Firehouse (3 page)

It had been some seventeen hours since the Ladder 35 rig left the house, and Morello, fearful of the worst, but having no inkling how bad the worst really was, had been calling various private department phone numbers he knew. He was by this time with his daughter-in-law Debi at her and Vincent's home in Middle Village, Queens. Finally, around 2:30
A.M.
, he got through to someone. Morello explained that he was a retired battalion chief and that his son had been down at the World Trade Center. The man at the other end of the line agreed to help him. Morello did not realize that Debi was listening in on the first-floor extension. “Thirty-five Truck,” the man had said. “Thirty-five Truck is missing.”

“What the hell does that mean, Thirty-five Truck is missing?” Morello asked. “The whole company is missing?”

“Yes,” said the man at the other end, “the whole company is missing.” That was when John Morello heard Debi on the line, screaming in agony, not just for herself, it seemed, but for every family member connected to 40/35 and all the other New York firehouses that day.

September 11 was a special kind of hell for 40/35. No one who works at the firehouse has really yet comprehended the apocalyptic nature of what occurred. That morning thirteen men set out on the house's two rigs, and twelve of them died. It was a tragedy beyond comprehension, not just the worst day in the history of New York City, but one of the worst days in American history—a day that people would compare to Pearl Harbor, sixty years earlier. The New York Fire Department was the institution that bore the brunt of it—343 men killed—and the 40/35 firehouse was among the hardest hit. The aftershocks of the tragedy have persisted not just in the grief for the men who were lost, but also in the guilt among the survivors, who have continued to wonder not just why they lived, but whether it was wrong to have done so. There have been acceptable days, and there have been bad days, when the pain was almost unbearable.

The men of 40/35 are bonded now more than ever, not just by their job, as in the past, but by their grief as well. Sometimes the house has the feeling of a World War II unit, in which a good part of the men were wiped out in one sudden, shocking battle, and none of the survivors entirely understands what happened—why so many men were taken so cruelly and so quickly, and why they, the survivors, were spared. So much of who went that morning and who did not was chance. Some were relieved early and were on their way home before they heard about the attack; some were supposed to have worked that day but had taken what are called mutuals, which meant that, for personal reasons, they had switched shifts with other men.

Bob Menig, a thirty-seven-year-old Ladder 35 veteran, had been scheduled to go out to Long Island for an often delayed doctor's appointment, one that he had been told not to miss. It was set for 9:00
A.M.
Tuesday in Valley Stream. That meant that Menig, whose shift was over at nine, had to leave half an hour early, so he asked his relief, Mike D'Auria, a popular young probie who had not yet graduated from the academy, to come in a bit early. In order to do so D'Auria spent Monday night at the firehouse, rather than going home to Staten Island. Even so, at 8:30, when Menig had to leave for the appointment, the house was still one fireman short, because Dan Marshall, who was being sent over from a neighboring firehouse at the last minute to fill a vacancy, had not yet arrived. Marshall was supposed to relieve Vincent Morello, and in this kind of situation at least one fireman must stay and cover, drawing overtime for so-called waiting relief. Morello asked Menig if he wanted to wait relief, and Menig said that normally he would, but on this day he had to get to his doctor's appointment. “Is that okay?” Menig had asked Morello. “No sweat,” Morello had answered. With that, Menig left for his appointment.

As he was driving on the Long Island Expressway, Menig heard a sketchy, preliminary report on the radio about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. He immediately called the firehouse on his car phone, and Morello answered. “Vinnie, is it a big plane or a little plane?” Menig asked, and Morello answered that it was a big plane, and that they had already gotten the fifth alarm. “I can't wait to get down there,” Morello said and then told Menig not to worry.

