Discount Sushi

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

The alarm went off at five o'clock as usual. If there's a worse sound than the morning alarm clock I'm certainly not aware of it. It signals the longest possible amount of time until the beginning of another weekend. The Tuesday alarm, though not as bad, is still pretty dismal. Of course, I recognize that when it comes to a workweek there's millions of Americans that have it worse than I do. I did five years in the Navy, and I still have friends in there that would most likely smack me in the head if they heard me complaining about my current 45-hour week. But, as we're all the stars of our own lives, the centers of our universes, I'm standing by my judgment on the evils of five A.M..

After taking care of our dog (our dachshund is the cutest dog in the world, if you think your dog is cuter I'm sorry, you're just wrong) and ensuring that my wife had adjusted her position to occupy as much bed as possible in my absence, I made my way to the kitchen to eat some Froot Loops. That's right... I'm a 35-year-old man and I eat Froot Loops for breakfast, deal with it.

My morning reading that day was the oversized paperback "Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the Worlds Greatest Comics". It's a terrific book, especially for anyone who was ever a reader of comic books. I grew up on a steady diet of Marvel comics myself, and armed with my Dr. Doom inspired vocabulary I was able to call my classmates "incompetent buffoons" when the wittiest rejoinder they could manage in return was "poop head". This book is a real trip down memory lane, and as I read it I remembered how I was always thrilled to see the villains defeated by the likes of Spider-Man, Captain America and the Fantastic Four. Seeing the villains fall was always satisfying because they had so very far to fall. Their schemes were always larger than life, the destruction they sought to sow so impossibly large.
That's the last morning I ever thought that. In four short hours the comic book villains of my youth would forever be reduced to small timers.

I have great respect for New Jersey Transit and the PATH train system. The schedule is so precisely maintained that my train pulled into the lower levels of the World Trade Center within 30 seconds of the same time every single day. I got off the train and bought my New York Post, muttering my customary "fucking people" at the newbie commuters that were always there; standing on the wrong side of the escalator, not having their fare ready at the turnstile and generally holding the rest of us up. A right turn at the top of the stairs and I was passing down the row of shops that greeted me every morning. Victoria's Secret, Express Clothing, Sam Goody. I'm sure there were others, but since I'm a guy the shops featuring half naked models and new DVDs are naturally the ones that stick in my mind. Out the doors and into the street, surrounded by the same two or three hundred people I saw pretty much every morning. Being something of an anti-social misanthrope I didn't actually know any of them but many of the faces had names attached to them in my head. Bald-Guy, Bad Manicure Lady, Blonde Girl and her sidekick the Toady, Bad Toupee Dude and Jabba the Hutt. A nod hello to the firemen as I passed by. Then it was just me and Led Zeppelin walking the three blocks to my office.

Except for Blonde Girl, whose name I later made it a point to ask when I saw her on a train, it was the last time I'd see any of them.

By trade I'm a NASDAQ market maker. Before you all jump to hating me let me assure you I had nothing to do with Enron or Worldcom, and I'm not the guy who lost your pension. In the Wall Street world I'm pretty much a small fish, just punching the clock and doing my job, helping keep the wheels of our economy moving. At 8:40 I had finished my bagel and Coke (soda, not drugs), and taking my New York Post I headed down to the men's room. I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing on the TV when I came back up. For some reason smoke was pouring out of the top of the North Tower, and my co-workers were saying that the WTC was on fire. So here's my first historic memory of the day. When people asked "where were you when Kennedy got shot" Mr. Zabruder had a great answer for them. When people ask me where I was when the plane hit I get to tell them I was taking a shit and reading an op-ed column in the Post.

So we're looking at the live news feed of the tower on fire, but none of us were particularly alarmed. Although we weren't all born there we were all New Yorkers, and let me tell you that the reputation New Yorkers have for being jaded and nonchalant is well deserved. "They'll put the fire out and we'll get on with our day..." I remember thinking, "...I just hope this doesn't fuck up my commute home". A couple of guys came down from the roof of our 6 story building and said you could see the smoke from up there, and papers falling like snow up and down Broadway. I went up to take a look for myself, and was standing next to the office manager (one of the most contemptible people alive, by the way) when the second plane hit. Because of the relative height and position of the roof I was on I didn't see it hit, but I did hear a sound right out of a World War II film. This kind of buzzing scream followed by an explosion that made the roof tremble under our feet. I had two thoughts one on top of the other: some lunatic has gotten his hands on a rocket launcher and I'm getting the hell off this roof!

