Special Report - Day 4: Tough

New York Diary: Day 4--Tough
September 14, 2001
by John Bloom

NEW YORK (UPI) --The fourth day dawned with the city oppressed by a chill rain. The subways ran late when they ran at all. Cell phones didn't work. Mail wasn't delivered. The news channels--which in New York means all channels--had settled into a benumbed drone.

And the city didn't react. The commuters were silent. When worried apartment-dwellers were once again denied access to their homes, they turned away from police cordons without comment. When the plumbing-repair number rang off the hook, without an answer, they resigned themselves to trying again tomorrow. There's perhaps no more profound indication of just how deep this grief goes than that New Yorkers had lost their capacity to argue or complain.

The fourth day after a tragedy--the day of the church services, the day of the political speeches, the day of the official grieving--people normally have a need to renew themselves. They cry, hug, break a fast, take their children to the park. Because of my reputation as a satirist, I'm usually besieged on the fourth day with emails full of grim sick jokes, which psychologists explain as a way to exorcise feelings that would otherwise be too difficult to deal with. There were no jokes this time. And in New York, which prides itself as being the most tough-minded cynical city in the world, there was not even that much talk of war.

Amazingly, men actually got up from their subway seats and offered them to women who were older or burdened with shopping bags. People stepped aside at turnstiles, allowing others to go first. Perhaps the grief has turned everyone sluggish, but it's more than that. Customer service people at notorious bureaucracies like ConEd and Verizon had been transformed into solicitous grief counselors.

No cross words. No confrontations. No arguing over what someone said or meant or should have done. It's unsettling and somehow unnatural.

A gap-toothed woman, sleeping off a drunken stupor on the 6 train, is gently roused by the engineer when the train has to go out of service at 51st Street. The engineer waits to see if the woman can wobble off safely, then moves through the rest of the cars, making her announcements.

At Lexington Avenue, a woman in a chador, with scared eyes, is looking around wildly, obviously trying to figure out her direction. Three men instinctively go to her, but she either speaks no English or she's too afraid to speak. They calm her down and gradually figure out that she needs to find a train that goes to Queens. One of them walks her to the station.

Every once in a while someone tries to start a good old- fashioned New York argument. "So they get rid of curbside check- in--what the hell does that do?" says a pontificator at the Baggot Inn pub in Greenwich Village. He gets one weak response: "Yeah, that's right." And then the conversation dribbles away.

"Vultures!" says a denizen of Brother Jimmy's Bait Shack on Third Avenue. He's reacting to a news report showing tourists snatching up World Trade Center souvenirs. But no one answers him. They wouldn't want to appear quarrelsome.

I actually think he's wrong about the souvenir scavengers, though. I've watched them--once at a shop in the Village, another time at a place near Times Square--and they go through the postcard racks like relatives checking morgue drawers. In the absence of any other connection with the event, they want them as keepsakes. They pick one and then move on. You can imagine it being unearthed in an old family closet 100 years from now, like a yellowed news clipping about the Lusitania.

New Yorkers haven't found their natural rhythm yet, and I think many of the "grief experts" on television simply pour salt in the wounds. "There are many ways to move beyond this and focus on our future," they say--to deaf ears, because it's obvious that New Yorkers don't want to move beyond this yet. Even if there weren't still bodies under the rubble, I think they would say that, no, like ancient clerics, we prefer to have the drapes drawn and the furniture turned upside down right now. We prefer to mourn properly and fully.

Still, there's the occasional sign of a return to normalcy. Walking down Bleecker Street, I encounter a man dressed in fireman's boots and surgical scrubs, with a white cotton mask hanging down from his chin. A woman just behind me notices him at the same moment I do. He's looking at us with sad eyes, and for a moment we think he's about to speak. Perhaps he's seen some horrible thing today and he needs to share it.

Then we see he's also holding a white plastic coffee cup, the universal tool of the full-time New York street beggar.

"Oh, honey!" says the woman. "You can't do that!"

And she gives the man a hug.

As we walk away, the woman and I break into laughter.

The beggar, we knew, would lose one or two accessories, modify his outfit, not be so blatant. She had hugged him because she'd recognized a fellow New Yorker, trying to figure out how everything would look after this is all over and just where he would fit in. He would find his place. He just hadn't had time yet.

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