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World Trade Center Memories By Perry Brass
In the fall of 1981, I worked for several weeks on the ninety-eighth
floor of the World Trade Center as a temp for a company called Fiduciary
Trust. Fiduciary Trust was a conservative - I would say very
Republican - company whose purpose was to shelter the assets of very rich
people and create for them either trust estates or pull assets from
these trusts. My job was take dictation from "advisors" or brokers,
which came in electronically through a headset, word process them, and
print them out for their clients on personal stationery. The dictation
would then be sent back to the brokers for a signature.
I noticed that many of the clients' addresses were on Park Avenue, or in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Palm Beach, Florida. This was during the beginning of the Reagan administration, and the brokers at Fiduciary Trust were hopeful that the President would do great things for their clients, especially since the economy, with Jimmy Carter as president, had not been doing well for them. Reagan, with his devoted little trickster James Stockman, was working on his little three-card-monte number of stopping the economy flat and sending millions of people into unemployment. The idea of course was to lower inflation, and cut all social services back to the Stone Age, or at least to 1929 level. The economy at that point had not come to a screeching halt, but you could certainly hear the brakes grinding hard, and dragging lots of people with it. So at that point Fiduciary Trust's always polite, always comforting brokers felt confident that Ronny was going to speed the country back into the arms of wealthy Republicanism - no inflation; poverty everywhere - regardless of the price that working stiffs like I would have to pay. I remembered tapping out many sweet little messages on my system calling for clients to "back the President, he knows what he's doing," or "with God's help, our new President will get us out of this slump and the inflation that's eating your assets."
I thought many times of sending out my own versions of these little notes, saying, "If we all put our hopes in this stupid shit Ronald Reagan, we can watch the country go down the tubes as you people on Park Avenue get richer and richer." But there were safeguards against this - every machine had codes attached to it, and eventually they would have caught me and I needed a paycheck. We were now pretty much wading into a recession, and the attitude at Fiduciary Trust was very simple: if you did not like your job, you knew what you could do. The environment we were in was totally unhealthy. The World Trade Center was still fairly new, and the system that pumped oxygen up to the upper floors was famously inadequate. So working there was like being captive on an airplane, eight hours a day, with pressurized air. The women around me were literally turning green. I got severe headaches all the time. When I complained about them, I was told that if I did not like working there, I knew what I could do. I would simply be replaced by another robot with ten fingers, who could probably type better than I could, anyway. At that point what most of us feared most of all was that the oxygen system at the new Trade Center would either completely give out, or become so defective that God-knows-what would end up in our lungs. There had been several exposès about this on the news, but they were quickly forgotten, and what could you really do about it? The women I worked around and the few men were mostly high school grads who could type, or a few artsy types like myself, going through temp hell. Most people kept a bottle of aspirin at their work areas, and if yours ran out you call always beg or borrow some more.
My own great fear was fire. The place was made so shabbily-even back then the cheap industrial carpeting in my area was ripping out; cheap ceiling fixtures were falling apart to reveal the guts of tangled, dangerous wiring-that you had to be nuts or desperate not to know what a high-tech tinder box you were in. There was this constant "Emperor's news clothes" blindness about this, and no one ever mentioned fire. I remember asking if they ever had fire drills and people looked at me like I was stupid. The idea was that you had work to do, a place to do it, and you went up to do it and down at the end of the day. I had remembered downtown New York before the World Trade Center was built, and one of the things I became quickly aware of was that it had eaten up about five or six square blocks of what had been "free" streets in the city. This meant that you could walk through them without worry; you could stop or stand on a street corner, even hand out leaflets and talk to people - just as you could on any open city street. Once the mammoth Trade Center had been built, all of this was in question. There were signs all over telling you not to loiter, that this was private property, that you could not leaflet, petition, or even speak publicly on any of the property without permission. I was always impressed that no one questioned this; they simply went up on the elevators - on the express elevators that zoomed up twenty-five floors at a time-and then, like good little robots, came down again. On the ground floor, and in the basement shopping complexes, there was a "panoply" of services offered for the thousands and thousands of people who were stuck there all day. There were chain drug stores and cheap clothing stores and fast food restaurants, and even bars. Eventually, years later, a real bookstore, Borders, opened up, adding a degree of humanity to the place. By that time, the Trade Center had "matured." The people who ran it like puppeteers, had to offer something else besides McDonalds and its various fast-food clones. The posh World Financial Center had opened, and the whole area was becoming upscale and "localized." That is, people were starting to live around there, and it was no longer simply a vertical working area attached to New Jersey. There was still a constant feeling of little worker ants running around, but some of the more well-paid drone ants had now taken up residence in nearby Battery Park City and in the late nineties, the area, now awash with money was becoming Gucci-ized, foccacio-ized, and filled with that sense of instant class through "correct consumerism" that the country wanted. One of the perks of my stay at Fiduciary Trust was that I was allowed to use the company cafeteria on the, I believe, 99th floor. The cafeteria was very cheap, the food was awful - so bad that many people still preferred delivery pizza - but there were plenty of window seats. So I got to have almost the same view as I would have got from going to the very expensive Windows on the World, on the 107th floor, for one-tenth the money.
