My Own Private 9-11 (Part One)
The last week has been a blur.
My clearest memory during the past seven days was that of Saturday night, April 14. I was in bed. It was the most comfortable bed I have ever been in. There were three sounds I clearly recall hearing: The music piping over the small speakers of my Apple Laptop; Hershey, our cat, using the litter box, and the piff-piff sound emanating from the sheets as I moved my legs back and forth across the mattress as if I were making angels in the snow. I had not been this comfortable in a while. It was hard to reconcile the peace I felt with the reality of the situation.
This was not my room. This was not my bed. This was not my home. But I wished it were all of those things. The truth is my home was gone. Literally gone. Yanked out from underneath my brother and myself by one of natures most enduring and destructive elements: fire.
Tuesday, April 10th started out like any day. Well, actually, that is not true. In fact, it started out almost surreal. It was 9 AM. I was in the bathroom with my laptop resting on, what else, my lap. I was checking email, sending emails, browsing headlines, more or less oblivious to the world around me. All of the sudden a message from my brother popped up in my Yahoo chat program.
My brother had recently started a new job at a local apartment community, and apparently he was messaging me from work. His message was chilling. It read, “Tim, PLEASE tell me you are there!” I immediately responded and told him I was. He then proceeded to say that “he had to type quietly, because he did not want to be heard”. Anticipating the next message, I went into rescue mode, sprinting out of the bathroom, upstairs to the kitchen, grabbing the telephone off the kitchen wall. Running back downstairs, I grabbed my Vonage phone, piece of crap that it is, and with a phone in either hand, ready to dial 911, I read the final message from my brother. It was exactly what I had anticipated. It read, “Tim, there is a disgruntled tenant in the office with a gun. We are being held hostage and I need you to call the police immediately.”
As I was just about to press the numbers 911 on both phones, I heard a voice from upstairs. “Hi Tim!”
My brother. That rat bastard had punked me but good. For reasons unknown, he had been unexpectedly sent home from work early and, driving home, he had devised a plan to play a practical joke on me. The plan was to come home, sneak in the house and send me instant messages leading me to believe he was being held captive. He had succeeded in sneaking into the house undetected, while I was on the can, implementing his most devious plan to greater effect then he had imagined. The voice I was now hearing was his. “Hi Tim!” He was calling downstairs to let me know he was playing a joke on me in order to prevent me from making that phone call to the police. Ha ha. Very funny.
Now, kiddies, you need to remember a few things. First, I have asthma. Second, I also have Cystic Fibrosis. Third, though I am capable of being calm, cool and collected under duress, my tendency is to produce too much adrenaline in times of crisis, almost always resulting in an asthma attack. This is clearly something I need to work on, but now was not the time to work on it. I was in trouble.
Here I was, phones in hand and at the ready one moment, then Beau laughing and me sucking on my Asthma inhaler like my life depended on it the next. As I said, very funny.
Oddly enough, I was not really mad at Beau for masterminding this joke. Still, I had to remind him of my medical condition. I had to remind him that pulling such a prank could kill me just as easily as being stung by a bee. When he saw how much distress I was in, he felt horrible. I don’t think he will be doing that again any time soon, especially after what would follow in the fateful hours that lay ahead.
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The day progressed without much fanfare. I went about my business, enjoying the three day layoff I was taking from training. I had run out of Metabolic Diet products and I was beginning to feel run down. The layoff was doing me good. Meanwhile, my brother was practicing his flute skills. Along about 1:30 PM in the afternoon I had occasion to go upstairs and talk to him. We gabbed a bit, and I went back downstairs.
As I descended the steps, I looked out the window situated in the wall ahead of me and thought I spotted, of all things, smoke. White smoke.
I rubbed my eyes. I was sure I was seeing things. I made it to the second floor and looked out the front door. The air at that level was crystal clear as a bell. So, I guessed I had been seeing things after all.
