This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here.
Last summer, I arrived at what I thought would be my father’s deathbed so angry I could have killed him. It was the fourth time in four years alcohol abuse had landed him in the hospital. This time, it was acute liver failure. His skin was bright yellow, and his body was skeletal with the exception of his belly, which was so distended he looked pregnant. Just one week earlier, I had cut him out of my life completely. Prior to that, we only spoke when a concerned stranger would track me down on Facebook and beg me to intervene in his drinking. Each time, he refused to seek treatment. I don’t know what I was expecting as I sat at the foot of his bed waiting to see if he would survive the night. Maybe an apology. What I got instead was a question: “Did I ever tell you about the time Murph kicked the head?”
Murph was his partner when he was an officer with the NYPD. His full name was Eddie Murphy (no relation), and the two of them served as first responders on 9/11. The story took place about a week after the attacks, when the rescue workers were at their peak of sleep deprivation and exhaustion and my father and Eddie were among those sweeping for bodies in a partially destroyed Hilton hotel across the street from Building 7. A supervisor told the team they needed to take a break — a real break. The half-dozen officers stripped down to their boots, swaddled themselves in some of the hotel’s cozy robes, and plopped down for a nap in a hallway near the lobby.
But they weren’t alone. Scattered throughout the corridor were statues of what appeared to be businessmen. Some of the figures were arranged together on rolling carts, others stood alone, and many were toppled over in the dust as a result of the previous week’s chaos. They looked like mannequins with one notably odd feature: a large hole cut cleanly through the belly, lined in a fabric patterned with blue sky and white, fluffy clouds. My father and Eddie Murphy (still no relation) were throwing some of the statues out of the way to make room to lie down when Eddie snapped, gesturing to the figure lying horizontally at his feet and asking, “What the hell are these things?” My father explained, “They’re art, Murph.” “Art? What do you mean ‘They’re art’?” My father clarified, “You know, art — like maybe there was a gallery around here or something.” Eddie considered this for a moment — “Art, huh?” — and then, my father recalled between delighted convulsions, “he just kicked the fuckin’ head off the thing!”
My father’s yellowed eyes beamed as he gave me the play-by-play. Eddie overestimated the strength of the statue’s material, and to his surprise, the head popped right off the body like a champagne cork, soared through the air, thunked off the ground, and rolled down the hallway. “Everyone just lost it,” my father said. It was a frenzy of rescue workers doubled over, gasping for air in a fit of laughter that went on for what felt like an hour and continued a quarter-century later as my father wiped his eyes in his hospital bed. He described the kick as a turning point, as if a spell had been lifted. It was the first time he felt like a human after the attacks. As he finished telling me the story, it was the happiest I’d seen him in years.
He survived the night at the hospital and stayed for six more weeks before moving into an assisted-living facility with full-time medical care. As he adjusted to a smaller living space and even smaller liver, I returned to my life as a late-night comedy writer in Los Angeles. But as the months passed, I couldn’t stop thinking about the disemboweled mannequins. Somewhere out there was a person who created the sculptures that brought unlikely catharsis to my father and his colleagues.
In February, I caved to my own curiosity and ran an idea by my father: What if we track down the artist and tell them the story? He jumped at the suggestion and offered to draw me images of the figures from memory. During my childhood, before he joined the NYPD, he was an aspiring cartoonist and I’d sit beside him as he scribbled away in our basement, cackling over stacks of his single-panel comics. One of my favorites depicted a crab crawling onto the beach from the water, asking itself, What the hell did I come up here for again? Now, over three decades later, he was drawing once more.
With assistance from puzzled elder-care nurses, he sent me a series of sketches. I forwarded one of them to an email I found for Hilton’s public-relations department, hoping maybe the company would have a record of previous art installations. It wasn’t until I hit send that I realized how bizarre the email must have seemed — a random question about 9/11 attached to a doodle of a body captioned “NO FACE.” I did not receive a response. Still, it felt like we were making progress. We had become a father-son detective team; I followed the leads while he promised not to drink.
During my search for clues, I called everyone my father could recall laughing in that hallway. To my shock, every one of them remembered the story vividly. One officer called it one of the funniest moments of her life, explaining through her thick Brooklyn accent, “Jesse, when I say hysterical laughing … No joke, for like an howa!” Another officer recalled a horrible feeling of guilt as he laughed, knowing how disrespectful it must have sounded. Even Eddie Murphy (again, not the one from Norbit) described the precise amount of pressure he used to kick the head: “Like when you kick a tire to check the air.”
They also shared significantly less funny memories from that time. They spoke of the body parts they retrieved from buckets of rubble, silent drives transporting lone firemen back to empty ladders, the friends lost to rare cancers, and for some, their own cancer diagnoses. After relaying these conversations to my father, he shared some of his own painful memories. I’d heard snippets of these stories before, like the spinal cord he saw hanging off building scaffolding and the young woman he found completely flattened by concrete. However, it surprised me that his most haunting memories weren’t from ground zero but from incidents several years later. In 2005, he started having nightmares about being crushed by skyscrapers, spurring endless nights of him waking up screaming. There was the panic attack that moved him to claw his way out of an MRI machine. Then came delusions of immortality. He was so riddled with survivor’s guilt he started to believe he actually couldn’t die. He told me he would close his eyes and walk into traffic to test his belief he was unkillable. So far, he had been right.
