Lucianne Goldberg's September 13, 2001 Trip to Downtown

Back to the Victim's Page

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON I AM AWAKENED FROM A FITFUL nap by the instant message trill. So far it has been a 14 hour day. It is not over. It was my friend and war buddy Lisa asking, "Can you smell it?" "Smell what?" I IMed back, bewildered - we live in the same neighborhood and if I could smell the same gas leak 15 blocks away we had trouble. "The smell of death," she typed.

I stepped to my open office window that faces south toward the carnage at the World Trade Center and sniffed. The prevailing winds from the war zone downtown had reached us. It smelled of concrete dust, burning plastic, paper, rubber, cardboard, whatever goes into New York skyscrapers when they go up then blow up.

Earlier in the afternoon, armed with a virtually useless but decorative NYPD press pass and my son's NYPolice scanner and NYPolice towing badge, I climbed into the minivan I garage in the city to haul groceries and street furniture. My son, Josh, who had worked all night the night before driving the injured in a seatless school bus to the various downtown hospitals, climbed in along side. We headed south on an almost totally empty Broadway. The silence was beyond eerie. Thousand upon thousands of people, turned out of their offices and enjoying the crystal air of early fall day, shuffled slowly south to see how far below the DMZ of 14th street they could get. Television wasn't good enough. They had to see this for themselves. Every table at every open outdoor cafe was packed. Others waited in line on the street speaking quietly on cell phones. New Yorkers are now all related to each other. The busy-person snarl between strangers has been replaced by a touch of the shoulder, a soft inquiry or two.

One can only see the carnage on TV but the story told around St. Vincent's hospital was the result. Hundreds of people stood in an orderly if irregular line. Each clutched some sort of picture of a loved and missing person. Some were framed, some folded and crumbled, some still caught in wallets and lockets. One woman held a line drawing. It was all she had to help someone else recognize her brother who phoned Tuesday morning and then disappeared. They were waiting, hoping against hope that the bone tired nurses at the door of the lobby would tell them, "Sure, we have that person here. Come right in." It wasn't happening for any of them. They slowly turned away with tears in their eyes.

As we move across the nearly empty city streets, there were New York State Troopers on every corner. No one can remember ever seeing State Troopers in the city. We see ambulances from Bohemia, New York, York, Pennsylvania, Bridgeport, Connecticut.

People have set up tables on the street in Greenwich Village. They are making free sandwiches. No one seems to need or want sandwiches. But, everyone has to do something.

My friend Lisa says she will call me later. She is crying. She has been crying off and on since Monday morning. By 9 last night, the TV said 20,000 people were in the rubble. 20,000? By 9:30 p.m. Rudy Guiliani, our Mayor, our rock and our salvation, was quietly asking the federal government to come up with 6000 body bags. New York doesn't stock that many body bags. New York has never needed anywhere near that many. The Fire Department priest whose job it is to pray for the dead is dead. Our elite Police Department bomb squad - a true band of brothers - is dead.

I watch Peter Jennings get snippy about Attorney General John Ashcroft "apparently he has something more to say." No one seems to have told him producers have set up a one on one interview with Ashcroft. Jennings apologizes but not before he has made an idiot of himself.

At l0 o'clock, Josh calls to say he is "standing in front of the hole" at ground zero and will be going in shortly. He has been asked to help search for bodies. He's phoning to say we won't see him until sometime today. This does not ease the heart. Two more buildings are creaking and ready to collapse. Late, they report there are asbestos particles in the smoke.

I finally shut things down. I am afraid to turn off the phone as I usually do. The last thing I hear is that Al Gore is "stranded in Austria" and Bill Clinton is "under protective guard in a resort in Australia." For the first time in a long, long day there is some good news.

Lucianne.

Friday, September 14, 2001

Rescue.......Recover......Revenge — written in dust — for now.

