the overhead, scrooched into the row, and put my bag under the seat. I pulled my newspaper out and thanked him and he sat back down, started futzing with the seat belt. There were elbows flying and I folded my paper, but before I began to even read the paper … and I never do this, I mean I don’t talk to anyone on airplanes. But I thought about it for a long moment, and then I turned to this man and said, “So. How was your week?”
It was a heightened moment. We were all on edge. By taking that plane, I was engaging in something that people were frightened to do at that point. Fly to New York. Go to Ground Zero. I admit I’d been making calculations in my head all evening, saying things to myself like, okay, if I’m taking a red-eye flight in a plane loaded with 60,000 pounds of jet fuel and we’re leaving Los Angeles, the terrorists are not going to crash us in New York because there’s not going to be any fuel on board by the time we get there. No fuel means no explosion, so they’re going to crash here in L.A. Obviously, they’d want a flight where they knew they had less passengers, so there won’t be any more Shanksville incidents. But hang on a minute. My flight is full …
This was the kind of shit floating through my head.
“So. How was your week?”
He looked at me and said, “Fine.” Just one word. A cold delivery. And it felt like, after the word “fine” left his mouth, a big white sheet of cardboard came up that read, “That’s it. That’s done.”
Then I thought, cut the guy some slack, huh? If it wasn’t this particular week, if anyone had asked me the same question two weeks earlier, I would have said, “fine” too. So I put my newspaper up in front of me and went about my business.
But then I had a thought right after that. How can you just say “fine”? How can anyone just say “fine” after the week we’d just had? September 11 was … it was a Kennedy moment. Like, where were you when JFK was shot? Everyone knows where they were when John Lennon was killed. Everyone knows where they were when the space shuttle blew. It’s a Kennedy moment, a Pearl Harbor moment.
I just didn’t expect to get “fine” as a response, and then have him drop it so suddenly. So I sat there and pretended to read my paper, but now I couldn’t help but preoccupy myself with questions. Why did he say “fine”? What does he really want to say? And I started looking out the corner of my eye, thinking, wow, he really does look like an Arab.
That’s when I noticed there weren’t any airline magazines in the front pocket of my seat. I found out later there’d been a picture inside the magazine showing the World Trade Center, so United had decided to pull them.
Now it was twenty minutes after ten. We were still at the gate. The flight attendants had run down the aisles, taken their head count, and whacked down the doors to the overhead compartments. We were all ready to go, but now my thoughts were going positively crazy: If this guy is a terrorist, what do I do? I’ve just put my rinky-dink, little Swiss army knife in my bag; it’s packed up and stowed below. I’ve got this copy of the L.A. Times, though. Maybe I could roll it up and hit him with the Sports section. Hey! I’ve got a blanket and an airline pillow. I could throw the blanket over his head, try to smother him with the pillow …
Then I thought, why am I having these thoughts? He’s just a passenger on a plane, no different from me.
For those ten or fifteen minutes we were waiting, I got a little wigged out. Abdul crossed his legs—his right leg crossed over his left, just barely sticking out in the aisle. He had the right-foot-leg-tap thing going. This was all registering to me. Sharp. Surreal.
Another ten minutes went by. Then I saw a flight attendant coming down my aisle. She stopped right in front of where Abdul and I are sitting, hunkered down, and looked at us. She said, “I’m sorry to do this, gentlemen, but you fit a profile and the captain would like to see you both.”
My mouth fell open. “Me?” I said, almost choking on the idea.
The attendant smiled. She kept smiling the whole time. “Yes. If you could just follow me, please?”
For a dramatic beat, neither of us did anything. Then I unbuckled my seat belt and Abdul unbuckled his. He stood up. He wasn’t in any hurry to go. I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to find out what was going on. I fit a profile?86 I had my American passport out and I was thinking, what is it? My goatee? But then I thought: Aha! The card! Someone gave the flight attendant my card and they must have thought, he’s out of his head! He’s the good cop, Abdul’s the bad cop! He’s too nice. Why did you give us this card, sir? Let’s question him!
Well, I got up. Abdul got up. He was walking in front of me down the aisle, right up ahead of me, and every head on the plane turned to look at us. Figuring my passport wasn’t going to be enough, I started fumbling for my California driver’s, digging it out of the little fanny pack I was wearing. My thoughts were starting to turn manic: Okay, I know I’m not in any kind of trouble. If nothing else, I’ll have a good story to tell when I get off the plane.
