American Gangster (27 page)

It weighs on you, thinking about 9/11, the day and the unremitting aftermath. The wound remains unhealed, emotions close to the surface. Certainly there was an urgency as activists gathered at the Veselka restaurant after the Tarpley meeting.

With all the saber-rattling about Iran, this was no time to decrease vigilance, said Nick Levis, proposing a toast: “That in 2006, we will crack the Official Story so we can stop being 9/11–heads and return to normality.” A classically hermetic New York conversation ensued, quickly moving from snickers about bin Laden's supposed CIA code name, “Tim Osmond … as in Donny and Marie,” to speculation about the role of Jerry Hauer, Giuliani's former OEM guy, in the post-9/11 anthrax threats.

However, all conviviality fled as the conversation slipped into the matter of whether, on the morning of 9/11, the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines flight #77 or not. Sounds kind of crazy, debating if a 150-ton airplane slammed into the world's largest single building, but this is the way it is with the slippery discourse of 9/11truth.

The matter was first broached by Thierry Meyssan in his 2002 book
L'Effroyable Imposture
(The Appalling Fraud), a #1 best seller in France, which said the damage at the Pentagon was caused not by Flight #77 as reported, but rather something else, most likely a cruise missile. This bold claim is based primarily on what Meyssan called “the physical evidence” gleaned from a series of photographs (see: “Hunt the Boeing,”
http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero_13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm
) indicating, among other things, that the hole in the side of the building was no more than 15 to 18 feet wide, certainly not big enough to accommodate an airplane with a 125-foot wing span. Other pictures showed a decided lack of the debris one might expect at a plane crash site.

This theory, one of the first to challenge the Official Story, caused an early sensation among 9/11truth people. But there are problems with the idea, such as the dozens of eyewitnesses that saw the 757 flying low near the Pentagon shortly before impact. Posting an item declaring “the Pentagon no 757 crash theory” to be a “booby trap for 9/11 skeptics,” Jim Hoffman said, “this is just the sort of wackiness defenders of the Official Story harp on to show how gullible and incompetent we conspiracy theorists are supposed to be.”

In other words, Meyssan and other believers in the no-plane idea were either flat wrong, unknowing dupes, or spreaders of disinformation, most likely the latter. And as is known to anyone present at the old Elgin Theatre nearly forty years ago when Kennedy assassination researcher Mae Brussel blew herself out of the water by asserting that the saintly I. F. Stone, who disagreed with her, was an obvious disinformer, to be tarred with the dreaded “d” word is no small thing in conspiracy circles. Things tend to get heated.

So it was at the Vesalka, where the question was floated that, if flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon, what happened to the fifty-six people
listed as being on the plane. It was a query that did not sit well with Nico Haupt, a tall, thin, black-clad man from Cologne, Germany, complier of the extensive 9/11 Encyclopedia (
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/911Encyclopedia.shtml
) and staunch no-plane advocate.

“Gassed,” he hissed. “Have you ever heard of gassing? It is very easy. You open the door of the plane, and it spreads.”

“You think they gassed them?” Would even the Illuminati stoop to this Auschwitz horror?

Haupt cast a withering look: how naive could anyone be? “That or some other method of murder.”

Someone said something about Cleveland, how the passengers might have taken off in Cleveland. Another said she'd read flight 77 might have crashed near the Kentucky border at that point to be replaced by a missile.

These views seemed to support Haupt's no-plane stance, but did little to calm the addled theorist. “Assholes,” he sneered.

“Nico, Nico,” said Webster Tarpley in a grandfatherly manner. “This is only tactics. There's no reason to make an enormous moral issue out of everything.”

But Haupt was past consoling. “You are motherfuckers. Stupid mother-fuckers.” Slamming the tabletop, he gathered his things and stormed out.

“Nico is so emotional,” said one NY9/11Truth activist, returning to her plate of potato pirogues.

