Rebound

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

When I awoke on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the only significance the day held for me was that it was a Tuesday, which meant I could get my dress shirts laundered for 99 cents apiece.

I awoke about 8:30, and absentmindedly made breakfast. Although I was up and around in the kitchen, mentally I was still asleep.

The Peters Township Council meeting the night before was long and boring, as Peters meetings tend to be. I had no real plans that morning, but someone else out there did, and it was to impact me like it did most Americans.

I sat down and began thumbing through that day’s papers. I got two papers, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who give me an employee’s discount of half off the newsstand price, and the New York Times, which I’m hoping will give me an employee’s discount someday.

The rerun of M*A*S*H on television bored me, so I decided to turn on the news. I turned on MSNBC and saw one of the World Trade Towers in flames. Reports stated that a plane had slammed into one of the towers. At first, I chalked it up to pilot error or something, remembering that once upon a time, a bomber smashed into the Empire State Building.

My illusions disappeared as I watched a jumbo jet slam into the other World Trade Tower. “Holy shit,” I muttered to myself. I quickly showered and dressed, and sped toward the dry cleaners, dropping off my shirts and commenting about what the hell was going on.

During my drive into work, a scant ten minutes, the car was filled
with Howard Stern. He was telling everyone to be calm, and stating that planes ran into the World Trade Towers as part of a terrorist action against the United States. After a few other calls suggesting turning the Middle East into a parking lot using 50-megaton bulldozers, I pulled into the office.

There are circulation, editorial and advertising departments in our office, and on a typical Tuesday morning, they are all going about their daily routine. But this was not a typical Tuesday morning, and there were about a dozen people crowded around the television. By the time I had gotten to work, another plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

Being a member of the media, able to keep cool under pressure, I thought that this was the beginning of Armageddon and wondered if my soul was right.

Then the towers collapsed. The one that I watched get hit was the
first, imploding on itself and thousands of people trapped inside. At that point, I hadn’t seen footage of people leaping out of the towers, deciding that if they were going to die, they would try to have some say in the matter.

The troops were being corralled at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. For the first time in its brief history, the Trib was putting out an extra edition. I was dispatched to the main newsroom and parts yet unknown.

I got back into the car, and the FM radio was filled with news reports by then. Rock ‘n’ roll stations had scrapped their scheduled programming in favor of news on what was quickly becoming a national catastrophe.

I took pains to avoid the Fort Pitt Tunnels, in part because I’m claustrophobic and in part out of fear of terrorist actions in the tubes. I got to the newsroom by 11 a.m. Newsrooms are organized chaos on a good day, but all hell was breaking loose. There were reports of a hijacked plane over Pittsburgh, its origins and, more ominously, its destination unknown. The tallest building between New York and Chicago is the USX Tower on Grant Street in downtown Pittsburgh. As a precaution, it was evacuated. Eventually, so were the other buildings downtown, creating rush hour at 11:30 a.m.

At that point, I honestly wondered if I would be around to pick up my shirts at the cleaners that evening.

I was dispatched to the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in the city. At that point, Palestinian groups were claiming credit for the bombing.

I filed enough for a story in the second of that day’s extra editions, which would ultimately be peddled in a deserted downtown. After filing, I returned to the main newsroom on the North Side, next to PNC Park. There would be no baseball game there between the Pirates and the Mets that night, nor would there be for another week.

I was sent back to the South Hills bureau, where I completed the work I would have done earlier that day, had all hell not broken loose. I checked my friend Art’s Web site. Art was in New York City, preparing to move back to Youngstown as he fought the good fight against Hodgkin’s Disease (a fight which, two years later, seems to be spiraling toward its inexorable and unpleasant conclusion).

Art watched the towers collapse from the rooftop of his building in Brooklyn. As I read his reports and realized he was safe, with all of my work complete for the day, then and only then did I weep. I went home. My friend Gangster Mike (his name’s Mike and he aspires to be a character in Goodfellas) arrived. He spends a lot of time on the road, and had driven into Pittsburgh from the Buffalo area.

The television was clotted with news reports, replaying the planes
hitting the World Trade towers and their collapse, as careful as a
planned implosion. I had no desire to stay in that night. Mike and I headed to the Saloon.

Initial estimates feared that more than 10,000 people were killed, but those estimates dropped. Ultimately, around 3,000 people met their end that day, sparing it from being the bloodiest day in American history (that dubious honor goes to the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War on Sept. 17, 1862), but it was still horrific. Because in addition to the dead in New York City, Arlington and Somerset County, there were more than 280 million walking wounded. Everyone at the Saloon was in a daze. Conversations were kept at a minimum, but nobody could watch the televisions. Normally, they’d be tuned to a baseball game or some other sports programming, but at that point, they were all tuned to various news channels. After some 80-proof balm in Gilead, we adjourned to my penthouse apartment. I slept the sleep of the dead that night.

The world was gray to me for weeks after that. I saw the opening of Barney Miller or the end of Working Girl, both showing the Twin Towers in their glory, and tears formed in my eyes. I went to a Mets-Pirates game, a week later than I’d planned, and it was like a wake. The atmosphere, normally subdued for a Pirates game in September, was almost sedated. The Mets players wore New York Fire Department or Police Department hats.

Six weeks after Sept. 11, I found myself in the D.C. area for the
wedding of a high school friend. The gang from high school had
gathered from Atlanta, Illinois, Missouri and other points because no matter what state the world was in, we could eat and drink on someone else’s dime. We didn’t pass it up.

On Sunday, I chauffeured a friend to the airport. The sun shone, and the sky was the same shade of blue it was that disturbing Tuesday morning six weeks earlier. Ray Charles was singing “America the Beautiful.” I could see the D.C. skyline in the distance. That song ended, and Bono’s voice came through the speakers of my Chevrolet. “The heart is abloom, it shoots up through the stony ground…”

I knew then I’d be all right. I knew then we’d be all right. I knew that every day for all of us is borrowed time. The President talked about letting the terrorists win. If we lived in fear, then we’ve lost. I will not live in fear, and not in that fatalistic sense that if it’s your day, then it’s your day.

“It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it get away…”
Goddamn right.

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