Back on the desk a few of my coworkers had seen the plane hit on TV, and the rumors started flying. Here's something you may not know about Wall Street, we gossip like old ladies in a sewing circle. The typical guy on a desk has 10 phone lines and an internet instant messenger in front of him, and any tidbit of news runs at the speed of light up and down our grapevine. In the absence of news we'll often just make some up. I heard several competing stories simultaneously; that bombs had gone off in both towers, that a plane had hit accidentally, that a plane hit deliberately and there were 18 more planes unaccounted for. I forgot about opening my markets then, as all of us started to get on the phone to reassure wives and girlfriends that we were close to what was happening but relatively safe at the moment. My own wife was in school and unreachable, so I settled for calling my mother, hospitalized at the time, to tell her I'd be home late.

It was then that Joey* came in, looking disheveled and distraught. Joey worked at Fidelity and we knew him socially, so when his own office became a war zone he thought to come to ours. He sat there with his head in his hands and kept saying he'd seen bodies pass by his window, that there were body parts in the street. "Oh shit..." Adam* said, "...what about the guys at Cantor?"

Adam was one of our sales traders, the people who convince institutions to place their orders with us instead of someone else. His biggest "call" was the firm of Cantor-Fitzgerald, which had it's office in the Towers. He immediately called to check on them. And now I have to stand corrected, because as it happens there is a sound worse than the alarm clock and it's what we heard on that phone. I don't know who picked up the phone at Cantor, but what we heard was the cries of people surrounded by dead friends and fire. People who only had a few minutes left on the planet, knew it, and couldn't do a damn thing about it. Cries of pain and hopelessness.

At this point in my narrative it's customary to say something like "I hope I never hear anything like that again for as long as I live" but that would be a lie. Truth be told hearing those cries coming from the mouths of Islamic Fundamentalists would be sweeter to my ears than Beethoven's Ninth.
More on that later...

Now, let me tell you something else about me. I go through life forever expecting things like this to happen. I'm one of those guys that loaded up on canned food and firewood in the year before Y2K. I would have loaded up on ammo too, but I already had plenty. The only thing that surprised me about a terrorist attack on the financial district was the exact timing, I had been expecting this or something like it for most of my life. This was a validation of my entire worldview playing out on live TV.

This attitude, considered fatalistic by many, gave me a little bit of cl arity that many of my coworkers lacked at that exact moment. It occurred to me that we were but one city block from the New York Stock Exchange, and that this was a logical next target for whomever was doing this. I remembered the pictures of ground zero at the federal building in Oklahoma City, and realized that one block was a likely minimum blast radius for any bomb someone was going to set off. It was time to go.

Joey needed no convincing at all, he was ready to go already. My partner
Bill* is a people person though, and was glued to his seat trying to contact friends at other firms in an attempt to make an organized exodus from lower Manhattan. Bill is a childhood friend of mine as well as my partner, and although I didn't want to deliberately leave people behind I wasn't prepared to risk our lives waiting for the indecisive. I'm sorry if that sounds awful, but there it is.

Now comes a moment of unintended comic genius in the midst of tragedy.
Bill, Joey and I, along with a guy from tech support named Bob* (whom I'd never met before that day, despite the smallness of our firm) were getting up to leave. The general manager of our firm, a despicable little half man who inspires about as much loyalty as a scorpion, stood with a straight face and said "Anyone who wants to leave has my permission to do so." I was stunned to speechlessness, but Bill to his credit managed to get off a wonderfully sarcastic "Thanks, that's what we were waiting for" as we started down the stairs. I cannot overstate how utterly irrelevant that "permission" was. Nobody asked him, nobody cared what he thought and the idea he could stop us is, well, funny.

We exited our office onto Broad Street and were surprised at the calmness of the general throng. Our plan was to walk up the East River Drive to around 30th Street, cut over to 5th Avenue and then continue North to Bills apartment on Central Park West. We figured that by doing this we were keeping a minimum of half a mile worth of buildings between us and any landmarks that might be targets for the other bombs we felt sure would be going off any minute. If you've seen any news footage from the day you'll know this was not a unique plan. The Southern tip of the Drive was so jam packed with people you'd swear someone was giving away Super Bowl tickets.

