|
Tuesday, September 18 Cooking in the hot zone ...
The cars that sat idling in the traffic jam stretching on The Bowery watched me walk past. I must have looked like quite the sight, this woman with tangled, blonde hair covered in grease, a face smeared with charcoal, carrying a bright-yellow hard hat and a ventilation mask. But the reactions were strange. Some people looked at me with a knowing smile, but some could not make eye contact with me. The few locals who had managed to forget about the disaster for a day and were having fun, drinking cosmopolitans in trendy little eateries or just joking around with friends, froze as I walked past them. They had actually allowed themselves to forget about it all for an afternoon, and the sight of someone obviously connected with the rescue seemed to make them feel ashamed. I wanted to say, "It's all right. You're allowed to let in some joy this week." But I kept on walking. I was feeling ashamed, too, because I knew they all thought I was one of the brave men and women who were down there digging and looking for bodies, but in fact I was just cooking for those heroes. Oh, I'm sorry. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the ground zero hamburger mama. I have worn many hats in my life: painter, writer, bartender, chef, caterer, bitch-from-hell … you name it, but this particular title is the one I wouldn't mind seeing on my tombstone, although, of course, I'm hoping that won't happen for some time. It all started with a phone call. I'd been walking up and down the West Side Highway, trying to volunteer, but no one would take me. Then finally, a young woman whose wedding I was supposed to cater, called to tell me it was canceled because her party space looked like a scene from M*A*S*H. They had turned the Seaman's Church Institute from a maritime museum/chapel/party location into a home for hundreds of rescue crews. There was no electricity, no plumbing and no running water, and they were trying to feed, clothe and give counsel to anyone who could get to them. I wasn't sure what to expect, so I showed up ready, in camouflage pants and my baddest girl boots. If anything happened, I wanted to at least look like I could handle it. Billy and Dominic were there, unloading trucks filled with supplies. Billy and Dom are the security guards at the institute, sweet guys whom I've gotten to be pals with over the many years I've been catering events there. Dominic looked like he just stepped out of a Bruce Willis movie. His head was wrapped in a flag; he probably hadn't shaved in days. They were both wide-eyed and pale. "We were trapped in the tunnel when it happened," Billy said. "I had to walk out and leave Dominic. He told me just go, go." A close friend who was the best man at Dom's wedding is among the missing. "There's no way! He was on the 76th floor!" Dom said, "I can't think about it. … Just keep moving! I've been here since Day One, haven't been home in a week." It didn't take much to get me on board. "She's a chef," was all Dom had to say to the man in charge. I was given a volunteer pass, a hard hat and a ventilator mask and put on a pick-up truck en route to ground zero. "She's going to St. Paul's!" someone said. "Where's St. Paul's?" I asked the driver. "Next door to the Millennium Hotel, but don't worry they say it's stable." We were led through police barricades and armed guards until the truck finally dropped us off at the church. It felt like I was dropped off in Beirut. What I saw was an old brown church, with a row of port-a-johns parked to the right and a long stretch of eight-foot tables to the left. The tables were covered with everything from hot dogs to thermoses filled with coffee and boxes of doughnuts, eye solution, Band-Aids, hundreds of apples and thousand of bottles of Gatorade on ice. Dozens of firefighters, cops and construction workers were in line to eat, and a small group of young woman were doing their best to keep up with the hot dog requests on two small back yard barbecue grills. In an instant, I was no longer a volunteer, no longer at ground zero, no longer anything but a caterer with a job to do. I added coals to the dying fires, threw on a few more packs of hot dogs and looked for anything that could be remotely called a pair of tongs. It was only after things fell into some kind of order that I took a moment to survey my surroundings. This historic church dating back to 1762 had been the place George Washington prayed. Here it stood, defying the impossible. There was something remarkable about its brownstone walls covered in dust. All this destruction, and yet the church stood, dirty but unharmed. Each step leading into the chapel held a different goody box; socks, flannel shirts, work gloves, second-hand hard-hats. Inside on some of the wooden pews teary-eyed policemen sat collecting their thoughts; in the back rows were napping soldiers. My grills were set up in front of the church's cemetery. Two-hundred-year-old tombstones, so ancient their inscriptions had long since been washed away, poked out from an avalanche of burnt, charred papers. These were the day-to-day works papers of the World Trade Center. I looked at one, a bit of banking business of some kind, a cover letter from a fax. These were the bits of this and that being worked on by people who may now be dead. "Have you been given the drill yet?" the young woman stuffing the hot dogs into buns asked me. "No?!" "If you hear the alarm, you've got to run around and out of the gate. Then run as fast as you can, that way toward the seaport." "Okay…" I said, trying to push my heart out of my throat. This was my first day cooking at ground zero. But that was a lifetime ago. On my second day grilling for the troops, I was taken on a cold drink run to the place they called "the hole." I went with one of the guys, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with ice and Gatorade. The hole is, of course, the collapsed area of what was the WTC. This is also called "the pile." I wondered if "the hole" meant, well, the hole, and the pile meant the parts jetting up, but I never had the guts to ask anyone. We were let in by soldiers guarding this area and permitted to come to the tent set up only about 100 or so feet from the WTC. It was then that I made the mistake of looking up. It felt as though I were jettisoned into a scene from a multimillion-dollar Spielberg flick. There smoldering in front of me was a giant wreck of a sculpture. Smoke and steam streamed out of it as firefighters on their air-breaks sat seemingly unfazed just a few feet away. It was massive. Nothing I'd seen on the news had prepared me for this. There were sharp burnt bits of metal sticking up 50 feet, 100 feet; have no idea how high. I had to crane my neck to find the top of it. These shards of bent, broken metal just