The Enmities Of 9-11

By Sandor Blum

Steve Scharf grew up in an abusive home and developed many enmities.

In 1972, he witnessed a heinous crime, and the perpetrator went unpunished.

On the morning of 9/11, he is challenged by a hate crime committed against his Muslim friend that he is determined to avenge. He discovers that the man who committed that crime in 1972 was now his neighbor who was running for governor.

Scharf struggles to deal with issues of justice and revenge, along with trying to give love to his adoring wife.

It is a story of the struggle to overcome demons from the past and gain redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639857203

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Copyright © 2022 Sandor Blum

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

This is a work of fiction. Since some of the events’ depicted really happened, they have been fictionalized to protect those who may have been involved.

ISBN 978-1-63985-719-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63985-720-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Prologue

When I was a child, self-loathing grew inside of me like a virus running amok from a petri dish. I had no one to blame but myself since the only data I could rely on to take stock of myself was provided daily by my mother. She branded me a no-good brat whom she wished she had not been conceived, and I fulfilled that prophecy dutifully. Then, when I turned eight years of age, hatred erupted like Mount Etna spewing molten lava across the pillars of Pompeii. My enmities spit out in every direction. I hated my mother and told her so with venomous curses and street slurs. I loathed my teachers and sabotaged their classrooms with pranks. I despised the poverty we lived in and the cops who took away our sticks used to play stickball on the street. I reviled the Yankees, the Irish gangs with whom we battled the drunken superintendent in my building who would fall asleep without shoveling coal into the furnace. I hated math, eggs, oatmeal, the German Jews who were told by their parents that we, Ashkenazi Jews, were Untermensch (subhuman).

I was an angry, acting out, brawling, hardened kid whose mother told him in Yiddish that he should drown in the bathtub or perish from cholera. The one invective that hurt the most was that I should be engulfed in the fires of hell. At the age of twelve, I had read the Inferno, and one of Dante’s levels of hell was my dreaded destination.

At sixteen, I began to mellow. I became philosophical about my fate and treated my mother with polite disdain. Hatred was in the way of having the energy needed to begin writing, play club basketball, and enjoy friendship with girls. Enmity became impractical and irrelevant to my vision of marrying a dream girl, whom I dubbed Sally with the toothpaste smile. Sally from a small town in Iowa. Sally who was country clean with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Over many years of relationships that I blew up, I learned to love. I married an adoring woman who tempered me. She laid me down beside still waters, and I glimpsed the shape and contours of a happy life.

When 9/11 happened, I was not prepared for a new brand of hatred that fomented in me toward people I had never known or met. My friend and colleague, Sami Daoud, was a Muslim but no terrorist. The name Al Qaeda was foreign to me. Who were they? What were they? Prejudice, I had learned from Gordon Allport, is hatred of the unknown. But I knew, with certainty and clarity, the man who crystalized my loathing. His name was Tucker Doyle. I knew what this onerous enemy of mine represented. I had never forgotten what he and a gang had done to me and my friends a long time ago.

When I ruefully learned that the mansion in which he lived was in the same town as the home we had purchased, I saw both threat and opportunity. Doyle had launched a campaign to run for governor. My PTSD came roaring back. Many years earlier, he had committed a heinous and unforgivable act. I knew that I would have to be calm and calculating if I hoped to bring him down, and rather than hate him, just drop a bomb on him like Paul Tibbets did on Hiroshima. According to Freud’s ideas about condensation in dreams and in poetry, Tucker Doyle efficiently homogenized my many enmities. After 9/11, new ones were spawned.

Chapter 1

The Morning of 9/11

After a long night of restless dreams—which played like a Bogart film across a screen filled with wars against the bad guys—I opened my eyes, stretched, kissed Sarah on the cheek, and felt a refreshing sense of alacrity for the day that lay ahead. My company, the Atlantic Advisory Group, was meeting at its headquarters in Boston, with a mission to design an event for a client on how to build an inclusive and diverse corporate culture. The conference was scheduled for December, to be held at the client’s annual retreat in Aspen. Along with an African colleague from Nairobi, an Asian from our office in San Francisco, and Sami Daoud, my compatriot, in the Boston office, we had been selected to facilitate the event.

It was always a pleasure to work with colleagues from other company offices in the States, to gain their perspectives and appreciate as I did, the distinct regional differences between us. I had lived in Boston since college but had come to perceive the city as provincial, forbidding, incestuously blueblood, and imbued with academic hauteur. I remember looking for a place to buy a bagel when I first moved to Beantown from New York. When I found a store in Brookline, the guy behind the counter handed one to me, and I said, You call this a bagel?

He looked at me disdainfully and said, Are you here to start an argument?

Yes, I said. I’m from New York. That’s how we start a conversation. You’re supposed to argue back,

Chicagoans, Philadelphians, and folks from our DC office were my kind of people. I kissed Sarah on the cheek again and told her that I loved her. After twenty years of marriage, we were