Cycle of life
'Bikeman' explains a journalist's experience on Sept. 11
HARWICH PORT - Tom Flynn is a tough, experienced newsman with a dispassionate eye for facts. The veteran TV writer/producer had covered the biggest stories of the past 30 years: Nelson Mandela's rise in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the violence in Tiananmen Square, wars and natural disasters. He'd witnessed events, gathered facts, written tight copy in the no-frills style of TV news.
But for all his professional detachment, for years he could not express the full truth of what happened to him on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Now he has done it, in a form that he never anticipated: a book-length narrative poem called "Bikeman." In 38 cantos over 73 pages, "Bikeman" excavates the horror, terror, and sadness buried in the writer for six years. "I don't think there was a better way to tell this story," he said in an interview at his summer home.
In 2001 Flynn was a producer for "CBS Evening News With Dan Rather," and before that had worked on the morning news, "60 Minutes," and "48 Hours." He and his wife, writer and media professor Nancy Reardon, live in lower Manhattan, near the corner of 10th Street and Sixth Avenue. That beautiful fall morning, he was enjoying his coffee and newspaper on his roof deck. Normally, he would ride his bike to work at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street. But before he left for work, the first plane roared in from the north, too low, and crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, about a mile away.
In 1993, the "48 Hours" team had decided not to devote a full hour to the previous attack on the towers, with an explosive-laden van in the garage underneath. "I was one voice among others, saying, 'It's a gas-main break - a good local story,' " said Flynn, who is 61. "So we didn't cover it, and later I said, 'I'm not going to make that mistake again.' " He called the CBS desk and said, "I'm going down there," threw a notebook and pen in a small canvas bag, jumped on his bike, rode west to the riverside esplanade, and turned south. Then the second plane hit the south tower.
He drew near the southeast corner of the blazing south tower, near the corner of Liberty and West streets. From above, a blizzard of paper fell like snow, and something else - human beings. "There was so much stuff coming down, including people," Flynn said, "that we moved back to a circle where the ambulances were lining up."
Then the south tower began to collapse. "Run, run!" voices screamed, and Flynn and a cluster of others fled the thundering, boiling avalanche. Engulfed by the dark cloud, they stumbled into an underground parking garage. In darkness they felt their way along the walls, looking for a way out. Flynn was convinced he had found his tomb. Then they found an exit. One of the others dubbed Flynn "Bikeman," because he refused to leave his bike behind. Moving west, the others ducked into the lobby of an intact building. But Flynn was afraid to go inside again, and continued on through the impenetrable cloud, pushing his bike.
He reached the Hudson and headed north, then came to the North Cove, a marina only about a block from the burning north tower. The only way around was east. "This is where my legs began to shake," he said. "I didn't want to be headed toward that thing. If that one [the south tower] went down, this one is coming down, and since it was hit first it's got to be soon." He got safely around, then came to a scene out of Dante's "Inferno." Dozens of panicked people were in the river, struggling or drowning, desperate to escape. A man in shock sat on the ground and stared at his bloody legs. A policeman restrained a hysterical woman from running back toward the towers to rescue a child.
On he went, and after he was out of danger the north tower fell. He passed a private athletic club where cups of water were being passed out to the people streaming north. In the interview, he reached up and took the blue paper cup off a bookcase, where it sits between two Emmy awards. The bottom is covered with the grime that rinsed off his moustache. In the cup is a 5-by-7 piece of stationery that fell from the south tower and somehow landed in his bag: "Fiduciary Trust Company International, 2 World Trade Center, New York, N.Y."
He made his way back to the CBS studios and was interviewed on-air by Dan Rather. "He was shaken, the likes of which I'd never seen," said Rather, who spoke by phone. "The sight of him would raise the hair on the back of your neck. He was disheveled, covered with ash and debris. He looked like a homeless person. I asked him if he needed a drink, but he said, 'No, I've got too big a story to tell.' "
That night, exhausted, he rode his bike home, sneaking past police roadblocks at 14th Street. Next day, the story moved on. Knowing how the memory distorts details, Flynn made four single-spaced pages of notes. "I put it away and didn't look at it again," he said. He did not write anything for publication. "Maybe it wasn't ripe yet." The bike was stolen the following spring.
'Memory by memory'
Four years ago, he got a pink slip from CBS News. "They wanted to go in a new direction," he said. For the first time in years, he was free of the day's news, and could turn to what still lay hidden inside. Once again, a bicycle played a part in his release.
"I never intended to write a poem," he said. "What got me going was rereading Dante. The combination of that and riding my bike on the Cape Cod bike path, where you just daydream, it all sort of came together. I started writing on the bike, in my head, and came back here and began to write down the whole thing. You know those times when you're writing something and you feel, this is absolutely right."
He worked on it for two years. Proceeding "memory by memory," he re-experienced in verse what had happened to him that morning. He had never so much as dabbled in poetry before.
"It was such an emotionally powerful experience," Flynn said. "To try to express that in ordinary prose just didn't seem to work as well. The first draft was 15,000 words. This is about 7,500 words. I just kept cutting. You rewrite and rewrite. Poetry demands that you check every word, every pace, every tone. I still find it difficult reading parts of it."
"Bikeman" is visceral and emotional - almost the opposite of a work of journalism. Identifying details of time and exact place are omitted. The unnamed narrator speaks in the present tense. He describes the colorful print dress on a woman falling from the sky, other bodies plummeting "like a load of fence posts," the onrushing cloud of dust and debris, "as if thousands of horses and millions of soldiers are stampeding," the conviction that he is inhaling human remains with the choking dust - "I cough; they scream to be released" - the nightmarish scene at the river.
"This is an amazing thing," said John V. Fleming, a classicist and professor of English emeritus at Princeton University, who wrote an introduction to "Bikeman." He calls it an epyllion - a mini-epic. "It is sui generis, as far as I know. In the spontaneity of the verse, it is actually capturing the nature of this event and maybe imposing some kind of order on it."
Flynn showed the finished work to friends in New York publishing, who had no idea what to do with it. Then he sent it to literary agent Julia Lord. Like Flynn, she lives not far from ground zero and found herself almost reluctantly trapped by the poem. "I thought it was beautiful." she said. "I tried to get it off my mind, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. I had not thought about that day in a personal way for so long - it became all about politics - but I had a child with night terrors for a year and a half."
She took it on, was turned down by several prominent New York editors, then placed the book with Andrews McMeel, a specialist in light nonfiction, gift books, and humor, based in Kansas City. Though it is nothing like Andrews McMeel's usual fare, editorial director Christine Schillig said the editors found the poem irresistible. "We were convinced it should be published," Schillig said, "maybe because we didn't live through it the way people in New York, which is the center of the publishing world, did. Here in the heartland, there is still tremendous interest in what it was like, how awful it was."
"I'm not a poet - I'm a writer who wrote a poem," Flynn said. He's no Dante, to be sure, but then Dante was not at the corner of Liberty and West streets that morning. "The job I had taken on for myself was to tell what happened that people have forgotten, didn't know about, or didn't care to relive."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 