Daniel Nester Remembers Our Hang With Paul McCartney & George Plimpton–The Night Before 9/11

Poet Daniel Nester just posted this poignant piece in the Times Union remembering what it felt like the night before 9/11… and after.

“Keep the Memory Alive”: An Account from Nine Years Ago
by Daniel Nester

On the evening of September 1o, 2001, I went to a party to honor former poet laureate Billy Collins. It took place at the late George Plmpton’s house, which also housed the offices of the Paris Review.

Paris Review parties are famous in literary circles: for the writers who go there, the booze, the pool table, and the beautiful women. I went with my friend Ross, a poet who is now is a vice-president at MTV.

Before we even got inside the Upper East Side townhouse, as we walked from our subway stop, we saw a limo pull right up to the house. No big deal, we thought; limos are a common sight in Manhattan.

And then I heard a familiar voice.

It was Paul McCartney. You know, of Wings and the Beatles fame. No Wikipedia link needed there.

There was no getting around it: we would have to arrive at the party at the same time as Macca and his then-wife Heather Mills.

“Which doorbell should we ring?” Paul asked nobody in particular.

“I’m sure any one would work, Mr. McCartney,” I said. I deliberated over working in a reference to his song “Let ‘Em In” but I couldn’t think that fast.

We were in the minority as unknowns. As I walked around the pool table, I saw my old teachers and famous novelists, and then Plimpton himself.

I drank too much. I tried to get people to put down bets on a a couple of shots of pool, which I recall as being obnoxious. The beautiful ladies turned out to be mostly Columbia graduate students in basic black dresses, which I suppose elderly men regard as beautiful. I saw it as kind of sad or bizarre.

I remember treating myself to a cab ride home to Brooklyn. I had just partied with famous people, after all; why should I stoop to taking public transportation after that? I had made it into the secret kingdom! Never mind that I had this feeling after a lot of other gatherings, where it seemed just by Being Somewhere Important I had become important myself. This one felt different.

I slept in the next morning, since I wasn’t teaching and I didn’t have any freelance work. My wife slept in, too. We were going to get some brunch. It was as crisp and as blue as it is this morning in Delmar, NY.

Then we heard this huge thud. It sounded like a dumpster had fallen from a truck, or maybe gunfire.

We kept on sleeping, but we got up, made coffee, and turned on NPR.

The news seemed more urgent than usual, and when I focused on what they were saying, we walked outside our apartment building and looked toward Manhattan.

We had a diagonal view of World Trade, and could see the smoke coming out of the side of one tower. I don’t remember worrying that much, at least at first. That was before I put on the TV and watching what happened on the ground. I heard one of the Towers fall at once through our living room window and, through a slight delay, the Today Show’s broadcast.

The whole day consisted of looking at the TV reports, then walking outside to see what was happening. By afternoon, I spotted some dust-covered neighbors tread down Fourth Avenue on their way home.

At some point my hands had started to shake. I think it was when a newscaster said there were other planes in the air that were unaccounted for.

Life gradually went back to some version of normal in the weeks to come. At the college where I used to work, there was a teach-in that seemed way too peace dove-ish to me at that time.

“We should ask ourselves how were were complicit in this happening?” one old timer asked. Another suggested the need to “problematize” something-or-other.

I didn’t want to hear any of it. I wanted to kick ass and take names. I’m a pretty liberal guy, and so it didn’t go unnoticed by my wife and others how, for a brief time, I had turned into an Alexander Haig-in-training. It reminded me of how my father tried to re-enlist in the Navy during the Iran hostage crisis.

“We’d rather take a nun than you, as old as you are,” the recruiter told him. I calmed down as the years went on, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had shifted.

There was always the smell from downtown. People guess what the smell was–buildings, septic tanks, mold. But we all knew what it was.

A couple months later, Paul McCartney played Madison Square Garden for The Concert for New York City. He had been on the airport runway that morning, and saw the whole thing, too. He played this song, “Freedom,” which I wouldn’t mind never hearing again.

The best song that night, hands down, was Billy Joel doing “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Down on Broadway,” which I used to sing along to in my bedroom in New Jersey and seemed to sum up the whole tragic and absurd and only-in-New York events that had transpired in the months.

“I am not an American,” I used to hear people say at parties. “I am a New Yorker.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel that way sometimes during my New York City years, especially after going to a fancy party and meeting famous people. You can get caught up in the whole experience. I would also be lying if I said September 11, 2001 didn’t mark a crack-up in how I see the world. I wonder what New Yorker could.

My evenings are filled with less famous people, which is just fine by me. Still, I like to take Billy Joel’s advice from the song, about how people who survive, no matter how they feel about it, no matter how much they change over the years, need to “keep the memory alive.


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