NEW YORKERS ARE A RELATIVELY impatient lot. Each of us has our own agenda. Our general reaction to changes in our environment is "What's in it for me?" and if it looks like something worth having, "Can I get it yesterday?" Around the World Trade Center where the dust is thick and heavy enough to hold graffiti for more than an hour, someone has written "War"and "God Help Us" and of course, untypeable obscenities as comments on the changes that took place on Black Tuesday. But we are a goal oriented group as well. On the wall at the epicenter someone has scrawled this suggestion on how to proceed. Rescue, Recover, Revenge. This shows our grim love of priorities. Save lives, recover the dead and then support a fire storm from hell to rain down on those who have to savagely tried to destroy us. We are still in the first two phases and very busy.

In order to understand the quiet ferocity under which we are currently living you have to know that New Yorkers are junkies about their city. Mainliners and stoners so hooked on the excitement, the people, the chance to change one's life that this great city promises and delivers, that they die a little when they have to be away from it for too long. New York is their White Lady. Their drug of choice and they cannot, will not live without it. This is why our Mayor cries when he talks of dead fire fighters. They die for this city and for us.

Today I got an E mail from a non-New Yorker whom I love a lot. A good and abiding friend who is not from here but from some bosky southern glen that drips moss and musk, where men say ma'am, still wear hats and tip them and ladies still use fans and talcum powder. He said this has all been too much, too horrible, too scary. He and his lovely southern wife and Bottecelliesque child want to leave - go anywhere where he can make a living - just go - get out of hell on earth where buildings blow up in the shimmering morning sun and snot-nosed teen-age cretins beat up innocent Arab American grocers on Atlantic Avenue.

Last night, he writes, he and his wife stopped in for a bite to eat at a local cafe. There was a firemen at a table. My friend's toddler recognized a hero and offered him his "sippie" cup. The most valuable thing the baby owned.

I wrote my friend that even though he was not a native New Yorker he shouldn't leave, that a child with that kind of judgment deserved to be raised here. Bring up a different kind of kid. One who doesn't cut and run when the going gets dusty and bloody and scary.

LAST NIGHT my older son Josh spent the night in the "hole" at the World Trade Center. They gave him a respirator, an iridescent flash vest, a hardhat that a falling steel beam would crack like a robin's egg, water and as many sandwiches as he had time to scarf down. Because he is a street level working New Yorker, he had the right shoes. This is a town where having proper foot gear can mean everything.

When the crew boss decided Josh was about to collapse with fatigue they told him to go lie down on one of the cots set up in the American Express building (later evacuated. It too, was about the go down.) On his way to a cot he noticed that other workers never made it to the building with the cots. They just sank down on the rubble and slept. Sometimes they fell down in puddles and slept. It didn't matter. When your bones weep, sleep is sleep.

The nightly news showed Clinton on the street here in New York. He was in front of Curry in the Hurry on Lexington Avenue miles from the scene or carnage. He had his arms around a comely, crying brunette holding a picture of a missing loved one. He was feeling her .....pain. Doing something for himself, not New York. Sorry, that may be crass but my loathing for his man requires medication. What, dear God, is he doing here in the first place?

Josh returned from his labors around 2 this afternoon. He had walked most of the way from downtown. He reported that as he dragged his dust covered body passed the loaded cafes, people applauded. A bartender was hanging out a flag in the Village. Josh had strength enough to remind him to fly it at half staff. He got home, showered, changed his crusted shirt and at 5 p.m. he went back downtown.

It is morning now and Josh has not returned from the "hole" where the biggest job is sorting body parts. Matching a leg to another leg, a hand to an arm. If he finds something he gives it to a medic who takes it to be logged. He and thousands are working like this hour on end. They are too old to own and offer a "sippie" cup. Their heart and spine is all they have to give. These are New Yorkers. They don't quit (Fuggetaboutit), they are tough (Wanna make somethin' of it?) and unforgiving (You gonna pay for that, man)

Rescue, recover....that's for now. Revenge?

Hey, bin Laden! Yo momma!

Tuesday, September 18, 2001

Hypocrisy of the Week Award

ABC's "Politically Incorrect" taped a show Monday. Producers were keeping one of the talk show's four guest chairs empty in honor of conservative commentator Barbara Olson, who died in one of the ill-fated planes last week.

