White With Foam - Chapter 4

ChapterFour

*The New York Front

September 6, 2002 and September 7, 2002
Including Field Note Passages From
(Nov. 20, 2001 to Dec. 3, 2001)

The Rules of Engagement in an Overcrowded World:
Through the TV Screen To the Stink of Ground Zero

(Friday)

September 6, 2002

Lawrence, Kansas

Joint Session

It was a quiet day on the homefront today, exactly a year since Janet and I left Kansas for Amsterdam and Paris on (what turned out to be referred to around the house as) the 9/11 trip.

A tropical storm (Fay) hit Matagorda Bay , Texas today, an old haunt of mine from my oil field days there during the late 1970s. And in Lawrence the thermometer nearly hit the dreaded 100-degree mark --- keeping me penned up in the studio and at work obsessing in front of the anniversary TV.

Fortunately (in a full day of monitoring the TV) I was only shown two video horror clips. But the official September 11 first anniversary kicked off in a surprising manner today when an unprecedented joint session of congress was convened at the federal building in New York City --- a ceremonial demonstration of non-partisan solidarity toward the ideals of unity and resolve. Harkening back, I imagine, to last fall when we were all on the same page. When we all stood and cried and waved flags and sang God Bless America together. Before we lost the mood and we all started sniping and bickering with one another again.

I monitored the TV and wrote today, and I putzed around with my streetphoto portfolio for a while. And generally the day went by as many days have gone by this summer. Not much big news in the newspapers or on the TV, almost as if we weren’t at war at all. That is, until this evening when I took myself back to Ground Zero last year, that awful place in its awful place in time ...

November 20, 2001

Lawrence to Kansas City to New York

Back in the Air

Ground Zero Holiday at a Smoldering Homefront:
Racial Profiling & Flimsy Plastic Airline Knives

                        Janet and I were off to New York yesterday for the first time in more than four years. It felt great getting back to the city. We were filled with energy getting back on an airliner too, advised by presidents and mayors and all those public service announcements on the CNN Breaking News Box to thumb our noses at the terrorists by going about our normal lives. We bought these tickets to go back east for Thanksgiving for the first time in seven years last June, and when we hold airline tickets for cool destinations --- stand back. Don’t even try to get in our way.

            Not even during all-out war ...

            So we didn’t let the holiday terrorism “high alert” issued by the new Office of Homeland Security alarm us as we flew. Nor did we let our destination   -- Ground Zero and the edgy front lines of World War III -- disturb our mood or our energy for getting back in touch with our favorite Manhattan streets. The tight security flying out (many questions and full metal-detector and X-ray security checks for everyone) reminded us about the serious nature of this trip.

            The attack, the war, Ground Zero and all that ...

            But the seasonal Christmas decoration of the very holiday season that sparked the high security alert in the first place somewhat cut the edge off the funk, which for Janet and me had been diminished naturally (a bit) by 10 weeks of time since September 11 and in our exuberance at getting back to New York.

            The Midwest Express Airlines flight to LaGuardia was superb, and I haven’t said that about a flight in years. Janet traded up at work for the all-business-class flights which came with leather seats and homemade chocolate chip cookies --- the smell of attendants baking them wafting through the cabin like Sunday morning on the farm. Glasses of complimentary champagne and wine served in glasses. Real glasses and real porcelain dishes filled with fresh food that was actually appetizing and tasty.

            Real silverware too, except of course for that out-of-place flimsy white plastic knife --- replacing the silverware knife that might be used by terrorists to slit the throat of one of the pleasant flight attendants passing out steaming fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies with a smile (I’m not making this stuff up) to everyone on the plane. A silverware knife that might be used to draw the flight crew out of their cabin in order to take over control of the flight to smash their hijacked jet fuel bomb into a building or a national monument or a stadium full of innocent civilians.

            Having to use a flimsy white plastic knife while dining on a premium flight is a small price to pay for security, and aside from that --- and aside from the newly installed high security steel cockpit door, the one that jammed prior to the flight locking the flight crew into the cabin and causing a twenty minute delay before takeoff --- there were only a few other reminders of September 11 during our flight.

            At both airports there were teams of camouflaged National Guard troops patrolling all public areas from the loading zone to the boarding gate to the ends of the runways. Automatic guns at the ready. Focused eyes watching everything including the performance of the boarding gate security guards. Security guards who are noticeably more serious nowadays, sometimes uptight, and usually unsmiling. Just like Janet and I have experienced all over the world on our many travels.

Only at American airports in September 2001 did you not see camouflaged troops with automatic rifles. Only in America could you board an airliner with only a few flimsy questions about whether anyone had access to your bags or not, a fool’s security;

“Has anyone had possession of your bags or asked you to carry anything for them in your bags?”

            But that’s all changed now, and it’s at the airport where regular Americans now come into most direct contact with World War III. M-16- toting National Guardsmen watching high security personnel perform 25-point checks on passengers who trigger the metal detector.

            We couldn’t help but notice during the flight that security at Midwest Express had made it a policy to single out four people per flight at random for a full carry-on baggage search, a practice obviously based on cultural profiling and not at all at random. Because racial profiling under the circumstances (the whole new world) has become a practical matter ...

            On the way to New York I was picked to be searched and my bags were gone through thoroughly. The names they called over the intercom to be searched sounded suspiciously like a combination of cultural profiling with a built-in cover-up of cultural profiling. They pick two guys named Hamid and Fahad and two guys named Smith and Johnson, and they called out our names over the intercom. It seemed like combination profiling and a profile cover-up to me --- two obvious Muslim names and two obviously not. But I didn’t mind. I’ve been against racial or cultural profiling all my life, but I’ve been against terrorists all my life too. I guess I’m frightened enough about what has already occurred to expect the worse. And expecting the worse, under a holiday high alert and with September 11 magnitude reasoning --- I didn’t mind the practical profiling at all.

            It seemed to make sense, checking Mr. Hamid’s bags in order to feel safe so soon after an organization wholly membered by Arabic extremists crashed four passenger jets into three monumental buildings killing upwards of 4000 innocent civilians.

            It seemed to make sense to me, so I let it go at face value and boarded the airplane right behind Mr. Hamid, who embarrassingly admitted to me as we stood in line to board that despite the suspiciously discriminating measure, that even he was more comfortable with his safety now too ...

*New York City:

Open For Business

                        We hit the ground running and took our traditional colorful (cheap) bus ride and subway ride to Manhattan. The Q-33 bus took us from LaGuardia Airport through Queens, and the E train we met at the Jackson Heights station there took us under the East River and around to Greenwich Village into Manhattan, losing us at Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. We walked a block up the street toward Washington Square Park to Ben’s Pizzeria at the corner of MacDougal and Third, and to a steaming hot slice of the finest pizza pie on the face of the Earth.

            Since I got back to the homefront from Europe in late September, I’ve become weary of all the excessive flag waving going on in Kansas and up on the CNN Breaking News Box. An overdose of sincere yet frightening patriotism --- even surpassing in its exorbitance the intense gravity of the September 11 attacks. I became so irritated at one point that I even occasionally took guilty pleasure watching one burn at one of those anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan that they kept showing us over and over again up on the CNN Breaking News Box. Not because I agreed with those al-Qaida losers or their Taliban loyalists, but because at the moment I was too patriotic (way on board for getting the bad guys) to burn one myself.

            But suddenly there I was -- back inside of, instead of in front of the CNN Breaking News Box -- riding in a city bus at the front lines of the war, slightly ahead of the news. And along the route into Manhattan from the airport I counted seven out of every eight New York City households that had decided to wave an American flag --- and I watched them flash past by the thousands from my seat on the Q-33 bus.

            The sight was quite awesome and quite festive, yet all that flag waving represented an awesome sadness. And it was on that Tuesday in New York -- ten weeks and a few hours after the horror -- that I grasped the essence of martyrdom as it applied to World War III. Contrasting the terrorist’s flimsy concept of martyrdom against the powerful martyrdom of the Twin Tower buildings and all the display of that Twin-Tower logo now stood for.

