To Mine
Okay, so this is what I remember.
Monday night… it was me, Val, Sean, and Lee (and I think Eddie… I’m gonna have to verify that later and do an update).
Lee and I were roommates at the time, and the four(five) of us were hanging downstairs in the living room drinking whiskey and joking the hell out of our miserable lives (except Sean… he was already a cast member on a little show called Gilmore Girls… we all thought he was famous).
I’m not sure why the memory comes with such a clear image of the nasty garbage strewn state of the apartment. Maybe cause I still live there, and these days it looks very different. We had a wicker lounge chair that had been peed on by our cat, a southwest style coffee table we found on the street, and this ridiculously long black pleather couch. There were two pieces of art on the walls. A super cheap “cabin on a landscape” print, and an 11 x 14 blank canvas that we thought was ironic.
At around 4:30am I stumbled upstairs to my room while the others powered through.
The next thing I remember was Lee at my bedroom door.
“Dude! Wake up! You need to come downstairs! There’s some crazy terrorist shit going on!”
I was half asleep, but I can still recall that first wave of 21st century fear. Because for a few moments, in my drowsy half conscious state, I thought Lee meant there was some terrorist shit going on outside our apartment… or in our living room!
I stumbled downstairs to Val on the couch and Sean in the pee chair, both locked on the TV. One of the towers was smoking, and I just got bits from them about a plane flying into it. No Eddie, so he must have gone home… or was never there.
I think we were watching prerecorded footage… either that, or time was flashing by, because I don’t remember ever sitting down… and it seems like all the events happened within minutes of one another.
Second plane hit the second tower. Val let out this gaspy grunty yelp I can totally still hear.
Sean was the first one of us to realize, “Those are people jumping!” I seem to recall him starting to cry. I haven’t seen him cry many times in my life.
I don’t remember the reactions to the first tower falling. But after the second, Val started saying over and over to himself, “They’re gone. They’re gone.”
If I remember right, Val was actually visiting Los Angeles from New York City.
Soon after, my girlfriend at the time called. She wanted us to drive out of LA to the suburbs and stay with her family. I wasn’t into it.
Then my mom called. She said she’d heard word of planes headed to LA. We’d already had the same fear based on the CNN scrolling headlines “Planes headed to LA”. It took us hours to fully accept that what they meant was the planes that crashed had been LA bound.
After a while, Lee left to be by himself. Then Sean. Val stayed on the couch staring at the TV.
My girlfriend came over and we went up to my bedroom and laid down. We freaked out in a prone position for about an hour, then decided to go to her place.
As we came down into the living room, Val woke suddenly from a dream.
“Whoa! That was… weird. And… ridiculous.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I just had this dream. Oh god it’s ridiculous… but it seemed so scary in the dream… that one of those planes we thought were on their way to LA… crashed into the Hollywood Sign.”
It was the first moment in the day where the fear sort of let up for a second.
Cause that really was ridiculous.
Then I noticed something I hadn’t before. Our blank canvas art was sitting on the coffee table. Someone had been drawing on it.
“Who did that?” I asked. Val said Sean had been doodling on it during the night while they were drinking.
I was like, “He drew that last night?”
In the lower right of the canvas was a goofy little pen cartoon of a plane flying over a city skyline… a little cartoon A-bomb was falling from it.
I realize this memory is sort of silly in comparison to the ones of people braving fire and smoke and ash. Walking for miles across bridges and through tunnels.
But that was my 911. Perhaps to a New Yorker befitting of Los Angeles… I don’t know.
I wonder how close the other guys’ memories are to mine.
And now that I think about it… I sort of do remember Eddie crashed out on the floor the night before. I gotta call that dude.
lizz on 11 Sep 2009 at 6:34 pm #
as someone who now lives in l.a. but was very much a new yorker (well brooklynite) at the time, this is quite lovely as a memory. well, not lovely, but not distasteful and filled with crap like, “…and then we discussed what it meant to be an american…”
i blocked out the people jumping from the buildings. a few of my friends saw it first hand and said it was excruciating. my friend that stayed at my place tuesday night b/c of his asthma and the insane smoke in the slope used his press pass the next day to get near the wreckage. he told me on wednesday, “i had to leave when i started recognizing human forms.” i never even tried to use mine — the news and the views were already too much. (that being said, i held it together for everyone else for days… at least until the video store was sold out of everything and all i wanted to see was crap like dawson’s creek where everyone’s biggest problem was that pacey was being a jerk.)