Who Giveth This Woman?

In our crippled and wounded city people, who last week led beautiful, active lives, are being identified by their fingers, bits of skin that yields DNA, a sock, a shoe containing a foot, some hair. It's horrible to read with one's morning coffee but we better all brace ourselves. This is our life now.

Despite it all, yesterday afternoon there was a wedding - a defiant gesture to the principle that life must go on. The bride was the sister of New York City Firefighter. She was marrying a New York City cop. With her father dead this year, her brother had been scheduled to give her away. Her brother died in a three alarm fire on Staten Island in August. Now she had no one to walk her down the aisle.

We have a mayor some people love to hate. Rudy Giuliani has taken incredible personal abuse for years. He was called a grandstander, a Nazi, and a bully. Yet, during this terrible week he has led us - a sleepless field marshall, organizing, directing, consoling, explaining and moving, constantly moving, about the city he clearly loves with a passion larger than ours.

Giuliani had a plan when he got elected. He thought a city should be livable, clean and safe. What he did to make New York that way made a lot of people crazy. He started by telling street people who jumped on the hood of your car at a stoplight with a squeegee (ostensibly to wash your windshield) to stop it. It was startling and symbolic. People defended the squeegee men. The poor darlings had a right to "work." He told police to arrest you if you smoked pot on the street, drank beer out of a brown paper bag in public, slept in doorways or peed in the street. He sent vans to drag homeless, dirty and starving drug addicts out of Grand Central Station and forced them to take a shower to get rid of the lice and sleep in a shelter. Chain snatchers went to jail and bunked with muggers. The same man who repeatedly stole cars from our block, time after time, for years, went to prison on Rudy's watch. There have been no cars stolen here in years. No one has been mugged on side streets. No chains have been snatched through open bus windows. The zonked out street person who opened my bank door for me and muttered obscenities as he pressed a dirty coin cup into my chest disappeared. The overflowing trash can on my corner is emptied twice a day by a corps of blue garbed former addicts paid for by something called the Doe Fund. I thanked one of them once, shaking his hand and telling him how much his work meant to the neighborhood. I asked what the Doe Fund gave him in return. He smiled and answered, "Soap and hope."

Through all of this the American Civil Liberties Union went through daily cardiac seizures.

Rudy Giuliani, because he had a plan and didn't care if we loved him, backed our police and lowered our crime rate by half. He got the mob out of the Convention Center and the Fulton Fish Market. Times Square is no longer a cesspool and live porno shops are really hard to find. In his own bull headed, self-confident, sometimes infuriating way he had given us soap and hope. He also proved that the Democrats who ran this city into the sewer and then used the excuse that it was ungovernable were wrong.

I wish Rudy had handled his personal life in a more moral and tidy manner. I wish his hot, Italian temper hadn't made a lot of people dislike him. I wish he had just forgotten about maintaining his tortured comb over and just gone bald like millions of other men that women always found sexy anyway. There was hardly a week that passed that he didn't find something to do that visibly underlined what he was all about. People said he was just another showboating pol looking for attention. "That's just Rudy," they would snarl, at any public gesture.

Yesterday, the sister of the firefighter who died leaving her with no one to give her away walked, beaming, down the aisle of St. James Lutheran Church in Gerrittsen Beach, Brooklyn. She was not alone. Rudy Giuliani had promised to take her brother's place when he died. Yesterday he kept that promise and offered her his arm. Then, he sat for thirty minutes in the front row of the church with her mother and smiled. "That's just Rudy" they will say today.

Right.

One week later. Life goes on........

Food and Tear Stained by The National Hearth

We have become one of the mole people and a bit squirrely from a solid week of around the clock TV. There is a TV in every room where I live. Even the smallest one and my family is grateful, otherwise no one would have showered. It was as though, if you left it for a moment, something more would happen and you wouldn't be part of it because you didn't see it in real time.

