September 2002 Archives

Hi everyone coming over from Melissa's site - thank so much for joining me, and thanks to her for her relentless publicity on my behalf! This is just a quick note to say I haven't disappeared, and that there's an entry forthcoming. Twas a busy weekend.

On September 21, 2001, I had my first real job interview.

It was the first time I had been back to Manhattan since the towers' collapse. I'd been watching the news broadcasts, volunteering at the Staten Island port where the rescue workers went for rest and food, living in the wake of the devastating events without work or school to distract me. But I hadn't yet crossed the river to the city, and truth be told, when my future boss called me on September 20 and asked if I'd like to come in for an interview the next day, I may have said yes instantaneously, but I was dreading the journey.

The closest I had come to the attack site was the day after the tragedy, when my mother and I silently drove to the tip of Staten Island. On normal days ferries would be shuffling in and out of port, but that day it was still. We stood at an iron railing and watched our city smoke. We tried to accept that the cloud would clear, and the towers would still be missing.

By the end of that week, we had signed up at the Staten Island Home Port, taking the only shift available to work - 4 through 8am. We cooked food and made beds, filled coffee cups and served breakfast for the firemen, policemen and military using the port as a place of respite before heading back to the war zone. We wrapped thousands of packages for the servicepeople - one type of which held a gas mask, rubber gloves and Q-tips soaked in Vaseline, which when placed in the nose kept the smell and pollution of the rubble from overpowering. We spoke with, and cried with, grown men the size of linebackers, who hung their heads over their scrambled eggs as they prepared for the day ahead. I spoke to a chaplain who told us about a fireman who had been avoiding his son since the tragedy because he didn't want him to see his Daddy cry. Even the dogs (who spent the day sniffing out remains at the Fresh Kills Landfill, where the towers now reside) came back to the facility drooping, limping, lacking the life and energy to even lift their heads when petted. We watched as the walls filled up with drawings from children, as the cards came pouring in, as restaurant after restaurant showed up with donations of food that could feed a small country, as retail stores dropped off helmets, boots, blankets, clothes. We watched as we started to trudge toward recovery. We may not have been moving debris or giving blood - but each coffee cup was important, and each serviceperson got a smile before they went back to the city.

At home, we huddled. We had made it past those awful first moments, and that was everything. A string of miracles that on any other day would be simply routine had delivered my family home to me. My sister, usually on the train right under the WTC at 8:48, had decided at 8:30 to do an errand in the morning rather than afternoon – and that errand may have saved her life. My father, usually in and around downtown Manhattan every day, arrived back in our house shortly after the second plane went into the tower. I had been alone, phones cut off, watching and crying and trying desperately to find someone on Instant Messenger who could get in touch with someone I knew. The door to my house opened, my father shouted, "Meliss?" and I screamed, nearly knocking him over from the force with which I hugged him. Then we just watched, open-mouthed and pale, wordless and speechless.

We got through that first week by that same speechless watch, by hugging and holding and crying. And I never left the island, even though my mother and sister walked down to the Trade Center a few days after, walked down to say their prayers over the site and came back covered in ash, with some burnt paper from Cantor Fitzgerald in their hands. We collected memorials – a high school friend of my sister’s, an uncle of our very good friend, a professor from Georgetown. All in all, we were monumentally blessed, and we knew it.

But I had already consigned myself to never, ever finding a job. If I had thought the market was bad before September 11, surely it was nothing to what it was afterwards – and I didn’t really care. I didn’t put out a single resume after that day, though I’d send dozens the week before. And the possibility of this job, my job at MTV Networks, was all but forgotten to me – I’d sent the resume in at least two months prior and hadn't really thought about it for a few weeks. I was content without work, though; I wanted to be with my family and enjoy my time home, stop the mad search for success.

And then I got the phone call. "Can you come in tomorrow?" The ambition in me jumped to say yes, and the next day I was on the ferry, crossing the chasm for the first time since the attacks.

I stood on the deck facing Manhattan – alone .The ferry was full, but everyone was inside the boat, a movement of avoidance I've never seen before. The ruins were still smoldering. I couldn’t see the heap itself – just a wall of buildings that were not the Twin Towers, and smoke.

As we got closer to the mainland, more people came out from the belly of the boat. They filed out until there was no more room, and we were all staring straight ahead at the approaching city. From our left, the Statue of Liberty came into view. Everyone turned his or her head toward it in one silent movement, and watched her in her unblinking, defiant stance, until she disappeared behind the scope of our vision.