Grabbing some lunch from the kitchen, I went down yet another flight of steps to the full basement that had been my home for the past eight months. Balanced on a plate which I held in my hands was a steaming pile of spaghetti I had prepared for my late lunch. It was now around 2 PM. I sat down and had just taken my first bite of what would fuel me for the rest of my day, when the doorbell rang frantically.
I bolted back upstairs, ran to the front door and answered it. There was a girl there I had never met before. She lived in the neighborhood I gathered, and she said, “You need to leave your place NOW! Your building is burning down!”.
I looked up and to the right. What I saw evoked emotions that even now I struggle to the find words to describe. One of the four condominiums in our four unit building was engulfed in flames. My first thought was, “Damn, that crazy bitch went and did it. She killed herself and now she is trying to take the rest of us with her!”. As it would turn out, the ‘crazy bitch’ was long gone, having evacuated herself from her burning box, but leaving the rest of us to roast alive in our own private 9-11. Rest assured, we would have roasted alive, too, were it not for the bravery of Monica, the girl up the road who had spotted the smoke and called 911 to alert the fire departments. She was the one who also alerted each of the residents that the building was burning. And burn it did.
Turning my attention to my brother, I shouted to him that the place was on fire. He didn’t hear me the first time. Either that, or he could not believe his ears. I repeated myself, this time with more fervency. I believe the words “Get the fuck out of here, the place is burning to the ground!” were used in order to convey the gravity of the situation.
Beau grabbed Hershey, a cat that passes for his daughter. The poor little thing hates her cat carrier. Always has. Beau would later tell me that he she went right in, but that is usually not the case. Usually she puts up a fuss. He then grabbed a few musical instruments, his laptop, and sprinted for the parking lot. I was not far behind him. In fact, I was right behind him. I had already saved a few of my belongings, choosing to safeguard my Apple Power Book, a camera, my stamp collection (worthless, as it turn out), and oh yeah, a 120 lb Quick Lock Dumbbell!
I need to stop for a moment and ask you a question. Of all the piles of stuff one could grab, what the hell good is one dumbbell going to do anyone if a house burns down, taking the rest of a home gym with it? I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought I could get all the equipment out to the woods, but I was way wrong.
Remember what I told you about stress and my asthma? Yep, it was in high gear by this point, and there was no way in heaven OR hell that I was going to be able to get the rest of my equipment to the woods. So I just said, “Fuck it!”, better save my ass before I save my weights. I ended up dumping what I could at the edge of the woods behind the condo, including my laptop. I then ran back inside and looked for Beau.
As I headed upstairs and bolted for the front door, bounding onto the front porch and running up the sidewalk, Beau was beside me having gathered his belongings. I remember my brother saying, “What the fuck did she do? What has she DONE?!”. He knew this girl, the one who started the fire. He had intimate knowledge of her, as did I. As did all of us who lived at Chatham Ridge. Indeed, what had she done?
Thanks to Monica, everyone made it out of that burning beast alive. Even the pets were saved. This would never have happened had not all the tenants been home, which they had been on this day. This was a miracle in and of itself, for the fire started at 2 PM when all of the tenants should have been at work, and for one reason or another they all had reason to be home on that day, at that time. Including Monica, who is a hero in my view.
As we all stood in the parking lot looking at each other, some of us crying, some of us wondering why we had never bothered to get rental insurance, others thanking their lucky stars that they had, I think we all came to the sad realization that we were now displaced. As we watched our lives go up in smoke, thanks to the dementia of one person who should never have been living alone and unsupervised in the first place, I found myself thinking back to September 11, 2001, and how the feelings I was now having were strikingly similar to the ones I had then, when we all watched our TV’s as those demons plowed headlong into hell, taking the Twin Towers with them, plunging the world into war. Melodramatic? Yes, but that’s as honest as I can be about how I felt at that moment.
Godspeed Iron Warriors
Stay tuned. More to come…..
