Firehouse (11 page)

Now it was Kotula's very delicate job to deal with the appalling truth—that there was almost no hope for anyone—and to do it in a humane way. It was comforting to the families that only one man, someone who was extremely sensitive and knew them personally, someone with more than nineteen years at 40/35, was handling their calls. Kotula quickly developed a sense of how candid each person calling in wished him to be, and he tried, without ever being dishonest or offering too much hope, to bring as much humanity to the job as possible. Some family members called every half hour wanting updates. Was there anything new? Were there any voids? Did he think they might find voids? Kotula felt himself pulled by the need of the families for hope, and, though he rationally knew better, he too began to believe that there might be a possibility of survival. Everything he said was tempered by the darkness he sensed descending on everyone, but he would not close off all hope. But hour by hour and then day by day, it got harder, like a battery that was getting weaker, and he could hear in the incoming calls, as Wednesday passed into Thursday and then Friday and Saturday, the flickering and dimming of all hope. In time, calls from wives were replaced by those from other relatives, as the wives wore down and became shakier. Finally, Sunday morning, Mike Kotula hung up the phone. He went to the bunk room, but he could not sleep, and so he headed over to P. D. O'Hurley's, a nearby pub that was a favorite of the men, and he had a few drinks. Only then could he sleep.

Kevin Shea was found unconscious by Todd Maisel, a photographer from the New York
Daily News
, and some rescue workers. Some of what happened after the first collapse was related to him later by those who saved him. His own memory is fragile—he suffered a concussion and a broken neck among other severe injuries, and he was very lucky to be alive. Perhaps if Maisel had not found him, he might not have lived, and it was true that when Maisel first saw him lying there, covered with debris, he thought that Shea was dead.

Maisel, forty-one, had been up in Harlem on West 125th Street covering the New York mayoral primary that morning when the call had come in about the first plane. He rushed down to the World Trade Center to find a scene unlike any he had ever witnessed in his more than twelve years of photographing on the streets—a kind of hell on earth all around him. The first thing he saw were the jumpers—he looked around just as one landed on and killed a thirty-seven-year-old fireman from Engine 216 named Danny Suhr. Other firemen were trying to drag Suhr's body back. Later, Suhr's wife, Nancy, said that she believed that he had saved several of his colleagues' lives by keeping them from entering the towers.

At that moment, feeling too close to the epicenter, Maisel started moving back, heading toward Liberty Street. But there was one photo he knew he wanted: The Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church stood nearby and Maisel wanted to frame a shot with the cross of the church in the foreground and the smoking inferno of the south tower in the background. But even as he focused on the tower, it started to collapse. Maisel started running as fast as he could, hoping desperately to be fast enough to escape it.

He dove into the lobby of 90 West Street just as the tower collapsed. The exact time, it would be determined later, was 9:59
A.M.
Then the ceiling and the walls of 90 West began to come down. The air was so thick with dust that it was almost impossible either to breathe or to see. Maisel was sure he was going to die if he stayed, so he started crawling backward—he could not go forward because there was a wall in front of him. What saved him and a number of others he aided in those most dangerous moments, he was later sure, was that he was carrying a bottle of water; thus he was able to drink and get the thick dust out of his throat and eyes. He shouted to the others in the room to follow his voice, and he tried as best he could to share his water with them.

Once outside, he snapped a few more pictures—he would later talk about a photojournalist's sacred obligation to record history—but soon he decided that this was a time when saving lives was more important than taking pictures. He helped get a couple of firemen to safety.
How odd
, he thought,
me rescuing the rescuers
. That was when he stumbled on Kevin Shea near the junction of Liberty and West streets. At first he thought Shea was dead, but then Maisel took his pulse and found feeble signs of life. Maisel, aware of his own fragile good fortune, was sure that Shea had been very close to the south tower, in an area where almost everyone else had been killed, and that he had been blown perhaps thirty or forty feet by the concussion from the collapse; then Shea must have crawled as many as 150 to 200 feet, to the place where Maisel eventually found him. No one who was not there, Maisel believed, could ever comprehend the power and sound of the explosion when the towers collapsed or could understand what a miracle it was that Shea survived.

