Firehouse (6 page)

That September Bruce Gary, fifty-one, was also thinking about retirement. He had been with the department more than twenty years. His twenty-four-year-old daughter, Jessica, was planning to get married, he said, in June of 2002, and then he was going to go back to plumbing full-time. (He had two other children, Richard, twenty-one, and Thomas, fifteen.) He was a brilliant plumber, which helped him as a chauffeur for the engine, because he
knew
water, and he could always find it. No one doubted that he was going to be able to make a great deal more money as a plumber than as a fireman, but they also thought the firehouse was going to be a very different place without him as its enforcer. He was like the battle-hardened master sergeant in an elite military outfit, someone who made sure that everything worked and worked well.

Gary was of Polish descent, or, as the others believed, he was mostly Polish—nowadays it was hard to tell; people who were supposed to be Irish turned out to be half Italian, and Buddha Arce, who was supposed to be Filipino, was in fact half Filipino and half Irish, while Steve Mercado, who was supposed to be Spanish, was half Puerto Rican and half Irish, or at least a quarter Irish and a quarter German. The name Gary had originally been much longer, it seems, before someone had chopped off several consonants and perhaps even a vowel or two. Gary told the other firemen that once, in the basement of his parents' home, he had come across a trunk, stamped with a name that began with the letters
GARR
and then went on at some length. He had asked his mother whose name that was, and she had answered, “That's
your
name, boy.”

Like ethnicity, nicknames were important in the firehouse, and it was part of Bruce Gary's power that he was the house's principal dispenser of nicknames. His own was Slip Mahoney, after one of the tough kids in the Bowery Boys, or Bruce the Bully, a nickname he did not in any way mind, since it implied his power. Everyone else seemed to carry one of his nicknames. Mike Kotula was going through a divorce, so he became Mickey the Lover. Giberson was known as Squarehead, a name he did not seem to like very much but had come to accept, as it was a little late in the game to try to separate himself from it. Another fireman, not known for his speed in picking up the tab at a restaurant or bar when it was his turn to pay, became Skippy Cheap Cheap. Another became Bubble Butt. Gene Szatkowski became Moe, from the Three Stooges. (They already had a Larry—that is, Larry Virgilio.) Someone else, for reasons they could never quite remember, became known as Feta Cheese.

The others were in awe of Gary's sheer physical strength. He was not that tall, perhaps five feet nine or five ten, but he weighed 230 pounds, most of it solid muscle. He had forearms like Popeye's, one of the other firemen noted. He liked to roll up his sleeves and show off his arms; according to his friend Bob Menig, “They looked like nothing so much as four-by-fours.” Gary had pushed the others to create a weight room in the house, a decision that at the time had astonished some of the old-timers, who never worked out like he did, and who were a little reluctant to contribute their share of the money for the equipment.

Gary worked out all the time; he could bench-press about 300 pounds. He was also a considerable athlete, a good softball player, a good hockey player, and a good skier, and he was very proud of his athletic ability. Once at the firehouse they had a younger man named Joe Laterza, who was also a very good athlete. He apparently had been a great schoolboy sprinter. But Bruce Gary was not impressed. He claimed he could beat Laterza in a race. No one believed he could—Joe was younger and looked more like a sprinter, but once the challenge was out there, Bruce being Bruce, a showdown was inevitable. So they roped off two blocks on Amsterdam Avenue and held the race. To everyone's surprise save that of Bruce Gary, Gary won.

Gary never let his passion for staying in shape get in the way of his passion for smoking. The other men would ask him how he could take such good care of his body, lifting weights and running the stairs, and then smoke afterward. He would just grunt and tell them that was a dumb question. Not all of the cigarettes he smoked were his own. In fact, Gary was a big smoker of other people's cigarettes, as if by not buying his own packs, he might one day stop. When he hit on another man for cigarettes, he would look at the pack, and if there were, say, only four left, he would observe that since the other fireman was going to need a new pack anyway, he would keep the pack with the four cigarettes.

