This isn’t the first post about what happened 10 years ago you’ll read today, and I’m sure it’s not the last. But it’s mine.
The landline rang and I groggily raised my head. Knowing the voice mail would pick up, I tried to stay awake enough to hear what was so important as to wake me up this early in the morning. The caller hung up before leaving a message. A few seconds later, a cell phone rang. Not mine because it was turned off. The Bald Man was crashing at my place for a few weeks before he moved back to Houston, and it was his distinctive ring that was going off in the other room. A few seconds later, the banging on my door began. “D, D, get up. Now.” The door flew open. “We’re being bombed!” All of a sudden I was wide awake. The Bald Man threw me the phone, where Mr. Gazpacho was calling from Spain. “Dude, turn on your tv, call me back later.” I flew out of bed, and the Bald Man and I began to watch the horrific footage.
We sat mostly in stunned silence, as the scene continued to unfold. We talked little, but most of the conversation revolved around being in the center of what, very likely, could be another target. We tried to call everyone we knew was in NY, and those that were traveling, but we weren’t sure where exactly they were. We got through to only a few. My neighbor’s cell phone began to ring, waking him up. He knocked on the door, asking to come in and watch, as he didn’t have a television at the time. We all three sat in silence. I watched the television, and I watched as the two transplanted New Yorkers in my living room watched their home city be under attack.
It was the second day of a 5 day voice-over job. I called the studio, to confirm that production was shut down for the day. The producer giggled nervously. “Did you know anyone in there?” “I…I don’t think so” – it would be almost 24 hours before I learned that I was wrong. The director was from a war torn country in South America. Terrorism was commonplace to him. The voice session was still on.
I drove to the valley, not able to stop my eyes from constantly darting up to the sky. The calls were starting to pour in from everyone in town. Was everyone ok? Were we all meeting up somewhere? The Sound Engineer was out in Calabasas, and wanted me to come out there to be away from the middle of the city, but my job called. I walked into the voice studio, and turned off my phone, realizing that in doing that, I was cutting off my lifeline to hear what was happening not only in New York, but everywhere else in the country.
The project was “The Color of War” The copy I was doing v.o. for was to go along with some of the first color and colorized footage of a war retrospective. The copy consisted only of letters. Letter written from wives to husbands telling of their fears. From daughters to fathers, telling how much they missed them. From mothers to sons; old friends to old friends. And I wept. Sixteen different letters and nine accents later I was wrapped for the day. My heart was broken, as were the capillaries in my eyes from crying. The emotion in my voice was real as I read letter after letter bemoaning the tragedy of war, and the terror that comes along with it.
I walked out of the studio, and knew I wasn’t ready to go home. I needed to be anonymous in my grief that was so mixed up between what had happened that morning, and what has always happened. I walked across the street and into a small english pub and sat without taking my sunglasses off. There were four screens on. Three of them were tuned to the footage and commentary. One was still tuned to a replay of a soccer match. The englishmen at the bar started going seamlessly between watching the constant coverage, and watching a game. It was the first inkling I had that things might eventually go back to feeling normal.