          For the firemen and policemen who rushed in. For the poor souls who faced jumping or burning to death or who were crushed to death in the collapse. For the bent and burning ruins still smoking and reportedly still a thousand degrees hot in lower Manhattan. For all those heartbreaking aftermath memorials to the missing and dead on every wall and lamppost. For everything that’s happened since 8:46 a.m. on September 11 and everything that will happen during the terror war in the years to come.

            All of that encompassed in the sight of that iconic Twin-Tower logo, a symbol of suffering. A martyr of freedom and liberty for civilized people against tyranny. And now a symbol of American hope, recovery, and renewal.

            I’ve always liked buildings (any building) and over time I even came to terms with the two imposing shafts of the World Trade Center towering over Lower Manhattan . I watched those buildings going up in the early 1970s as I made my first spirited forays to Greenwich Village from the ranch (a couple-hour drive away in rural Pennsylvania) to expose myself to the world and to begin growing into my own insanity.

There I was, a teenager, wandering around Washington Square in Lower Manhattan . Up to no good and watching the Twin Towers rise to the south. Poking into the sky above a bouquet of buildings once thought to be tall but now only garnish to the skyscrapers that were shooting up next door. I remember being there when they hit the eightieth floor and not long after when they topped 100 on the way to the final 110. In later years I took my first self-portrait photograph to use in my streetphoto resume in the elevator doors of the World Trade Center, the second-to-last time I rode that elevator all the way to the top.

Now it’s all gone ...

*Heaven With Crust

                        Back in Greenwich Village and off the E train and sitting happily at Ben’s Pizzeria at the corner of Third and MacDougal Streets. Eating the best pizza pie in the best town for pizza pie in the world.

            “The Best Pizza in New York !,” the joint’s napkins say.

            And if you don’t believe the napkins or the men behind the counter at Ben’s, then just ask me.

            I’ll tell you!

            Just to taste that glorious stuff again after four years of enduring Pizza Hut hell and all those other twisted Chicago pizza styles and trends that I’m forced to suffer in middle America between trips to the city ...

            Back in New York all right.

            Put a little pepper on top of the grease-dripping slice --- a red Hawaiian punch chaser nearby, ready for the heat. Fold that slice in half the long way and take that first big hot juicy bite --- good lord!

            It’s like heaven with crust!

            The extra grease dripping onto the paper plate below as I raise the pie to my lips --- forgetting all about Ground Zero, or the war, and all that pain and suffering --- for half a slice or so, anyway. Until a man walks past on the sidewalk outside wearing an FDNY hat and a Twin Tower logo T-shirt --- but then he’s gone down the street and Bam!, I’m almost to the best part and I’m sliding back into my brief holiday from the madness --- re-focused by the devouring of that golden New York pizza pie crust.

            Man-O-man!

            We finished our pizza party at Ben’s and crossed the street and walked down the block to Washington Square. It was my first time back to my favorite place in the city since last year’s release of my Searching For Washington Square streetphoto book, and it was a nostalgic but quick visit.





We walked around past the chess sharks and the dog run and the fountain and the NYU students making independent films and the kids on swing sets and the drug dealers peddling bags of marijuana and the hot dog vendors and the police. And then we paused under the Washington Square arch for a moment to consider that before September 11 the World Trade Center towers made a glorious sight from that spot --- framed in the opening of the arch. We took a short walk around the rest of the park and then headed uptown through Chelsea, past Madison Square Garden, and past the Port Authority --- due uptown in Hell’s Kitchen by six o’clock at our friend Robbie’s place for dinner.

*Boots on the Ground at Chez Josephine:

Bruised and Bloodied -- But Still in the Game ...

                        We went out with and watched Robbie perform at an off-Broadway comedy venue, a place called Don’t Tell Mama in midtown Manhattan . Robbie did a solid job on stage and so did some of the others in the show. However, I’m still having a tough time concentrating on performance art of any sort. There were only a few veiled Osama bin Laden references during the routines, as the city as a whole still wants to forget more than it wants to remember. Of course, it’s impossible to forget, but most of the jokes were built for escaping what was happening rather than exploiting it.

            David Letterman can joke all he wants to about Osama bin Laden for his international audience. It looks and feels good on him as an escape from the grim CNN Breaking News Box. But here at the front --- boots on the ground at the first Thanksgiving after the horror --- a lot of New York City wants to concentrate on forgetting as they weave this philosophy around all the reminders of the tragedy everywhere they look.

            After the show we walked against a cold wind toward the Hudson River to one of my five favorite restaurants in the world. Chez Josephine on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue . A place I’ve dined at about five or six times. An off-Broadway institution since 1986, opened by my restaurateur friend Jean-Claude Baker, where you can spend a few hours on Theater Row dining and eating fine food.

            Around the third bottle of wine under the burgundy grandeur of the place --- gilded and crammed with the charm of fine art evoking Paris in the time of Josephine Baker with hanging burgundy chandeliers and a piano player who tickles the air with the atmosphere of burgundy tunes --- diners forget the time and place. They begin feeling as if they’d gone to Paris on the Seine, and 42nd Street on the Hudson shocks them at first slap on their way out the door.

            It’s a big bill at Chez Josephine for a hard-scrapple artist like me (about $250 for the four of us) but Robbie’s friend Sam Siegel --- an accomplished character actor on New York stage and screen --- picked up the check. Sam got my vote for New Yorker of the night, not just by coming to the comedy show and to dinner and by picking up the check, but because he did it all night long with an oozing open head wound that he’d suffered just before arriving to meet us at the comedy club. When he tripped over a utility strip on a sidewalk over on Ninth Avenue.

            During the feast he went through the whole box of bandages he’d bought at the bodega where the accident happened and then during dinner he went through two large white Chez Josephine dinner napkins dabbing at the mess.

            Dining for hours.

            Chatting and dabbing at the dripping blood from his open head wound. Blood oozing out from under the bandages. Blood occasionally getting past Sam’s dabbing and then dripping off his chin, just missing his glass of wine and staining the white tablecloth below.

            Halfway through dinner it dawned on me that in the state Sam was in tonight he was an apt metaphor for and the personification of New York City itself. Damaged, bleeding, wounded, and in pain for all the world to see.

            But as resilient as all get out.

            Still in the game and going about all the conventions of a night out off Broadway without skipping a beat and without complaining too much about his condition. And thinking about Sam as a metaphor for wartime New York spun my head around for a moment or two and reminded me of the season of battle we were in.

            We had a ten-minute conversation during the long dinner about the recovery of New Yorkers. Both Robbie and Sam started off by debunking all the apple-waving going on up on the CNN Breaking News Box. Phrases arising in conversation like: still a little depressed..., or still in a funk..., or still low on energy uttered along with reports about friends who’d decided to get out of town for awhile --- or for good. Substituting the actual fear and loathing of the time for the rosy nationwide CNN Breaking News Box image. Those public service announcements running on TV promoting New York as a travel destination. Using film of Woody Allen twirling on ice skates at Rockefeller Center or a visitor ordering a Stiller (Ben Stiller) with Bacon (Kevin Bacon) sandwich at Sardi's Restaurant.

            There’s been a lifetime of courage and resolve shown by New Yorkers since September 11. But the mood two days before Thanksgiving was behind the curve of the optimistic TV culture, and was here-and-now into the fear of “what’s gonna’ happen next?” So instead of mentioning to the others how I was finding Sam’s deflection of the pain of his head wound an apt metaphor for what we were all going through right now --- I just poured myself another glass of wine and continued pretending to forget about our plight the best I could.

            Here on the front.

            All of us ignoring the war as best we can.

            Boots on the ground at Chez Josephine ...

November 21, 2001

New York

Ground Zero:

The Stink of World War III

I Lift My Lamp Beside The Golden Door?

                       On Wednesday morning Janet and I set off for Ground Zero at 10:30 a.m. from Hell’s Kitchen at 52nd Street and 10th Avenue, taking the E train downtown as far as it would take us down the Eighth Avenue line --- post terror attack. The E train used to take us all the way to the World Trade Center , but not anymore. Today, the day before Thanksgiving in the year of the jets, it dropped us off just south of Canal Street . The beginning of the exclusion zone of September 11 when the city evacuated lower Manhattan from Canal Street on south. Tens of thousands of people that day streaming uptown on every avenue and over every bridge to escape the horror.

