My 9/11 Story
Posted: September 11th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | 1 Comment »I was living in Los Angeles, temping, via Manpower, for the city of Los Angeles, in the basement of City Hall. I was sorting responses to jury duty notices.
If you live in Los Angeles, and you want to get out of jury duty, here’s a hint: just don’t bother responding to the initial notice. Nobody cares. The bureaucracy between you and the jury box is so big that you literally have nothing to worry about. I’m not exaggerating.
The economy wasn’t doing so well, although by comparison to the present, it was doing great. Still, unskilled labor was relatively hard to come by. I was very unhappy working in the city hall basement, sorting jury notice responses, but I couldn’t find any other work.
On my desk, in the basement, were three telephones. I was not allowed to use any of them. There was also a computer. I was allowed to use it, but not to install any software, which is to say, I was allowed to play solitaire, or to use Windows Media Player to play a conventional CD. There was a pay phone in the hallway, which cost seventy-five cents. To use my cell phone, I had to take the creaky elevator (the long-expired safety inspection certificate was displayed prominently) to the ground floor, and to do that, make a thirty-second call, and return to my desk took longer than the allotted break time.
On 9/10, a rival temp agency called me and offered me a position, starting the next day. The nature of the job was unclear. So was it’s viability. Basically, and this is a typical temp situation, they promised nothing, while strongly implying that this single day of work could turn into months of work, maybe years, maybe a whole career. But then again, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would only last one day.
I desperately wanted to get out of the city hall basement. But I had no money, and I knew that if I took a chance on this other job, and it didn’t work out, I was fucked. Manpower would not forgive me for blowing them off with no notice. It pained me, but I did the conservative thing, and declined the offer.
The next day, I was at work for about three hours before the Los Angeles city hall, like all government buildings in the country, was evacuated. This action, it was understood by everyone working in the building, was ridiculous. The Los Angeles city hall was not a pleasant place to be, and there was certainly a pervasive sense of something bad about to happen. But it wasn’t because of terrorists.
I went home, and called the other temp agency from my land line. I offered to go to the other job, but of course it was too late. My mother called and asked if I was glued to CNN, but I could not afford the basic cable package that included CNN.
I was in my apartment in Koreatown, from which I would soon be evicted, when I heard about the plane that had been taken down by the passengers. My usual sense that my life was a meaningless series of events leading nowhere in particular was intensified. Those people had made a decision that had defined them forever, and I was living a mealy-mouthed existence somewhere between aspiring writer and absolutely nothing. I felt sick. I had the sense that there was something profound that I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
When I returned to work in the basement, I installed WinAmp on the computer on my desk. WinAmp is a tiny, free piece of software that allows the user to play music encoded in mp3 files, as opposed to a standard factory-stamped CD. I also started using the three phones on my desk to look for other jobs. One day, around 9/20 or 9/25, Martin, the representative from Manpower who was had placed me in the basement of the Los Angeles city hall, showed up in person, and asked to speak to me in the next room.
I gathered my things, exchanged phone numbers with the girl who had been sitting across from me for two months, and followed Martin out into the hallway containing the seventy-five cent pay phone. We walked in silence for a minute, and I was hoping that no words would be necessary at all, that this could be a sort of dignified parting between men. But eventually, Martin spoke.
“The assignment is over,” he said.
“I know.”
“You can’t work for Manpower anymore.”
“Okay.”
“And not just Los Angeles Manpower, but any other Manpower, in any city. We’re the largest employer on the planet, and you have burned your bridge with us.”
“I hear you.”
I heard Martin exhale sharply, and I turned to look at him closely for the first time. He was about twenty-three, and very thin, wearing a short-sleeve white button-up shirt and a tie, and glasses with light brown rims that looked like Lenscrafters.
We stepped onto the creaky elevator with the prominent sign announcing that it should be out of service. The door eventually closed, and I thought about the neighborhood I was in, and what I might see there in the afternoon, without the impediment of a job. I decided to visit the Bradbury building, an architectural landmark that appears in many movies, such as Blade Runner.
I realized that Martin was staring at me with genuine puzzlement.
“Why did you do it?” he asked me.
For a few seconds, I couldn’t even figure out what he meant. “Do it”? Was there something that I had actually done recently? I couldn’t think of anything. But then I realized that Martin was asking me to give him closure. I felt bad for him.
“It was a boring assignment,” I offered.
“But it was an assignment!” he nearly shouted. In that moment, he reminded me of Harry Potter’s muggle uncle, angrily denouncing the existence of magic.
The elevator creaked and groaned. We were only going up one story, but the fucking thing kept you in suspense every time you rode it.
Martin’s indignation was heavy in the air. It occurred to me that I was sharing space with a man who was more decent than I was. He cared about things that I would never care about. He had a strong sense of the way things were supposed to be, and it pained him to encounter a person who did not share his particular anxiety.
“You know what kind of shape the economy is in,” he said, trying to rekindle the conversation.
I didn’t know what to say, so I forced myself to look him in the eye. He met my gaze, and I saw no anger there, only pity and disdain. I felt myself tear up. Martin looked at the floor.
The elevator, finding that it had finally spent so much time hovering in one place that it could no longer pretend that we hadn’t yet arrived, slid open the door.
I stepped out.
“See you later,” I said. As the door closed again, I remember Martin’s bewildered expression, as if he wanted to say: What do you mean, ‘See you later’? Didn’t you hear me when I said you don’t work for Manpower anymore?
I went to look at the Bradbury building, and then I went back to Koreatown and got drunk with nearly-homeless guys in the bar across the street, and slept until noon the next day. I woke up and watched Bush’s speech to the nation.
My favorite part was when John Major stood up at the front of the balcony, and Bush said “Thank you for coming, friend,” and the whole room applauded.
