Free Turn Around Bright Eyes by Rob Sheffield

or longer after dark, when they started closing off exits. I got used to feeling lost, wandering the tunnels under the World Trade Center. They had an entire mall down there, catering to other disoriented travelers looking for a way out. There was a Gap, a Body Shop, an Urban Outfitters. You knew you were close to escaping when you smelled the Krispy Kreme.
    They even had a record store, a Sam Goody. One Friday afternoon I found an old hair-metal artifact there that brought back fond memories. It was a CD by the band Blackeyed Susan, the side project by former Britny Fox singer Dean “Dizzy Dean” Davidson, absurdly overpriced at $4.99. I already had a copy at home, which I snagged for two dollars on a visit to Berkeley in 1992. But I got a sentimental rush holding that Blackeyed Susan album in my fingers, marveling at how far it must have journeyed to end up here, a bargain bin in the basement of a skyscraper. I decided I would have to come back and rescue it someday. It was September 7, 2001.

    A FEW DAYS LATER, THE neighborhood was rubble. There was a column of smoke where the towers used to be. I spent the evening at Chelsea Piers, an athletic complex that had been quickly set up as a makeshift hospital, with a bunch of other volunteers. The doctors had us form a fire line to load medical supplies off a truck. (Nobody knew these supplies would never get used; the next day, they’d all have to get loaded back onto the truck.) A cop came around to instruct us on how to identify wounded officers by their badge numbers. We sat on the floor all night with the doctors and watched CNN, waiting for the ambulances to bring the survivors. But there weren’t any ambulances, because there weren’t any survivors. Around 2 a.m., they told us to leave. There was nothing to be done.
    It was a few weeks before I could get back into my apartment; there were tanks rolling down my street. I slept on couches for a month, borrowed socks, got to know my local public men’s rooms, went into the Rolling Stone offices to work whenever they had a spare desk. Two days after the attacks, I was walking to the office in midtown, up Sixth Avenue. The streets were full of pedestrians, since there weren’t any cars or trains operating. Then, somewhere in the upper 30s, everybody began to run like crazy. I ran, too. Total stampede, blind panic. Did somebody see something in the sky? Was it a sudden noise? Literally thousands of us in the street took off, running for our lives.
    We stampeded for two blocks, and then the panic died down, as rapidly as it had begun. People started to walk again, looking around nervously, out of breath. Nobody made eye contact, obviously; there was no conversation. I never did find out why we all started running. I didn’t mention it when I got to the office. I hunted in the papers the next day, but there was nothing about any midtown scare on Sixth Avenue. It was just another moment of fear nobody would ever talk about.
    Everybody around the world knows this was a time when New Yorkers rallied together, rose to the occasion, hugged it out, etc. Unfortunately, we also got stupider, like the rest of the country except more so. We got more insane, volatile, paranoid, and unstable, which (understandably) nobody likes to remember. Two weeks later, when the 1 train was running again, I was riding uptown with a bunch of friends, planning a Saturday afternoon walk in Central Park. A one-legged homeless guy with a crutch confronted me and accused me of being one of the twin towers. (I’m really tall.) He kept clobbering me with his crutch while he yelled about how I’d fallen on the city and killed everyone. I had no room to slide away, so I just held on to the pole and pretended this wasn’t happening. Everybody on the train looked away. My friends didn’t step in because . . . well, who the hell wants to argue with a one-legged hobo swinging a crutch? We got off at the next stop, which took forever. Nobody said a word.