Transcript of #637 - FDNY Firefighter

We've got new merch. The Year of the Rat Hoodies just hit the site. We have them in two colors, and they're made from my favorite hoodie template. We also have the winter sale that's happening right now, 20% off some of your favorites. You can get them before they're gone at theovanstore. Com if you get a chance to go there. If not, that is totally great as well. Thank you guys so much for the support. Today's guest is a retired firefighter and a veteran of the F FD&Y here in New York City, which is where we filmed. He spent 20 years serving with the fire department in the communities of Washington Heights and Queens, and bravely served alongside many others during 9/11. I'm very grateful for his time and his service. He is what I would call a legend. Today's guest is Mr. Tony Bonfiglio. I'm up.

Is it too hot in here for you, Tony? No, I feel comfortable.

Okay. What temperature do you guys operate How do you say that?

Well, sometimes it's so hot in the summer when we're out there in like 90 degree weather and you're putting a fire out. It's hot. You lose so much body water. Yeah? Yeah. It's like when you take off your turnout coat and your gear, it's like you fell in a pool.

Have you ever started a fire where you had to pee in and by the end, you didn't?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm talking. Kid me? Yeah. Then sometimes you're so thirsty. I mean, there were times I was so thirsty from pulling ceilings and the plaster dust that I actually would look up and would take water coming off the drain pipe. Just right into my mouth because I can breathe. Yeah, it gets pretty crummy in there. Oh, I bet. Yeah, it's shitty.

20 years, you were a Tony Bonfiglio? Yup. And that's Italian?

That's Italian, man. My whole family's from East Harlem. We're Italian.

Yeah, it's fun, huh? Yeah.

Grew up in New Hyde Park. My father moved us out of the Bronx when I was about six. And we moved to New Hyde Park. That's like a town on the Queens borderline on the suburb side.

Bringing up New Hyde Park?

New Hyde Park. Went to Herrick's High School.

What was it like back then?

It was great. It was like all blue collar workers, all the blue collar workers kids. We had bus drivers, cops, firemen, truck drivers.

So it's a nice suburb over there.

It was great. Right over the city line. I had such a great childhood. We had so much fun running around, doing all kinds of crazy shit back then. Hot rods, motorcycles.

Mischief, huh?

Yeah, mischief, rock and roll, rock clubs, in Long Island, rock clubs.

Listening to some Def Leppard, some AC/DC?

Yeah, well, back then it was Twister Sister, and we used to go to the clubs and see Twister Sister. Your OBI. There was a bunch of good bands back then, house bands, but they would play all the cover songs. You had like Doors, you had Zeppelin. Oh, yeah. That was awesome.

Yeah, that's a beautiful time, dude. I think that's a time that a lot of people romanticize as well.

I think so. I always say that when I die, I hope the heavens like the '70s, man, because that was so awesome. Kicked ass.

And you were on the FD&Y for 20 years?

Yeah, '21.

'21 years. How did you get started? What were you doing before you When you got in a firefighting? Because things are going well. You're listening to Twister Sister.

Yeah, hanging out with the boys, getting in trouble. I did get arrested. I was at Speaks Club once in Lido Beach, and I did get arrested there for had some weed and a couple of other things on us. We were young. I was going nowhere. I went to college for maybe three weeks.

Oh, yeah, that's not enough.

Farmingdale University, I went for food technology. I was going to be a meat inspector.

Oh, really? Yeah.

Thank God that didn't happen.

Yeah, hell, yeah, dude.

I was working in a meat factory when I was a kid, scraping hangar room floors like Pauley and Rocky. I had the white coat on. I'm freezing, scraping the blood and the fat off these floors all day.

And what was that like over there? So what meats did they even have going in and out of there?

Just big sides of beef, big factory, like hanging rooms, big hanging rooms.

And would you be alone in there?

Or would you No, there'd be other people, butchers coming in, grabbing their meat. It was like a big production place, big time. Lots of trucks. They would give all the meat out to all the restaurants and everything. And that was right in Minnola.

