Blue Lights, Big City

I could see the blue lights all the way from Fourth Avenue to Williamsburg. They haunted me like they never had before. Three years later, emerging from all the blocking out, and the withdrawl. I didn't lose anyone close to me, rode it all out in the home office with A., who never showed up for work before 10 a.m. Like most people in the publishing business.
Watching New York 1 as I always did, A. busy getting dressed, the strange theater began when shots of the first plane hitting flashed on the screen. The announcer speculated about a plane accidentally hitting the tower. As everyone knows, it was an extroardinarily clear day, one of those rare crisp September mornings when all the August haze had entirely burned off, like October in San Francisco when suddenly the fog is gone. How could there be an accident with such clear skies?
That's what I told Ricky in the open-air escapism of Williamsburg, after throwing back a couple of Stella's at the overground-underground lair called Bugaloo. I had not intended to push the discussion of 9-11 at all. It's become so meaningless anyway. There is no real analysis of why it happened or what it really means. It's been drowned in flag-waving.


Yeah heroes fought and died and I wasn't there. But that doesn't mean it all has to be about flag-waving. As I sat in Privileged Slope with A., in a daze, wondering how the world was going to change, the wind blew the particles of death over my head. I could see the purple cloud and the pulverized remains of commerce and its people-instruments float over me like a sword of Damocles. I can feel the stories of Ricky, or my cousin J., about looking up and seeing things falling, and some of those things were people. And it was the most unreal, unexpected thing anyone could hope to see (at least those of us in the First World). And everyone not knowing what to do. And the people like Yuzzy, who had to get off the Path train at Cortlandt Street only to stumble into the dust cloud that the collapse of the first tower created.
Even those mundane trips into Manhattan, over the heavily guarded Brooklyn bridge, on the Q train, every inch of the way sweating out the possibility of the train stopping, and escape. We all had escape on our minds. Getting home. Loved ones. The constant cloud of toxic air that permeated as far north as the East Village. I'll never forget the foul smells, even 6 weeks later, going to a show at Joe's Pub, or talking shit at the last of the Avenue B bodegas.
And when the flight to the Dominican went down in South Queens, I was at the Sony building interviewing Guillermo Del Toro, and as soon as I got out I heard the nervous news from security guards, and I called A. at home and she said, I'm not going to work. And I said, yeah, don't go in, and I couldn't believe that a plane crash, as serious as it was, paralyzed everyone and sent us into protective mode.
Yes we are soft, and we don't face the kidnappings and guerra civil and all the mierda that makes life insane (real) in much of the rest of the world, but despite the relative bullshitera of our reaction, and how hard I want to seem in the face of it, mami, it has jodido con mi cabeza.
Delayed reaction, we have inhibited the trauma that showed us the blood we ignore, the blood spilled in the rest of the world. Still, we ignore the warnings. La tormenta that missed us (mi isla) and kind of missed Jamaica and may crush Castro (CIA cloud-seeding no doubt) does not move us. The genocide that proceeds, the inevitable consequence that protects our mundane murmurings, is an afterthought. We cling to our false security like the lucky survivors of history.
Democracy matters, but the blue lights are fading into tatters of memory. What strength will we draw on when memories of home no longer shine on us, and the subways stop between the stations, and there is no escape from the hole we have burrowed ourselves into?

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