Free Turn Around Bright Eyes by Rob Sheffield Page A

My friends felt awful. I felt awful. We sleepwalked through the park until I slunk away. None of us mentioned it again, not that day, not ever.
    There were a lot of scenes that never got mentioned. We all witnessed things daily we wanted to forget. If you looked in the paper, you saw that in Washington, D.C., they were dismantling the Constitution. If you wanted to see if it was okay to go back to your apartment, the only way to find out was to walk downtown, stop at the checkpoints to show soldiers your ID, and see how far you got. (You walked down the East Side because they were more lenient letting people through in Chinatown.) Nobody knew if the air would ever get safe to breathe. Bad news was arriving faster than anyone could absorb it.
    By the time the soldiers let residents return, my neighborhood was one of the world’s most famous tourist attractions. The streets were congested with visitors, lined up for blocks to gawk and take pictures of the hole in the ground. Leaving the apartment meant putting on my dust mask and elbowing through the crowds. Sticking around meant breathing in the smoke, and knowing that the smoke was the dead. I still couldn’t see anything out of the windows, but now it was because they were caked with that smoke. There was a bike still chained to a lamppost on my street; the messenger had gone into the WTC and never come back. Every wall was plastered with pictures of the people who disappeared in the explosion, photocopied fliers with faces and phone numbers to call if you found them. Dead eyes followed you everywhere.
    It was hard to live with, day by day. It was everything I had moved to New York to get away from. I’d left Virginia to escape the shadow of death; now I lived in a shrine of mourning, surrounded by cameras. Everybody wanted to talk about death all the time. I stared uncomprehendingly at the swarms of people who came here every day, more than the tiny sidewalks could hold, eager to be part of it. I looked at them the way a hopeless drunk probably looks at the crowds on New Year’s Eve: amateur night. This is what grief looks like for normal people? How does it feel for them? Do they go home and sleep it off?
    Some of the dead faces on the walls were young wives. One husband had added her last words on the phone to the flier (“They’re telling us to leave, I have to go now”) as if it would help people identify her when they found her. “This husband could be in this crowd,” I thought. “Looking for a trace. We could walk past each other and never know it.” I tried not to look at the fliers as I walked past, breathing through my mask and feeling the smoke settle into my bones. I tried more desperately than ever to avoid the topic of my past, because if I confessed I was a widower, people changed the subject to 9/11. Now I wasn’t just reeling from the grief of a personal apocalypse; I was witnessing mass grief with no idea of how to fit into it. There were so many topics I wanted to dodge, I could barely hold a conversation.
    It was a month or so before rock shows started happening again. There was something uneasy about groups of people gathering in public, especially at downtown venues like the Bowery Ballroom, where you could smell the smoke for months. I met up with some Virginia friends who came to see the British band Clinic, but my friends got so spooked by the way lower Manhattan smelled, they turned around and drove home. Clinic came out in their standard high-concept stage costumes, wearing gas masks as a symbol of modern alienation. Poor guys, they were a little late to impress us. We’d all worn those masks to the show.
    Jonathan Richman played the Bowery Ballroom that fall, on October 12. There was a hush in the crowd, watching Jonathan on guitar with just his stand-up drummer. With no introduction or explanation, he sang a song from one of his earliest albums, “Lonely Financial Zone,” a song I’d loved as a teenage boy but hadn’t thought