Paul Bacon Read online

“No!” I said. “Don’t ride your bike in! Don’t come in at all. You have the day off. Trust me on this.”

  About ten minutes after the second tower fell, a security guard walked into our office and ordered Bob and me to the basement, insisting that we take the elevator. It was reassuring to see that someone was taking charge, but while we were waiting for the lift, I noticed a sign on the wall.

  IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, the sign said, DO NOT RIDE ELEVATOR.

  “Um, shouldn’t we take the stairs?” I asked the security guard.

  The guard shook his head as though he’d grown tired of answering this question. He waved me toward the emergency staircase with a condescending smile and said, “Be my guest.”

  I walked over to the stairs and opened the door. Peering inside, I saw that smoke and ash from the fallen towers had reached up inside our building as high as the twenty-sixth floor and beyond. I closed the door and waited in front of the elevator.

  After sitting in the basement for thirty minutes, the security guard gave us the all-clear to go home. Out on the street, tawny brown dust covered every surface like a layer of fresh snow, and a dome of metal-colored smoke closed the horizon to about ten yards away. For all I could tell, every skyscraper in the city could have fallen in the last half hour. The Financial District was scattered around my feet in heaps of ashes, with scraps of charred memos and newspapers littering the ground like confetti.

  I joined an exodus of thousands leaving the Financial District on foot. Ambling up the FDR Drive, I happened to witness my first friendly exchange between a New Yorker and a member of the police department.

  The young male officer was very calmly keeping watch over the crowd as we made our quiet and cooperative march up the drive. A middle-aged woman walking beside me seemed overcome with joy that he was still on his post.

  “Thank you,” she said, grasping his hand and shaking it. “Thank you, thank you. Thank you.”

  The cop nodded and winked as we passed by, as if it were just another day at the office.

  Prior to this encounter, I had only seen cops at odds with the citizens of New York, either shouting or being shouted at. I didn’t know civilians could share a moment like this with the hated men in blue.

  Like a lot of my neighbors, I woke up the morning of September 12 completely scrambled, but also aware that many people were much worse off than me. So I joined the hordes of sudden philanthropists who lined up in front of Saint Vincent’s Hospital to donate blood. But because few of the victims survived the attacks, there was little need for blood. I moved on to the next places I thought I could be useful: the makeshift emergency headquarters at Chelsea Piers and the Javits Center, where I’d been told people were signing up to volunteer in the cleanup efforts.

  Late that afternoon, I was waiting with a long-faced group outside the Javits Center when a call came for “laborers” to be transported to the Trade Center site. The crowd—a handful of youngish men, desk jockeys like myself, from the looks of it—instantly came to life. Sure, we could labor. We’d come to do something, and now we were going to do it.

  After about fifteen minutes, a city bus rolled up and six of us strode to the doors, charged with purpose. The guy at the front rolled up the sleeves of his French-blue dress shirt, and in the back, I wished I hadn’t worn a T-shirt so I could do the same. But as our line of faux foot soldiers started to penetrate the vehicle, we seemed to be losing momentum. When I got inside and turned toward the back of the bus, I could see why. Except for the six of us, straight out of the pages of Maximum Golf magazine, the bus was packed with burly, suntanned men who looked as if they spent a lot of their work time outdoors. They had tool belts. They had hard hats. We did not. We were weekend warriors, and we knew it. Making my way down the aisle, I looked only one of these laborers in the eye, to apologize for stepping on the steel-reinforced toe of his work boot. He didn’t seem to have noticed. None of the men I had boarded with acknowledged each other for the rest of the ride. I assumed this was for fear of being kicked off the bus.

  But cruising down the West Side Highway past Tribeca, our entire crew was given a heroes’ welcome. Thousands of Lower Manhattanites, who normally couldn’t be forced at gunpoint to agree on the time of day, were now lining the road, blowing kisses and waving homemade banners proclaiming, WE LOVE YOU! The air inside the bus turned jubilant, infusing our entire group with camaraderie.

