I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life

By JOSH FOX

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

Inside the WTC

Flashback: For about two years I worked for a landscaping company called Mornhurst Gardens. We used to do plant maintenance and installation on the 22nd, 44rd and 61st floors of the World Trade Center. All those plants and flowers that I used to take care of are now dead. Perhaps some of the people that I used to see on those floors are now dead as well. My watering can destroyed, burned or crushed. The sink that I used to hide it under also gone. I can remember walking by some really amazing art on the walls of the offices up there. Warhols and De Koonings and Miros and De Chirico sketches. Thinking, fucking corporate world man, what the fuck are these pieces of art doing here? Nobody has looked at them in ages, I'm sure. I wonder if the people working here even know what this stuff is. I wonder. I wish I could just stand here, in my landscaping clothes, with dirt on my boots and under my fingernails and look at these amazing pictures. But then of course, Keith, huge hulking Keith who could rip a ten foot ficus tree out of the ground with one hand, would just keep walking, yell at me for stopping along the halls of this place while we had deliveries to make.

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 I haul this gorgeous mass cane down to somebody's office and the receptionist on 43 flags me down. "Are you the flower guy?" she says. "Yeah." She's got a four-foot potted Douglas fir that looks really bored with her. She says, "I don't like this plant, I want a new one." "What's wrong with it?" I ask. Knowing full well that what's wrong with it is her. She says, "It's boring. I want something with big leaves or with flowers." Shit. Middle of the day. I guess that means that this Douglas fir is going in the garbage. That's what happens to office plants that receptionists or interior decorators or administrative assistants or account managers or whatever the fuck they are get tired of. Into the trash. Or home with me if it was close to the end of the day or I was lucky enough to have the truck with me to take these things home.

Look — I'm sure she was a wonderful person, deep down. But it was that kind of atmosphere in there. Office buildings suck. Isn't that a universal truth? Is there any other kind of building you'd want less to be in? A prison maybe. A morgue. Sometimes an office building is both. A holding tank for the soul.

I heard that you can tell how depressed a person is by how depressed you feel when you walk away from them after talking to them. I think that's true.

When are the times when we really appreciate life? When are the times when we can actually see how amazingly beautiful a flower is? Why not every day?

The outside of it was what I liked. What I felt as a New Yorker, that I owned. . . . My WTC restoration plan is just to build the outside of them over again. Leave the insides hollow.

On good days I'd ride around the back of the flower truck and smoke cigarettes and talk to the plants. On bad days we were stuck inside office buildings all day.

They used to put tropical plants on air conditioning vents at such and such stocks, bonds and sheer evil company. Then they would wonder why they were dying as they shouted sell sell sell into the phone lines. I guess I could go on and on for days about how I felt that the inside of the World Trade Center was god awful. (I have a bad fear of heights, too.) I hated going there. The outside of it was what I liked. What I felt as a New Yorker, that I owned. That was a part of me forever. The goddamn outside. The shape. God I love that shape. I hope they never take it off all of the signs and emblems and things: !! That Shape: !! It was so fucking great. Like the two hugest exclamation points in the universe, marking the south end of the biggest exclamation point there is. Fucking brilliant fucking simplicity. SO ugly. So perfect.

My WTC restoration plan is just to build the outside of them over again. Leave the insides hollow.

"Why is it so beautiful?"

We're standing on Church Street at dawn on the 13th and the sun shines through the street and hits the twisted steel remains of the facade of one of the twins. It lit up like it was gold on fire. Like a series of twisted lighting bolts. Connie pulled off her dust mask, burst into tears and said, "Why is it so beautiful? Why is everything so beautiful?" We were all thinking that. It was undeniable. There was something so incredibly striking about it. It was beautiful because we were really there. We were alive.

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. I been bored. Real real bored. Real real bored. I don't think I'll ever be bored again.

The city looks completely different now. Every street. Every building. Everything in the city is totally different. Every corner, every person. There is no mistaking it. We're different. We are different. We have to work with what's here, there is no other choice.

Why can't I be you? Why can't you be me? Why can't I remember my dreams?

In a way, I hope that "The Bomb" is the most difficult play I will ever make. I would love my work to be fanciful, full of uncontained joy and irrelevant happiness.

But on the morning of 9/12, when it began to sink in, I had the selfish thought that all of my past work, every other production that I had ever made was now irrelevant. Dated. Pass�. Over. Full of structures of meaning that no longer held sway. The only thing we had left to work on was "The Bomb."

I was kinda surprised at the non-reactions of most theaters in the six months that followed. I kind of expected the theater world to completely change their schedules. You know, tear out the whole front page and react, immediately. To me, theater is immediate. It is about the present moment or it is a kind of failure in motion. If it's not about now, then don't do it. There's too much "entertainment" out there anyway.

Do I feel responsible? Yes of course I do. Not personally, but I feel a sense of a world that I am responsible to. That I feel that I must work with and change and spread love. Honestly, shouldn't that be any theater director's mission, to spread love and reveal the love at the center of humanity?

I think so.

But the more the week went on, the more the anger came. It came in so many forms. It came from all directions.

	"It isn't hard to figure out that there's some people in the world that want you dead. Not you personally of course. It's not personal. But it isn't hard to figure out. And it isn't hard to see why either. It's pretty easy to see why. Its pretty easy to see. You just gotta look."
	— From "The Bomb"

The irony of this all never escapes me. It fills up a hot air balloon that lives inside my brain. The greater the irony expands the more my head feels like it's about to explode. There are alot of people who feel the way that I do, people who refuse to give in to the rage and the bloodlust. The American media seems to want to pop a pin into my head and empty out all of the contradictions, ease the war inside of me, let me sleep let me breathe, let me bomb those bastards and let go of the tension. Its a great fantasy, that there are people in the world that are ok to kill. We all live with that. We are conditioned to it. The Average American has seen 30,000 situations resolved by violence by the age of fifteen. It's a release that we are accustomed to. Blow things up, roll the credits, go home.

Not so fast, New York.

So I really want to scream. I want to stand in the theater and yell fire. "Chickens come home to roost," said Aaron, in a hushed tone, at first, on the morning of September 13, 2001. Then, four days later, as the war machine kicked into high gear, he was screaming it.

We delivered a cartload of food and water to the Lower East Side Fire Station on Pitt Street just South of the Williamsburg Bridge. There were no cars anywhere, there was no noise. There were also hardly any firemen left in the station to recieve the food. They told us to give it to the homeless, that they had enough. They said, just go down there, go down there, see who needs it. I have never seen such faces of grief in my life, as those huge heroic figures, standing in the mouths of the fire stations, staring off into space. They, like the citizens of Hiroshima, never knew what hit them. They, like the citizens of Japan during World War II, citizens of a nation perpetually at war, perpetually being misled about the terms of that war, were left to pick up the pieces.

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SEPTEMBER 11, 2002
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