Afterward, Bob Menig was one of the men who took the tragedy hardest. He had been spared by such a fluky chain of events, he thought, and his dealings with two of the men who died later that morning made it all the worse, the guilt all the more immediate. In his mind he replayed what had happened over and over—
he
was the person who had asked D'Auria to come in early to fill in for him,
he
was the person who had not been able to wait relief for Vinnie Morello. Menig was unsparing in his self-examination, and it tormented him every day. He worried that because of his choices—even if they were not choices, for his doctor's appointment was essentially mandatory—he might have had a hand in causing the deaths of two men. It was almost more than he could bear. Menig tried therapy but did not find it especially helpful. What did help, and gave him as much solace as he was able to accept, was talking to the other men at the firehouse, who were going through similar anguish, and to Marc Morello, Vinnie's older brother, also a fireman, who had come over to 40/35 on temporary duty after the tragedy.

It was as if there were an enormous hole in the house. As Matt Malecki, one of the veteran 40/35 firemen, said, what was hard was the constancy of the loss, the fact that it would never go away. Sometimes for a brief moment, he noted, you would catch yourself thinking, well, they're just off on vacation and they'll be back. But then, almost immediately, the truth would return, and you would realize that they were never coming back, and you would have to accept the hard reality of that. It meant that a new social fabric had to be created within the house, not the same one as before, but similar, with new men, like it or not, taking on the roles left behind by such veterans as Bruce Gary and Jimmy Giberson, who did so much to set the tone for the company.

The station house, like so many others in New York City, became, in the days after, something of a shrine. The names and photos of the men who died were posted near the door. People, strangers mostly, still come by to leave flowers, notes, and cards there. To no small degree it has the same feel as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, in the sense of it being a homemade memorial. In the first few days after the tragedy, a young woman in her twenties would stop every morning, look at the pictures, and then burst into tears. Finally one of the firemen asked her what was the matter, had she lost a close friend in the firehouse? No, she answered, but she felt as if she knew one of the firemen, and then she pointed to the photo of Giberson, a big, strapping, good-looking man, who had been a chauffeur on Ladder 35. In the photo he was wearing a hat because he
always
wore a hat. Giberson, who was forty-three at the time of his death, had been quite sensitive about losing his hair, and one of his idiosyncrasies was what the men called “the hat switch.” It was not something they teased him about—he was too strong and forceful to be teased about something like that—but everyone knew that Giberson always wore a baseball cap around the firehouse, and his fireman's hat on the truck, and when it was time to go out on a run, Giberson would switch the baseball cap with the fireman's hat as fast as possible, when he thought no one was looking.

Jimmy Giberson always started slowly in the morning, and the other men knew it and did not crowd him then. One of his small pleasures was to come in a little early, when the city around him was just beginning to stir and the people in the neighborhood were going off to work. He would take his coffee in front of the firehouse and watch everyone hurrying by. He would smile and say hello, as if the better to understand the people in the neighborhood whose lives he was charged with protecting. That was when the young woman had seen him, and though they had never said more than hello to each other, and she did not even know his name, she had come to think of him as her personal fireman.

That morning had started lazily enough. There had been little action during the previous three days. Labor Day had come and gone and now the summer was unofficially finished, vacations were used up, children were going back to school. Over the weekend the big event had been an alarm from a box a block from the firehouse, which turned out to have been caused by some kind of mechanical error in the box. The weather was brilliant, and the city seemed unusually empty and quiet, with many people still away at their summer homes, trying to squeeze out a little more vacation. A primary election was being held, in which New Yorkers were to choose the candidates for a new mayor, among other officials, but it had stirred little excitement, and the turnout was expected to be very low.

Among the 40/35 men were a number of golfers—how good they were was a subject of constant debate at the firehouse kitchen table. Several of them—Greg Petrik, Mike Kotula, Anthony Rucco, Ray Pfeifer, and Joe Mackey—were still away on a golfing weekend in Ocean City, Maryland. Two other firemen, Michael Boyle and David Arce (Arce was known generally by his nickname, Buddha), who worked out of Engine 33 on Great Jones Street in Manhattan, had originally been scheduled to go along on the trip. The two had both recently rotated through 40/35, and they remained de facto members of the house and still played on the 40/35 softball team. But at the last minute Boyle decided not to go, because he was active in politics and wanted to spend the primary day campaigning in Queens for his cousin Matt Farrell, who was running for city council. Arce had offered to help him out. Rucco was quite disappointed Boyle and Buddha were not coming; the way he saw it, politics was getting in the way of really important things, like golf.

