nineeleventwentysomething
*ping*
turn on tv now
It took literal minutes to text a message that sophisticated back in 2001. If you weren’t around then, you have no idea how cumbersome this was — see, the T and the U were both 8 on the numerical dial pad. Skipping the the in that message was understandable.
Consecutive letters on the same number meant you had to press 8 once, then wait a bit, then press it again twice to get the letter you wanted. Just calling someone was easier than texting. It was still a rarity in 2001.
Our primitive and clunky texting language — c u l8r — was born out of a Nokia phone with exactly nine keys. As a twentysomething, texting was cumbersome and clunky but also the most innovative way to find your friends at a loud and crowded bar.
Prior to texting, you’d walk into chaos, call a friend and scream WHERE ARE YOU GUYS? only to hear unintelligible details in return. Texting allowed you to drop a specific, written location like pool table and avoid futile screaming.
turn on tv now
Getting a text before 9am in 2001 was strange, let alone a text telling me to turn on the television while getting ready for work. Like, no channel, no reason, no specificity — just turn on tv now. Seemed important even without details, especially knowing how long it must have taken to type.
This is my first memory of 9/11. Someone is texting me, what the hell? I turned on my 600-lb (inexact weight) 36-inch (exact size, considered luxurious for that era) television. It was still on ABC from the night before because of Monday Night Football. Giants-Broncos. I think Denver won.
Good Morning America was on, and they were showing a small smoking hole in one side of one of the World Trade Center twin towers. The sun was shining and the picture was perfectly clear, however distant. The show hosts were fumbling around with their words trying to say something coherent, likely while hearing prompts in their earpieces telling them what to say.
I remember right at first cynically thinking about how useless television personalities are when they don’t have someone like me writing their words for them. And then I remembered I had gotten a text to watch this. Okay, this is more serious than I typically prefer to be. Twentysomething chronologically, probably 12 emotionally.
Central time is an hour behind Eastern time, and I lived in Chicago on 9/11 which was why this was happening while I was still getting ready for work. I was supposed to fly to Toronto. I couldn’t watch for much longer because I had to get to the airport. The sun was shining here, too.
But then the picture got clearer and closer as the TV voices kept talking about it. That smoking hole wasn’t just a paper shredder that had overheated. That’s a big hole in a huge building, holy shit. The text made more sense now.
If that sounds like a bizarre revelation 22 years later you’re not considering how unimaginable 9/11 was that morning. The mind couldn’t comprehend.
One of the hosts said something about a small plane and I thought how does a pilot fail to see something as massive as the World Trade Center? What kind of idiot amateur pilot was this? And who was the flight instructor?
Unfortunately, I share a first name with the main perpetrator of the 1993 WTC bombing and had been harassed about it for years. I was fully aware and educated to the threat of terrorism and WTC’s history as a target. And yet I was totally oblivious to the notion this might have been deliberate. Twentysomething chronologically, maybe six-and-a-half intellectually.
I kept staring at the hole with everyone in the world who was awake.
The voices were speculating about what kind of plane it could have been. I had visited the WTC before, so they weren’t just postcard buildings on television to me. The WTC towers were absolutely massive. They each had their own zip code, no hyperbole. Vertical towns at the southern tip of America’s greatest city.
That smoking hole on TV seemed far too big for a small plane to make. But this seemed to be the consensus thought on that morning show, so it had to be true? It was true for several minutes: A small plane crashed into one of the towers. Oops, tragedy.
While this was all happening on television, my landline and cell phone were both ringing constantly. I have no recollection of who called or if I even answered. Maybe I talked to someone? I’m sure we talked about what we were watching. Every other channel was showing the same thing.
Back in 2001 there was no deliberately stressful or ominous ALL CAPS TEXT CRAWL along the bottom of news television screens — only finance programs had those. It was 9/11 that made them standard everywhere else. They kept us scared and watching TV far longer than we ever want to.
Hijackers taught TV producers One Simple Trick to keep audiences engaged. Don’t even need planes crashing into buildings after today. Clever.
I was still staring at the hole in the tower on Good Morning America, which at that point had shifted to a live, closer shot from a helicopter. Previously it had been from atop another building in midtown Manhattan. Wow, this is really bad.
Then all of a sudden the other WTC tower exploded into a massive fireball. The show hosts made guttural noises. Turns out we were all watching a Pearl Harbor attack on working people using American planes on live TV. The sun was still shining. The sun never cares, it only burns.
They ran back the tape and it was clearly a commercial airliner slamming into the building. That other hole we had been staring at — that must have been another commercial airliner. Small plane had been wishful thinking. Everything up until that point had been wishful thinking.
Someone was flying commercial airliners into American skyscrapers on a gorgeous, sunny September morning. And then TV cut away to a shot of the Pentagon on fire. That’s not in New York. That’s not even close to New York.
