Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,81

close to a laugh at my expense. They had witnessed the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history and had the morning to process it and call their family, and then the dummy in 1C came up in his jammie bottoms in the middle of the afternoon, like: “Wait, what happened?”)

We went up and down like that for a few hours. Roof deck to TV and back. Just finding new places to say, “Oh, my God.”

The worst thing at the time was that you couldn’t help. Nobody was allowed anywhere near what they were just then starting to call Ground Zero, and word was starting to spread that they were turning away blood donors. They have enough, we thought. But that wasn’t it. They just didn’t need any. Anybody who wasn’t out wasn’t coming out.

Lee came home around 3:00, and I don’t remember which one of us suggested it, but it was decided that 3:00 was an appropriate time to start drinking. So we did. We went to 7B and began ordering whiskeys. It was absolutely silent in 7B, which it never is, especially when it’s crowded, which it was. Everyone watched the TV. Ned came to meet us there. So did my friend Kelly Sue from my improv days. We didn’t talk. We couldn’t talk. We had our arms around each other, tight.

Every few minutes, someone in the room would remember a friend who worked down there, and they’d pop up and run outside and try to reach them. You’d have to try your call a bunch of times before they’d go through. Sometimes people came back inside looking relieved, and sometimes they didn’t come back. You could see them get the bad news through the window, hazy with cigarette smoke. My friends were okay. Thank God.

By the early evening, the smell started to reach the East Village. I had never smelled anything like it before. None of us had. It was like an electrical fire mixed with gasoline mixed with burned hair. It was people and planes and buildings.

The story goes that we were united as a country in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but that was definitely not the case in 7B. Some people cheered when Bush spoke, some people hissed. When he recited that Bible verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, some people heckled. Kelly Sue heckled back at them: “What if this is giving someone somewhere some comfort?” When the newscasters speculated as to whether our military would retaliate, half the bar whooped and half pounded their tables and said “NO.” The bar was turning into a Parliament meeting, and we had heard and seen and drank enough, so we left. We walked up to Union Square, candlelit as the sun fell, where people were writing messages on the ground in chalk: “USA!” “INTIFADA!” “PATRIARCHY FUCK OFF!” Everyone was already claiming this thing as their own. It was already a mess.

We kept walking, and walking. The only things open in the neighborhood were the bars and the churches, and they were all crowded. Someone hung a huge American flag over Fourth Street. By the next morning, a few chunks had been pulled out of it.

We passed Bowery Bar, where “Beige,” the Tuesday night gay dance party, was actually starting, right on schedule. People were going about their business like normal, but in a state of shock, and so were we, so we walked in. The DJ opened his set with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Cities in Dust,” which we agreed seemed a little on the nose. We left.

Kelly Sue had just quit drinking a couple of months before, so she went home. Lee went uptown to be with Michelle. That left me and Ned. Again, I don’t remember who suggested it, but it was resolved that we should go try to get laid. (“Disaster Sex” ended up being a real trend in the city that week. All sorts of random hookups and unplanned pregnancies. Salon did a piece about it and everything.) We went to The Cock, because it seemed like the right place to go for such a thing. I think we both expected the place to be crowded, but when we walked in, there was only a handful of people at the bar, two people dancing to Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf,” and, on the periphery of the dance floor, smoking a cigarette and holding a rocks glass full of some flavor of white liquor, with a single,