A Decade of Hope (32 page)

 

 

 

W
e were raised in Plainview, Long Island, around forty minutes outside of the city, and we kids had very little concept of what my father was doing in New York City. He never told us why he joined the FDNY. He never really talked to us about his job, never came home and told us about any fires or exciting runs they had had that day. He would talk about the South Bronx, his experiences with the people there; he'd talk about the community, the poverty. I think he had a strong sense of social justice. It might have just been innate in him. My father was first-generation American, and my mother was as well. His parents, our grandparents, were old, both in their eighties. They were ordinary elderly people, Irish immigrants. They went to church on Sundays, but religion or social justice wasn't something they brought up or spoke about.

My father came out of the big war, put a year in at Fordham, apparently didn't like that much, and then didn't do a whole lot of anything for a year or two, taking whatever jobs he could get. When he got the Fire Department job in 1949, he got married and started a family. We were not a small family, six kids in all. There are two girls—Elizabeth is the oldest and Janet is the youngest—and then there are four boys in the middle—Billy was the oldest boy. Chris and I are twins, and then Jimmy. Very balanced. And the blue eyes were the oldest and the youngest.

We were always a Fire Department family, but much different from other department families. My father didn't have work paraphernalia around the house, and he didn't wear anything that was particularly Fire Department, which I guess was not as common as it is now, because they didn't have all the sweatshirts and stuff back then. I could probably count on one hand the times we were in the firehouse when I was growing up. If we were there, it was only because he was going to see his parents in the Bronx and had us with him while stopping by the firehouse for some reason or another.

When my younger sister, Janet, was in seventh grade, she made a little doll in her ceramics class at school—a little go-go dancer with blond hair, blue eyes, and pink skin. Seeing it, my father thought of the children who would hang around his firehouse. And he knew that a little Puerto Rican girl was having a birthday, so he asked my sister to make another go-go dancer, but one with dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin. I can still see him wrapping it up in a shoebox, tying it up, putting a lot of paper in it. He was really careful with it. He took the train then, as he usually did. And just imagine it: Here's this deputy chief going to the South Bronx and bringing a doll to this little girl. I always remembered that. In fact, I ended up marrying a black Puerto Rican girl, and when we were first dating I used to look around her apartment to see if the dark-skinned go-go dancer ceramic doll was there.

My brother Billy was a chip off the old block in many ways. He was an FDNY captain, and there was no doubt he would become a chief like my father. He was good-looking, witty, charming. You could say life was pretty good for him. Because he also lifeguarded at the beach, in his mind was:
I save lives for a living
. And his running joke was that he used to sign all his letters: Hero Billy Burke. He put it tongue in cheek, but it was pretty accurate. There were one or two instances in which he got hurt and was treated, but, kind of taking after my father, he didn't bring that up. He never told us about it. I remember one fire that he was proud of when he was with 11 Truck, on the Lower East Side. He and another guy, Leroy Smith, saved people on the third floor. There was fire beneath them, and still they were able to get them down in a very difficult, hair-raising situation. There was an article about it in the
New York Post
, along with a couple of photos, and he saved those papers. He had a bunch of papers like that. When I met Billy's lieutenant after 9/11, he told me, “I wish I had put him in for a citation. . . . I should have put him in and the other firefighter.”

Billy had worked in a firehouse right down from La Salle Academy. My father had actually graduated from La Salle Academy too, and was the captain of their basketball team. They won the Catholic Eastern Seaboard Championships when he was a junior, and they went back to the play-offs when he was a senior. My father had saved the newspapers that covered the stories of his team and shared them with us as kids. It's kind of funny that we knew all about his success in basketball, but we didn't know all about his success in the Fire Department. Well, we did know what his responsibilities were. We knew he was of high rank, a deputy chief. We didn't know he was the commander of the 6th Division in the South Bronx.

On 9/11, I was working at the Sheraton Hotel, the big one on Fifty-second and Seventh. My wife, Wanda, was also working there—it's where we met, actually—on an early shift that Tuesday, so I dropped her off at 6:00 A.M., driving in like we did every day to get to work. At the time we were living in the black Latino section on Commonwealth Avenue in the Bronx, the same kind of neighborhood my father had worked in the South Bronx. I was off that day.

