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 (17 page)

She waved her hand munificently forward and said, “Oh sure, hon! That’s a fantastic idea. Tell you what, when we come back from commercial, I’ll cue you, and you do your thing. OK?”
Yes, Oprah. Now I’m OK.

When they came back in from commercial, you could see how my face changed. I was happy, loose. We’re back in, and Oprah says, “I’m sure you have received notes from well-wishers since this happened, Michael.”

My face lit up. “Yes, Oprah, in particular…” I fit in everything, except I forgot Mrs. Toussaint’s name. But I did it. I thanked those kids on TV. After that, I kicked back and enjoyed the show.

At the end, Oprah hugged us. I remember my cousin saying that Oprah must have liked me because when she hugged me, she lifted her foot up.

There is one part of the
Oprah
show that I wish I didn’t have to mention, but I feel I must. Toward the end of our segment, Oprah went to the audience to interview a few of my reps. Mike Wright, for example, had a tremendous story about his staying behind to administer CPR and then getting caught in the collapse of Tower 2. Oprah also let another manager of mine, Adam Andrews, tell his story.

In the first moments right after the plane hit our building, after we got everyone out of the office, Adam was the last one to exit the office with me. We came down the stairwell together. Right around the time, or right after the time I ran into John, I lost track of Adam. Well, Adam proceeded to tell Oprah how he saved a number of people by preventing them from jumping out of windows. This didn’t make sense to a lot of us. The problem is there were no windows broken at that level in the tower. There was no reason for anyone to jump below the 81st floor.

Perhaps he kept people calm and helped them down a stairwell, but as far as directly preventing people from jumping out a window, it didn’t happen. As Oprah is interviewing him, you can see me wriggling in my seat and getting very uneasy with the whole thing. To me, and to others who were in Tower 1 on 9/11, his story was so obviously untrue. Yet he insisted on talking about it. I had never heard this story before that moment. When we got back to New York, the whole office felt uncomfortable.

Back in New York, I pulled him aside privately. “Just be careful about what you say and how you present yourself because you will be questioned about it,” I said. I especially wanted to tell him this because we learned that he was scheduled to receive an award with John and me at the annual CompTel Conference and Trade Exposition in Boston in October. He told his story there, anyway. I felt very uncomfortable about it, but I also felt like,
Who am I to question him?
But there would be some who would question him. I knew that after the CompTel ceremony we were going to be interviewed by
The Wall Street Journal
, so I warned Adam one more time: “Listen,” I said. “You are going to sit down with a journalist, and she is going to interview you about this incident. You have to be really careful about what you are going to say. And know that because I was not there with you, I am not going to be able to substantiate anything you say.” Sure enough, we met with a
Wall Street Journal
reporter. She questioned him, all right. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re telling me you saved people, but there was no fire on the floors you are talking about. Why would anyone want to jump out a window?” And she’s looking at me, and I’m looking straight down. I didn’t talk to Adam much after that night. I don’t know why he said what he said, but it was, well, sickening.

I had been so deliberate about managing my guilt. I had been so insistent about qualifying all my reps as heroes. I was so
tortured from battling images of firefighters and jumpers. Right up to and during the moment I sat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, I picked and sorted, wallowed in, and then ignored all these feelings, still and always profoundly doubting whether I had any right to talk to anyone about anything. If I spoke in public, I wanted in the utmost, and if nothing else, to be sensitive to families in pain. And this guy gets on
Oprah
and flat-out lies? Why? For God’s sakes, why? I’ve never mentioned the Adam Andrews incident much, or at all, until now. These are the kinds of thing you want to forget. He represents not the best of 9/11 but the worst of it. This was, for me, the first time I saw the grotesque incongruity between the tragic loss and noble heroism from 9/11 and the unconscionable profiteering off it. So fresh from the wounds, and someone was already selling the blood.