Gary was, by consensus, the dominating political force in the house. As much as anyone, he was the arbiter of proper and improper behavior, in effect chief justice of his own supreme court, which sat unofficially in chambers in the very kitchen he had expanded with his sledgehammer. If there was a dispute, Gary would dominate it, and his side would always win. He was smart, he was forceful, and on any particular issue he always wanted whatever it was more than anyone else did, so people tended to defer to him. Conversely, whatever he opposed tended not to happen. With Gary, said one fireman, it was his sheer
righteousness
—an odd word, the others added, to apply to a fireman, especially a rough and tough one such as Gary. But if anyone was serious—indeed righteous—about the traditions of the house, about there being a right way and a wrong way to do things, it was Bruce Gary.

Gary had a strong opinion on
everything
, including the food purchased for the firehouse. Regarding cereal, for instance, he would tell the probies fixing breakfast that most cereals were garbage, but if they wanted a
real
cereal, then they should serve up Cheerios. If he traded barbs with the other men, there was always a sense that the repartee was a bit one-sided: He was so forceful a figure that there might as well have been a sign around his neck that said Don't Mess With Bruce Gary.

Had he, as one younger fireman said admiringly, lived in another time, Gary might have allied himself with Robin Hood, always on the side of justice. Perhaps he would have been Robin Hood's muscle. Gary knew his power and his influence, and he used it shrewdly, always with absolute respect for the firehouse tradition and codes. He had come into the department six weeks ahead of Jim Gormley, and for a long time he had not let Gormley forget that he was senior; he would look at Gormley and say,
“Six weeks,”
and then he would add, “You know, I remember when you were going on your first fire.” Gormley eventually left the house, but returned, after nearly ten years, as a lieutenant, and Gary once again delighted in reminding him of the critical difference in their respective seniority—it was six weeks and would forever be six weeks. But when Gormley was promoted to captain in the house, Gary immediately dropped the stinger. That was a line that, for the good of the firehouse, he would not cross. A captain was not to be toyed with or lightly teased—nothing was to be done that might undermine his authority in front of the junior men.

Gary could be very hard on young firemen coming in—testing them constantly, monitoring them for just the trace of the slacker, coming down on them very quickly when he saw signs of weakness or a cheater within. But with Gary it was never harassment for harassment's sake, a veteran beating up on a new kid who was vulnerable and an easy target. It was never for personal advantage—that is, an older fireman leveraging a younger one for better hours or better vacation slots. Rather, it was about conducting a tough, ongoing examination in which he probed the core of the younger man's character, looking for his potential lesser side. It was
always
for the greater good of the firehouse, and it was always about whether the younger fireman was measuring up. That was all Gary cared about.

He was classically a blue-collar guy. He sometimes used big words that he had not yet quite mastered, and a favorite expression of his was to say of something that he did not like or that he feared was a bit trendy, that it was “avant-garde”—which somehow came out as
advent guard
. That was something of a catchall phrase, used to describe anything or any idea that he deemed a little too fancy for the firehouse. He was most wary of younger firemen coming in, as happened more and more, with college degrees; he feared that because they had been to college, they might think they knew more about the job than they did, or that they might believe themselves above the grubbier side of firehouse life, cleaning up after meals and doing the menial support tasks that make a firehouse run efficiently. In addition, he worried they might not have the requisite courage in the face of danger—why should they, if they had other options in life? One of his brothers had gone to college and Gary, known for his exceptional mechanical skills, was famous in his family for telling his brother when some kind of assemble-it-yourself equipment arrived: “Here are the instructions—you take them and read them, and by the time you finish reading them, I'll have the thing put together.”

His wariness of college men was well known, and younger men coming into the house were always warned to tread lightly in that area. College guys, Gary clearly believed, had to be taught that they were not a superior species, unless otherwise demonstrated, and therefore they would have to work extra hard before they were accepted. When Sean Newman, a college graduate, joined 40/35 in 1997, he was warned of Gary's prejudice, and told to tiptoe around it. “Hey kid, what did you do before you became a fireman?” Gary asked him. Newman knew it was coming, and he was ready. “I was a sandhog,” replied Newman, who then weighed a slight 175 pounds and had in fact worked as a journalist for Reuters. For a moment Gary seemed impressed—the kid was slim but he was a sandhog, and sandhogs were stand-up guys who faced great risks every day to build underwater tunnels, one of the toughest jobs in the city. “There was this very long pause, and then Bruce's eye traveled first to my very soft hands, and then to my pipe-stem arms, and then even he began to laugh. He knew he had been taken if only for a minute or so—but I got a bit of dispensation,” Newman recalled.