But I was insanely curious. And it wasn’t even an option to protest.
I thought we were going up to the cockpit. We didn’t. We de-boarded the plane on the gangway. I remember thinking, oh, wow. I didn’t expect to leave the actual airplane. Aren’t there merchant marine laws that go into effect when you get on and off a plane? I had this little moment of “what are my rights?”
I stepped out and saw a small crowd of United employees standing around: the captain and a U.S. marshal, plus other United security guys with their blue blazers, and the two flight attendants whom I’d given my note to hovering by the door, but still inside the plane. And two other Arab guys were there, too. A total of three Arab-looking gentlemen, and me: the suspects.
The captain was engaged with the other two Arab men. His posture was rigid and he was shaking
his head back and forth, back and forth, staring at the passports he was holding in his hand. The look on his face wasn’t pleasant, more like he had a bad case of gas. He took a couple of deep breaths, and I saw him hand the documents back to the two Arab guys. Then he turned to Abdul and said, “You’ve probably been getting this all week and I apologize, but I need to see some identification.”
Abdul pulled out a piece of ID that looked like a driver’s license. At that point, I started getting tunnel vision; I couldn’t focus on anything but my pounding heart. I started getting sweaty, thinking, what am I nervous about? Why is my adrenaline running?
I remember hearing one of the blue coats say, “Do you have anything else? Where are you from? Where are you going?” The captain was rolling his eyes now and shaking his head. I kept repeating this inner monologue of, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to have anything to do with this at all. Meantime, everyone else was just watching.
The pilot finished with Abdul and looked toward me. I looked at him—then past him, over his shoulder. And that’s when I saw another person who’d been standing there the whole time, about five feet away, the Senior United Woman with the red scarf. We made eye contact and her face went all bug-eyed. She mouthed, “What are you doing here?”
I shrugged my shoulders and mouthed back, “I don’t know.”
The captain started toward me but the Senior United Woman intercepted him, grabbing him by the bicep. Then she dragged him toward me, grabbed me by the bicep, and herded the three of us off to one side. Our heads were really close together and she said to the captain, “Steve, this is Mr. Cass. He’s fine. We talked a little while back. His sister was in the World Trade Center, and he’s going to New York to see her. I put him in that seat twenty minutes ago, a last minute switch—he wanted a window.”
The captain looked at my passport, then at me, and said, “Well, aren’t you traveling with this guy?”
I guffawed. “Nooooooo!”
He looked back at Abdul and asked, “Are you traveling with him?” Abdul looked at me, then back at the captain, and shook his head no.
The captain turned back to me. “I’m really very sorry, Mr. Cass. I assumed you were traveling with him. These other two gentlemen are traveling together. I’m very, very sorry. Please accept my apologies. You can go back to your seat.”
My pulse rate was peaking by now. The lovely United employee was holding on to me with both arms saying, “I’m sorry. So sorry. Please. Enjoy your flight.”
I felt like I was being genuinely sincere when I looked at both of them and said, “It’s fine. Really.” And I walked back into the plane.
The first person I saw was the flight attendant whom I’d handed the card to. I looked at her and said, “Is this because I gave you the card?”
She gasped. “Oh, you’re Mr. Cass! I’m so sorry. No, we loved your card! I’ve passed it around to the entire crew—we’ve all read it. So-and-so cried when she read it. They took you off the plane? Oh my God, please!”
She grabbed her co-flight attendant and said, “This is the guy that wrote us the card.” Suddenly everyone wanted to kiss me.
Well, I walked back down the aisle again. Every head turned to watch me, and everyone was asking each other, “What happened?” I wasn’t back in my seat for a beat when two heads popped over the chair in front of me, and the guy sitting behind me stuck his head up over my seat like we were in that old E. F. Hutton commercial. People all the way on the other side of the plane were straining to get an earful of what I was about to say. But I didn’t know what to say.
I abbreviated my experience by saying, “I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s pretty serious.”
About ten or fifteen more minutes went by. Then the two flight attendants came down the aisle. One of them sat in Abdul’s vacant seat and put her hand on my arm. “We’re sorry,” said the other. “Please accept our apologies, we’re all under a lot of pressure right now.”
