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.
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