Sep 11 Transcript Check-In: Transcript

In which we talk about the smoldering months after 9/11 in New York City, the healing effect of traumatic memoirs, and how to receive healthcare off the grid.

Doug French: We're recording in high quality.

Magda Pecsenye: I know, it's a Monday and you can't hear all of the machines outside here in the yardwork capital.

Doug: Should we start with our customary rant against machines and humidity, and get that out of the way?

Magda: I know! Oh my god, the humidity! “Oh, the humidity!” See, there was the joke. Yeah, I can't breathe, it's so humid. I don't understand. 

Doug: All right, well I'm not going to rub it in too hard.

Magda: Well, okay, so I looked at the weather app and here it was like 70 degrees and 100% humidity. It said 1-0-0% humidity. And then I looked at Detroit.

Doug: How is that possible?

Magda: I don't know!

Doug: You don't live in an aquarium.

Magda: I looked at Detroit and it said it was 62 degrees and 85% humidity. And I was like, oh man, I long for the dry Midwest.

Doug: Well, you'll be here shortly and you'll see you'll relive it for yourself. But yeah, the mornings are very lovely and crisp here already.

Magda: Yeah, that boy, I miss that. I mean, people have claimed that it's like that here. And the first fall that I was dating Mike and I came out here to visit, we went apple picking. And it was very couply. You know, it was Weekend in New England.

Doug: That's how they get you.

Magda: Yeah. It really is that.

Doug: They lure you in during tourist seasons for sure.

Magda: I know.

Doug: Like my week in Copenhagen when there was like zero clouds the entire week I was there. And people I met were like, yeah, “enjoy it, man.” This place is overcast 90% of the time.

Magda: Wow.

Doug: But I left Copenhagen saying, I want to move here. That's it. I'm riding my bike everywhere. You can swim in the river that runs through the city. They have these two enormous filters on either end of the river as it goes through town, and people just gather and swim in the river. It's startling.

Magda: That is something. I do not have a segue. It's 9/11 again. And I, for one, I'm really glad that it's been overcast and cloudy because I have always had PTSD from that day that seems to be triggered by the weather. When it's the same weather that it was that day, you know, perfectly blue skies, sunny, gorgeous, just a little touch of coldness, I kind of shut down for a while. And I guess that's the nice thing about it being rainy and humid here, that is that that's not happening to me this year.

Doug: That's what you do. Find the joy in 100% humidity.

Magda: Exactly. So I have been noticing for the past couple of years that people have either attached really fiercely to that experience, almost as if that's sort of like what the country is about on this day, or they just aren't talking about it anymore and that there are people who are saying, oh, we shouldn't talk about it. And I don't think that that's true. I think it's something that happened to a lot of us that we still carry with us. And that is why I'm really glad that we talked to Alex Walker last week about it, about sort of the differences in who we were then and who we are now. I don't know, 22 years ago, I'm not sure that I would have predicted that we would have still been here as a species, even.

Doug: You were thinking that?

Magda: I didn't really know what to think, you know.

Doug: For what it's worth, I'm going to break in here because you're breaking up horribly and your picture's gone and I don't know if it's your Wi-Fi or mine. I know you're in a different place than usual.

Magda: Well, I can see you just fine.

Doug: Right. But the bottom line is I can't hear what you're saying, so I can't respond to it.

Magda: Ohhhh.

Doug: Okay. Right now when you said “Ohhh,” it came out like <imitates distorted voice>. 

Magda: Well, and I can believe that, because sometimes when I was not living here, when I was talking to Mike, Mike would be walking around the house with the phone and he would just suddenly,  suddenly he would start talking like this [in a robot voice], and it wasn't him making a robot voice. It was just something about the phone connection making him sound like this. It was very like, Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto. Domo domo.

Doug: All right, well then, let's soldier through as best we can. I know there's work to be done, so. Well, I was reading a friend of mine, he wrote a Substack today about 9/11, just in terms of, he remembers it very viscerally just because he has since paired up with a 9/11 widow.

Magda: Oh, wow.

Doug: Yeah, he tells the story of his two daughters whom he has adopted.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: His daughters at the time were six and three when 9-11 happened and their father was killed. And six years later, he started dating their mother and now they're a family and the kids are adults. But he has this heartbreaking picture of these two little girls sitting on a memorial bench with his name and the date of birth and date of death, September 11, 2001. And so he talks a lot about there's this chasm now between the people who experienced 9-11 but didn't lose anybody.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And the people who actually lost family members, lost friends. I mean, I'm not in that group. I mean, a classmate of mine died. The brother of another high school classmate of mine died. The girlfriend of my former boss died.

Magda: Yeah, I mean, I knew people who died too, but they weren't like friend friends.

Doug: Right, but actually there are more people that you and I know who would very likely have died if they had gone to work that day.

Magda: Yes.

Doug: Remember?

Magda: Absolutely. Absolutely. I had a number of... 

Doug: Roosevelt the opera singer?