Oh, that's pretty cool. And Minnola, is that here in New York?

Yeah, I mean, New York was pretty much right by New Hyde Park. Got it.

You're over there, you're in there with the meat. You're in there at night.

Like Rocky hitting the meat.

Yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure when nobody's looking. Because that was right around the time.

Oh, yeah. For Sure.

Yeah, there we go. That's what it looked like.

Oh, definitely. Everything turned to veal after this came out. Bro, you couldn't get something that wasn't tenderized.

It was funny because we were all kids, too, and all this meat after the place closed would be. But we never took an ounce of meat back then.

You got all this beautiful meat.

There would be like big tubs of filet mignons, all kinds of things. You guys are just in there beating it.

You got a sausage room. Yeah.

And then I had a-So what happens?

You're in there, you're beating, you guys are punching the meat or whatever. Was that a common future in your area?

No, it was not at all. I just got a job there. My friends were all working there. The whole crew was working. That's fun. And we were a cleanup crew. So once the butchers were all done, we would come in with these high pressure hoses, and we would just hose this whole place down.

You all were just partying probably.

Yeah. Then we'd oil it up with vegetable oil. It was a funny job.

What was the vegetable oil for?

Just make everything shiny and clean because we had online. The inspectors were there. There was two inspectors every day, and they would inspect everything. If they didn't get their Paola, then they would knock a machine down, and then they'd have to rope the whole thing off, and we would have to come in and clean the machine, and then they inspect it again.

So was there a meat mafia going on a little bit? Meat Mafia, yeah.

Was it really? Mm-hmm. Wow. It was owned by two Jewish brothers, the Cohons. Oh, yeah.

So you know something. Something was aflooped. And so what makes once you get out of there, were your friends graduating? Because I ended up working at... Dude, me and five of my buddies worked over there at, I think it was called Save a Center or something. It was a grocery or Windixi, maybe it was called. Dude, one of my buddies would come, clock in, go home. Then he would wake up, and he'd come, clock out, dude. He worked there for like, yeah, he worked there for almost 11 months. Oh my God. Dude, and the rest of us were afraid to do that, so we'd actually be in there working. But we would during... But it was so much fun as having your Bro, there was nothing better, I think, than that time. If you were either late years of high school or right out of high school, and you got to work with your buddies who hadn't gone all... Nobody figured it out yet. You got to work with your friends.

That's what it was. Saturday morning, we'd all be banged up from being out drinking all night. We'd just be getting home, and we had to go in Saturday morning to oil the whole place. Those were fun trips. We had oil fights. We'd get soaked in oil.

Oh, God. I think we might pick up a new listenership here in this episode.

We would have some good oil fights. Really? Because you'd have these big squirt bottles, and then we'd have these 55-gallon drums of oil. What?

It was seed oil?

Yeah, it was vegetable oil. We would even do the trucks in the vegetable oil. It looks like they got waxed. What? Yeah, they were all shiny.

What vegetables was it coming out of?

I have no idea.

Look at vegetable. I never even thought about that. What could even have that much oil? Maybe an eggplant? What is vegetable made of?

Vegetables.

You think, but what?

They squash them.

Vegetable is made from the oil is extracted from various plant parts like seeds, fruits, nuts, and grains, most commonly, soy beans, corn, canola, sunflower, and palm, because that's the oil that everybody's against nowadays. But I guess you guys were just using it to keep stuff shiny. Shiny. Wow. Yeah. I didn't even know people use it like that.

We had these black trucks, and they would look all waxed after we were done oiling them all down. Yeah. It stunk, too, because it was such a big place, and there'd be a lot of the bones and the fat, and you'd had to go in the pit sometimes. It's like you would puke. It was so bad smelling.

What was the pit? It was below the floor.

Yeah, that's where all the water would drain into there. Every time our dad, our boss would have to go in there. I'd see him reaching in. He'd have fat on his glasses and shit. It was gross. Yeah, dude. No, I I don't want to stay there.

