West Side Blues

The first time I walked on Manhattan’s Pier 54 was August 8, 2009.

I didn’t know it that day, but it was a fateful pier. It was the pier from which the Titanic’s survivors disembarked in 1912, and also the pier which docked the doomed Lusitania in 1915 before it left for Britain and was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

The first item I saw pulled from the water was a backpack. The NYPD officer laid out a T-shirt and I recognized the style from my time living in Germany; it’s European, I thought. The shirt belonged to one of five Italian tourists who died that day, along with four others.

I wasn’t even supposed to work. Barely a month on my first operational squad, I was still the FNG (Fuckin’ New Guy), and as such, it wasn’t proper for me to refuse requests from anyone. Matt asked me to take his Saturday shift, so I dutifully acquiesced. “You’re just on call,” he said. “You can just sit around the office since you don’t have any cases yet.”

Sweet deal. I came into the office on that sunny, cloudless summer morning, grabbed a coffee and a New York Times and headed out to walk Manhattan’s Hudson River Park for my first time. I sat down on a bench in front of the water and had not even made it through my first article when I heard what sounded like an explosion. I looked up just in time to see a tailless helicopter, spinning helplessly among debris, crash into the water, followed closely by an single-engine airplane nosediving straight into the river.

I froze. “Did I just see that,?” I asked myself. The half dozen other people around me seemed to think the same thing. I ran straight back to the office, straining my stubborn calf (and not for the first time on that jogging path) and promptly made a call to the operations center. But by then, as I witnessed from a window, a first responder helicopter had already arrived over the crash site and a diver was entering the water.

“I think I saw a helicopter and airplane collide,” I said, instantly realizing how incredibly stupid it made me sound. They were already aware of it.

It was purely, and pretty clearly, a freak accident. But this was New York City and shit was different here, to say the least. Eight years after 9/11, it might as well have been 9/12. Within the hour, every agency in the Tri-State area converged on either side of the crash site; many seemingly just clamoring for relevancy in the post 9/11 security industry.

It was a long goddamn Saturday. My supervisor, Kristy, who arrived on her bitchin’ Vespa, mouth still numb from her dentist appointment, bailed me out from having to take charge of anything. I simply followed her around, helped comb the shore for debris and made calls to our counterparts in New Jersey. She told me that I did a good job, but I was just a spectator, like everyone else who didn’t dive in the water that day.

By evening, I had personally witnessed NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine give their news briefings from their respective sides of the Hudson River. I clung to the side of a Coast Guard boat and made my way back to Manhattan from Hoboken, New Jersey. When the brackish water mist hit my face as the NYC skyline loomed in front of me, bobbing up and down, I realized… this is the GREATEST fucking job in the world! I wanted to pump my fist in the air like that asshole DiCaprio’s character did on the Titanic, but I thought it was too early in my career to look that stupid in front of my supervisor.

A few years later, I recounted this story to a writer sent to our office by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. He was soliciting anecdotes for plot lines for a TV series that CBS had just green-lighted. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for,” he said. But the show was never made for whatever reason, and probably for the best, because I wanted to throat punch Bruckheimer for fucking up “Pearl Harbor” with that goddamn ridiculous love triangle anyway.

There is a jogging path that runs the length of Manhattan’s entire west side. Eventually, it came to encapsulate my New York experience; fateful, exciting, transformative and utterly unpredictable. Running was my escape; when I got into my own head and became someone else. Like when I was in high school, and I would run laps while wearing my ankle weights around the grass field at the elementary school, and once had a crowd of Hmong kids run alongside me cheering me on like I was Rocky.

When I was running in New York City there were no Hmong kids with me, but I still felt like Rocky.

My route took me from chic Chelsea, down the West Side Highway to Vesey Street, and back up. My turnaround point was a brand new, 44-story skyscraper at 200 West Street, the world headquarters of Goldman Sachs.

There was a sea of self-important looking banker-types that reported to this blackhole of greed each morning. They often crossed my jogging path in a gaggle and I felt 10 feet tall when they stepped out of my way, parting like the fucking Red Sea, pulling their attention from their lattes and iPhones while they stared at me with bemusement as I sliced through them.

My route was only five miles, but I made it count by often running with a weight vest and with detours onto the various piers where I incorporated sprints, Iron Mikes, inclined pushups, and flutter kicks. I guess needed shit brought to me.

And on some days…oh, that shit was broughten.

With the wind sweeping down the Hudson River corridor, the West Side Highway could get really fucking cold. So cold that on some days I would encounter just a handful of other runners and I called them “Nod Days,” because there were so few runners on the jogging path, we were likely to do perhaps the most un-New Yorker thing and acknowledge each other with a simple nod of our head, like we were saying to each other, “Fuck yeah, dude!” “You’re out here, too, you crazy motherfucker”!? Awesome.

Gloves were for pussies, and running without them on most winter mornings meant a predictable cycle of losing feeling from my fingertips up through my wrists, then as I made my way back to the office, rounding the Goldman Sachs building to head North, I gradually regained feeling just before I returned to the office. It was clockwork.

