An Unbelievable View (published September 19, 2001)

On the morning of the attack, our writer in New York looked out on a city that would never be the same

by Larry Getlen

From the roof of my five-story walkup in Brooklyn, less than a mile from the East River, I saw the dense black smoke creeping like a sheet of moss up the walls of the twin towers. Ignited jet fuel billowed from the majestic glass and steel structures, creating a harrowing inkblot on the New York City skyline – a skyline that, moments later, would be horrendously altered.

People the world over share our grief right now, as so many have lost friends and loved ones in this unbearable atrocity. But for those of us in or near Manhattan, an area so compact that almost everyone here viewed some portion of the tragedy live, the memory burns a little deeper.

After the first tower fell, the crystal clear vision of towers teeming with smoke had been replaced by a dense sheet of ashen gray. I was running from roof to apartment and back, absorbing news and sights, trying to make sense of it all. Returning to the roof at one point, a neighbor got breaking news on the phone.

“The second tower just went down!” he yelled.

In my haze, I either didn’t hear, or couldn’t comprehend, the word “second.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The tower went down about 20 minutes ago.”

“No. The second tower.”

Now I got it. Standing what seemed like mere feet from two of the tallest buildings in the world, separated by an impenetrable wall of smoke, I needed my neighbor to tell me that one of them was not, as I thought, directly in front of me.

Anxious to be around people, I walked along Court Street, just blocks from Brooklyn Borough Hall. People wore paper masks or covered their faces with small towels. Debris resembling large snowflakes fell all around us. A man carried a piece of paper, possibly a magazine page, its border charred throughout. An oddly generic burning smell engulfed us as if coming from down the block. For its texture, it could have been a tire fire.

A suited man in his 20s, carrying a briefcase, strode down the street blanketed in soot and ash, his eyes intense and unblinking. His hair was dark gray around the edges from debris – a gray distinctively darker than the gray of age, a gray built of particles, soot, dirt and remains.

At my friend Kenny’s apartment, I called my mother, who lives in Weston (FL). She told me that our cousin Lenore worked at one of the Towers, and they hadn’t heard from her.

Kenny and I walked along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which borders the East River and has a glorious view of New York’s skyline. Hordes of people stared, almost half of them with cameras, all taking the same exact photo of a dense cloud of smoke.

We stopped at a grocery store, and a twenty-something with an expensive camera consoled a friend who was bitching about the price of film. “Dude! You’re gonna make $10,000 with these pictures.”

He was, of course, an idiot. The real moneymaking shots – two planes merging into buildings like keys into locks; people who minutes earlier were making coffee and checking e-mail despondently leaping to their deaths; fireballs and rubble that would decimate a symbol and destroy the security of a nation – had already been taken and filed.

Moments later, this vile, loud-mouthed douche latched his hooks into a cute blond woman. “You can’t let this get you down,” he said loudly. “It’s OK to mourn, but you have to move on. Enjoy your life. Do something beautiful today.”

Kenny and I cringed. Move on? Do something beautiful today? It just happened! Survivors and fatalities alike, my cousin possibly among them, were trapped in rubble, praying for life. And he’s ready to move on?

Minutes later, he directed his wisdom toward me. “We can’t be upset…Do something beautiful today.” Can’t be upset? Right. I’m not usually a confrontational guy, but this was not your average day.

“Hey shithead, I have a cousin who works in that building who may be dead, so shut the fuck up. Go make money with your camera. Asshole.” I then told him in no uncertain terms to go inside, and he took my advice. Kenny and I shared our only laugh of the day.

Back at Kenny’s apartment, I spoke to my aunt, who told me that Lenore hadn’t gone to work, a coincidence I would hear repeated throughout the day. We discussed the odor and debris that permeated the city, and my aunt, a typical Brooklynite, blurted out, “People here are skeeved out, thinking the ashes are people’s bodies.”

Later on, near my apartment, I noticed a woman with a piece of paper similar to the one I’d seen earlier – charred around the edges, solid in the middle. She said it was debris from the explosion that had floated into our neighborhood.