This is when my apartment got quiet. The TV was still making noises but I couldn’t hear anything. Maybe my phones kept ringing, but I didn’t hear them either. Everything slowed down. Everything got really bright. Twentysomething minutes probably went by and I did not move an inch.
I eventually snapped into lucidity and pulled myself away from the television. I had to get outside. I went up to the roof of my apartment building in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, to find a lot of other people there in the common area. Usually this was where we would grill out and drink beers.
No food or drinks. I had never been on my roof in the morning before.
Everyone was looking up at a clear blue sky that had no planes in it. That had never happened before. No planes above Chicago. No planes anywhere. It did happen again in 2020. That felt horribly familiar.
My neighbors on the roof were all transfixed on the Sears Tower, which loomed over our five-story building. Two men were audibly calculating if a toppled Sears Tower could land on top of us.
Another neighbor joined the conversation with the amount of energy a structure that size and weight would create if it hit the ground, even if it missed our building. Our homes would never survive the shock. Should we leave? Where should we go? How many more hijacked planes are there, and what buildings will they be flying into next?
Chicago is 800 miles from New York City, but that didn’t matter. America was under attack. I went back into my apartment. The TV was still on, and the sirens from Manhattan with the sirens from outside my window had created a horrifying duet. My phones began ringing again.
One of the callers was a local friend desperate to know if I had any connections in the IT or telephony industries that could route a call into Manhattan to check on another friend who worked in the South Tower. Nobody’s calls were getting into or out of New York.
He was unreachable. Everyone was desperately trying, redial, redial, redial, redial, redial, redial. They needed to know if he was okay, if he was at work, if he had gotten out — they just needed to know. I got his number called it twentysomething times, as if my phones had some unique connection ability others didn’t. I had to try. But I couldn’t get through, either.
His name was Kris. He didn’t make it. Kris and 2,995 others died that day. That doesn’t count the 19 hijackers. They don’t count. Fuck those guys.
But that morning there was no precise casualty count. It was an incalculable number for an unimaginable event that seemed simultaneously without end but also the end of everything. This was the beginning of something that wouldn’t conclude in my lifetime.
I would not survive this. No one would survive it. Whatever this is. Everything in the world would be different now. It was not even noon yet.
The sun was relentless and perfect, the kind of day that convinces you to skip work in a city with so many attractive distractions like Chicago. It was a perfect day in New York, too. Everyone was skipping work for the worst possible reasons.
The voice on TV, now speaking in a catatonic tone informed the audience a commercial airliner had crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania but they weren’t sure where. Somewhere in Pennsylvania. That’s a giant state, guys. We don’t know anything. There could be a plane heading toward me right now.
This day was going to be spent watching television, learning which planes were crashing next and desperately hoping the Sears Tower would not land on top of me if it got hit and fell down. I tried calling Kris again. I received my second and final text of that day.
r u ok
That’s 7, 8, 6, 5 on your keypad in succession; one of the easiest text messages to send. I was not okay. No one was. No one would ever be okay.
I called my parents. I got my girlfriend from the train station, which was filled with panicked people who had gone to work on a Tuesday and then returned home abruptly, but not because it was so nice out. Nobody could function because real and imagined planes were crashing all over.
The idea of any large crowd being allowed to exist peacefully seemed impossible. Would I see the inside of airplane in this lifetime? Had I attended my last stadium event? What would walking on a crowded street be like — and could streets ever be crowded again?
Safety felt so distant. A hijacked plane or a toppled skyscraper could land on everyone at any moment. This was surreal, and it was also nothing I ever wanted to experience again.
And yet the prevailing historical document of 9/11 are the televised reruns.
That footage is offensive. It’s rubbernecking porn. It’s a vacant snuff film. Being subjected to the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding live in my junior high classroom was a lot different than watching its reruns over the following decades already knowing what happened, why it happened and how it happened. They teach this business school. It’s a lesson now.
What’s disturbing is I’ve seen the 9/11 footage I first watched live that morning new fewer than twentysomething times, usually around this time of year for remembrance, and I still struggle with the reasoning. We don’t teach anything about it, nor have we learned a thing from what led to that day.
There’s still no lesson from 9/11. And it’s been twentysomething years.
I know what brought the Challenger down, conclusively. And I’ve read plenty about how this brand of Islamic terrorism operates — I also understand the role America plays in making itself a target. But flying people on commercial jets into skyscrapers doesn’t compute. As David Letterman said in his first show after 9/11, this will never make any goddamn sense to me.
My final lucid memory of that morning was watching the second tower that got hit collapse first. Manhattan was left with a single twin tower for only about 90 minutes. It’s easy to forget how jarring that sight was, even in the context of how jarring that morning had been.
For 90 minutes there was some fleeting hope that some of the people in that tower had escaped. That one had gotten hit first, and yet it was still upright. Maybe it was a small plane, after all? Perhaps Manhattan would repair the North Tower and rebuild a new South Tower beside it.
But then the North Tower came down too. The sun was still shining.
