Bomb Blast (4)
Today’s SKETCHBOOK post comes with a trigger warning for violence, terrorism, death, and gore.
4.
The way I became famous is this: I was in Seattle on Labor Day when the bombs went off, and in the middle of the chaos someone snapped a picture of me giving CPR to a toddler in a pink tutu and tiny white Converse hightops.
I wasn’t supposed to be in Seattle that weekend but at the last moment Don decided to close Tank for the holiday, and I had a buddy with a car and some extra cash in his pocket, and Outcast was playing Key Arena so we thought maybe we’d snag a couple of tickets in the parking lot and have a good time. We drove all night, stopping only in Spokane for a piss and a smoke, and hit The Emerald City before morning traffic.
I saw the sun rise on The Space Needle as we were scoping a street spot to ditch the car for a while. Sometimes I stop and think how I’m one of the last people who ever did see that.
We never made it to Key Arena but we did have coffee and bagels at Zeitgeist. We hung around throwing bits of bread at the ravens in a nearby park. At around 9 when the Public Market opened we wandered that way in search of distraction.
Later I learned that the seven devices were timed to go off all together at noon when downtown would be swarming with tourists and locals out for the weekend, but the one buried in a trash can near Pike’s Seafood went off early. There was no bang or anything like you see on tv. The ground shook me off my feet before there was a blast of hot air, and after that everything was falling, pieces of glass and metal, fresh flowers and shellfish, people and bits of people.
I ended up under an overturned florist’s table surrounded by display buckets spilling water and tulips. There was an old man lying on his side next to me. I knew he was dead because where his chest should have been there was a mash of black and red gristle, and he sure as hell wasn’t breathing any more. The little girl wearing the tutu was on her face in a puddle of water near my knee. The water and the pavement around her were turning red.
I turned her over. Her eyes were open and staring and she wasn’t breathing either but I couldn’t see any obvious reason she should be dead, so I just did what I learned in Mr. Miller’s first period high school health and started kiddie CPR.
That’s when a guy used his mobile to snap a picture. The Photo shows me bent over the girl, fingers on her tiny breastbone, my ear to her mouth. She looks like a fairy ballerina in frilly pink tulle and a blond bun. Her white Converse were probably pristine when she put them on that morning, but in The Photo they’re spattered with scarlet. It’s not her blood: it’s mostly mine. I’m bleeding from my nose, and a nasty scrape on my chin, and from the place in my thigh were a long shard of jagged metal sticks out like some sort of gruesome robot appendage.
In the shock I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t hear anything either because of the blast, so when the guy with the phone finally put down Twitter and crawled across debris to help I didn’t get at first that he was trying to put pressure on my bleed. I would have punched him in the face for groping my thigh if I hadn’t been so busy saving the ballerina’s life.
I did, too. She started breathing again just before I passed out from shock and blood loss. She’s a second grader in Bellevue and every Christmas and birthday her mom sends me a card. The guy with the mobile who took The Photo and then saved my life is called Greg. He’s a stockbroker who lost his wife and dog and luxury apartment to the bombing. We only see each other on the anniversary of the attack, at the Seattle Memorial, and only then because the press flies us out to say a few words.
Greg’s photo was everywhere for weeks after: on the internet, on the television, in print. My dad enlarged it and threatened to hang it on the wall near the TV but I convinced him that was probably in really bad taste. Honest to God I thought The Photo would be my 15 mins of fame and then I could get back to everyday life in Twin Falls. I was hardly the only Good Samaritan that Saturday. Five hundred thirty-two people died but many more escaped with their lives, and that’s because someone else stopped to help. I figured The Photo would be old news in a few months and I could get busy trying to forget one of the one hundred sixty-one people dead in Pike Place was my buddy with the car and the extra cash in his pocket.
It didn’t happen that way. Once air space was cleared again the President flew Airforce One down to Twin Falls and walked right into St. Luke’s where I was recovering just to shake my hand. And she asked me if I wouldn’t like to design her a tattoo for remembrance and ink it on her left wrist where she could always see it, and I was high on pain killers so of course I said yes.
Come New Year’s I was set up in the Oval with my machine and there were more cameras and it didn’t look like my 15 mins would be over any time soon. President Hawkins made sitting for ink a photo op, I was trending again, and pretty soon all sorts of odd ducks were showing up at Tank’s, Twin Falls, wanting a Hemingway original and willing to pay real money to sit in my chair.
That’s the way I became famous – because some white supremacists decided to blow Seattle all to hell and I was in the wrong place at the right time.
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