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I wrote the bulk of this the evening of September 11, 2001. Over the next couple months I edited it and reframed it a bit, turning it into something a little more than simply a journal entry, adding what amounts to an introduction and a few thoughts that came to mind within the next couple months, but I hadn't even looked at it since the first part of 2002 until I sent it to a friend recently for no paricular reason. You'll note I talk to my journal and that the journal sometimes answers back; in my head it's that friend I sent this to, so I thought he might actually like to know what I say when talking to him when he's not around. Anyway, the basic content, the retelling of events and my thoughts and feelings from that day have not been altered, and they are as faithful to what happened as they could have been at the time, which is to say a few errors exist, such as planes scrambling from the local AFB. A lot of planes were in the sky, and everything became surreal.
This is long. I hope you'll read it.
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A million or so years ago a man uttered a few words that would soon be enshrined as history, not just history like the textbooks say, but History, important stuff, stuff that means something now, just as it meant something then, but the meaning being different when then became now, but then again not so different really when it all comes down to it. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He said some day would live in infamy, whatever that means. Faulkner would have a field day with that. All days "live in infamy" when viewed from a certain perspective.
The day my grandmother died, for instance. Infamous that day was. But, it's not history, not really, just like that day wasn't history, because it's now, affecting us now. I live with it every day. We all live with it, whether we know it or not. It was the Worst Thing that Ever Happened. Until now ...
I have entered the bizarre. It's not unreal. It's way too fucking goddamned real to be even in the realm of the unreal. It's bizarre, which is its own word with its own meaning. Look it up. Fucking people that think they know what words mean but don't piss me off.
This is not my world. This is not where I was born. This is some other place. Punctuate that last sentence with a period after every word. Consider it, deliberately. Annoying isn't it? Fuck it.
Nukes? Yeah, I lived with the possibility of nukes. I never lived with the reality of them, or this either, not here. It was always over there, somewhere else, some place made real only by streaming electrons. This is fucked up, a phrase tailor-made for this bizzaro-world shit.
But I am here, regardless of whether I believe it. I've just been living in a cocoon for the last 30 odd years. Divorce and near homelessness don't seem so tragic to me right now, certainly not the kind of tragic that would make me think my best bet is to eat a piece of lead accelerated to the speed of sound.
I cannot adequately describe what went through my head today. Oh, I can, in a way, which is why I'm writing. But, you, any of you who happen to one day read this, just can't get it from what you read here. You just can't. No way. Not gonna happen. Game over. Roll out the tarp and call it for rain 'cause trying to play this here game is just plain useless. Don't even begin to think you can use this in some of your I-Want-My-PhD papers and have it mean what you want it to mean. And don't you dare quote this out of context, you lame, pre-conclusive bitch. You're ignorant and always will be. Deal with it. I can tell you what happened, how I feel about what happened, how my day progressed because of what happened, but you will not understand. Punctuate that last sentence as above. You. Will. Not. Understand. I never realized how pointless a history degree was until now.
I'm at work, doing some mindless task I've done thousands of times without thinking about it and so cannot remember it precisely. Probably pricing something. A guy comes in. Asked had we heard about the bombing. Bombing? Yeah. Where? New York City. New York City! Get a rope. Oh, wait, no, my life isn't a television commercial. New York City, eh? Big deal. NYC, city of rats and stupid t-shirts. Bomb. I'm like so not interested.
A few minutes later, a woman, same thing, only different. Plane crash, NYC, big boom. Lots of dead people. In the city. People in the air, on the ground. Bad deal. Okay, I care a little now. Plane crash, in a city, not a good thing. It's not just some random freak with a fire cracker trying to get his girlfriend's attention. Anyone remember Reagan? Geezus what an asshole Hinkley was. If you're gonna do it, fucking do it.
I must not let this enter my subconscious. I've worked past my fear enough I can actually get on a plane now. Don't let the horror stories get to you. There will always be horror stories. People have died after shaving, Uncle Glen for instance, but you don't have facial hair down to your dick, do you? No, didn't think so.
Minutes later, two planes, one this tower, one that tower.
Towers? As in World Trade Center towers? What, were the pilots on crack, or did the damn things grow all of a sudden. Shit.
