Light of Disaster Shows One NY Cop Who He Is
A few nights after the Sept. 11 attacks, a woman on North Moore Street took one look at me in my dirty uniform, started crying, and silently handed me an apple. It was a moment so charged with metaphor, I got confused; I couldn’t even thank her. I’m sure she still thinks I was an ungrateful jerk.
You want to hear a strange truth? There’s a part of the cop psyche that’s tremendously uncomfortable with such moments. Clutching that apple, I couldn’t help wondering: What happens when I go back to writing tickets? What happens when the apple woman hears I took her brother in on an old turnstile warrant? What happens when it’s business as usual?
But that’s the thing, this time. This one is so big, business as usual may never fully return. Forget relations with the public; that’s not what I mean. The real change is probably--had better be--in us. If Osama bin Laden has reminded America of who we are as a nation, he’s reminded New York’s cops of who we are as well.
I grew up in this city, in a family of cops--my father, my uncles, even my grandfather back in Italy. But in my 20s, while my relatives told war stories over barbecues and backyard beers, I was a professor teaching English at a university. It wasn’t until my 30s that the tug of police work asserted itself, inevitable as weather.
In five years on the force, I’ve done beat work in uniform and plainclothes narcotics work, but I know I’m still pretty inexperienced. Yet, compared to the average citizen, I feel I know this city the way one knows a difficult sibling.
So, on the morning of the attacks, I recognize our immediate dilemma. How do a handful of cops clear half a city block of people who are certain they have to be here? By dark, I’ve had so many worthies give me a hard time that I’m numb to the shock of it.
Two actually choose to ignore my pleas to keep the area clear for body removal just so they can walk their dogs, hideous little designer creatures I have to restrain myself from punting into New Jersey.
And the volunteers! They come in droves, ragtag groups drifting up to the checkpoint, young men and women in their 20s mostly, yearning to do the right thing. But when told there’s nothing for them to do here, they encamp all over, turning the night of Day One into a crisis Woodstock.
Late into that first night, when we’ve been standing on the same corner for 14 hours without knowing what day we’ll finally get home or how completely our lives might be changed, two young women separate from the volunteer army and tentatively approach us. My alarm rises vaguely when I see one of them gingerly carrying a box.
She’s on me before I can protest, coming right up to me and my partner. She asks us if we’re hungry and tells us that she and her roommate have made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us, if we want them. Which we do, desperately.
Looking into the box, I see that inside each sandwich bag is a little note: “Thank you for your bravery,” and “God bless you.” I have the first of what will be many moments when I find it difficult to speak.
Late that first night, I have occasion to wander right down to the site. The dust is still heavy, and I can see only about 10 feet in front of me. Wandering in this gloom, I have the strangest encounter: Four people in medical scrubs suddenly appear and ask if I have seen anybody who needs medical help. One nurse pulls down her surgical mask to ask if I am OK. She smiles at me so beatifically that I wonder, for the briefest moment, if I am still back at the checkpoint, have fallen asleep on my feet and am having a strange Fellini-esque dream.
They are gone soon, these apparitions; there is nothing for them to do.
During the early morning of the second day, we accept a grim reality: Forget triage. The destruction is so great, there are very few wounded. Seeing the site up close, I don’t wonder. I wonder instead at people’s faith, that they can look at this and think anyone could have survived it.
After four hours of attempted sleep during which I imagine my nerve endings humming to each other, I’m back for the evening of Day Two, assigned over by the river. There, I discover that, when there is no triage, there will be a morgue.
A group of eight or so professionals--medical examiner, fire department paramedic, police department chaplains--hunch on folding chairs, waiting. Then the call goes up outside the tent: “Heads up. Body coming!”
The worker lugs it onto a makeshift table composed of a sheet stretched over plywood. We crowd around, our heads bending to the bag. Will it be a cop? A fireman? Will it be some horror I will never forget?
The paramedic unzips the black plastic bag. This is human? That is my first thought as her gloved hands sift the contents. But then I see. On a mat of gray dust and paper fragments, a latticework of ribs. No blood or flesh, nothing that is not simply gray and woolly with ash.
Only occasionally is there more than this. One bag reveals a severed human foot, the toenails painted a heartbreaking violet. And this, eventually, is what shocks you, what sits you down with a nauseated, displaced feel of a world spinning awry. Not the gore or the lack of it, but the small details that point to fragile lives caught in the maelstrom.
