Baltimore is my native turf, though many of you reading this blog have already surmised a part of my heart belongs to New York. Upstate along with the Big Apple. I have a ton of friends in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Yonkers and Staten Island, largely through the music industry. The other part of it is I just can’t get enough of both the rural and the urban splendor found all across New York state and city. Everything is just bigger and grander because it has a bigger and grander standard to live to up.

Most of the time, though not always, there’s a charm to the random arrogance and self-entitlement of New Yorkers, and yet, if you spend enough time up there, you’ll see an understated mutual bond seldom found anywhere else in the United States. Though I suppose anywhere, any country, when the chips are truly down and a society is pushed to the brink of survival, everyone rises in the face of life-threatening adversity.

There’s nothing I can say about 9/11 the event that hasn’t been said globally. Heinous, mortifying, a kick in the pants to a superpower with the intent of delivering a message no empire is wholly invulnerable to infiltration. A ferocious tug on the beard of Uncle Sam, a rude upskirt blow to Lady Liberty, all at the highest cost imaginable.

What I can talk about, since we all have our stories of where we were when the 9/11/01 attacks happened, is never forgetting heading off to work on a still warm and bright September morning. I remember pulling the sun visor down in my car and squinting, not yet clinging to a spiritual revisionism to give the mighty Ra a hearty good morning alongside Jesus Christ. The gods wouldn’t have heard me anyway. They were elsewhere. They were needed. So badly needed.

I’d gotten out a couple miles on Route 140 of my former hometown of Westminster, Maryland, and I recall grunting at myself for inadvertently leaving my day’s music behind. A CD copy of Husker Du’s Zen Arcade. It was laying like a taunt next to my coffeepot, which I’d rinsed and left in the drain, but left the daggone Husker Du album behind. I can remember such fine details like this, even the lunch I’d made: a turkey sandwich with an orange and a fun size pack of peanut M&Ms. Fun, yeah, okay. That lunch would end up becoming an uneasy dinner much, much later into the evening. I, like everyone else in the world, became transfixed upon the news reports that just wouldn’t stop, playing a smoke-infested horror show making Stephen King’s The Mist mamby pamby by comparison.

I remember fuming inside my car being subjected to FM radio, which I couldn’t stand most days since it was always then as it is today, cherry-picked repeat singles played ad nauseum at the mandate of a program director made a bitch from record label payola.

September 11, 2001, those first few minutes on the road, I heard, like the prophecy I didn’t take for what it was then, Soundgarden’s bitter pill “Fell on Black Days” from their big hit Superunknown album. The song had overstayed its welcome with me, on that day already released seven years prior. I remember grumbling to myself how I wish radio had the stones to play Soundgarden’s earlier work from Ultramega OK and Louder Than Love. I wanted to hear their rowdy “Big Dumb Sex.” The safer but grindy “Hands All Over,” at the least.

Like I should’ve been whining about something so trivial.

Soundgarden became an afterthought as I pulled up to a stop light and nudged the channel selector. I heard somber voices, shocked voices, from a trio of local morning show hosts paid to laugh every other second at their own innuendo. Not a raspy chuckle to be heard. Instead, it was the sound of death enunciating through reporters, emcees and jockeys. The World Trade Center had already been attacked by a suicide bomber plane. By the time I turned the channel, I heard those same DJs exclaim in fright, as if Orson Wells himself came back to say it wasn’t a put-on this time.

The second building of the WTC had met the same fate as the first. The green light came at the busiest intersection in Westminster, and nobody moved. Absolute truth. Everyone gridlocked, not a single angry horn wailing to move the line.

I had no choice but to turn to my left and look outside, to see if what I was hearing was true. I will never forget the horrified look of a woman staring back at me from her own car, her wavy brown hair tumbling into her face as she asked me between closed vehicle windows “Do you hear this?” You didn’t need to be a lip reader specialist. We all connected that day.

I got to work slower than usual, driving in a daze. 9/11 got even more real with reports of further terrorist attacks in Shanksville, Pennsylvania and an hour fifteen below us at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. We were wedged between these hit sites and pissing ourselves we were next. It was Terrorgeddon.

Not a soul dared speed for change and Maryland has the most selfish, reckless drivers in the country. I was three minutes late for work, and I’d given myself a five-minute edge for arrival. Nobody at my job had been on time.

In fact, we all sat there at our desks, stupefied and reeling as if we’d seen it firsthand ourselves. We had a handful of real estate closings scheduled, but nobody lifted a finger. The phones, which were usually incessant upon starting time of 9:00 a.m. hardly rung all day. A t.v. was brought in to our office and Lord knows where it came from. It reminded me of school days long ago and what joy we took when the teachers opted for a video lesson or, better, a break from the mundane by putting something mindless and entertaining on.

This was hardly mindless, nowhere near entertaining, and nobody could take their eyes off the repeated sight of those dagger thrusting planes and the miasma of hell the victims were going through. We gasped at the televised sight of people having no choice but to jump to their deaths from crumbling towers of power in downtown Manhattan. We teared up, we mumbled our reactions, we canceled all of our closings but one. Turns out the lone customer insisting we close his refinance in the midst of a national tragedy worked as a cameraman for a local news station and was on the clock to hustle up to New York for coverage.

The nation bled, the nation wept, the nation wanted revenge. I ended up tape recording six hours of straight-on footage by the time I got home. It just felt right at the time. It was something you wanted to forget but could never. A year after 9/11 happened, I pulled out that tape at my ex’s request and we played it. We couldn’t get through fifteen minutes before taking it back out of the VCR. Yeah, VCRs were still a thing in the early 2000s. I’d recorded a gazillion football and hockey games on tape, all scooched into the trash down the road when home locations and technology changed. I gave the 9/11 tape to a senior center and the woman sighed at me, then nodded and thanked me, saying it would remain with them. I couldn’t just throw it out. It felt wrong.

By the time I got to visit the 9/11 Memorial myself many years later, 2018 or 2019, with my buddy, we’d hoofed 13 miles all around lower Manhattan and parts of Midtown and Chinatown. We weren’t a bit tired, and we both looked at one another in silence at Ground Zero, measuring the gravity of the moment, taking in the gush of the cascade fountain. People were silent and reverential. Children who weren’t alive to understand they were in presence of phantasmagoria were scolded for their nattering and screaming, as children will.

I’d been to Ground Zero years before, two after the devastation. One of the neighboring towers which had miraculously survived its wounds had an aqueduct in the main lobby from which a series of single droplets fell, one-by-one into a pool. Symbolic tears for the thousands lost on that dreadful day.

As my friend and I marveled at the new 104-story infrastructure at One World Trade Center, gleaming a puncturing missile into the Manhattan sky, I said to him, “That, dude, is New York City’s thumb bite back. That’s what New York and America is all about.”

Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Preceding photos from the public domain.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.