I returned to my apartment around 5:00, drained and weary. A charred odor filled my living room. I breathed it in, wondering if the remains of victims now permeated my lungs.

Back on the roof, I looked at the spot where the towers had been. The dark gray smoke had proven fertile and blossomed, enveloping half the sky, but remarkable in its stillness. I saw a piece of paper, about 4” x 6”, charred around the edges and slightly browned in the center, in the corner of the roof. It looked 20 years old.

It seemed to be some sort of guideline for fabrics.

“Of wool or fine animal hair (459)”

“Of synthetic fibers (659)”

“Of artificial fibers (659)”

Questions raced through my mind. Who’s was this? What did he or she do for a living? Might I one day find myself in conversation with them about the nature of natural vs. synthetic fibers? Or was that knowledge buried under a pile of rubble, crushed under tons of steel and glass, or incinerated by the flame ignited by a jet deliberately full with fuel?

I have inserted the piece of paper into protective plastic. I will either put it on my wall, or in a book. I’m not sure why – I don’t think I’ll need a reminder of this day. Of all my memories, this one surely will not fade.

Maybe it’s my way of paying homage to the victims. Maybe it’s my way of saying that no matter what abominations are committed upon this country, no matter how heinous our experiences at the hands of people dedicated to our destruction, I will not let them stop me from living my life.

And maybe, just maybe, memorializing one of the victims of this tragedy is my way of doing something beautiful today.

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My City of Ruins (Published September 11, 2002)

New York’s resistance to change may be the key to its survival. It certainly is to mine.

By Larry Getlen

When City Link asked me, the magazine’s resident New Yorker, to write about the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks from a New Yorker’s perspective, I knew it would be my most emotionally challenging assignment since the piece I wrote last year about the attacks themselves.

There are countless reasons for this – most of them obvious – but perhaps the most prominent reason is that ultimately, I don’t feel qualified. And I mean that not as a writer, but as a person.

How can I possibly hope to encapsulate and represent the thoughts, feelings, fears, resentments, and even hopes of eight million New Yorkers in response to the most horrific event of our time?

Because as any New Yorker knows, asking one person to represent New York is as ridiculous as assuming that the concept of “a New Yorker” represents a solitary breed. What makes this city magical is that it is not one city, but many. Williamsburg hipsters wouldn’t be caught dead on the Upper East Side. The Puerto Rican stores of my neighborhood have no symmetry with the French bistros popping up right across the street from them. And Coney Island remains a rare vision of New York’s past, an area less connected to modern-day New York than to black and white movies, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Bowery Boys.

Plus, while everyone in New York suffered on September 11, no matter how unifying the experience was, anyone who lost someone in the towers suffered on a level that those of us who didn’t – including those of us who were here, seemingly inches away, watching the buildings burn and crumble – cannot possibly comprehend. For us, the events of September 11 represent losses on a far more abstract plane – a loss of innocence and invulnerability, a loss of what little faith in the goodness of mankind and freedom from existential fear we might have had left, a loss of the world’s greatest skyline. But those losses are as grand as notions of heaven, and ultimately, as difficult to grasp and define.

What one sees on the outside, at brunch with friends and at holidays with loved ones, on the faces of passing strangers and in snippets of cell phone conversations gleaned while buying the morning coffee, is a city that has gotten on with its life. On any given day this summer, Times Square was a creeping cattle car of tourists. Subway platforms radiated unbearable heat, and sweat was the great equalizer, drenching rich and poor, lawyer and poet alike. Thousands of people packed every inch of the Bryant Park lawn every Monday night, leaving nary a visible blade of grass as movies like “Young Frankenstein” and “The Grapes of Wrath” unspooled free of charge to the delight of all, planes soaring virtually unnoticed overhead.

And just as enjoyment and leisure maintain, so too do discourtesy and greed. At Ground Zero, tourists and residents congregate at the viewing stands daily, straining to see the infamous footprint, the ghost and shadow of architectural awe and dashed dreams. Meanwhile, directly across the street, exploitive merchants sell what seems to be the same book published under two different titles – “Day of Tragedy” and “Day of Terror.” The books feature the same pictures of the towers burning, which, by now, are as familiar as the image of Armstrong’s moon landing or the photo of the Hindenburg crashing. I recently saw a young woman even smile for a photo with the wreckage in the background, as if she were on Waikiki Beach, or standing before the Eiffel Tower.