After the meeting, on my way back to Brooklyn, I stopped off at Ground Zero. My father used to take me down here, before they built the Trade Towers, when the place was called Radio Row. We'd look over the reel-to-reel tape recorders, buy some tubes, eat a hero sandwich and go home. I always hated the WTC for that, taking away a place I used to go with my father; it took me years to look at the big, ugly buildings without sneering. In the weeks following 9/11 I came here several nights a week. It was hard
to get really close by then, the barricades up everywhere. But there were some spots, random vantage points, from which you could follow the arc of the great plume of water, shining in the vapor lamps, as it rained onto the smoking pit. It seemed the place to be, the thing to see. For more than a year later I couldn't cross the bridges or ride the elevated section of the F train without being able to trace a precise silhouette of the vanished towers, looming over the downtown skyline. Sometimes I'd just start crying.

Now my hold on the psychic geography has grown a bit shaky. We had someone from out of town in a few weeks ago. As we drove along the BQE, he asked where the Trade Towers had been.

“Ah, somewhere in there,” I answered, vaguely.

Now I was back here again, standing before the not quite finished replacement for WTC #7, the building I saw fall down four and half years ago, a collapse Dr. Shyam Sunder and his experts “couldn't get a handle on.”

A nice-looking building it is too, Larry Silverstein's new $700 million baby, a nifty parallelogram with a stainless steel finish reminiscent of a fancy Viking stove, way hipper than the old shit-colored WTC7. The place will provide 1,700,000 square feet of rentable space while still giving the impression of “airiness,” according to the Web brochure. The brochure also repeated Carl Galioto's testimony as to the building's safety, attributing the old WTC7's demise as “probably” due to ignition of Con Edison diesel stored in the base of the building.

“To avoid this hazard in the new building, the diesel is stored under the new plaza across from the reopened Greenwich Street,” the brochure said. Another change was the address. Silverstein was promoting the building's “alternative” address, 250 Greenwich Street, which brokers feel will play better in “the trendy TriBeCa neighborhood.” Call it Real Estate MIHOP.

When the new building finally opens, sometime at the end of March, the 9/11truth movement is planning a demonstration here, so “no one forgets what used to be here,” says Father Frank, veteran of much street action. He is hoping for a large turnout, even better than the one last summer when three hundred people gathered outside the New York Times office to protest the mainstream media blackout of 9/11Truth. Demonstrators
screamed, “Ho, ho, hey, hey … bin Laden was trained by the CIA!” and “Truth! truth!” But few Timesmen looked out the window.

Now, however, it being late Sunday night, there wasn't anyone around, so I walked slipped past the construction barriers to get a closer look at the new building. The lights were on in the finished lobby, gleaming card-reading security gates already in place. A giant LCD screen, maybe a hundred feet long, hung across the empty lobby's back wall. They must have been testing it because it kept playing the full alphabet and numbers from 1 through 9 in various fonts. It just kept scrolling, hypnotically.

It was about then that a cop car came along. I figured they were checking me out, to see if I was the type who stole things from construction sites. They stopped a moment and stared at me before driving off. Obviously, they wanted me to move on. Cops always want you to “move on.” But I had the right to be there. Larry Silverstein didn't own the sidewalk. And even if he did, fuck that. This is my city, born and bred. Knew it like the back of my hand. I had as much right to the site of the disaster as anyone.

But then the cops came around the corner again and I remember more factoid I'd heard tossed around the meetings of NY911truth. David Cohen, head officer of the CIA office at WTC7 on September 11, 2001, was the same guy hired by Ray Kelly as Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence; he instituted the subway bag search, one more of those chimeras of safety we're supposed to put up with in the forever-changed 9/11 world. Who knew what a guy like that might be up to? So I pushed off, got back in my car and left. It didn't pay not to be too careful nowadays.

This story served as the basis for the long-running TV show
, Taxi.
I didn't get rich, but Danny DeVito once bought me a sandwich while we talked about his character. Plus I didn't have to go back to cab driving, which is way harder than writing. The Dover garage is long gone now, of course. Also, as predicted, “leasing” did spell the end of the artist/writer cabby. You'll never find someone like me driving an NY taxi now. They're all from Lahore. From
New York
magazine, 1975
.

