The Day the City Went Dark, and I Was Given Light

Kids – who needed them?

They drain your bank account. Destroy your dreams. Suck the life right out of you.

Every time I saw an overzealous mommy delirious over her mewling poop machine, I knew it HAD to be an act.

I was living in New York City – the epicenter of EVERYTHING. I milked that shiz like Bernie Madoff at a Ponzi scheme party.

I hobnobbed with pseudo celebrities. My love life was restricted to musicians or DJs, because life outside the velvet rope was not worth living.

Saturday nights – dress to wicked perfection and head out at midnight. Nothing fabulous starts in Manhattan before 12.

Sunday mornings, I put on my shoebox-sized sunglasses and walked out of a club into pink hued dawn. Stepped meticulously over crack vials and used condoms and went out for mimosas.

Taking care of ME was a full-time job. Plants died in my care.

I was a die-hard urbanite with the Holy Grail – a rent controlled apartment in the Village. I had a full-throttle addiction to Broadway plays, ethnic restaurants and designer shoes, supported by a bullshit corporate job.

If I combined them into The Sacrosanct Trifecta – went to see a play and ate Afghani food in a pair of Jimmy Choos – I spontaneously orgasmed.

My then boyfriend wanted rug rats. Sorry, love. Wrong uterus.

I brunched (yes, I used it as a goddamn verb) at the Odeon in Tribeca.

If a family came in, I’d move my table. I’m here for a cocktail and to maybe make a little eye contact with Robert DeNiro, and I don’t need to hear your rug rats squalling for more ketchup.

Just because you had to go fuck up YOUR life doesn’t mean I don’t get to enjoy my warm goat cheese salad.

“Excuse me, hostess? I’m pretty sure I smell shit in that kid’s diaper, or maybe it’s just my friend’s penne gorgonzola, but, either way, just move us.”

My boss was a psychopath. I had that job for years, trapped by a corporate syndrome known as the “golden handcuffs.”

It sounds like kinky sexplay, but sadly, is not. It’s getting paid a whole lot of money for a job you despise.

You’re a whore, and a dishonest one. At least the hookers staked outside the Lincoln Tunnel, their lipstick smeared from a hundred blow jobs, make no pretenses.

He was a vulgarly successful multimillionaire with a God complex and a nasty temper.

Do you know what it’s like to be paid six figures for a high-powered position and have Hitler’s brother throw a stapler at your head because his bagel had SEEDS on it?

When the corporate bourgeois aesthetic has you by the throat and you find yourself addicted to Jimmy Choo shoes, you do worse things than when you were addicted to smack.

A Crisp Fall Tuesday Morning.

8:50 am: I had just dodged a paperweight when my phone rang. My brother was saying something I didn’t understand.

What was he talking about? He was recovering from lung cancer; those pain meds and the pot he smoked incessantly took him on verbal joyrides.

Today, he was babbling about a plane.

“I have to go. Can I call you later?”

9:05 am: My boss emerges from the inner sanctum.

He always watched the news while he ate the breakfast that may or may not result in an inanimate object being hurled in my direction.

I was on hold with London. If I didn’t get these curricula vitae faxed over soon, I would surely have a desk accessory lobbed at me.

Across the Atlantic it was after 2. In another hour, Deutsche Bank kingpins would be leaving to do whatever it is the wealthy do in London at the end of a work day. Don an inherited worn wax Babor jacket and go on a fox hunt?

He yelled for all of us to get in his office, NOW. Several co-workers darted out of their offices and barreled into his. I hung up and followed.

The TV screen showed… what was that? Was that a plane jutting out the side of a building? Engulfed in beautiful brilliant red and yellow flames, blazing wildly?

Above and below these violently beautiful hues was the blackest smoke I’d ever seen.

The dark of things and people gone forever.

9:21 am: Port Authority closes all bridge and tunnels. My boyfriend was in New Jersey. No way to get to him. No way to get out of the city tonight.

9:31 am: President Bush does nothing to reassure us. I want to hear that this is an accident; that an alcoholic air traffic controller got blackout boozed up when he walked in on his wife fucking the pool boy.

He tells us there is an “apparent” terrorist attack on New York City.

Apparent? That means nothing; that’s like the “apparent” phone number I give men in clubs.

