I’ve never followed the maudlin practice of turning September 11th into an observance, but because today marks 25 years since the event, I decided it would not be inappropriate to do the “Where were you when…?” thing today. In the ’60s and ’70s, it was “Where were you when you heard Kennedy had been assassinated?”, and in the ’90s it was “Where were you when you heard about the Challenger disaster?”; I imagine in the ’50s people used to ask, “Where were you when you heard Japan surrendered?” But for quite some time now the event so referenced has been the September 11th terrorist attacks. I have told mine many times in person and I may have mentioned it on social media, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never brought it up on this blog, so here goes.
At the beginning of September, 2001, Grace and I were living in an apartment near New Orleans International Airport and operating our successful escort service; I had just recently become engaged to Matt, but he was in Los Angeles at the time. I typically took gigs from 2 pm to 2 am and then took over answering the phone until 4 am so Grace could sleep; after that I forwarded the phones to our day operator and went to bed, turning the phone ringers off so nobody could interrupt my well-earned rest. Our answering machine had a light which flashed once per message, so for example if there were three messages it would go Blink Blink Blink {pause} Blink Blink Blink {pause}, etc. We also had a caller ID unit. Typically, I woke up between 11 am and noon, and that day was no exception, but when I went to turn on the ringer I saw the little light flashing so rapidly I couldn’t count the number. I pressed the playback button while looking at the called ID unit, and what I heard on the tape was a long series of hang-ups except for a single message from Matt, saying, “Don’t worry; they closed LAX so I’m heading home.” That was mystifying, as was the fact that the caller ID showed all those hangups had come from our friend Doug, who owned another escort service I did calls for. But before I could call Doug to find out what the hell he was thinking, the phone rang and this time I answered. The conversation went like this:
Doug: Can you believe this shit?
Me: What shit?
Doug: They blew up the World Trade Center!
Me: What’d they use, a nuke?
Doug: No, they flew a plane into it!
Me: You’re shitting me! Wait, there are two towers; how could a plane hit both?
Doug: They used two planes!
Me: OK, you are definitely shitting me.
Doug: Turn on your damn TV!
Me: What channel?
Doug: Every damn channel!
Me (after complying): OK, you obviously aren’t shitting me.
If you’re wondering how I could possibly be so nonchalant, it was because A) I was only half-awake; and B) I had been expecting some major terrorist action for some time, though I was obviously surprised by the supervillainous method the terrorists employed.
There is one rather odd detail I remember from that day. I had not seen Babylon 5 when it first aired, but Grace watched it every day in reruns on the Sci-fi Channel and I had seen enough in passing to get interested, so when they started running it again from the beginning I watched it. The day before, September 10th, they’d played the episode named “Believers“, in which the central conflict are aliens who believe surgery is evil and refuse to let a doctor save their child. On September 11th, they played it again; I thought that was odd, but I assumed somebody in their programming department was too upset by the morning’s events to change the tape or however that’s done. But then the next day they played the same one again, then again on Thursday and Friday; they didn’t move on to a new episode until the following Monday. I don’t understand why they did it, except that part of the show’s backstory is that terrorists had at some point in the past nuked San Diego, and perhaps the channel’s management wanted to put off getting to an episode where that was mentioned to avoid upsetting viewers; continually repeating an episode focusing on the harm done by religious fanaticism hardly seems like an improvement, though.
