September 11th
September the 11th… ten years ago today I went into a Burger King in San
A walkman... my only way of receiving news on 9/11
Francisco and asked for a veggie burger. I was presented with a bun inside which was Iceberg lettuce combined with mayo and nothing else.
“You’ve forgotten the burger,” I told the server.
“No, you ask for veggie burger…” she replied.
I didn’t argue. It had been a long day.
I woke up at about 7am in a hotel room St. Louis Obispo, a strange town between LA and San Francisco. I was on what was to be the last holiday I would ever take with my parents and we were travelling around California. That day we had to travel by coach up to San Francisco. I turned on the radio, which I’d tuned the night before to a punk rock station and the two DJs, two stoner college kids, were talking about something happening at the World Trade Centre. I’d never heard of the Twin Towers. At first I thought this was a building in LA, where we’d just come from. It didn’t seem very serious at first but when we got on the coach the tour guide was crying.
All that day we travelled up the East Coast and I listened to the news on my cassette walkman – picking up, despite the bad reception, that something really bad had happened: a terrorist attack.
Terrorism isn’t totally foreign to me. I grew up near Warrington and not that far from Manchester. I remember sitting, that day, in a café in Monterrey, eating a cheese and avocado sandwich and telling my parents how America had funded the IRA for years so should we really be sympathetic? Of course, at that point I hadn’t seen the footage that I’ve seen hundreds of times since, of the planes hitting the building, the burst of fire, the jumpers, the towers falling, and the dust. But I still can’t get the image of Gerry Adams rattling his collection tin in New York out of my head.
All up the coast everything was shut, local branches of Saks closed because of the terrorist threat. We arrived in San Francisco and the city was in lock-down. Outside our hotel someone had written ‘Wake up’ in chalk on the pavement. All the restaurants were closed, so we had to go to Burger king.
That evening, despite being under-aged, I got drunk in the hotel bar with two US Marines. It felt like the end of the world, fin-de-siècle; it was I suppose.
