Project Rebirth (12 page)

Charles has not celebrated Thanksgiving since Tana passed away. However, his coughing fits and chest pains finally forced him, in 2005, to visit the place where he last saw his grandmother. During his first visit, he was tested for possible side effects from his time at Ground Zero. It was only then that he started to seriously commit to his medical treatment.

A friend prompted him to go, suggesting that he might be able to sing again if the doctors cleared up his throat. Charles has a deep voice that is still beautifully mellow but at least an octave lower since 9/11. He can't hold his notes as long as he used to when singing his favorite doo-wop songs or spirituals at church. He is just one of many first responders suffering the effects of the poisonous dust cloud that slowed down their rescue efforts and now threatens to speed up their deaths.

The doctor at Mount Sinai handed Charles a folded sheet of paper. “That has your next appointment written down on it,” the doctor said, smiling. Charles took a look. It was a threefold flyer, one of many informative bulletins for first responders consistently printed by Mount Sinai, as the hospital continued to monitor their health. “I'm famous now,” Charles joked, wondering why they put that ugly picture of him on the front flap.

Charles's doctors are pleased with his progress so far. They tell him to keep doing whatever he's doing. “I drink vinegar cider sometimes,” he explains, a recommendation from an herbalist in Brooklyn. “It cleans my lungs. I still feel like I can't clear my throat, but I've been exercising a lot. I ride bikes, walk eight flights of stairs. So it's working out.”

Charles is not alone in his physical struggles post–September 11th; almost all of the rescue workers who pitched in at that time have dealt with long-term difficulties. The debris that remained after the collapse of the towers was “wildly toxic,” according to Professor Thomas Cahill, a pollution expert. The debris consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants, many of them carcinogenic. Dr. Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital believes there is a 70 percent illness rate among first responders. In a 2010 study of 5,000 rescue workers, Dr. David J. Prezant found that
all
the workers had impaired lung functions, presenting early on with little improvement with time. Thirty to 40 percent of workers were reporting persistent symptoms and one out of five studied were on “permanent respiratory disability.”

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a police officer who died of a respiratory disease he contracted during the 9/11 rescue operations, received final Congressional approval on December 22, 2010, and was enacted by President Barack Obama on January 2, 2011. The act will funnel $2.5 billion into a Victims Compensation Fund that will provide aid to first responders and construction workers who were exposed to the World Trade Center dust, as well as some residents in and around Ground Zero. The Zadroga Act also more than quadrupled the funding for health clinics and other programs that screen and treat people for 9/11-related illness. In 2010, these programs received $70 million. They will get $300 million for each of the next five years.

Friends and family continue to question Charles's altruism. If he was aware of the damage to his body, what made him stay so long? “We all chose the way we were gonna go,” he says. “But no one need to worry 'bout me.” His sickness is his sickness.

Charles's retirement from recovery efforts was fairly brief. By 2003, he started taking courses in emergency preparedness in order to enhance his already wide range of survival and rescue skills. In August of 2005, he watched as another disaster unfolded on television: the flooding and devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina. A young African American child was pleading to the camera for help; his sick grandmother was going to die if she didn't get her medicine. Charles was moved. He knew the time had come once again to leap into action.

In order to receive his assignment from the American Red Cross, Charles had to take a train to D.C., then switch over to the local for Silver Springs, Maryland. There he was told he was being deployed to Montgomery, Alabama. Charles's tinnitus, a debilitating ringing in the ears he developed after a traffic accident, prevented him from traveling by plane. No matter—a group of volunteers who were already planning to drive down offered him a ride.

The nonstop drive extended into the night, and Charles fell asleep in the car. When he awoke, they were in Mississippi. The sun had yet to come up, but even in the darkness he could see what looked to him like a junkyard surrounding them. The “junkyard,” he soon realized, was actually the ruins left by the hurricane winds and the floods. The debris stretched for miles and miles.

To make matters worse, Hurricane Rita was now nipping at their heels. The group was forced to stop at a naval base in Gulfport in order to stay safe as the second hurricane in weeks passed over the region. The rain was not heavy, and yet when he went outside, Charles could feel the wet up to his knees. Water pooled quickly in these parts, and he now understood why he saw so many boats caught on tree branches.

Charles had some experience driving large vehicles, as well as operating heavy machinery during his army service, so he was assigned to Emergency Response Vehicle duty. When that didn't work out, he was put in charge of a cargo truck. During the nineties he owned his own van service and provided transportation for performers such as Diana Ross, Jackson Browne, and U2.
If Bono could see me now,
Charles thought.

Charles liked the cargo truck because he could disburse large amounts of food and supplies quickly to as many people as possible. The instructions were clear in terms of what he had to do, yet vague about where he had to do it. He was told to pick an area he wanted to service, drive around to find people in need, then pick up the necessary supplies and deliver them. Repeat. Charles found himself making several trips a day to the warehouse and back out east along the coast, sometimes crossing over to Alabama, where he was originally supposed to be stationed.

