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The lives of three local residents show how attacks still impinge on daily routines.
By LANE DeGREGORY, THOMAS FRENCH and BRADY DENNIS
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 16, 2001
They didn't know anyone in the twin towers, on the planes, or in the Pentagon. The attacks happened on the other side of the glass screen, far from their corner of Pasco County.
But like everyone else, the poet, the secretary and the monk were changed over the past week.
Inside each of them, the skyline shifted.
He smashes his cigarette on the bottom of his boot, flicks the butt. Reties the blue bandanna around his brow and strides into the classroom at Saint Leo University.
"All right, you young snap weasels!" he barks at his freshman comp class, brandishing its papers. It's Thursday afternoon in east Pasco. "Y'all gave me a bunch of grocery lists and garbage here. Nothing that even looked like a sentence. Your papers were so bad, I got two of my dogs on the disabled list from kicking 'em around last night."
The students laugh nervously, shuffle their notebooks. Professor Mark Edmonds peels off his dirty jean jacket and tosses it on a chair. Pushes up his green sunglasses.
He never takes them off. Not in the classroom, not in the rain, not while he's eating scrambled eggs at the Waffle House on State Road 52. When you look at him, you see yourself.
His friends call him Tiger. He calls himself Scooter Trash. He has long, skinny legs in faded Levis, a brass BMW buckle on his worn leather belt, gray T-shirt with a pack of Winstons in the pocket. His waist-length silver hair is tied into a ponytail. A thick beard and mustache hide his lean, leathery face.
He's 55, divorced twice, no kids. After college he tried to dodge the Vietnam draft. He wound up in the Army anyway, went AWOL to see Woodstock, still has the tickets tacked to his office bulletin board, next to pictures of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac.
He has published one novel, Longrider: A Tale of Just Passin' Through. He's most proud of the miles: more than a million on motorcycles, crisscrossing the country, tracing both coasts. Sleeping under bridges, racing falling stars. Chasing the white lines, on and on.
Teaching gives him summers to ride. He has been at Saint Leo since before his students were born.
"All right, young scholars," he says, his voice a deep, smoky drawl. "We're going to talk compare and contrast here today." He goes to the green chalkboard, scrawls a word.
Tuesday
Beside it, he adds two more.
Pearl Harbor
"Now, y'all been watching TV for three days straight. Tell me what's going on, what you thought when you first saw the disaster."
That gets them going. One boy says he kept waiting for Bruce Willis to jump out of the World Trade Center and save everyone. A young mother talks about wanting to comfort her children, to have them comfort her. "I just wanted to talk to my mom," says a 19-year-old boy from Boston. "When I finally got her on the phone, we both just cried and cried."
Edmonds listens from behind his shades, pouring Cuban coffee from his battered Thermos.
"My immediate thought was, "This is the end of the world.' I was expecting anthrax and all sorts of horrors," he says. "While Armageddon was raging, all I wanted to do was go home and hug my dogs."
Edmonds tells them how he stopped at a feed store the night of the attacks. He bought a 50-pound bag of dog food and two boxes of shotgun shells. He wasn't sure how much ammo it would take to hold off the apocalypse.
"But I had to do something," he says.
After class, Edmonds steers his rusty Ford pickup down the dirt road to his house.
He calls it "The Redoubt," a stronghold within a fortress. It has low ceilings and panelled walls, old couches covered by old sheets so the old dogs can sprawl on them. The mottled skin of a rattlesnake he shot wraps around the living room. He doesn't have cable TV, a VCR or CD player. But hundreds of homemade cassettes fill a bookcase: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, J.J. Cale. In his house, it's 1969.
When Edmonds' last lady moved out more than a decade ago, he rearranged the furniture, propped his two guitars by the window, taped a few more BMW bike prints to the bedroom walls. He hasn't had many folks by since, he says.
"And I don't much like going out."
He's sitting on his sofa smoking a Winston, scratching his black lab, Amtrak, behind his ears. His scuffed brown boots are propped on the coffee table. Outside, the sun is slipping below the fenceposts.