Well, not a slow news day today by god. I wonder if I'll actually be able to watch That 70's Show tonight, or if this is going to be like that plane blowing up with all the high school kids on a trip to Paris in it. Damn plane crashes. Scare the shit out of me and take up too damn much television time. Oh, and the dead people.
I shouldn't be like that, really shouldn't. The families all will hurt.
Yes, and I hurt when my grandmother died, but that wasn't plastered all over the front pages, was it?
No.
And I didn't get a free pass from paying my bills or going to work or having somehow to control myself and not smash in the face of that fuck-stick who called himself my friend and got all shitty because I didn't feel like playing a fucking game of golf the next week, did I?
No.
People die every day, right?
Right.
Am I supposed to weep for all of them?
Maybe.
Oh fuck you.
No, fuck you.
Yeah, whatever. No one's fucked me literally in years. Figuratively, yes, and maybe I do have an attitude problem about it, but we're getting off the subject here. So, okay, some people died in New York, and I think we can all agree this is a bad thing, and maybe we should, as a nation, feel bad about it for a little bit anyway, and maybe I should put away my personal shit for awhile and not be all melodramatic about a death in my family that happened almost a decade ago that no one gave a shit about except me and my family.
Ya got issues, dude.
Yeah, so does everyone. Let's move on. Got Gatorade to put in the cooler, and obviously the talking heads are going to be talking about this all day, so I can hear about it later. Shit gotta get done.
A group from the FAA Center down the road, coming in, buying smokes, caffeine, looking stunned. They talk, slowly. They're going home, sent home. They tell what they know.
Three planes now, maybe four or five. Who knows how many. One at the Pentagon? One still missing, maybe more? You're fucking kidding me.
Monty, for the first time since I've known him, decides, on grocery day, to stop putting up groceries, stop telling bad jokes, stop bitching about people that quite frankly need to be bitched about. He walks behind the counter, leans up against it, turns up the radio, shuts off his mouth, and ... listens.
Houston, we have a problem.
It continued like that for about three decades, which seems about right since time completely lost any semblance of meaning. About the time I should have had all the cooler stuff put away and been thinking about moving on to the toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and such -- the home stretch for grocery day -- the Gatorade sat there, blocking the aisles, unmarked but with the plastic covering undone and lying to the side as though a testament to disorder. I thought about Kathie and Katie and John and Jon. People came in and left, telling us this or that, us telling them the other thing. We cycled between radio stations and discovered (remember, I've entered the bizarre) that The Sports Animal seemed to have the best coverage at that point, that is if you consider "best" to be synonymous with "as little bullshit and as much vitriol as possible." At one point, must have been about 10:30am, five or ten or a thousand of us stood huddled around our little radio, customers forgotten, the James Gang probably walking out the door with the safe that had once been molded into the concrete foundations.
A voice, a professional voice, probably crying, certainly wavering, ". . .a gargantuan explosion. . ."
. . .Oh the humanity. . .
I don't think he was trying to plagiarize by paraphrase. Don't think it was possible because with some things, there are only certain words, certain emotions, that fit. Cliches become cliches for a reason.
And that's when the storm began to boil.
Duties of the day forgotten, Monty and I stood behind the counter, not really discussing, but saying things, stupid things about killing all the sons-a-bitches. We knew who it was and why it was -- or at least he knew why and who and I knew why and possibly who, but the "why" and "who" were different with each of us, not that we dwelt on this disparity openly, even if I was becoming terrified for reasons I couldn't quite grasp at the time but knew they weren't quite the same as his reasons. Now is not the time for argument. Killing begets killing, and there's killing to do -- and if we had our way, he'd be dead by sundown, whoever he is. Never liked Westerns, but they sure had their influence just the same, huh? Bloody talk, man talk, stupid talk.
But talk.
I realized as I reflected what kind of talk it really was. I started to wonder more things than I really should have wondered at this point, or maybe I started to wonder more things than certain people wanted me to wonder. A guy Monty would call a rag-head walked by, from the direction of the airport. Monty called the police, really and truly called the police because someone with a different sort of style in dress or a different sort of manner of looking at religion, or a different sort of way of having genetics shape his face and shade walked past us. We didn't know anything, nothing. But, we were blaming all the same, and maybe he was right, and maybe that guy was a psycho, or maybe he was just scared out of his mind. Someone on the radio mentioned terrorists and the WTC bombing years ago, and that's all it took.
