Petula Clark, "Downtown"

I’m feeling pretty raw right now. Raw over the cold-blooded murder of families in their own homes, and the fact that there are human brains out there that can plan, perform, rationalize, and defend these practices as strategy, or policy, or politics by another means. It doesn’t help, either, that half a world away from these events it’s business as usual, and let’s just roll this outrage into the machine of partisan conflict that increasingly has to process every last shred of our shared experience. Keep your eyes on the prize, Americans, or we’ll never get to have these same horrors for ourselves.

Look: I have no insight on what it’s like to live in Israel, or in Gaza. Or for that matter, in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia, or a dozen other countries wracked by armed conflict. That single fact might be enough for a lot of people to tell me I should just shut the hell up. Which is exactly what I’ll do today, on the political questions. But political questions and human questions aren’t the same. In fact, they have as much to do with each other as politics and humanity—i.e., next to nothing, these days. And I think we all have a moral imperative right now to consider the human questions, such as whether and what we can feel for people we’ve never met, and whether and how we can love them.

I’m worried that last paragraph came off as self-important. Or as just too easy for me to say. This is politics back in my head now, a matter of minutes after I ordered it away. Politics never leaves. It only rallies its energies and comes right back to undermine you. From my right now, two all-too-familiar voices are piping up. They heard a rumor that someone on the Internet was trying to practice empathy. You’re a SUCKER, the first one says. No, he’s WOKE, says the second, which is worse. And from my left, an altogether different motion to disqualify: You, sitting there in the professional class in the suburbs of Boston, with all your PRIVILEGE: how DARE you talk about human suffering?

Get behind me, Satan, and damn the torpedoes. I’m going in.

Subject to the caveats that yes: I was probably never in any real danger; yes: my state of fear was limited in time; and YES: I am part of an advantaged class that prioritized policies to reduce low-probability risks of terrorism over the abatement of conditions posing longstanding and pervasive threats to vulnerable communities because terror could get me and by contrast I was not a member of those vulnerable communities …

I will walk on this treacherous ground today, because I want to talk now about the years after 9/11 and what I felt back then, because thus far, it’s the closest I’ve come to living in something like the state of fear that grips at least 50% of humankind, worldwide, all of the time. I write all this fully aware that by any measure—duration, degree, extent of exposure, resources for protection—my experience nowhere approaches what is happening right now to too many people in this world. But it still seems a worthy exercise at least to try to recall those times and what they felt like, toward forming some kind of community with these stricken, broken families in the Middle East tonight.

I was a week shy of my 28th birthday when I first realized there were tens of thousands of people out in the world who would kill me in cold blood, if they had the opportunity. They had the funding, the training, the rationale, the will, and the nerve to do it. All that was missing was the opportunity. I hadn’t done anything to deserve this, but (to be fair) I hadn’t done anything not to deserve it, either. The simple fact was that by virtue of spilling out of my mother’s womb at a particular set of GPS coordinates, I had been strutting around this world as an American, and for this I deserved to die.

This was a rude awakening, but let’s be clear: I had overslept. Suddenly motivated in the fall of 2001 to learn more about the world outside the United States—not just for my edification, I thought, but for my safety—I subscribed to The Economist. American news magazines in those days published cover features like “The Truth about Hormones,” and “Babies vs. Career.” By contrast, The Economist reported multiple stories each week from every continent on the globe. Three articles deep into my first issue, I came to the conclusion that 28 years of bliss is a pretty good run on a planet like ours.

But let’s roll the tape back a few weeks. I had just started my day’s work in 125 Summer Street in downtown Boston, when I first heard that planes had hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. There was no ready access to information at the law firm. We had no cable hookups for our televisions, the news websites were overloaded and couldn’t be reached, and there were no social media outlets at the time to allow man-on-the-street reporting. We learned secondhand that the towers had fallen, from attorneys who were talking on the phone with their spouses. The law firm sent us home. I took the Red Line train back from Downtown Crossing to Central Square in Cambridge and walked down Western Avenue toward the River.

There was a room I used to walk by every day on Western. A quasi-public space, like some neighborhood rec room. On warmer days the door was open, with smoke pouring out. I was never quite sure what went on in there, but a 24/7 craps game never seemed out of the question. On the morning of September 11, I walked by that room and the police were inside. Beat cops in uniform. Not rousting anybody. They were just standing there, looking up into the corner of the room at the news playing over the TV. Along with everybody else.

This day was different.

Back then I had a Nomad Jukebox portable .mp3 player I took everywhere with me. It had a six-gigabyte capacity: room for around 1500 songs. I may have had a playlist on while I walked, or I may have had the Nomad’s entire cache of songs on call, set to Shuffle. In any case, I had just passed that room where the Police and the Policed were watching the news together, when the Nomad played Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (Apple Music, Spotify). And that was when the enormity of that day hit me.