You didn’t have to do that, Adam. When the plane hit, you didn’t run out of the office. You stayed with me to help get every rep out, before you went out. You were heroic. When nobody was looking, Adam Andrews was a hero. When the cameras were on him, Adam Andrews was somebody else. Sadly, his actions were the first of many, made in the name of 9/11, that I found baffling and hurtful.

I want to mention that when John and I first walked out on the set, we got a standing ovation. Then my whole office was introduced, and they got a standing ovation too. To see my reps’ faces and how good they felt about everything at a time when I knew they felt awful was very important. Each of them had their own test of survival that day, and they did survive by sticking together. In fact, it was later discovered that we were the office on the highest floor to have everyone survive. That
Oprah Winfrey Show
was as much about them as about anyone that day. I am forever grateful they got that moment.

When the show was over, I waited around to get my package of personal photos back from Roy. He kept me waiting. Maybe
he was still salty about my mentioning the kids on air. They said they could mail me the photos, but I said I wanted them now. Apparently, that meant Roy had to go get them, and he wasn’t happy about it. After some time, Roy came walking down the stairs and handed me my pictures. I stuck out my hand with a big smile and said, “Thanks, Roy. No hard feelings.” We didn’t keep in touch.

Back home, everyone was going crazy about Oprah. People who had not actually
seen
the show,
heard
I was on it. Everyone knew about it. (My mother wanted to know why I didn’t wear a tie.) Now I knew how big Oprah was. In just two weeks, I had already done a good deal of national media, had been name-dropped by Jim Carrey during the telethon, and recognized by the president of the United States, but
The Oprah Winfrey Show
took it to an entirely new and frenzied level. I also felt that I had an idea of
who
Oprah, the person, was. What she did and how she did it is a model for treating people right in difficult circumstances.

What Oprah did was let us move on as an office. We were
all
recognized. There was something very healing about that. And I didn’t realize the power of that type of healing until years later. None of us are alone in this. To be welcomed in Chicago by Chicagoans the way we were—we talked about that a lot when we got back to New York. The sharing helped. On the plane ride back home, I was thinking,
Now we can all get back to life. To normalcy. To business.

My reps were selling again in October. We hit our quotas. But normalcy? That was a bit much to ask.

Once people hear you were on
Oprah
—well, they don’t even know your full story, they just know you were on
Oprah
, and that’s good enough. They want a piece of that. And after the incredibly positive experience with Oprah, I decided this
is
worth sharing. I believed it was important to say that in the midst of so much loss—in the wake of so much horror and in honor of so much sacrifice—there is so much value in staying together.

The amount of calls I received was overwhelming. I had no strategy. I just tried to do as much as I could, and do the types of things I thought would do the most good. I had to say no a lot. Some of the offers I said no to didn’t make sense to people. I turned down
Larry King
,
The Today Show, Dateline NBC, Inside Edition
, and many others. It wasn’t that I was against major media. In the next twelve months, I would make dozens of media appearances and accept dozens more speaking engagements. The way I decided what to do and what not to do was guided by the following self-imposed standard: Kids and good causes first, everything else second.

It was easy to say yes to the A-T Children’s Project. They honored John and me at their annual event in New York City.
A-T
stands for ataxia-telangiectasia, which is a rare, fatal neuro-degenerative disease that strikes children. Getting A-T is like getting muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, immunodeficiency, and cancer all at the same time. The A-T Children’s Project fights this awful disease. Joy and I have been on the New York committee since I was honored in 2002. I plan on being involved with this cause for the rest of my life.

It was easy to say yes to Bethphage, a foundation in Nebraska that helps handicapped adults with everyday living needs in twelve different states. Bethphage is an organization that would provide services for someone like my sister Susan if my sister didn’t have us. Joy and I flew out there and met John. David Jacox, the president and CEO of Bethphage, presented us with an award at their annual dinner. There must’ve been a hundred Bethphage recipients at the event. At one point during the
evening, one of the younger recipients took the microphone and sang “God Bless America.” If you had been in that room, surrounded by young men and women with varying disabilities and heard that boy sing, you would’ve truly heard that song for the very first time. When it came time for my remarks, I said to them, “We did something great
one
day, you do something great
every
day.” It was a powerful evening.