Almost as soon as Maisel found Shea, Richie Nogan, a fireman who had gotten separated from his company, Ladder 113 of Brooklyn, during the collapse, stumbled over to help. Nogan had survived the fall of the south tower by hiding behind a car. Now he saw Maisel bending over a crumpled body and heard the photographer yell out that the man might still be alive, and that he was a fireman. Nogan rushed over. “I'm your brother,” he said to the barely conscious Shea, using the phrase by which firemen refer to one another, “and I'll be with you until we can get you out of this.” Nogan was amazed that Shea was alive, and sure that he had been thrown at least half a block by the implosion, in which cars had been tossed around as if they were children's toys.

Maisel and Nogan decided that Shea was in desperate shape, so they cut off some of his clothes. His body was all bruised, and he was moving in and out of consciousness. Nogan told Shea that it looked like he had lost a thumb. “That's okay, I've got another one,” Shea answered. They thought it was extremely dangerous ministering to Shea where he was, that they might be hit by other collapses. The north tower had not yet come down, so Maisel and Nogan strapped Shea onto a backboard that Maisel found. Trying to protect Shea's head, they carried him to the corner of West Street and Albany. By then other men had arrived to help with the rescue. (Later one of the doctors who tended to Shea said the rescuers had done an amazingly good job; had they messed up with his head just slightly, Shea might have been paralyzed for life. Somehow, under these combat conditions, they had gotten it just right.) “Where are the others? Is everyone okay? Is everyone okay?” Shea kept asking, and one of the rescuers told him, “Yeah, sure, they're okay, they're out there laughing.” Just then the rescuers heard another deep rumble and the explosion that was the north tower collapsing. The time was 10:28
A.M.
Shea passed out again, only to become conscious long enough once more to ask if the other tower had collapsed.

Shea's rescuers needed to get him out of there. There was a car nearby, and they got Shea to it, but they couldn't close the door on the car with him lying on his board. They tracked down an ambulance, though, and the ambulance took them as far south as it could. Then they carried him to the Hudson River and lowered him into a police boat. Thus Shea became one of the first firemen ferried over to Jersey City, where a triage center had already been set up. His injuries, however, were so serious that he was quickly taken to the hospital.

Joviana Perez-Mercado was at her job handling insurance claims at a hospital in the Bronx that morning when she heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. She called her husband, Steve, who was not supposed to be working at the firehouse that morning, but who had rearranged his schedule in order to take care of some family chores later in the week. “Is there a fire at the World Trade Center?” she asked him. There was a printer at the firehouse that ticked off all the local fire news, and there was nothing on it about a fire, just a report of a plane hitting one of the towers. “Is that all?” she asked. Yes, he said. But a few minutes later, when the second plane hit, she called him back. “I know, honey,” he said. “Look, I've got to go. I can't talk any longer. I'll talk to you later.” And that was it, she thought later, that was it.

At the firehouse Steve Mercado was sometimes called Steve Muchacho, but more often Rico, a nickname coined by his close friend Mike Kotula, after “Rico Suave,” the early-'90s hit by the pop singer Gerardo. Mercado had grown up in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx. His father, who was Puerto Rican, worked for the government handling unemployment cases, and his mother, who was half Irish and half German, worked for the school system. By dint of his last name, however, Mercado was, according to firehouse ethnicity, simply Spanish.

Mercado was the resident mimic, and he was a brilliant one, so good, the other men thought, that he could be a professional comedian. He would sit quietly watching the other firemen, studying their idiosyncrasies, their manners, body language, and speech patterns, and then when the time was right, he would do a wonderful impersonation of them. He was generally careful never to push it too far, to stay on the gentler side of the line that separated humor from cruelty. But if you were sitting around in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee, and Steve Mercado was there as well, studying you a little too closely, it was time to get up and move away, because he was almost surely working on his repertoire. He also liked to study the newspapers every morning, clipping headlines (“New Treatment for Bowel Problems,” “Turns Down $10 Million One-Season Contract, Feels He's Worth More”) to attach to an appropriate photo among those of all the men, which hung upstairs in the house.

