Firehouse (4 page)

Most people understood the need for some degree of distance between the officers and the men; Callahan's friend Captain John Dunne, who had worked with him in Brooklyn at Ladder 105, thought such distance was a necessary part of the job, “because when you're the captain, it's like being the father of twenty-five terrific but incorrigible kids. You need the distance.” But there was no doubt that Frank Callahan preferred a little more distance than most other officers.

On the first day when Callahan had shown up to take command of 35 Truck, in July 1998, no one in the house knew very much about him. Several of the men had hung around expressly to greet and welcome him. They intended, of course, to size him up as well. Callahan arrived, carrying his own gear. When he saw the men, he put it down and gave them a cool appraising look, neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was not the cold, hard stare that they would come to know all too well later on, when they had performed poorly at a fire, but rather a neutral glance, which on the first day implied, one of the men thought, that they were not to feel too good about themselves. Then without saying a single word—not even his name in introduction—Callahan turned and went upstairs to his office. That, naturally enough, had made the men nervous. It was a very clear signal that he was already measuring them.

In the world of big-city firemen an enormous amount of information is constantly being passed through back channels; everyone, it seems, has worked with someone else at some other firehouse during rotations, or has a brother or a cousin or a father who has worked with a particular fireman, and so there is always someone who has the book on anyone new coming in. The men checked around, and someone knew Charlie Bonar, who had worked with Callahan when they were young firemen, and the word eventually came back: Frank Callahan was a bit distant, very quiet—they would not get a lot of words out of him—but he was a very good fireman. He was, Bonar and others warned, likely to be quite exacting with them; they would do well to be at their very best, and not to take anything with him for granted.

Callahan, it turned out, was nothing if not exacting; if the men did something wrong at a fire, he would go over it with them immediately, and not necessarily gently. Clearly, in his eyes there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. In time, though they thought a little more warmth might have been helpful, and a touch of the avuncular a bit welcome, the men came to respect how dedicated and professional Callahan was. They realized that what he wanted was their very best, and that he did not shirk from such excellence himself; he did not talk one game and then play another. So if he was somewhat severe and aloof, they could live with that. The men will, as Captain Jim Gormley once noted, work very hard to protect a good officer and to keep him in place, because by protecting him, they are protecting themselves. Therefore they performed at a very high level for Callahan, and the reason was simple enough—they did not want him to be replaced by a lesser man.

In those early months, though, the scrutiny of him was intense as they tried to figure out what made him work. The captain's character is elemental to the code of the firehouse, for he holds in his hands the men's very survival, regularly making decisions of life and death. By tradition the captain is the first in and the last out of any fire. It is one of the things, firefighters think, that differentiates them from the police. The higher you rise among the cops, firemen believe, the less likely you are to expose yourself to harm; police officials tend to arrive on the scene after the heat of battle. But that is not true of firemen. When you become an officer in a firehouse, your burden and need to expose yourself to danger only increase. The officers lead the men into the fire and share their dangers. Thus leadership and title are not merely hierarchical with firemen, they are the basis of a sacred trust, and so officers are viewed through a brutal prism. But that did not turn out to be a problem for Frank Callahan. Week by week, month by month, he won their trust.

Not everyone did. A few years earlier there had been an officer who had come into the house determined to make his mark by letting the men know who was in charge. He was a strutter; one of those officers, the men said, who swaggered when he was sitting down. He operated from the start as a hard nose, always showing everyone how tough he was and how they had better shape up in order to meet his high standards. That was bad enough in a veteran house such as 40/35. What was worse was that they did not like what they saw of him as a fireman. The fascinating thing about a firehouse as a workplace, thought Terry Holden, is the unspoken truth:
Everyone knows everything about everyone, and therefore nothing can be faked
. Because of the nature of the profession, because of the risks taken daily, nothing can be hidden. The men are always watching and measuring one another, and, above all, watching and measuring their officers. They do it because they have to. That kind of scrutiny is nothing less than mandatory; words in a firehouse matter much less than deeds—it is a place where no one dares use the modern art of spin, so valued in most other places in America. It is not a place for the slick or the facile. The result is that everyone inevitably comes to know all too well everyone else's strengths and flaws. And so the men of 40/35 had almost immediately discovered that not only did this new officer swagger and push them hard on superficial things, but he was, when it really mattered—at a fire—not very aggressive. He lacked the elemental, fearless instinct that a good officer needs.

Some of the senior men quietly tried to talk to the officer and told him to knock off the artificial, tough-guy stuff, that it was not needed in this house; they told him that he was losing the men. But that only seemed to make matters worse. Not surprisingly, the officer did not take such guidance from the men well—it was clear that he thought the whole point of being an officer was that you were above the men and did not have to listen to them. In the end his tenure was a disaster, and he was moved to another house.

Captain Callahan was the exact opposite: His leadership was all by example. He understood the uses of authority in a veteran house—that less was better, that the senior men, even more than the officers, ran the house and set the codes that everyone
had
to respect, because their lives depended on that automatic quality of obedience and loyalty and unwavering commitment at crucial moments. Therefore it was the veteran men who shaped the younger men. If the captain was throwing his weight around, then something was wrong—it meant the senior men were not doing their jobs properly.

One of the things the men came to like about him was his contempt for fire department red tape, of which there seemed to be more and more each year. Those in the upper levels of the bureaucracy had come to be armed in recent years not merely with powerful titles, but also with powerful computers, which they used to generate ever more paperwork and to centralize authority. Callahan was openly contemptuous of some of the bureaucratic byplay, the reports and the paperwork that seemed to make the brass so happy. Those who came to know him believed that this attitude was not merely one of annoyance with the unnecessary work; rather, it was another aspect of his conservative, old-fashioned world view. He disapproved of the trend to grant more and more power to headquarters and less and less to the captains in the firehouses. It had always been in the nature of bureaucracies for the people who ran them to want to centralize power, but now their new electronic machines seemed to give them new leverage in an old struggle.

