Tower Stories Read online

  Debris from the planes was later found at remarkable distances from the point of impact.

  She’d said she’d covered her face against the flying debris and crawled into the lobby of a building, where she tied her shoe and left once everything was over. Then she’d walked all the way across the Williamsburg Bridge to get home.

  Evan and I got to the DoubleTree Hotel8 and I thought that maybe they’d let us use their phones.

  Once we got inside, the people there looked at us as if we were nuts. This was Midtown and we were the only people covered in soot head to toe. We must’ve looked like space aliens. Little did they know, there were hundreds more people like us. Thousands. But most of them were walking north from the Trade Center. Because of the bus we’d been lucky to board, Evan and I arrived about an hour or so before them.

  The receptionist behind the desk at the DoubleTree looked at me and said, “You’re dirty.” A definite reproach.

  Uh huh. Thanks for telling me. “Okay,” I said. I remember getting angry. “I was just in the World Trade Center and I need to use your phone.”

  She just kept looking at me.

  “I need. To use. Your phone.”

  She turned the phone around for me to use without taking her eyes off me. I decided to call Kim’s mother in West Caldwell, New Jersey, figuring that, if anyone knew where Kim was, her mother would. I’ve dialed that number thousands of times. But on that day, I had to make four or five attempts to get it right. First I couldn’t remember the number. Then my fingers were shaking so badly.

  I finally got through and my mother-in-law answered. She said she’d heard from Kim and knew where to find her.

  Kim had been evacuated from NBC but hadn’t known where to go after that, or what to do. One of her co-workers had shown up late to work and had no idea what was going on, just that their building was emptying out. And this co-worker had a cousin who worked in a building close by, so they went there. Kim’s mom gave me the number where I could reach her.

  Apparently, Kim had reasoned that if she went to another office, she’d have multiple phone lines at her disposal. I called at about noon and … well, we were happy to hear from one another. About twenty minutes later, she met me at the DoubleTree Hotel and we started figuring out how to find a way home.

  That’s not the end of the story. Not really. I’ve been keeping to myself lately, spending a lot of time with Kim. We’ve been married three years, did I tell you that? Three years in May. We met in high school, so what does that make it? We’ve been together over thirteen years.

  Why have I kept to myself? Because I’ve been an emotional wreck. Not so much in breaking down and crying a lot, it’s more like sudden mood changes. I’ll flash to anger like never before. I’ve always had a short fuse, that’s nothing new, but I’ve always been able to keep it in check. Lately it feels like, why bother?

  I’ve also been hideously depressed. I go from normal to extremes, these huge ups and downs. From what I’ve read, it’s post-traumatic stress, but you know what? I refuse to go to any counseling—for multiple reasons. First of all, I don’t think that therapists are going to suddenly make me better. It’s gonna take time, a lot of talking and a lot of living. Second? I had a horrible experience with the hospital I went to on September 11. My insurance paid for everything, but they kept sending me these astronomical bills. They found out I had a concussion, by the way. Which probably explains why I walked the streets so long like a zombie.

  I say I don’t talk to people, and I say that I’ve pushed a lot of people away. I have. Will that continue? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this much: a lot of my friends come to me when they’re having hard times and it turns out that I sort of become their counselor. But I felt as if none of them were there for me after the eleventh, when I needed them. Not that anybody could really be a counselor for this. The whole city’s in need of counseling right now. I know I’m being selfish.

  And I’m truly sorry that my friends are having problems with this and that. One guy I know—his marriage is breaking up and I’m sorry for that, I truly am. But I don’t have time for it right now. I keep thinking about the hundreds of bodies I saw. So instead of being an asshole, which I have great potential for right now due to my temperament, I haven’t answered phone calls. I haven’t responded to emails just so that I don’t lash out at people.

  I guess it’s safe to say that I’m trying to give myself space to take care of my own shit. I don’t want to hurt anyone in the process.

  I went back to work the week after everything happened. What can I say? They needed stuff done and I thought that it was a way for me to focus on something else. I was driving myself nuts sitting at home. Once I found out that everyone from my office lived, I went back to work. Work sounded like a good idea.

  So now I take it day by day. It helps that I’ve come up with a way of looking at things. For instance, I make a parallel between my situation and the situation of people who’ve seen combat. My grandfather was on the beach at Normandy, and one time he told me what he witnessed there. It was horrible, of course. But somehow he’d managed to be a part of this horrific event and maintain a normal life. He never allowed that horror to overtake his personality.

  So I use that as a motivation. I won’t allow this event to redefine me. In all honesty, it has and it hasn’t, but I prefer not to think of myself as a victim. I’m a soldier.

  UPDATE

  Tom Haddad and I caught up with each other in late January 2007, at a diner off Park Avenue South. I admit that I had reservations about seeing Tom again. The man I remembered from our first interview was prone to anger and dark lapses in conversation. Under the circumstances, it was a perfectly understandable reaction. All the same, I wondered how Tom had weathered the past five years. His experience on 9/11 had been dire. How had he managed it since?

