2 Degrees of Seperation

[JerryHofschneider]

I like to write stuff about cars because, obviously, this is a car site, but an anniversary has come around that is compelling me to write about an experience that is only a brief memory of a car that I once drove, fifteen years ago...the Devil's Isuzu.

I went down from Ocala just before Labor Day in '01, to catch a plane out of Tampa. I was going to New York City.
Along the way, I stopped in Venice, Florida to have a couple beers and a J with my old friend Tom.
He was my mentor when I first began my career in insurance and now he was retired.
A few months earlier, during another visit, Tom said that he had begun buying cars from some of the people around town and was detailing them and selling them from his front yard, something, he said, to keep him busy when he wasn't drinking or fishing. He'd already sold the beige Isuzu Trooper that I'd seen (and driven) on an earlier visit, but was having a tough time moving the Roadmaster and the Mazda.
The Isuzu buyers, he said, were a bunch of foreigners who paid cash and spoke bad English. They lived in an apartment across from the local airport and only opened the door a crack when Tom went by their place to drop off the paperwork. He said that they weren't very friendly...

We had a good visit, then I drove on to Tampa.
In New York, I took a room at the Hotel Pennsylvania and spent about a week exploring the Big City. On the sixth, my last full day in town, I found myself Downtown at an early hour, 9AM, walking past the World Trade Center and I decided to take the Tourist trip up to the top. It was a beautiful cool, clear morning, perfect for sightseeing.

To get to the top, you had to walk up to a second floor mezzanine along a broad ramp that led to the ticket counter, pay the $13.50 tab and queue up for the elevator. The place was crowded with like-minded tourists, and as we waited for the elevator we could look down two floors to the main elevator lobby. It was a sea of people, moving and massing at the elevators. Hundreds of them were swarming around in the spacious lobby, highlighted by the yellow morning sun that had just crested the eastern skyscrapers, grabbing coffee, buying the paper and waiting on their rides up to work.

I spent a couple hours up top, taking photos and marveling at the expansive panorama below.
New York is an amazing place, a city that I have been in love with since I was a kid. I've been there dozens of times, even lived there briefly. My Dad used to have an office in the Trade Center when he worked for the State, but despite visiting the City a lot, I had never been in the buildings.

I was spellbound. I lingered for hours on the outdoor observation area, taking in the City. Finally, after I used up all my film, I left the Tower around noon and commenced roaming around the City, returning to the hotel at dusk.
I have, hanging on my wall, a photo of me taken later that day at Brooklyn Heights, the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan over my right shoulder. The picture was taken by another tourist. I passed her my camera and asked her to be sure to get the Towers in the picture.
The next morning I took a cab to JFK, and as the plane lifted off and banked South I caught a glimpse of the buildings, brilliant silver exclamation points on Manhattan's tip, and I thought that I could see the place where I had stood 24 hours before.

Five mornings passed.
Tom called around 8:30 on a Tuesday, waking me.
"Have you got your TV on?" he asked. "It looks like someone has flown a plane into the World Trade Center. Weren't you just there???"
--Whoa.
I turned on my TV and saw the North Tower belching black smoke,looking like a silver candle-- then watched as the South Tower, where I had been standing 120 hours before, erupt in a huge fireball !!
I was shocked awake. My life changed, irrevocably, at that moment.

Tom and I discussed what we were watching, and like everyone else that morning we were horrified and stunned to see American landmarks being destroyed before our eyes.
I thought back to the hundreds of people whom I'd seen in the elevator lobby just a few days earlier, and got emotional as I considered their fates. It wasn't the last time I would feel that way, that day.

Tom called again a couple days later. He said that the FBI had just left his place.

It seems that the Isuzu that Tom had sold--and that I had driven-- was bought by one of the hijackers, probably Mohamed Atta. One of them ( there were four in Venice at that time) had driven it from Florida, where they all were taking lessons at a Venice flight school, and had dropped it at long term parking at Logan Airport in Boston. They then boarded a flight, jacked it and flew the plane full of passengers and jet fuel into the tallest buildings on Earth.
In the front seat of the Trooper were several flight manuals and some notebooks written in Arabic. On the back end were Florida tags--Sarasota County--and it took the FBI just a few hours after they found it to track it back to Tom's front yard.
I drove their car, one that was sold to them by my friend.
I was two degrees of separation away from the Devil and never knew it until after the Devil had done his dirty work.

Fifteen Septembers have sped by.
Over 3,000 innocent people were slaughtered that day, in NY, DC and in the hijacked plane over Pennsylvania. The ugly Islamic terrorists had come to our shores and destroyed America's complacency forever. The Trade Center disaster spawned wars that we are still trapped in, taking thousands more American lives, young men and women lost in battle.
New York rebuilt Ground Zero and a proud new cluster of buildings have replaced the Twin Towers.

Tom passed away four summers ago, a few weeks before September 11, 2012.

I can't think of the Trade Center horror without thinking of Tom and the Trooper and the Saudi bastards who dumped such sadness and destruction on my City and my country. I am comforted by the knowledge that this weekend marks the fifteenth year those azzholes have been burning in Hell.

Never forget.

[WDRacing]

Damn dude...

2 degrees of separation is pretty accurate. Well written piece.

WD

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Damn. That's a hell of a story. That must be such a weird feeling.

[float_6969]

Thanks for the story. That was a great read.