I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life

By JOSH FOX

(Part 2. Jump to part 1, 3, 4)

The part that was not about sex

But that is for later in this piece, not now. This part of this is about "The Bomb," the production, because it is what makes me relevant to most of you reading this anyway. "The Bomb" was mostly about sex in the summer of 2001. It was just where we were at. Sex and challenging monogamy and the ways in which the fundamental structures of "relationships" as models for love and all that, are inadequate for today, or at least, incomplete or need a new kind of vocabulary or creativity or whatever. We did a lot of weird exploring about that, involving big parties with blindfolded kissing booths and getting all naked and smearing ourselves with clay from stream beds (not at the same time, of course). Crazy shit like that. Not planned. Just that kind of spontaneous, uh oh we went over the edge again, we crossed the fucking line again, you know the one, that line between professionalism and love-cult. Oops. Shit. We crossed the line again, but it's cool . . . it's cool, we're all cool. Bob, don't pull your pants down in rehearsal today, okay? For a change. That line. You know that one, don't you? Yipes.

Josh Fox is director of the International WOW Company in the United States. The company's productions include "HyperReal America" and "The Bomb," a play that was in development at the time of the World Trade Center bombing, about the history of manmade terror.
Official site

New York since Sept. 11

Artists take a look at the city since the World Trade Center attack:

• Josh Fox: I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life (jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4)

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So what happened, gloriously over the course of the three-week workshop process of "The Bomb," was that all thirty or so participants kinda fell in love with each other. It is a fantastic experience, to fall in love with a huge group of people like that. I highly recommend it. I think that any group of thirty people over a beautiful summer, working hard on how to express what they believe, I mean emotionally believe in the deepest most contradictory parts of themselves, and without money really involved at any level, will fall in love. Love is really at the center of all honesty. I really believe that. Do you?

But it was the last half of the summer presentation, that part that was not about sex, the nuclear part, which ended up haunting us all, and it became the basis of the production that went up post-9/11.

Back to 9/11. Tuesday was the day after our day off at camp WOW. We had Mondays off, Mondays the space was silent. Mondays Aya and I tried to go to the movies or the Beach or Atlantic City. So Tuesday was like the day when everybody was due back in all of their craziness. So the immediate thing was to find out that everybody was ok. I spent most of the day on-line keeping a list of all who checked in. After eight or so extremely panicked hours, everybody was ok. The whole summer program, the whole extended family of International WOW. I have the something like one hundred e-mails and instant messages that I got on that day. It was like calling your boyfriend or girlfriend to see if they were alive about 60 times. Everybody was fine. Was this some kind of miracle? Kinda. We had three people who sometimes temped at the WTC who didn't get any work that day.

"Josh, they blew up my job. I hated that job but I didn't want them to blow it up. Although, I can't say I haven't thought about it."

In fact, I used to work at the WTC. On and off as one of the myriad interior gardeners or landscape contractors in the building. I have written in a pad at home, instructions about how to take care of over 25 species of plants on the 44th, 22nd and 61st floors. I used to have to go there starting at 8 a.m. I coulda been there. Thanks to the Levi's corporation (re-arranged spells evils, yes I know, sweat shops and globalization, bad, BAD, but they needed a banjo guy) who put me in a big national commercial and bought me out of my fucking support job for the summer (eight thousand dollars for four hours work, if you don't count the painstaking hours of banjo practice). So I hadn't been anywhere near the WTC for a good four months.

And there was Patrick McCaffrey, the brilliant actor who played slugger Rusty James in "The Bomb," who worked directly under the building. But he worked the graveyard and went home that morning at 8 a.m. When I finally got him on the phone he said, "Josh, they blew up my job. I hated that job but I didn't want them to blow it up. Although, I can't say I haven't thought about it." We used that line in the play. Let's face it, most of us living in New York City want to blow up our jobs at one point or another. Until somebody else does.

America the beautiful my ass. America the race to see who goes postal first. The Grand Canyon is beautiful, the Grand Tetons and the Great Plains are unspeakably beautiful, the Appalachians are amazing. The uninterrupted American continent is the most incredible sacred fantastic mind-blowing spectacular place on earth. But we interrupt it over and over with Walmarts and McDonalds and I've recently heard about a merger of Starbucks and Blockbuster that they are going to market as Starcocks Busterfucks. At least that's what I read in Ad Buster.

Pause for station identification:
This is not about that either, not about ugliness. This is about love. Because that is what I truly want to remember. The biggest love I ever felt in my entire life. Before the TVs came back on, before George Bush surfaced from his Air Force One steeplechase to once again murder the English language with extemporaneous ramblings about evil (now there is a bad actor), before the constant vicious warmongering chant that came over what airwaves we had left, (no cable, not yet not in that part of Brooklyn) before the cut-out American flags provided by Sony and the suspension of habeas corpus, before IT, the overwhelming force, started again, there was nothing but love that I could feel. I mean, we are all brothers and sisters. And that day, the first of its kind perhaps ever in Manhattan that I ever experienced, we were all brothers and sisters. You could not look in a person's eye and not share their crying. It was thick in the air like a steam bath. It was the truth of how we can love one and other. One and all. Way beneath all of the screaming and the pain and the rage, or perhaps, on top of it, smothering it, holding it, was this tremendous support. 25 million people with their hearts in their eyes. I think that any group of 25 million people, working hard to express what they believe in, I mean really truly believe in their hearts, without money involved at any level, will fall in love. I honestly believe that.

