Review: Cat People (1942)

My junior-year English teacher once assigned me to write a short story using 250 words or less. With my lousy handwriting, that came out to one page of notebook paper, front and back. I don't recall what the story was about--something sappy and sentimental about a kid whose brother died in Vietnam, I think--but it got an "A." I was challenged by the restrictions placed upon me and found myself rising to the challenge.

I mention this memory because I think of it whenever I think of Val Lewton.

Lewton was a producer at RKO who was given the task of creating a string of B horror movies, but with numerous creative and budgetary restrictions: The studio provided the often-sensational titles (Cat People, Ghost Ship, Body Snatcher, etc.), but provided little cash. Lewton worked with what he was given with. The result? Some of the most intelligent, elegant and suggestive horror films ever made.

Cat People is the first--and, many reasonably argue, the best--of this string of B pictures (nine in all) and stars Simone Simon as Irena, a beautiful young fashion artist from a small European village who meets, falls in love with and marries an architect (Kent Smith). But Irena has a superstitious fear that, if emotionally (i.e., sexually) aroused, she'll turn into a black panther and kill her mate. Hell of a hang-up, that. This, as you'd imagine, causes all sorts of problems, so she winds up seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), who tries to convince her that it's all in her head. But when one of her husband's co-workers (Jane Randolph) seems to be more than casually interested in the architect, Irena stalks her.

It's in these scenes of stalking that Cat People really takes hold. Nothing is really shown--we never see Irena turn into a panther, and there's only one scene in which we see a panther that's even assumed to be Irena--but plenty is suggested by screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and director Jacques Tourneur. Randolph walks down a dark, deserted street seemingly pursued by the clicking of Simon's heels...until the clicking stops. Why? Did she just change into a panther? Is Randolph about to become a meal? And what about the scene in which Randolph swims in a hotel pool, only to see shadows and hear noises that would suggest a large cat is about to pounce. Is this Irena? Has her jealousy transformed her into a killer? A non-human killer at that? And is the "transformation" sexual in nature? If so, is there an element of lesbianism involved? Could you even do that in a '40s monster movie?

Cat People is a great film to look at (and no, not just because of the exquisite Simon), thanks to the sure-handed direction of Jacques Tournier, who would handle other horror films for Lewton and RKO (I walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man) and make further contributions to the genre in later decades (Night of the Demon in the '50s and The Comedy of Terrors in the '60s). And, as with all of the other Lewton-produced horror flicks, the quiet moments are the creepiest. Characters aren't comfortable being alone. Empty streets are more menacing. Even an empty room can fill one with dread. Where other filmmakers might have shown a complete transformation scene (as in Universal's Wolf Man pictures), Lewton has neither the interest nor, bluntly put, the budget for such gimmicks. The horror, for the most part, is off-screen...and is all the more effective for it.

Cat People started a great winning streak for Lewton and RKO. And horror film fans were the beneficiaries.

Review: Candyman (1992)

Some horror movies thrill me. Others disappoint me. Still others make me laugh out loud, whether they are meant to be funny or not. But very few horror movies make me as spitting, throw-shit-at-my-TV mad as Candyman.

I avoided Candyman for a long time, mostly because it's based on a story by Clive Barker (who also acted as executive producer), who was declared "the future of horror" by no less than Stephen King. (Gee, thanks, Steve.) I'd seen the first two Hellraiser movies and found them both to be gory, illogical messes. But I'd heard good (well, better) things about Candyman from a variety of reliable sources, and I've always loved me some Virginia Madsen, so I picked up a used VHS copy and gave the flick a try.

And those sources were right--up to a point.

Madsen plays Helen, a grad student at the University of Illinois-Chicago preparing her thesis on urban legends. She and her friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) stumble across the legend of the Candyman, who, if you say his name five times into a mirror, will appear and wreck havoc with his hook hand. (Why five times? It only took three times to summon Beetlejuice, and Mary Worth was supposed to appear only if you said her name repeatedly.)

Helen's investigation leads her and Bernadette to the Cabrini-Green housing projects, where a young mother (Vanessa Williams) fills them in on a murder supposedly committed by Candyman. A rival at the college helpfully tells Helen and her philandering professor husband Candyman's story. He was the cultured son of a former slave who had an affair with a white woman, got chased by an mob into the Cabrini-Green neighborhood (which wouldn't have been called Cabrini-Green for several more decades, but okay, I'm nitpicking--again) and got killed by having his hand cut off "with a rusty sawblade and being smeared with honey so that he'd be stung to death by bees. (Doesn't that seem like an awful lot of work just to kill somebody?)