I know this already, know it after listening to Monty and the Sports Animal and half a billion other people all day long. We're going to war. We're at war. With who? Who the fuck knows or cares, but by god we got billions of dollars worth of fuck-up in storage, just sitting there, and some people are gonna have a shitload of it dropped on their heads because shit gotta get done. My generation has met its doom, and with it every other generation may follow. This will wake us up, one way or another, only to die collectively in a waking nightmare. This is the Reichstag Fire. This is the end of the Republic. This, my friend, is the beginning of the terror we have long expected.
Did I say that?
You said it.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, oh shit, now what are you going to do about this Gatorade?
Who the fuck cares about the fucking Gatorade!
You do.
Well, okay, but not right now, please. I have other things to obsess over.
Back in the moment, I looked outside, off to the east where I so often looked when I needed to let my mind wander past my current circumstances and to dream or remember. Out there, a mile or so distant, 45 or so degrees up, was the flight path into Will Rogers World Airport. World Airport. What a joke. May as well call Main Street in downtown DooDad, America the gateway to Europe. But anyway, every ten, fifteen, or sometimes thirty minutes, a plane would appear. It would remind me of other times going here, coming from there. People. Places. Good things. Bad things. But things worthy of being remembered. Things that kept me alive.
But it wasn't like yesterday when I saw a Southwest Airlines plane turning into its approach, flying in from the northeast, completing its circle that had begun as it flew into the area somewhere above Norman, about 30 miles south. Yesterday, about a quarter hour later, there had been a Delta jet follow its invisible wake. No. This is not yesterday. We've entered the bizarre.
At least a dozen planes, maybe more, certainly more. What are those specs of color in the cloudless sky in all directions, all seeming to converge, or trying to converge? Have I suddenly been transported to a 7-Eleven outside of O'Hare? I've seen air traffic stacked up like this before, saw it from the runway itself at night while waiting to take off from St. Louis in a TWA Boeing 737. I saw the lights of a half dozen planes converging on a single line, waiting to land as I waited to leave, thinking, briefly, that my plane might not cross the path soon enough to avoid them all plowing dead into my window seat. But, this is OKC, just little ol' OKC.
All those planes, all those potential . . .
Rumors had spread, even through the now Pulitzer-winning Sports Animal and the FAA people who seemed to cling to the store, that there were more, more planes and more terrorists (they were using the word regularly now) and more targets and more people to die. Were all these planes coming right at us, and was it the same scene everywhere else in the country, the world? Oh. My. God. All those so-called prophets who spoke and wrote of fire from the sky were right, but we were wrong when we thought it was nuclear bombs they were talking about. It's here, right here and now, and the fire is jet fuel.
Umm, Monty, does Aero Mexico fly into OKC? Look there. Look. LOOK! Off to the east. Is that what it looks like when all the planes scramble from Tinker?
But they land, or at least the civilian planes do. The military planes fly off somewhere and circle back, or maybe they go back to Tinker. Are those military planes? I don't know, can't tell, not sure I care. I think this must all be a hallucination, so why not that. The Sports Animal tells us why this is all happening. Grounded. The whole fucking country is shut the fuck down. I hear it, but I don't think about it. It's airplanes. I'm not flying anywhere today. No one is flying to see me. It means nothing, well something, but not more than a little something just outside my personal experience. It's not in the area of things I'll be dealing with any time soon, in other words. As I said, though, I'm not thinking. Within another hour or so, I still won't be thinking, but I'll be not thinking in an entirely different direction because by my dead aunt Patty's dirty panties, it sure as hell will be affecting me.
Like all things of this sort, it started with a trickle, just your average noonday rush, people off-work from lunch putting gas in their cars or buying a pack of smokes. By 12:30, Monty and I both realized it was something else, something we’d never seen, not even close, in our combined 26 years of experience in convenience stores. This was a run. My history-minded brain thought of bank runs, and that’s what this was like, people lined up, at first patient, later not-so-patient, and finally drunk-stupid impatient. They wanted gas and water and canned goods and -- oh we can’t forget this since it’s the end of the world as we know it -- smokes and beer. If I’m gonna go out in a blaze of a terrorist’s wrath, I’m at least gonna be drunk and nicotine sated when it happens.