Those details are what I’m here for; I’m one of five cops tagging and bagging anything that might be linked to one of the dead. It’s far, far tougher than viewing human remains. Where morgue duty deals only with representations of people--small, broken facsimiles of what they once were--the property somehow manages to capture them, captures their lives and personalities.
A leather shoulder bag holds a management textbook and a notebook. The textbook has a woman’s name on the frontispiece in a graceful feminine hand, the notebook her weekly classes written into the scheduling grid. They’re all evening classes; she was going to night school. Little reminders are written beside the schedule: “Keep up with the reading!”
You wonder: How could these things survive intact and their owners be completely erased?
Then there are the cell phones. If there is one dilemma facing the property cops, it’s what to do with a working cell phone. The argument ensues every time a worker off the bucket brigade brings one in. Undeniably, hitting the appropriate button will reveal the owner’s last call, and thus help with identification. But at what cost to the call’s recipient?
And who will be the one to make that call, to risk raising false hopes among family members or friends who will be receiving a phone call from a dead person?
We’re digging now, anybody who can. It’s still only Day Three, and the chances of finding somebody alive are, in theory, still real. It’s a cyclical process; you pull carefully at the impossibly antagonistic tangle of metal and concrete, until eventually a major beam or girder is exposed. Then the ironworkers hook a crane line to the girder and hoist it free. Then you start again.
Among the cops working down here now, a distinction has emerged; the photo-takers versus the non-photo-takers. Some feel the attacks are something we should vow never to forget, so the scene should be documented as much as possible. Others, myself included, find this distasteful and would as soon forget these sights once (if ever) this is over.
A crane, off to my right, is noisily hoisting a half-melted girder free of the rubble when a chorus of despair goes up. I turn in time to catch a glimpse. It is a young woman, or rather the top half of one, stuck to the top of the beam. Her arm flaps free once, a disembodied wave; then the torso falls free, disappearing back into the wreckage.
Go ahead, I can’t help but think. Take a picture of that.
It’s raining now, and the ash has turned into a ubiquitous copper mud. I pass a bedraggled group of firemen and find that, in my NYPD uniform, I can’t meet their eyes; they’ve suffered far more than we have--343 firefighters lost, and 60 NYPD and Port Authority cops.
When the first building came down, a sergeant from my precinct was on the street outside; he’s long and lanky, and when he dived under a car for shelter, an arriving emergency vehicle ran over his legs.
That’s what passed for a success story down here.
For one night, Midtown becomes celebrity “ground zero”; a telethon is being held to benefit victims and their families. As a Manhattan cop, I’ve worked this sort of thing before. Your objective is to make sure the “talent” gets in and gets out without something happening to make you famous yourself.
After Billy Joel’s rendition of “New York State of Mind,” I am deputized to drive him down to greet the workers at ground zero. I realize, watching little knots of hollow-eyed workers drifting over to us, that I am not showing Billy Joel off to the rescuers, but quite the reverse.
This shows in Joel’s reactions. Upon rounding a corner and taking in the panorama of the destruction in one beat, he gets the “cannot speaks.” The workers all know this feeling. They happily ignore the fact that the star is openly weeping as he signs their hard hats.
Later that night, I take a walk down a side street and encounter a couple of cops I don’t know leaning on barricades and talking with a young female aid worker. Flirting; this would have been unthinkable even 48 hours ago, and it suddenly strikes me that this horror may indeed end at some point.
Still, it’s difficult to believe that even now. And certainly it’s impossible to believe that “the Job,” the NYPD, will ever be the same.
I saw bosses we once laughed at and mimicked behind their backs unhesitatingly organize rescue parties, establish medical stations, dictate rest periods for their men, clamp order onto the sudden anarchy. For the first week, patrolmen getting off their 12-hour shifts would defy orders and head right back down to the site, where they would work until literally delirious.
Like the city, the Job’s been blooded--by the instant in which thousands died and by the months in which we sifted the wreckage.
The city will eventually forget us; after all, we are just doing our jobs. We’ll be the enemy again soon enough. Which is fine; that’s the nature of a contentious and complicated relationship.
But we, the cops, we had better remember. Not what we’ve seen, but what we’ve done. It’s the way you remember the things you’ve done that make you who you are.