But these observations belie insight, for they are not truth, but projection and façade, images of functionality that may be fiction or docudrama but, either way, broadcast the illusion of perseverance. Actual strength or failure of will and character in the face of challenge and adversity is internal. Therefore, the only experience I can truly relate, on behalf of my fellow New Yorkers, is my own. And when I think of September 11 and what I wish – no, need – to reveal, one emotion stands out: guilt.

Like the rest of the world, I first watched the towers burn on CNN. I soon realized, however, how that was the equivalent of watching a boxing match on TV while sitting ringside, and ran to my roof to watch the horror in visceral 3-D, without the aid of satellites and electricity.

Later on, I deduced that since the towers could be prominently viewed from my rooftop, they must have been visible from my street, had I ever glanced skyward.

“Must have been,” I write, because I never noticed.

That’s because the Twin Towers, in the eight months between my return to New York after an eight-year absence and their tragic collapse, were a peripheral ornament to me, meshing with the trees and utility poles and clouds that followed me in my travels. I had made my way through New York life every day for almost a year on that street with the towers prominent for all who chose to enjoy the view, and yet as hard as I try or wish, I will never remember looking up on my way to the subway, or to buy groceries, or to workout, and using the towers as my marker, their sheer voluminousness practically daring you to notice anything else. The towers were one of New York’s greatest pleasures, and while we’re all deprived of them now, I’ve been stripped of their memory thanks to my own obliviousness and complacency, my own absorption in life’s minutia, my own failure to stop, just once, and smell the proverbial roses.

Which is exactly the sort of myopic malaise that supposedly evaporated in the wake of September 11, right? Our uncanny ability to take life for granted and our failure to appreciate the wonders of life and how lucky we are to be alive in the United States of America crumbled with the towers, with the event representing a new awakening, an era of outward concerns. Isn’t that’s what everyone said – that none of us would ever be the same?

Well, here’s how September 11 ultimately changed me.

In the article I wrote for this magazine the day after the attack, I told of a piece of debris, most likely a page from an instructional manual of some sort, that floated for two miles or so along the airborne wreckage from the World Trade Center to the roof of my apartment building. I wrote of how I preserved the charred page in plastic and intended to frame it, place it in an album, or in some other way use it to pay tribute to those who were taken from us.

Well, want to know what I eventually did with that piece of debris, preserved in plastic with such care and reverence?

Nothing.

It sat atop my desk for months, often in the midst of other papers, tapes, CDs and Post-it notes. Initially, I always made sure that it remained on top, never covered or buried. Eventually, though, it got mixed in with the rest of my papers, with articles I pulled off the Internet or correspondence from clients. When I would notice this, guilt would set in, so I would place the page back on the top of the pile.

The charred page floated from disheveled spot to disheveled spot around my office and finally settled in a closet, reclining comfortably on a rarely-used camera bag. It never saw a frame or an album – and it couldn’t possibly have happened any other way.

You see, I’m a pack rat. The kindest description ever applied to my apartment – in fact, to any apartment I’ve ever lived in – is that it looks like a writer’s apartment. Throughout my life, I’ve always had way more papers, books, CDs, and general crap than any apartment should ever contain, and my organizational systems are always wholly inadequate for the task. So invariably, piles of notes, receipts, and magazines create worlds of their own, rendering every place I’ve ever lived seemingly one file cabinet short or one storage room too small. That’s how it has been since I was a teen, and now that I’m far beyond those years, I have long since accepted that like it or not, that’s how I’ll always be.

My pledge to put the World Trade Center debris in a frame or album was made with good intentions – you know, that thing the road to hell is paved with – but truth be told, I’ve never framed or albumed anything in my life. My high school diploma? Not sure where it is. Probably in a file somewhere. Pictures of my young nieces, whom I love dearly? Loose in a drawer. The original copy of my first article for Esquire Magazine? Sitting in a gym bag, at the moment, except for the rare days when I actually make it to the gym, at which time the article (and many other important documents) get placed on my bed, and then returned to the bag upon my return.

