I fled Lower Manhattan on 9/11. The memory still haunts me

One thing everyone who was in NYC on 9/11 says is how beautiful the weather was. And it definitely was a beautiful, bright and crisp day. I recently landed a temp-to-perm job sorting mail and converting hard copy bond notes to digital files in the J.J. Kenny Repository at Standard and Poor’s on 55 Water Street, very close to the Twin Towers. I was 20 and trying to prove I deserved to keep my job, so I would get to work at 8 and leave after my boss. 9/11 was no exception, and I was standing at my boss’s desk when we saw what at the time we thought was a news helicopter hit the north tower.

We all stood watching, trying to figure out what had happened. I called my mom from my boss’s desk. She was in mountain time, two hours earlier, so I woke her up. I told her that a news helicopter had crashed into World Trade and to turn on the news. We were on the phone when Tower Two was hit, watching it at the same time from very different vantage points. Without pause she said, “Get out of that building right now.” I told her I would and that I loved her.

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We were on the 45th floor, and everyone was in a state of shock. The building intercom came on and told us to shelter in place and that they were shutting the elevators down. I wanted to get out, and so did my friends Alice and Taisha. People really dressed up for work back then. Alice and Taisha were both in skirts and heels and I was in slacks, dress shoes, and a button down. The three of us decided we would not stay put, so we made our way to the stairwell, surprisingly some of the only people making the trek, the girls still in their heels.

When we finally made it down, it looked like a grey snow made of shredded office paper was starting to fall. We had no context for what was actually happening, so we decided we would try and hop on the train at Bowling Green, which now seems like an extremely weird instinct, but we were all young. As we walked up, we saw a flood of terrified and confused people coming out of the station. It hit us that we had already made our way down the stairs too slowly and wasted even more time trying to get on the subway. It was time to evacuate downtown.

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I lived in Queens, and the girls lived in different parts of Brooklyn, and we headed in different directions. I made my way up Trinity Place/Church Street but very quickly realized Church Street was not the right move. The sounds were horrific. People hitting the ground. A building that sounded like an industrial apocalypse had brought it somehow to life and it was now in a war with itself. People were covered in grey. Too close, so I veered right and somehow made my way to Broadway.

Those of us heading north had started to run. My best friend, roommate, and bandmate Derek worked in SoHo at Yellow Rat Bastard. I knew he wouldn’t be at work yet, but I knew all his friends. I didn’t have a cell phone, so I needed to use their landline. There were a few people there, looking dazed and slightly catatonic, very stoned. I called Derek and told him to stay home. I called my mom and told her I was alive, but I had to go. Little did I know it would be three days before I talked to her again.

As I made it to Tower Records on Broadway and 8th, I noticed the posters for Tori Amos’s heavily promoted new album Strange Little Girls. It looked cool, and extremely eerie given the morning unfolding around her steely gaze. Then there was this collective scream making its way uptown like a wave at a baseball game. I turned south and saw Tower Two fall completely in on itself. It looked like it was happening in a perfectly geometric way. There was nothing I could do but stand there and watch. There were so many people still inside.

Then the second wave of people came into view, running much faster than I had been, and I was booking it. No more standing and watching. I knew I was going to have to make my way to the 59th Street Bridge.

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Crowds started traveling in packs, kind of along the same routes our trains would be going. People in my general vicinity were not talking at all. As I got closer to the bridge, Tower One fell. Seeing this from a more panoramic view made me feel like time simply stopped. People were now fully panicking. The consensus was that crossing the bridge was risking your life, because they were definitely going to be the next targets. It didn’t sound insane at the time, so I told myself I would make it across as quickly as possible, hoping for the best. People were yelling down to drivers with flatbeds, asking if they could jump down and ride in the backs of their trucks. I made it across and walked home.

In the apartment, my first instinct was to take off my shoes and clothes and throw them away, something I still do if I've had an extremely bad day. I showered and, in a daze, sat for hours staring into the abyss. We didn’t have a TV, so we recorded some music on our 4-track until we decided to go outside and see if the world around us had exploded into an actual apocalypse. Oddly, everything in Queens seemed to stand completely still. We made our way to a local bar that didn’t check IDs and sat drinking. When we were well lubricated, we made our way up to the train platform and just stared where the Twin Towers had been.

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They called us back to work a week later. Everyone was funneled through Union Square. You had to show your IDs, and men with machine guns escorted you to a train. The train tunnels were boarded up with wood because debris had flooded them. It was all lit up like a forensics scene. When we surfaced, we were escorted to our offices through canal-like trails through the debris. The smell was like no other. Our office had a 360-degree view, and you could see the barges carrying wreckage out of the site.

After 9/11, people got really close. For a brief and beautiful moment, no one’s divisions seemed to matter anymore. Everyone wanted to hang around with each other and share in love and revelry. People partied, hard. The world might end, after all. One of my favorite memories was taking a gang of very straight finance bro coworkers, per their request, to an extremely risqué gay party at John Street, a long-gone downtown venue. And we partied until 4 a.m. as if the future had no guarantee, because maybe it didn’t. Maybe it still doesn’t.

Twenty-five years, and I still can’t watch TV on 9/11.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness.

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