Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He's Learned, How He's Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget (15 page)

I called each one of them in the morning and said, “Look, I don’t care if you stay at work. You just come down here, see me, and if you want to go back home, go back home. But all I want you to do is get up and come see me in this office. After that, the day is yours.” Eventually, I got everyone to come back to work full-time.

By October, I had a sales force again. We had a good October too. New York City was a nerve-racking place in those first days and weeks after 9/11. I remember going out to have a smoke, hearing sirens, and getting an uneasy feeling, thinking,
Is it terrorism?
Then they said anthrax was traveling through the mail. Then a plane went down in Rockaway Beach.

Life pre- and post-9/11 were entirely different in every way.

My pre-9/11 Network Plus mind-set was all about the public offering, the stock value, growing the company. My post-9/11 mind-set on Network Plus? I had little concern with long-term business goals. I was going day by day. Get up. Go to work. Get through the day. My drug of choice was bravado. Bravado can keep you from facing yourself in a lot of ways.

But there was another pre-9/11 preoccupation I had more trouble navigating. Pre-9/11, I had just gotten engaged. The morning of 9/11, wedding plans dominated my life. Two weeks before 9/11, we booked the place where we were going to get married. Now the wedding barely registered for me. It was secondary. How unfair to Joy. Not only was the wedding no longer the biggest thing in our lives, but I wasn’t the same. Pre-9/11, all we talked about was the wedding, the fun things we would do that day, our lives together. Post-9/11, she’s dealing
with my distracted and haphazard “Oh, right … the wedding.” She’s engaged to a guy who is no longer emotionally or psychologically available. She looks over at her fiancé and sees a person in a state of shock. She doesn’t see the same guy she planned to marry. When you watch tapes of my television appearances, you can see it in my eyes. I’m just not there. That’s what Joy always said. She could tell that night—the night of 9/11—the moment we first and finally saw each other. I just wasn’t there. I was gone.

That was the hardest thing. I wasn’t there because I didn’t want to accept a lot of things. I was afraid. I was afraid to delve into the effect those things had on me—the things I saw, what I went through. My pre-9/11 personality for dealing with life’s little adversities was to handle
it
, put
it
aside, and move on. But this thing—9/11—could not simply be put aside. You can’t move on from
it
without facing
it
, fully. To be my old self, I’d have to eat
it
up, chew
it
up, re-taste
it
, and re-digest
it
—all of
it
and what
it
really was to me. Deep down, I knew that’s what it would take. There was no way I could do
it
.

I look back now, and I can see myself in those early days. Joy wanted to discuss the wedding, but I was no help. I sat there, physically present in conversations—in our kitchen or in our living room or at a Home Depot—talking about it, but not present. My mouth was moving, and words were coming out, but I wasn’t feeling it. I’d respond with dismissive brevity. “Yeah, sure, OK. You take care of it.”

In those days, it was also not lost on either of us that the date of our wedding—September 13, 2002—was right around the one-year anniversary of 9/11. The intertwining of those events was inescapable.
Is this a message?
we’d ask ourselves.
Should we save the money and just run off to Vegas?
We seriously considered it. I said we might regret it. I think Joy knew better but didn’t
say it. We stuck to our plan. We’d get married two days after the first anniversary of 9/11.

“You sure this is the right thing for us?” she asked me. The phone rang again. This time I picked it up.
A call from the media should require less real feelings than talking about the wedding
. This is how I was operating.

I got through my first full week in the new office.

On Friday night, September 21, I’m sitting on the couch with Joy at my parents’ house. We’re watching TV. I’m tense, mind racing, saying little. We flip through channels, but every network is showing this huge, live telethon called
America: A Tribute to Heroes
. The event was raising money for victims and families of victims of 9/11. In America, the telethon was simulcast by over thirty-five network and cable channels, broadcast on over eight thousand radio stations, and streaming on the Internet. You couldn’t turn on any device you owned without seeing or hearing it.

My phone rings again. It’s the people from the telethon. They don’t want money. They want permission to use my name. I didn’t know what they were asking, exactly. Did they want to mention it when they called people for donations? Did they think
I
needed money? But yeah, sure, OK, I said.