shot up like some giant, cruel death trap. In the background was nothing but total destruction. I felt my heart beating out of my chest and breathed hard in my mask. "I'll take one of those!" a silver-haired firefighter said, and I handed him a Gatorade. "Where you from?!" "I live here," I said. He took off his helmet and ran his fingers along his scalp. "I'm sorry what they did to your city. We just flew in from California to help out." "Thank you!" I said feeling dizzy from the sight I was still catching in my peripheral vision. I think he patted me on the shoulder, but I'm not sure. The tent of full of firefighters cheered when we poured ice into their cooler of warm sodas and energy drinks. We handed out the cold Gatorades all around. "I haven't had something cold to drink since 6 a.m.," said one of the guys. It was sometime after noon. Seaman's delivered two hunks of steel they'd welded into grills. They were four-foot-long pits filled with charcoal that sent up smoke and fire so intense you had to throw down a burger and then jump back. They'd made the legs too tall, so Hector, the tallest griller among us, had to stand on milk crates to flip the burgers. I kept up on the backyard grills. Every time I threw a burger down, the fat would send fire and smoke shooting up into my face. After two full days of this, I felt like one of the guys. My head ached from inhaling too much of the smoke and I took to popping Tylenols on the hour. When shifts would change, 50 rescue workers at a time might show up hungry for burgers. The hot dogs were only what they'd settle for when we ran out of burgers, which we did all the time. Someone said we fed a thousand people on my second day. I don't know if that's true, but it felt like it. "You guys are the best," said a carpenter from Queens. "No. You're the hero," I said. "Nah. We're all in this together. It's you guys feeding us and the people who run up with eye wash the second you rub your eyes, and the people cheering you on as you drive in. That's the reason I can do what I do, because you all do what you do." "Thank-you!" I replied feeling like I was blushing. "Do you know how many times I've heard that since I've been out here. I can't even count them." He walked away shaking his head. There was an air about the area they call ground zero that was not filled with overt sadness so much as an intense burst of something like love. Everyone was going the extra mile. No one looked as though they had slept. There was Steve the out-of-work actor, who had been there for a week throwing foil-wrapped hot dogs directly into the hole. The men would catch them as they worked. "More! More! I need at least a hundred hot dogs," he shouted at us. He was wired and pushy, but none of us took it to heart. There was Scott, who had taken his place supervising the many drug store and clothing donations. He'd been sleeping on a blanket on the floor of the church for a week. "Are you with the church?" I asked him. "Naah. I just found my way out here." There was the pastor from some other church who came to deliver ice and stayed for a week. His job was simple. He ran to Costco six times a day and bought all the burgers and dogs he could carry, then drove them out to the hot zone. I did not ask if he was spending his own money. There was Meredith, who works with Steve. She is tiny, blonde and adorable and looks like a high school cheerleader. She knew the men perked up when they saw he,r and she made sure they saw her all the time. Everyone here is a hero. But where else could we be, any of us? There is a bond that all of us here feel, from the clergy to the relief people to the construction workers volunteering for days on end. None of us fit in anywhere else. None of us can mix with the real world. In the days after I watched the towers collapse, I walked around Manhattan feeling like a lost, out-of-place freak. I was just making the motions, but could not force myself to do anything normal. Eating breakfast in a restaurant or having a glass of wine with friends felt like an atrocity. Most of the people I met felt the same. Some had given up going home at night because the thought of dealing with anyone outside those gates was just too impossible. I wondered how any of us would be able to blend back in again when this was over. On my third day at the site, things changed. There had been no official statement, but you could feel internally that this had gone from being a rescue mission to being a clean-up mission. Even the pace of the rescue workers changed. I was told that the dogs sent out to sniff for survivors had gotten so depressed from only finding bodies, that the crews had to take turns hiding so the shepherds and labs could find them. Once they sniffed out the hiding man, they would be given hearty praise and hugs all round. It was only in this way that they could keep the dogs from going into a state of total despondency. I went with a relief run to the hole and handed out packets or trail mix to the crews. They loved the chance to eat something healthy and grabbed handfuls of the packets from me. It was then that I noticed the dumpster on which was painted, "Airplane parts, FBI." The sight of the dumpster was a jolt back to the reality of what this all really is, a giant graveyard. The men have a look on their faces that clearly reads, "It's over." This day, the Board of Health sent inspectors to make sure we were wearing plastic gloves. They asked us to wrap the apples in foil and cover the grills. They felt the dust was a health hazard. "We're pretty sanitary over here," I said. "Are you worried we might be creating a health problem?" "More like we're worried about your health," the inspector said. One of the girls told me they think the bodies might be creating a bio-hazard in the air. We were told that they would shut us down soon. "These guys are going to be down here for two months," the inspector said. "We want to come up with a long term way to deal with this, working with the local restaurants that have been closed." I understand what this meant. This was no longer a rescue mission, though no one official had said this. This was a long-term clean up process and they wanted the workers to start dealing with local businesses, paying for their food. Too many businesses in the area were going bankrupt. We were told that we could not use the huge steel grills, as they have no covers so we added a third backyard barbecue and I ran back and forth turning hot dogs and replacing the cover on the three grills. A truckload of replacement volunteers arrives to give us all a break, but no one wants to go. "I think tomorrow might be the last day they let us do this," Scott says, instructing the new crew on how to sort clothes and supplies, "but I'll be here for as long as they'll let me stay."
| 
Archives |