Half a year had passed since my father first told me the story. By then, we were speaking every day and he was making jokes about his assisted-living situation. (“If I sound excited,” he faux bragged, “it’s because it’s lentil-soup night.”) I had exhausted what limited internet-research ability I had and given up my hunt for the artist. Then, one night after work, I found myself sharing my father’s amusing 9/11 story with a producer named Anthony, who works at Jimmy Kimmel Live! with me and was first hired as a footage researcher. For years, Anthony’s job entailed watching hours of news and entertainment broadcasts, then flagging moments that might be funny or interesting enough to highlight during monologues. The job title was actually “TV Watcher.” I asked him what he would do if he were looking for my statue. At the time, he just shrugged, but about four hours after we parted ways, around midnight, I woke up to a text message — an image of the statues my father described.
Anthony had gone home that night and, in true TV Watcher form, scoured hours of YouTube videos showcasing POV footage of rescue workers on 9/11. He sent me one of the videos, and exactly nine minutes and 28 seconds into it were 12 seconds of firefighters frantically running past a rack of mannequins. A freeze-frame revealed a pattern in the belly of one of the figures: blue sky and white, fluffy clouds. I sent the screengrabs to my father and his former colleagues — some of whom included retired detectives and active private investigators — and they couldn’t believe what Anthony had found in just a few hours.
I plugged the screengrabs into a reverse Google image search, where I discovered I was not the only person obsessed with these mysterious statues. It turns out they’re the center of an entire 9/11 conspiracy theory claiming they were evidence the attacks were an inside job. But the reality was far less exciting. The statues weren’t a symbol left behind by the deep state to expose an awful truth. They were Canadian. According to some articles Anthony sent me, they were part of an enormous exposition called Quebec New York 2001, a planned Manhattan-wide showcase of French Canadian artists that was supposed to include massive art installations, live theater, food, musical performances, and Cirque du Soleil acrobats flying through the air. It was set to open on September 13, 2001. The event was canceled, and the Quebec government lost millions on the project.
I sent an Instagram message to the director of PR for the ill-fated extravaganza, Rémy Charest, to ask if he knew which artist made the mannequins. He responded a few weeks later and identified the artist as his personal friend Bernard White. Rémy explained that the statues my father found in the hallway were not part of the event itself but more like mascots. The foam men were meant to be sprinkled throughout the city near any event tied to Quebec New York 2001. Some were already set up in the street, grouped together holding banners and signs for the events. Rémy said the statues were meant to symbolize international collaboration — what New York and Quebec could accomplish if we worked together. I was over the moon, but my excitement was immediately tempered when Rémy told me Bernard died from intestinal cancer in 2015. I broke the news to my father, who noted that Bernard’s cancer metastasized in the same spot his statues had their missing piece.
I wanted to know more about Bernard. Mostly, I wanted to know what kind of sense of humor he had. Rémy and I arranged another call, during which he told me more about his friend, including that he was a 9/11 survivor himself. On the morning of the attacks, Bernard had been transporting racks of mannequins from the Hilton hotel, where my father later found them strewn about in a hallway, to the World Financial Center. Rémy recalled Bernard lamenting during the chaos, “A year of work to create something beautiful, and it all goes to waste because of these nincompoops.” “He called the terrorists nincompoops?” I asked. Rémy assured me it sounded much harsher in French.
I asked Rémy if Bernard had any family who might be interested in the story. He told me about Bernard’s widow and creative partner, Nancy, and I asked if I could pass her a message. I wanted to share my father’s story and ask what Bernard would have thought of it. Would he have laughed, or would he be insulted his work was defiled so barbarically? More than anything, I wanted Nancy to know that Bernard’s year of work wasn’t a waste — he had created something beautiful after all.
It took months for Rémy to get my message to Nancy. I got the feeling there was hesitation in dredging up these memories. But I eventually received a response from her. She was delighted by the story and assured me that had Bernard seen Eddie decapitate his work for a laugh, he would have been doubled over alongside my father. She said he was humble and never took himself too seriously. She told me all about the wonderful life they built together and how deeply she and their children loved him. She still marvels at Bernard’s ability as an artist. “Even with everything artificial intelligence can now produce,” she told me, “I still rarely see models as beautiful as his.”
Like my father and his fellow first responders, Bernard also dealt with painful trauma. In the wake of his experience on 9/11, he developed PTSD, coped with alcohol, and closed himself off. “In many ways, I never truly got my Bernard back,” Nancy told me. She believes his cancer was caused by exposure to dust at the World Trade Center; his type of cancer is indeed included in a list of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the CDC. It was impossible for me not to see reflections of my father in Bernard’s story: two artists who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One year has passed since my father first shared his story with me. He still relapses, and I still want to kill him when he does. But now, we speak constantly. We talk about new illustrations he’s working on, the jokes I’ve written that week, and the hilarious things my nieces said on their last visit. Our father-son investigation has concluded, and now that I’m starting to reflect on it, I view it more as an art project. It’s a creative collaboration that allowed us to linger together in a memory where all it takes to snap someone out of despair is a swift kick to a foam statue’s head.