Two years ago, when he took a sabbatical to write and ride, he went 54 days straight without talking to another human being.
Until Tuesday, that kind of isolation seemed okay. "Then I started thinking," he says, flicking the ash off his Winston. "Oh, I got way too much time here to think."
When he's riding, the wind roars in his ears, the engine screams and he can't hear his thoughts.
Here, alone, in the stillness, he can't block them out. Two days after the world exploded, they're pouring out of him. It's dark now. He's still wearing the glasses.
He talks about defending himself, his house, his dogs. About having a beer, which he hasn't done in 25 years. About how people are probably going to get searched at airports now, about how gas prices might go up.
He talks about his life. About dying.
"I've always known I'd die alone," he says. "I just never knew I'd care.
"I didn't understand how big the solitude was. I've never really been lonely ... but still ... "
He snubs out his cigarette, walks slowly to the kitchen, grabs a Coke in a clear glass bottle, comes back.
"I mean, I'm 55 years old. What do I have to show for myself?"
Memories from 40 years on the road, scribbled in the margins of crumpled maps; three wet, dirty dogs; eight unpublished novels and a pile of poems, a small house, a big yard.
"What the hell was I defending?" he asks. He closes his eyes, shakes his head. Amtrak licks his left hand. "If the world did end today, I don't even have anything worth defending."
As he says these things, Edmonds finally takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are brown.
In a hospital 10 minutes down the road from Edmonds' house, Room 5 is ringing on the intercom. At the front desk, Salisha Lackey pushes a button.
"May I help you?"
A voice comes from the speaker, sounding slightly desperate. "Yes. She's throwing up in here."
Lackey sends a nurse, then goes back to her paperwork. She would be tired, but there's no time for that. She would do something for her aching back, but there's no time for that, either.
Only 7:20 a.m., and already this Thursday is extra crazy. The mom in 5 is puking and the one in 3 is laboring with a baby whose heart rate is dropping. Two more women are scheduled this morning for C-sections. Plus, a big storm is out in the gulf, lumbering in this direction.
The phone rings. Lackey picks up.
"Women's Center," she says. "This is Salisha."
It's the nurse on call, wanting to know if she can stay home.
"No," Lackey says, "you gotta come in."
She is a 39-year-old woman in teal scrubs and sneakers, a secretary in the labor and delivery unit at East Pasco Medical Center in Zephyrhills. She's the nerve center of the unit, the one who holds it all together. She answers the phones, logs patient information in the computer, keeps track of all the moms, babies, nurses, midwives, doctors, hospital administrators, company reps and any other surprise guests who stumble up to her station. Occasionally, she also helps care for the patients, which explains why she's wearing the scrubs.
She's small, maybe 5-3, with dark brown eyes, jet black hair that curls to her shoulders, a wicked laugh and a perfectly balanced combination of softness and steel. She can listen to three people talking to her at once, something that happens at least 15 times a day, and remember what each of them said. Everyone around the hospital knows her, just by her voice, because she speaks with a distinctive accent that's half Caribbean, half New York. She was born in Trinidad, in a Muslim family of Indian descent, and her family moved to Long Island when she was 12.
Lackey has been working in health care since she was 17. She started as a nurse's aide at a convent in Amityville, N.Y., helping retired nuns. She would dress them, feed them, brush their hair, rub their backs, read to them. They loved hearing about the saints, she says.
All this time later, she still enjoys taking care of people.
"I guess it's the mom in me," she says.
For the past two days, as the news played out on the TVs in the patients' rooms, Lackey has been crying and praying. She has been mourning for the victims and their families, but also for a piece of her youth. The World Trade Center was the backdrop to her teenage years. Whenever she saw those twin towers, she knew she was home.
Just after 8 a.m., a baby girl is wheeled into the nursery, fresh from the first C-section of the day. A pediatrician examines her; a nurse weighs her, takes her footprints, suctions fluid from her nose and mouth. The girl's father stands beside them, memorizing every detail of his daughter's face.
