Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He's Learned, How He's Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget Read Online Free PDF

then help them out! Whoever has the ability to care, takes the care. I live that imperative because I learned it young. I was blessed with being in a position to help—to give strength, lend intelligence, provide defense—when I could. So I did.
    That Sunday, a little after 10:00 p.m., Joy and I left Angelo’s house after an episode of The Sopranos , a show that always left me ambivalent. In the thirty-minute drive back to Jersey City, I was already feeling the onset of my “Sunday night blues,” as Joy called it. It was more like Sunday-night anxiety derived from the cold, hard fact that I had to get up insanely early for the weekly Monday morning Network Plus conference call the next day. There were fourteen Network Plus sales offices up and down the East Coast.Where your office finished in sales for the previous week determined what time you got your call. The earliest call began at 5:00 a.m., and the latest one at 7:45 a.m. Any way you sliced it, it was an early wake-up. And Monday was all about clockwork.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2001
    I’ve never been someone who, as soon as he moves into a new apartment, kicks into Queer Eye for the Straight Guy mode. I’m more college dormitory anti -chic. My basement apartment in Jersey City reflected this interior design philosophy. I’d positioned the bed in the obvious spot, slid in a couple of end tables, and made sure the TV was viewable from every angle in the apartment. I had no couch in this small space, so I watched TV from bed. It was a railroad-style apartment. First car was the living room / bedroom; then you hit the kitchen, then the bathroom. There was a door to the back patio area. My building was an old one that, to my knowledge, had never been refurbished.
    I don’t like getting up early. So I didn’t like my 5:00 a.m. start on Mondays. I tried to make my morning rituals as unconscious as possible. I shaved. (I hate shaving. I tried to shave every other day, but it didn’t really work.) I threw on a suit, I grabbed my backpack—which I used the way most people use a wallet—and I was out the door.
    The advantage of taking the PATH train before rush hour was that the trains weren’t crowded. The disadvantage was there weren’t very many trains running. So if the PATH didn’t come in on time, I was late for the Monday-morning call. Then I’d start off the day and my week in a bad mood. In my head, I would already be in a bad mood just worrying about being in a bad mood. Welcome to my Monday-morning commute.
    The PATH train was, for all practical purposes, my only way to work, to the World Trade Center. I took it every day. The PATH Pavonia-Newport Station was about a half-mile walk from my apartment. It’s a ten-minute ride—two stops—to the World Trade Center. I typically bought a number of tokens in advance. When I first began working at the World Trade Center office, the PATH cost $1. Now it’s like two bucks and rising, but still a pretty good deal.
    My daily commute had become a matter of repetition. I can still recall every step as if I’m doing it right now:
    Once I go underground to catch the PATH, I never feel the outside again. Ten minutes later, the PATH doors open, and I am in the basement of the World Trade Center. I walk up a small flight of stairs and step onto a giant escalator bank, which carries me up to the main shopping area in the North Tower, or Tower 1. I walk right by the Verizon Wireless kiosk where I bought my cell phone. I walk briskly through the shopping corridor, which looks like a subset of any top mall in the country: Banana Republic, Gap, Godiva, Borders. Invariably, I stop at American Coffee and grab a cup of black with sugar. I leave the shopping area and enter the North Tower lobby. It is an enormous lobby. Off to the right is a whole row of twenty to twenty-five security desks. Turning to the left, I flash my security pass to the guard stationed behind the battery of turnstiles lined in front of the elevators.