So what ultimately happened with that charred page from the World Trade Center is that, much like the tragedy itself, it was slowly integrated into the fabric of my life.

George Carlin does a great routine where he says that non-biodegradable plastic won’t destroy the environment as some fear, but that the Earth will eventually adapt into a new organism called “Earth plus plastic.” And so it is with my World Trade Center debris, and so it is, I believe – if we’re being truly honest with ourselves when not providing the media with solemn sound bites – with New Yorkers and September 11. We have adapted, and we have integrated.

A New York-based comic named Jonathan Corbett makes the case for why September 11 should not become a national holiday. His reasoning is that it will eventually become just like other American holidays – treated with solemnity for a few years before becoming an excuse for lazy days off work and barbecues, with MTV promoting their “What’s the 9-1-1 weekend,” and T.G.I. Friday’s imploring customers to “come on down to Ground Beero!”

The routine is funny because of the truth it speaks in asserting how solemnity often fails to endure, even in a case this extreme, and in the process states a truth that few of us want to admit. But what’s unsaid here is that that failure of reverence may not be a bad thing.

For what it really says about our city, and our country, is that we adapt, and in integrating the horrendous, can remove some of its power to dictate terms. And yes, oftentimes we trivialize in the process – we’re certainly not perfect, and who’s to say where balance lies – but still, that may be a better alternative than being ruled and driven by constant enmity and fear.

September 11 has not, as the media would have us believe, changed us all. In fact – excluding those who suffered direct and personal losses in the tragedy – I’d say that as individuals, September 11 didn’t really change any of us. Those who were thoughtless cretins before the tragedy remain so, and those who were kind of heart retained that wonderful quality. We are still, and will always remain, the same people we have always been. Only now, September 11 is, and will forever be, a part of us.

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Interview with Carlin co-author Tony Hendra in City Scoops Magazine

My first-ever public performance occurred in elementary school, when I was around 10 or 11 years old. For the P.S. 216 talent show, Russell Magidson and I dressed up in little kiddie suits and ties, sat at tiny desks like itty bitty mini news anchors, and “performed” George Carlin’s “The 11 O’Clock News” routine (from his “FM & AM” album) in front of several hundreds students and teachers.

And by “performed,” I mean, we read the hilarious, pre-SNL selection of one-line news headline parodies off of scripts. Also, by performed, I mean that we killed.

This first exposure to the thrill of making an audience laugh would ultimately lead to a lifelong relationship with comedy in various forms, including writing, performing, and covering it at great length (although in fairness, early SNL, Monty Python, and the National Lampoon had a hand in it as well – together with George, they were the grand Four Horsemen of my comedic development.)

So George’s death last year was a shock to me. As a fan, writer, comedian, and one who was fortunate enough to have gotten to know the man just a bit beyond simply watching him on the small screen, I found that George contained a practical wisdom almost unheard of today, especially within the media.

In our all-pundit, all-the-time society, it so often seems like we’re surrounded by people poking their smarts at us like daggers to the skin – a succession of quick jabs meant to drive back the opponent (both the viewer/reader/news consumer, and any who dare disagree) for the purpose of ideological and – more so – career and ratings advancement. We are attacked daily with opinions, theories, platitudes, reactions, and reactions to the reactions, verbal and written volleys that quickly shift from mano-a-mano combat to a free-for-all battlefield massacre, with all concerned fighting to present the opinion that comes out on top as right, just, and the smartest in the room. But in the course of endless verbal battles, it often seems we’re simply being served more for the sake of more: more because reacting to events is the niche that people have carved out for themselves, and not more because someone truly has an answer, or an opinion we haven’t heard, or a theory to resolve the situation that requires resolution.

The missing element in all of this, it often seems, is wisdom – the sort of removed and cared for intelligence that requires space and time to formulate, and consideration and caring to understand the need for.