  My fears evaporated the moment Tom slid into the bench across the table from me. He was smiling ear to ear. We exchanged a few pleasantries and ordered coffee. Then I realized that, miraculously, I was grinning, too. Tom’s pleasure was infectious.

  “It’s funny,” he said, looking around and chuckling. “Kim, Evan, and I went to a diner just like this one on West 34th Street on the afternoon of 9/11. Didn’t I tell you that? We tried to hop a ferry back to New Jersey but the lines were too long. So we found a diner and walked inside. Evan and I were still covered head to toe in the debris, and we ordered grilled cheese sandwiches. I never ate mine. Guess I had too much on my mind right then.”

  “How have things been?” I asked.

  “Great,” he said, shrugging and grinning. “Really. Kim is fine and the kids are great.”

  “Kids?”

  “We’ve got two sons now,” Tom said. “Mitchell, who’s three years old, and Malcolm, he’s seventeen months.” Tom beamed when he reported this, and it was immediately obvious that he was crazy about his boys.

  He went on to tell me how he and Kim moved back to their hometown of West Caldwell, New Jersey, and bought a house three blocks from Kim’s mother. “I don’t know why we did that. Maybe it was the need to return to someplace comfortable. We’d both grown up seeing this old house from the 1930s on the corner, and suddenly there it was, for sale. So we bought it as a fixer-upper and we’ve been working on it ever since. We’ll probably still be patching it up for a few years to come, but—I gotta tell you—I love it. I really do.”

  Tom’s still working for the same company, but a promotion raised him to the level of Creative Director. “9/11 hurt our business a lot,” he admitted. “We used to offer full in-house service in all areas, but nowadays we’ll partner up and hire out a lot of jobs. Rather than using a staff of full-time employees, we hire freelancers on a per-job basis from outside the state and even outside the country. It’s a different model than we used to use, but it’s much more suitable to the way we’re working right now.”

  I asked Tom if he ever thought about what happened on 9/11, hoping that the question wouldn’t i
n any way spoil his good mood. But Tom took the question with great equanimity. “Do I think about it?” he asked. His eyes were fixed on the coffee he was stirring into a smooth brown vortex within his cup. “Every day. Yeah, every single day. And I won’t lie to you, there’ve been some really rough times. Here and there I’ve experienced sudden bouts of panic and anxiety. Do you remember the blackout in August 2003?9 That really rocked me. But the incidents have been getting less and less frequent.”

  “Have you ever considered getting professional counseling?” I asked.

  Tom shook his head. “No. And I don’t mean any disrespect toward mental health practitioners, but I figured, what could anyone really tell me about my experiences that I wouldn’t have to figure out on my own? Besides, I found something else that keeps me sane.” And with that, he pulled out a sketchbook and started leafing through the pages.

  It’s difficult to describe what he showed me. A different drawing leaped forward from every page, each stunningly detailed to a professional level. At first I didn’t understand what I was looking at, but Tom said:

  “My wife bought me my first pad. She thought it would help me work things out. And I had all this time commuting to the city from home, an hour on the bus each way, every day. So I’ve used the time to draw. I call it my Bus Therapy.”

  The drawings, quite frankly, were astonishing. In one, a white-collar worker with the head of a bison, in shirtsleeves and a tie, hunched over a computer keyboard, typing with its hooves. In another, a beast with the body of a man and the head of a fish rode a lonely bus from someplace to another, all the while staring out the window at the barren landscape moving past.

  In all, Tom has filled countless notebooks with his work. His attic, he said, is full of them. “I can’t seem to stop,” he grinned. “It’s really something. But I should tell you: most of these drawings have nothing to do with my experience on 9/11.”

  I re-interviewed Tom Haddad in late September 2020. We talked about how he profited from an experimental therapy program designed to treat soldiers with PTSD. You’ll find that interview at the back of this edition in the new Retrospectives section.

  1 From other accounts in this book, it is likely that this man was Frank DeMartini, an architect employed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who also worked closely with Rick Zottola at Leslie E. Robertson Associates. See Rick Zottola in the “Ground Zero and the Volunteers” section of this book. According to some estimates, DeMartini—along with his Port Authority colleagues Pablo Ortiz, Peter Negron, and Carlos da Costa—saved at least fifty lives in Tower One before perishing when the building collapsed.

  2 A Sky Lobby was a sort of dock that increased office space without having to put in more elevators. There were elevator banks at the base of each Tower that would go direct to the Sky Lobbies on the seventy-eighth or forty-fourth floors. From there, you would take a local elevator to the floor you worked on.

  3 Sculpture by artist Fritz Koenig. A huge gold sphere made of steel and bronze, created in 1971 as a monument to world peace through international trade.

  4 Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation. A series of trains connecting points in New Jersey, notably Hoboken, to stations scattered throughout Lower Manhattan.

  5 The church mentioned here was probably St. Paul’s.

  6 The Naudet brothers, a pair of French filmmakers, happened to be filming a documentary on the New York Fire Department on 9/11.

