Popeye and The Leaning Tower. Of World Trade-
There are many well known things about New York City. It's people are abrasive, the rats are legendary, almost everything is way overpriced, and it's a horrible place to drive or own a car.
But take the time to walk around the corner from the $50 breakfast joint, and you might find the soft and pleasing underbelly of the worlds most ambitious and inclusive big metropolis.
Dollar pizza slices! A perfectly designed and beautifully efficient public transportation system! Every language, cuisine, musical style, and sub-culture is represented in New York. Wander into the East Village on a Saturday night and 'melting pot' doesn't begin to describe it.
And walking and biking. All New Yorkers do it. Fast and purposeful, the life spirit and blood of the city flows on street level. One of the more common sights down here are the two thousand or so brave -and some say crazy- bike messengers tearing up and down the avenues or bustling in and out of midtown skyscrapers, all geared up and on-task, like steely-eyed urban insects.
New Yorkers abhor a delay, and due to a state of perpetual gridlock on the island, all major Manhattan businesses depend upon bike messengers to get important items across town quickly. I became a messenger in the winter of 93-94, and that job sometimes sent me downtown to the World Trade Center.
Whenever I delivered to the WTC, I could feel it was a death trap. Most buildings in the city bear the weight of history with a sort of weary patina, but in the towers there was a palpable tension. Due to the recent bombings in 1992, entry required that you go through metal detectors. To a bike messenger, time is money, and the long lines at security and between elevator banks made me lose commission every time. Some buildings you could get around the messenger access rules if you knew the doorman, or clients could call down to the front desk, but at the WTC there were no exceptions for anyone. You and the CEO of JP Morgan were both just workers in a hive, and everyone had to wait in the same queue. That made all of us equally pissed, and feeling cornered.
I've always suffered from a mild sense of vertigo, and one of the most disturbing sensations I've ever experienced was feeling the bottom drop out from under me when I finally did get into those high speed elevators. It would take at least a full minute to get up to the sky lobby on the 86th floor, and I imagined it as sort of a reverse Day of Rapture, that balls-up-into-your-stomach feeling as you realize you are being shot straight up to hell in a metal tube.
But those feelings of claustrophobia were less intense than what the busboys and other staff of the famous restaurant on top of the North Tower experienced daily. It was called the 'Windows On The World', and at one time it was the top-grossing eatery in the United States. My friend Popeye was one of those busboys.
Popeye had about 15 different jobs in the city. Everything from bike messenger and construction worker to male stripper or wedding DJ. A soft, memory-stricken smile spread across his pale and boyishly aging face, as he recounted what it was like to work in the restaurant on top of the world...
“Y'know I couldn't take it seriously, and I only lasted about 8 months. I mean, this was an old-school, high-class joint with a strict dress code and the owner was very proud of that image. The manager -we called her the 'Dragon Lady'- would line us up every morning in our uniforms like catholic school boys, and then inspect us for dirt underneath our fingernails.”
“Some days I'd go out the edge of the revolving dance floor, by the windows and stare at all the twinkling city lights spread out below and reflected on the East River snaking uptown. You can see the bridges and avenues laid out in order, and then look a 1/4 mile down onto the street at the toy cars and ant people crawling around. It's a feeling of sheer terror...
"They designed the buildings to sway about 15-20 feet in the winds, and when they keep blowing the towers lean ominously towards and away from each other, making all the tourists seasick and clearing out the restaurant, leaving the poor band playing Sinatra standards all day to an empty room. The Dragon Lady insisted that the show must go on, and she would never let us take a break. Even if there was nothing to do, the busboys would get their knuckles rapped if we were caught leaning on the furniture..."
"I'll never forget the eerie scene of the musicians diligently banging out 'My Way', this-time-with-feeling, as the bored and immaculate wait staff tried to look busy on the sides ... the slowly swaying towers keeping time.”
Popeye's a squatter on the Lower East Side and we talk about where we were on 911. I tell him about how I went to work at my bike collective in Santa Cruz that morning and was shocked and dismayed by the -“They Deserved It.”- sentiments expressed by some of my co-workers. All I could think of was the feeling of being trapped inside those buildings, and what a horrible way to die that would be.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” remembers Popeye, “when we were watching the towers fall from our rooftop, some people were shouting -“Death to Capitalism”- and I had to tell them to shut the fuck up. All I knew was that my friends were burning to death, right there in front of us.”
All 72 employees and managers of The Windows On The World died that morning because they were trapped above the impact zone of American Airlines Flight 11. The owner wasn't there that day, but afterwords he set up a fund to help the victims families. The controversial picture of 'The Falling Man' plummeting to earth face down to escape the smoke and flames was identified as restaurant worker Jonathan Briley.
Today there is a gleaming new 'Freedom Tower' under construction where the World Trade Center once stood. As workers have built to the 107th floor they've reached the height where employees of Windows On The World looked out and saw the jumbo jet hurtling towards them.
Some say that up there on a cold night, you can still hear band playing 'Fly Me to the Moon' on the wind blowing in from Hoboken.
'Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars ~ Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. In other words .. Take my hand..'
After all, the show must go on.
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