I’ve interviewed hundreds, probably thousands of celebrities, politicians, writers, and other notable members of the citizenry over the years, but none of these interviews stands out for me as much as the five hours I spent talking to George Carlin in 2001, over three separate conversations, for Esquire Magazine. While I’ve spoken to many smart people over the years, there was a level of wisdom in George that was, and is, almost impossible to come by.

It was not my first nor my last time speaking with George, but it was by far the most in-depth. I interviewed him for the magazine’s “What I’ve Learned” column, a column that affords you the rare opportunity to broach THE BIG ISSUES with your subject – love, sex, death, freedom, religion, history, wisdom – whatever major topics you can throw at them. Talking to George about all this and more, there was such a rare sense that every answer he gave – whether about himself, the art of comedy, or the state of the world – had been heavily contemplated and evaluated over time; that every answer was the result of a life fully lived, of wisdom fully earned, and of a man taking the time to intellectually process every bit of information and both grand and horrible experience that life had hurled his way.

And within this thoughtful consideration, the greatest surprise of all was that over five hours of interviews, George Carlin cursed only once.

Here is a never-before-published excerpt from that conversation, where George and I discussed his love of language and the nature of censorship.

LG: Why are you so fascinated with words?

GC: Because it’s all we have. Nature gave us this magnificent brain, this brain that is so different from any that came before it. And the only way the wonders of this brain are shared and developed is through language – the exchange of ideas and communications and feelings. Words are the conveyers of all that. They’re magic – they’re mysterious and wonderful and magic.

LG: Then why do you think so many people are afraid of words?

GC: Because they allow words to be crystallized into meanings that are too solid. That’s one of the limits of language. As fluid as it is, as much choice and as many options as it gives you in expression, it’s very limiting, because words tend to have meaning that are hard to budge off of. That’s why I think there are so many synonyms that aren’t really synonyms; they’re just kind of close. They say almost the same thing. Because there’s a need for nuance, and words don’t give you that. Words can lose their general utilitarian value when they’re too closely associated with something. For instance, the word “gay” will never be as useful as it once was. During the fifties and sixties, the word “comrade” lost a lot of its value to general usage. “Closet” is another one. I have a lot of them listed somewhere, because they interest me. These words have to come out of general circulation, because they bring the brain somewhere you don’t want it to go.

LG: Do you think we’re a less literate society than we used to be?

GC: According to what the people who measure these things say, I guess so, sure. Certainly if you’re talking about just people who are illiterate. It’s amazing to me that literacy isn’t one of the things that’s considered a right. There are a lot of things we have that we call rights that I don’t agree with, by the way. I think they’re mostly privileges, because courts can take them away, and anything that can disappear isn’t really a right. It’s like a temporary privilege. But I think if there were to be anything that was a right, I think the right to develop your brain, to learn to read and write and think well, would be a right. I think another right would be to have something to eat, and then to have a way of continuing to have something to eat. In other words, a job. So there are certain things that oughta be rights, but the system doesn’t think of it that way. They have these other kind of abstract things.

LG: People get so carried away with fear of things like violence on television, or people like Eminem and Marilyn Manson. Do you thing it’s possible for these things, or these people, to do any serious harm?

GC: Society ought to figure out what creates all these things that they’re trying to prevent children from hearing. Eminem, who is a brilliant poetic artist, isn’t saying those things in a vacuum. They don’t just spring out of his raw imagination. They’re part of the experience that society has laid out that he was a partaker of. His family life, his street life, was created by society. I don’t think you can come in late in the process and say, “well, now that we’ve created all the conditions that make this thing possible, we’re gonna intervene at this point and cut that off.” That’s just more of the hypocrisy, and the need to control and to keep people in line. That’s mostly what all that is about to me. The trouble with what they do with kids is that the first thing they teach them is that there’s a god. They teach them that there’s an invisible man in the sky who actually is watching what they do and is displeased with some of it. There’s no mystery why they start with that with the kids, because if you can get someone to believe that, then you can add on anything you want. And that’s what they do – they just keep adding on their own fears and superstitions, and whatever they need to keep order the way they see it to keep the big commercial machine rolling, so any dangerous ideas that kids have are only dangerous to the society as a profit-making organization. There’s no danger in these ideas. The danger is, it’s gonna make someone think for himself and figure things out. That’s why some of those drugs are illegal – they create value changes. Psilocybin, marijuana, the hallucinogens – they’re all value changers, and they’re illegal because they give people a new slant on the game that’s being played on them.