  It all came to a sudden end when we got off the bus a few hundred yards from Ground Zero and took our first whiff. More than a day after the Twin Towers had fallen, the buildings’ remains were still spewing toxic smoke like an underground volcano. Within moments of stepping off the bus, nearly every man without a hard hat had broken ranks and begun walking back uptown.

  A few minutes later, a construction foreman approached our group at a frantic pace. Cigarettes were flicked away and coffee cups were dropped to the ground as we huddled around the important-looking man to receive our orders. But all he could tell us to do was stand by, because no one knew what to do with us yet. Only guardsmen, firefighters, and police officers were being allowed near the smoldering World Trade Center site. Even the real laborers were out of their league now. For the next two and a half hours, the foreman returned with similar news, each time looking more and more frazzled.

  Finally, four hours after we’d arrived with our unusual civic spirit, the organizer brought word that made it seem like old New York again. The man climbed atop a ladder and spoke to us through a bullhorn. We were rapt. “We got all the hands we need for now,” he said. “As it is, youze’re just a bunch of lawsuits waitin’ to happen. So thanks but no thanks.”

  Most seemed to understand the situation and began to disperse. Someone in the crowd, perhaps another tourist like myself, cried out, “There must be something we can do!”

  “You know what you can do?” said the foreman. “You can give me a fuckin’ break, all right?”

  CHAPTER 3

  FOR THE NEXT WEEK, post–9/11 security measures shut down most of Lower Manhattan. Subways and buses stopped running south of Fourteenth Street, and nonresidents were being turned away. Police checkpoints seemed to be on every corner of my neighborhood. Nonessential businesses like clothing boutiques and restaurants remained shuttered. When the bars reopened, the New York equivalent of flowers blooming in spring, a college fraternity brother named Dave called me on the phone. He invited me to happy hour at our favorite Mexican restaurant in the West Village. He said he already had a table. He said he was sitting outside in perfect weather, looking at a plate of nachos with my name on it. He also told me that some of his coworkers would be joining us, and they’d been barhopping since noon. Sure, I said; the more, the merrier.

  Meeting Dave for the first time since the towers had fallen was like seeing him at a class reunion. Like me, Dave lived and worked downtown.

  “You’re alive!” I said, reaching my arms to the sky.

  “You’re alive!” he said.

  Our usual handshake led to a hug, which became a bear hug.

  Then his colleagues arrived. The two men in polo shirts and tan slacks wobbled up to our sidewalk table the same time the waitress brought our first drinks. One of the men, William, a senior account executive at Dave’s firm, sat down next to me and immediately grabbed the pitcher. With no place setting of his own, William took my water glass, spilled its contents on the sidewalk, and replaced it with freshly blended margarita.

  I looked over at Dave, and he winked at me.

  “Fucking cops,” William said, then took a long swig.

  Dave asked him, “How many times did you get stopped on the way here?”

  William said, “I lost track. Man, those guys are rejects. I don’t have my ID with me. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

  Four pitchers later, William was still cursing the aftermath. When he wasn’t looking, I gently kicked Dave under the table. I pointed my thumb over my shoulder, as if to say, “Let’s lose this guy.”

 
Dave leaned in and whispered, “He’s buying.”

  I nodded. A few more rounds couldn’t hurt.

  I distracted myself by people watching. Gazing around the neighborhood, I saw a demographic shift taking place. The massive effort to clean up Ground Zero, about two miles away, had turned the trendy West Village into a staging area for hundreds of dump trucks, cranes, and other utility vehicles. Less-than-trendy drivers of these vehicles were walking around and mixing with the locals, who seemed surprisingly undisturbed by their presence. I sensed a new attitude taking hold when I saw a smartly dressed couple with a bichon frise in tow sharing a cigarette with a garbage collector.

  The change did not go unnoticed by William. He watched the blue-collar visitors with a wistful look of admiration. “You know what?” he said. “I hate my job. No, seriously. I wanna build something. I wanna weld something. I wanna work with my hands. I wanna be a fireman, you know?”