By 2:00, absolute chaos. I had talked about chaos. I thought I had seen chaos. I even thought I had at various times of my life created an appropriately entertaining level of chaos. I was delusional. You have not seen, experienced, or even imagined chaos until you’ve seen an elderly lady barely able to stand up straight threaten to blow someone’s “fucking head off” if they didn’t move out of the way.
Unreal, no. Bizarre, yes.
It lasted until around 6:00pm. During the time in between, I somehow managed to maintain what I thought of as sanity, despite Monty all but losing his. The two people that were supposed to come in to work that night actually managed to make it despite struggling through a line of traffic backed up two miles each direction from the gas station/convenience store. And that’s just one store in a somewhat out-of-the-way location that isn’t all that busy. What in the hell must it be like out there? I'm not sure I want to know.
All four of us were there for awhile, and in some deep part of our brains, we thought we might die there. And, it bonded us. Even though we never spoke the words, our topics of conversation betrayed us. I made three friends right then and there I might never have made, learned middle names and mothers’ histories and hopes and dreams never to be realized. I, at her invitation, made plans to spend the night with Ashlie, who lived within walking distance – and walking distance at that point had quickly extended itself to about ten miles with absolutely no reservations. I even entertained the fantasy of expending my last bit of lust with her that last night, if she was willing. Wouldn’t want to be uncivilized even as civilization broke down all around us; this is not the legacy I want to leave even if no one is left to care about it.
But, it didn’t happen. Almost as quickly as it began, calmness, sense, seemed to come back, and the cars drifted away. It was almost a normal day.
Of course it wasn’t.
I drove home. I stopped first, stopped to see if I could find a Pepsi and some milk since we were all out of the latter at our store, and I had forgotten to get the former before leaving.
Wish I were going home to Laverne; she’d already be stocked up.
Luckily, I found the store nearest my cousin’s house, where I am staying, fully stocked with both. I paused for a moment to wonder at that but discarded it quickly as one more bizarre thing in a bizarre day.
I called my mother from my cell phone. She’d called me earlier and left a message on my voice mail, but I’d just then heard it. We talked. She told me to be careful. I didn’t cry but wanted to. I told her I loved her. She said the same. I hung up, not wanting to, wanting nothing more than to be a six year old boy again and clinging to her dress as we walked through TG&Y and talked about how even through Grandma had flown to Germany to visit her son, she’d be back soon and make me some macaroni and cheese just like I liked it. Soupy.
And I got home. But Grandma wasn’t there, no macaroni and cheese for you today. No Mom either. Just Kathy, codeine addicted, tiny-footed, big assed, fucked up ol’ Kathy. Is this any way to spend my last moments on Earth?
And Kathy and I watched the video, and for the first time I saw it and it was real, not just bizarre but real bizarre. And maybe this wouldn’t be the last night because whoever or whatever had done this had more plans. More suffering needed to be inflicted, and it would be. We know that, even if we won’t admit it. We’re changed, and not for the better.
And I sat in my room, watching it over and over again, and I picked up the phone and called John, whose number was in my head, and he answered, and we talked. I told him I loved him and he balked and talked about tits. And I called Jon and Pat, whose numbers I found, but no one answered, and I didn’t leave messages. And I called other people, but no one was home. I called John again. We talked some more. And then I called the 1-800 American Airlines number, and when the operator answered, offering to direct my call to the appropriate crisis line for the appropriate flight number, I paused, considered – why did I call here – and I cleared my throat.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes, how may I direct your call?” All business. Long day for her.
“Ma’am I’m sorry to bother you and I know this may sound stupid and I don’t really know why I’m doing this but I don’t have anything I want to know but I wanted to say something because I know you’ve been through hell today.” Another pause, silence on the other end. “God bless you.” And, I meant it. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever used the phrase “God bless” and felt that I was invoking something substantial.
One more pause.
“God bless you and keep you,” words my non-religious mind is scarcely capable of stringing together.
“Thank you.” She was crying. Or maybe I was projecting. It was only moments ago, but I’m no longer sure, and that’s the point, isn’t it.
“Don’t thank me. You need it. I’ll let you go now. Goodbye.”
And I hung up, and I came in here, and I wrote this, and that’s it. Although, it’s not it because I already feel the twinges of meaning coming through to the front of my mind, but it's not the kind of meaning I even could have conceived 24 hours ago. It’s new, for me, for Us, anyway.
William Faulkner never seemed so prescient. For it is all now you see…
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