One day, as he drove back to the warehouse from a delivery far along Route 9, a woman flagged him down. She had a baby in her arms, pale and puffy like a marshmallow. Charles got out of the cargo truck and asked how he could help. She asked him to come over to her house.

The woman showed Charles that she had no supplies left in the house, not even Similac for the baby. “I don't have much in this truck right now,” Charles explained, then added in the most reassuring tone he could muster, “but what I have, I'll give you. Now, you tell all your neighbors who have babies or who need anything else to come meet me here tomorrow at the same time.”

The grief in their faces was unbearable. Mothers being unable to care for their babies really got to him. The scene there was worse than 9/11, for him, at least. There was nothing but devastation everywhere he went. Not even the rich had been spared. As he got back on the road toward the warehouse, Charles saw the remnants of a huge estate. Trees were all gone, the fence had been ripped out and lay near a body of water, and there were no houses in sight.

The next day, Charles kept his promise to the woman with the baby, and the woman had brought many of her neighbors with her, all in dire need. Charles gave them all formula and teddy bears. “I've done a lot of things in my life,” Charles says with a proud smirk, “but nothing better than that . . . that was my shining hour.”

When asked about what Tana would have thought of his volunteer work, Charles says, “She would've expected it.”

Grandmother and grandson would often go out fishing in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. In fact, it was a tradition they continued well into her old age, bringing Charles's daughter along as well. Tana was great at it. Whatever they caught on a given day, she brought back home in the evening to distribute to the neighbors. Charles, however, took note of what Tana did when no fish had made it onto their boat. On their way back to Manhattan, she would stop by the market and buy fish.

“Now, don't go telling anyone about this,” she'd warn Charles before handing out the fish in the neighborhood. Tana was as proud as she was generous.

Helping others would become a form of healing for Charles. Psychologist Lorne Ladner, Ph.D., asserts that taking care of others is a way of taking care of ourselves. He says, “By developing deep, powerful feelings of compassionate connection with others, we can learn to live meaningful and joyful lives. Only such feelings can help us to learn experientially how to work for meaningful causes and give of ourselves without becoming exhausted or burned out.”

Charles would certainly agree. As he shrugs off the idea of receiving anything in return for his help, he says, “We should pay them for the feeling they give us. It's a good feeling, helping people.”

Another New York City summer is ending, and the air this September morning at the park is a bit cooler and drier, making Charles cough repeatedly. He clears his throat and adjusts his Hogwarts baseball cap over his short-cropped, graying afro. He is glad that at least the piercing “sticky-glass” feeling in his lungs isn't there anymore. He reflects, “Lord must have blessed me, 'cause I should be in a box by now. I see so many people sicker than me that spent less time down there.”

“Down there” means Ground Zero, where he arrived on September 11, 2001, and stayed for the first 117 days, pouring his soul into the rescue and recovery efforts. C.C., a name familiar to subway riders during his last days as a conductor on the local C line (“C.C. on the C.C.!” he exclaims), was one of New York City's angels on that day.

With the tenth anniversary almost upon Charles, the words of the Mount Sinai doctors who examined hundreds of first responders like him have made the reality of his failing health feel more imminent. Some of the reports he has read state that inhaling the dust at Ground Zero during the first few weeks after the attacks may have cut his life expectancy by fifteen to twenty years. Charles might not feel old, but he accepts that his time will be up soon. “You come, you go,” he nonchalantly tells friends and family.

His casual attitude toward his own death is perhaps possible only because he feels secure that his legacy, the legacy of his grandmother, has been continued in every teddy bear he's pressed into the hands of a forlorn child, every bottle of water he's delivered to an ash-covered emergency worker, and every brick he's cleared from a disaster zone. Charles is a man whose grief is assuaged by giving, whose loss is honored by dedicated service to others.

His service is remarkable and yet not out of the ordinary. Lao Tzu, the celebrated Chinese philosopher and author of the
Tao Te Ching,
teaches that there are four cardinal virtues: reverence for all life, natural sincerity, gentleness, and supportiveness. The last of these, it turns out, is the virtue that releases us from our own pain by allowing us to focus on healing the pain of others.

When grieving a loss in our own lives, sometimes the most powerful action we can take is to forget ourselves for a moment and turn to others—connecting us to all of humanity. Charles has continuously done this, threading the loss of his beloved grandmother to the losses endured by his beloved hometown and his beloved nation. In the process, he has destroyed his body, but his heart is happy. He knows, as Lao Tzu also wrote, that “life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.” Charles ties his fate to the fate of his neighbors, his fellow New Yorkers, his fellow citizens, and so, in a sense, lives forever, just like his Tana.

Larry Courtney

 

 

 

L
arry Courtney excuses himself from his own New Year's Eve party for a moment. He steps onto his large terrace and looks down at tens of thousands of revelers in Times Square, drunkenly swaying arm in arm, blowing kazoos, and squeezing past one another in an effort to get closer to the infamous ball. It will drop shortly. Larry wishes he felt even a fraction of the giddiness of these revelers. He envies their drunken kisses, their sentimental send-off to 2001, the year that's just passed. For him, it can't end soon enough. Though he is fifty-six, he feels one hundred years old.