The joy in that song, its naive and simple beauty—pianos, string, horns, and Petula touting the delights of the City, inviting all of us listeners down to share in them—it just gutted me. Juxtaposed with what had happened earlier that morning, what I understood was still happening in Lower Manhattan in that moment, and what would carry on for years afterward across America, in Central Asia, Indonesia, London, the Middle East, Cuba—everywhere, really—this dumb, catchy pop song playing through my headphones on a lovely late summer day was the most beautiful and heartbreaking sound I could hear.

I walked the rest of the way home, with the sun at my back, sobbing. I sat by myself on the couch of our second-floor Cambridge apartment for too long before driving back into Boston, to watch the news coverage with my uncle in Back Bay.

I specifically remember the first time I heard “Downtown.” My father was driving me to school in Youngstown, on his way to work. This was in the early 1980s. We would listen to AM radio—Dan Ryan on WKBN. A man named Barney Clark had received the first ever artificial heart, and I feel like Dan Ryan gave updates on the patient’s condition every day until Day 112, when he reported that Barney had died. Paul Harvey did a nationally syndicated segment every day. I liked his voice and his tongue-in-cheek attitude. Some mornings my dad traded in the talk radio for music, and it was on one of these days, somewhere between Belmont Avenue and Broadway, that “Downtown” came on in the car.

I remember thinking this song was downright bizarre. Silly and strange. It didn’t sound like any kind of music that was familiar to me. It wasn’t rock, wasn’t new wave, wasn’t country. Not Michael Jackson, either, or the Mussorgsky the music teacher kept playing for us at school. The subject matter didn’t make any sense to me, either. I’d been downtown more than once, to my dad’s office. Things weren’t great there, and nothing was waiting for me. Looking back, I realize that Petula Clark was most assuredly not singing about Youngstown. (See “Any Wednesday.”) And I see now that “Downtown” wasn’t any more out there, subject matter-wise, than “Thriller” or “Synchronicity II.” It was just a cultural artifact of 1964 and therefore off the wall and alien for a preteen to hear in the early 1980s.

As it turns out, I have a real soft spot for these 1960s British pop singers. The Smiths pointed me to Sandie Shaw: Morrissey and Marr were big fans, and against all odds they prevailed upon her to join them in the studio in 1984. Standing in for Moz on vocals, she recorded alternate versions of “Hand in Glove” (Apple Music, Spotify), “I Don’t Owe You Anything” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Jeane” (Apple Music, Spotify). In law school I found Sandie/ Smiths recordings on Napster, and I ran out and bought a couple of her hits compilations, which turned me on to her early 1960s singles. Blondie and Saint Etienne—and especially the latter’s 1998 album Good Humour—pointed me in this direction, too, with their retro bubblegum sound. It wasn’t much of a leap from “Picture This” (Apple Music, Spotify) or “Split Screen” (Apple Music, Spotify) to Sandie’s “Long Live Love” (Apple Music, Spotify). From there, a friend and work colleague with encyclopedic music knowledge and impeccable taste referred me to Dusty in Memphis.

So of course by the summer of 2001 I had a copy of Downtown: The Greatest Hits of Petula Clark on my CD rack. I hadn’t loaded all its tracks onto my Nomad—there wasn’t enough storage space for that kind of extravagance. But I distinctly remember selecting “Downtown,” “Don’t Sleep in the Subway” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “A Sign of the Times” (Apple Music, Spotify) for copying over. Also maybe “I Know a Place” (Apple Music, Spotify).

I can’t say for sure what was driving my interest in Petula, Sandie, and Dusty around this time, but a good guess might be that I’d spent so much of the mid-1990s digging deep into punk and new wave, the cynicism was wearing on me, and I needed a bit more balance in my headphones. As I try to characterize this music, I keep returning to the words joy and innocence. 1960s English pop spoke to me of simpler times, and maybe even in the right moment, a particular song would put me back in the car with my dad, in those halcyon days before The Day After came out on TV and my parents had to explain to me that the grownups I’d been trusting to run the world were just two button pushes away from destroying it.

I of course hadn’t put all these pieces together in 2001. You like the music you like, and at least until you’ve turned 50 and started a weekly Substack, it’s best not to overthink it. But in retrospect, the notion that my Nomad’s random number generator should have spun up “Downtown” on the morning of 9/11 smacks almost of simulation programming. It was too cruel, too gutting, too perfectly chosen for the moment. And it would be “Downtown” that rang in my head all too often in the years that followed, when I spent so much of my time feeling needlessly scared.

In the wake of September 11, the news informed us past the point of exhaustion about the vulnerabilities terrorists could exploit. The electric grid, the water supply. Research facilities had stocks of smallpox that could be stolen. (I took grim note of the fact that the U.S. stopped routine vaccination in 1972, the year before I was born.) Fissile material taken a decade earlier from collapsed Soviet Socialist Republics was surely available on the black market for use in dirty bombs. The issue of nuclear proliferation took on a personal dimension for me. We were subscribed to The New Yorker, and I read Seymour Hersh’s long-form reporting from unnamed intelligence sources—about yellowcake uranium, centrifuges, black ops interrogations—as if my life depended on it. Because it felt like it did.

