Firehouse Read Online Free

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