The role of the mimic was important to him long before he went to the firehouse, Joviana thought, but it was there that his talent had flowered. Some of it was done, she believed, partly in self-defense, because he was ethnically the new boy, being half Puerto Rican. If he was zinging the others, then it was a sign he was one of the boys; also, if he was zinging them, then they would be just a little more on the defensive and perhaps reluctant to zing him. Ironically, he did not even speak Spanish, much to the irritation of some of his officers. When he was growing up, his family had spoken English in the home. Sometimes when the firemen would go into a building where no one spoke English, one of the officers would summon Mercado to be the translator, a role at which he always failed miserably.

The longer he was at the firehouse, though, and the more accepted he became there, Joviana thought, the more it seemed to stir his ethnic pride. He now wanted his own sons, Skylar, six, and Austin, two, to speak Spanish. That became something of a bone of contention in their home. Joviana, who was Puerto Rican and who spoke Spanish fluently, would tell him that if the boys spoke Spanish, he would not understand them. “You'll be left out, and you won't like it,” she said. Still, he lobbied for Spanish, and if Jovi's mother spoke English to the boys, he would get upset. There was no doubt that he was becoming prouder of his own Hispanic heritage. When it was his turn to cook, he would ask his mother-in-law for her recipes, and when it came time for the firehouse picnic, he would work with her to make her Spanish-style roast pork, which was considered something of a specialty. Invariably it was one of the first things that disappeared from the picnic table.

Living in the city had become ever more important to Mercado. He had grown up there, and he had played stick-ball there as a boy. Now he wanted his sons to play the game, and he had even written a poem about stickball, “Our Game,” in which he explained how the sport had brought him and his father closer together. He was president of the New York Emperors Stickball League, and he was constantly campaigning for stickball to become an official Olympic sport. If that did not seem likely to most of the other men in the firehouse, he did not care. He was certain that the International Olympic Committee would eventually recognize it, probably by 2016, at which time Skylar would be coming of age as a world-class stickball prospect. For that reason he was reluctant to leave the city for the suburbs, even as his family expanded and they needed more room, because in the suburbs, they didn't play stickball. If they left the city, the Olympic dream for Skylar and Austin would die, so he looked hard for affordable housing in the city, and finally found what was for him an ideal place in the Bronx.

Ray Pfeifer loved the shameless way that Mercado would do
anything
to promote stickball—and himself. No one at the firehouse, Pfeifer thought, worked harder than Mercado, and no one had more fun. “I don't think I ever knew anyone who enjoyed the firehouse so much, and who took so much pleasure in just being there every day with the other guys,” Pfeifer recalled of his friend. The two liked to cook together, and they were both exceptionally proud of the moment a few years earlier when they had won the Food Network's firehouse chili cooking contest with their “White Heat” turkey chili, featuring Mercado's not-so-secret ingredient: dried jalapeños that he had stored for a full year.

Mercado and Pfeifer's was a most unlikely friendship. Mercado was part Puerto Rican from the Bronx, and Pfeifer was German and unabashedly suburban, from Levittown, Long Island, a place where people had moved after World War II in order to avoid, among other things, the Hispanic migration to the city. They would constantly inflict ethnic zingers on each other—jokes that would never be permitted by outsiders. Indeed, if anyone from the outside had said such things, there surely would have been a brawl, with all the firefighters on the side of their own man. Thus Pfeifer would call Mercado “a stupid spic,” and Mercado, in turn, would say that Pfeifer was not just from Levittown, but from “lily-white Levittown,” and that he would never dare to visit Mercado in the South Bronx, because he was too white to find his way around there.