God, yeah. It was cold. It was cold in there, too?

And there was freezers there. And the guys that worked in the freezers, you never saw them. It looked like they were from the Antarctica. They had these hoods and these parkers and they were big boots. And you'd see them now and then. They were scary. You were a kid. You're like, There's the freezer, man. They never came out of the freezer.

Yeah, dude. That's fucking wild. Be living in it. It's hiding from your wife and kids probably in there. Oh, God. That's when family life's bad. When you're like, I don't care how cold it is. I'll stay in there.

Yeah, that's bad. That's the last job you want is working in a freezer. Yeah? Oh, I think so.

That was in the line. And what guys would do? Was it tough guys? Was it Russians? Who was doing it?

Tough fucking guys, butchers, psychos. They got They were on their own toolbox of knives. The big. A couple of times, they would pick you up by your shirt. Because we were just the kids. We run it around.

And you ever get arrested for crimes or anything like that? You think we're any low-key dexter, that guy? Yeah.

Yeah, they were low key. They were. Strange, some of them. Yeah.

That's why.

Then you had the women. They were the packers. Oh, they were? Yeah, they would pack the chickens and all that. Oh, gifrapping? Then wrap it and everything.

Women do better GIFRAPID.

They had tough women, too. They were working. It was like the boss of the women was a real tough bro.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Some girl would have a tattoo of Richard Den on us.

Everybody be out smoking. There's your smoke breaks. Then the guy would come with the roach coach and call you out for your coffee and shit. He would? Yeah, the coffee roach. They had roach coaches here, and everybody would come out. You know what a roach coach is? It's a coffee truck. Back in the day, they would come to factories.

So it just pulls up and you got to get your snack.

And they would be like, All right, the guys here. And everybody would be out of break, get their coffee, their lousy donor, whatever he had.

A little bit of a break. Yeah, I like that, man. Dude, when I was a kindergarten, they had, or I don't know what grade I was in. I wasn't even in a grade. It was nap time or whatever at kindergarten, but I wouldn't I would sleep. I would just keep my eyes open because they'd bring in this other lady to watch us. I was curious about her, so I would just lay over there.

You were eyeballing her.

Yeah, I was eyeballing her, I guess, because me and my mother were always on the outs. I was shopping around. I remember at a certain point, she'd come over and kick me a little bit, and she'd let me go outside and watch her smoke. That's funny. That was nice, dude. She had pretty nice hair. She looked a little bit like a man, but she was definitely-What year was that? This was probably '84.

The early '80s. God.

She looked like a fucking man. But she's only the third woman I'd ever seen. So at that point, she was really I'm looking. You don't know. Yeah. Yeah, she's beautiful to me. She was just stunning, dude. But yeah, she'd let me go out there and watch her smoke, and she'd complain about stuff. That's funny. God, that was nice, man. Just getting a little break. So it felt like it was break from kindergarten. We were on break.

I remember kindergarten well. Really? Oh, yeah. Nap time. That was the best. Snack and nap. Then out to the sandbox and dig a hole of China.

Dig a hole down to a fucking butcher shop.

Yeah, they would always put a cone in the sand. They'd be like, Oh, you're almost in China. I'll be like, Yeah, let's keep digging.

Yeah, dude. Then some people get sand in his eyes and he would look like he was Chinese. Yeah, that's what I got good, dude. So take me out, how How did you get out of the meat area into the fire? Take me out of the freezer under the fire, man.

After that, I went to a plastic mold injection factory job. Unemployment sent me to. Oh, they did?

They were making body parts?

No, we were making... There was a game called Othello back then. It was like a black and white chip.

Yeah, I remember that game.

We were making the chips, and we made the colored beads. It was all like these plastic mold injecting.

The color beads for like what? Mardi Gora or something?