Late at night, when he was relaxed, Callahan would sometimes talk with a few veteran men in the house about how he felt: that there was far too much micromanaging from headquarters. To the degree that he could circumvent the paperwork, the make-work directives from senior people who had too little to keep them busy, he did. When he got home, he would complain to his wife, Angie, about how much time he spent doing verification of hours put in by his men; by his lights it should have been verified by the all-powerful computers that they loved so much down at headquarters. Just a waste of everyone's time, he would say. Callahan also hated the red tape that was increasingly attached to building inspections—if he did a building inspection, he wanted to know only one thing: what it would be like if they had to fight a fire there. That endeared him to the men, who were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function.

Still, before they came in with a final verdict, the men wanted one clear test of him under pressure. It came at a fire at St. Luke's Hospital in his first year at the house. It was not a particularly big or dangerous fire, but there had been some hazardous material stored there, and as a result it became the unlikely scene of a test of wills between Frank Callahan and the department brass. For some reason a number of big shots had shown up at the fire—a lot of suit-power, as one of the men noted. When it was over, one of the brass had demanded that Callahan and all his men undergo what was called a washdown—a kind of decontamination process in which not only the clothes of the men were to be cleaned, but also the men themselves. It was an enormous nuisance; had they been proceeding to another fire, it might have been an issue, but their shift was over, and they were on their way home. The personal washdown was a miserable process, one the men truly hated; they would have to go into a tent set up in the street, strip down, and take a cold shower, then dry themselves, probably with paper towels, and wait around, in, at best, some gym clothes, while their own clothes were being cleaned. Callahan was clearly annoyed by the order for his own reasons—it would be an unnecessary imposition inflicted on good men who had just done a tough job, men who were under
his
command. To his mind the order was just about bureaucratic gamesmanship and power, not safety. If anyone was supposed to order a washdown for his men, that person was Frank Callahan.

Callahan looked at the official who had given the order, technically a superior, and, pointing out a couple other superiors, including one who was in charge of all potentially toxic incidents in the city, he said, “Okay, we'll go through with it, but I just want you to know that you and your men walked through the very same halls as we did, and you were in the same room we were in, so if my men and I do it, then you do it too, and we'll damn well watch to make sure you do it.”

Then he turned to his company, gathered right behind him, and he said, “Come on, Thirty-five Truck, get on the fucking rig and let's get out of here.” Never having stood quite so tall, the men walked out of the building, got on the truck, and drove home. Everyone was thrilled by the moment, and back at the station house, although Callahan went directly to his office, the men went upstairs and had their own celebration:
Hey, we've got us a captain! We've got us a helluva captain!

When something went wrong, when some fireman had not measured up on a particular fire, Callahan said very little. He would call the offending man in to his office and give him what became known among the men as The Look. He would not say anything in the meeting, just stare. When The Look had been turned on, time passed ever so slowly. A few minutes would seem like an hour. “It was as if he could look right through you and see everything you had ever done wrong all your life, not just the things that you'd actually done, but all the bad things you had ever
thought
of doing—every bad thought you'd ever had,” said Sean Newman, a thirty-two-year-old Ladder 35 fireman. Nothing needed to be said—the offender was supposed to know exactly how he had transgressed, and he always did. He was to sit there and ponder his fate and how he had endangered himself and his brothers. Callahan would not dismiss the man, and so he would have to sit there wondering when it was over and when he could leave: In the end, he would have to make that decision for himself, and would finally leave, feeling very small indeed.

The men hated The Look; if only, they thought, he would shout or scream, it would have been easier, they could get the whole incident over with. The Look was infinitely harder to deal with—cold, hard, and unforgiving, seeming to last forever. Later, after his death, when his wife, Angela, came to the firehouse to share her grief with them, the men had asked her if she knew anything about The Look. “Who do you think he practiced on all those years?” she answered.

Callahan's occasional stabs at old-fashioned camaraderie did not work particularly well. There was a roll call once, where he decided to ask some of the men he did not know very well to talk about themselves. “Tell me a little bit about yourself,” he asked one fireman. The man in question, duly surprised by this moment of unexpected intimacy from the captain, hesitated for a minute and then answered, “Well, I like to drink a lot....”

If anything bothered Callahan about 40/35, it was the tempo, the fact that they did not have enough fires. Before joining the house, he had been working in ghetto neighborhoods where he would get called on as many as two or three fires a day. So Callahan thought the men at 40/35, especially the younger men, could have used some more work, that it was probably better for a house when there was a great deal more action, because the more runs you did, the better you were, the higher your normal level of concentration, and the more you came back to the station and sat around the kitchen table talking fires, instead of sports and women. As a result, doing things the right way became instinctive.

The Upper West Side was a curious place for Callahan after working for so much of his career in ghetto neighborhoods. The culture of the area was different, so much more affluent. There were all those high-rises, many of them office buildings, which had foolproof high-tech alarm systems that, it would turn out, were not quite so foolproof. The alarms were always tripping accidentally. One day when he was relatively new to the neighborhood, they had gone on a run at a relatively fancy high-rise, and afterward he asked one of the men about a rather elaborate desk in the front of the lobby. “It's the concierge,” the fireman answered. What's it for? Callahan had asked. “It's where they leave packages and things,” the fireman told him. The captain went home the next day and asked his wife what a concierge was, and whether all apartment houses had concierges. It was, Angie decided, just one more symptom of her husband's culture shock.