Helen continues to probe Candyman's story and, while checking out the site of another murder victim, is brutally beaten by a gang of thugs whose leader brandishes a hook and claims that HE is really Candyman. One police report later, the thugs are rounded up and thrown in jail.

Up to this point, Candyman is well-paced and stylish (despite the parenthetical nitpicks above), engaging the audience with restrained storytelling; smart, subtle acting (especially from Madsen and Williams); and creepy visuals that make great use of the Chicago cityscape (a point I may be prejudiced on, as a native of the Windy City). So far, so good.

Then Candyman himself shows up. And this movie goes straight to shit in record time.

Candyman (Tony Todd) confronts Helen in a parking garage, blaming her for pressing charges against the thugs and thus weakening belief in his legend. He also implores Helen to "be my victim." Don't know how Helen could resist such a charming invitation, but when she does, Candyman gets nasty, kidnapping the young mother's baby and framing Helen for that crime and a bunch of seriously violent murders. (And Kasi Lemmons gets to find out why it's not so much fun to play "the best friend" role in horror movies.)

In just those few moments, Candyman goes from being an intelligent, thoughtful thriller to being a gory, illogical mess.

In other words, Candyman becomes a Clive Barker movie.

All of the good will generated by the first half of the movie, with its sophisticated, intellectual approach to the material, is blasted away by the second half, which gives us a villain who is nothing more than a less witty, more pretentious Freddy Krueger. And while the concept of an urban legend taking physical form through the strength of belief is intriguing, the back half of this movie can't do anything more interesting with that idea than serve up typical slasher-flick splatter.

Candyman also abandons all pretense of being logical and reasonable and raises far more questions than it could possibly answer. Like...Why does Candyman kidnap the baby in order to make Helen do his will, then continue to threaten the baby when she finally gives in? How will making Helen appear to be a serial killer make her love him (since she's apparently the reincarnation of his lost lover)? If Candyman was killed by a racist mob, why does he spend his time offing people in the projects? Shouldn't he be over on Michigan Avenue knocking off tourists or something? Why doesn't cut up the guy pretending to be him? (You'd think he'd be offended.) Are urban legends really as flammable as this movie implies? And why the fuck is he called Candyman in the first place? (Aside from a bag of chocolates with razor blades jammed into them, we get no clue.)

The only thing worse than a bad horror movie is a good horror movie that goes bad. And Candyman turns very bad very quickly, blowing an opportunity to evolve the slasher film to a higher form, to elevate it above the rest of its less-ambitious brothers and sisters, to make not just a good horror film, but a good FILM, period. Instead, Candyman gets lazy around the midway point and goes on autopilot from there, and I couldn't have been more disappointed.

(NOTE: despite being a gory, illogical mess, Candyman still did well enough to generate a couple of sequels.)

Review: Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

This French Avant-Garde version of Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story is often pointed to by film historians as the best evocation of the gothic spirit of many of Poe's tales. And they have a valid point. Many movies named for Poe stories either pad the story out to the point of totally diluting the atmosphere of gloom and paranoia so essential to Poe, or they discard the story entirely and just retain the title, like any of the movies called The Black Cat or The Raven.

This House of Usher runs just over an hour long, and the only real filler comes in the form of details lifted from another Poe story, "The Oval Portrait." And director Jean Epstein (and assistant director Luis Bunuel, who reportedly quit the film over the usual "artistic differences") shows admirable restraint in many ways, setting his story in sparse sets populated only by flickering candles and dusty floors.

Like everybody else who's ever made a Poe movie, though, Epstein does wander away from the original story's details. In this version, Roderick Usher and Madelaine (who's played by Margeuritte Gance, wife of famous French director Abel Gance) are husband and wife; they were brother and sister in Poe's story. Madelaine is dying of some unknown, unnamed disease, and Roderick is obsessed with painting her portrait, which seems to be alive (it breathes and moves its eyes). Roderick asks his friend, Allen, to come for a visit, and Allen witnesses his friend's mental disintegration when Madelaine dies--or so it appears.

