I'd been living in NYC for a few months and was running out of money.
Luckily I'd landed a job to keep me going. It was a temp thing and i was going to be handing out name cards for a convention at the Javits Centre. I turned up to work 5 minutes before I was supposed to start at 9am and people were watching the first building burning. Someone said a plane had crashed into it and we all thought it was a small plane. We had a clear view of it and as I was watching the fire I saw a plane that looked black (It must've been in shadow or at least that's what my memory is of it).
I jumped up on a bench, pointed and yelled, "FUCK OFF!"
That's when everyone started talking about how we were under attack and that a plane had just smashed into the Pentagon. The people at the Javits Centre told us they were locking it down and we could either come in or stay out. I got very excited and thought there was no way I was going to miss out on this. So I elected to stay outside. I've often wondered about my reaction here. I was not scared, I was excited.
This wasn't the first time I'd had this reaction to being in a potentially life threatening situation. Years ago I was on a plane and I'd taken some LSD.
We were flying from NYC to London and I was sitting up the back smoking, yeah it was that long ago. I'd just bought a carton of Malboroughs because I couldn't roll myself a cigarette as I was tripping too hard. There weren't many people on the plane and as we were cruising along the plane took a sudden dip in altitude and then readjusted. An announcement came over the speaker system telling us that our oxygen masks were about to come down and started giving us instructions on how to use them. And then nothing happened. People started looking at each other as if to say, "Are we going to crash?" But it wasn't a panic. It was more like people were looking around at each other trying to work out how we should react. Like silently trying to work out if this is the moment we're meant to panic and be hysterical. Now I was tripping, so time took a very long time within all of this. But my reaction was excitement. I thought, "Woah, how cool. How lucky am I to be tripping while I'm in an aeroplane crash? Like it won't hurt because it's all just sensation. I was genuinely excited for what was about to come. Eventually a new announcement came over the speaker system apologising and telling us that something was accidentally triggered when we suddenly lost altitude but that everything was ok.
So back to 911.
I decided to walk down to the WTC to check out what was happening. remember I was excited and curious. Everyone was talking to everyone. All the social barriers were suddenly down. Homeless people were chatting away to rich people. A bum was asking people for $64,000. I walked down 5th Avenue with no cars on it chatting away to people. There were massive lines at public telephones because none of our mobiles worked. And I thought I better find some internet to let my family know I was ok. I also needed to find somewhere to sleep that night as I was living in Brooklyn at the time and the whole of Manhattan was in lock down. I didn't know anyone who lived in Manhattan. So I decided to make my way to NYU. Once there I jumped on a computer and wrote an email to my family to let them know I was ok and tried to suss out info an where I could sleep if it came to that. Outside I started chatting with a girl covered in dust. She was traumatised and told me about watching people jump out of the buildings on fire. I had no idea what to say to her.
By that time the buildings must've come down and I decided to check it all out. So I started walking downtown. At one point the police had cordoned off the street and I couldn't get through. Then I noticed a sign that said free food and I was hungry. It turned out to be an abandoned film shoot and they had all this amazing food out. I was the only one there and started feasting out on prawn cocktails and fruit. I grabbed some cans of drink, put them in my bag, and headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge to see if I could get home. It was closed and I started wondering somewhere else when someone said they'd opened up the bridge so I went back and walked home.
That night I called a friend and she said, "Hey Jonno. What's up." I replied, "Not the world trade centre." There was silence on the other side of the line. I guess it was too soon.
The only restaurants open were the Chinese takeaways so some friends and I went to get some food and then sat on our roof (which was covered in pagan symbols - apparently witches used to live there) watching the smoke billowing from where the buildings had been. Later we went to a bar downstairs from where I was living and people were PARTYING. It was amazing. Everyone was talking to anyone. NYC was a place full of desperately ambitious people and normally when you meet someone new one of the first things people try and find out is where you are on the power hierarchy. But that night people were just relating in a really truthful way. It felt like it was the end of the world and the only thing to do was connect with others. That lasted for a good 2 weeks. People offering each other seats on the metro and being really nice. Then at the end of 2 weeks it all went back to normal.
It was an amazing experience to live through. I learned a lot about myself and how I react to adversity. I got energised by it. I was excited. That's probably not what we're meant to say but it's what happened to me. At the time I was part of a group making a theatre show and we were doing "Shadow of the Invisible Man". It's a story about an invisible man terrorising a small town, his head covered in rags, and I saw all these amazing parallels to what we were experiencing. I wanted to use it for the show. But everyone else was too traumatised to do that. They were all young American actors fresh out of NYU's experimental theatre wing. They couldn't understand why anyone would want to attack them. I mentioned US foreign policy for the last 50 years but they had no idea what I was talking about. I guess it was a steep learning curve for many Americans. Don't get me wrong, it's an absolute tragedy what happened, but in my view it was what the US had been administering to the world for years. I would never justify violence but I could understand it.
So that's my story. For a couple of months afterwards I was living off beans and rice because I'd lost the job but then got back on my feet and had an amazing 2 years living in NYC.
Here are some other things I've written on Steemit if you're interested:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@jonno-katz/this-is-me
https://steemit.com/steemit/@jonno-katz/14-podcasts-that-rock-my-world
https://steemit.com/future/@jonno-katz/time-travel-how-we-will-be-able-to-do-it-in-the-future
https://steemit.com/steemit/@jonno-katz/another-reading-of-the-crab-bucket-story
https://steemit.com/swearing/@jonno-katz/fuck-cunt-and-nigger-nsfw
https://steemit.com/embarrassing/@jonno-katz/my-most-embarrassing-moment