Ten Years, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #145

September 13, 2011 Arthur Tebbel 2 Comments

I didn’t want to talk about September 11th.  For one, it’s a few days late and we’ve all gotten past it.  Also I really don’t like talking about it but nothing else that happened this week really spoke to me so here we go.

If you read the comments in Martha’s column this wee you’ve read the account of the events as I wrote it back when I was 17 and I couldn’t bear to read it the whole way through again.  Needless to say it was a profoundly sucky day.  I saw people jump to their death, I saw the tower collapse, I saw the ghostly white cloud obscure the entire view from the large front windows on my high school.  It was the worst day of my life by a generous margin.

Not to mention the aftermath, I’ve had posttraumatic stress, flashbacks and the like.  I’ve had nightmares.  I still do sometimes.  I think it’s no coincidence that I decided to move to LA during the fall, the clear blue fall sky in New York has always been hard to deal with.  I went to school for months next to a smoldering crater.  The respiratory illnesses that first responders suffered from could easily end up taking my life.  The president of my senior class has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  He believes strongly that it was caused by exposure to Ground Zero.  I’ve seen nothing that convinces me he’s wrong.  That’s quite a sword to have over the heads of 3500 children who wanted nothing more than to attend New York’s finest public school.  I wonder what my 25th reunion will be like.  I wonder how many of us will make it.  I shouldn’t have to.

There are the things I never talk about.  I was a really talented musician, one of the best tuba players in my age group.  I was accepted to a conservatory program without needing an audition; my reputation preceded me.  I was in the band classroom when the tower fell; I basically refused to return to the classroom after we got back.  I haven’t played since high school.  The shame I feel about how thoroughly I failed a person I loved when they were going through a similarly traumatic urban event a few years later.  I saw the parallels and shut down, blocked it out, left her to fend for herself.  I was such a fucking asshole.  I’ll try to do better next time.  God forbid.

It’s very hard not to have something like this sound really morose.  And it shouldn’t sound like that.  I’m really quite capable of laughing about this stuff approximately 51 weeks a year.  Next week we can all go back to laughing.  I just needed to type all this and I have this column space instead of a diary.  I’m fine.  All the people I went through this with are collectively doing better than like 99% of the world’s population.  It gets better all the time.