To top off the weekend, we were the guests of Bethphage at the Oklahoma-Nebraska football game. Coincidentally, my freshman football coach at Brown, Ron Brown, had become an assistant coach at Nebraska. We met on the field after the game. It had been fifteen years since we’d seen each other. We embraced. I saw the emotion in his eyes. This all made sense to me—my connection to him, to all those kids, to my sister, to Tina, to myself.

As soon as I got back home, I shipped six dozen I ♥ NY T-shirts to the Bethphage recipients I met that night.

These were the types of events that brought some logic and sanity to the otherwise-unmanageable state of my psychological and emotional life. It was not just easier to say yes to these invitations, it was one of the only ways I kept it together.

It was easy to say yes to kids. The first “audience” of any kind I spoke to was an auditorium of 150 high school students at Kittatinny Regional High School in Sussex County, New Jersey, in October. Jenn Reynolds, a childhood friend of Jeff Fernandez’s wife, taught there. She said the kids were removed from the event. They saw it on TV, but they didn’t really feel it. I was hesitant only because I did not know what to say or how to deal with it—what would be appropriate. So I just shared what I remembered. After I spoke, they opened it up for Q&A. That’s when I could really see what was on the kids’ minds. They all had some personal connection to the day. They knew someone or
lost someone, or knew someone who lost someone. One student asked me point-blank, “Were you scared?” They had so many questions, and each question they asked was forward, honest, penetrating. Finally, a student said to me, “What advice can you give to us about thinking about all that happened?” I paused for what was maybe an uncomfortable full minute. I stared at them soberly and spoke in a softer tone, “Look, if I have a message for you, it’s this: My office, me, and Tina—we made it out because we decided to look out for each other, right from the start. That’s what you have to do. You may not like everybody, but you should look out for each other because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.” They presented me with a big
K
for
Kittatinny
sweatshirt. I walked out of there feeling funny, but Jen thought it was fantastic.

From then on, no speaking engagements were better than schools. With each group of kids, I tried to remember back to when I was a boy and read about big national events and thought,
What if I met someone who was part of that event?
9/11 had to be frightening and confusing for them. I wanted to offer kids some sense of comfort. I thought the best way to do that was to present a strong front, to let them know that it was going to be OK. Even though in my gut, I felt it wasn’t. Maybe in trying to protect them I diverted myself from feeling my own vulnerability. Maybe.

In particular, I’ll never forget a trip to the Boys’ Latin School of Maryland, in Baltimore. My dad drove down with me. That was a treat. It was the only time when he was part of one of these things. We enjoyed the whole ride down together. The kids took pictures of me and my dad. Again, the biggest thrill was hearing their questions. I could feel their remarkable empathy. These are kids who are so desensitized from TV, video games, commercials. But these kids felt 9/11. I watched my dad sitting
in the back of the classroom with a smile on his face, listening to me talk to these boys. I was a Catholic school boy in a uniform myself once. No doubt, my dad was remembering that too.

With each school, I imagined that in the days and weeks and months following 9/11, teachers were bombarded with questions from kids—tough questions. These poor teachers don’t have those answers. How do you explain to grade school kids why things like this happen? How do you explain to them why people are jumping out of windows? You know they saw it. You can’t prevent them from seeing it. And I imagined teachers tried to counter with,
But did you hear this good story? Instead of the jumpers, how about the guy who carried the woman in the wheelchair? Why don’t we sit down and write to him?
I could not say no to that. If I could give that alternative story to what these kids were seeing on TV—fire, planes, blood, funerals, villains, people jumping, running, screaming, crying—if I could take my story to them, then maybe they could walk away with something more than never-ending replayed images of abject terror. And instead of walking away, we could walk forward together. I walked out of every classroom feeling that I had done something useful.