A Decade of Hope (39 page)

I met someone back in 2002. His name was Pete also, and he helped me a lot. He was very kind to me, but I wasn't ready for a committed relationship then. I just couldn't commit, and I felt guilty. I felt unfaithful. But this past year he came back into my life. He asked me to marry him, and I said yes. He's a good man, and he understands when I talk about Pete.

So I'm moving on in life. It's just a little harder to move forward when you're not well. My fibromyalgia was actually Lyme disease that turned chronic as of last year, so it's as if the Lyme disease is taking over my life little by little by little. Hopefully they'll find something to help me get better. I can't take antibiotics anymore. I just had the gallbladder taken out, and so the stomach became so badly inflamed that I cannot take antibiotics anymore. So I just have to be thankful for each day. The only thing is, I live each day in pain.

I love life, yes. And if I had at least my health, I'd be happier. Because if you don't have your health you have nothing. I have to say that. You could have all the money in the world, but if you don't have your health . . . So I don't really know what's going to happen.

 

I asked Pete to send a sign that he was with me:
Send me a quarter
. I want to find quarters. I don't want to find pennies, nickels, or dimes. How often do you find a quarter? It's more special, because it's not that often. Well, now I find them constantly, and in the weirdest places—in the basement, even on top of the cuckoo clock. It's just amazing, how little things happen.

One day we'll be together again, but for now I'm trying to move on with my life here.

But you know what? It's all in God's hands.

John Vigiano is a retired captain in the FDNY. His reputation within the ranks of the city's firehouses is that of a very professional, experienced, and reliable manager—a “great boss,” as many refer to him. Throughout his career he worked in the busiest fire companies of Brooklyn, including the legendary Rescue 2. He and his wife, Jan, had two sons: John, thirty-six, a FDNY firefighter, and his brother, Joe, thirty-four, a NYPD police officer. Both brothers responded to the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, and they died in the line of duty.

 

 

 

W
e are a police and fire family. My father joined the Fire Department in 1937. He was a very interesting, talented man. He could draw, and illustrated most of the training material that the department used. I can still see a huge picture of the MSA mask [an early smoke mask]. He drew the whole thing and labeled all its parts, like something you would see today in a catalog.

My mother and father divorced when I was seven, so I never really had a father. I didn't know him, other than that he worked in Greenpoint, was a handsome fireman, and took me to the circus, the rodeo, and
The Last Alarm
, the firemen's show they used to hold in Madison Square Garden. Maybe that was the mustard seed that was put in my head about being a firefighter.

I lived with my mother and my grandmother. Back then there was no such thing as alimony checks. A fireman was probably making $2,000 a year, so every month my father would send a green money order for $18.75, and every month I would take it to the delicatessen, where the owner would cash it and take his $0.75 out of it. We lived in a poor man's brownstone, a frame building laid out like a brownstone, no heat, one bedroom. So I would sleep in the living room.

When you grow up without a lot of frills, and everybody's the same, that's normal. Today they call it dysfunctional. It's not dysfunctional but just the way it was. Everybody was struggling. It was a different code. I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominantly mixed area. I didn't have any problems. You judged a guy by how many sewers he could hit in stickball. There were no parks. Our football was a newspaper rolled up and tied with a string. At Christmastime someone would get a football and think,
Wow, that's the cat's meow
, until the asphalt beat it up. It was a good life.

One day, when I was fifteen and hanging out, a couple of guys said, Why don't you come with us to the National Guard? National Guard, who are they? Soldiers. You get to carry rifles and shoot guns. I said, You're kidding me—that sounds like fun. So I went down to the armory, and I said, I want to join. It's amazing what you can get away with. Because I had some of my father's art talents, I created a birth certificate, not a problem. The hardest part was making the seal, but I found a way. It didn't look good, but it was raised. I brought it down there, some sergeant looked at me, and asked, “You're eighteen years old?” I said, “Yes, sir.”