You were never so exposed as when you were taking public transportation. I used to sit on the Red Line train and worry about the size of a construction worker’s lunchbox across the aisle. Nobody eats that much. What is he hiding in there? One morning I arrived at the Central Square T station just after the train pulled away. Standing alone on the platform, I saw a man about my age run down the steps, take a picture of the platform, then run back up out of sight. At the urging of my co-workers, I actually called the “See Something, Say Something” FBI tip line later that day. In 2004 I bought a Vespa. I realize now I was orders of magnitude more likely to die riding that scooter back and forth to work through Cambridge and Boston traffic (see “Down in It”) than if I’d been on the train. At the time it just felt better staying above ground.

We went to London in December 2001. In the baggage check line, we watched a family from Pakistan—Lahore, the address label on their luggage said, because I’d made it my business to look—as they towed The Most Suspicious Package in History around and through seventy yards of Tensabarrier line columns toward the airline counter. A cardboard box, dented in all corners, wrapped around and around with three different kinds of tape, then tied with twenty knots of twine for good measure. Oh my God, I thought. We’re getting on a plane with this box. The government hadn’t yet implemented X-ray scanning of checked baggage. We were of course aware of this security gap, because these matters were all we could think about. At the counter, the ticketing agent informed the family: You’re going to have to open that up. It’s possible these innocent travelers never made the plane.

Then came the anthrax attacks, and as sometimes happens, I got the sniffles. I went on the Internet and searched for symptoms of anthrax infection. Google reported back: it’s basically like having the common cold, except two days later you die. Kate tried to kick me out of the bedroom, because I was keeping her up blowing my nose all night. I told her I’d sleep across the hall, but there was a nonzero possibility I’d be dead in the morning, and we would have missed the chance to spend one last night together. I said this in all sincerity. Ultimately, she agreed to let me stay with her.

We traveled regularly to DC in 2002 and 2003 to see Kate’s mother, who was being treated for cancer. When we landed at Reagan National Airport, we would walk past armed military guards stationed at regular intervals along the concourse. They were holding automatic weapons and wearing full jungle camo, precisely so they could be seen.

We rented cars for these visits, and before we could return them, we had to fill their tanks with gasoline. Except that during at least two of these visits there was a sniper driving around the DC suburbs shooting people dead at gas pumps, because of course there was. Three minutes out in the open, sitting ducks watching the digital gallon and dollar readings, willing them to go faster, as this was a matter of life and death. I remember trying to decide whether to drop into a squat while I pumped the gas. This didn’t guarantee me anything close to full cover, because the bullet could be coming from any direction. I recall looking across the pumps, to see what risk mitigation strategies the other drivers were applying. None of them were squatting, so I didn’t either. Here I stand today, with all of my dignity preserved, so I must have made the right call.

I can’t put a precise date and time on when this period of terror ended for me. I can’t figure, either, what allowed me to stop spinning myself up, imagining the worst possible outcome, and second-guessing every step I took outside. Having children in 2006 and 2007 surely helped get me out of my own head. Security adjustments, the War on Terror, Joint Terrorism Task Forces: these were far from perfectly calibrated, but over the years they, too, helped take the edge off. But more than anything else, I suppose, it was the passage of time without catastrophe that delivered me from these cares.

Still, when I look back on those days, “Downtown” and Petula Clark stay front of mind. The song acquired a kind of totemic quality for me. It stood for a lost, irrecoverable innocence. Meaning you can get back to a place where you’re chill about airplanes, train stations, and riding the T. Maybe you can walk through a city without looking over your shoulder, you don’t obsess about what could be inside someone else’s lunchbox or luggage, and you open your mail and pump your gas without a second thought. But despite all this, you remember that you are part of an animal species that is unique in the ability of its members to inflict unspeakable horrors on one another. You remember this, always.

Now of course “Downtown” was never about some Edenic time when there was no evil in the world. Petula Clark released this song at the height of the Cold War, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and two years after an industrial smog descended on London and killed 12,000 of its residents. (1962 was an especially lousy year, it seems.) Petula was never offering us utopia, some pathway back to a life before original sin. That’s all trumped up in my head. What “Downtown” was offering was respite. Just a place where you could forget all our troubles and your cares for a time, and where you might just find somebody kind to help and understand you.

To be in that place, to be lifted up against the much brighter lights, the movie shows, the rhythm of that gentle bossa nova for just a moment—for three minutes, five seconds? No finer place, for sure. And at least for that long, you’re gonna be all right now. Even when so much of everything is all wrong.