The first time I ever drank Jack Daniels whiskey was also the last time.
It was 25 years ago today – September 11th 2001. In Brooklyn, New York. I found myself drinking it just a couple of hours after the World Trade Center had been attacked and destroyed, a few miles away from where we lived.
Just before 9am, I heard a newsflash on the radio as I was getting ready to go to work. Ian and I clambered out our pokey kitchen onto the fire escape and up onto the roof of our 4-storey apartment building. From there we looked across the beautiful blue sky to the familiar skyline of lower Manhattan. Then we saw with our own eyes a plane flying into the second tower, and then, a little while later a massive cloud of smoke which cleared to reveal both towers were gone. Just gone from the skyline. The shock we felt was gradual, slowly taking hold of our reason. Was this an accident, was it something else, what was going on?.
What else would we do but think of the company of friends, and maybe a strong drink. We had no smart phones or Whatsapp in those days where we could converge in a virtual space and express our shock, share thoughts, news.
We had dial-up internet at home and I managed to get an email to my sister out in Long Island to say we were fine and she ended up passing the word around the family. I was smart to do that.
Next thing we knew, our dial-up went down: either knocked out or just jammed with panicked traffic.
And from that point on, the universe of Brooklyn, that huge but separate part of New York, gently closed in around us. We had no TV or radio as our local stations were beamed from an antenna on top of the twin towers. We learned by text, and instinct, that we weren’t meant to travel anywhere. Subways and buses were stopped to stop people moving around.
The sky above our roof went eerily silent as the airspace was closed, while later in the afternoon it ripped with the sounds of fighter jets. I hated that bombastic sound, so un-New York. But Ian reminded me they were there to protect us.
Is it fair to keeping talking about 9/11 when so many other terrible and terrifying things have happened in many places since then, and will continue to happen? Is it old history?
But for me and clearly for the majority of Americans (a country that had never before experienced invasion) this was a marker that we were living out history, it was happening to us whether we liked it or not. And things were going to change. I am not an American and I moved away from New York a long time ago after three amazing years but I deeply loved that city and my time there; it’s part of my identity.
Watching it all from our rooftop we were at a loss as to what to do. Looking down we could see people on the street going about their normal business, walking slowly, carrying grocery bags. Cars moved as normal. This wasn’t a movie, the streets were not full of panicky yelling people. Or maybe it would go that way?
I texted my friend Sarah who lived 20 minutes from us and she invited us over. She had cable TV and it was working. Some others were coming over, stranded at home with nothing else to do.
On our way to Sarah’s place we decided to stop at the hospital off 7th Avenue. Maybe we could give blood. Something useful to offer, feeling useless as we did. We joined a long line of other Brooklynites waiting for the same reason, until a nice nurse came out to tell us that there was no need for donors. There were no reports of injuries coming from the towers. People had died outright and, we would learn, many would never be found.
As we left the hospital with our heads low a couple of old Italian guys sitting outside asked us what the long line was for. “It’s because of what happened at the World Trade Center this morning”, I told them, “we were all trying to give blood. But they don’t want it.”
They looked at each other: “What are you talking about?” We told them what happened, the words sounding odd as they came out of my mouth. They didn’t seem so bothered and stayed sitting on the wall as we walked on, watching their little Brooklyn world moving quietly about them.
Sarah was, and still is, a good friend, and a real sweetheart from Tennessee. We all hugged and she brought out the bourbon, the Jack Daniels – she had nothing else – and handed us a glass. We sat on her couch clutching her cats and watched CNN for hours – looking for nuggets of explanation, from New York, then from Washington which was also under attack. And maybe other places in the US too. In the world? We didn’t know. The day passed in a haze
Later on, as we walked home, tipsy from JD and stodgy pizza, we saw people coming out of the ground at the Grand Army Plaza subway station. Their clothes were white from the slowly-settling ash of the streets in lower Manhattan. Their faces were also white, from shock and exhaustion, many of them having been stuck on a non-moving subway for hours, out of communication with their loved ones and the bigger picture of what was going on above-ground.
I had managed to avoid that situation for myself as I had not yet left for work when the attacks happened, but that would probably have been the worst that could have happened, with my workplace being near Houston street.
Over the coming days as the city stayed at a halt and no-one went to work, we checked in with an ever-widening network of friends, acquaintances and colleagues.
One friend who worked in finance in a neighbouring building witnessed bodies falling (or, he thought, more likely, jumping) from what had been the tallest building in the US.
One of my old work clients had set up his own startup’s office in one of the towers. His funeral a week later in New Jersey was devastating; so many people not knowing what to say to each other, feeling this was just one of many many funerals around the region.
Another friend revealed that his brother-in-law was one of those who helped force down the Pennsylvania plane, the ramifications of which have stayed with his family.
Later still, back at work, I learned of many other people who died that day, the invisible victims who are rarely mentioned: the cleaners, janitors and window-cleaners who serviced the towers, most of them immigrants in New York. I was working on a website project for the city union that represented these people and their families. It was work that I was more than happy to keep doing as the union struggled to find ways to help the families left behind.
The landscape and mood of the city began to change over the coming weeks – with the arrival of American flags, of charities from around the country, the posters of the missing all over the lampposts of lower Manhattan, the unwelcome rhetoric of the government, and eventually, by Thanksgiving, the protests against relatoratory actions, the toxic air. Not to mention the world we now have today, surely shaped by layers and layers of reaction to that day.
But on that day, we were in a bubble in Brooklyn. Perhaps better off not really knowing what was going on, and what was to come, trusting that we were safe and nothing more would happen.
And we were lucky to share Jack Daniels with friends. I raise a virtual glass to them every September 11.
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