I was assigned to 10th Company, 106th Infantry Regiment, Heavy Weapons, at Camp Drum. In the daytime I got to run around in the woods blowing things up, but at night I had, like, twenty godfathers making sure I didn't smoke, drink, or get into trouble. I never told my mother. When I brought my seabag home with all the army clothes, she asked what they were, and I told her that I had won a chance to go to a camp through the Herald Tribune Fresh Air [Fund]. I said, “Because they knew we didn't have any money, they gave us all these old army clothes.” She bought it the first time, but when I came back with a corporal stripe she got wise to me. But she never said anything, and I had a good time in my two years in the National Guard. So I was now eighteen years old, and all I wanted was to be a marine. My mother said, “You've got to graduate high school.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I never graduated.

I think it was about my tenth week in boot camp that my DI [drill instructor] called me into his hooch, which is never a good thing, and I got a little bit of a bouncing around. He was screaming at me, and the junior DI was screaming at me, calling me a liar, a traitor, for what I had done to their Marine Corps by being in the army. I asked how they found out—nobody had told me about fingerprints.

After two years in the Marine Corps I was looking for something to do, and took a test for the Police Department and a test for the Fire Department. I went to visit my father at the firehouse—the last time I had seen him was the night I left for Parris Island [the Marine Corps training camp]—and told him I had taken the test for the Fire Department. He said, “Good, good, and I hope you make it.” We sat and talked, and he introduced me to a couple of the young men that were there. I got on the Fire Department list, and because they called before the Police Department did, I said, “I'll be a fireman.”

I went to probie school, and my father came to the graduation ceremony. My mother had left when I went into the Marine Corps—I don't know where she went—and my grandmother had died, so my father's being at graduation was a pretty special day, and his coming in uniform made it even more special. And my wife-to-be was with us. He was proud that I was a fireman. We talked a little about the job, and he asked, “Where would you like to work?” I said, Where he worked, and he said, “Well, right now I'm driving the chief in the 36 Battalion, which is in Greenpoint.”

I said, “Pop, to be honest with you, I'm probably gonna screw up, and if I screw up, it's on me, and if I do something good, it's on me. I don't want somebody saying, You did it because you're Vigiano's son. I want people to come to you and say, You're Vigiano's father.” He said, “You're a hairy little son of a gun.” I told him I didn't know what “hairy” meant, but that's the way it was going to be. I told him, “I love you, but I don't want to work with you.”

My father had good friends in the job, so I was assigned to Ladder 103, East New York. I had a very good Fire Department career—there were maybe three days or five days in thirty-six years when I wasn't happy. Probably the worst day of my life before 9/11 was when a fireman died in my hands. You know, I never forgot that. I was a lieutenant in Rescue 2. I was actually holding a mask on this firefighter in the emergency room in Kings County [Hospital] while another firefighter, who happened to be a Special Forces medic, was doing the chest compressions. A few firemen had been brought in, plus the normal collection of bodies in an emergency room, and by the time the team got to him, he was dead. It was Bob Goldman. That wasn't a good day.

 

Our boys, John and Joe, were good sons. Whatever we asked them to do, they did. Jan got them started in Cub Scouts real early, at seven or eight years old. When they were eight, I began to coach them in baseball and football. When they were ten years old, Mama said, “Now you've got to take them into Boy Scouts.” So I became an assistant and took whatever job they gave me. When the scoutmaster quit, they asked me to take over, and I ran it like I did in the Marine Corps. The scouts are a takeoff of the military—learning skills, leadership, what you're made of, and learning the role of rank.

For the next eight years I saw each of my sons grow from boy to man. When John was ready to make Eagle Scout—I think he was close to sixteen—Joe was shy of about four merit badges, and he asked his brother, “Why don't you wait, and we'll make it together?” And not only did John wait, but he helped Joe get the merit badges. They both made Eagle Scout the same night, and I don't know if that happens very often.