            We skirted across town to City Hall and then up Broadway toward Ground Zero. Janet had me stop to take her picture at a World Financial District information sign about a block south of City Hall. She was standing there (deciding not to smile for the camera because of the gravity of the occasion as I framed the picture) --- --- --- and suddenly I smelled Ground Zero --- a sense of the tragedy that can’t properly be translated to the world on either the CNN Breaking News Box or in the pages of this journal.

The smell of this despicable tragedy.

The acrid, nose-wrenching Ground Zero stink.

The smell of twisted steel and crumbled concrete, and of everything else buildings of such size that collapse contain. All pulverized together with the fire and the smoke and the copy ink and the desks and the thousands of people. A smell neither easily gotten used to nor easily forgotten. A penetrating smell of new-world death that by the end of the day inflicted an acrid scratch in the back of my throat and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

            What remained of the building was still on fire.

            According to the local newspapers, the World Trade Center fire (still burning at 1000-degrees) has burnt longer than any building fire has ever burnt in the history of building fires. As we walked the perimeter today we could see dozens of fire hoses still -- after 10 weeks -- trying to put that fire out. Hoses hanging off of cranes or shot from the ground up. Wetting the dust down as heavy machinery hacked at the buildings that still remained above street level by Thanksgiving, 2001.

            We walked past the first lines of souvenir vendors on lower Broadway (business being business) and approached the memorial chainlink fence outside St. Paul ’s Chapel. Janet and I got separated there for about 20 minutes or so. Both of us lost in our own fogs. Detailing in our minds and on film all the sad mementos left behind by a stunned surviving world that just couldn’t understand the horror that brought us to this place at this time.

            A T-shirt from Holland.

            Origami from Japan.

            A flag poster signed by a classroom of grade school students from Kansas ...

            At St. Paul ’s, a National Guardsman posed for a portrait at the memorial fence and I spent the rest of my time there choking myself up with every yard of memorial I was compelled to read and photograph.

After awhile I’d had enough.

            I’d taken enough sad streetphoto still lives of the place, and I’d tuned in long enough to get in touch with my own pain about the whole mess, and it was beginning to get a little crowded. The sparse morning gathering beginning to thicken with the first real wave of post-September 11 tourists hitting town this afternoon prior to tomorrow’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. So I found Janet and we continued south down Broadway until we came to the intersection at Dey Street. Down the block was our first disturbing inside-the-CNN-Breaking-News-Box look at Ground Zero. It was a hideous close-up view of what was left of World Trade Center #5, looking like the Alfred P. Murrah building after the Oklahoma City bombing, wall-less open cubes that used to be offices with twisted rebar and mangled concrete hanging out and cascading down the bombed out mess. Exposing in an obtuse cross-sectional view the internal wreckage and debris dangling out of the holes. In front of the ruin the salvage tractors tore at the mess and firemen shot hoses into the mess. To the left and behind WTC #5 we glimpsed the first haunting view at what remained of WTC #1, the stub of the World Trade Center north tower.

            We negotiated the Ground Zero perimeter to the south and west and found ourselves on Washington Street and heading straight toward the 10 or 12-story skeletal remains of the north wall of the north tower. Just standing there mangled and grim. Mocking our weakness against the anarchy of the evil that hit us out of the blue that day and providing everyone alive its best evidence of the horror that overtook us.

            A broken icon sticking horribly up through the nearly flattened mess --- poking jaggedly up from the rubble under the hole in the skyline like a ghoul. Haunting the ghosts of thousands of dead civilians in a war they never knew they were in. The grave marker of hundreds of rescue workers who rushed in there to save civilians and who perished for their standards of valor. The ghostly stub at the heart of all the tears that have flowed from nearly every eye on Earth since September 11. Eyes that all watched our grisly CNN Breaking News Boxes that day and which wept uncontrollably. The ghost of all the tears that flowed from my eyes in Amsterdam while watching the north tower burn and the second jetliner hit and the rest of that god-awful day.



            The Pentagon.

            Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.

            The collapse of both Trade Center towers and the abandonment of lower Manhattan .

            People calling people they loved by cell phone to say good-bye.

            People jumping from a hundred stories up.

            All that sadness and all those tears while stuck in Holland and Paris , when the pain and confusion reached unbearable proportions --- and then when resolve began to take hold. Back to Kansas where all those heart-wrenching homefront stories brought the country together.

            All that courage.

            All that sacrifice.

            All the bombing in Afghanistan.

            All those refugees.

            All the death and injury of innocent Afghans who got caught up in an uncivilized Islamic jihad out of their control.

            I’d heard Ground Zero described on the CNN Breaking News Box this morning as, “A grotesque sight. Looking like the end of the world...”. And I found that description apt.

            We were stunned by that skeletal stub of the north wall of the north tower of the World Trade Center down Washington Street, jaggedly poking up 100 feet into the air, and we both had a sudden and peculiar urge to get away from the thing, to consolidate our emotions, to regroup somewhere familiar to us --- somewhere not so grim. So, as residents of Lawrence, Kansas, the Cradle of Liberty, we opted to take a quick side trip a block away from the mess to the south to Battery Park wharf. To get a grip and to take a look at the closed-down Statue of Liberty from the tip of lower Manhattan.

            Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-toast to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

            Well perhaps not so much anymore. America’s not a very welcoming place right now for just any teeming mass ...

*Twilight Zone Moment at a

Ground Zero Pizza Stand

                        After regrouping and pondering the liberty and immigration issues for a few minutes and wondering what the war might do to our ideals during the next ten or twenty years, we returned to the view of the skeletal remains of the north tower at Washington Street. I made some more photographs of the surreal street scene. Mostly still life portraits of the wreckage --- as no addition of a person could properly help express the loneliness and emptiness of that object. But including in the image a lighted streetlamp as a glimmer of hope for revival. And then we dipped into a food court and plopped ourselves down in the pizza section to come to grips with what we’d been experiencing the last two hours.

            As it turned out, the men working behind the pizza counter were so new to America --- now working in this place only feet from Ground Zero to replace those who no longer wanted to work in the shadow of that target --- so new to New York that they didn’t yet know what a slice was.

            It was a Twilight Zone moment.

            There at Ground Zero. Exhausted from my morning experience. Pondering the dim future of an open, welcoming, and tolerant America . On site of the tragedy in New York, ahead of the news inside the CNN Breaking News Box and inside the closest pizza place to the still smoldering ruin a quarter block away. And the guys charged with feeding me that fine New York pizza in my moment of need didn’t even understand the word slice yet.

            My side trip to see the Statue of Liberty combined with immediately thereafter stumbling upon such a compelling New York pizza quandary would have made a great short magazine article, had I been a magazine journalist. But at the moment I was really only a hungry and confused street artist. So Janet and I fled the food court even hungrier and more confused than we’d been before we went in, and we headed west on the Ground Zero perimeter until we found another pizza joint. Where we stopped for about half an hour to recover from our morning and to cool down the Ground Zero scratches in our throats with a cold drink and a slice of New York City that even the terrorists couldn’t ruin ...

After re-gaining our equilibrium, we continued circling the Ground Zero perimeter on the west side. And there, after crossing the closed-down West Side Highway and ending up at the harbor, we stumbled onto the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

            It was many hundreds (perhaps many thousands) of Teddy Bears piled up and stacked on a wall in front of a black wrought-iron fence. They’d been there for weeks and were a little weathered and slightly wilted, their ragged condition just adding to the extreme sadness of the place brought on by the memorial photographs and laments left by mourners in honor of murdered loved ones, wired onto the fences and placed among the Teddy Bear bodies. The bears dressed in ribbons and bows, several of their black staring eyes gazing out over dust masks that had been tenderly attached over their heads and mouths by mourners overcome with the overpowering urge to do something about this whole mess.

           Something good.

           Anything they could do to aid in the healing ...