  I found myself agreeing. “Yeah. I wanted to be a fireman too, when I was a kid.”

  “So did everybody!” he shouted, banging his hand down, rattling the silverware. “But look at us now.”

  When I got home that night, I sat down at my computer and checked my e-mail. I had eighteen new messages; all but one of them looked like spam. The last was from my employer, with the subject line “Staffing Advisory.”

  “Dear Temporary Associate,” it began. “Due to recent events, our Wall Street office will be closed for an undetermined time. Your service to our company has been greatly appreciated, but is no longer required.”

  First I’d been fired via cell phone by someone in a taxi, and now I was being fired with a mass e-mail. I wondered if the next time I got laid off, I would just hear it on the wind.

  I started looking for a new job the next morning. I checked the listings on my temp agency’s Web site, finding many clerical positions that paid well. The openings ran the usual gamut from administrative assistants to assistant administrators. Could I go back to that now?

  On a lark, I decided to pull up the New York City Fire Department’s Web site. A picture of a shiny red fire engine appeared on the screen, and my heart beat faster. A long-forgotten dream was still a dream. Why not give it a try? I was in decent physical shape, and I already had proven rescue skills, thanks to the time I’d spent training to become a scuba instructor a few years earlier. I clicked around the various pages on the site, thrilled at all the important, exciting things that firefighters do. I was picturing myself sliding down a brass pole when I stumbled across the FDNY’s age requirements for new recruits. I turned out to be a whopping five years over the maximum limit.

  Luckily, I hadn’t grown too attached to the idea of becoming a fireman. I was, however, still interested in serving the city. Seeing its valiant response to 9/11, I felt like the guy at the end of Ghostbusters who, after the Upper West Side is flattened by spectral warfare, crawls from the rubble and shouts, “I love this town!” I’d lived in New York longer than I’d lived anywhere in my life. The city was my home, and it needed protection. Manning the fort and getting paid for it—I could do worse. The only question was how I would serve. Join the military? That would probably take me away from New York. Growing up as a marine brat, I knew Uncle Sam would send me to a series of backwater bases and foreign countries. If I wanted to defend my adopted hometown without leaving it, I saw only one choice: join the police department.

  Before I got my hopes up, I visited the NYPD Web site and went right to the recruitment section. I was three years under its maximum recruitment age. The department’s other qualifications were even more lenient. As long as I had two arms and two legs, no felony convictions, and could tell red from green, I was almost assured a place on the force. A week later, I sat for a reading test designed for kindergartners. Then, a week after that, I ran a few laps in a gym and scaled a four-foot-high fence to prove, I don’t know, that I wasn’t afraid of heights, and that was it. I qualified as a recruit candidate. All I had to do now was pass a background check. That would be easy; I had no skeletons in my closet.

  The NYPD’s background check, which took six months to complete, was on par with a White House cabinet appointment. On top of providing a lifetime of tax records, I had to get a notarized letter from my parents confirming that they had paid for everything from my diapers to my college education. I also had to obtain written references from two decades of previous employers, retrieve long-buried paperwork for every broken bone and torn ligament I’d suffered, and show that I’d answered all my teenage speeding tickets and curfew violations.

  After the paperwork was done, I visited the NYPD medical division in Queens. I received a complete physical rundown, including the usual sight and hearing tests and a drug test. Things got a little personal after that. Standing in a room with about forty other recruits, I had to strip down to my Calvin Kleins to show I had no gang-related tattoos, then strip down to my John Thomas to prove I was the sex I claimed to be. Putting my clothes back on, I was escorted to a small office, where I filled out a probing self-evaluation. An hour later a civilian psychiatrist joined me in the room and started reading my responses.

  “You’ve had ten girlfriends,” he said. “That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

  “I’m thirty-four years old,” I said.

  “I’m thirty-three, and I only dated two women before I met my wife,” he said smugly. “Tell me, how do these failed relationships of yours usually end?”