Her name is Colleen. She is red and tiny. Her body is trembling. She is crying.
Her dad leans over, lets her grip his finger.
"It's okay, everything's okay," he whispers. "Everything is gonna be fantastic. You have no idea."
A few feet away, at the front desk, the phones have stopped long enough for Lackey to sip her coffee -- two creams, four sugars -- and glance at the morning paper. She stands at a table and opens to a list of the dead. She reads over their names, noting their ages.
"Look how young these people are," she tells one of the nurses. "And if you look at some of these names, they're foreign names. It's New York. ... You know there's going to be Islamic people who work there. ... That's what I was telling Steve." Her husband. "I said, "Steve, there's Muslim people in that building, too. They died, too.' "
Lackey was raised Muslim and was taught to speak her prayers in Arabic, but she has also been baptized and now attends a Methodist church. She fasts during the holy month of Ramadan; she goes to service on Easter Sunday. At home, she and Steve, a bank vice president, read from both the Bible and the Koran.
She does not understand what could have been going through the minds of the terrorists.
"How could these men say Allah told them to do this?" she asks.
Now she is anxious for her sons, ages 17, 15 and 12. They're from her first marriage, to another immigrant from Trinidad; all, like her, have dark brown skin. Just yesterday, at Wesley Chapel High School, where her middle son is a sophomore, he heard other students saying horrible things.
"They were making remarks about killing sand n------," says Lackey, shaking her head. She remembers hearing the same slurs when she was in school and the Iranians took hostages from the American Embassy.
What if outrage over Tuesday's attacks gets out of hand? What if something happens to her boys?
In the hall, a nurse is pushing a woman on a hospital bed. It's Colleen's mother. She is headed for recovery, but before she goes, she wants to see her daughter. Inside the nursery, on the other side of the glass, the dad holds up the baby; the mom, still weak from the C-section, manages to lift her head and smile.
This is the moment Lackey has been waiting for. She reaches for the phone and enters a four-digit code. Immediately, Brahms' Lullaby plays over the hospital's public address system. It's a ritual at East Pasco, a way of greeting the baby and congratulating the parents, but also of letting everyone else in the building -- some of them sick, some dying -- know that another life has entered the world.
All day, Lackey talks about the attacks. She talks about the bodies in the rubble, about Osama bin Laden, about how she went to a service the night before with her husband and prayed for the families of the victims and for her own children. Although she was sitting in a church, inside her head she spoke the words in Arabic.
"Allah and God," she says, "are the same."
As the hours go by, she talks about her sons, wondering if they're all right. One by one, they call her, checking in.
"How was school?" she asks her seventh-grader. "Everybody was okay? ... Okay. I love you."
Midway through the afternoon, the woman in 5 -- the one who was throwing up -- goes into transition and begins to push. Over the intercom, Lackey can hear her crying out. A few minutes later, the intercom rings again with another request from a nurse. Now the woman in 5 is screaming.
"They need help," says Lackey, dispatching another nurse.
At 3:21 p.m., the intercom rings again. The screaming has stopped. In its place comes the sound of a baby crying.
A boy.
Lackey reaches for the phone.
"I'm gonna play the Lullaby," she says, and punches in the code.
Light filters through the stained-glass windows where the monks gather for Mass. It is just before noon Thursday at Saint Leo Abbey, not far from the hospital and just across campus from Mark Edmonds' classroom.
Chimes call and the Benedictine brothers pace in slowly, taking their seats in high-back wooden pews. When the music stops, the world inside these walls falls still. The monks sit motionless for five minutes. Then 10.
Brother Patrick Creamer, 86, is in the second row. He is bald with pale blue eyes and glasses. He emits an aura of peace, a sense that he has come to terms with things. He sits stoically in his black hooded robe. Through his mind flows the prayer he has repeated for decades. He calls it his mantra.
"God is in charge, and all is well. All is well in good and bad."