We spend a lot of time nitpicking the people who produce our favorite means of communication. The most prevalent complaint among us conservatives is the decidedly liberal spin on the networks. This is why Fox News has flourished.

It's not that Fox is "right wing" it is that it gives the other side of the news and that is so revolutionary it just sounds like its coming from the right. But, network or cable, the people who bring us the nonstop news have behaved magnificently during this great national tragedy. Oh, there were a few false reports. Desperate hope and a few whacked out hoaxers will do that but all in all we got a furious torrent of accurate, up -to- the -second news, 24 hours a day. That's what kept us riveted to the TV as we watched a big chunk of our extraordinary city amputated and destroyed and the world's reaction to the outrage.

We couldn't go anywhere and one doesn't have to go out to eat. They bring it to you - anything you want. Except for the first terrible day the papers always arrived. Our delivery service even brings milk and bagels if you order ahead. There was no reason to leave. And, who wanted to? By the second day otherwise sane people called to ask if we really thought there might be a germ warfare attack on our subways. A shrink friend called to say he had been on the phone 18 hours a day with agoraphobic patients who were convinced that terrorists would be coming in their windows, even on the 21st floor. They came in through the windows of the 102nd floor of the WTC, didn't they? It was hard for him to talk them out of such reasoning.

There wasn't any reason to dress up. A pair of sweats works fine during the day and are perfectly comfortable sleep gear until someone tells you the food stains are beginning to gross them out. You'd stumble in a find a clean T-shirt and pull it on the appease the more hygienically sensitive.

Thank God and a bunch of 23 year olds for inventing the computer because millions of us can work with a 20 second commute. But, the TV is on there too. Our life has become the people inside the flickering glass box.

This was a beat up, literally ratty, and nearly unlivable place when I moved here as a bride. People thought nothing of flinging newspapers and coffee cups they no longer needed into the street. The quickest way to dispose of a flaming mattress was to heave it out the window. But, despite the side streets you couldn't walk on and the places you simply wouldn't go - it was so much fun. The people were so vibrant and in your face. The attitude was indeed, if I can make it here, I'll make it anywhere.

Not until our current mayor did it finally become that shining city on the hill, the "alabaster city undimmed by human tears" that caused Dan Rather to break down on Letterman last night just repeating the words. Last week without warning some faceless subhumans smashed it.

Last weekend I actually go to see what they had done, albeit from the Jersey side of the river and I felt as though I had opened my door to see a beloved child staring up wordlessly dripping blood from the stump of a missing arm.

The first reaction to a wounded child is to bandage up the wound and provide comfort. The next reaction is to scream "Who did this to you?" and the last reaction is to set about tracking them down.

That's why hearing George Bush say, "Dead or alive" felt so good. Our bandy legged, phrase mangling President didn't bite his lip and hang his head. He didn't tell us he felt our pain - he assumed we knew that. He told us he was going to inflict some of his own - big time. We will all watch it happen around the TV, our national hearth - riveted, red eyed and wondering if a larger force didn't know something was up when he gave us real leaders this time around.

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LDotter Note: We thank all who have E mailed us over this last week. Your words and gratitude for this site mean more than we can say. For those of you who wrote concerning our comments about Rudy Giuliani and want to let him know how you feel - the New York Post has set up an E mail account for you to do just that. It is RudyThanks@nypost.com. And to those who wrote that it was hypocritical for us not to mention that when the Mayor moved out of the mansion he moved in with a gay couple we suggest you get a grip. We didn't mention it because we simply forgot. Even so, we thought it was terrific. What better place to find comfort and peace than in a large and beautifully appointed home of a rich supporter and his partner. We understand that these guys make him home made cookies and don't turn in until he's home safely. We think it was the perfect solution for one who is escaping an unbearable domestic situation to go live with people who love you and wait up.

Well, I'm crying and I'm keeping my cool,
Crying and I'm keeping my cool,
I'm crying and keeping, can't you hear me weeping,
I'm crying and I'm keeping my cool.