Breathe, Samara. Apparent, apparent…

9:37 am: Hijackers aboard Flight 77 crash the plane into the western facade of the Pentagon in Washington DC.

It’s definitely terrorists. There is no more uncertainty.

9:59 am: The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

What are we supposed to do? Do we stay? Do we leave?

The rumors fly and claw at us like the crows in the “The Birds:”

The terrorists are targeting New York City.

The Empire State Building.
Times Square.
Port Authority.

Midtown Manhattan.

WHERE WE ARE.

The company’s human resource director voice comes through the speakers, giving us instructions on how to evacuate safely.

Too late for that. Full scale bedlam has broken loose. We’re all going to die, and we know it.

We just don’t want to die here, where we loathe each other so much.

Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.

For some unknown reason, the elevators have been turned off. The staircase is jammed.

I can’t breathe. Too many people. Pushing. I fall. A man helps me up. We both fall. People step over us, on us. We use the wall and each other for support to get up.

He’s my life line. It’s so crowded, I lose sight of his face. He’s just a detached arm. A hand, clasping mine.

I try to help the people who are down. But if I stop to help them, I get knocked over by frantic people behind me. It’s every man for himself.

I can’t breathe. I’m going to suffocate and die in this staircase.

I’m going to die in the staircase of a building of a job I hated.

I hear screaming.

It’s my own.

I see light – is that the street? I push, push, PUSH. We’re bottlenecking at the edge.

We’re crowning like the desperate head of an infant pushing out of a mother’s vagina. One… last… PUSH

I’m OUT.

All around me – chaos. The subway stations are shut down. The streets are pandemonium.

I begin the long walk home, on shaky legs, to my apartment downtown. I pass people walking who are walking uptown.

They are bloody. Torn. Disoriented. Covered in strange white dust. Covered in black soot.

I realize… these are the survivors.

The streets are thick with frightened people.

At 11 am, Mayor Giuliani had evacuated Lower Manhattan. Including residents, workers and tourists, it was over a million people.

The air in my neighborhood is black and filthy, like the inside of a chimney.

Soot flecks fall from the sky, landing on my clothes and hair. From the front of my building, I have a clear view of the wreckage.

And I know, in that moment, I’m going to die.

We’re all going to die, the people of New York City.

We’re all going to die today.

I can’t call anyone. No cell service. No land lines. No communication with the rest of the world.

I want to talk to my mom. I want her to know how much I love her.

I don’t particularly believe in God, but that moment – I decide to believe.

I don’t want to die. I’m only 32.

I still have shoes to buy.

All these broken people trudging past me, covered in the wreckage, dazed and destroyed, are TERRIFYING me

And then – I do the oddest thing.

I fall to my knees. Right on the filthy, unyielding, abrasive, soot covered pavement.

I was never religious before, but this moment feels like church to me.

“Dear God,

Please, please, don’t let me die. I know I haven’t always lived my life correctly. But if you let me live, I’ll be a better person. I’ll use hemp products. I’ll boycott Arizona. I’ll rescue a dog. I’ll drive a hybrid.”

I thought a moment.

“I know I might have pissed you off with those abortions. I wasn’t supposed to have that baby in college, was I? With all the drugs I was doing, I would have given birth to a frog baby.

But the others – I’m sorry.

Since you made me so freakishly fertile that I got pregnant even on birth control, did you want me to have a baby? I promise, I won’t interfere with your plans again. Just let me live.“

—-

I lived.

I got pregnant 16 months later. I kept my bargain with God.

Me and Him – we’re good.

In 2003, I gave birth to my son.

I had been given clarity, on September 11, 2001.

My son is the constant reminder of the good graces of God.

And I am grateful, not for the tragedy that day, that singular moment in history when searing images and heartbreaking stories changed the world forever, but for the moment of clarity it afforded me. Which changed my world forever.

Samara is the no-holds-barred, three time Freshly Pressed blogger at A Buick in the Land of Lexus, where she shares everything from stories of motherhood and surviving suburbia to edgy tales of her life in New York City. She mixes honesty with humor in high definition, first-person story telling. In addition, Samara is also a founding member of two other blogs: The SisterWives, a woman’s blog collective, and Stories That Must Not Die. She lives in New Jersey with her son Little Dude, the coolest, most soulful 11-year-old kid on the planet. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.