September 11, 2011

A few days ago, I was contacted by an alumna of my high school who is now a reporter for the New York Daily News.  Our high school was (is) located about 400 meters from the World Trade Center. She had found a picture I took on 9/11 of students from my high school being evacuated and wanted to use it.  She also wanted me to write something about it.  In about an hour and a half between classes I wrote an article in the teacher's lounge of my school on a legal pad.  When I finished the article, I found I was furious.  Who was I furious at? Was I angry at the terrorists? You might as well be angry at a force of nature, a typhoon or an earthquake.  The School Administration? They didn't do a bad job, really.  Most of my anger at them was adolescent angst.  The Bush Administration? They've been gone three years now, rejected by the American people and history.  I suddenly realized I didn't know why I was angry.  I had no reason to be. So I let it go.  I transcribed the article to my computer and emailed it to the reporter.  It was rejected by her editor.  This is that article...

I was 15 years old on 9/11, a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School, and that was a good thing.  Fifteen year old boys are immortal and invulnerable, at least in their own minds.  So on 9/11, after seeing American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower, I skipped out of class and walked around the school taking pictures.  It would be another two or three years before everyone had a camera on their cellphone, and my camera was a hyped piece of 1990’s technology called the Sony Mavica.  About the size and weight of a brick, it took 1-megapixel images and recorded them on a floppy disk.  I had three disks with me, enough for about 30 photos.  I wasn’t sure if I should take pictures of the burning towers, brilliantly framed through the floor-to-ceiling windows in my 9^th floor homeroom, or the reaction of the students at the school.

I took a picture of Julie, an inaccessible purple-haired punk with a safety pin pierced through her left eyebrow and a Powerpuff Girls backpack.  I’d silently crushed on her since we’d sat next to each other in Music Appreciation on the first day of freshman year.   She was sobbing in the 6^th-floor hallway.  When she saw me taking her picture, she yelled, “How could you do something like that, Sam? How can you take a picture of someone when they’re like this?”  I don’t remember the response I stuttered, but I do remember thinking, “Hey, she knows my name.”  I deleted the picture.

I took a picture of Vlad, a self-styled Russian Mafia gangster who told stories of guns, speed and crashing BMWs on Brighton Beach Blvd.  Even now I don’t know whether or not to believe him.  In the picture, he’s wearing the uniform of gangstas and suburban wannabe gangstas-oversize sneakers, basketball shorts, a plain white t-shirt and a Yankee’s cap with a straight brim.  He’s perched on a windowsill, the soft light from the smoke reflected on his face.  I kept the picture.

I took a picture of Roman, a preternaturally cool and self-confident gay 15-year old.  He’s alone in our empty English classroom.  The teacher, in one of those miracles of the Department of Education, would show up 20-30 minutes late for class every day on an old granny bicycle, but couldn’t be fired. (I later heard she was reassigned to be a college advisor.)  On that day, she didn’t show up at all, so most of the students left.  Roman is sitting on a desk, watching the classroom TV showing what was going on 500 yards away.  He’s wearing a T-Shirt that says, “I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist, I’m a slave to a world that doesn’t give a damn.”  A moment or two later, the first tower fell.

In Art Spiegelman’s oversize comic book, “In the Shadow of No Towers,” Spiegelman, drawn as his usual anthropomorphic mouse, shows up at Stuyvesant to get his freshman daughter.  While arguing with the security guard, he hears the principal announce, “due to the terrorist attacks, students will not be allowed to go outside for lunch today.”  I don’t remember that particular announcement, but it summed up the attitude of the school administration.  Terror attacks, displacement, toxic dust in the air, trucks carrying rubble to marine cranes just outside the school walls; these things were merely bureaucratic obstacles to the efficient running of Stuyvesant High School, and should in no way be allowed to interfere with anyone’s college application or GPA.

So by October, after a few surreal weeks of Stuyvesant classes and teachers at Brooklyn Tech, we were back at school and nothing had changed.  This was, I felt, for the best.  “I mean,” 15-year old me reasoned, “shit happens, y’know?”  Our school became the recipient of hand drawn posters from high schools in middle America, scrawled over with hearts, American flags and phrases like “Bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon.  Kill 10x as many civilians.  Make the survivors pay reparations.” 

I wondered about the students who wrote the posters.  Did they really believe what they were writing or were they cynical teenagers like us?  And we, the last generation of the 20^th century, were cynical.  We had grown up watching Beavis and Butthead and listening to angry, flatulent young Eminem; we learned about oral sex from our president, and in the last election “Who would you rather have a beer with?” was a serious qualification for candidates.  When enough people in Palm Beach voted for Pat Buchanan to throw the election to Bush, we shrugged because, hey, Shark Week was on.

We wore our cynicism proud, took 9/11 head on, made plane crash and jumper jokes.  We groaned through pious early memorials: 6-month anniversary, last girder removed from ground zero, 1-year anniversary, the Republican Convention.  We were horrified and embarrassed as the tragedy that happened in our backyard was hijacked to justify the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. 

And then I went to college, and everyone around me had watched 9/11 on TV, and none of them lived with it every day for three years.  My cynicism and bluntness made me a weirdo.  If I told my 9/11 story in the dining hall, described the view from my homeroom’s window, watching the debris fall and trying to figure out if it was a girder or a jumper, the words on Roman’s T-shirt, everyone got quiet, stopped talking and eating, looked awkward.  So I’ve stopped telling the story.

I’m 25 now, and a teacher.  I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer, riding herd on classrooms of English students at a village school in Armenia.  Last winter, at an ex-Soviet ski resort, I was having dinner with a group of other American 20-somethings.  For some reason, one girl decided to eagerly recount her 9/11 story, the usual banal I-was-in-my-classroom-when-someone-came-in-and-said-there-was-a-terrorist-attack-and-I-couldn’t-believe-it.  I sat, twisted my napkin, looked at my lap and waited until she was finished and the topic of conversation changed.

On 9/11/2001, I didn’t want to be anywhere except New York City, my home.  But on 9/11/2011, I’m happy to be anywhere but.  That cynical 15-year old, the one who can’t stand self-righteous piety from authority figures and wants to just get on with it is still within me.  I have no interest in ceremonies or dedications.  Maybe I’ll get together with a few other expat New Yorkers and drink a Manhattan, if we can dig up some vermouth and bitters.  Most of all I’m glad I won’t have to see that offensive bumper sticker “9/11: Never Forget.”  As if I ever could.