Magda: Yes. There were a lot of people who weren't there that day. Yeah, I completely get that because I felt like about five years out from it, there was a huge gap between the people who lived in New York City Metro and DC Metro, and everyone else. Because we were in those two areas still dealing with the physical fallout and how close we had been to it and the fact that it had really impacted everything about those areas, whereas everybody else, you know, they could remember where they were when they heard about it, but it just wasn't physical for them the way it was for us. And I'm imagining that now that gap is less as people have come into those cities and left those cities and gone other places. But so now the gap really is between the people who lost people and the people who didn't lose people. 

Doug: But people like us, also, who just spent so many months in the city afterward, I mean, when I did finally go back to work, they used to bus us out to another office out on Route 3, and we could look back at the skyline and watch it smolder still. I mean, this was November.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And then we got back to my office, which was right there, you know, 10 blocks north of Ground Zero, and the offloading point to Staten Island, because essentially what they were doing as they were clearing debris. They would load the trucks up, bring them up the West Side Highway, right to where my office was, and that's where the offload point was to the scows that brought the scrap metal and everything else out to the landfill in Staten Island. So I would spend all day listening to debris being offloaded, you know, scraped and dumped into a scow right below my office. It was really jarring.

And that's what sticks with me. The fact that it just, it was a months long process, A, to understand what had happened, but B, to watch us slowly, slowly, slowly build back to some semblance of normal again, which still hasn't happened. I don't know.

Magda: My friend Jamie (Fiore Higgins) published a memoir. You and I spend a lot of time talking about memoirs, I think, both recording and not recording. Anyway, Jamie published a memoir last year, the year before, maybe. It was called Bully Market, and it was about her time being a managing director at Goldman Sachs and like one of the only women and, you know, just what a shitshow that place is.

Doug: That's a story. That's a total story.

Magda: Oh my God, it's a real story. Like I would highly recommend if you want to read a really traumatizing memoir, read her book.

Doug: You know, I live for traumatizing memoirs.

Magda: Yeah, you know, she started working there right out of college in, I think, like ‘98. And so she was working there and living in New Jersey when 9-11 happened. And there's this whole section of the memoir. It's like, you know, all the excitement and the gaslighting and all this crazy stuff of her early days at Goldman and then like, you know, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And then suddenly 9-11 happens. And there really is like a hole in the memoir where you can feel her just like freefalling emotionally. And she's so traumatized by it for so many months. And it's really hard for her to go back into the city and all this kind of stuff. And just reading it, I was like, yeah, I bet people who didn't live in New York City Metro are thinking, wow, this must have been exaggerated. But when I was reading it, I was just like, yeah, I completely get this. She was writing about it so viscerally that I just cried through reading that whole section because it was so realistic.

Doug: See, and that's what I think the traumatic memoir serves in our lives right now, because we need to share our collective grief over whatever we're going through, because everyone's grieving something.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: That's why I mentioned this in the Friday Flames, this memoir I just read in one sitting, which is Rob Delaney's memoir, A Heart That Works, about when his third son was diagnosed with a colossal brain tumor, and eventually died.

Magda: Wow.

Doug: And since he's a comedian, he just comes at you very blunt, very cathartically raw about, you know, he wants to look at strangers and say, “Don't ask me how I am, okay? My two-year-old was just carted away in a rubber bag by strangers and burned.”

Magda: Oh my God.

Doug: You know what I mean? He just has that, I want you to know and understand what I went through. And I'm so angry because I feel so isolated in my grief. It's just me and my life. Because when you're in that space, all you can think about is how you're processing your own trauma. Irrespective of whatever other traumas people are going through.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And I really think anybody who's grieving anything and is going through that stage of grief, that anger, needs to read that book just because you will empathize with how frustrated you feel, with how impotent you feel, and how resentful you feel that this happened to you and somebody else has all their children healthy and intact and you just get overwhelmed by this comparison and and an anger that overtakes your overall mood all the time. He says he got really into horror films. I mean, when things go terrible, he would exult in them just because the anguish they were going through mirrored his own.

Magda: Right.

Doug: So, I hear you on that. I think they're going to see a lot of memoirs coming out of here because anybody who wants to relive something like that and wants to share what their experience was And not necessarily how they even got out of it, more about how they just process and how they made it a part of their new normal, because that's also the common thing, right? You know, you don't really get over grief, you just kind of take it on and make it part of your new daily daily. So I recommend that. I haven't gone through anything close to what he's been through, but he says it's made him a better father, a better partner, because he's got four boys. It's a staggering story. It's a brief one, but it definitely, it serves a particular purpose, I think, if you are in that particular angry mood. By the way, now I'm getting... I'm getting... 

Magda: Yeah, well, it's like somebody weed-whacking or doing some shit, like, literally right under the window.

Doug: Man, you weren't kidding. Fucking terrible.

Magda: Oh my God. It's just insane.

Doug: The encroaching weed whackers.

Magda: It's completely fucking nuts. So, well, okay, I'm going to mention one more memoir before we shut this down. I run a memoir book club for my college alumni association. And, I mean, it's not official, but whatever. And today we're reading... 

Doug: It's on the DL.

Magda: It's on the DL. Today we're reading Ellis Avery's really really beautiful memoir of what it was like living in New York City during 9-11.

