Junk Food Nation, I’m not going to review any junk food today.  Instead, on this 10th anniversary of 9/11, I thought I’d tell you a story, my 9/11 story. It’s rather long, so if you’re not interested, totally cool – I’ll see you back here tomorrow for Awkward Mondays. But if you’d like to learn a little more about your friendly neighborhood Junk Food Guy, read on.

9/11 affected everyone differently. Everyone remembers where they were. I am fortunate not to have any loss in my family or friends related to the awful event. But 9/11 affected me in a profound way – it was what led to my discovery of talk radio. Before you stop reading in disgust or disinterest, please understand that talk radio has, since that day, helped me understand people, current events, trends, news, fads – I could probably trace my interest in writing this blog to talk radio. So while it may seem like a very small moment to you, it had a large impact on me.

Growing up in rural upstate New York, I’d never heard of talk radio.  Radio was where music was, where I used to tape the Top 5 at 9 from. I was in the middle of nowhere, upstate NY; there was no internet and I didn’t have the ability to catch any good radio signal outside of a Top 40 station. College was a similar bubble for me – between 1997 and 2001, while I could ramble on about communist oppression in 20th century China, I didn’t know about anything really happening in the country, outside of an election here and there. I didn’t listen to the news or seek out opinions.  I remember at my first college internship, one of my supervisors was listening to Howard Stern, and asked if I liked him.  I’d never heard of him before.

When I graduated from college in 2001, I moved to New York City to take my dream job – a position at Major League Baseball. I was in their Productions department, starting out as a video logger, working down in Chelsea. It was a bottom of the barrel job, and I certainly took it for granted. (In retrospect, it was a great opportunity that I treated poorly. Ah, memories.)

Young and brash, I insisted on living in Manhattan despite making peanuts at my job. I moved into a tiny expensive studio apartment, about 425 sq. ft., on 32nd Street between 5th and Madison with a tiny window and no natural sunlight – in the heart of Koreatown right across from a vegetarian restaurant named Hangawi. Besides being so close to the center of the city, I also lived near so many cool things – a short walk to Times Square, steps from the city’s only White Castle, and most impressively, I was one block from the Empire State Building.  I would get off the Subway and it’d be there, towering over me. Nice.

(Here’s where I make a startling admission: in my current every day work, I am a lawyer. Yes, a lawyer. Don’t judge. And don’t ask me any legal questions.)  

I became a lawyer because I had noticed that everyone at MLB in the higher tiers of management was an attorney. So, I registered for the LSAT and checked out every book from the New York City Public Library that was an LSAT exam book. And because I had some grand notion of REALLY needing to do well on this standardized test, I refused to install any internet in my apartment until after the October test – no web, no porn to distract, no TV, and no telephone.  I had no connection to the outside world except for my tiny old school Verizon-issued cellphone.

And so it was that on 9/11/2011, I got up and hopped the subway, like I always did, to work. When I got into the office, the first plane had already hit the towers. People were scrambling about, but in my naivety and being in a brand new city for only three weeks at this point, I just tried to go about my day. When the second plane hit, people started to really panic. 14th Street was still about a mile away from the Towers, but it was close enough to see from the roof of our building.

Some in my office went to the roof to watch. Some were glued to the TV. Others started to leave and head home. I called my parents, insisting I was ok, but I was scared. I had no one else in the city, and I wasn’t smart enough at that time to head down to my then-girlfriend’s place in New Jersey.  (Looking back, it wouldn’t have made a difference, seeing all those people walking across bridges and the tunnels packed).

By noon, pretty much everyone had left the office, but I stayed…I really had no where to go, no friends in the city to stay with. I was on my own…I hadn’t at that time connected with anyone in the city since I was studying all evenings. Finally my boss came around, surprised I was still there, and told me to leave – they were shutting down.  I somehow grabbed a still-running subway and headed back up to midtown.

When I got off a block from my apartment, the streets were taped off.  The police were guarding the Empire State Building which (I later learned) was just as tall as the Towers and thus was a target in NYPD’s minds.  I was finally able to make it back to my apartment after taking the long way around.  I walked in, sat on my futon, and did nothing. I had no internet, no TV to see what was going on. My girlfriend called upset but understood there was no way for me to get to her, at least for that night.

The only thing I had besides my cellphone was my old clock radio. It was what woke me up in the morning with 80’s music blaring. I never used it for anything else, and while I used to listen to stations in my car in high school, I didn’t have any particular stations memorized.  Panicked, I grabbed it and started spinning the dials. I couldn’t find CNN, news, nothing.  The only station that stood loud and clear that was talking about the event was a talk radio station: 102.7 WNEW-FM.

My clock radio, that I still own to this day.

Ron and Fez, a comedy duo on the radio at that time, discussed the event and tried to keep the atmosphere light. It was the first time I’d ever heard talk radio, and it was the only communication I had with the outside world.  I was too frightened to go outside, and I had horrible visions of the Empire State Building coming down, and that I’d be buried.  So I tethered myself to this talk radio station, too paralyzed to do anything else.

That night I listened to Ron and Fez until they signed off the air at 11pm. Then I listened the next night when they came on the air at 7pm. Then the next night. Then the next night. I enjoyed their banter, and was hooked.

In the weeks that followed 9/11, I learned more about pop culture and news then I ever cared to before – partly fueled by a desire to learn more about the attacks, partly because of this whole new medium I’d stumbled on.  I embarrassingly had, up until that point, only looked at CNN.com when something big happened, and only glanced at the paper to read box scores. Now I heard about current events, about things happening around New York City and the country, about past cultural benchmarks I never knew about – even if it was through the words of two radio hosts poking fun.

Like a kid trying to understand words in a new book, I looked up the references as they spoke so I could understand the jokes they made. I increased my cultural aptitude. I began seeing the world around me a little more clearly, and actively began to break from my bubble. I still listened to Ron and Fez, but then I began to listen to Opie and Anthony, Don and Mike, Jim Rome, and, yes, Howard Stern. After the LSAT was over, I started to watch the CNN, the Daily Show, Meet the Press. I learned about issues I’d never considered before (again, embarrassingly), like gay marriage, police brutality, religious fanaticism, local politics, poverty and mental illness, and much much more.

It marked the first period in my life that I really began to open up to the world. I wanted to know about what was going on before the talk shows hosts had a chance to comment on it, I wanted to find my own exposure to current events. Most of all, I just wanted to keep up.

When I finally left New York to move to DC in the fall of 2002, I was happy to discover that talk radio existed in the Washington Metro area. I avidly listened to the Sports Junkies in addition to what was then Don and Mike and Ron and Fez. For the nine years that followed, I became a very different person – someone more attuned, I’d like to think, with what was going on around him.

We all constantly gain new perspective on a daily basis from our experiences. While I was in NYC during 9/11, I didn’t suffer. This isn’t a story meant to attract/elicit sympathy. No, when I think back to 9/11, all I remember is that scared kid, listening to his clock radio. And from there, my life was different.

Sincerely, Junk Food Guy.