February 9, 2011, was an especially cold morning. As I headed northward back toward the office, my left pinkie wasn’t thawing out. It stayed ice cold, turned yellow and looked as if a rubber band was wrapped around my middle knuckle. In a panic, I sprinted the last mile to the office, trying to get my blood pumping. Forgoing my post-run stretching outside, I ran straight into the elevator, and practically shit myself when I tapped my finger against the stainless steel wall and it made a clinking sound like fucking metal on metal. I went straight to the gym and kicked the treadmill up to 10 miles-an-hour and flailed my arms around like a toddler playing tag.

Circulation soon returned, but my finger swelled to nearly twice its normal size. I showed it to the nurse who promptly sent me to the hospital where the unimpressed doctor sent me home with Tylenol, an article on “frostnip” (the onset of frostbite) and a suggestion to buy some gloves. Later, the narrative I wrote for the workers compensation paperwork was so embarrassing, that I considered just eating the cost. Then I bought gloves.

My colleagues joked about how my weight vest resembled a suicide bomb vest. With its digital camouflage pattern, protruding iPod wires and neatly rowed, elongated pockets holding the two-and-a-half pound cast iron weights, I’ll admit it looked rather menacing. But bitchin’, too.

May 1, 2013 was May Day and, unbeknownst to me, that morning a protest was planned in front of the Goldman Sachs building, across the street from Ground Zero and the still under construction One World Trade Center.

On the back side of the building preparing for the event was a group of about 50 NYPD officers receiving a briefing. Only a few in the back turned around to notice me as I jogged passed them running East on Vesey Street, straight toward perhaps the most secure construction site in the world. I made my left turn Northward, back onto the jogging path away from Ground Zero and passed the crowds beginning to gather in front of the Goldman Sachs building.

Everything was still pretty routine up until about right then. I still imagine what the fuck kind of spectacle must have followed me for the three more blocks I ran until I hit Chambers Street.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed the cop running next to me with a hand on his holster, mouthing something wholly unintelligible under my iPod’s sweet jam of Taylor Swift’s “22.”

As I slowed down I was pushed toward a fence and multiple hands began tugging at my vest, ripping open the velcro pockets and popping out some of the weights. With my arms held out to my sides, I looked at the cop as he was still trying to tell me something, but I dared not reach for my volume control/detonator. They spun me around, and there, in front of a gathering crowd of Stuyvesant High School students, was a panting group of no less than 10 NYPD officers, some holstering their weapons.

With the hesitating uncertainty of a rookie bomb technician unsure of which wire to cut, he pulled out one of my earbuds from my ear, held up one of the weights and asked, “What is this?”

“It’s a weight vest,” I answered.

The realization of what just transpired came slowly over his face and turned into a look of plain annoyance. “I jog this route every day,” I said plaintively between breaths, my voice slightly cracking from the adrenalin. Another officer approached and opened an official looking notebook encased in plastic, intending to document what was likely the craziest fucking stop-and-frisk in NYPD history.

The other officers began to disperse and he asked me my name. I gave him my name and when I added some other details about my profession, all without producing any actual identification which I never carried with me on my runs, he promptly stopped writing, gave me a once-over and simply said, “Alright,” and he closed his notebook and walked away.

Picking up the pieces of my vest, I felt traumatized and somewhat embarrassed by what probably could have been the most ironic (and hilarious, for Al-Qaida members with a sense of humor) NYPD shooting in its history. In Iraq, I was caught in a mortar attack and a sandstorm on different occasions while out running, but I never came this close to dying. It was neither the first nor the last time I was grossly misunderstood by others in my profession, but I’m pretty sure it was the only time the outcome was almost my death in a hail of bullets.

Years later, on October 31, 2017, a very real terrorist would drive a truck on my jogging path and killed eight people before being shot by NYPD officers at this very intersection of Chambers and West Side Highway. Fucking crazy.

Before I left New York in 2014, there was a blizzard that winter. As the snow began to fall and the storm was imminent, news crews staked out spots in front of the Sanitation Pier to get footage of the salt-filled trucks dutifully leaving for their routes. Bundled up in their North Face attire, looking like Ralphy’s little brother in “A Christmas Story,” they stared at me as I ran passed them in my shorts and windbreaker. That was my last Nod Day.

I have a new jogging route now on the West Coast. I’ve traded the Statue of Liberty view for the back parking lot of a Walgreens. Along the Hudson River Park, I used to regularly see Peter Dinklage walking his dog, trying to look inconspicuous while wearing sunglasses and a beanie. On my new path, I recently stopped to observe a flock of sheep that had been temporarily brought in by a local farmer to clear out fields of weeds.

I look over my shoulder now and there is no one chasing me. Here, my conscience and the uncertainty of paths I’ve chosen weigh me down more than my vest does. I long for my old jogging path. I don’t believe there is another quite like it anywhere in the world, and I’ve been around a bit.

Running through suburbia dodging sheep shit; it’s the path I’ve chosen now.

But I’ll always have me some Taylor Swift. So I’ll keep running.