It was a bright sunny morning that September 11, and I was horny as hell. I hadn’t had sex in ten days, an eternity for my dick—too many chilly bitches at the clubs, plus my job kept me busy. For the past two years, I’d worked as a personal investment revision specialist for Pierpoint Carson, this brokerage house on the 19th floor of the World Trade Center, north tower. Essentially I was the clean-up guy, like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, minus the gore and the hip oldies soundtrack. I salvaged what had turned out to be the underperforming—hell, unperforming—investment portfolios our goofball brokers had drawn up for our sucker clients. I averted a lot of lawsuits that, in retrospect, the company deserved. At least I received full medical and dental, and could get away with murder due to my high status. Plus the company had a high employee turnover, which meant a fresh stream of pussy.
That morning, all the women were avoiding me at work, bitch-like, except for Mara Lindgren, this babe who had joined the company only a few days earlier. She kept walking past my open door, obviously eyeballing me with lust. I mean, she was all but drooling like Niagara Falls. I figured I should make my move, so the next time she passed by I invited her in and asked her to close the door. Then I buzzed the receptionist and asked her to hold my calls until further notice.
I know this sounds like a bad cocktail napkin cartoon, but so what? It really happened. I wasn’t kidding about getting away with murder; I’d had plenty of romantic rendezvous during business hours inside my Ikea-cized corporate sanctum.
We stood around and talked for maybe half a minute. Mara said she’d just moved from a flyspeck town upstate into a crackerbox apartment on the Upper West Side. “Who cares,” I thought. Personal stories—even my own, even this one—bore me. Before I could kiss her to shut her up, she suddenly vacuum-locked her mouth onto mine and started sucking out my tonsils.
I was turned on and started Hoovering her tonsils in return. We sank into my bloblike beige swivel chair and kissed some more, even harder. I ran my hands through her shoulder-length jet black hair, which she wore in that pouffy style one of the chicks on Friends had had several seasons ago. Her, Mara’s, hands skittered all over my shirt front. I unbuttoned her blouse; she had smallish breasts in a generic white bra. Good contents, bad packaging. I pawed them a few times anyway, as a formality, then slid my hands down and rubbed her tight abs; at least she worked out. She pulled down my pants and boxers and stroked my hard-on, a bit too roughly. I pulled down her skirt and panties and stroked her snatch, maybe a bit too roughly myself. Her snatch was bone dry, so to speak. Oh well, didn’t matter—the condom I had was lubricated. I suited up, so to speak, and commenced plowing her right in that chair. The foreplay lasted 60, maybe 65 seconds; the plowing, maybe half as long.
We got up and readjusted our clothing. She acted nonchalant, but not very well, as if she’d taken only half a Prozac. I hoped she wouldn’t start considering us an item now. I hoped Chuck Blandford had finished those profit reports. Suddenly this sound came, a roar, like an oncoming airplane. I barely had time to give her my “Naah, couldn’t be” look before the gigantic crash, the shaking building, the power outage.
I didn’t hear any formal word about a plane crash, or an evacuation. Everyone in the office knew what had happened and just began converging at the stairwells. Soon we were streaming downstairs, a bit too slowly for my tastes. I trudged behind Orrin Osley and stared at the long skinny wart sticking out of the back of his fat neck, dead center. My coworkers, those wags, called the wart his on/off switch. I called it his neckboner. Mara followed close behind me, even trying to hold my hand as we passed the 7th floor. “Oh, great—itemhood,” I thought.
Eventually we all reached the ground floor and streamed outside, away from the damaged tower. Mara walked beside me. No sign of Chuck Blandford anywhere; I really needed those reports. Then came the whine of another oncoming airplane. My coworkers and I looked up and saw the south tower get it. Our lucky day. Almost all of my coworkers would later say the explosion looked like something from a movie. From what I could tell, the fireball looked greasier and more irregular than its cinematic counterpart, plus lacked the crucial component of that idiot moviegoer sitting in front of me with the beeping cell phone. I didn’t waste too much time gawking, though. I hauled ass, natch, along with everyone else, to avoid the falling debris. Mara kept up with me, even outran me at times; she really did work out. A million other people and I had run into central Manhattan just as the north tower collapsed. As Mara and I ducked into a coffeehouse to escape the onrushing cloud, I made a mental note to update my résumé. The company probably would’ve tanked in six months anyway; the terrorists merely hastened its inevitable demise.
Everyone in the coffeehouse saw the south tower fall, live, on a twelve-inch black-and-white portable TV placed next to the cash register. Gasps, moans, some crying from the alt-robots surrounding me. Same reaction form Mara. I did my best to gasp and moan, but I drew the line at crying. I hoped I wouldn’t break down from all this someday at an inopportune moment, such as picking up my dry cleaning or boffing some babe.
Speaking of babes, Mara then tried to call her mother and stepfather in Craptown, New York, on my cell phone, which I’d let her use. At least I’d had the foresight to grab my briefcase before evacuating the tower. I hadn’t wanted any sticky-fingered fireman to treat himself to that $300 imported Italian leather case and its contents: my cell phone, my laptop, my racquetball goggles, and an overdue DVD rental I’d never gotten around to seeing: Filthy Whorelords, allegedly the first porn movie ever shot in Rwanda.
Mara did get through to her folks after an hour of busy signals. She spoke to both her folks for a few minutes, at the same time, starting with tearful I’m-all-rights and ending with tearful, but strained and slightly chilly, I’ll-call-yous.
Hmm.
Anyway, you can probably guess what happened to Chuck Blandford. Yup, he hadn’t reported to work that morning. He’d had a hangover and called in sick. He told me all this after Mara and I had run into him that evening at M. Hattans, this precious and pretentious bar in upper Manhattan whose mere name gives me a headache. Highest concentration of chilly bitches on the East Coast. I’d suddenly needed a drink or three, and that bar was closest to my final destination, my apartment. The 60-inch color TV there at M. Jerkoffs showed the usual loop of classical music videos instead of live news coverage, and no one else seemed to care.
Chuck looked barely conscious. I asked him if he’d ever finished my reports. “What reports?” he answered. Damn drunk.
I’d lost my urge for a drink, so I went to my place with Mara, and she stayed the night. You think we’d have screwed our brains out after that near-fatal day, you know, to reaffirm life and all that crap. Actually, she alternated between numb and weeping and just wanted to lie in bed holding me. I let her hold me as seed money, so to speak, toward much more uninhibited plowing, possibly. And such plowing occurred the next morning. Her snatch gushed more than a hundred Niagara Falls—Fallses?—combined.
I wouldn’t say I had the last quickie at the World Trade Center. But who knows for sure?
© 2026 David V. Matthews (originally written in 2001; I deleted one word and added one word on 9/10/26)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 