           Anything.

            I’d begun to photograph that disarming place, making little squares and little rectangles of streetphoto art documenting the monumental outpouring of grief. A global sadness of unprecedented proportion expressed in piles of children’s toys and in hundreds of messages lovingly left by forlorn family, friends, and by the horrified public. I stood there trying to grasp the overwhelming significance of being at that special moment in history. A moment starting after September 11 and continuing up until the city carts these Teddy Bears away.

            I crossed the sidewalk to wipe away a tear, and I took out my medium-format Hassleblad camera and began preparing for as long a shoot as I could stand --- --- --- but I was suddenly separated from my thoughts by Janet who was pulling at my arms like a wounded child, bawling and pleading with me to take her away from that gut-wrenching place.

            “I’ve got to get out of here right now Gary --- please get me out of here --- I’ve had enough --- I can’t take it anymore,” she moaned, so overcome and weakened by the weight of the grief and the pain of the past several weeks. Hitting rock bottom right there on the streets of Ground Zero.

            I knew I’d be back at this awful place again next week on my way to the streets of the terror war, and that I could document the Teddy Bears again at that time. And I knew from her tone that Janet’s breakdown was urgent. And I knew that the distraction also conveniently gave me the excuse to follow my own instinct to flee that mind-blowing moment --- as I too had nearly been brought to my knees by the utter misery of the place.

            We held hands and fled to the northwest, The Teddy Bear memorial at our back, the Statue of Liberty off our left shoulder, the space in the sky above Ground Zero off to our right --- And nearly half the squalid battlefield yet to circumvent.

            As it turned out, the Teddy Bear memorial was the low water mark of our Ground Zero tour and because the north side was fenced off and greatly inaccessible to visible debris, it didn’t take us as long to return to the memorials at St. Paul ’s Chapel as it had to get from the church to the bears. There were a couple of more street intersections where subtle views of the rubble and the recovery effort could be watched. There was a plywood sign at one of them that warned photographers that their, “Cameras would be seized for taking pictures at this sight.”

            As a street photographer who’s goal is to document global change as I go about my work, I can’t agree with hiding history, so I made a photograph of the sign and went on with my work.

            On the western and northern boundaries of the perimeter we came across the storefronts of shops and restaurants. We peered through plate glass windows that survived the attack and which now revealed chafing dishes and an entire breakfast setting inside one building, just as it was at 8:46 a.m. on September 11. Still set up in a dining room for a business breakfast meeting that morning. Abandoned 10 weeks ago and still caked in Ground Zero fallout dust --- left just as it had been the moment patrons and staff fled for their lives on that awful morning.

            Exactly like all those scenes I’d photographed on the volcanic island of Montserrat , inside homes in the abandoned capitol city of Plymouth . Where thousands of people fled forever in an instant from the volcanic eruption there and never returned to their homes. Evidence of their last moments now covered up and caked in ash and dust.

            After re-visiting and re-photographing a few poignant memorials we’d seen at St. Paul ’s Chapel earlier this morning, and after saluting the battlefield we’d just circumnavigated --- hailing all its victims as innocent and wronged and wishing their spirits justice --- we headed uptown. Pretending again as if life in New York City was the same.

            We walked past City Hall, through Chinatown, and past Canal Street --- where we stopped to buy a few FDNY baseball caps from 9/11 vendors --- and on up to the Pop Shop up on Broadway where we popped in to honor graffiti artist Keith Haring (who I went to high school with in Kutztown, Pennsylvania) and so Janet could buy a Keith Haring pin to put on her FDNY cap.

            Soon we were back at Ben’s Pizzeria on the corner of Third and MacDougal Streets in the Village for another perfect pizza snack, this time to sand down the edges of a morning filled with curiosity and grief. Four hours spent circling the smoking Ground Zero battlefield, the first field of fire in North America of World War III. Occupied by the tragedy and consumed by what we now knew -- the smells and tastes and sounds and sights of the place -- elements of the disaster that we’d never have known if we’d just stayed on the homefront watching the CNN Breaking News Box instead of going inside of it. Way too occupied with the weight of what I’d seen today to lose myself in Ben’s superior pizza as I had on our arrival yesterday. Too deep in thought to pretend anymore that the city was just like it was ...

*Go Figure ?

                        We finished the snack and went up MacDougal Street and hung out at Washington Square Park for a while. After watching a pick-up basketball game for a few minutes at the hoop pit at the corner of Third Street and Sixth Avenue , we took the train up to 34th Street and Macy’s. A department store that tomorrow would be at the center of America in its role as traditional sponsor of the yearly Thanksgiving Day parade and balloon extravaganza. Celebrating the Pilgrims and kicking off the all-important Christmas holiday shopping season, business still being business ... ... ... no matter what frame of mind we’re all in.

            But this year Macy’s would be sponsoring much more than just another parade of balloons full of gas bouncing around uncontrollably in fierce wind gusts and exploding off the facades of tall buildings. This year it would also act (by way of TV) as host to both America and New York City’s first attempts at jump-starting themselves after their traumas and preparing themselves for the steep challenges that lay ahead in the coming terror war years.

            But on this unseasonably warm late New York afternoon on the evening before Thanksgiving 2001, the festive red and green holiday-decorated department store was bustling with tradition. Thick with sidewalk traffic, people with kids watching the kinetic holiday window displays in the store windows, and with the familiar sound of the Salvation Army bell- ringers outside every entrance to the store. All giving the place a strong sense of nostalgia for a time before Ground Zero Teddy Bear memorials and a time before flimsy plastic dinner knives on premium airline flights.

            Back in the old days ...

            We popped into my travel agent’s office just across the street from Macy’s to reconfirm my flight next week to Islamabad . My agent for my Asian shoots --- a Muslim Pakistani immigrant who works in an office with a Christian Indian immigrant --- told us he was optimistic about the future but distressed with the pall September 11 had left on his relationships in New York as a Pakistani. And how the depressed travel market had also put a strain on his business as a travel agent.

            After a soda and a rest at the travel office (it was so unseasonably warm that we were sweating like mad) we walked through Times Square , past Sacs Fifth Avenue , and we lit a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Then we crossed the street and stopped for a few minutes to watch the ice skaters under the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center . On the way across town while walking down 53rd Street from Rockefeller Center to Hell’s Kitchen we passed the David Letterman Late Night television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway. I had a surreal five-minute chat there with Mujibur (of Sirajul and Mujibur fame) at K&L’s Rock America souvenir shop where Mujibur works and where the Bangladeshi immigrant and Queens resident often gets called on by Dave Letterman to play along with his little neighborhood street shticks. He and I talked passionately for a few minutes about my upcoming photo shoot and about the history of Bangladesh , formally a disjointed part of Pakistan before gaining its independence in 1971 after a nine-month civil war with Islamabad.

            Janet and I left the souvenir shop on Broadway and turned the corner west to continue down 53rd Street toward Hell’s Kitchen, when we damn near bumped into TV actor Ray Ramano who was going from his limousine past us on the sidewalk into the Letterman side door near the Hello Deli.

            It had been a sad day. A tiring and trying day. A peculiar 24-hour sweep through the war. But it was also a New York City day I’ll never forget.

            Boots on the ground at Chez Josephine.

            Teddy Bear memorials, smoking ruins, jagged scars in the empty sky, and Ground Zero souvenirs.

            Washington Square Park, the best pizza on Earth, the Statue of Liberty closed down and empty, with nothing much to say ...

            Macy’s, Rockefeller Center, Mujibur, and Ray Romano.

            New York City ?

            Go figure ...