So on 9/11, I dropped my wife off and then drove back home. Our son, Josh, was home sick from school that day, and Wanda called right before 9:00 A.M, to check up on him. She then said, “Oh, by the way, turn on the television; a plane hit the Trade Center.” I looked out the window, and it was a beautiful, clear day, so I'm thinking,
How'd that happen?
I hung up the phone and turned on the television, and there it was on the first station: ten floors of the North Tower, smoke pouring out, and I thought immediately,
The only thing that could have done that is a jetliner.
It had to have been hijacked; it couldn't have been an accident. It would have taken a hijack on such a beautiful, clear day. Somebody had to have flown that plane intentionally into the building. But . . . you know, it was unbelievable. Your mind couldn't comprehend it. Couldn't accept it.

On the TV station that I was watching the newscaster was saying that people were calling in and reporting that they had seen the plane fly overhead and hit the tower. They were reporting it as a private jet, a chartered jet. So then I thought it was a private chartered jet and debated with myself whether it was terrorism or not.

But then Wanda called back. She had just gotten off the phone with my brother Billy, who had called the hotel looking for me, thinking I was at work. They passed the call to Wanda, and she was in a state when she reached me, you could hear it in her voice. This is a tough woman, my wife—you're talking about a black Hispanic woman, a single mom, who had raised a son before we married. So to hear the fear in her voice was scary. Billy had told her, “We're under terrorist attack. Get out of the building, get out of the city. Go home.” And I was like, “Where was he calling from?”

She said, “I don't know. He sounded like he was out on the street somewhere.” “Mike,” she whispered, “I could hear it in Billy's voice, I could hear the urgency in his fear. And that scared me.”

For Wanda to have heard fear in Billy's voice, that was a hell of a thing. And that's when the second plane hit.

I didn't know it at the time, but Billy was calling from the firehouse. And he'd called other people who lived in New York from there.

And then my younger sister, Janet, called from Florida and said, “Mike, do you see what's going on?” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And she asked, “Where's Wanda?” I said, “At work.” And then Janet asked me what I was going to do. Like everyone else I had to think.
What to do?

How was Wanda going to get home? She couldn't get on the train, for fear of bombs. She was in Midtown. If they hit the Trade Towers, then they were gonna hit Midtown too. Then they reported that the Pentagon had been hit.... You could see smoke coming from the Pentagon. They didn't even know what happened there. You didn't know what to do.

I was watching a reporter on TV who was downtown. And as the first tower collapsed, he reported that a third plane had hit. That's what he thought. He was running for his life; the cameraman was running; everybody was running. There were people passing by and were screaming, “A third plane has hit. A third plane has hit!” I was at home in the Bronx, and my wife was in a war zone. And that's when I told Wanda to get out of the hotel—now. She was saying that nobody in the hotel knew what to do. They were all sitting around there crying and making calls. They didn't know what to do.

So I said to her, “A captain in the FDNY has told you to evacuate the building. Get out of the building.” So that's what she did, and started walking up Madison Avenue. I told her to go up Madison, because I figured Fifth Avenue was more well-known. If they were gonna hit an avenue, it'd be Fifth. She was in good shape, so I knew she'd be okay walking a long distance. Once I knew she was walking, I got on my bike to go down and meet her. Wanda's older son, Louis, who was about nineteen, was home, and so he stayed there to watch Josh while I headed out.

I rode down the Bruckner Expressway service road into Manhattan, and from there I got a full-scale view of the skyline. By the time I set eyes on it, all you could see was the white smoke of the towers, and I wasn't sure what that meant.

On the service road there was no one—no cops, nothing. So I biked along the Bruckner Expressway, which I was familiar with because I used to run it when I was training for the New York City Marathon a few years back. It was about ten miles and took me right through the South Bronx, past St. Jerome's Church, where my parents were married, Intervale Avenue, where my father worked the fires, and over the Madison Avenue Bridge. And that's when I started to see the people marching up like refugees. I was stunned. It was just:
Wow, this is New York City. This is America. This is happening
. I remember thinking,
Well, we're at war. We are a different world now than we were a half hour ago, and it was . . . This is the world now. That was then, this is now.

