Firehouse (8 page)

Kevin Shea was the son of a fireman and brother of a fireman, but he seemed younger and significantly more innocent than the other firemen—he was in no way a macho kind of guy. He was aware that when Steve Mercado, the resident mimic at 40/35, did an imitation of him in the kitchen, he pitched his voice a little higher, but it did not bother him—he had been through all that before at other firehouses, when he was a probie. He knew that in the world of firemen a certain sharp-edged humor such as Mercado's or Gary's was part of the culture. Besides, Shea was uncommonly good looking and finding women was never a problem.

It was not just that Shea had been to college (well, actually, a number of colleges, as he liked to point out: Stony Brook, Emerson, Suffolk, and St. Joseph's in New York), and that he was good at computers—better with them than anyone else in the house. He was just different. Among his colleagues he was known as something of a flake—talented, smart as hell, amazingly hardworking—but somehow
different
. It was a description he would not necessarily have disagreed with. A few years earlier, before he had joined the department, unsure of what he wanted for his future, he had taken the exam for the police department, and he had done reasonably well. But there was a moment when he was hooked up to a lie detector machine and was asked questions about himself, and, in his own words, he had folded. One of the questions was whether he had ever stolen anything. He thought long and hard about the answer, scanning in his mind his whole autobiography, going all the way back to early school days, and he answered, “What about paper clips?” No, the interrogator said, somewhat annoyed, he meant stealing something of consequence—paper clips did not count. Well, Shea answered, I stole some magazines once. That, if anything, annoyed the interrogator even more, which in turn threw Shea off. By the end of the session, he managed to confuse both himself and the machine, and to irritate the cop who was doing the questioning. It convinced Shea that he was not cut out to be a cop, a verdict, he was sure, that the officer testing him agreed with.

He was still quite new at the firehouse, still finding his way around, still trying to prove himself to the officers and the senior men. He had not yet figured out Captain Callahan. There was always that distance to the captain, which to the older men was merely a sign that the captain was being the captain, but to the newer men, especially someone like Shea, it seemed more personal. And there was the fact that Callahan had a somewhat weird sense of humor. He liked to test people, quizzing them with questions to which it was hard to get the right answers. “How much do you tip a bellboy?” the captain once asked Shea, who puzzled over the answer, for he had not tipped that many bellboys in his young life. Finally, he answered, “Five dollars.” Callahan shook his head, showing that the answer was wrong, and then he said, “Find out what it is, and let me know when you know.” That had left Shea even more puzzled.

Shea grew up in Brooklyn and then on Long Island. When he had been allowed to choose his firehouse, he knew he wanted one in Manhattan, because he considered it the most sophisticated borough, and by working there, he was sure that he would become more sophisticated. When he called Captain Callahan, to tell him of his decision, the captain seemed surprised and asked him why. “Other houses are much busier,” Callahan pointed out. But Shea insisted he wanted this one—he was sure he would learn more about all aspects of life there.

He joined the house on July 3, 2001, arriving very early in the morning that day, around 3:00
A.M.
, determined to make a good impression. He was carrying with him all kinds of food, some things he had made, such as strawberries dipped in chocolate, and all the fixings for an egg-white omelette that he intended to make for his fellow firemen. No one who was awake seemed very interested in eating at that moment, but later, when they went on a run, Shea started cooking, and by the time they returned, around 6:00, they were all hungry, and the meal was a success.

Shea and Bruce Gary were not exactly a natural fit, but Gary always spoke well of the young fireman, for Shea worked maniacally hard—harder than almost anyone other than Buddha Arce, who was widely regarded as the hardest working young man in the house's recent history. Shea's nickname for a time was Ricochet (or Rick O'Shea) because he moved around the firehouse so fast. What Gary particularly liked about Shea was that when he made coffee in the morning, he did not simply prepare one big pot and try to make it last too long, but, because coffee gets bitter when it sits, Shea would make it fresh five or six times each morning. At 7:00
A.M.
Gary might have his first cup of coffee, and he would tease Shea: “This tastes old, like six-thirty coffee.”