5
(Saturday)
September 7, 2002

Back Out on the Streets Against War:

An Evaporating American Unity

                        This morning I got out of bed, put the FDNY memorial hat on my head that I’d bought in Manhattan last November and that I’d taken with me to Pakistan, and I headed to downtown Lawrence for the first big anti-war protest of the whole new world. My first anti-war protest since the anti-Cold War demonstrations in Lawrence in 1983 following the airing of the anti-Cold War movie The Day After, filmed here in Lawrence the year before. The demonstration was sponsored by the Lawrence Coalition For Peace and Justice, and was a rally against the Bush administration’s push for all-out war with Iraq, even if it came down to only a coalition of willing nations rather then at the request of the United Nations. I was one of about 325 demonstrators there, and it seemed as if I were one of the few there who may have supported the Afghanistan war but were now wholly opposed to aggression in Iraq without proper and moral cause.
            War should be a last resort, don’t you know?
            Containment and deterrence has worked. We’ve had Saddam Hussein in a box and he hasn’t hurt anyone outside his borders for 12 years since the Gulf War in 1991. We couldn’t find anything more than shadowy connections with the September 11 people, and now the onus is on America to do the right thing. Let’s face it, this is one sorry bastard in Iraq, and his lifestyle at the expense of regular Iraqis is despicable. But it’s a matter of sovereignty, an Iraqi and Arab matter, and I for one cannot condone a single death of either a single Iraqi civilian or a single American soldier in the name of unilateral intimidation --- what the American authorities have begun calling, “A coalition of willing nations”.
            The government and eventually the media will (in their bloodthirst hangovers) sluff-off the civilian casualties of war that are the breaking point for me in an unjustified and immoral action. But America is without peer in this world as a war machine and if we can overcome the predictable civil war we’ll surely succeed. And under the notion that: nothing succeeds like success --- and in that event everything, including GI and civilian deaths, will be swept under the carpet.
            Deemed worthwhile.
            Deemed as a necessary consequence of war.

            I chatted with about 10 or 12 people as we marched past the thousand or so Saturday shoppers in Downtown Lawrence on this anniversary weekend. One Kansas University student told me he was against all war, no matter what, even after September 11. Another pair of KU students (attractively modern people with belly pins, tattoos, and facial jewelry) told me they thought the whole war was all about oil and that all wars were unjustified, even the war in Afghanistan --- even wars in self-defense.
            I wondered aloud to them how an instinctive reaction based on the human right of self-defense could be avoided in Afghanistan without imposing anarchy in Lawrence by default. I told them that I believed in September 11 because I’d seen it happen live on TV, and that I believed wholly in terrorist cells because I’d also been shown what they were capable of doing. And I wondered aloud how the couple thought I should come to terms with my conflict --- being a pacifist who also believes in terror cells and self-defense against terror cells.
            They had nothing new to tell me and I confused them --- so we went our separate ways ...

I moved up the line of sign-waving demonstrators marching up Massachusetts Street, and I encountered a couple of great stories that demonstrated the power of delusion --- even among the good and the meek. One older woman told me and a few others milling around that, “Dozens of selfish educated people” she’d talked to recently in Lawrence had told her that they were in favor of attacking Iraq but were unwilling to send their own children to do the job and were now frantically trying to enroll them in graduate schools or trying to find a way to ship them off to Canada. This woman was about 75 years old, and she was probably counting on her age and the politeness of others not to question her wisdom, but I challenged her findings anyway. I told her that I’d been keeping close track of the war -- as close as anyone else -- and that I’d talked to dozens of people about the war just in the past few weeks and that in all that homefront jawboning, and in all my trips going to the war at its many fronts, and in all I’d read, I hadn’t heard that tired old statement from anyone else until now.
She swore it had been dozens of people and that all the comments had been unsolicited. Obviously the woman was a liar or delusional or both. But I’m wise enough not to start a fight with an old lady. So I thanked her for her information, and I moved on up the line of demonstrators as it moved on up the street.

            I listened in as another woman whispered quietly to her group of younger friends about how if they saw anyone pointing cameras at them that, “doesn’t look like one of us, then he’s probably from either the FBI or the CIA.”
            “Smile pretty for them,” she told them.
            What she said will no doubt occur down the road with this thing. But it was obviously way too early for that kind of paranoia in this Axis of Evil era and I wondered what her motivation could possibly have been other than to assure the younger protesters that she’d been through anti-war protests before and that she wanted to be seen as a leader. Even though her contention was way too premature and at this early date in the fracturing of the American politic --- just plain poppycock ego and bluster.

            I’d heard enough.
            If there’s anything I can’t stand more than the far Axis Of Evil right wing in America (who I’ve never understood) --- it’s the know-it-all, paranoid, low-self-esteemed nature of the far left wing (who I knew all too well).
            Both creep me out in my middle age, and make me run for cover.
            So I left the demonstration before getting to the point where I might laugh out loud out of turn. I didn’t reckon I’d be attending too many more anti-war rallies this time around. And if so, then only to quietly cast my well-informed vote against war without being any more involved than that. There seemed to be plenty of others who have the temperament for hair-splitting infighting.
            Their efforts are eventually marginally effective --- and I wish them well.
            Besides! In only four more days or so I’ll be comfortably slipping back into premeditated cynicism. And demonstrating more than half-assed about anything after that (pissing against the wind) would go against the rules of not caring so much that it hurts ...

Headline News*
After the break of only having to endure two video horror clips yesterday, the total spiked back up today, but only up to 21 by the end of the evening.

                *         There was an urgent Breaking News bulletin today on the CNN Breaking News Box, but it turned out that it was
                                 only a Tony Blair news conference after getting out of a face to face Axis of Evil meeting about Iraq with George
                                 W. Bush in Washington DC.

                                                                   In Other News*
*     Today marked the 75th anniversary of the first television transmission ever by Filo T. Farnsworth. The CNN
              commentator who read me the story wondered to his viewers: “(Even) if sometimes we’re not sure weather to thank
              or curse Filo T. Farnsworth for inventing his glass tube box...”

Farnsworth --- as legend has it --- thought his invention (it’s color version sold first in America on Radio Row, which the World Trade Center replaced in lower Manhattan) would eliminate war by increasing global communication. (The same thing Ted Turner thought was the best-case scenario about CNN) But at the end of the day --- wars go on. And although a lot of money has been made from his invention since 1927, it’s said that Farnsworth didn’t get very much of it.

Business being business and all ...

~
(Thanksgiving Day)

November 22, 2001

Ground Zero To Bethlehem:

From the Macy’s Day Parade to the Christmas City

Dad and Kathryn weren’t able to come up for the parade like we’d talked about at the Philadelphia airport on the way to Amsterdam in September, so instead we’d planned to bus down to my sister’s place in Jersey for a big family dinner. We got up late, got out the door fast, and raced up 52nd Street from Robbie’s flat to Broadway just in time to catch the first float and first balloon of the 2001 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The lead Snoopy balloon had been upgraded from a few years ago when I photographed it being blown by fierce wind gusts into the side of Macy’s Department store at the very end of the 1996 parade. Macy’s always has been lined on 42nd Street with a row of large American flags. And in 1996 the windblown Macy’s Snoopy balloon slammed face first into the Macy’s storefront at flag level, popping ole’ Snoopy on Old Glory and leaving his ripped face flapping in the New York City breeze.

This year it wasn’t so windy, and Janet and I got up to the crowd at 52nd and Broadway just in time to see the new Snoopy float by. There was a festive buzz to a crowd in need of a festive buzz, and there were few reminders at that corner of the horrible attack we were all trying to put out of our minds as much as possible for a four-day holiday from pain. It was impossible to put it out of our minds altogether of course, but we were doing what we could at 52nd and Broadway.

There were a few Twin Tower T-shirts, some FDNY or NYPD or PAPD ball caps, and an honorary red white and blue float here and there to salute the fallen. One of those floats included Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the torn American flag that used to ride the top of the radio tower on the north tower of the World Trade Center. There was a lot of red and green as always in the parade, but this year there was also more red white, and blue than usual.           But the reminders of the war were an exception to the rule as most of the balloons floated by the huge Broadway show advertisements with holiday cheer and in usual full parade form.

            In fact, a few things in New York did seem to be slowly coming back to normal despite the much lower-than-average turnout at the parade. At one point I was about 30 yards down 52nd Street operating my streetphoto cameras from the middle of the street when a New York Police Department van bearing the NYPD logo and the motto Courtesy/Professionalism/ Respect on its side panel pulled up to the curb and several cops jumped out.

