Go On; or, A Halligan Bar Of One’s Own
Anyone who knows me well enough to say they understand how I think knows “Waiting for Godot” is my favorite piece of writing. This play, allegedly about nothing, is, in fact, about everything: life, death, and how we struggle from one pole to the other. It is also about how two men, faced with oblivion, find comfort in one another, perhaps even a little grace. Their lives are rubble, but they have each other to pull meaning out of it, and they go on. They wait for what may be nothing more than a repeat of the previous day’s misery, but alas, they can pass the time together among the ruins.
I think about the rubble — my own, the world’s, yours, whoever you are — and at times, the enormity of this debris overwhelms me. Somedays, it’s to the point of wanting to curl up in my bathtub and never come out again.
In these moments, though, I see my Uncle Peter, the FDNY’s chief on September the eleventh, who died when the second tower came down two decades ago, resting his bashed helmet on the lip of the tub, still dressed in his battle-scarred turnout coat and shouldering a Halligan bar.
I think he’s waiting for me. I don’t know. He never says anything.
I remember “That Day,” the pixelated horror and the smoke and the running away. I was supposed to be in the area for a job interview but didn’t go because I forgot the time, and when I called, the man on the other end said we would pick up again another time, that “Something” was wrong in Lower Manhattan. That never came to be, and my mother buried her younger brother a few days later.
The following week, I went back into the city for work, and the air smelled like burning rubber and asbestos. And it was quiet. Cars went by, and people milled about, but the silence that swept those streets was near -deafening.
No one said anything.
It felt like the moment I announced in an Irish household that I believed in a free and unified Ireland but not putting a gun to someone’s head to achieve it. The air got sucked out of the kitchen.
No one said anything then, either.
In the aftermath of “That Day,” a girlfriend — the first real purpose-giver and love of my life — evicted me from a four-year relationship with the parting words, “I could never love someone this angry.”
Rubble became an apt metaphor, and it only piled higher as the years went by, as we plunged into two wars that, history has demonstrated, were not valuable, and I forgot my purpose entirely.
I used to think in those days that maybe if one were pushed too far, then excessive force was fine and dandy. I also drank a lot of friends under the table.
After all, this horror was laid at my mother’s feet, and so, too, the rest of our mothers’. Vengeance should be ours.
It happened my own (actual) foot exploded post-surgery in a Bronx recovery room. I ended up in a wheelchair battling a foe — this time, my own body — which did not — and forgive me, mother -give a flying fuck what I thought about the terror it was wreaking on my life. It was hard to be me, to the extent I see that ever as easy, and all of this came crashing down psychically on me. Mostly, I wished death on the doctor who screwed it up and the lawyers who shrugged off my the desire for justice as “frivolous.”
Then, I found myself under the rubble, in the dark and screaming…but not pinned down? I would sit for hours, days, weeks, in that pit, arms folded. Something told me I had a choice in all this, one that others did not, and I was stubbornly avoiding it.
I stayed in the burn ward of New York Hospital in February of 2002. I had burned my foot badly and sat out a chunk of my life. The last firefighters and other 9/11 survivors slowly came out from the same place. My doctor and his team had worked around the clock to repair their bodies. Another of his patients, a little kid with half her face scarred, would often come to my door, peeking in and darting away, giggling. She played this game with me for days. Her suffering, incalculable to me, never seemed to outweigh her joy of coming and going.
I remember the story my mother loves to tell, where I was in a rehab center as an infant learning to walk. I fell at one point, bursting into tears, and the therapist bent to pick me up, but my mother held her back.
“Come on, Mickey. Get up. It’s ok.” She stood there patiently, and, sure enough, I got back to my feet and went on my way.
I’m told that my uncle survived the first tower collapsing, dusted himself off, and told his driver to radio in and order the others to pull the trucks back. This was no longer about putting out a fire. His driver started to run, turned back, and saw my uncle headed to the other tower. I imagine it was because a few hundred boys were still trapped there, and he wouldn’t leave them behind, nor any civilians.
My Uncle Peter went.
Going and tragedy have been dance partners thesepast twenty years. It has caused bitumen to fill up around our lives to where it makes it hard to feel, let alone move. Administrations have come and gone, some espousing hatred for the “other” among us and abroad. In vengeance, citizens repeatedly used firearms against innocent people. The “trusted” media told us to blame broken brains that could never be fixed for the devastation. Financial systems melted down, and the solution was — and still is — to keep the poor hungry while the rich drink themselves stupid. Thousands die, keep on dying, from a plague that has no feelings toward our suffering. It just wants to eat, and, seemingly, it takes its cues from our avarice.
The only conclusion to draw from any of this is to check out, right?
So, we turn the channel.
We’ve learned through our pain to sabotage one another, rob one another of means, dignity, and, worse, life, all because we forgot where we placed our empathy.
There is no church nor country for us, just rubble.
Forgiveness comes hard. I remember having things done to me as a child no child should ever have done to them by supposed friends, and I thought, face to the carpet, “Forgiveness is retarded.” I understood why a kid would want to take a rifle into school and point it at the kids who bothered him. Sadly, I felt that well into adulthood. I could not get higher off the supply of believing my hatred protected me, somehow made me better. Did it keep bullies away? Did it keep her from leaving? Did it keep anyone from dying
Yet, I find myself now in a place where sunlight makes the landscape glow all year round. It’s something you should see, but I know I’m here because I worked out what needed working out and did it because others were there with the line on their shoulders, carrying me to where I needed to go.
I also know forgiving myself for feeling weak and angry and forgiving others for feeling the same has shaped my world. It’s a daily prayer that has no House of God, nor does it need one.
It has nothing to do with starting fires and weaponry and stepping on another’s neck. It’s about always turning toward that fire and dragging as much life out as one can carry to safety. It’s a Halligan bar to break down every door between us.
I’ve struggled to pray that every day since 2001, even as sometimes I forget how it goes. Maybe there aren’t even words.
So, I try to sleep, and it comes in waves, but comedy is what I fall asleep to usually, especially the wisdom of Mr. Dave Chappelle.
He said:
“Oh man, believe me, believe me, I know how that feels. Everyone knows how that feels. But here’s the difference between me and you: You guys hate each other for that, and I don’t hate anybody. I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through. That’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve gotta find a way to live your life. You’ve got to find a way to forgive each other. You’ve got to find a way to find joy in your existence, in spite of that feeling.”
Then, Peter Ganci’s gloved thumb jerks over his shoulder toward my shattered door. Again, he says nothing. He doesn’t have to say anything.
He knows tomorrow is another day.