Charlie Crow - 1997

Okay, that's it. I quit. There is no longer any reward in crying. Most of us have been crying since around 9 o'clock on September 11. That first cry, when we saw the plane hit the first tower, was an Omigod cry. The hand went to the mouth or chest, the eyes bulged in disbelief. Most of us sat down after the second attack and reached for the phone or ran down the office hall desperate to find someone to share what was happening. Then the for-real crying started. The crying that came at night was the most satisfying because if you were alone you could indulge yourself. If you were with someone you love you had some forgiving company.

The worst crying, the crying that leaves you with air bubbles and fluid in your inner ear that makes you half-deaf for days and plants a persistent knot in the chest, is the public crying. This is the kind you try to stop because you (a) don't want to look uncool (b) don't want to upset others or (c) you know if you give in you will be out of control. Then there is that another kind. The kind of crying that just pounces on you when they sing God Bless America or the fourth verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The part about Christ being born among the lilies and transfiguring you and me. By the time you get to that line you are blubbering big time.

Most of us haven't cried this much in our lives. And, I for one, now realize that it is debilitating. It totally freezes one's focus. It immobilizes one with a sadness that sits on your chest like a sumo wrestler. It blots out all other meaningful endeavors and I am going to stop it and find something else to do.

Some people have made lists of people they have been nasty to, called them up and asked forgiveness. This is very A.A. (I don't know which step. It doesn't matter). Some people have cleaned out closets and thrown away a lot of junk they will never use in an attempt at control. A simple decision like "Do I really need to keep the orange polka dot halter with the Loehmann's tag still on it?" is empowering and gives one a small feeling of being safe. A tidy nest is really important and we start up again looking at pictures of people pulling wheeled suitcases around Battery Park. Their inaccessible nests are smashed to pieces. Any orange halter decision has been made for them. It would be covered with dust and soaked with sewage from broken pipes.

Some people have rented a bunch of movies but it's hard to concentrate. You start looking for scenes that have some relevance to our current state of affairs. I rented a completely innocuous piece of comedy fluff only to have the opening scene be a bombed building in New York with a voice over talking about terrorism. The scene meant nothing to the plot but there it was. The movie was three years old. Movies are risky. They can start you up again with the crying.

I once read about the mother of a murdered girl who couldn't stop baking even though there was no one to eat the stuff: Toll House cookies, pecan sandies, cinnamon-nut clusters, oatmeal-date squares and bread, bread, bread. She baked them, wrapped them, froze them until she had no room left in the freezer. This seemed like a crazy thing to do but she said it kept her from crying.

Mayor Giuliani says it's patriotic for us to shop. Have you tried that? Does anything in any store call out to you? Do you give a rat's patoot about a new lipstick or blusher that really won't change your life like you thought it would before?

Friends helps, family helps, talking helps. Drinking, oddly doesn't. Neither do relaxing pills. They just lead to more crying and a sick stomach. One could go to the gym but invariably you run into someone who is crying and sit with them rather than working out. New Yorkers who have never spoken to each other, even though they might live ten feet apart, now speak. They speak in elevators, in line at the bank, at the frozen food counter. The most asked question is "Did you lose anyone?" The answer is often, "Yes" and that starts the crying all over again.

The only solution is to just stop. Stop crying. Stop it now. That part is over. Suck it up and soldier on. Shoulders back, head up. Focus on tomorrow clear eyed and strong. Look for some heroes. Hang out another, bigger flag. Limit your TV to important news shows and not all day, repetitive cable. If something really big happens, you will hear about it soon enough.

In your heart you know the next phase is fury, a white hot uncontrollable fury so be patient and don't cry while you wait for it to come.

In the meantime. Would anyone like a brownie? They are fresh out of the oven. And, there are more in the freezer.

Lucianne Goldberg

We Need A Little Triteness, Right This Very Minute

by Lucianne Goldberg

Hundreds of people, some sobbing, filtered into a building on a Hudson River pier yesterday to begin the agonizing process of applying for death certificates for loved ones still missing in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. A young reporter watching them file by kept hitting herself on the head with her notebook and saying softly, "I hate this, I hate this, I hate this." Her assignment was ask the shell shocked and grieving , "How do you feel?" Her last big assignment had been covering the Lizzie Grubman story. That was the story of the spoiled New York flackess who backed her daddy's Mercedes into a group of party animals waiting outside a nightclub in the Hamptons.