Joe would come with me to the firehouse, and the firemen adopted him. He was as big as some of them that I had working for me, and he used to wear the guys' boots. Lee Ielpi [see page 98] would teach him how to light up an area when we were doing extrication training. He looked like a little mini fireman, and would say that he was going to be the next generation.

For his thirteenth birthday I brought him to Rescue 2. We bought a big chocolate layer cake with “Happy Birthday” written on it. But Lee Ielpi was there and said, “We're gonna give you a better cake.” So he took a milk container and cut windows out, cut the bottom out, and put it on top of the candles. He lit them, and fire started coming out of the little so-called windows. “You got to put it out, Joe,” Lee told him. They gave him water. So he put the fire out, and the cake was saturated. We had a soggy birthday cake, but it was a good day.

But at seventeen he began dating a young girl whose father was a police officer, and the guy talked him into taking the PD test. We drove him to the test, and I told him, “Joe, go in and do your best, and when you finish, meet us at the Van Wyck Diner.” Just one pencil, that's all he had, and he said, “No problem, see ya.” I'm watching him go in, this seventeen-year-old kid, with a group of men. He was a good size, but he was still a kid. So my wife, Jan, and I walked to the diner and were on our second cup of coffee when Joe walked in. I thought
, This is not good
, figuring, all told, an hour and ten minutes for a three-hour test. I said, “How'd you do?” He said, “I aced it.” He took out a piece of paper, and we looked at the numbers. I said, “It's a good thing you didn't break the pencil.” He said, “I did, but the guy next to me had a lot of them, and he gave me one.” So I asked, “Well, when are they gonna give you the answers?” “I think tonight. They're gonna be on the radio.” I said, “You know, Joe, if you fail the test, it's not the worst thing in the world. It's an experience. You're gonna take another one down the road—maybe the fireman's test. They're all pretty much the same.” He said, “I'm not worried, Dad.”

We went home, and he got dressed up to go out with his girlfriend. Calls me up about 11:30. “Dad, I got 110 on the test.” I said, “How did you get 110?” He said, “I did the extra credit.” After the numbered questions they had a couple of reading comprehensions, then one with a diagram in which you had to pick out certain things, and he got them all. So I said, “So you're seventeen and you're on the list.” He said, “I'll be in the first class.” They later called him up and said they couldn't take him until he was twenty, so at twenty years and two days old, Joe was a New York City police officer.

John was in college at the time and said to Joe, “You're an idiot. You should be a fireman.” But even when he was a cop, Joe was heavy into the Deer Park Volunteer Fire Department. He had joined when he was sixteen, and he was on every team that the Deer Park Fire Volunteers had. He loved the fire service.

John wanted to finish college at Stony Brook. When he started there, I said, “Since you're not going into the military you've got to learn to be on your own, and living at home would be an extension of high school.” So we agreed, and he lived on campus. Then, in 1984, I got diagnosed with throat cancer. I didn't tell the boys, as I didn't think it was something they had to be burdened with. Joe was a senior in high school, and John was taking his final exams in college, so I said, “Let him get through school, and then we can let him know, and Joe too.” But after all the tests were over, Jan told them. They came to the hospital and realized what all the secret meetings had been about. John was upset, really upset, but Joe handled it better.

A firefighter from my company would volunteer every morning and another every night to drive out to Long Island with the chief's car, pick up my wife, take her to the Sloan-Kettering hospital, and then bring her home. They did this for three weeks, and not one person got overtime, not one person complained. I got to see every member of the company every day. When the radiation started, the department had Ambulance 4, which was in Manhattan, pick me up here in Long Island, drive me to Sloan-Kettering, and then bring me home. Two of those guys also owned two successful restaurants called Donovan's. They said, We're not using the Fire Department cars, so would pick me up in their Cadillacs, back and forth, for thirty-six treatments. When it was all over I wrote and I thanked the Fire Department for what they had done, but told them about the Cadillacs. The department said we have to get something to take care of the families, and an old, broken-down FDNY chief 's car won't do. And that was the start of what is now the FDNY Fire Family Transport Foundation with comfortable vans.