            “Have you been drinkin’ buddy?” one of the cops immediately burst out yelling at a man who’d let his obedient dog run loose a few feet away from him and far back from the parade route down Broadway. A technical violation of the leash law.

            “I mean, HOW MUCH HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING?,” the cop screamed unnecessarily.

            Another of the cops with far less coffee in him than the first one mumbled something about “zero tolerance” and the three overworked officers (because of all that overtime since September 11) bristled up the street toward the parade.

            “Maybe things are getting back to normal,” a bystander commented to the master of the re-leashed dog who’d been reduced to the standing of Thanksgiving Day terrorist for half a minute or so by the agitated New York cop. Whose outburst reminded New Yorkers around the fray --- with his over reaction and gruff manner --- that things might finally indeed be getting back to normal around here.

            It was the fifth or sixth time either Janet or I had been to a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and it outlasted us this time. We left early, went back to Robbie’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, and watched the rest of the parade from a couple of blocks away on a local TV channel on the CNN Breaking News Box while we finished packing for the bus trip to New Jersey and the big Thanksgiving dinner at Alyssa’s house.

            We walked the 10 blocks with our light luggage to the Port Authority, and took the bus from there to Clinton, New Jersey. The bus ride that I’d been dreading ever since I first imagined the inevitability of it during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.

~
(Thanksgiving Day)

The View From New Jersey:

Amputated Limbs & Phantom Sightings

Where Were You On 9/11?

I always thought the Twin Towers looked best from a distance. From Brooklyn or from New Jersey. They towered best from there --- head and shoulders above all the other little skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan.

            On Thursday during the bus ride to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving dinner I missed them about as much as I dreaded I could, getting choked up on my way out of town. But as I stared from the bus windows toward Lower Manhattan, I swore I could still see them there, still standing there --- still the overwhelming aesthetic punch on the most impressive of the planet’s skylines. I felt in that moment like an amputee laying in bed in post-operative intensive care. Hooked up to fluids and machines. Waking up out of the anesthesia and staring up at the ceiling --- knowing his leg is gone and his life is changed forever --- and yet I could still feel it there where it had always been before.

            Could still somehow see it through the haze ...

            I thought about the new sadness and horror of experiencing those missing buildings for the rest of the bus ride to Clinton and right through Thanksgiving dinner. Between turkey and table conversations about Islam, from cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie to a holiday round of where were you when the second jet hit the second building. I enjoyed the meal and I participated in all the September 11 reflection.

            I watched a little Thanksgiving Day pro football on the TV set with my dad and was surprised to see the September 12, 2001 front page of my hometown Kansas newspaper already published in a book Alyssa had purchased about how newspaper front pages nationwide had treated the attack on New York and Washington in their day-after editions. The Lawrence Journal-World cover with the banner headline “EVIL!” over a nearly full-page color photo of the second jetliner hitting the second skyscraper.

            But whatever I ate, whatever I talked about or saw in books or up on TV screens, my mind’s eye would not stop conjuring up the amputated lower Manhattan skyline I saw this morning through the window of that New Jersey-bound bus. It was the holiday season, and I was thankful for a rewarding career, a beautiful wife, and for my family who I was getting to spend a rare Thanksgiving with and for having the wherewithal to be here now.

            But, I wasn’t thankful for very much more than that ...

            When Thanksgiving dinner ended, a dozen people went in several different directions. Janet and I went with Dad and Kathryn through Easton, Pennsylvania to their home in Bethlehem.

            Bethlehem. My birthplace and my home for a while. And as always --- The Christmas City.

            A place established on December 24, 1741 and named for the place where the Bible tells us Christ was born. And where today Palestinians go throat to throat with Jews for their independence and Jews go throat to throat with Arabs for what they say is their birthright.

            Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (on the other hand,) is a beautiful city who’s charms were tainted for years by a layer of rust-colored soot from the steel industry and steel giant that bears the city’s name, Bethlehem Steel Corporation. An industry leader in the old days when my grandfather helped Bethlehem Steel help America and the free world win World War II by making big ships and powerful guns by the war-load and where my dad worked for 30 years helping to ensure the peace and win the Cold War. An armament industry giant from the Christmas City celebrating a Christian place lived in by Palestinian Muslims and Christians and threatened with occupation by Israeli Jews.

            Sometimes I just don’t get it.

            Some years leave me more thankful than others.

            Some years just leave me dazed and confused ...

~
November 26, 2001
New York to Lawrence

Furious Landings:
Crashing Convictions

                        During the last half hour on the flight home from New York to Kansas -- feeling at ease from seeing the family and re-energized after having been back to my childhood home and to Ground Zero -- I began reading an article in Newsweek titled; The Real Story of Flight 93, by Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift and Evan Thomas. An article about those innocent civilians who called from the airplane to say good-bye to loved ones. About their rush to stop another attack knowing that by trumping the bomber’s suicide mission they would end their own lives.

            And by the time I finished the article --- just seconds before our plane touched down at Kansas City International Airport --- I was so angry and so bloodthirsty for revenge that I could barely cope. It wasn’t the same fierce anger that I felt in Amsterdam in the seconds and minutes and hours and days after the second jetliner hit the second World Trade Center tower. It was worse! It was as angry as I’ve ever been or ever hope to ever be again in my life. As happened in Amsterdam at the Down Under Coffeeshop, I felt for a few moments as if I might just self-combust --- right there on the airplane. But this time it was less confusing, more concentrated on needing to kill someone ...

            The courage of those civilian passengers on flight 93 was inspiring. And the thought about how the civilian passengers of the other three jets had been cheated out of their own chance to stand nose-to-nose and fist to box-cutter with the terrorists --- only because they hadn’t understood the implications of their hijackings in time to do anything about it--- infuriated me. They didn’t know what was happening in time to show the same human courage and American resolve demonstrated over Pennsylvania by the passengers of Flight 93, or they would have.

            I felt proud to be an American.

            I felt personally wounded by the terror.

            I became enraged --- and so disturbed at the emptiness of September 11 that I didn’t quite know how to deal with it ...

~
November 28, 2001
Lawrence, Kansas

Brutal Transgressions:
The Time Has Come

                        The time has come. The civilized world is going to find and kill several thousand mad dogs now. The civilized world is going to trample their civil rights. Because that kind lost it’s civil and human rights the moment it lost its humanity.

            And now I do believe that many in America and in the West would enjoy the thought of desecrating the bodies of the guilty terrorists --- --- --- such is the level of the hate we feel and see others feeling all around us right now. In the newspapers and on the CNN Breaking News Box. From public streets to private homes --- and we don’t feel badly about our bloodthirst in the face of defending ourselves from this incredible ordeal.

            Not one bit!

            The civilized world --- as flawed as it is --- is a good world full of fair people who for the most part believe in peace and security. But now the civilized world is faced with dealing with these proven hateful animals who’d sadistically commit something as evil as September 11 and who’d insidiously design for it to happen live on our CNN Breaking News Boxes. Just so we’d all see it and be terrorized and traumatized by it.

            But now what we want to see is several thousand of these criminals dead. America wants --- as I said I did in October --- to kick their bodies into unrecognizable pulps. To spit at bullet-ridden bodies torn apart and piled up high in roadside ditches.

            Any ditch will do.

            We’re not usually this vengeful, this vicious. But we can be if we’re pushed to it.

            We’ve just recently found that out ...

            We won’t shoot these mad dogs if they broadcast to the world they’re surrendering and come out of their caves naked and waving white flags. But only then will we allow them to bother us with their trials and testimonies and pleas for mercy, pleas we just won’t be capable of understanding.

            The civilized world wants to kill them all --- if everyone pleases. The not so bloodthirsty civilized world will turn their heads, for most want these mad dogs dead in the worst of ways and they hardly care to watch how it happens. But a great many would like to lend a hand, including me.

            Now that Kabul has fallen and the dogs are on the run, all we want now is to get our sites on the terrorists who committed September 11 and on those who would harbor such losers. This extraordinary anger is uncharacteristic for us and way outside our typical comfort level.