A younger man who did not buy into Gary's authority did so at considerable risk. Gary might say of a young fireman who did not meet his standards that the young man would be spending much of his time in the next few months trying to figure out how to get out of a medical pension. Or he might say, “I don't think he's going to be with us very long. Take a good look because you won't see him in a few years.” But if a younger man was working hard, Gary would always know, and he would respect that commitment.

Gary knew he was not just a fireman, but a teacher as well; that, by tradition and necessity, it was the responsibility of senior firemen to teach as well as to do. Ray Pfeifer, who weighs well over 200 pounds, remembered catching his first fire with Gary at Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway. Pfeifer was on the nozzle, a physically demanding and scary job—holding the hose and going right smack into the face of fire. He was, he remembered, incredibly nervous that day. Gary was the backup, and he was keeping a sharp eye out on Pfeifer, to make sure that he was all right. After a few minutes of tentative advancing, Pfeifer felt an incredibly strong arm come around him from behind, locking him into position and then lifting him off the ground, as if he weighed no more than a feather. It was Bruce Gary's arm. Slowly and steadily the veteran fireman pushed and carried the nervous rookie into the fire. Gary was utterly calm, and his calm gradually washed over Pfeifer—
If this man is okay, I'm okay
, Pfeifer thought. And then they did it, put out the fire, and Pfeifer took a good long look at the man who had seemed to come out of nowhere to help him. There was a big, cool smile on Gary's face, a smirk almost—the old pro enjoying a new guy's nervousness on his first day. “You did okay, kid,” Gary told Pfeifer. “Welcome to the New York City Fire Department.”

Lieutenant John Ginley, thirty-seven at the time of his death, was the Engine officer on duty that morning. He had been at the firehouse for three and a half years. Thanks to the television set in the house, the men had, in those early chaotic moments of the terrorist attack, a strong sense of how terrible a day this was going to be. As the news came in, Ginley, as usual, was cool and very much in command. He was, the men later decided, like two different people. The first was the relatively new lieutenant in the house, all business, extremely capable but very quiet—“almost like a priest,” one of the senior men said. There was little play to him, almost no lightness when he was at work, and he generally seemed to be outside the usual firehouse games. He was exceptionally precise and well prepared, and yet never out of sync with the job or his men. He seemed young, but his drills were impressive, like those of a true veteran. One of the things that others liked about him was that when he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to excel at his job. The men, Captain Gormley once noted, were very good at deciding into which category an officer's efforts fell: Was he doing something, pushing himself and pushing them, simply because he wanted to get ahead, or was he doing it because he wanted to do a better job? With Ginley there was no doubt it was always about the latter.

But there was another John Ginley—one the men glimpsed a few times a year at picnics and at the Christmas party. During those times, especially when he was with his two children, nine-year-old Taylor and seven-year-old Connor, he was a completely different man—totally relaxed, all play, and it seemed there was nothing he enjoyed more than his role as a father. That was not surprising, thought Father John Delendick, a priest who was a close friend of the Ginley family and who was named the department's chaplain on September 16, after the death at the World Trade Center of the much-beloved FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge. John Ginley's father, Joseph, was a fireman, and of his children—five sons born within a space of six and a half years—four had become firemen. It was, Reverend Delendick believed, a family in which there seemed to be an unusually tight bond between father and sons, “in which father and sons did
everything
together.” Delendick recalled, “In most of the families I knew, when September came, you could feel a sense of relief from the parents because the kids were going back to school, and it was going to be a bit easier and more restful at home with them tied up for most of the day. But with Joe Ginley you could actually sense a very real depression every September—the coming of school meant that he was going to lose his five closest pals, the people he went camping with and played with every day. The fall meant that he had to stop doing most of the things he loved most, with the people he most wanted to be with.” Because all her children were boys, Delendick thought, Betty Ginley, who had been born in County Dublin, Ireland, had faced a special challenge in understanding and mastering the world of her family, with its emphasis on sports and masculine activities. Possibly for that reason, she had ended up as a very good golfer, the best in the family.