  7 The United Nations, located on 1st Avenue between 41st Street and 42nd Street.

  8 In Times Square.

  9 Referring to the Northeast blackout of 2003, a massive power outage that became the largest such incident in American history and affected the cities of Cleveland, Toledo, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Detroit, and parts of New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, Long Island, and most of northeastern Canada. Estimates have recorded the affected area at 9,300 square miles. The incident was undeniably serious and incredibly confusing when it happened, not to mention (cont’d) expensive: outage-related financial losses were estimated at $6 billion. However, retrospective analysis shows that cases of looting and civic unrest were much higher in the legendary New York City blackout of 1977. Rumors of terrorism quickly circulated as having been the root of the blackout but these were dispelled within an hour, leaving many people to wonder who was more dangerous, Islamic fundamentalists or the power companies.

  FLORENCE ENGORAN

  Florence Engoran, thirty-six, worked as a credit analyst at a securities firm on the 55th floor of 2 World Trade Center. She and her husband moved out of Manhattan and into a home in the suburbs six months previous to September 11.

  “So many things happened in the spring of 2001,” she says. “We had just purchased a house, we moved to New Jersey, and I switched jobs. Then I found out I was pregnant.”

  Florence was five months into her pregnancy when United Airlines Flight 175 struck her Tower.

  AT 8:40 on the morning of September 11, I got a coffee in the World Trade Center lobby and took the elevator up to the 55th floor of Tower 2. Everything seemed normal enough until I got off the elevator and saw everyone standing around, confused. I heard someone say, “A small plane hit the other building.”

  I wasn’t especially upset by the news. We hadn’t seen or heard or felt anything. Usually when things like that happen, people stop working and start milling around.10 So we were like, “What should we do?”

  Some people said, “Oh, just sit down, let’s keep working, we have to get out some focus reports.” They went back to what they were doing.

  I went to my office, which was one of five against the far wall. I put my bag down, but something didn’t feel right. I walked out onto the floor. Our space on 55 was a big open court with [work] cubes and then a huge window on the other side where you could see the Hudson River. And within a few minutes, we started to see flaming debris falling past the window glass. Then the noise …

  Huge boulders of concrete. Flaming pieces of paper. At first it sounded like it was starting to rain. But then it got so loud …

  Now people were really stunned. I still had my coffee in hand. I didn’t go back to my office to pick up my bag, I turned right around and ran to the fire steps. This wasn’t a conscious thought on my part. I don’t even recall wondering, should I go to the elevators? The stairs? Which one? My mind was on autopilot: I went to the stairs.

  It was a panic situation. People started running. We had a trading floor attached to a section of our office and the traders were getting up and running to the stairs. I thought, I’m five months pregnant, and now I’m gonna have to walk down fifty-five flights? Evidently, that was the case. I’d have to make the trip with all these guys running past me, pushing to get into the stairs.

  The stairway was wide enough for two people across, no more. You either stayed against the wall or held on to the handrail. The woman behind me started to scream, “Go faster! Go faster!”

  I screamed back at her, “I’m pregnant, I’m going as fast as I can!” But other people were saying, “Everyone calm down. Relax. Just keep going down. Focus on walking.” It took five flights for me to realize I was still holding my cup of coffee. I put it down and kept moving.

  I wasn’t exactly in the peak of health. I’d been having morning sickness, and I was thinking, what if I pass out? No one’s gonna help me. I’d just switched jobs, so I was pretty new at the office; I didn’t know a lot of people. But these two guys I’d gotten to know bumped into me and essentially said, “Oh, there’s Florence.” One guy’s name was Brimley, the other was Brian.

  I’d only known them since May. They worked in the accounting department. When I say I knew them, it was more like we said hi in the morning and that was about it. But these two men promised that they were gonna stay with me the whole time down, which they did.

  We kept hearing announcements that said, “A small plane has hit the first building. The incident has been contained there, you don’t have to go down. “Over and
over and over again. But in my head, I was not paying attention to this. I was thinking: I’m on my way down, I’m going down. You can tell me later on that everything’s okay.

  We probably got to floor 20 or thereabouts when the second plane hit our building.

  Up until that point, I guess most people were thinking, it’s really not so bad, we’re not the building that got hit. Let’s just get out of here and everything’ll be fine. Even though we were nervous and had seen the falling debris and wondered if our building might catch fire higher up, we thought we were safe. But when our building was hit, people started to scream. The impact knocked people right off their feet. I held onto the handrail with everything I had. The building started swaying so badly; it moved six to ten feet, that’s what it felt like.

  Everybody started calling out, “What’s happening?”

  “Oh my God, what was that?”

  Different people saying, “They’re setting off bombs!”

  People took out their cell phones and tried to call their families, but other people panicked and said, “No! Stop using the cell phones. Maybe that’s what’s detonating the bombs as we go down.” Crazy things.

  And then the lights went out. Concrete dust started wafting up the stairwell—we were breathing it in. People kept screaming but no one was moving. Now I could smell the reek of what I guess was jet fuel; it smelled like gas.