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 (25 page)

Intellectually, I understood that I was digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole in every aspect of my life: socially, financially, emotionally, physically. But my rationale for living was no longer rational. I wanted to see just how deep of a hole I could bury myself in and still get out, as if simply waking up the next day was “getting out.” Somehow I equated self-destruction with industriousness. Anything that required real effort and real responsibility, I just turned my head away. I didn’t care about the house anymore. I didn’t want to fix it. I was, in short, living a life that was everything my life pre-9/11 was not. All the things that were most important to me, the things I once gave the most energy for—family, friends, career—were the things I wanted to evade and ignore.

And in the middle of this descent into the abyss, Joy tells me she’s eight weeks pregnant.

What strength and patience. All this time, while I became more and more difficult, more and more unavailable, Joy kept trying. She believed that we could, and would, overcome. She continued to live life with vision and hope. She continued to be my loving wife.

July 9, 2006, was my birthday. Joy took me to dinner in New York City, at La Kitchenette, on the West Side. Sitting at the table, she says, “I have two surprises for you. Here’s your first.” She hands me a beautiful birthday card. The waitress comes over, and I order calves brains. (
Calves brains? Why not.)
They bring us our meals. I dig in. “Ready for your next surprise?” she asks. “Sure,” I say, chewing my calves brains. She takes out a portable CD player and puts headphones on me. The music plays, and I hear the words “Three is a magic number.” It’s an old Lou Donaldson tune from a collection of ’60s blues music we listened to often. I listened and looked over at Joy. She’s got this grin on her face, her eyebrows raised, looking back at me like,
Don’t you get it?
And I’m looking at her like,
Get what?
She starts singing along, “Man and woman have little baby, yes, it’s three, three in the family … three is a magic number.” I’m still clueless. The smile on her face just gets bigger and bigger. And I am like,
What in the world are you talking about?
She shakes her head, says, “Listen to the words, Michael.” Oh my god. I got it.

We reached across the table, held hands, and for one night let ourselves celebrate life.

I’d like to tell you that in the next seven months I climbed up out of my emotional dumpster and rose to the call of duty. I did not. If I had been waiting for something in my life in which I could take meaningful part, this was it. But instead of being a part of it, I made myself apart from it.

Joy did everything: She read all the books, did the Lamaze classes, and made all the requisite doctor’s visits, essentially without me. I was there physically for all of it, but I was not in it with her, let alone make it at all special. I saw these as things I needed to get done and over with, so I could go do what I wanted to do.

And what was that, exactly? It certainly wasn’t to go look for a job or pull myself together, prepare for what was about to come. No, I just wanted to self-medicate. I wasn’t in mourning anymore. I was an addict—a misery addict. My primary treatment for that addiction was alcohol. Another particularly consistent element of my treatment required my being absent as much as possible—absent even if I was sitting right next to you.

A pregnant wife is not someone you can skate by, give just a little attention. I gave little attention, and I got plenty of feedback on my shortcomings as a husband and caretaker. For seven months, our relationship became a simple pattern of Joy needing and me pretending. That made for seven months of mounting tension.

But this was a process I could not reverse. My absence notwithstanding, Joy’s pregnancy progressed, and on March 5, 2007, my son was born at New York-Presbyterian/Weill-Cornell Medical Center. We named him Michael Reyes after both of his grandfathers.

After a few days, Joy and the baby were released to come home. Now there were definitely three in the family.

Right after 9/11, I had grappled with anger and guilt, derailing my professional career and leaving me questioning whether anything had meaning. After my father passed away, I lost interest in figuring any of that out.
Fuck it
was my answer to problems.
Leave me alone
was my answer to people.

The arrival of little Michael didn’t change my mode of operation.

I thought I could keep that frame of mind and still be a father. I thought,
OK, it’s just another thing I’ve got to do. I can be physically there, go to parties, go through the motions. Then I can go out and drown my pain.
It didn’t work. I was spiraling faster and deeper emotionally, psychologically, downward financially. Life became harder, and the harder it was, the farther and farther I removed myself.

Emotionally and psychologically, I had checked out long ago. Then, ultimately, I stopped physically showing up for things.

How could that work? I now had a child that relied on me for everything. I had a wife who needed me to be there for her, and if not for her, at least for the child. Our house that was once an emblem of unity and optimism became a huge vestibule of acrimony and burden.

Joy and I didn’t sleep for three months. The child needed us day and night. Joy was home on ninety-day maternity leave, and I took that as an opportunity to work more construction, which was really more like doing some half-day jobs with buddies and hanging out, which became working half-days every other day. “Joy’s gonna go back to work soon,” I’d tell them. “Then what?” Nobody really answered. They’d change the subject. I should’ve been getting more organized and more directed. Instead, I was becoming more disorganized and misdirected.

Joy went back to work in June. She had to, because we needed the money. I got my mother to watch Michael so I could “work” construction. My mother couldn’t really quit her job at the school cafeteria in the fall, though, so I hired a nanny to watch Michael full-time. Soon it became clear the nanny was making more than we could afford to pay.

The spiral deepened—financially, emotionally, psychologically. I was drinking all the time. I was drinking at work, after work. On the days I didn’t work, I’d go meet guys I worked with to hang out and drink. I’d come home with booze on my clothes, in my head, and in my talk. My plan for the next day was nothing but the same. That’s if I had a plan at all.

But I have a son. I have a son.

Did I use the word
abyss
earlier? Now I’m living below the abyss.

Never had I felt more alienated from everyone and everything. I looked at the world, and more than ever I felt that nobody—not my wife, my family, my friends—nobody gets it.
They wouldn’t even if I tried to explain it
. Explain what, though? I wasn’t even sure anymore. I needed a drink.