Two other flight attendants suddenly appeared and walked quickly toward us, one down each aisle in the plane’s fuselage. The attendant in my aisle stopped at my seat, while the other stopped where the other two Arab guys were sitting toward the back of the plane. I saw the overhead bin over my head open up—the same thing happened to the compartment over the other two guys’ seats. The attendants rummaged quickly through all the luggage, then whoosh, they took the bags of the Middle Eastern men right off the plane.
Now it was past eleven o’clock. We were over an hour late. The pilot got on the PA and said, “We’ll be taking off in a few minutes. Right now we’re just removing some luggage from down below.”
And then? Applause. Not a standing ovation, but there was quite a reaction.
My emotions were mixed. That’s the best way I can describe it. I’m as angry as the next person about what happened on the eleventh, but I don’t want to run around killing all Arabs, all Muslims, because that’s not what it’s about. What I’d just seen happen was a “let’s intern the Japanese” move. It was suddenly very clear to me that we, as a culture, were going to pigeonhole these people—or at least we were going to that week. The political and moral machinery inside my head was grinding, and not grinding easily. The situation was confusing and it was awkward.
We finally took off. By the time we’d been in the air an hour, every single flight attendant on that plane had come by my seat to apologize.
Now, there was a young black woman sitting one row behind me in the center section. She was clearly in view of what had happened, but not within earshot. At some point in the flight she got up out of her seat and sat down next to me. She asked me, “Hey, what happened?”
An older black couple was sitting nearby—they looked to be in their seventies, at least. Very nicely dressed, middle-class, knowledgeable. No one had to say what we were all thinking; it was clear that everyone felt it. Immediately after the eleventh, there was this sort of unspoken communal pain among people. We were all in tune with some sort of human wavelength that allowed us all to communicate, practically telepathically. Everyone’s senses were heightened.
The young black woman said, “Boy, I’m so relieved they took those guys off.” And she got up and walked away.
A split-second later I wondered, would she have been saying that forty years ago if a black person had been escorted off the plane? This woman, who was barely in her thirties, had missed the hardcore civil rights movement, but here she was, certainly benefiting from it.
I kept trying to look at the older black couple, trying to read in their faces what they thought about all this. But they kept to themselves and never looked over. I just wanted to get a feeling, some sort of expression. But they didn’t share it with me. All I know is this: a black man in his seventies has faced discrimination in this country.
I was hoping to find some wisdom in that man’s face that I could learn from. But nothing came.
86 At this point, it’s probably important to describe Christopher Cass as a Caucasian male with brown hair and blue eyes who was, at the time, wearing a goatee. On the day of the flight, he was dressed casually in a jacket, denim shirt, tie, and khaki pants. He is not the first person I’d pick to be a terrorist of any sort.
SCOTT SLATER
Scott Slater, thirty, a New Yorker …
AFTER THE ATTACK, I holed up in my apartment, compulsively watching the news for two days. But then I felt the need to get out and do something. I grabbed my camera and started walking, visiting every site in New York I could possibly think of. Lincoln Center. Union Square. Canal Street. The Empire State Building. The Armory. I walked all around the city.
“It was a pronounced statement of sorrow. Despite all that had happened, our flag was still there.”
“The single flag had been replaced with more American flags than you can imagine … all flying full staff, a tremendous show of strength. On that second visit, I looked at the flags and thought, we’ve risen.”
At Rockefeller Center, I was struc
k by an image. Normally, the flag posts fly banners from all different nations. On September 13, there was a single American flag flying at half-staff. The other poles were bare. It was a pronounced statement of sorrow. Despite all that had happened, our flag was still there.
A few days later, I happened by that area again with my camera. The single flag had been replaced with more American flags than you can imagine. One for every single pole, all flying full staff, a tremendous show of strength.
On that second visit, I looked at the flags and thought: we’ve risen.
BRENDAN RYAN and KRISTIN IRVINE RYAN
If you follow the music scene in Manhattan, you’ve surely heard of the Bogmen. In the mid-1990s, the band became the toast of the town, playing rock music they smirkingly described as “Hi-Fi/Lowbrow Super-Charged Lounge Fodder.”
Brendan Ryan, thirty, founded the band with his brother, Bill, and their friend, Bill Campion. Brendan’s wife, Kristin Irvine Ryan, co-founded a charity called Secret Smiles, which, in the wake of September 11, took on a mission its founders could not have possibly imagined.
Brendan tells us his story—about music that plays again, charity that finds new purpose, and a love that refuses to die.
WHEN THE FIRST plane hit, Kristy called me and said, “Put the news on.”
Tower Stories Page 40
