Tuesday, June 17, 2014

10/10/01: LUNCH WITH JOE

Joe, an employee of Marsh McClenan, is one of the people whose business cards I found while picking up papers from the back yard of my apartment building at 22 River Terrace when I re-occupied on September 22 and 23.  I looked through the Marsh Web site boards they set up for employees and their families and found out that he was alive.  I sent him an email a week or so ago asking if he wanted his card back.  He responded, yes, and that he would like to meet.  I should call him on his mobile phone.  But when I called him, he was driving and he said it wasn’t safe to be on the phone while driving.  (He is the Risk Management Strategist, after all!).  But we finally connected and on Wednesday we went to an Italian restaurant on 46th, I think it was, anyway it was a couple of blocks from my 1515 Broadway office in Times Square.  The food was good and I was glad to be there with him but I couldn’t eat much at all, I hope he wasn’t offended.

Joe is about 60, the Senior Vice President of Risk Management Strategy at Marsh McClenan USA.  He survived the attack, as he said in his email to me, because he was in Boston on business.  I learned more of his story at lunch.

Joe had arrived in Boston the morning of September 11 and was twenty minutes into giving a presentation on what to do in case of interruption of business when the attack started.    He was supposed to fly directly to Washington, D.C., after the Boston presentation to give the same presentation.  Instead, he drove back to New York to execute the plan for his own company.

Joe had worked on the same floor as Jean, the woman whose card I found and sent to her family so they would have something to lay to rest at her memorial service.  I don’t remember which floor their offices were on, 80 or 90-something, but Joe had the Northwest corner office of their North Tower floor.  He said he would have been incinerated had he been there.  He has worked in that office for fifteen years.  He was still trying to understand why he wasn’t there.

Jean’s manager was with Joe in Boston.  “A young fellow,” Joe said, “We drove back together and he didn’t say a word the entire trip.  His wife was getting calls from his employees’ family members, wondering what was happening.”

When Joe first heard that a plane had crashed into the North Tower, during his presentation in Boston, he thought, “They’ll be okay.”  He thought this because his co-workers were senior experts on fire and emergency safety procedures.  He thought, “They’ll know what to do, they’ll bring everyone out safely.”  He didn’t realize that the plane had hit them directly.

“I am still trying to process this,”  he said.   [I hate to be so naïve, but I find it distressing when the people that I might normally look to for answers and leadership are so distressed themselves.  When everywhere I look, brave firemen, burly soldiers and seasoned officials are on their knees, sobbing.  I know they’re human, I understand that they are still brave, but it is so painful to see their pain, because it validates my own and makes me feel that everything is out of control.  Joe seemed the kind of person that I would turn to for answers.  And he has been unable to process this, just as I have been unable to.  A valuable lesson on humanity for me.]

I showed Joe my photo album / scrapbook, after he assured me he was okay seeing the graphic pictures.   We walked through the pictures of the Towers on fire and he described how the elevators and stairwells were all in the center of building, so the people who worked above the impact zone, including the Cantor Fitzgerald people (and my childhood classmate and neighbor, Blake!  God…), wouldn’t have been able to make it down. 

I pointed out the little person in one of the pictures who was holding on to the outside of the building on the North Tower at the restaurant top floor.  And then the picture of the same person falling.  He asked me, did I see helicopters flying around the top of the building?  Didn’t I think there were people who went up to the roof, hoping a helicopter might pick them up?  Then again, he said, maybe there was too much smoke in the top restaurant floor, maybe they couldn’t even get into the restaurant.  I said, I only saw a couple of helicopters and they didn’t look like they were trying to get near the top of either Tower.  Remember we were under attack, I said, it was total craziness and the fires in the Towers were spreading rapidly.

Joe told me he can’t help but think about his co-worker who was on the phone with his wife when he looked out of the window and saw the plane coming, right for him.  This man said a final good bye to his wife on that day.  Joe also wonders about his good friends, the senior fire and emergency strategy people, about how some of them didn’t die right away but were sending messages on their Blackberries asking for help.  He must be suffering a lot with these thoughts of his friends’ suffering.

He said that every person in Jean’s department was killed, except for the young manager who was with him in Boston and one other guy who was at a doctor’s appointment.

Joe asked about me, too, what happened to me on that day, was I displaced for long, how were things going Downtown and at work now.

I told him about the moment of the second jet hitting, that that’s when the world, or at least my perspective of it, changed.  After the first hit, when I was standing outside my apartment with other people watching the North Tower burn, we all thought it was a horrible accident.  But when the second jet flew over us and turned into the South Tower, the realization hit everyone that we were being attacked.  Suddenly everything became suspect – everything once normal now looked like a potential death machine.  After all, we just watched a passenger plane fly into a building, it was quite possible in my mind that the police helicopter was going to open fire on all the people running to safety.  Joe said he hadn’t thought of that.  That must have been terrible.  Then I felt bad about adding another aspect of horror to his already saturated sense of it.

So I told him something positive, about the Residents Association and how we were all working together to get Downtown up and running again.  Then I told him about the checkpoints and 24/7 clean up activities and that I really hate to leave my beautiful apartment but it is so painful to be in the neighborhood, now a grave site for thousands, that I will probably have to move.  He hasn’t been to the WTC site and doesn’t want to see it. 

I also told him we were expecting layoffs at work soon and that I might be on the list.  He said if I am laid off to send him my resume, since Marsh is a big consulting firm they might have something for me.  I said that since what they do for Internet businesses is risk management, they would probably need someone with more technical background than I have.  I can tell an ecommerce company that they need a firewall and a secure server, but that’s about all I can tell them.  He said, that’s all you need to tell them, it’s up to them to implement.  We laughed.  (Ah, the life of a consultant!)

I gave Joe his business card back, the one I found in my backyard, four blocks from where his old office had been.  The card was still dirty and a little warped from being wet.  He marveled that it wasn’t charred.  He said he had a theory about how all these office papers ended up blanketing Lower Manhattan.  He said that when the planes hit the buildings, all this stuff must have instantly been sucked out.  He was more technical about it, but I don’t remember the details.  I showed him some other things I had found that are in my scrapbook: charred fragments of financial documents, a business card of a senior person at Cantor Fitzgerald, a photo of a child’s birthday party that had been on someone’s desk, a photo of three older white men in tuxedos that might have been taken decades prior.  He stared at them for quite a bit.

He held his own card for a minute.  He said, fifteen years in that office, he had a lot of things there but he couldn’t at the moment think of anything specific.  Files, his computer documents, mementos, he had lots of stuff but maybe he doesn’t need it if he can’t remember what it was?

I am glad I had lunch with Joe, it was intense but put me about as close inside the Towers as I think I can handle, which I guess has been what I’ve been looking for.  I just can’t shake that feeling of helplessness, of just standing there watching people die.

No comments:

Post a Comment