the hardest part of leaving new york right after 9/11 for the midwest was listening to peoples’ ridiculous stories of how they were put on hold b/c the towers were down (i can name 8 off the top of my head) and/or how they kept thinking, “could this happen to milwaukee???” (um, probably not.)
i totally get the l.a. thing. right after i covered the story about the shoe bombers that were caught on flights out of england (2006?), i was driving to my then-boyfriend’s place in echo park, saw a plane get too close to downtown and completely freaked out.
wow, i just wrote more on this than my own tumblr piece i took down because it seemed flip. so there you go, if you got me to not make jokes, it was a good sentiment.
Jeannie on 11 Sep 2009 at 7:27 pm #
I’ve been waiting for your post all day because you said you were going to make one. I often wonder what it had been like for someone watching all this unfurl on television so far away. I don’t know if it makes it any more or less real. I think when everyone looks back on that day, no matter how close or how far you were, it will never not feel like something like a dream.
It must have been horrific to watch people jumping out of the towers. I’ve never seen footage of that, only stills, which lets me look at it in a detached way. Sort of. It’s still horrible but a little less so?
Some days after, one of the local newspapers printed a photo of a severed hand lying amidst the rubble. It was a really disturbing and horrifying image. But I kept it. That’s really morbid, I know. But I really felt like I needed to hold onto it.
It’s funny that you remember Monday. Probably because your reaction to what you were seeing the next morning was so closely tied to everything you had been doing the night before. But me? I don’t remember a thing about Monday. Or Wednesday.
But that’s enough out of me.
Thank you for sharing this.
Itzel on 11 Sep 2009 at 9:07 pm #
I don’t live in the US, but I do remember it was shocking. I was in high school at the time, and found out before going to my classes, I think I even saw the crash of the second plane “live”.
And in my school I had half of my classes in english, most of my teachers were from the US. When I got to my first class we had to tell the teacher cause she didn’t know (don’t recall which place of the US she was exactly) and she immediately left. She didn’t return to the classroom.
It was a weird day. I don’t think people even believed it all had happened.
Sean Harding on 11 Sep 2009 at 9:55 pm #
I remember waking up, checking my email and seeing a big pile of “breaking news” alerts. Before I even read the first one, I knew something big had happened. I turned on the TV and was mesmerized for some time. I didn’t go to work that day. I don’t know if any of my co-workers did, but I doubt it.
I think most people living in a major city had at least some thoughts about further attacks closer to home. I lived a few blocks from the Space Needle, which seemed like an iconic enough target to be plausible. But I never really believed it would happen, and I didn’t do anything about it. I just sat at home, watched TV and read reports on the web.
At one point, I wandered outside to go to the store around the corner and get some food. Everyone seemed to be in a daze. To say it was a weird day would be an understatement. It sure doesn’t seem like eight years ago.
sorano916 on 12 Sep 2009 at 10:54 am #
I was back home in FL, about half hour away from where President Bush was when the attacks happened. We were watching the TV in my history class, ironically.
I remember one of my friends coming into the classroom to be with me and the rest of our friends. Her mom was flying out of DC that morning and for a while, she didn’t know if her mom was on the plane that crashed into Pentagon. Fortunately, she wasn’t.
It still gets to me whenever I drive by the Pentagon because the road that I drive on, the image of masses of people running on it with the Pentagon burning behind them still pops up. I have yet to visit the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial but I do plan to soon.
Thanks for the post, John.
kelseroo on 12 Sep 2009 at 1:17 pm #
I really like your story. It is interesting the strange things we remember on a day like that. I feel very weird because I spent the whole day yesterday trying to remember what I did and what I felt that day, and I can’t really come up with much. I feel kind of guilty about that, like if I was a more conscientious person I would have vivid memories about it.
I do remember I was in my senior year in high school, and we spent the entire day watching the news reports. I was just in shock and denial the whole day. I remember thinking how strange that my half birthday is the same day as this date that will be remembered forever. Half birthdays really are so silly and unimportant, aren’t they?