Survivors Face A Harsh Reality

Jimmy Breslin

September 15, 2001

I was coming from the downtown East Side, where on streets like Avenue C and D there had been no garbage picked up for three days and no trucks were allowed in to make food deliveries. People had no bread or milk. Some women civic workers were out on Avenue D, looking for a bodega owner who asked people to pay $5 for a quart of milk. This never should have been done in time of war. He ducked and the women looked on.

As usual, the people of a neighborhood like this are the first to be shoved whenever anything happens. Later, their country will make sure that they don't try to do any fighting without the men from this neighborhood. But for now, as they are still just poor, they can be ignored.

In front of a building on Avenue D, a volunteer civic worker had a sheet of paper describing a person upstairs who had had a liver transplant and needed drugs. His doctor was away. The worker was going back to an office to make calls. Then in a hallway of the Jacob Riis Houses, Pilar Velez filled out a form:

Q. Are you on life support?

A. Yes.

Q. What kind?

A. Medicare.

She said that she needed medicine for asthma right away. "I had some, but I gave it to the woman across the hall," Pilar said. "Now I have none and she has none."

With the city tied up with the beginning of war, there was no agency to help. The people who don't have money reel from one failure, one shortage, to the next. They are the last in their city in peace or war.

I caught the crosstown bus. On Sixth Avenue, there were these pictures pasted to the wall, imploring people to call if they have seen the person. I happened to notice one of Farrell Lynch, age 41, and then it said that his brother, Sean, is missing, too. They worked on high floors in the Trade Center. I was going on, not looking at any one picture, when my eyes fell on Lucy Fishman. She is holding her little daughter and beaming. The address was in Canarsie. The bottom of the picture had her medical examiner's number: 0247.

The number did not mean that she had been examined. There isn't anything left of Lucy. She went into the sky, incinerated, blown to bits. In fact every one of these hundreds of pictures with the notation of the floor on which the person worked - 104, 105, 108 - meant they were gone forever.

I can testify to seeing them go in two explosions in the sky.

I felt sad when I looked at these pictures, and of course I felt depressed on seeing these shattered people who walk the streets holding a picture of a missing loved one.

I understand that this is denial or trying to maintain a false hope.

But at the same time everybody around here has seen so much of denial in the local undertaking parlors.

"That's not Joey!" the woman shrieked when she took her first look at her husband who was in the box in front. This was at the main chapel at D'Arienzo's Funeral Home on Skillman Avenue in Greenpoint.

"That's not Joey," she said again.

Nick D'Arienzo remembers his father assuring the woman that, yes, this was her beloved Joseph.

"That's not Joey. Joey's out somewhere, wherever he is ... "

At the 14th Street stop of the 1 and 2, the uptown train moved on the downtown tracks. Two women held folders with covers saying, "The World Trade Center Catastrophe." They opened them to show four pages of large pictures in brilliant color of the exploding buildings.