el peregringo

A few minutes before 9 o’clock that Tuesday I was in a cab headed cross town on 14th Street. I was running late for a meeting in a mid-town hotel that was to start at 9. The stretch of 14th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues has quite a few electronics stores and like many such stores, there were banks of televisions facing the street.

When I’m late, I can feel my blood pressure rise, and I begin to sweat. I don’t like being late. I’ve had to learn to use breathing techniques to try to control my anxiety, and that day in addition to that, I was watching the store fronts and trying to take my mind off the fact that I was going to miss the start of my meeting.

It was curious. Virtually all of the screens were showing the same movie–some action/adventure flick that was obviously a remake of Towering Inferno. Except that more than one store seemed to showing the same movie…

We reached the intersection of 7th Avenue and 14th Street and all traffic came to a dead stop. I glanced down 7th and the movie turned out to be live action. North tower was spewing tons of smoke. I yelled at the driver to turn on the radio, and I, like hundreds of others around stepped out of their cars and cabs and stood staring down at the towers. Just after 9 am, South Tower was hit from the southern side and the north side of it exploded as we watched. The radio was still suggesting that it had been a small private plane that had hit north tower–all of us at the intersection of 7th at 14th knew differently.

For three days I stayed in a mid-town hotel overlooking Times Square, waiting for a way to get out of the city and back to Ana and Vermont. At 8am the next morning, Times Square, normally a sea of yellow cabs and 10s of thousands of people walking was virtually empty. Twenty four hours after the attacks, pieces of office paper still rained down from the skies; the sidewalks were gritty with ash. It was the calm after the apocalypse, and nothing would ever be the same again.