It turned out that my new company had lost two complete substations, something like five hundred million dollars’ worth of equipment, and that this had blacked out Wall Street and much of Lower Manhattan. We had one killed-in-action, Dick Morgan, a recently retired executive who’d been at the Trade Center that morning for a meeting with the Transit Authority. I’d never met Mr. Morgan, but he was famed for being the only “nice guy” executive in the entire company. For months afterwards, folks said, “They got the only good one.”
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| Standing on Pier A in Hoboken, 2016 |
I soon learned that I was far too new to help with the recovery effort downtown. But when the company offered its phone banks for the charity telethon later that week, I volunteered to work the phones. I took calls all night as entertainers played to make America feel better about itself, and despite the tragedy, this proved an uplifting experience. I talked to hundreds of people from all over the country that night and began for the first time to feel the overwhelming community spirit that would consume New York City over the course of the next year.
Closer to home, though, life remained challenging. Hoboken had long been a utopia of hip young urban professionals, and as such, it suffered more casualties per capita than any other neighborhood in the entire Tri-State area. In the wake of such a massive loss of life, a pall settled over the town. There weren’t any official casualty reports, nor were authorities in any way sure who’d been in the towers when they collapsed, nor who had or hadn’t made it out afterwards. People occasionally awoke in hospitals and called home, generating stories of miracles but also giving false hope to literally thousands of newly made widows and widowers. “Have You Seen Me” posters went up everywhere, the most prominent for a beautiful young blond woman of perhaps thirty. The majority of these came down after a few weeks or months, but that blond woman’s husband kept searching for his wife for more than half a year. I saw those flyers for months after the attacks and would find myself transported instantly back to the moment when I’d seen that second plane hit. The town and I both struggled with the memory, realizing only afterwards how deeply we’d been affected.
Life went on.
My mom came up for Thanksgiving, professed her love for a city that cared nothing for her personal problems with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, and promptly vanished, never to return. We walked the streets of Manhattan, went to Thanksgiving dinner at a boutique restaurant on Washington Street, and shopped at Macy’s After-Thanksgiving Sale. The President called upon Americans to do their part to stimulate the economy, and I tried to take this seriously. Mom was alarmed to see me run one afternoon when we heard multiple sirens come roaring down the street during a shopping trip.
“It could be another terrorist attack!” I said breathlessly, looking back towards the sirens. I wasn’t the only one who’d run. “You never know what’s going to happen around here.”
“I was just worried about airplanes,” my mother replied miserably. “Why won’t you just come home?”
Come home to what? I thought. This is my home. This city actually needs me.
* * *
I was doing good work, building out the basic infrastructure in the Bronx and southern Westchester County, and working for a City institution, so maybe the City did need me. I was learning to set utility poles and high voltage transformers, to manage union work crews and plan construction jobs within the Byzantine legal structure of municipal New York City and the various townships of southern Westchester County. Many of the guys who worked for me were themselves veterans, mostly out of the Army or Navy, and I found managing their workload to be relatively straightforward. The technical aspects of the job were more challenging. I had to learn to work around live high voltage conductors, to design makeshift repairs when poles or wires came down as a result of traffic accidents or storm damage, and to design more permanent solutions once power was restored and the area itself was made safe for passersby. Sometimes I even made changes to engineered blueprints on large reinforcement jobs based of conditions I found out in the field. In many ways this reminded me of planning tactical solutions in 4-7 Cav, but our solutions now left something real and tangibly useful once we’d finished our work. I didn’t realize it immediately, but I was learning to build for the first time in my life and finding myself suited to the task.
Professionally, it was a heady time. Personally, I was still struggling to adapt.
I knew virtually no one and spent the majority of my time either working or commuting to work. I made an effort to get out with the few people that I did know, but even this was often a pain in the ass. I had to travel all the way to Manhattan for a club scene that I mostly felt I’d outgrown, and compared to the Wild West atmosphere of rural South Korea, Manhattan’s nightlife felt hopelessly, relentlessly manufactured--and ultimately tame. Ugly American Nights on the backstreets of Seoul had taken hellraising to unimaginable heights. Compared to that, the pretty boys of New York looked like useless pretenders in overpriced silk shirts and shoes. Worse, it would sometimes take me an hour or more to get home via the PATH train, a ride that I did not enjoy when what I really wanted was to fall straight into my bed and sleep. I signed up for an Internet dating site, gave it up, considered an actual brick-and-mortar dating service, and wound up just spending time by myself down at the bar on 10th Street and Willow Ave.
I sat there one night talking to one of the bartenders when a young guy came in wearing a rumpled suit and a furious expression. It turned out that he’d just lost his job.
“Goddammit!” he said. “I was making money. I love money! Do you love money?”
“It’s never really been a motivator,” I replied slowly, “if I’m being honest. But I suppose it’s better to have it than to not have it.”
The guy looked at me like I’d spoken Chinese. “What the Hell is that s’pposed to mean?”
“There’s more to life than money,” I said. “A lot more.”
The guy gave me a hard look and then turned pointedly away, addressing the rest of his rant to the bartender. “Well, I love money. That’s all I ever wanted. And I was makin’ money, too…”
I sighed, paid up, and walked out.
Apparently, I hadn’t just come to New York. I’d landed on a whole other planet.
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