To their eternal credit, NYC Police and Fire department personnel had acted with lightning speed to do some basic setting up in the immediate aftermath of the first plane. The Drive, normally a two lane highway along Manhattans East Coast, was closed to all but emergency vehicles. Far from forbidding us to walk here the cops were actively encouraging people to use it as a footpath to safety, and there was no chance we'd be hit by cars. We pointed ourselves uptown and started walking.

That's when the first dust cloud came.

I found out later that a huge chunk of Tower One had come off and plunged to the street. We didn't know that then, though. All we knew was that an enormous dust cloud was billowing from West to East up the street and driving the crowd before it. If we had been smaller people there's a good chance we would have been either trampled by the crowd or crushed by them against the iron gates of the pier. But we're not small, and we were determined to follow our plan, so with a little creative pushing and shoving of our own the four of us were on our way.

The dust didn't want to settle, it just hung in the air like smog. Joey took off his undershirt and, using my Spyderco pocketknife, started to fashion masks for us. Last in line for the material, I grimaced when Bill passed me a scrap that had been the right armpit and part of the collar.
Dropping it to the pavement I decided to take my chances with the dust instead.

We had roughly 7 miles ahead of us.

The first mile had a few thousand downtown workers walking more or less as a single coherent group. The one thing I saw along the way that caused me some alarm was a number of armed police cadets being used to direct traffic. If someone thought that police academy students had to be yanked out of class and allowed to carry guns they barely knew how to use then the situation must be dire indeed. At the first exit these cadets were directing people to get off the highway and back onto the proper city streets, and the mass of people started to disperse itself into the general population. After two more blocks it was just the four of us. That's when the first tower fell.

We felt a rumble beneath our feet, a little stronger but otherwise not unlike what you'd expect from a subway train passing underneath. We all looked back, and Bill asked the rhetorical question "Say, didn't there used to be two towers?". I told them it didn't concern us, we should just point our feet North, pick them up and put them down. It was easy for me to spout cliches like that, recalled from boot camp. And it was even easier for the guys to listen to them. But even if we weren't going to talk about it any more we all knew that the unthinkable had happened, one of those towers had actually been reduced to rubble. I knew then how the inhabitants of ancient Rhodes must have felt when they looked out after a storm to see just a pair of feet where their Colossus had stood the day before.

I couldn't believe how normal everything and everyone looked here, and my disbelief would grow the farther uptown we got. As we passed through the courtyard of a housing project we saw senior citizens playing chess and backgammon, and a mother (or possibly nanny) with children in tow was buying ice cream from a Mister Softee truck. On Second Avenue, somewhere in the 30's, we saw what would come to be my dominant memory of the day.

There was a Japanese Restaurant, I can't remember it's name. It clearly is the kind of place that caters to office workers and relies on the lunch crowd for it's very existence. Someone within, someone in charge, realized that there would be no lunch rush that day. This fellow was out in the street, in the middle of the sidewalk at 10:15 am, chanting "come get it, come get it" and bearing a hastily made sign that said "Discount Sushi !".

That, to me, is the spirit of New York City on display. Thousands were dead, the lower third of the island was on fire and no one knew if, where or when the next explosion was going to happen. But this guy knew that letting his sushi spoil, going uneaten and unpaid for, wouldn't change any of that. So he did what he could to take care of business. That's what we all did that day. We just looked at a bad situation, sucked it up and did what we could to salvage it. That's why everyone who was in the city that day is, to a greater or lesser extent, a hero.

Joey had by now recovered his wits and had been busy for about half an hour on his cell phone. I don't know whom it was he finally reached, but he started to gather from us phone numbers of people we wanted to reassure of our safety. He also started giving her phone numbers of people we wanted to check on, and he managed to get a very efficient phone tree going to inform our circle of loved ones about our status.

I eventually made it out of the city and back up North to my suburban house. I spent the next week watching Fox news and keeping my guns loaded, then the following Monday it was back to work. Sitting at my desk, wearing a filter mask, smelling fire and death. That stink hung in the air for months afterwards.

I don't have much else to say. Time has gone on and the smoke has cleared, and way too many people have forgotten what happened that day. They've forgotten, or they don't care, that there are people out there right now just itching for their chance to do it again. Shame on us if we let them.