Name dropping and deep hyperlinks.

In August of 2001, I was picked up in some outdated oversized car from a part-time realtor connected with The Rural Connection.  The Rural Connection was/is a real estate company that had a small window front shop on Barrow Street, that advertised farms, houses, and other assorted abodes for unheard of prices, even back then. We are talking $140k for a farm and 40 acres.  I bought my first house - a 400 sq ft wonder built into and on top of a rock ledge way back when - we called it the Rock House - I bought it for $24k, and I bought it with one of those credit card blank checks that used to come in mail.  Randy Florke - model, designer, married to eventual NY Congressman Sean Maloney - was the pied piper broker who painted rural dreams in vibrant colors.

So I was picked up by a gentleman, and he showed some homes and probably hit on me, and I picked one abandoned, partly through a remodel, with a steep short undriveable drive to the home in Cochecton NY.  It was listed at $32k, and was owned by I Have a Dream Foundation based in NYC, having received it as a donation of sorts from someone.

I was living in NYC at the time; this was one month or less before 9/11.  I had zero for money, had just a few months earlier been laid off by the Shooting Gallery, an enterprising independent film company before independent film companies proliferated.  It employed the sons of Henry Kravis and other sons of wealthy families, families whose offspring not only came with ‘film ideas’ but ready cash from family trusts to finance the Shooting Gallery films, including such early winners such as Sling Blade and the earliest and youngest Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count on Me.  Such funds were immediately deployed by the fast-talking co-founder Steve Carlis - you can still find him on the internet long after the high point, still with the same bio picture. His creative partner - Steve was the money and fund-raiser - his creative partner, Larry Meistrich.

Film companies attracted a very strange crowd back then, everyone excited to be in film business, half looking for their break.  CJ Follini’s mom bought his way in to manage the creative commercials division but stuck in ‘facilities’ dealing with primadonnas complaining about being hot or cold.  I worked directly for CJ (and if I had half a brain this could have been a train I followed to the top). Carlis was a master of promising one thing and delivering another. You can do that and get away with in film, since everyone just wants to be close up to it.

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I was dating, or had recently broken up with Mara Buxbaum, a PR agent to the stars, trained under the best, Leslie Dart (this is a guess) and then off on her own with a trifecta partnership at idPR, which was a huge hit. I used to hang with Eddie Burns, Sean Penn, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, and was in the room when Nicole Kidman called our apartment early one Sunday morning in a tizzy about some death or divorce. Michelle Williams was a pet project who credits Ms Buxbaum with both sage career advice and friendship when it counted, especially through the Heath Ledger drug death. I remember being at Al Pacino's NYC pad and asking him what his opening move in a chess game was, as he had a chess board set up prominently.

It's fair to ask how I got caught up in all that and the simple answer is my pure animal magnetism caught a whole host of unsuspecting upper class women in my web of unreadiness. If I had 1/10 the game of Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley I could have really made something of myself

Anyways, back to me!  So, somehow I’m in contract to buy this house at age 31, having visited Sullivan County exactly once.  I had no car, no plan, little in the way of money.  But, unemployed and idle hands are the devil's playthings.

9/11 then happens, and I’m on the 11th floor or something of the new (at the time) Scholastic HQ on Prince Street in SoHo, and had a window framed view of both planes.  Stay in the building, or go to the street? What was safer?

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I got down the site early on 12th. As I got closer I found a yellow Con Ed jumpsuit, throw it on, and explored the area for 6 hours. Sometimes in the bucket line removing debris, other times off on my own climbing stairs in a damaged building that could fall, with all the sirens and alarms of all the buildings around ringing their individual songs. Pre-cell phones - these are camera photographs.

In this picture below, at one of the adjacent buildings, empty, destroyed I came across this scene, which seems similar to the one above - life, interupted, mid-stroke.

But look harder at them- who is drinking beer at 9am the morning of the attacks - No One before the attacks? This was a resting place and retreat of some crew of fireman or police workers or whoever was dowe there breathing that dust moving concrete of 100 story buildings by a 5 gallon bucket through a chain of 100 men. The above, a genial breakfast scene unyet disturbed in their morning routine. Below, at least for a moment, held a crew of men looking out on the unfathomable, after working without pause in the pile. Having a beer, on the house, fraternizing, in a small bunker, beside Ground Zero.

More than once, an alarm would sound and the concrete mountain of men would scramble - the makeshift alarm indicated another building might fall, and we would all run in a slow random direction over the uneven concrete.

I have a lot of memories of that span of time. - August and September, 2001. The tech market crashed, startups collapsing all around, terrorist attacks - all in America's densest city, a ringside seat to history. One memory was auditory - the lack of sirens, even though first responder vehicles from States around showed up to help. Thousands of emergency vehicles, and not a siren. There were no rescues that day.