Joy and I were enjoying the show. Various celebrities came on, one after the other, telling about different poignant and powerful things that happened on the day, and then a song was performed after the telling of each inspiring story. I was gripped by it. I felt connected to every story they told. It was really beautifully done. Then Jim Carrey came on. He told
my story
. He said my name and John Cerqueira’s name. He spoke about selflessness and being a hero and acts of kindness, how we put our
lives at risk to save someone else. Enrique Iglesias followed him and sang “Hero.”

I was blown away. This was different from
USA Today
or the CBS news footage, which to me was all about news reporting. This wasn’t
People
magazine, where the writer knew Tina Hansen’s husband. This was ten days later. To be singled out on this kind of show, running on every network—I mean, the words “Oh my god” flew out of my mouth.

That elevated things. It became clear to me that our story was circulating in the national oxygen. It started to sink in. First, President Bush, and now this.
My story
was positive. It carried a positive message that we—the country, the victims, the survivors—could all be proud of. I sat there on the couch with my fiancée and my parents, and
I
felt
proud
of it.
This is who we really are
.
That’s what I really saw in the Tower and on the ground
. That worked for me. It released a good feeling in me.

You see, as much as everyone was patting me on the back, I was not having too many good feelings on Friday, September 21, 2001. I was having nightmares. I said nothing about it to anyone, but underneath my stony silence, I was shaky. Hearing the president refer to me seven days after 9/11, and then being singled out during a national telethon three days after that gave me hope. I had no answers, but those two things pushed open a door, letting in some daylight of belief in me that maybe there was some meaning to what I went through. Amid all the twisted and fucked-up feelings, this feeling was OK.
If the White House and the producers of a nationally broadcast telethon feel good about it, maybe I should feel good about it too. Feel good instead of feel anger and sorrow and guilt.
Those two things let me feel that I did something right, instead of feeling that I did something wrong. Friends called me that night, saying, “Hey, did I just hear Jim Carrey say your name?” I said, “Yeah. I can’t believe it.”
I
smiled
. That show gave me permission to smile. It made me want to personally thank Jim Carrey for my first truly solid good feeling in ten days.

Maybe I’m really OK. Maybe it’s OK to talk about this publicly, with other people.

Up until that moment, I couldn’t hold one good thought in my head. I looked at others, and they always seemed to know something I didn’t. On 9/12, after my CEO, Rob Hale, saw the CBS feed and led the
USA Today
reporter to me, he said, “Mike, you’ve got to understand—you’re a national hero.” I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m still trying to figure shit out. I don’t even know if she’s alive. I’m checking to see if I still have my nuts attached. I’m making sure I didn’t lose anybody from our office. Man, I was choking to death with my face against the pavement and my ass in the air, halfway under a goddamn truck. I’m just pulling my head together. I saw
bodies
coming down from the sky. The firemen. The firemen. The firemen!” But nobody wants to know that. The TV’s on, didn’t you know? I’m standing amid death, dust, and rubble; I’ve just witnessed horrors unimaginable; and all of a sudden, a camera is in my face. And I spew out what happened. I had no idea, nor did I care that it was being fed by CBS to the world. And because of that, the next conversation that afternoon, maybe two hours later, is with my CEO, who says, “You are a national hero.”
What?
That made absolutely no sense to me. I just saw a person and then another person jump—
fucking jump
—from the top of the World Trade Center. That’s why maybe the only purely true thing I said to that CBS cameraman was “This is chaos,” referring to everything,
including the camera people documenting the chaos
. Hero of fucking what? Madness, that’s what.

I guess that’s how things happen. I told a CBS cameraman that I had just carried a woman down sixty-eight floors, not realizing
that I was in the middle of some national media moment. If that cameraman had walked ten feet to the left, he’d have met a woman who saved somebody else. Ten feet to the right, he’d have met a man who made sure his friend stopped crying so they could walk the last ten floors. I just happened to be standing where someone needed me. That’s all. But national hero? Say those words, and
boom
, people are on it. They’re on me. The media buzz is instant, immediate. And ten days later, I’ve got to navigate it?