I remember distinctly that the cafeteria was not used that much, and I think it was because a lot of people were not as thrilled with the view as I was - it could be quite frightening, especially when the building swayed. The first time I felt it sway, and managed to keep from throwing up, I was told that a ten degree sway was built into these towering structures - not to worry about it - and the sway that I had felt was "nothing. Wait'll we have a real storm." I was at the cafeteria once when a real storm did happen. It was fall, dark early, and you could see the line of rain approaching from New Jersey, along with distant bolts of lightening. The drama of it was riveting: I could not figure out why everyone did not want to watch this, but then most people only got about forty minutes to eat lunch, two quick coffee breaks (I was on my afternoon one) and they had lives to lead. So what could they do - schedule all this around the chance of storms? The truth was, in a storm you felt very isolated, trapped, and vulnerable up there - a situation I'm sure people felt often enough, and horribly, certainly, on September 11. The time I spent working at the WTC became indelibly etched in my mind, I hated it so much. All of chilling, bland, powerful corporate America was so beautifully captured in the place - especially when it first opened, and you became aware that the buildings were not only starkly ugly but basically unhealthy. People were starting to talk about the "sick building" syndrome and the World Trade Center towers easily epitomized this. I was relieved when my stint at Fiduciary Trust was over. I asked my temp agency not to send me there anymore. In later years, I remember going back to the Center, going up in the elevators to the towers, and having this sense of being compressed there, being squashed by this unseen power that was so much bigger and less human than you were. Some of that became softened however by the fact that downtown money-Manhattan was becoming a city within a city, and not just a fortress. Like many New Yorkers, l liked the vast indoor space of the new Winter Garden, attached to the World Financial Center, opening out onto a drop-dead expensive marina. There you could catch a sight of your own dream boat, the one that would never come in. The area was very clean, very patrolled, and you felt that you were no longer in New York. You were in this international city of slick, efficient corporate activity. You could have been Singapore, for instance, or parts of Toronto, or any other whip-and-chill corporate center that is identical to so many others of its ilk. All of humanity of New York, as well as its grittiness and character, was gone. You were now in a world of hyper-expensive Mont Blanc ballpoints, glowing silk designer ties, and the kind of armed-casual wear that the Battery Park City yuppies wore. This was a place where the imagination exercised itself in business ventures, not adventures. You were not in a real city, but an urban theme park: the one called All Money. No Time. In this park, individual human lives and their histories meant nothing. After the September 11 terror, the media made a special point of erasing the stories of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of gay men and lesbians whose lives had been lost. Their lives did not fit into this corporate tragedy of our time, delivered by an enemy we could not see on people whose lives were for the most part unseen as well. For the past several weeks, the New York Times has been running a series of thumbnail portraits of those lost in the fall of the towers, and none of them has talked about people who were neither married nor unmarried, but were part of the gay and lesbian community. We knew that there were cops and firemen and priests and office workers and executives and lots of "little people" like I was, who were killed-murdered, really - and who were in that group. In the little bios, I came across the name of one temp, who was a musician, a banjo player, trapped on the 100th floor. He could have been what I was. I stopped reading, closed my eyes, and felt again torn up. The reason why these people are dead is because they had a job to do and a place in which to do it. And no matter what, no one can take that away from them. Perry Brass is the author of 12 books. His latest book, Warlock, a novel that deals with the intersection between evil and business, will be available through Belhue Press in October. He can be reached through his website, www.perrybrass.com. |
Perry Brass 
© 1997-2002 BEI