“No, no,” Shea would say, “it's
six-forty-five
coffee.”

“You absolutely sure about that?” Gary would say. “It tastes more like six-thirty than six-forty-five.”

Most of the men in the house had other jobs—they were plumbers, or carpenters, or mechanics—and Shea had one, but it was typically quite unfireman-like: He entertained at children's parties by impersonating Big Bird, a Ninja Turtle, Barney, or Elmo. This did not entirely please Bruce Gary, who thought it somehow beneath a fireman's dignity to dress up in goofy costumes. “We can't have someone from this house going as Daffy Duck or Barney,” Gary told him.
“A fireman dressing up as a purple dinosaur!
Jesus! You've got to go as a hero.”

“What about if I go as Spiderman,” Shea asked, and Gary said, yeah, that was better—Spiderman was all right, a lot better than Barney. And so Shea worked a few parties as Spiderman, and in time showed up dressed as the superhero at the firehouse picnic for the benefit of everyone's kids.

Shea had just been relieved when the first call had come in on September 11. He was loading his personal gear into his car, parked across the street. He tried to get on the Truck, his usual assignment, but all the seats were taken. So he went to the office of the Engine, where Lieutenant Ginley was working, and asked if he could go with the Engine. Ginley said they hadn't been called yet, but he gave Shea permission to join them if they were.

Shea was still taking care of his gear when the Engine got the call. That was, he remembered, almost immediately after the second plane hit. At this point, Shea put on his gear and he took his video camera with him. His account remains the only record of what happened on either the Truck's or the Engine's rides down, because he was the only survivor of the thirteen men who went out from 40/35; his account is fragmentary because of the injuries, both physical and emotional, he suffered that morning, including a severe concussion. Much of Kevin Shea's recall of what actually happened at the site remains clouded.

On the ride down, Shea sat next to Mike D'Auria, the twenty-five-year-old probie who had not even graduated from the academy yet. This was only D'Auria's second real fire. They got to the site amazingly fast, Shea thought. Normally the traffic in midtown Manhattan tended to slow the rigs down, but this morning they moved practically unimpeded down the West Side Highway, as if somehow everyone had known in advance that something terrible would happen and had stayed clear of the highway. As they were riding, Shea was thinking, two planes, two towers, that had to be the work of terrorists, and he asked Lieutenant Ginley if he thought it was terrorism. “It appears to be so,” Ginley said, “but we just don't know yet.”

Mike D'Auria was a quiet man, and in that way the antithesis of Shea, who was always talking. Shea tried to engage him in conversation but D'Auria seemed very much inside himself. Shea knew how hard it must be for the probie, so young and so inexperienced, traveling toward so dangerous a site. Shea knew that Steve Kelly, one of the senior men at the house, thought D'Auria was unusually reflective and sensitive, somewhat different from many of the firemen. D'Auria read widely, Kelly had said, and there was a deep, spiritual sense to him—almost all of his reading was about his own spiritual quest.

Kelly's was an interesting endorsement. He came from a tough part of Yorkville, a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and he often spoke of how thin a line there was between the kids he grew up with who became firemen and cops, and those from the same streets who ended up in prison. He was not entirely comfortable with the more raucous side of the firehouse, and he had liked Mike D'Auria from the start. They not only seemed to feel the same way about things, but Kelly sensed that he and D'Auria were struggling with the same issues, trying to figure out what a good life was—that is, a moral and spiritual life. What was the guiding purpose of a human life? To what should one dedicate oneself? They read many of the same books, and Kelly was impressed that D'Auria had read Carlos Castaneda, the cult writer who had explored Mexican and Native American shamanism and whose works were not exactly firehouse best-sellers.

