Later that day...

I remember later that day David and I went to a bar in the Castro called The Cafe, which in retrospect is completely hysterical - I mean, it's like the last place on earth you would expect you would want to go after some traumatic event. We just wanted to be around other people, people we knew, and we knew would find them there. I remember we met these two flight attendants from United Airlines, both New Yorkers. They had arrived in SF the night before and had been scheduled to return the following afternoon. Luckily, the colleagues they had known weren't scheduled to fly that morning from the east coast, however they had been unable to reach some of their family members and friends who lived in Manhattan. I remember the phones not really working, because so many people were trying to make calls in and out of New York. I remember them saying how helpless they felt and that they both wanted to get back home as soon as possible. After some discussion with these two, David and I moved over and joined a crowd of friends. At some point, I don't remember how long afterwards, I noticed the flight attendant guys were in a heated discussion with another guy (who I only knew by sight - never knew his name but would see him out around the Castro all the time). He was blaming them for what happened; rather, he was blaming the flight attendants on those flights for allowing this to happen. I was dumbfounded. This guy was saying some really nasty things. I always thought he looked so sweet and innocent, but now he had morphed into something that was very disgusting to me. The guys from New York had had about all they could stand and it almost got physical. People jumped in and separated them and the two guys left - I never saw them again. However, I would run into the man who blamed them for years. I watched him age over that time. If I had to guess, I would say he was at least 10 years younger than me. I remember I saw him before we moved to Australia in 2008 and I recalled what had happened that day at The Cafe in September 2001 and I thought to myself, he really looks like shit.