It's called The Smoke Week. And I mean, she was a writer and a novelist.

And she just kept a diary during her whole adult life. And so like a year after the dust had settled, literally, she just sort of put together this memoir from her diary of those 10 days, from September 11 through September 21, and published it as a memoir. And it's just beautiful.

It's quiet, and it's sweet, and it's anguished, and it's confused, and it's clear, and it's, you know, it's everything. So I think if there's anybody who's thinking, I just want to read something that makes me feel really human, The Smoke Week by Ellis Avery. And she wrote another memoir later about her experience with cancer that she just couldn't get on top of. And she did end up dying about six years ago of cancer.

Doug: Do you think the cancer she got was from all that smoke?

Magda: I do not know. I don't know. It might have been.

Doug: Did she live nearby?

Magda: Yeah, she and her girlfriend at the time and then wife lived right, oh, crap, I'm trying to think of where, like right by the the cube that turned.

Doug: 140 Broadway. I worked in that building!

Magda: Well, they didn't live in that building.

Doug: But still, though, that is right on top of Ground Zero. Holy crap.

Magda: Well, right by Astor Place, right? No, no, no, Astor Place, like up the cube by NYU.

Doug: Oh! I hate when I confuse my rotating cubes.

Magda: Yeah, no.

Doug: So that's why I chose to move here, frankly, because Ann Arbor also has a rotating cube, but I really don't feel at home unless I can go visit a rotating cube. Rotating cube, yeah. That's still...close. So that's far that's closer to Ground Zero than we were.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: So I guess it would make sense that a topic today would discuss memoirs and processing grief and processing anger and figuring out what to do with them because they really don't go away.

Magda: Right, exactly. And there isn't anything to be done about it. I think that was part of what was so horrifying about the actual day and like maybe the first 10 to 15 years afterwards, I just always sort of felt like there was something to be done about it on 9-11. And now it's like, well, there wasn't anything to be done about it. Do you remember when I had that weird doctor that only took cash up in Inwood? I called him Dr. Yoda.

Doug: There were a lot of weird people who only took cash up in Inwood.

Magda: I got that strep throat and like could not make it downtown to see my regular doctor and my friend Jeannie told me that there was a guy who only took cash and Medicaid, who was like two blocks from my house and I practically crawled there because I felt so bad.

Doug: Seems legit.

Magda: Right, and he came out and saw me and he, I don't know, he was somewhere between 80 and 150 years old. And I nicknamed him Dr. Yoda because he looked like if you had taken Yoda and had stretched him, he was like six feet tall. But he just had this kind of elderly Yoda look and he was very wise. And I came in and I had this sore throat and he just... 

Doug: And he said, “Sore your throat is.”

Magda: Well, what he said was, “That's a lot of pus!” And then he prescribed me prednisone and old school penicillin and I got better, right? Well, so one time I was in there for some medical concern that I was going to pay cash to have solved with $2 worth of old-timey medicine. And it happened to be Pearl Harbor Day. And he started telling me where he had been on Pearl Harbor Day and what he remembered about it. So then, you know, later I was trying to do the math and figure out exactly how old he was. He was well past retirement age. Let's just say that. But I think, you know, it was very interesting to hear his perspective. He had been, I think, a teenager at the time and had been just like out on the street, you know, doing teenage boy things.

Doug: Where? Where was he?

Magda: He was in New York City. I think he was probably in the same neighborhood, probably in Inwood. And, you know, like nobody knew what to think. What did you think, right? You didn't know. And they thought they were going to be attacked next in New York City. And like, you know, they didn't have any way of putting it into perspective at all at the time. And that was part of what we talked about was that he had no idea what was going on.

Doug: No live images. No up-to-date hot take commentary.

Magda: Yeah. And what he said was, “I still don't really know what to think about it.” And I think that that's... I still don't really know what to think about 9-11. You know, maybe when I'm 85 or 90 and working well past my prime, although he was providing a valued service to the cash-paying people with illnesses in that neighborhood, right?

Doug: Yeah, he probably wasn't sketchy. He just knew how shitty our health care system is.

Magda: No, he wasn't sketchy at all. He had an office space that he was probably still paying the same amount of money that he had been paying for when he started in it in like 1965 or something, right? And you would just come in, and you'd put your name on the list, and you'd wait there, and he would see people in the order that they came in, and if you didn't have Medicaid, you would pay him $35 cash. I might have tried to write a check one time, and they were like, no, we can't take a check. We'll just take cash. But...

Doug: They're off the grid.

Magda: Yeah, exactly. And then he would just, like, I don't even know if he had a nurse. He just had some lady working at the desk who would call you “honey.”

Doug: That's also why you were so at home in Detroit, because you are the queen of “I know a guy who knows a guy.”

Magda: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I really am the queen of “I know a guy.”

Doug: How are you adjusting to life where you have to go through normal channels to get things done?

Magda: Not so well, so far. Like, I don't know any guys yet.

Doug: Well, that's the plan, right? Those three years are gonna be spent finding a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who will take care of the fixed stuff.

Magda: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.