The president and a nationwide emergency telethon recognized me on national television. What do I do about this? Do I have a responsibility of some kind? Should I be doing more? Should I be doing less? You try to wrap your head around it. People are saying you should get an agent. I’m getting offers sent to me from Hollywood for “my story.” I’m getting offers to speak at all kinds of public functions. It’s crazy. I still have a fulltime job with Network Plus. Yet I’m starting to see it. After the president and the telethon, I am coming to believe that people can take something good from what happened that day. They need to. Because there was good to take. All my reps made it. Tina made it. Yet how do you appropriately express that good? There were too many people who didn’t make it, too many people in mourning. So much pain everywhere. You couldn’t help but feel that by talking about the good that happened— about surviving—that you were doing something wrong.

But all those phone calls I had been ignoring, they weren’t going to end. President Bush and Jim Carrey saw to that. They also got me believing that maybe I could help others.

I should pick up the phone.

So I said yes to
Good Morning America
. Was I thinking
I’m a hero
? No. But If I could tell my story and maybe somebody somewhere would feel better, then I’d do it. I was very conflicted
about it. The nation was in mourning. I was in mourning. The nation was hurting. I was hurting. And I was nervous as hell.

Charlie Gibson was a cool guy. A guy’s guy. He made John and me feel calm. He was professional and sensitive. He saw we were TV rookies, and he explained to us how things would go. He said, “Just talk to me like we’re buddies on the street.” And that’s exactly how he conducted things when the cameras started to roll.
This feels wrong
.
My mouth is moving, but I feel like I’m in somebody else’s skin.
I was feeling that alien feeling I had in the bar the night of 9/11.

The interview was short. They ask questions. You answer questions. And that’s the story you tell. But in my head, it was,
Yes, I carried this woman down, but just after that, I ran from this exploding building, man. I heard the thing explode behind me. I ran for my life
. I understood the woman-in-the-wheelchair story was what they wanted. But what I wanted someone to know was that three minutes after I put her in an ambulance, I was really close to dying in an atmosphere of overwhelming terror. I never felt that I was ever really getting across what happened that day and how I felt. Carrying Tina out was a great thing. She made it. But what raged in my memory was seeing the firemen, the bodies, the things that happened
after
I got out of the building. That’s what consumed me. What the hell was I going to say about that? I couldn’t bring up the horror, could I? I was angry. I just wanted to scream into the camera. I wanted to tell everyone who lost something that I felt them.
I feel your loss. I feel your loss. I feel your loss.

When I got into the office that morning, I took a good ribbing from everybody. My family and Joy saw the show too. But all they saw was the distance in my eyes. They were thinking,
What’s wrong with him? Maybe he should be concentrating more on himself. Should he really be doing this?

That was the paradox. I get kudos on national TV, but my family can see I’m not healthy. Wherever I go they’re calling me a hero and clapping their hands, but the nation is in mourning, crying. They show my face on television and in magazines, and I walk outside to see thousands of faces of the missing on photographs posted everywhere.

“Great job this morning, Mike,” my CEO told me over the phone. “Now, up next, I really want to make sure you’re fully on board for this
Oprah
thing.”

“I am, Rob,” I reassured him. And then I asked again, “But seriously, is she really
that
popular?”

I didn’t know Oprah Winfrey was that big of a deal. It just wasn’t something I was aware of. Calls from the media came into our office all the time. I hung up on so many producers. Some calls I just didn’t take at all. A producer from
The Oprah Winfrey Show
had called every day since 9/12 asking me to be on the show. He called me, and he called our home office in Massachusetts trying to get to me. I wasn’t interested. The producers were shocked that I wouldn’t do it, that I didn’t scream into the telephone like a schoolgirl. I guess they didn’t hear “no” too often. Plus, their approach wasn’t entirely sensitive. It was all business. They were abrupt. And I get it. They’ve got a job to do. They’re trying to put a show together. I didn’t expect them to be my therapist. I just had no interest in selling my story like it was processed food. Plus, to go all the way out to Chicago didn’t sound like a good use of my time.