I became a curmudgeon, the downer, the cynic. I was the guy in the room who watched the news and yelled at the TV, the guy who read the newspaper and griped indignantly. I constantly vented disgust. It was all disgust all the time.

Joy had had enough. “How much can we take?” she asked me. “We have a child. You cannot be like this around him.”

But I still had my excuse, my get-out-of-jail-firee card. I was in 9/11. That meant I was entitled to be overwhelmed. I had special license that allowed me to find everything meaningless. I earned the privilege to sit around every day amid a sea of question marks. If I wanted to avoid, delay, prolong, re-purpose, redirect, or drink away my pain, that was my right. Woe is me.

What utter bullshit.

Nobody was calling about 9/11 or anything else anymore.

Joy sat me down. “Listen to me, Michael,” she said. “When I first met you, you were a glass-half-full kind of guy—the most positive person in the room. That’s who you always were, wherever you were. You are now totally the opposite of that person, and 9/11 was where it all changed. Just after 9/11, you at least thought you were a lucky person. You thought that 9/11 was a reason for you and others to be even more grateful and more appreciative of all the little things in life. That’s not who you are now. You are angry and bitter. You fought so hard to get yourself and Tina out of that building. You fought so hard to stay alive while you were choking under that truck. And you did stay alive. Here we are, years later: There’s no smoke, no fire, no building collapsing around you, but you’re letting it crush you. You’re not even trying to beat it.”

She was right. This is not who I was the moment I met Tina. In the moment I encountered Tina, I was a man of action. Now I was a man of inaction. Worse, I was the one who needed to be carried out. If I found myself at that moment in a situation to carry someone out of a burning building, would I have done it? Could I say in an interview now “I knew no other way to be”? The question was too painful to pose to myself.

9/11: How could the one day that exemplified who I was take me as far away as possible from who I was?

This was rock bottom for me. I could go no lower. I had become a person that was so far from the person he used to be that I was not just unrecognizable but I was completely the opposite of the person I was—the person Joy knew and fell in love with before 9/11. How did I get to this place? I got here because the new person I had become was built on all these new feelings—denial, anger, guilt, blame, mistrust, and other defense mechanisms—that were a result of not dealing with the original, unresolved feelings, not dealing with my fear. What does a fearful, traumatized person do with his fear and trauma when it’s too great for him to face? He piles bullshit on top of it. That way you can fool yourself into thinking it’s not really there. You’ve paved it over with so much bullshit you can’t even remember what those scary feelings were or why you have to work so hard to hide them. And after you’ve piled enough bullshit up to cover those original unresolved, untreated feelings, it’s inevitable what you eventually become. Gradually, overtime, day by day, you become that bullshit. You become something so foreign to who you used to be or once wanted to be. You become what I was at that moment: a person who had lost his code.

“You’ve gone too far, Michael,” Joy said. “Either you figure it out, or we find a different way.” I knew what she meant. I could lose everything—Joy, little Michael, all of it. I had to change, but I had no idea how. I was terrified. I felt as if I was under that truck again, gasping for air, terrified that I was going to lose it all. My anger, my bitterness, my guilt,
my bullshit
—that was all I had. That’s what scotch-taped me together in this insane world.
And who the hell is she to make ultimatums?

But my son. My son.

The next morning, they called me for construction—a half-day job working on a back deck in Montclair. We had no nanny. I’d have to stay with Michael.

The little guy was running around pretty good by this time. It was an early October morning. Not too cool, but the season was changing. The sun was out. I unfolded a lawn chair, nursed a coffee, and watched Michael kick his favorite ball around the backyard.

Michael created a little game for himself in which he’d kick the ball against the side of the garage, making a little
boom
sound, which amused him to no end. He did it again and again, squealing in delight each time he made the
boom
. Every other kick, he looked up to me for approval, or maybe just to see if I was still watching. I was watching. My neighbor next door was watching too. Holding a rake in his gloved hands, he nodded to me, smiling toward little Michael.

I smiled back. Michael smiled back too. We all continued smiling at each other—Michael kicking, my neighbor raking, me sipping coffee.

I squinted up at the sun. Was it getting warmer? I looked at Michael, who giggled. My neighbor raised his eyebrows at me and nodded his head. I couldn’t help it. I cracked a big toothy smile. My shoulders relaxed a little. I felt the sun on the side of my face, pleasant and warm. I could really taste my coffee this morning. It was a good first cup. The air outside smelled fresh, that familiar subtle smokiness of leaves first drying in the earliest of autumn. I heard the birds.

I looked again at Michael and then again at my friendly neighbor, who was looking at Michael and then smiling at me, and to himself. And I felt … good. Really good. In that instant, a rush of feelings overwhelmed me. All at once everything came into focus—my father, my family, Joy, 9/11. I could see it all perfectly—all I had been through, seen, and done. I saw the answer—the key to unlock me from my torment, free me from my exile, and set me on my road back to myself, my friends, my family, my wife, my life. It was clear. How had I forgotten it? It was the same simple truth I understood the moment I saw a woman sitting still in her wheelchair on the 68th floor:

All we have is each other.

That’s how we get through this.

It’s the one true thing my father taught me that I can pass on to my son. It’s the forgotten truth of 9/11, which forced us to truly see each other through the masks of boss or employee or competitor or cultural adversary or anonymous Internet antagonist. And in truly seeing each other, we saw that all we had, if we were to make it through this—through the fire—was each other. I saw that in the stairwells on 9/11. I saw it in this moment now with my son, in his face. I saw it in the face of my next-door neighbor.
All we have is each other.