South Toward Hell
LABASH, MATT
South Toward Hell The sad streets of New York. BY MATT LABASH New York IT DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT, really— romanticizing catastrophe instead of just confronting its grim particulars head-on. Still,...
...He knows this because her toes were painted, though everything above her thigh was gone...
...I filled 25 bags full of parts...
...I thought, 'I gotta get home now, or I'll never get home again.'" Below the 14th Street perimeter, non-rescue vehicles and civilians are forbidden...
...There are also plenty of horrors above 14th Street, and nowhere more than at the National Guard Armory on 26th and Lexington...
...His eyes fill up behind aviator sunglasses, but he snaps to, taking a final anesthetic swig...
...The part he's seeing now— and saw last night during haunted sleep—belonged to a woman...
...Still, they cut quite a swath at sir Harry's Bar in the Waldorf-Astoria, these brave men with forearm tattoos and walrus mustach-es—firefighting volunteers who have swooped in from places like Danbury and Pittsburgh to shore up New York's own decimated ranks...
...Tomorrow, the bad list will be updated, and she'll have to look at it again...
...It's difficult to tell if people are crying or perspiring, as the only cooling agents are two small fans propped against televisions beaming the latest in disaster developments...
...Their twenty-first anniversary is in two weeks, and maybe she'll be able to give him his already-purchased present—a new wedding ring...
...Signs marking closed businesses—"Lingerie, Lounge Wear, Essentials"—seem profoundly decadent, as all that matters now (besides, as my cabbie suggests, "bringing the pain" to whoever did this) is the 20-story-high heap of broken stones and people...
...But the further south one travels from Midtown, the fewer morale-quickening encounters one has...
...On my walk down to the site, I catch up with an iron worker from Queens...
...Yesterday was cruel to the system," he explains, as if the human-interest stories on the cable shows haven't quite conveyed the intensity...
...The inside of the armory represents something Dante would have conceived of if he'd possessed a truly dark imagination...
...One volunteer offers a final shot of Pepsi, as if caffeine can prepare someone for the worst news they'll ever get...
...They go through an archway, descend a staircase, and snake down a long hall to see the lists...
...Row upon row of people shrug off detectives and chaplains and oversolicitous Red Cross volunteers, who every 30 seconds or so offer anxious family members bottled water or chocolate chip cookies or Arizona Iced tea...
...He now seems reluctant to part...
...Edlene assents, then lays her head on the table like a despondent child...
...Even after two days of clean-up, many streets retain footprints in a light snow of concrete ash...
...I need this drink," he says...
...They ought to give you tranquilizers instead," jokes Edlene LaFrance, a nurse from the Bronx who is waiting, along with her adult son Jody Howard and his wife, to find out what became of Alan LaFrance, her husband and Jody's father...
...Not bodies, exactly...
...And while it is just eerily silent from the Village to Little Italy, everyMatt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...After he tells of his prior day's work, it's understood why...
...For a moment, hope is restored...
...They, like other relatives, sit in stony silence, facing the door that leads to the basement, where, 20 at a time, they are taken to see two lists indicating that their loved one has been located and is either hospitalized or deceased...
...I busted a U-turn on the West Side Highway...
...The Wallers have come to supply investigators with more information, such as hair samples they pulled from their cousin's brush...
...Even the drug-dealers and nut-cake orators are on leave from Washington Square Park...
...After two hours of waiting—"the most nervous I've ever been" says Edlene—the family finally gets the call...
...But then there's the hard math...
...thing below Canal Street looks like Pompeii...
...In this second category are Elliot and Andy Waller, two Maryland brothers on the lookout for their cousin, Josh Rosenthal, last seen on the 90th floor of Tower Two...
...The first line contains those who are, for the first time, filling out "Personal Information Questionnaires"—not about themselves, but about loved ones who have not turned up since the Twin Towers collapsed...
...The second line contains people who have already filled out the painstaking identification survey (the facial hair category, for instance, contains 10 subcategories from "Fu Manchu" to "Handle Bar"), but who have more information to give...
...on the ride down to 14th Street, I notice splintered glass embedded in the dashboard of my cab...
...It's been 58 hours since Alan disappeared in Tower Two...
...It flew through my open window," says cabbie John Parafestas, who was driving near the south tower when the second hijacker steered the plane through it...
...Still buried under concrete slabs and twisted steel are two firefighter friends and a paramedic cousin...
...The hotel has graciously provided free accommodations...
...Like goddamned heroes," he replies, as the fireman douse their dust-infested insides with complimentary rounds...
...Though Alan wasn't on the "bad list," he wasn't on the "good list" either...
...Alan has not turned up in any of the hospitals...
...While the Wallers store their posters in a manila envelope, others are less subtle, preferring to advertise missing loved ones on their torsos— as if they were wandering city streets, waiting to be recognized...
...Edlene clutches a wedding picture of her husband in his white tuxedo...
...Hundreds of people sit on metal folding chairs on a scuffed wood floor, while hundreds more clog the aisles...
...So after a 12-hour shift sifting through World Trade Center rubble, firemen stagger into the bar like flame-retardant cowboys, still wearing their charbroiled gear...
...Outside the grimy, gothic building where a surly gargoyle keeps sentry, people wind around the block in two lines...
...They look like somebody," I say, struggling...
...As they fill the room, I turn to a well-heeled patron, trying to summon an appropriate reference from a Peckin-pah movie...
...It's about the only joking the family does...
...He spent his volunteer shift not only cutting through fallen I-beams, but also recovering human remains...
...Newcomers to the scene needn't ask directions to the heart of the wreck-age—since the spot is marked by a smoky, sulfuric cloud that changes shape with the wind, but never quite moves on...
...I just want to use my skills, cut metal, whatever," he says...
...He doesn't want his name used, nor does he seem thrilled that I'm interrupting his breakfast—a Budweiser tall-boy which he sips out of a slim paper bag...
...At a basement table, a Red Cross volunteer offers to comb the lists for Alan's name...
...We stop at a security checkpoint beyond which I'm not allowed...
...After telling me how they almost failed to secure Josh's dental X-rays (his dentist's office is near Barneys, which today received a bomb threat), they hand me a "Missing" poster describing all their cousin's vitals...
...Edlene's consolation prize, it turns out, is not much of one at all...
...Emergency vehicles, many of them caught in the towers' collapse, are stacked like soot-covered matchbox cars...
...That's why I'm going back...
...I don't want to go back in there," he says...
...Neither is he on the deceased list...
...Everything was in parts," he says...
...Lower Manhattan has been emptied by terrorists...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 2
