THE MOST FUCKED UP THING I’VE EVER SEEN: Ruth Gerson
Sep 09, 2011
In which the singer-songwriter recalls the events of 9/11.
BY RUTH GERSON
It went backwards for me. Aside from some minor blips, my adulthood got protected and tame, while most of the memories from the first half of my life are fucked-up. That said, the most fucked up thing I've ever seen, was during a relatively calm, soft part of my life, when I was completely divorced from the violence I grew up around.
I was married, thirty-six weeks pregnant with my first daughter, living in a 650 sq. ft. East village condo on 9th and B, in New York and watching the second tower of the world trade center crumble down outside my window.
My ex-husband was with me at the time. Most of my memories of being married to him are vague and undefined, like a book you know you read, but your vision of the plot and characters have blurred to make you wonder if you only dreamed you read it. You take with you one piece, a picture that you keep with you forever.
Almost ready to give birth, I was often sleeping in by the second week of September. Josh was sitting on the bed looking out the window and I woke up to the sound of the first explosion. He stood, he looked, and went down to his knees, "What have they done?" His shirt became soaked with sweat and he was crying.
When you're in a couple, if one of you spins out, the other rushes into caretaker mode. I assured him it must have been an accident. If somebody was gonna do something, they'd do it later in the day and that we were not in danger.
"Most people can't be in the office yet. Look, It's not even 9 o'clock. Are there even offices up there?" I lived in NYC my whole life. I had been up in the WTC twice on school trips. You don't do those things when you live there. I had no idea who was in there, what was up there.
Josh flipped on the news. I watched the window. The second plane flew directly into the building. "That's not a fucking accident." I repeated over, and went to fill the tub with water.
I hadn't yet seen Josh in the state he was in. I wasn't sure how to help him.
"Come on, we'll walk you to work, the trains will be shut." I thought, This will be taken care of. Go on about your business. There's nothing to see here. I had been trained.
As we started walking, I knew it would be difficult to make it up to 55th and Madison and back with what seemed now to look like a resist-a-ball hanging off my chest, and with a weight more like a medicine ball. We didn't get very far though. By the time we were on Avenue A and 12th, we heard a guy, "They got the Pentagon." Josh leaned against a chain-link fence and grabbed on. "That's it. This is it?"
Many people imagined the whole city would be blown-up that day, for a minute, for several hours, that we were trapped on an island and we wouldn't get off.
I suggested we go sit in Tompkins Square Park. We were there for a minute and the air above us filled with the sound of military planes. I did not grow up with that sound in NY. I'd never heard them. Loud as shit. I decided to bring us back upstairs.
I returned to the window. "Where's the building?" I kept looking to see if it would peek out from behind the smoke, "Josh, where's the building? Where's the building? I think the fucking building is gone!"
He said it was behind the smoke. I said, "It is not behind the fucking smoke. I am seeing the smoke move and it is not behind the smoke."
We had missed the first tower fall while we were out; so had everyone else outside and in the lobby of our apartment building. Josh moved into caretaker mode now, as I was leaving it. He brought me a piece of toast with peanut butter. "You better eat." I held the toast, my body was pounding, I must have been crying, I don't remember. Of everything I had ever seen, the empty space where the building was before we had gone outside was the most fucked up. Until, staring at the smoke, thinking the building might come back, watching the news, looking out the window, the second tower began to collapse and I saw it fall. My head turned back and forth between the television screen and the window. I knew there must be a lot of people in there. And people on the ground.
Anyone who grew up in New York wanted to go down. My brother Glenn went right away. I looked down at my stomach. I couldn't go. I couldn't do anything.
I left the house with a shopping cart and went to the store. It was empty. I bought water, cans of beans, corn, some bread, rice, raisins, I think I got some Pop-Tarts. As I was walking out, a hundred people were coming in.
The streets were filled now. People were making eye contact, saying hello to each other, acknowledging that they saw you there. No one was invisible. Some looked at me, head-tilted, sympathetically - oh, good time to have a baby, huh?
I brought the food upstairs and then we went out and wandered. On Second Avenue, when was it? It was the most un-fucked up thing I ever saw. Firetruck after firetruck, rolling down, firetrucks from other towns driving in. Lines of people, standing on the block, watching and waving. They were going to walk right into it. They were going to pull people out.
I was glad I kept cash at the time. No credit cards were being accepted and no ATMs were working. I used to keep all my gig money in a coffee can in the freezer, wrapped in tin foil, buried in coffee. I had thousands of dollars in my pockets. I kept it on me. We slept in the apartment. The next morning the air was thick and amber. I realized I didn't know what was in that shit, and I better get my belly out of it. We walked up avenue B to the L train, which was running. I put my shirt over my face to avoid breathing in smoke.
A man stopped, seeing my round stomach, and took his face mask off and gave it to me, pulling his own shirt up around his nose. We switched at Union Square and got onto the 6 uptown, we'd still have to cross over Central Park, but by the time we were uptown, and came out of the station, the air there was getting brown, too.
I felt wrong for abandoning the city, but responsible for the small person inside of me. We went back into the subway and headed for 34th St. Walked to Penn Station, got on the LIRR. As we pulled away from the city, and it drifted off into the distance, you could see all ash, the brown bubble around lower Manhattan. There were so many people there trying to help others, and we were leaving.
The San Francisco Chronicle called Gerson an "underground songwriting master" with the release of her original solo album This Can't Be My Life last July, and her most recent release, Deceived (5/17/2011), an album of traditional, country and folk songs about the "bad things that happen to ‘bad girls'" has been hailed by critics as "a triumph." Proceeds from Deceived go to family violence prevention and domestic violence organizations. For more information visit www.RuthGerson.com
Meanwhile, go here to read more 9/11 stories from the BLURT staff and contributors.
(Photo: Lisa Mazzucco)
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