As with any experimental film, House of Usher has its peaks and valleys. Madelaine's "death" scene is really nightmarish, with effective use of slow motion and smashing, distorted close-ups driving home the despair and insanity washing over Roderick. And Madelaine's return from the grave, in which we see her long, flowing white gown long before we actually see her, is also finely hallucinatory.

But some of Epstein's touches are so bizarre as to be unintentionally funny: The procession with Madelaine's coffin is so exaggerated that it looks more like it belongs in a Monty Python skit, and the intercut images of penetration--nails being driven into the coffin lid and two frogs fucking (no, I'm not kidding)--is downright ridiculous.

And then there's the ending, in which everybody gets out of the obviously (intentionally?) fake house as it burns to the ground against a starry nighttime sky that has all kinds of symbols in it, including a crucifix--hey, wasn't Allen the only one to make it out alive in Poe's story? And why bother carefully building a sense of overwhelming doom, only to undercut it with a happy ending?

Epstein's Usher tries harder than most adaptations do to retain the heavy atmosphere of Poe's stories, and it succeeds better than most adaptations do. But it evokes as many unintended laughs as it does intended chills, so the experiment is not a wholly successful one.

Still, I'd rather watch this again than, say, Murders in the Rue Morgue, which has more Poe spirit in its title than it does in the film itself.

Review: The Birds (1963)

For just under five years, I worked for a small publishing company on the northern fringes of Evanston, IL. To get to this job, I had to take a long train ride north from Chicago to the next-to-last stop on the CTA's Purple Line and walk along Central Street, crossing a bridge over the North Shore Channel and passing a public golf course.

The river is lined with trees on either side, and wildlife liked to pass through on occasion. (Once, on a sub-zero January afternoon, I saw a fawn standing in the middle of the frozen river, staring at me as I was staring at her.) And occasionally--sometimes in morning, sometimes at night, sometimes in springtime, sometimes in fall--crows would gather in these trees and call to one another incessantly, almost loud enough to drown out the traffic rushing by. The sight of these crows, gathered in large numbers for no reason explicable to human eyes, always made me unspeakably nervous and invariably quickened my step even though, had they decided to take flight and blacken the sky with their wings, there was no place for me to hide.

And I blame this unspeakable nervousness entirely on Channel 7 and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Channel 7--also known as WLS, the local ABC affiliate--ran movies every afternoon at three (just in time for kids coming home from school) and liked to have theme weeks, like "war movie week" or "western week"--or "horror movie week." And even within this structure, there were variations: They would show a week's worth of Christopher Lee's Dracula flicks or giant monsters on the rampage, like Kink Kong or Godzilla (or, if we were really unfortunate, King Kong vs. Godzilla). But one of Channel 7's favorite movies to show during their mini-horror-film fests was The Birds. And unlike most of the other films they showed, The Birds never failed to frighten me--perhaps because has plausibility that most horror films lack.

Think about it. We know that vampires and werewolves don't exist and that you can't build a human being out of spare parts dug up in graveyards (not yet, anyway). Mummies don't get up and walk around after 3,000 years, and dinosaurs are dead, dead, dead.

But birds? We see and hear them every day. Sparrows chirping merrily in bushes. Cardinals calling their mates from the heights of maple trees. Seagulls scavenging for scraps in shopping mall parking lots. Crows massed along the banks of an otherwise peaceful river. As one character in The Birds helpfully points out, there are millions of species of birds in the world, and if they ever got the idea to get together and start killing people, "we wouldn't stand a chance."

The Birds is adapted from a novella by Daphne du Maurier, modified by screenwriter Evan Hunter to move the setting from England to the California coastline and modifying the ending to lend a sliver of hope to the audience. Newcomer Tippi Hedren stars as Melanie. (Funny, but that's her real-life daughter's name as well--Melanie Griffith. Coincidence?). She's another in a long line of tall, cool Hitchcock blondes, and she becomes involved with hunky Mitch (Rod Taylor), who has a young daughter (Veronica Cartwright) and a strong-willed mother (Jessica Tandy).

Mitch and family live in Bodega Bay, a quiet coastal community--quiet, that is, until birds start attacking human beings.

Wisely, no explanation is ever given as to why the birds do what they do here. Any explanation would undercut the terror the attack scenes instill, and such attacks, while exceptionally rare and never involving more than one species of bird at a time, do take place in real life. (While getting ready for work this morning, I heard a news report of a bald eagle attacking vacationers at a beach--it seemed to be especially fond of footballs--and, yes, the newscaster played an audio clip from The Birds.)