It has been a year since I last drove a cab, but the old garage still looks the same. The generator is still clanging in the corner. The crashed cars, bent and windshieldless, still lie in the shop like harbingers of a really bad night. The weirdo maintenance guys continue to whistle Tony Bennett songs as they sweep the cigarette butts off the cement floor. The friendly old
YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL FRONT-END ACCIDENTS
is as comforting as ever. The dispatcher hasn't lost any weight. And all the working stiffs are still standing around, grimy and gummy, sweating and regretting, waiting for a cab at shape-up.

Shape-up time at Dover Taxi Garage #2 still happens every afternoon, rain or shine, winter or summer, from two to six. That's when the nightline drivers stumble into the red-brick garage on Hudson Street in Greenwich
Village and wait for the day-liners, old-timers with backsides contoured to the crease in the front seat of a Dodge Coronet, to bring in the taxis. The day guys are supposed to have the cabs in by four, but if the streets are hopping they cheat a little bit, maybe by two hours. That gives the night-liners plenty of time to stand around in the puddles on the floor, inhale the carbon monoxide, and listen to the cab stories.

Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. They are the major source of conversation during shape-up. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-fifty-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teenagers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not bad. They're all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. A year later the cab stories at Dover sound a little bit more foreboding, not so funny. Sometimes they don't even have happy endings. A year later the mood at shape-up is just a little bit more desperate. The gray faces and burnt-out eyes look just a little bit more worried. And the most popular cab story at Dover these days is the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here story.

Dover has been called the “hippie garage” ever since the New York freaks who couldn't get it together to split for the Coast decided that barreling through the boogie-woogie on the East River Drive was the closest thing to riding the range. The word got around that the people at Dover weren't as mean or as stodgy as at Ann Service, so Dover became “the place” to drive. Now, most of the hippies have either ridden into the sunset or gotten hepatitis, but Dover still attracts a specialized personnel. Hanging around at shape-up today are a college professor, a couple of Ph.D. candidates, a former priest, a calligrapher, a guy who drives to pay his family's land taxes in Vermont, a Romanian discotheque DJ, plenty of M.A.s, a slew of social workers, trombone players, a guy who makes three-hundred-pound sculptures out of solid rock, the inventor of the electric harp, professional photographers, and the usual gang of starving artists, actors, and writers.

It's Hooverville, honey, and there isn't much money around for elephant-sized sculptures, so anyone outside the military-industrial complex
is likely to turn up on Dover's night line. Especially those who believed their mother when she said to get a good education so you won't have to shlep around in a taxicab all your life like your uncle Moe. A college education is not required to drive for Dover—all you have to do is pass a multiple choice test on which the hardest question is “Yankee Stadium is in A) Brooklyn B) New Jersey C) The Bronx—but almost everyone on the night line has at least a B.A.

Shape-up lasts forever. The day-liners trickle in, hand over their crumpled dollars, and talk about the great U-turns they made on Fifty-seventh Street. There are about fifty people waiting to go out. Everyone is hoping for good car karma. It can be a real drag to wait three hours (cabs are first-come, first-served) and get stuck with #99 or some other dog in the Dover fleet. Over by the generator, a guy with long hair who used to be the lead singer in a band called Leon and the Buicks is hollering about the state the city's in.

“The National Guard,” he says, “that's what's gonna happen. The National Guard is gonna be in the streets, then the screws will come down.” No one even looks up. The guy who says that his family owns half of Vermont is diagnosing the world situation. “Food and oil,” he says, “they're the two trump cards in global economics today … we have the food, they have the oil, but Iran's money is useless without food; you can't eat money.” He is running his finger down the columns of the
Wall Street Journal
, explaining to a couple of chess-playing method actors what to buy and what to sell. A lot of Dover drivers read the
Wall Street Journal
. The rest read the
Times
. Only the mechanics, who make considerably more money, read the
Daily News
.