Most people thought Arce was called Buddha because he was so quiet, but in truth he had gotten the nickname in childhood, when he played cards and carried around a Buddha bank in which to stow his poker winnings. On every deal of the cards, Arce would rub the belly of the Buddha bank for luck. He had grown up a few doors away from Boyle in Westbury, Long Island, and had been virtually drafted into the Boyle clan and thus into the world of firemen, since the Boyles were a legendary firefighting family. The paterfamilias, Jimmy Boyle, had served as a much-loved head of the firefighters' union.

Buddha and Boyle remained inseparable best friends in adulthood, and Buddha followed Boyle by a year on rotations through three houses—Engine 33, then Ladder 35, and then Engine 226. As Boyle departed each house, he would tell the men there to take care of his buddy, and Buddha took care of Boyle too. After Boyle had gotten a bit too boisterous once at a firehouse golf outing, it was Buddha who had lobbied for nearly a year to get him permission to go on the next one. In the eyes of most of the men at 40/35, Buddha was nothing less than a brilliant fireman, and Mike Boyle was also someone special, the scion of an important firefighting family, active in department politics, a young man who might one day himself head the Uniformed Firefighters Association. Plus, Boyle was engaged to marry Rosemary Kenny, the daughter of fireman Mark Kenny, who had recently retired from Engine 40.

That Saturday both Boyle and Buddha had participated in the Marty Celic Running Festival, a four-mile race on Staten Island honoring a firefighter who had died battling an arson fire in lower Manhattan in 1977. They were representing their own firehouse, Engine 33, which had been looking for its fourth Celic victory in a row. Boyle was a good marathon runner and was hoping to break three hours in the upcoming New York Marathon in November, while Buddha was better at shorter distances. While they were at the race, Anthony Rucco was shopping for golf clothes for the Maryland trip. Suddenly his cell phone beeped. It was Boyle on the other end of the line, screaming so loudly that at first Rucco had trouble understanding him.
“Anthony! Four-peat! Four-peat! We did it again!”
Boyle was yelling. Rucco finally figured out that Boyle was trying to tell him they had won again. Both men had run very well that day, and Boyle was beside himself with excitement—later Buddha had had trouble getting him to leave the race because Boyle was so busy talking to and celebrating with everyone there. Rucco had been pleased for his friends, but he was a little sad that they weren't coming on the golfing trip—they were both on such a high that it would have been great fun to have them along.

At 8:00
A.M.
that Tuesday morning the house was bustling. That was one of the best times of the day, the firemen thought, because it was an hour before the change of shifts, and most of the men tended to come in early, and so the house was full of people, exchanging gossip, some of it pure firehouse talk, some of it more social in origin. With the weather outside so strikingly clear and the temperature around seventy degrees, everyone was relaxed. That two planes had already taken off from Boston's Logan Airport and were to be hijacked and aimed like missiles at the World Trade Center was something no one at 40/35 could yet know.

Captain Frank Callahan, the senior officer in the house that morning, had been a fireman for just under twenty-eight years and a captain at 40/35 for three. He was an old-fashioned man, the other firemen thought, very much a throwback to another era when the officers did not lightly mix with the men. There was a certain emotional distance to him, and he did not encourage intimacy or pal-ship. He did not readily tell them that they had done a good job, and that too was a throwback to another age in America, one when life was harder and more austere, when compliments and kind words were more carefully rationed. In those years fathers did not lightly praise their children, and bosses did not easily praise their employees, in no small part because no one had praised them when they were growing up. It was a culture in which the absence of criticism was regarded as praise enough, and doing the job for the job's sake was viewed as reward enough.