300 Million of My Closest Friends
It’s 9/11 Eve and I’m expecting Santa to come tomorrow. Sinterklaas. Krampus. The arrival of some new, vast horror, first thing, like it arrived that morning 22 years ago. And then that terribly still afternoon. Empty skies. Grounded planes. America was a church before a mass begins, a hotel during a fire drill, a high school classroom on a weeknight. Neighbors huddled in the middle of their street; dads competed to have the most crossed arms, the widest stance. And we were all worried about the sun setting. We were whatever else would come that night, or the next day. Rabbits hiding in the tall grass. Let me get maudlin. Let me have this.
I was 12 on September 11th 2001, and still processing Aaliyah falling out of the sky. She deserved more mourning. We didn’t have enough time—about two weeks. That was it. And then it was 9/11 forever.
9/11 is everyone’s troubled relative. The identified patient of the family, sucking focus from everything and everyone in a hideous vacuum of sorrow and carnage. Aaliyah was a superstar and a martyr. She was the harbinger of the era we’ve been in for over 20 years. The Tragedy Era. A never-ending parade of national nightmares, each outdoing the one before. Aaliyah’s death was pulled into the riptide of September 11th, like a birthday on Christmas. She should be canonized.
One of the most seminal moment of my childhood was in 2002, when I watched the cast of the Real World: Chicago watch the 9/11 attacks “as it happened.” It was incredible to see these twenty-somethings gawking at the avalanche of mass murder happening 800 miles away, with a wisdom I didn’t yet have. They cried and hugged and made it all about them. It was beautiful and wretched and deeply funny. It was voyeurism. It was, like a lot of 9/11-centric entertainment, camp. But most importantly, it was the future. These people were my surrogates. I was grateful for them.
Years later I learned what was filmed in that episode was staged, days or even weeks after the attacks. I’m not sure when. They were apparently at Wrigley Field when they found out. They were at Wrigley Field and James Cameron was hovering above the Titanic in a submersible. Bill Paxton broke the news to him after he surfaced.
“The worst terrorist attack in history, Jim,” Bill said.
Jim???? Did you hear that???! Jim???!?
It probably wasn’t a tall order to ask these young people to play 9/11. We couldn’t get enough of it in those days. It was everywhere, and you couldn’t escape it. You could for a little while if you were 15,000 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean, but eventually, you must surface. You must hear the news. You must let it drip all over you like sap and harden into amber, encasing you for the rest of time.
Being asked to pretend it’s 9/11 again was a no-brainer. Like when we did our first lockdown drill the following spring, and we all sat in giddy balls in our dark classroom while a “terrorist group” roamed the hallways searching for patriotic American children in South Jersey to slaughter.
In the Real World episode, they’re watching the attacks unfold on a tiny TV—the same kind that I had in my bedroom; the small TV I watched “Building Seven” collapse on live, hours after the towers had fallen and I heard my older sister who was also watching it happen downstairs scream in anguish; her threshold for disintegrating buildings was understandably maxed out that day.
While the Real Worlders watch on their cheap couch—the hot gay perched atop it like a cat, naturally!—you can see there’s a Jack-O-Lantern candy bucket in view.
That would be nearly two months after the attacks. By that point, we were all one thousand years old. We were a country of wharf hags, cleaning out pint glasses with a rag and shaking our heads knowingly. We’d all been changed on a molecular level. We were all infected with the virus. It was chronic, and mainstay.
I guess the real thing would have been too ugly and strange to see, just like that day. I didn’t want that. I wanted 9/11: The Musical. I wanted it performed and explained to me. I wanted the spectacle. It didn’t need to be believable, just passable. Logical. I needed it to make sense.
***
True summer in Los Angeles begins in September. It’s 100 degrees today. I just walked my dog by the sinister evangelical hipster church next door where everyone who attends mingles outside after the service and smiles at passersby. 40% of them look like they were also born after 9/11. But I won’t let that fool me. I know they hate me, they just are dressed well. Impeccable Bigots. Carhartt Homophobia. A few times my dog has shit on the church lawn and I didn’t pick it up.