It was, as so many have pointed out, a heartbreakingly beautiful morning.
I had just come back to my apartment from buying the papers and half and half, and had a luxurious 45 minutes reading the sports section and thinking about the enviable day I had in front of me. I had 10 am editorial meeting at ESPN Magazine, where I had been writing my humor column, The Monologue, for almost 2 years, then back home to change into my softball uniform and get ready for the Show Business League 1:00 pm championship game in Central Park. The Letterman show was dark that week, which means that night I'd be able to attend the early reading of my friend Joe Cummins' first published novel, The Snow Train. Great day.
Don't be fooled by the name of the softball league. 16 teams and maybe there were 11 guys actually in show business. It was a ringer-dominated, modified fast-pitch league, the second best in the city behind the weekend doubleheader circuits. Wonderful players from all over who could wise guy away from their jobs on a Tuesday from April-August. My team, Garrison, was back in the championship, playing a rematch against McHale's. We had lost to them the year before in an absolute heartbreaker, 6-5, on two walks and two errors in the bottom of the ninth. We had taken the lead in the top of the ninth on a two-run home run by a guy who humility prevents me from naming.
Garrison had an even better team in 2001, and we were feeling unbeatable since dispatching O'Hurley's in the division finals two weeks before. O'Hurley's was a bar-sponsored team composed entirely of NYC firemen. They had a phenomenal pitcher, John Brown, but because they carried no ringers, they had to win every game 1-0 or 2-1. We had an easy time of it, which never happened with John Brown. (And by "we," I mean everyone else. I could never hit him. Nasty.)
The final against McHale's was scheduled for September 4, but got rained out. I was grateful, because Dave had given me special dispensation to play in the 1:00 game and miss the monolgue meeting, and now I didn't have to cash in that card. We'd play the following Tuesday. September 11.
I got on the elevator around 9:30. Went down a few floors. Feeling great. My neighbor Lucille gets in on 7. White as a ghost. "How's it going?" I say. She looks at me. "You didn't hear?" she says. "Two planes flew into the World Trade Center." And I said what nine years later still makes great sense to me.
"I don't believe you."
I ran onto Lexington and got into a cab. The cab driver had 1010 WINS on, the all-news station. My friend Ralph Howard was on the air. He would talk for five seconds, be interrupted by bulletin music, then begin again with updated news on the towers. He barely finished two sentences all the way down to 34th and Madison, where ESPN Magazine had its offices. So, this really happened.
I saw the first tower go down in the ESPN newsroom, and then they evacuated the building because we were a block away from the Empire State Building and who knew how many more planes there were. I walked five blocks to my trainer's gym on 39th Street where my wife had gone for a workout. On my way there a disoriented old woman ran into me and knocked herself down. She was okay. Five minutes after I got to the gym, the second tower crumbled. I've never asked others, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who was watching and thought, "Oh, this is the animation of what it would look like if they fell."
My wife and I walked up Lexington Avenue as if the smoke from downtown was chasing us. I remember hearing that night about hundreds of men in pulverized concrete-powdered suits and briefcases walking from Wall Street home to Greenwich, Connecticut. Adrianne and I sat and watched TV for two days between fitful sleep, desperate for information other than bookeeping that Giuliani had ordered 10,000 body bags.
Finally, Thursday. Another cruelly glorious day. Adrianne says, "We need to get out of here. Let's go to the park." We walked out the door and were slapped with an otherworldly odor, a rank, vaguely chemical smell. "Are they working on the garage?" I asked the doorman. "Nah," he said quietly. "The wind shifted."
The following Tuesday, after they canceled the title game for good, the league commissioner and a dozen of us from Garrison and McHale's met in the park and walked down in our uniforms to 66th and Columbus, where we presented the $1,500 first prize check and championship trophy to Engine 40, Ladder 35, the firehouse that lost all but one man, among them four players on the O'Hurley's team. Back then, nobody knew what the fuck to do, so we did things like that. A check and a softball trophy to a firehouse.
We still don't know what to do.