            Yet we feel no remorse and such little discomfort at being so angry.

            Remembering the terror on those airplanes and in those buildings and up on our homefront TVs.

            So now as we vowed in early fall: Were hunting those butchers down to kill them all in whichever cave or whichever worldwide ditch they choose to die in.

            The time has come ...

November 29, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

So Sad:

Life in a World War III Funk ...

                       I feel so inconsolably sad in so many confusing ways. That’s one good reason to go over there. After eight weeks of bombing I’ve become morose all over again. Janet too. She’d been blasted by the Teddy Bears at Ground Zero last week and this morning she received a slide show program over the Internet produced by a regular American who just had to express her own confusion, to somehow be part of the healing. And although done by an amateur using borrowed photographs --- it had us both crying by the end of it.

            I just can’t sit here watching it all happen on the CNN Breaking News Box. That’s not the way I’m built. That won’t stop my head from spinning ‘round, or stop my emotions from getting the better of me. And everyone from the mayor of New York to the president of the United States to all those public service announcements on the CNN Breaking News Box keep encouraging me to fight terrorism by thumbing my nose at it and by going about my normal routine. So I’m taking their advice and doing my part for the war effort, and I’m going over there to make some street photography in an important global place at an important historical time.

            That’s what I do.

            Go inside the TV to wherever globally significant events are happening on the streets of the world and make streetphoto art.

            This time to the region of the world where terrorists misused a religion and twisted vulnerable, uneducated, hopeless, and resentful dead-enders to launch an unholy, uncivilized, and selfish war against civilization and to stage their hideous attack on the globe.

            To wander the streets as a professional bystander, there to see if I can figure out why they did this to us – and to kill bin Laden with my bare hands if the opportunity materializes ...

            I’ll just have a little look around.

            Go about my normal routine and try to find a few poignant street moments to make photographs of as I try to recover my post-Cold War marbles ...

November 30, 2001

Lawrence to New York

Back to the Front

Headline News*[1]

                        I jotted down a list of the headlines I ran across during my return to Ground Zero and on my way to the war. About how the war was going. About how things were going over there --- where I’d soon be --- and elsewhere in the world on the eve of me hitting the streets of Islamabad;

          * Northern Alliance Forces Mop Up:

                                      Taliban Defenders Staging a Bloody Last Stand in the
                                     Remaining Taliban Foothold of Kunduz After Bitter
                                     Two-Week Siege

          *   Operating Base (Camp Rhino) Springs Up in Afghanistan Desert

          *       US Troops/Alliance to Move on Kandahar Soon

          *      CIA Operative Killed at Prison Uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif

          *     Suicide Bus Bomb Explodes in Israel; Two Civilians Dead
          *      Taliban Retreating From Kandahar;

                                 New Fighting with Al Qaeda at ‘Tora Bora Cave Complexes’
                                 Near Pakistan Border

          *     More Suicide Attacks Launched Against Israel

          *     Kashmir Deaths Increase in Terrorist War

          *    Taliban Fighters Surrender;

                                      Bloody Siege at Mazar-e-Sharif Ends

          *     World Press Finally Gains Access to Afghan Battle

~

                        After a typical flight east -- meaning that I was picked for a full security hand search again, me, Mr. Habib, Mr. White, and Mr. Muhammad -- I hit New York running with the traditional first stop at Ben’s Pizzeria in the Village. Then I wandered back to my bed at Robbie’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen through Chelsea, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and in honor of the death of Beatle George Harrison last night I ended the walk in Central Park to get near the candle and flower tribute to him at the John Lennon Strawberry Fields memorial.

            My anticipation is high about flying off to Pakistan and everything that shoot will entail. I’m also dreadfully anxious due to the harrowing thought of the daylong commute that stands between Islamabad and me. I live to travel, but I typically hate to fly. And the thought of more than 24 hours in the airline system on Pakistan International Airlines has me way more concerned than what may await me once I get there --- on the ground in southeast-central Asia.

December 1, 2001

New York City

Return to Ground Zero:

A Recovering, Yet Strained New Normal

Two suicide bombers acting in concert struck Ben Yehuda pedestrian

mall in downtown Jerusalem yesterday killing 13 civilians ... [2]

                        I rode the E train to near city hall (which this week took me a stop further downtown than it had last week,) with a subway car full of a VIP group of Canadians from Toronto who’d come to the city in droves with their maple leafs flying to show support for New York City, to pay their respects to Ground Zero, and to do some Christmas shopping.

            As I approached Ground Zero I pounced into action when a fire engine (engine number seven) screamed past St. Paul’s Chapel --- scattering Canadians and others there to see the aftermath. Some who were really spooked as the fire engine and other rescue vehicles flew by in an urgent rush. It was still too soon after, and many worried for a few moments that there’d been another attack.

            As I sat across from the gathered throng of Canadians at the memorial fence at St. Paul’s putting film in my three cameras, I met a man from Manchester, England who’d come to New York to end a two-month around the-world trip by paying his respects at Ground Zero. I guided him past the chapel and past the remnants of World Trade Center #5 to the view at Washington Street where I began a surprisingly wonderful day of photographing the tentatively recovering New York City by the tentatively recovering me.

            While I was there, I talked to a cop guarding the entrance to Ground Zero. He’d just posed with a smiling woman from Ontario whose husband wanted a snapshot of her at Ground Zero with the destruction and a hero cop in the frame. I asked him if people taking such tourist snapshots instead of documenting the site bothered him. He said that at the beginning of the ordeal in the weeks following the tragedy the police were under orders to confiscate cameras and that they took hundreds away from unaccredited civilian photographers and tourists.

            “But after awhile an occasional busload of tourists started emptying out in front of the barriers,” he said, “all of them with cameras popping. And so the confiscation policy gave way to the tourists and their curiosity about this place. Now we pose with civilians whenever they ask us to pose. They get in touch with this horrible place and the department gets good public relations.”

            The Ground Zero cop nodded at this morning’s crowd and said it was the busiest he’d seen it there since just after the attack in mid-September. I suggested that a little terrorist attack wasn’t going to completely stop a New York City Christmas shopping spree, and he replied, “There’s a lot of Canadians here today --- a lot of Canadians...”

            I moved around the Ground Zero perimeter in a markedly thinner fog than I’d been operating in when I shot this place last week with Janet. And in a lot less of a state. That is, until I again came across the Teddy Bear memorial at the harbor. I worked the site for fifteen minutes and read quite a few of the memorials and choked myself up to tears again and by the end of the bear shoot I just couldn’t get the sadness that had enveloped me to go away. Just couldn’t stop hearing Janet pleading with me last week at Thanksgiving: I’ve got to get out of here right now Gary --- please get me out of here --- I’ve had enough --- I can’t take it anymore..

            The weight of it all put me back into a proper September 11 fog that somehow felt more comfortable at Ground Zero than the Christmas-time cheer I’d passed through on the way downtown. The manufactured mood that had slightly melted the fog of war for a while and temporarily made me uncomfortably optimistic.

            I stepped into a tavern across the street from Ground Zero to speak with the patrons about the attack and while I was there I found out what all those fire engines and emergency trucks I’d photographed earlier screaming past St. Paul’s had been all about. Found out from a Breaking News bulletin up on the TV set there -- about how a powerful explosion in lower Manhattan injured more than 35 firemen (three of them transported to burn units) when an electrical transformer in a cooling and ventilation unit blew up at an office building over on Whitehall Street near Battery Park.

            I continued around the perimeter stopping to eat a slice of pizza in my new measured funk. A funk that I’d gotten used to after all these weeks and a funk I was prepared to keep for the rest of the day if I had to. A funk that was aggravated further when I ran across and photographed a pathetic Bible-thumping street preacher whose act was to use Christianity to suggest that those who died up the street somehow deserved it. Not because they were regular Americans, but because they were regular sinners.

            However, in the next six hours of shooting New York after leaving Ground Zero and heading uptown, I unconsciously worked myself back out of that fog by experiencing the city still slowly working itself out of its own stumbling funk.