The bird attacks scenes themselves are frightening technical marvels. Back in the days before computer-generated effects, Hitchcock and Universal's special effects department resorted to optical effects, paintings, mechanical birds and horrible makeup to lay out the devastated landscape. But terrific special effects and momentary scares, which would be plenty for most directors, aren't enough for Hitchcock. He takes his ability to build tension until it's nearly unbearable before springing his traps. Is a disaster worse when you can see it developing but are powerless to prevent it? That's the position Hitchcock puts the audience in again and again.

Consider the scene in which Melanie goes to the local school to pick up Mitch's daughter. Melanie waits outside the school, smoking a cigarette while listening to the children sing. She faces the audience, and behind her we can see a small playground with a set of monkey bars. One by one, crows gather on the monkey bars. The audience can see this, but Melanie can't. So she continues to smoke calmly. The children continue to sing. Crows continue to gather. Each close-up of Melanie is tighter and tighter. Finally, Melanie catches sight of a crow in flight and follows its arc until it lands in the playground, which is now black with crows. Melanie's eyes widen with horror. She realizes what the audience did minutes before her: she and the children are trapped, and there may be no way out.

Combine this talent for constructing tension--honed by Hitchcock in many thrillers before this one--with the realistic setting and sympathetic characters, and you have one seriously unsettling moviegoing experience that stands the test of time. The Birds never ceases to amaze and scare me.

And I'll never cease to be weirded out by crows.

Thank you, Mr. Hitchcock.

Review: Day of the Dead (1985)

In the years since its initial theatrical release, Day of the Dead has, in some circles, gained a reputation for being the darkest and most intellectual of George Romero's three Living Dead epics. And this, bluntly, confused the living hell out of me. When I bought my first VCR back in 1988, I rented three movies, one of which was Day of the Dead, (the other two were The Hidden and a porn flick called Sex Star--but did you need to know that, really?) and while I didn't think it was the worst horror film I'd ever seen, it was probably the most bitterly disappointing. I was (and am) a huge fan of the first two Dead movies, and I found Day to be loud and stupid, tossing aside the atmosphere carefully constructed in the first two films for a cheap, sloppy and ultimately depressing conclusion to the series.

But I'll be the first person to admit that I'm fully capable of being wrong, so I recently sat down and watched Day of the Dead again for the first time since that initial viewing. And found that my contempt for it has only grown.

I can't argue with the perception that Day is the darkest of the trilogy; that's stating the obvious. The dead rule the world, and humanity has been driven underground into cavernous bunkers like the one we find our characters in. The big problem, though, is that the remaining survivors all seem to be either idiots, assholes or idiot assholes. From Sarah (Lori Cardille), a pill-popping shrew, to Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), a maniacal military freak, to Dr. Logan (Robert Liberty, who gives the film's best, most eccentric performance), a scientist so removed from reality that even his subordinates refer to him as "Frankenstein," everybody in this movie seems to be in varying stages of mental disintegration. That's understandable-if the world were ending and the dead were waiting right outside the door to belly up to the table with me as the main course, I'd pretty well lose it, too. But these characters are so universally unpleasant and poorly drawn that spending time with them for even a few minutes gave me a ringing headache. And interminable stretches where actors unconvincingly scream at one other qualify as "intellectual," then Day of the Dead may be the most dizzyingly cerebral movie ever made.

Many of the quieter moments in the movie, in which the more marginally likable characters discuss theories as to why the zombies do what they do or how it would be better to forget the past and just start the whole worldover again, are much more effective than the more "dramatic" scenes, even if they echo moments from the previous two Dead movies. And Tom Savini's special effects reach their ultimate zenith--or valley, take your pick--withan ending so overrun with spilling guts that they must have raided every butcher's shop on the East Coast to pull off those gushy effects.

But it all comes back to the script, which was reportedly severely reworked because funding had fallen through for the zombie picture Romero had wanted to make. That's no excuse. Romero has had zilch to work with on many ofhis movies, but has most often turned out startling work. Day of the Dead only startles in how easy it is to predict which of the survivors will make it to the end of the flick and in how shallow and, inevitably, disappointing the whole exercise is. What a shame it is that the one horror series entirely controlled by its main creator still ends with an entirely unworthy entry. Maybe, someday, Romero will revisit the material and come up with a more fitting conclusion to the Dead saga.