My sister Janet had told me a reporter was saying there were eight more planes, so I fully expected more planes to drop into New York.

At the time Wanda had a cell phone, but I didn't, so I would stop on my bicycle whenever I saw a pay phone to call her. Then I would call home to get the messages, hoping that someone would have called about Billy. Wanda and I planned to meet at Marcus Garvey Park, and when I got there I couldn't find her at first. The park was . . . Wow . . . There was this stream of people, thousands, who had just walked up from downtown. Everything and everyone was so frantic. The day was frantic.

By now I knew that both towers had collapsed. In my mind I was visualizing a partial collapse—chunks of the towers the size of a city bus. I knew the towers. I once worked not far from them and used to walk over there at lunch. Those buildings were so big that if a piece the size of a city bus fell from the hundredth floor, you couldn't possibly outrun it, because your perspective would be all off. How dangerous that was.

And then I saw Wanda, who had her back to me, and there was that instant sense of relief, knowing that she was alive, such an emotional thing. Now I began thinking of Billy. Wanda saw the look on my face and asked, “What's wrong?” I said, “Billy's down there.”

I got home late that day, eight o'clock, and spoke with my younger brother, Jimmy. He had spoken with Billy's girlfriend, Jean, who said that Billy had called her from the towers.

“I'm okay,” he said. He told Jean to call our sister Elizabeth in Syracuse and let her know he was all right, and for her to call the rest of the family: “Tell everybody I'm okay.” And that was just after 10:00 A.M.

He was in the North Tower.

So that night I was with the family, and I was talking to my brother Jimmy on the phone as we were watching everything on television, looking at the ruins. And as we were staring at the screen, we both realized we hadn't heard from him. Billy was the type who called, and he hadn't called. I said, “Well, if he's down there, if he is, how's he gonna call, anyway?” He'd have been too busy doing something else. So hell, it wasn't a sure thing; you know, it wasn't a sure thing.

Then there was the rest of our family, my mom and other siblings. I guess I spoke with Janet again; I don't recall. And my twin, Christopher, went over to Elizabeth's up in Syracuse, and they were watching TV together, hoping to get word from us, or from Billy. We were all communicating, but none of us had heard from Billy yet.

The next day everything changed. I drove into the city to look for Billy's firehouse, Engine 21. I wasn't sure exactly where it was, because he had just started there as captain five months before 9/11. All I knew was that it was somewhere around Fortieth Street on the East Side. I got stuck in a massive jam by Grand Central Station. There was a bomb scare, I heard on the radio. I just gave up and pulled over into a parking spot. I don't know what street I was on, somewhere on Park Avenue by Grand Central, but it was a spot no one should park in. So I wrote on a piece of paper: “I'm looking for my brother, Captain of FDNY, ticket if you must, please don't tow.” I left it on the dashboard, and I took off.

I found a pay phone and called my brother Christopher in Syracuse to ask him where the firehouse was, but he didn't know. Then he told me that he was watching the news, and four firemen just walked out of the pile. “They were down at Bellevue,” he said. “Go there, get down there.” At this point I was on Thirty-eighth and Second Avenue, so I wasn't far away. I was halfway down and began thinking,
Things just don't happen this way. It's a nice dream, but things don't happen this way.
But I went down there anyway.

There was a big crowd outside of Bellevue, and so many pictures everywhere—pictures of people whose families were trying to find them. There were a bunch of people holding the flyers, and family members crying, being interviewed by newspapers, holding up the pictures, hoping that somebody would see them. I managed to speak with a woman at Bellevue who had this great big book, and I said, “Billy Burke.” And I asked about the four firefighters. She said that those four guys had just been working at the site today, and fell into a pit down there, and they were fine. But nobody had found anybody yet. I looked at the flyers again, seeing those family members. It was so sad.