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Messin’ with the Kid | Sep 18 2001

A week ago today, sometime after nine in the morning, my friend Andrew called to say that terrorists had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center. There were gaping holes in both buildings, he said, with smoke pouring out. We discussed the possible political ramifications of this, while also speculating, guiltily, how it might impact traffic in downtown Manhattan. (We had plans later this morning to move his things from his mother’s apartment in the West Village to his new place in Brooklyn.)

Andrew went outside see what was happening on the street and I called my girlfriend Rachel, remembering that her sister’s family lives in Battery Park City, about five blocks from the south tower. Rachel reacted rather lightly, I thought, but promised she’d talk with her sister.

Then Andrew called back to report that scores of people were milling outside his mother’s apartment building, watching the towers burn. In the middle of his description of this, there came a roar through the phone and Andrew shouted, “Oh, no, one of the towers must have collapsed! I have to go!”

I immediately called Rachel, who was now hysterical. She’d been talking with her sister and there’d been this loud noise on the line and her sister had cried something like, “My god, the tower’s falling…” at which point the phone had gone dead. Rachel was certain had been crushed beneath the fallen tower. I asked if she wanted me to come to her. She said she needed to keep trying to reach her sister. I said, “We should be together.” She said, “I have to call my sister.”

I tried to reach Andrew but couldn’t get a dial tone. I looked online for information; all the major sites were jammed. Then I heard my next door neighbor in the hall and went to see what he knew. He had been watching television, he said, when one the towers collapsed. Also, terrorists had flown a plane into the Pentagon, which was now on fire. Also, a fourth plane had crashed outside of Pittsburgh. I put on my sneakers and headed for Rachel’s, about an hour away on foot, assuming I could figure out how to get there (the trains, I correctly assumed, would not be running).

I live on the border of a large Hasidic neighborhood, a neighborhood of people who spend much of their time pretending that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. On this day, though, the charade was abandoned, as hundreds of Hasidic men were gathered in the street, gazing in the direction of downtown Manhattan, shrouded now in smoke and ash.

I walked south along the service road that follows the big expressway around here, the BQE. Above me, on the BQE itself, a long line of cars were parked on the shoulder, their drivers perched at intervals along the guard rail, looking out towards Manhattan. Traffic everywhere was at a near standstill, yet no one seemed to notice. Instead they sat in their cars with blank expressions, following events on their radios. I caught a few words here and there, but understood nothing, exactly, save for the tone. The tone was scary.

At the corner of Flushing and Kent, I stopped to consult my map. Under normal circumstances, I would have avoided showing vulnerability here, at the edge of a somewhat dicey neighborhood, but this was a day in which the normal rules didn’t apply.

A few blocks later, a car pulled up and my friend William leaned out the window. He was driving around Brooklyn, he said, trying to find a route to his apartment in Carroll Gardens. Since Carroll Gardens is close to where Rachel lives, I joined him.

William and I barely spoke, and it was then that I realized that I was in a kind of shock, for lack of a better word. The radio reported that the second tower had fallen, which prompted me to tell William about Rachel’s sister. He assured me that she was fine: he’d seen the first tower fall, and it went down accordion-style rather than toppling over.

We drove for at least a half hour and got almost nowhere. Streets were blocked off in a seemingly random pattern. When we reached Bergen, William said that walking would be faster, so I headed off on foot again. A few blocks later, I noticed a policeman standing in the middle of the pavement, apparently guarding something, although it wasn’t clear what. As I approached, he asked me to cross the street. This revealed what he was guarding: he was guarding the pavement along the west side of Bergen Street, just north of Flatbush.

I crossed the street.

Flatbush itself was closed to traffic, and thousands of stunned-looking people were walking east. They had come, it was clear, from Manhattan, having walked across the Manhattan bridge, and were on their way home, wherever home was. I was struck by the sight of a man in a business suit covered head to foot with gray ash.

A block away I spotted Rachel’s roommate Jessi. I ran to her and she told me that after a panic-stricken half-hour, Rachel had spoken finally with her sister: the tower hadn’t fallen on her; everyone was safe.

The rest of that day I did what most people did, which was to watch television. I haven’t the strength to try to describe that, nor see any reason to: you saw what I saw.

Ah, but here’s something I forgot. While walking along the BQE, I sang a song I’d heard for the first time the previous day – the Junior Wells blues classic, Messin’ with the Kid. Actually, I didn’t sing the entire song but just a single verse and chorus (this being all I could remember), repeating these over and over with increasing fervor:

Now the kid plays hot
And hot don’t pay
I say what I mean, I mean what I say
Hey, hey
Tell me what you did
You can call it what you want
But I call it messin’ with the kid

The identity of the “kid” kept changing as I sang. First it was me, then our president, then the leader of the highjackers. All of us were pissed and wanted the world to know about it.

Oh, and I didn’t walk so much as stride, as befitting one who doesn’t appreciate being messed with.

It was weird.

And every now and then, I would reach a street with a view of downtown Manhattan and I’d sneak a peak or two at the mountain of smoke, and stop singing.