Till then, Day of the Dead is what we're left with--and we deserved better.

Lottie

I had planned to write about death this week, but of the celebrity variety--Warren Zevon, John Ritter and Johnny Cash passing in one week (the latter two on the same day, 9/11) was too concentrated a dose to let go by without comment.

But I don't feel much like talking about death right now. I don't feel like talking about much of anything, really. Not now that Lottie is gone.

Maybe someday I'll go through the blow-by-blow of what happened over the past weekend. Not this minute, though. This hurts too much for me to go into detail. But, when boiled down to its essence, the story is this: It looked like Lottie had a nasty case of diarrhea, but it turned out to be a bowel obstruction caused by a large growth in her abdomen; exploratory surgery on Sunday revealed that there was nothing that could be done for her and rather than make her suffer any more than she already had, I gave the surgeon permission to have her put to sleep (or, more accurately, not to let her wake up from the surgery).

This all happened in a short amount of time--just over a month from the day I noticed anything was wrong with Lottie to the day she died. The brevity of the situation doesn't make it easier to take.

Parents will tell you they love all their children equally, even when it's obvious that they have favorites. Pet owners will tell you the same thing about their dogs or cats or ferrets or whatever. But there is usually one more dear to them than the others. Their favorite. Their baby. Lottie was my baby.

I love Ms. Christopher to pieces and have been doing my best to be there for her these past few days--petting her, throwing rings from milk cartons past her head, getting her loaded on catnip, etc. She's been wandering La Casa del Terror, looking under couches, behind doors, in the litterpan, wherever for Lottie, her sister, her friend, her constant companion since leaving the womb ten years ago.

But as much as I love Christopher, Lottie was the one I was closest to. The more sociable one. The more intelligent one. The more intuitive one. Lottie picked up on my moods and would appear at my feet, rubbing against my legs, butting her head against my hand, looking up at me with eyes huge and bright and meowing as if to ask, "What's wrong, buddy? Why so sad? Anything I can do to help?"

As I sat in the lobby of the vet hospital, trying to occupy my mind with anything but the poking and prodding that was no doubt going on a few doors down the hall, one of the attendants brought Lottie out and gave her to me. "The doctor thought she'd be more comfortable out here with you," she said, straining not to drop Lottie on the floor as she handed the big girlie over. Lottie sprawled in my lap, butting her head against the cradle of my arm, purring loudly enough to feel through the leather jacket, looking up at me with those same intelligent eyes and meowing as best she could. The damn cat was dying, but there she was, comforting me because she could see, could feel, that I was sad. That made me cry that much harder.

But that's just how Lottie was.

Rest in peace, my Girlish Girl.

P.S...My thanks to everyone from all over--Chicago, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Orlando, Minneapolis--who either called or e-mailed condolences or expressions of sympathy and support. It really does help.

A Day to Remember

That Tuesday morning started off like just about any Tuesday morning had or has or ever would. Shave. Shower. Feed the circling furbags meowing at my still-damp feet. Pull on clothing. Push out the door and onto the Brown Line. Fall in love half a dozen times before the train even reaches the curve before the Belmont stop, where it sits without a word of explanation from the conductor for minute after minute. Same old same old.

But something was off as the train rolled on. A vibe. A buzz. Something. Two women in business suits standing near the doors, swaying and jerking with the turning and swerving of the Brown Line, talking to one another. Scattered words make it through the throng--"Didyouhearohmygodisn'titawful?"--but not enough to provide any meaningful context. Just enough to make me wonder. Just enough for me to make a mental note to log on to chicagotribune.com as soon as I got into the office.

As soon as I stepped into my cube just outside the men's room and threw myself down before Bridget, my Bondi Blue workplace iMac, I hit my bookmarks and tried to get onto the Tribune Web site. Tried. The site wouldn't come up. Shit. That meant one of two things: Either the site was down for whatever reason--maintenance, virus attack, sunspots, etc.--or there was too much traffic for their server to handle. Whatever had happened to cause the buzz on the train must have been big. Globally big. I decided to try the Sun-Times site instead. Less traffic. Less flashy graphics. Better chance of telling me what the bloody hell was up.

I hit the bookmark. Bridget churned and buzzed for a few seconds. The Sun-Times site came up straight away.