            I argued with (and ended up chewing out) an over-the-top socialist at Washington Square Park who justified the Lower Manhattan terror attack down the street by condemning America for its capitalist, free trade viewpoints that led to the whole thing in the first place.

            I watched a cabby pin an SUV to the curb along MacDougal Street at Washington Square Park and spend four light changes screaming and unmercifully cursing the SUV driver out for cutting him off earlier up on Fifth Avenue.

            I watched one of the chess sharks at Fourth and MacDougal Streets at the southwest corner of Washington Square as he deftly double-moved a betting tourist in a flash --- scamming him out of $10. The tourist glanced away from the game board for only a fraction of a second (really just an instant while punching his time clock) and in a flash the chess shark made the quick cheater move. Then he spent the next half-minute pretending to study his situation on the board while actually just reading the tourist to see if he’d caught the shark making the cheat. The tourist clearly hadn’t noticed the scam move and after the shark became comfortable with that conclusion he moved again and punched his clock --- a half-minute closer to pay dirt.

            I encountered one of the park’s soft drug dealers as we both waited in line to buy a hot dog from the vendor at the fountain near the arch, and when he found out what I was up to and where I was going to he told me: Don’t go there --- please don’t go there man. I beg you, please don’t go there...

            I encountered an angry Jamaican in the subway at the Eighth Avenue Line under Fourth Street who roared at the waiting commuters about how they were all just fucked up white people who owed him retribution (Now!) for our fucked up white ancestors enslaving his beautiful black African ancestors. He ended his subway platform performance --- one of the best street raves I’ve ever encountered in the wild --- with that old pre-September 11th classic: And you can all just kiss my black Jamaican ass!

            New York City and Washington Square and the subway system all seemed so normal in so many ways. Kids playing on the Square’s playground equipment along Waverly Street. Pet owners exercising their dogs at the Fourth Street dog run. The vendors selling sausages and sodas to the NYU students, the regular park patrons, and a few tourists gathered around the perpetually broken Washington Square fountain. New York Pizza at a Greenwich Village pizza joint --- taken with a Hawaiian Punch chaser. Campaigning socialists with unpopular and ill-timed agendas. Sensitive dope dealers and cheating chess sharks in the park at the corner of MacDougal and Fourth. Screaming cabbies cursing out visitors, mean hyperactive cops chewing out petty violators, and angry raving Rastafarians screaming at white people in the subways.

            New York City seemed so back to normal in so many different ways ...

            But then after getting back to Hell’s Kitchen, I went to dinner at a Tai restaurant on Ninth Avenue with Robbie, her roommate Robin, and Robbie’s friend Marilyn. And they all easily agreed that the city and the feeling about being everyday people in the city had changed and would never --- they figured --- ever quite seem as secure again. At least as far as they were concerned.

            We laughed, we talked a New York mile, we sent back the soup, and we drank the fine wine of another Manhattan Saturday night out on the streets.

            It seemed the same in so many ways, but at any reminder of the attack, and at every glance to the empty skyline of lower Manhattan, we all knew it was only the same as seen through the clouded veil of the indelible memory of what we’d all seen happen on the tip of the island at the end of last summer.

~

December 2-3, 2001

New York

Never Forget

                       On Sunday morning I went back to Ben’s for one last slice of pizza and one last smoke on the benches at Washington Square. On the bus ride from the Port Authority to JFK Airport at the Grand Central Station stop I saw two sets of lovers reluctantly kissing good-bye as their mates boarded the bus for trips away from Ground Zero. A pretty young woman in pink with a fluffy fleece hat prying herself away from her black-leather man. A set of Gay lovers hugging and smooching and the one staying behind standing and waving from the street as the bus turned east from the Grand Central stop and sped toward the tunnel to Kennedy Airport.

            Along the way through Queens and Brooklyn, I saw hundreds of basketball players on playgrounds lit for the coming night, just as there had always been before on unseasonably warm November evenings.

            The city seemed the same.

            But along that route and at the airport tonight, the reminders of the horror were too many to make it seem as if it were just like it had always been before.

            Before.

            Before the city was attacked, horrified, and challenged by the aftermath of a hideous homefront war. Roadblock security checks with camouflaged army trucks and National Guard machine gun emplacements at both ends of the Midtown Tunnel between Manhattan and Queens. Huge American flags at the entrances to the tunnel and a much bigger American Flag billboard just off the expressway. Another sad look back at the lower Manhattan skyline lighting up for the night. Looking more like the skyline of Cleveland than like the crown of the financial and free trade capitol of the world. The ruins of New York exposed at nightfall by the disappearance of two long-accustomed dotted lights in the sky. Rising head and shoulders above all the other lights for thirty years.

            Destroyed on the whim of a few hundred religious zealots ...

            Two and a half months ago I was blissfully ignoring the growing problem of murdering zealots training armies of stateless mercenaries in clandestine terrorist training camps. I was enjoying the post-Cold War decade of peace and prosperity as much as the next guy without much thought (even while wandering the edgy streets of the world) of either suffering an attack either from cruise missiles or terrorist explosives.

            The Soviet Union had dissolved, Islamic extremists didn’t have bomber aircraft, and their occasional truck or boat bombs barely affected my life in the least. Sure, one day I figured they’d set off a nuclear bomb either in Israel, here, or in Europe. Or attack the West on multiple fronts with biological or chemical weapons. “But until that time came,” I thought, “I’ll just ride the gravy train of peace and prosperity,” a peace and prosperity unlike the West had ever known before, and perhaps will never know again.

            Those losers were someone else’s responsibility and I was sure we had competent people on the job. Because I was just a rider on their bus. A fat, rich, and happy post-Cold War global street photographer on a fat, rich, and happy post-Cold War bus.

            Closer to the airport the bus drove past a landscape of urban cemeteries with lots of fresh grave sites flashing past the windows, reminding me of September 11. I noticed a billboard on a bridge that beckoned commuters to Never Forget Our Heroes; FDNY-NYPD. I noticed laundry hung from clotheslines under the bridge. I saw American flags hung from almost every house along the route. I saw a V-formation of geese up in the sky heading south over the expressway. I remembered two buildings missing from the New York skyline and glanced back again to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I watched glimpses of sandlot flag football games, playground basketball, and team soccer being played in the parks near the highway. I saw more flag billboards, and then I saw a camouflaged convoy of National Guard army trucks booking down the highway the other way toward Manhattan. And there was that miniature golf course we passed --- all lit up and teeming with young people trying to get on with their lives...

            New York City was the same. Aside from the amputated skyline and all the fear and horror. A stage for the ongoing struggle for human happiness in a fast, grimy, and sometimes cruel world. But now it was even tougher than it had been before, and perhaps as I watched it --- perhaps it was even more compelled now to go on with its normal routine.

            Maybe a New York minute had become 60 seconds long on September 11. Its typical 30 second pace for a minute shooting back up to an even 60 seconds in the flash of an exploding jetliner. Perhaps its clock had even stopped for a couple of days. But since that time I’d noticed from reports on the CNN Breaking News Box and from wandering around these old familiar streets this fall, that a New York minute had once again dipped into the low 50-second range.

            Perhaps it will settle into a 45-second holding pattern for a while. As it recovers and remembers how things used to be. As it frets about new attacks on this American front line. As it just forgets for awhile and goes out to the park on an unseasonably warm November evening to shoot basketball with its neighbors instead of just sitting on its couches in its living rooms inside its flag-draped houses watching worlds collide in Afghanistan on its 24-hour CNN Breaking News Boxes.

* Go to Chapter FIVE

NEXT Chapter Table of Contents History Index Home

[1] See New York Front sources on Source Page at back of book

[2] Associated Press

September 6, 2002 and September 7, 2002 Including Field Note Passages From (Nov. 20, 2001 to Dec. 3, 2001)

The Rules of Engagement in an Overcrowded World: Through the TV Screen To the Stink of Ground Zero

September 6, 2002 and September 7, 2002
Including Field Note Passages From
(Nov. 20, 2001 to Dec. 3, 2001)

The Rules of Engagement in an Overcrowded World:
Through the TV Screen To the Stink of Ground Zero