  I said, “Painfully, I guess.”

  “Painfully,” he said with a hint of satisfaction in his voice. He wrote the word on my evaluation and circled it a few times.

  “Painfully emotional,” I added.

  “At what point do you generally start hitting your female companions?”

  “Hitting them? I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

  The psychiatrist dropped his chin and looked at me over his glasses.

  “Well, okay. I did hit my college roommate once,” I admitted, “because he snuck up on me while I was studying and screamed in my ear. He thought it was funny. I didn’t.”

  “How did you hit him?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “Not very hard.”

  “I mean, in what manner?”

  “I pounded on his chest like a punching bag.”

  The psychiatrist started writing “punching bag” on my evaluation.

  “But only until my adrenaline rush passed,” I said. “He was laughing the whole time. Seriously, I’m not a violent person.”

  The psychiatrist said, “How often do you feel these ‘adrenaline rushes’?”

  CHAPTER 4

  I LEARNED THE RESULTS of my background check two months later. At approximately ten forty-five P.M. on July 7, 2002, I received a phone call. The man on the other line told me to report to the NYPD recruit orientation ceremony in Brooklyn at six the next morning. This wasn’t much notice. I didn’t know whether to jump for joy or tremble with fear. I had just seven hours to turn myself over to the police.

  I decided I could start telling my friends now. It had been a long process, and I hadn’t breathed a word to anyone except my parents, whose signatures I’d needed for the background check. Joining the police ran counter to what most people thought of me, and I didn’t want to have to explain myself again and again until I was sure I was in. Now that it was official, there was someone I wanted to tell right away. I knew Dave would still be up, so I called to give him the news.

  “Wait,” he said. “You are becoming a cop?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You, who hates guns.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who says marijuana should be legal.”

  “Could make my new job a lot easier.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Assuming this isn’t some kind of practical joke, why?”

  “It just feels like the right thing to do.”

  I’d be facing a more critical audience the next morning at orientation. Despite a copious amount of air-conditioning in the a
uditorium, I started to perspire as I walked inside. Uniformed police officers were all over the place. It felt as if a major bust had just gone down, and I was returning to the scene of my own crime.

  I took an aisle seat near the exit door in case someone outed me as a Democrat. I didn’t think being a liberal should prevent me from working in law enforcement, but I wasn’t counting on any of my future colleagues feeling the same way. I’d never met a cop who wasn’t writing me a ticket. Everything I knew about police culture came from the University of Colorado Sociology Department and the televised comments of Reverend Al Sharpton.

  As if there to reinforce my bias, a bald-headed instructor who could have passed for a Klansman was pacing around the auditorium like a drill sergeant, shouting at us in a roughneck drawl. “Yo, in the balcony,” he snapped at one recruit wandering around the second level. “Take your seat. This ain’t no opera!” To another young man who looked like he was still on summer vacation, the instructor shouted, “Take those sunglasses off your head! You ain’t playin’ baseball no mowah.” I started to enjoy the man’s biting repartee. Then he singled me out in front of the entire group. “Get your feet out of the aisle, recruit,” he shouted at me from the stage. “This ain’t no plane!”

  I found this offensive. Obviously, anyone leaving his feet in the aisle of a plane would get his toes smashed by a passing food-service cart, making this a forced metaphor at best. Rather than point out the instructor’s semantic inconsistencies, I took a cagier strategy: I quickly and quietly did as I was told. But I didn’t like it.

  My father, both of my grandfathers, and two of my uncles had been in the military. I knew I owed my existence in no small part to their sacrifices, but it seemed like a waste not to reap the rewards. What would be the point of their battling oppression if I wasn’t free to pursue a life of leisure, intellectual achievement, macramé—what ever I chose? At least that’s how my mother had put it. A disgruntled military wife, my mom drove off-base while my dad was in the shower one morning and never came back. Years later, she told me that if the draft was ever reinstated, she would drug me, kidnap me, and lock me in her basement until the fighting was over.