Only the deep, ancient chants break the long silences. The monks fill the air with Psalms five times a day, 365 days a year. Today's scripture, chosen long before Tuesday's attacks, comes from Luke:
"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you ... "
The monks and several visitors form a circle at the altar near the crucifix. A priest breaks bread, lifts a silver chalice.
Creamer walks slowly, pushing his wheeled walker up the handicap ramp to the altar. He is among the last to join the communion circle. He sits while the others stand.
He takes in Christ's body and blood, makes the sign of the cross, lowers his head.
"God is in charge, and all is well."
Only two days ago, he was shouting at God.
Why did you permit this? Why did you let this happen?
"If anything, the silence has gotten greater here," Creamer says after Mass, on his way to the abbey basement for lunch. "It has a different sound to it. We are aware that a mile away people are all upset and disturbed. But we still need silence. It's part of our lifestyle; it's something inside you."
In the buffet line, the monks help themselves to sausage, sauerkraut, rye bread, boiled potatoes and strawberry pie. As they eat, they wonder aloud about the latest news.
One says he heard the terrorists were trained pilots. Another asks if flights have resumed from Tampa. But soon the talk subsides, leaving only the sound of forks scraping plates. The world can intrude here for only so long.
Creamer picks at his portions slowly. He says little, eats less.
After lunch he heads for his room. He shuffles down the corridor, leaning on his black walker, with its handlegrips and basket. He calls it his Cadillac.
He moves through the monks' living room, past recliners and a big screen TV. Shelves of videos line the wall: Boyz in the Hood, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Forrest Gump.
Creamer wheels into his room. The walls are yellow cinderblock; a window faces west. The room has only a blue recliner, a wooden desk, a twin bed, a dorm fridge and a sink. Portraits of Christ, Mary and Pope John Paul II adorn the walls.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family in Manhattan, Creamer was an officer in World War II. He manned a tank in the European Theater. He stepped over bodies on the beach at Normandy.
During the war he carried a camera held together with Scotch tape. He used it to make a photograph of a crucifix standing high above the ruins of a city.
Now the black and white picture hangs over his bed.
"It was a small town in Germany, I don't even remember the name," he says. "But I remember the whole town was totally destroyed, except for that cross."
He joined the merchant marines after the war. On his 40th birthday, friends talked him into going on a weekend retreat to Saint Leo. He hadn't been a churchgoer in years.
When the monks served cognac at lunch, he thought the abbey couldn't be so bad after all. He kept coming back, more for peace than for cognac.
Now, almost 47 years later, he sits in his recliner, talking about the sister and three brothers he has lost, the war buddies long in the ground. He describes headstones at Saint Leo, so many of them etched with names of friends.
"I've lived through a lot of tragedies, had a lot of sadness," he says. "I sometimes feel very alone."
His mind turns to people who lost someone in the attacks.
"Those people will be alone now, too," he says.
And yet he is done shouting at God.
"I have developed great trust in God," he says. "After a while, there's no one else to turn to. Prayer really is our only weapon."
The grotto is Creamer's favorite place at the abbey. A white statue of Christ guards the place, a pale figure in the green of the forest clearing.
It is midafternoon, and Creamer has found a bench under a canopy of Spanish moss from the live oaks. Inside two ivy-covered rock caves, dozens of candles wait to be lighted. Each will flicker with a prayer.
Two people have written notes in remembrance of the terrorism victims and left them at Mary's feet. "Dear Father, may justice prevail, Lord give peace to all the families that are suffering ... "
Creamer sits silently on the bench. Then he talks about the twin towers crumbling and the world that will emerge from their ashes.
"People are saying this will change our world forever, and it will," he says. "But the changes will come gradually. I will not live to see them."
He pauses, leans forward.
"I don't talk about this much, but I think I'm ready to die," he says. "I am totally at peace, even with what happened Tuesday.
"I don't like pain. I don't like sorrow. I think I'd like to go to heaven. I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask God."
- Lane DeGregory reported from Saint Leo University, Thomas French from East Pasco Medical Center and Brady Dennis from Saint Leo Abbey.