Kelly knew his own life might have easily been a complete disaster, and yet he had somehow managed to save himself and was doing something he wholeheartedly believed in. College had never been a possibility for him—he was street-kid, not college-boy material. Becoming a fireman had given him dignity and pride. He now saw some of that same background in Mike D'Auria, although D'Auria, he was sure, had never come as close to slipping through the cracks as he had.

Kelly thought that he and D'Auria had a chance to become very close friends in the years ahead. Unlike many of the other young men who came to the firehouse from blue-collar neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island, D'Auria did not bring with him all the usual neighborhood prejudices about people who were different. In fact, D'Auria seemed to have almost no prejudices at all. Part of it was the influence of his mother, Nancy Cimei D'Auria Marra, who hated the ethnic biases that she had grown up among. It seemed to be the lesser side of an ethnic neighborhood that in all other ways she felt very proud to be a part of.

Part of it as well, Kelly was sure, was the fact that D'Auria had worked in several restaurants, and New York's restaurant kitchens were often the first stop for many of the city's newest residents moving north from the southern part of the hemisphere, who worked there as dishwashers and busboys. Many of them had come from impoverished Third World countries, and they had no green cards, and were thus working illegally. D'Auria had seen how difficult their lives were—how hard they worked, and how vulnerable they were to everyone and everything around them (especially to the people who employed them)—and he had come to admire their inner strength, their courage, and their optimism.

That weekend D'Auria had helped cook several of the meals at the firehouse, a job that he loved and a role the other firemen loved to see him play, because he alone among them was a genuine chef. D'Auria had gone to cooking school after high school and had apprenticed at several excellent Manhattan restaurants. When he cooked at the firehouse, there was always a crowd of five or six men, trying to watch and learn, around him. He had promised that he was going to teach them the five classic sauces, upon which all the other ones are based, that every chef has to know.

D'Auria was about to start work as the pastry chef at a restaurant he and some friends were going to open soon in Staten Island. The new job, he was sure, would knit perfectly with his firehouse hours. One of the restaurants he had worked at was Gabriel's on West Sixtieth Street in Manhattan, just a few blocks from the firehouse. It was a popular place in the Lincoln Center area, and he had done well as a grill man there. Because he was well thought of at Gabriel's—there was a job for him there anytime he wanted it—he had gone back there the Friday before the tragedy to sharpen the firehouse knives; he did not want to bring his own, professional-quality knives to the house, because if he took them home with him at night, as any restaurant chef does, it might look impolite, as if he was violating the communal sense of the firehouse.

D'Auria had been associated with 40/35 since July, and he loved it there, because the senior men had not exploited his status as a probie. Instead they had worked hard to teach him how to be a fireman. Still, for quite a while he had remained frustrated because his tour lacked an actual fire. Week after week he went to work, and there was no action, though on the days he was off, there seemed to be frequent fires—thirteen, in fact, as he told his mother, and
none
when he was on.

He was still single and lived in Staten Island with his mother, her second husband, and his grandparents. Sometimes after he finished a shift at the firehouse, he would have breakfast with his mom. “Anything yet?” Nancy Marra would ask. “Not yet,” he would answer. Then finally, in the middle of August there was a fire, not a huge one to be sure, just a small kitchen fire. But the other firemen had let him be the nozzle man, and he had put it out. He returned to the station house absolutely triumphant. “I finally got my fire,” he told his mother the next day.

Nancy Marra agreed with Steve Kelly that her son was somehow different and special. She had often pondered why. He was, she knew, serious about finding a spiritual path in life, and yet, in the traditional sense, he was not religious. When he was a boy, she had
never
been able to get him to go to church. Yet he was only eleven years old when a group called the Guardian Angels became popular in New York as a kind of vigilante force trying to reduce crime. Michael had been fascinated by them and had decided that he was a de facto Guardian Angel. He started to patrol his school yard, on the lookout for any instances of bullying, until the school principal called Marra and said that her son had to stop—he did not think it appropriate for an eleven-year-old to act as a self-appointed playground policeman.