I was awake at the dawning of the new world.

I got up early that day. I had coffee, thought about what to wear. Took a hot bath. Wanted love, real estate and rock and roll.

I was surviving after five months in the naked city, and feeling pretty damn victorious about it. I was loved and respected and had even managed to beguile two local fishwrappers to dish on my persona that very week. New York Magazine was running a piece about my sexual exploits called "The Newbie" (in which I was described as an atypical ex-stripper with a first-class education and cowgirl eyes who covers her mouth when she laughs) and in days my first big piece (regarding my first big love: rock 'n' roll) would appear in the Village Voice. Portland friends were coming to visit for the CMJ music festival and I was closing in on an apartment and a drummer. The weather was perfect. It was Fashion Week. It was September 11th.

I ran to catch my subway at Borough Hall in Brooklyn. It wasn't packed like it usually was. I got cozy for the ride to midtown as the train lurched under the East River and into Manhattan. By Bowling Green I got a seat. The next stop was Wall Street, and the end of the world as I knew it.

At Wall Street, a handful of guys in suits got on, looking about as happy as guys in suits EVER look. They were chattering like gossip columnists at a wedding, something about airplanes flying into buildings. The World Trade Center. And that this was probably the last train in any direction that we were on, hallelujah, and that they were goin' to New Jersey.

The atmosphere changed perceptibly. I glanced around the subway at everyone else who was glancing around the subway. We were petrified. The train stopped at Fulton Street, right under the World Trade Center, and the doors seemed to never close. I did not want to be underground. I wanted to run the hell out of there and keep running to the south Bronx. Or to South Dakota.

Each subway stop offered its own destiny like a choose-your-own-adventure book from my childhood. Brooklyn Bridge: I could run home to Brooklyn. But if the shit hit the fan, I'd be stuck there, on Long Island. I'd played enough Risk to know that. If I got off at Union Square, I could sleep off this nightmare at a friend's house: all the late-night Village people were undoubtedly still snug in bed. But again, if this was as bad as as it sounded, that whole area might be pretty ugly, too. So I stayed on 'til Grand Central, my usual stop, and dutifully went to my two-day a week 9-5 copy-writing job, unsure of what else to do.

When I got to Fifth Avenue, there were hordes of people gawking in horror at the towering inferno down the street. Some were crying. All were on cell phones. I went in to my office where my boss, the author of the businessman's Bible, The Power of Yes, tried assuaging me with statistics:

"The odds are one in eight million you'd be on that floor when the plane hit....just relax and find some work....probably more like one in ten million...." Hadn't he heard there were two planes? i.e., HIGHLY CHOREOGRAPHED TERRORIST ATTACK?! All the secretaries were crying. The Pentagon was hit. My supervisor grabbed my arm, saying, "Let's get some tea and get to work." Instead we went to see Evelyn, who had a daughter on the 83rd floor. That girl was dead. We all knew it. I was out of there. I might be the new kid in town, without that New Yawk tuff to talk me down, but I had survival instincts and they were screamin'. There were other targets all around us: Times Square, Grand Central, the Empire State Building, the U.N. Building. I was Snake Pliskin. I was Escape from New York. I was walkin' to Connecticut in my slutty Florentine boots­not quite made-for-walkin', and carrying a five-pound Proust novel­not quite made-for-carryin'.