When I turned back, the boat had shifted, and we were close. I smelled burnt…burnt something. There in front of me was the pyre, the funereal mass of steel and flesh. I wasn’t prepared for the image, and I staggered. I held onto the boat for support, and noticed a few others doing the same. I thought for a moment I would vomit.

I arrived in New York City on that day — the day on which I would begin my professional career, the day on which I got off the island and stepped right into the real New York at its most vulnerable time, the day on which I realized that not only does life go on but you have to go on with it — not expecting my life to change, and certainly not expecting an event that has wrought so much pain and suffering to watermark the very beginning of my real life. But it has, and I can’t help but feel special for the welcome. I walked into New York at the edge of its new consciousness, and became part of this wonderful city as I became truly conscious of the real world.

I've loved this city my whole life. And now, I'm in love with it. I heart New York.

I just don't get Bon Jovi elitists. They swarmed out of the woodwork on Thursday, as I work in Times Square, Center of the World, and 30 floors below me the city was revving up for the NFL Kickoff Concert. It made our building rumble. I was all twittery; I scoped out the best viewing location and spent the latter half of the day sprinting between the glassy conference room and my jumbled cube.

And that's when the bashers came, one by one, out of their holes. Those too-hip for eighties rock, way-past-it downers whose iPods are stuffed with nothing but bach, condescending scoffers who think the "hair band" phase was a crock. "Pfft, you like bon jovi," they said. "You're so un-cool."

Pretentious posers, all of them.

I'm the first to admit that Bon Jovi isn't grade-a, life-changing, Grammy-worthy, musically-challenging, lyrically-provocative, history-making music. I listen to it occasionally, but sparingly, as its chronic sameness can sometimes grate on my nerves. It's on my playlist but below a bevy of more worthy artists (currently musicians like Zero 7, Coldplay, Ella, Janet, Norah Jones, Peter Gabriel, Prince, Tori Amos, Sting, U2, lotsa showtunes - and we'll discuss that another time).

But seeing Bon Jovi live is, always has been, and continues to be the most musically pure experiences of my life. Those who say you have less "culture" or are less refined because you can jam to Gershwin at your desk one minute then run into Times Square and rock to "Living on a Prayer" the next are not merely misguided, they're missing out. They live in their cerebral, musically-exclusive world without ever knowing how much fun they don't know how to have. Simply not liking Bon Jovi is one thing — thinking others lesser mortals because they do…that's just snobby.

I'm not a birthright Bon Jovi fan, as I'm not from Jersey. I'm from Staten Island. In the eighties, the Staten Islanders wore their hair large, but only cautiously so; the Aqua Net was only pulled out on special occasions (Aussie sprunchspray, Aqua Net's second cousin, sufficed for everyday wear). Our hair height never truly defied its gravitational limitations, as it did in our western neighbors' neighborhoods. And we didn’t have the acidic attitude or backscratcher fingernails of Brooklyn girls either; we were the tame ones, sandwiched between the state that had the name and the borough that played the game.

But the one thing we all learned, inevitable as pimples and puberty, was Bon Jovi. Perhaps it's to do with the singalong nature of the songs. Perhaps its Jon Bon Jovi himself, who married his high school sweetheart and sings about love without restraint. Perhaps it's that the music doesn't seem to know sadness. It's all about keepingthe faith, and loving people forever, and staying together through the worst, and bouncing back from defeat, and staying strong and true to yourself. It could be Christian rock if it wasn't so damn sexy.

Or maybe it's just that it's fun.

Whatever it is, you put fifty thousand fans together in one open space, plug Bon Jovi in, and you get three hours of pure music, of pure good spirits, of fifty thousand people knowing every word and where everyone goes in every beat of every song. You get nostalgia without the bittersweet, high school memories without high school horrors, a place where you don't think - you just sing. And you sing as loud and hard as you possibly can.

And to those people who prance around flaunting their too-good-for-the-hair-band status - I feel sorry. I feel sorry that you didn't get to have fights with your sister over who would wear the "Welcome Home, Bon Jovi" T-shirt to school after the homecoming concert. I'm sorry you didn't get to make out at a grade school dance with "I'll Be There For You" playing in the background. I'm sorry you don't know what it's like to just throw back your head, laugh, dance and sing with the utter abandon only present at Bon Jovi concerts. I'm sorry you can't live your entire adolescence through one hard-pumping song.

But mostly, I'm sorry you can't understand. And I'm sorry I can't understand you either.

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Oh yeah - hi! And welcome to my site. Poke around, have fun.