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

There, on the Sun-Times home page, in color as vivid as deep real blue the New York morning sky behind them, was the World Trade Center, holes ten stories tall punched in each one, black tangles of smoke pouring up and out of them, like an enormous, fiery giant had come along and shoved his flaming fists through them. I stared at the photo for one very long minute before I even read the headline beside it. Commercial jets had flown into each tower, minutes apart. Okay. One plane? Flying into one tower? Horrible. Tragic. Catastrophic. An accident? Possibly. Just possible. But two planes? Hitting two towers? No accident. Terrorism. War.

I couldn't sit still. A TV was on in an office up the hall, Dan Rather's faded Texas twang cutting through the unnatural silence in what would normally be an office thick with activity at the beginning of a work day. Normally. Not now. Now there were several co-workers crowded around the TV, trying to make out the signals that the skyscrapers around us would let through. CBS ran what footage it had of the towers afire, of the thousands trying to escape the conflagration, of emergency personnel rushing to the scene, always returning to the black smoke blooming from the towers' wounds. "Motherfucker," I muttered to no one in particular, regardless of a vice president at my right and department managers fore and aft, all women. They weren't listening to me anyway. They were staring at the snowy pictures.

I watched for a minute or two, then crossed the hall to Red Secretary's desk. She was there, busily typing away, and looked up to give me her usual, bright "Good morning!", a latter-day Louise Brooks with smiling gray/green eyes in place of Lulu's black gaze. Which thoroughly confused me. (Like that's difficult.) I asked if she knew what was going on. She knew something had happened. That there had been a plane crash or something. But she really didn't know what. I envied her that. Didn't stop me from breaking the news, though.

Her face drained of all color, and the smile abruptly left her eyes. "What?" I repeated the news. We crossed the hall together. We watched more reports. Then, we watched the first tower fall.

It wasn't like something out of Independence Day or War of the Worlds or anything anyone at Industrial Light & Magic could ever conceive. It was brutal. Dirty. It reminded me of being in the alley behind our apartment building on Ohio Street and covering a sheet of cardboard with topsoil from the nearby empty lot--the same empty lot where I used to scrounge for nuts and bolts in the hopes of someday building my own robot-- and tossing the whole lot in the air and watching the resulting mushroom cloud with awe. Except for the "awe" part. There was none of that watching the first tower fold in on itself, story after story, life after life. That was one of the tallest buildings in the world. Filled with thousands of workers just arrived for just another Tuesday at the job. Just people. Just like me and RS. Just like us.

I tried to go back to my desk. Tried to surf the Net. Tried to damn near anything but think about what was happening in Manhattan. But I couldn't just sit there. Restless. Shaking. Had to get up and stalk the halls. Passed empty office after empty office until I came to the main conference room. Filled with what looked like most of the company. All staring at the TV in the southwest corner of the room. All with exactly the same expression on each of their faces.

Disbelief--utter, complete, everlasting disbelief.

Info started filtering in. Some of it strictly rumor. "There are hijacked planes headed for Chicago," one co-worker reported with authority. "Cut that out," I snapped back. "You don't know that for a fact." "But I heard it on the radio...." "That doesn't matter...they don't know what the fuck's going on any more than we do." No planes headed for Chicago other than those already in flight looking for a place to land. No car bomb outside the State Department, either. But some of it grim fact. A jet slamming into the Pentagon. Another, likely headed for D.C. as well, going down in Pennsylvania. I have a dear friend in Gibsonia, just outside Pittsburgh. I hoped that she and hers were all right.

More info. Red Secretary's then-boyfriend, Czynsk, called her to say that the building he worked in was being evacuated. That was directly across the street from us. Reports were coming in that the skyscraper two doors south was emptying out, too. And we were still there...why?

Just before 10:30, one of the office admins came around to announce that workers had the option to leave if they wanted to. It took me and RS about, oh, five seconds to exercise our "option." Why stay? Even if we weren't in danger of attack, we couldn't concentrate on work anyway. And I admit it. I was nervous about being in a tall building at that exact moment--like being in a grove and hearing there's a forest fire raging not far away. (Strangely, some workers opted to stay and labor away--until the city evacuated all downtown buildings early in the afternoon.)