While it may seem either incongruous or lacking that in all these thoughts about, and quotes from, George, I have yet to say much about how goddamn funny he was – and he was certainly one of the funniest comics of all time – it actually is not. George would be the first to say (and the excerpts certainly bear this out) that in many ways he was a serious person – one with great capacity for seriousness – and that this serious side, including the great love of language and the years of soul-searching that resulted in the several major changes in his comedic direction, was what allowed him to create his art. As such, it’s perfectly in keeping that his new, posthumously-released memoir, “Last Words,” is a fairly serious book.

Co-authored by best-selling writer and comedy pioneer in his own right Tony Hendra, who worked on the book with Carlin throughout much of the 1990s, its completion during George’s life was perpetually postponed for reasons including mutually busy schedules, the 1997 death of George’s wife, and George’s health problems. Hendra, who compiled the book and prepared it for publication in an astounding three-and-a-half months, succeeds masterfully at allowing George’s voice to shine though simply and clearly. With great candor, “Last Words” manages to cover every aspect of George’s life, including his wondrous New York City childhood, his perpetually turbulent relationship with his mother (which played a large part in the formation of his comedic sensibility), his several career conversions, his battle (and his wife’s) with drugs and alcohol, and the immense joy he took from a life in comedy. As noted above, I got to speak to Hendra about the book and his friendship with George at some length, and also reviewed the book for the New York Post.

Now that he’s gone, it’s impossible to know exactly what George would have come up with from here on, but given the state of the world and certain ludicrous events, we can conjecture. While he wasn’t a political comic in the usual sense – he avoided tackling current events because he hated watching material grow stale, and he also thought that style of comedy was already greatly served by Jon Stewart and Lewis Black – he had a wonderful ability to process the maelstrom of absurdity, and then to condense it in ways that attacked its essence, such as in his take down of environmentalism, “The Planet is Fine, the People are Fucked,” from his landmark 1992 HBO special “Jammin’ in New York.”

It’s easy to wonder, then, what he would have made of certain current political movements. While he may have never specifically mentioned Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck in his act (although he did specifically attack George W. Bush in his last few years), he would have relished the way their current movements revolve around symbols, groupthink, and the manipulation of facts and language, from Beck’s tears to Palin’s wink, to socialism and death panels and “you betcha!” George spent virtually the entire Reagan era absorbing circumstances he would so deftly address in the 90s. Had he lived, our current political climate would surely have been fertile ground for yet another decade-long exploration of how people allow themselves to be controlled.

What made Carlin one of the all-time greats, though – THE all-time great, in my book – was that he navigated all of this terrain while never placing any of it above the primary goal, which was being hysterically funny.

At the end of my conversations with him in 2001, I took a moment to share with him the story of me and Russell Magidson at P.S. 216, reading his jokes off our scripts for the delight of the crowd. Getting a clear kick out of the tale, he asked me the only question that mattered: “Did you get the laugh?” I was proud to be able to tell him that I did. And he seemed proud to hear yet one more instance of how he had spread laughter, as he always considered his fan base a community of comedy that he had created.

One more, from 2001:

LG: What makes someone funny?

GC: I don’t know. It’s one of those dopey, very elusive things. When you hear the phrase “sense of humor,” you always hear the accent on humor, sense of humor. To me, it’s the sense of humor – there’s a sense in it, an understanding and a feeling for what doesn’t fit, the incongruous, that which is out of place or in the wrong scale. So I don’t know what makes a person funny except there’s a certain freedom and abandon in the way they think or express themselves. They just don’t honor the prescribed lines of demarcation – they step across.

Indeed they do – and none did it better than George Carlin.

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