A magazine writer friend spent yesterday focusing on those who worked for a single employer in the World Trade Center. They are all dead. Her assignment is to tell their story as an example of the pain. I speak to this writer several times a week. She has been crying into the phone since September 11. I asked her how the assignment was going. She said, "I hate this, I hate this, I hate this." Her last assignment had been an in depth look at Gary Condit's other girl friends.

For those whose livelihoods are tied inextricably to the fun and excitement of popular culture the world we giggled at has changed. For the millions of pop culture consumers who unashamedly read the Enquirer or the Star, the Globe, People magazine and Page Six of the New York Post, our cultural life is at a stand still. There are even those among us who read the Weekly World News. How else to get a quick and tranquilizing yuck at the adventures of Bat Boy (last seen stalking Jenna Bush on campus) and the Family With the Longest Tongues (even the baby)? No one would have to threaten me to get me to admit that I love this stuff. I would rather curl up on a cold winter night with Vanity Fair than the Federalist Papers. Been there, done that with the Federalist Papers when there was a true need to know but that was years ago. Now I want mindless drivel. I still want to know what happened to Chandra Levy. I don't really care why Tom Cruise and Nicole split but given the choice of reading what it was like to see a couple, holding hands, jumping out of the fifty-seventh floor of the flaming Trade Center and an interview with the hairdresser Nicole confessed all to....gimme the hairdresser's dish and fast.

This doesn't mean one is heartless or insensitive. We are all heartbroken and permanently sad. This simply means we need to give ourselves a break from choking back tears. A respite from the memory and agony of what has happened.

Why can't there be some off beat TV station that would help us through these times. I want to see B-roll of Gary Condit, thrilled at being off the hook, dancing around his Adams-Morgan apartment in a scuba suit and swim fins, high fiving the lamp shades and shrieking, "Free at last."

I want to see Monica Lewinsky, grossly over hot fudge sundaed arriving at the opening of a new Thai-Mex Fusion bistro in Queens with Alex Baldwin on her arm. I want to see a sit-down with Barbara Walters in which Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen Degeneres announce their engagement. I'll tell you how bad I miss the old days. I would even watch the oleaginous Lanny Davis swearing on his children's lives that Clinton really was buying that Rio bikini for Chelsea. I want our junk culture back. I want news of who P. Diddy shot last night and whether that Skakel creep will be tried as a grown up or a kid. Wait....wait...here's how bad it is.....I miss O.J. and news of his search or Nicole's killer(s).

I want junk. I want trash. I want gossip. I want.....I want... God help me....Barbra Steisand's Peace Proposal to the Taliban. I want Chris Hitchins and Gore Vidal and the Naked Chef to get into some horrendous hissy fit food fight. I want blind items about Tina Brown leaving Harry Evans for Steven Brill. Anything, just anything to make us forget the pain of 300 crushed and burned up firemen and the 1500 daddyless kids left behind by dead Cantor Fitzgerald employees.

The pompous and intellectually superior (and I say, insecure, among us) will say junk news is for the brain dead, for the incurious and undereducated. To this I say, "Feh!" - Junk news is for those of us who know how to protect ourselves from total mental collapse when the real world is too much to bear.

Lastly, while I'm asking for the impossible. I want a little respect given and funds raised for statues in the park and certificates of appreciation from every mental health organization in the land to Richard Johnson and Jeanette Walls, to Liz Smith and Cindy Adams and Mitchell Fink and that married couple over at the Daily News - Rush and Malloy and Neal Travis and the memories of Hedda and Louella and all those who toil in that down market, slightly sleazing world of gossip. It doesn't seem so mindless any more when its the one thing we have that can save our sanity.

Two things I know for sure right now. There is going to be a war and Steadman is never going to marry Oprah.