I suggested that we avoid the trains, which would undoubtedly be packed like rolling sardine cans, and grab the Grand Avenue bus out of downtown--we'd be more likely to get a seat, and we could swing by the drug store where Mom worked. I could let her know I was okay. More importantly, I could give her a hug and tell her I loved her. Something thousands in New York and D.C. and Pennsylvania no longer had the option of doing. RS readily agreed, and we shot out of work and onto Michigan Avenue.

These scene below was surreal. Michigan Avenue is usually busy. Buses. Cabs. Shoppers. Tourists. Panhandlers. Rollerbladers on cell phones. Crazy. But now, everybody seemed to have their heads down in determination, walking fast, like everyone was late for the same appointment. There were more vehicles than usual for that time of day. The strangest aspect, though, was the sky. No passenger jets. No private planes. No traffic copters. Not even a lousy cloud. For the first time in my lifetime, the sky above me was completely clear.

RS and I caught a bus pretty quickly and grabbed seats at the back. The bus filled quickly and made slow progress west. As we passed beneath the elevated tracks, a Brown Line train lumbered by. No daylight could be seen through its windows. Standing room only and beyond. Everyone was abandoning the Loop. Headed home. Seeking shelter. Or information. Or the embrace of a loved one. The bus continued on through the heavy traffic, and every so often I'd turn back and look to see whether the skyline was still there.

Eventually, traffic cleared just enough that the bus was able to move at something slightly faster than an arthritic retiree deprived his walker. We got off at our stop, walked the three blocks to the drug store where Mom was a cashier and walked through the automatic sliding doors. Inside, we were greeted by long lines of shoppers stocking up on supplies. Bottled water. Canned goods. Batteries. Booze. Anything to outlast Armageddon. Mom was busy checking out customers. I swung around her line to try and sneak behind to say hi. All the TV sets behind the electronics counter were tuned to the networks. Evereyone glanced up at the screens, down at their baskets, up at Mom, back at the screens.

After a couple of minutes, between checkouts, I tapped Mom on the shoulder and she turned around. We hugged. Exchanged I Love Yous. "Just wanted you to know I was okay." "Thank you. I was worried...." I turned to introduce Mom to Red Secretary...but RS wasn't there. Nor was she anywhere in sight. Mom laughed. "You never could hold onto a woman!" she said. Loudly. Loudly enough that every shopper in every line stopped glancing at the screens and their baskets and the checkout clerks and fixed their stares straight on me.

RS suddenly appeared, I brought her over, made a hasty intro and headed for the doors, with one middle-aged woman in like calling after me, "Yeah, why can't you hold onto a woman?" Back out under the alarmingly clear sky, I told RS why I'd run for it so abruptly. She thought it was funny. Me? Not so much. (Mom apologized later that evening. "I'm sorry, honey," her voice heavy and sad. "I didn't mean to embarrass you in front of your friend. I love you. You know that." I knew that.)

After another long, slower-than-usual bus ride, Red Secretary and I parted company for our respective apartments, both anxious to get somewhere with at least the veneer of safety. I still made a side trip to a neighborhood gyro stand, though--comfort food was definitely called for--and wound my way through side streets toward home.

Then I heard a sound that made me stop, stand, stare at the blue above--the unmistakable roar of an airplane. For what was likely only a minute but felt like a few hours, I stared. I shouldn't have heard that roar. All planes were supposed to be grounded. Maybe the reports of hijacked jets headed for Chi-Town were true after all. Stare. Stare. Rotate in place. Stare...nothing but blue, blue and more blue. Walk a few more steps. Another roar. Another stare. Another nothing. A few more steps. Another roar. Lather, rinse, repeat. This time, I spotted a small white jet far above me, way too small to be a commercial airliner. Found out later that it was an F-16. A fighter jet. Patrolling Chicago's airspace. Ready to shoot down anything deemed a threat. Jesus.

I made it home. Popped a tin for the Girls. Stroked their fur more than usual. Plopped myself on the loveseat. Worked the remote for the next few hours. Watched the same horror show play over and over and over some more. From different angles. From varied eyewitness accounts. From seasoned reporters, all of whom looked shaken, no matter how close to or far from the carnage they were.

Just before I went to bed, one of the networks ran silent footage, provided to them by French filmmakers who happened to be in the Big Apple shooting a documentary on the city's fire department, of the first plane slamming into the first tower. At that moment, I realized why the whole day had seemed skewed, discolored, off ever so.

That image was just like something straight out of a dream. Or a nightmare.

Went to bed. Didn't sleep a second. A few hundred million others did the same.