On September 11, 2001, as the first tower went down. I was asleep. I was still asleep when the second one crumbled. I was a nightlife columnist for the Village Voice, and I was often out till 3 or 4 in the morning, and the Voice’s work hours were officially from 11 to 7. I didn’t normally wake up until just before 10.

So, on that bright sunny, perfect morning, I got out of bed and went about my business. I had just moved into a tiny studio apartment on Avenue C and East Fifth on the far edges of the East Village (better known as Alphabet City), and didn’t have an Internet connection. At that time, it wasn’t an automatic thing, having Internet at home. And when I checked my phone for text messages, there wasn’t any news about the attacks. I learned later that phone lines were jammed. I didn’t yet have my home phone set up. I had no television.

I remained blissfully unaware until I stepped outside and saw my new superintendent, Carmelo. I asked him about the leaking sink and looked at me like I had three heads. “You don’t know?,” he said, and pointed at the sky behind him, I looked and saw black smoke where the towers would be. And he explained that they were gone. I looked at the sky and back at him and back to the sky and tried to comprehend what he was saying.

Planes had been flown into the towers. Terrorists. “Bin Laden.” I walked the mile to the office, normally a pleasant 20 minute walk down East Fourth Street, and the streets seemed eerily quiet. They had stopped allowing cars and busses to travel north past Canal Street. There were a few people on the streets, and some of them came from the towers, covered in ghostly white dust. It was like being in a zombie movie.

The day was a perfect day. A 78 degrees with no clouds in the sky, no humidity day. An acrid smell, one that would last for weeks, began to permeate the air. It was a smell of fire, of burning flesh, and jet fuel.

A man had parked on the street, the doors to his SUV open, and blasted the radio. George W. Bush’s Texan drawl leaked out. Something about Americans, and getting the “folks” who were responsible. He sounded weak, like we were are all in a Spaghetti Western and not at war. I hated him.

What people don’t understand about Rudy Giuliani was that during that day, when Bush and Cheney were invisible and distant, Giuliani was at the site of destruction. He was there, he was immediately on the television and radio and addressing the city, the country, the world. I had no love for Giuliani; I had already spent two years routinely excoriating his nasty infringements on freedom of speech and personal liberties by his draconian police force and his terrible use of the cabaret law to shut down nightclubs. But I so was grateful for him during those hours. He seemed strong and powerful and effective and reassuring, whereas Bush seemed weak and cowardly and pathetic.

I walked to the Voice’s offices and was one of the few who were there. Many lived in Brooklyn, and couldn’t get to the office. Others, thought it best to stay home. The few photographers and reporters went to the site.

Don Forst, our editor (RIP), was there. In his 60s, he was an old school newspaperman, wore a dress shirt, suspenders and slacks, and arrived at 9 a.m. every morning, which we thought was weird. It was in the office that I finally witnessed the destruction of the towers, on television, where it was being replayed over and over.

That day and the next few days, I became tasked with writing small profiles on the “Missing.” It was a delicate exercise. The hospitals had been set up to take thousands of injured people, but they never came. The city became papered with posters for the “missing” and as I called the families of those who burned in the towers, I knew and they knew, they were not missing. They were just gone. It was heartbreaking.

The cover—changed at the last possible second—was one that some in the newsroom didn’t agree with. It featured a photo of the burning Twin Towers with a piece by Alisa Solomon. The headline read: “The Bastards!”

We weren’t the only paper to use that title and it encapsulated the rage many Americans felt that day.

I only knew one person who perished in 9/11. A security guard who had worked at the Voice had moved to work at the the Twin Towers some time before the attack. I learned later that he had died. But there was a constant, heightened awareness of future attacks. Anthrax scares at the newspapers became routine. I was afraid of the mailboxes in the newsroom. I think we even had a false alarm. For weeks, I dreamt of planes. They weren’t crashing, just falling and swooping, dark clouds of smoke behind them.

The cover of the Village Voice that came a week after the attacks is the cover that I’ll always love and remember. It featured a hand holding up a postcard of the Twin Towers, perfectly positioned over the spot where they should be. Behind the postcard, the smoke from the fires that were still burning billowed out and up into the crisp, blue sky. The headline: “Wish You Were Here.”