I was working in a kitchen at The Boulevard Restaurant just
off of A1A in Palm Beach, Florida, when a waitress came back to get a plate and
said, “The world Trade Center is on fire. It’s on T.V.” I thought that sounded
like something cool to see so I took a break from the Tuesday morning breakfast
rush to check out the T.V. in the dining room. She was right, there was a
massive fire toward the top of one of the towers and I instantly regretted my
previous thought because it looked like a pretty deadly fire. Something came
across the screen stating there was some sort of explosion and that grabbed me.
It seemed odd that they would set off a bomb so high, and I wondered how many
people were injured.
It was right about then that the boss yelled over for
everybody to get back to work. The news reporters were saying something about
an airplane possibly being the culprit which made more sense, and then it
happened. There was another explosion that rocked the other tower. I didn’t
actually see the plane before it hit because I was saying something hilarious
to the boss about getting paid to watch the news, but everybody gasped at the
same time and I looked. What the fuck? The boss again suggested I get back to
work.
Back in the kitchen there was talk of something called
terrorism. I wasn’t really familiar with the concept being a Minnesota boy, but
down in Florida, everybody is from New York, and they have dealt with it
before. The only time I had ever heard of a building blowing up it was by an
American, Timothy McVeigh in 1995. One of my kitchen counterparts suggested it
was probably the “towel heads” and that we would blow up their entire country. “Hmmm,”
I said. I remember thinking, then saying, “This is big, I bet everybody in our country
will know somebody somehow affected by this.” That was when they were
estimating that 50,000 people were in those towers, and I didn’t think anybody
could get out alive.
We weren’t allowed to leave the kitchen and we didn’t have
smart phones back then, but we did have informative wait staff. People actually
communicated verbally back then. Susy, a middle-aged New York Jew transplant,
my favorite waitress, came back and told us that the whole tower just fell
down. She was crying, and all I could do was just stand there in the silent
moment. The most significant terror event in the history of the United States
was unfolding, and I was stuck in a kitchen making corned beef hash for
retirees.
At the time, I had just short of five months of sobriety in
me. I had just moved down to Palm
Beach Gardens to a half-way-house to get away from the temptation of familiarity
at home. My thoughts were clear and I was captivated by the events that were
transpiring out in the dining room, but ultimately in real life 1,225 miles
away. I had to wait out another six hours of torment before I could get home to
a television set where I could see what the hell had happened. It was bad.
I’m still mesmerized by the events that took place that day.
I continue to watch documentaries, and am drawn to any stories involving
terrorism or the subsequent events of that day. I’m amazed how 19 people were able to strike
enough fear into the people in four planes with nothing but box cutters, and
eventually kill nearly 3,000 people. I’ve always wondered how I would do in a
situation like that. It’s likely that I would get my throat cut telling jokes
to terrorists, but you never know. It’s only speculation at this point.
I don’t know, nor have I ever met anybody that was directly affected
by the actions of that day. But there are many out there whose lives changed
forever. If you are old enough to remember where you were that day, please post
a sentence or two stating just that on this link on my Facebook page.