Yes, there was looting. That is true. The cops told us at ground zero, at dawn on the 13th, that there were people dressing up as construction workers and looting the stores. Yeah, that's true. But so? It was a widely suppressed fact, that people were looting. It's still not part of the history. Yes, people looted. People bought water at the fucking supermarket, too. Big jugs of water. You know the kind that is supposed to flow down the river and you can drink it? But let me backtrack again first.

The further down we got the weirder everything looked, smelled and sounded

The Summer Bomb. The last 30 minutes of our workshop production, which went up on August 26th, for one night for an audience of about forty, in the former burrito factory near the navy yard we call home, was a trip to a kind of future horror. A sort of Post-Nuclear Pandora's Box. There were scores of people in gas and dust masks, and a long long silent segment (which most people hated) of a post-apocalyptic or pre-historic tribe, choose your own adventure, of people covered head to foot in white dusty clay.

From "The Bomb"

It was freaky. There's no other word for it. I mean, "The Bomb" traces history's big I-told-you-so's from Hiroshima to Afghanistan. But it was as if the images we were using got sucked out of our studio and onto the streets of Manhattan two weeks later. The post nuclear clay tribe looked just like the dusty figures from the WTC. So we used it in the piece six months later. We used the dust masks too. We handed them out downtown to relief workers who had none on 9/12 and 9/13. I guess they were waiting for Home Depot to get their shit together and DONATE something.

So we were lucky, to have no one in our immediate family down there, incredibly lucky. Luckier still when Aaron called and said that his cousin had set up an immediate food donation and delivery center in the West Village and they needed volunteers. Everybody in the city wanted to volunteer. Everybody in the city wanted to give blood. Everybody in the city wanted to get down there and help somehow. Except for, perhaps, the looters.

But there was no more blood needed. There was not that much to do, for an average non-construction worker. There was a lot of sitting around watching the TV. But we were all night people and Aaron called at night. So at 11 p.m. on the 12th a bunch of us got on the F train and went downtown. It was like we had never rode the F train ever before. We got out at West 4th and everything, everything was different. Sixth Ave was lined with bulldozers and trucks and jeeps. There were little or no people at all. There were no cars. There was no music. The air was acrid and thick with dust and there were papers blowing around the streets even that far up. It felt like the surface of the moon. We got hand trucks and we walked around the streets of lower Manhattan, giving out water, coffee from Bereket, and sandwiches and slices donated from Joe's Pizza. International WOW Company turned into the volunteer food distribution for the Church of Our Lady of Pompeii. We had to keep working, we had to keep moving along streets filled with toxic dust and ash. We had banners on our carts that said Pompeii. The cops let us through the barriers. They knew us as the Church of Pompeii.

The further down we got the weirder everything looked, smelled and sounded. The fire was still burning. We couldn't hear each other or really speak because we were wearing the respirators we had bought as props. The air looked like television snow. We waded through ankle high ash that had the consistency of cottage cheese. We threw two liters of Pepsi onto the backs of flatbed trucks. We talked to a lot of people.

Everyone wanted to talk. Everyone wanted water. We handed stuff to people, that was important. To put the bottles of water into their hands. There were supplies everywhere. But it was like you couldn't see anything. We walked up to some cops. They looked up at us and said, "Yeah. Water, that's just what I need." They were too dazed to realize that there was a whole crate of bottled water sitting directly underneath their bench. It was like that.

The whole world downtown had turned grey. Ash covered everything, Then these flowers, one on each car. And I thought, people are amazing. People are amazing. People are amazing.

The cops and the firemen were flush, had more than they needed. The Con Ed and MTA guys had nothing. So we targeted them. The guys underground in blue hard hats. They liked the brie and smoked ham. This was still fuckin lower Manhattan, after all. Relief supplies were duck breast sandwiches and fresh mozzarella. Have you ever had a duck breast sandwich? I never have. There were five thousand of them down there.

We'd make runs, give out everything we had, then go back to Joe's Pizza on 6th and get 20 more pies and go back out. The guys at Joe's worked all night, for free, making pies and sending them down with us. Everybody wanted pizza. Fruit was good. When we'd run out we'd walk into the smashed up McDonalds near ground zero where somebody'd left like a truckload of soda and give that out on the way back. On the way back we were met with the cheering squad. All night long there were people on the corner of Sixth and Carmine applauding every truck, every car, every volunteer that went by. For a week. When we ran out of the stuff we'd collected, we'd hand out the Salvation Army's stuff for them. Or we'd walk into a deli and say we're on our way down town and 9 times out of 10 they would hand us 40 coffees. I'm telling you, love, nothing but love.

As we were walking down Church Street, I reached into a crushed car where papers from the WTC had gathered among the dust. At the top of what looked like an Internet printout there was a banner ad for Bloomberg.com. It said: "The Rules have changed." The corners of it were burned. The grey ash that we were wading through made the streets totally unrecognizable. No people. No cars. A hum.

Then, I saw it. Someone had placed an incredibly huge orange tulip on the dashboard of a completely smashed grey dust-covered car. Then I see a lily on the dash of another car. Someone had come out with dozens and dozens of flowers and placed them there on all the moon-colored smashed up cars, and walked away. The colors of these flowers where like the brightest, richest colors of anything you ever saw. The whole world downtown had turned grey. Ash covered everything, Then these flowers, one on each car. And I thought, people are amazing. People are amazing. People are amazing.

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SEPTEMBER 11, 2002
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