Yeah, Mardi. People just buy them for their crafts and stuff like that. They're like 100 different colors. Yeah. I could never remember the color after I boxed it up. I get ready to send it. I'd be like, I'm sister, but brown, green. I'd put something down, and then the guy would come back, You can't be yelling at me. You can't send these out. I'm laughing. He's like, What are you laughing about? I mean, I'm making $3 an hour.

Dude, I remember one time I eat a bunch of mushrooms or whatever after school, and I worked at this mail center. My job was to mail out these insurance forms to these different companies around the country. While I'm in the mail room, dude, I'm not doing real good.

Oh, I could imagine.

When my body had gotten really hot, so I took all my clothes off. I put all my clothes into a box, mailed them to some place. Oh my God, that's great. Dude, my first girlfriend, her mom got me that job. Her dad, shout out Mr. Earle. He was a fire chief, actually. Oh, really? Yeah. But anyway, I got laid off. The mother had to come. Thank God it was a day it was raining because she let me borrow a raincoat she had so I could go get in my car. Yeah. Wow. Anyway, we made some tough choices over the years, but I did have a good time. They had a firehouse down there on Chapa Toulous in New Orleans, and it would be great because the Mardi Gra parades were down there. So we'd go down there and the firehouse would be open on days like that.

Must have been an old firehouse, too.

It was beautiful. I think, bring it right up. It's right down there off a chop of Chapa Toulous over there. That was it right there.

I see it. That's it right there. It looks like they made it into something.

Yeah, they made it into something. But anyway, it was a great time, man. It was a great time. We'd go over there. Everybody's cooking hot. Dogs and just having a great time. That was a beautiful time.

The Cajun.

Yeah, we had so much fun. How do you get into there, man? How do you get... You're over there making jewelry and stuff.

Well, the funny part is they sent me to this place called It's called Stonewell Plastics in Mineola, and I go in and I got this little Mexican guy. He's doing the interview with me. It's like middle-aged little guy. He's got a little pencil mustache. I'm sitting there, I'm 18. He goes, So what's your I came and I said, Tony Bonfiglio. He writes it down. He says, And how old are you, Tony? I said, I'm 18. Writes it down. He goes, And Tony, were you born here? I said, No, I was born in New Jersey. He starts laughing. Oh, you'll do. You'll do. And when I went back there, I realized I was the only American in the place. Everybody else was foreign.

So you're in there learning Spanish, huh?

Yeah, Spanish.

What languages were they? Whowho was that?

It was mostly Spanish. Yeah? Yeah. There was some black people, but even them, I didn't understand because some of them from Brooklyn. I had one friend, he would drive me home. I would say, I'd shake his head. He'd shake his head. We don't know what the hell he was saying.

Dude, I still can't understand black people.

I'm here, so I'm here, so I'm here, my damn boss, I'm there. I'll be like, Yeah, we're motherfucking here. Yeah, dude.

I mean, look, bro. I don't know what he said. It's 40 years later. Something's never changed, and maybe it's for the best. It could be, yeah. You're in there. Are you just dissident from me? No. Or how do the winds blow you over to the fire world?

Well, then my father got me into the printing union, the Amalgamator Lithographers of America Local One. And I did that for about four years. But I took the fire department test when I was 18. I was 19, in '78.

Was that part of school you had to take it?

No. My neighbor came over, and he came in our back door with an application. Johnny LaLima. Thank God, Johnny saved my life. Gives me the application. He says, You'll never get rich on this job, but it'll put a roof over your head and food on your table. So I'm sitting at my kitchen table. I'm like, Okay, Johnny, thanks. I had no idea it was going to be the biggest career move of my life.

What made him even come over there and do that? I wonder.

I guess he knew I was going nowhere, Because he was my neighbor, and they saw us all hanging out all the time. I figured this kid be a pie. I mean, it'll be all right. So thank God. I mean, he saved me because the printing union was going south. Computers were coming in, and they weren't printing anymore on these big printing presses. So I got that. And then about a year later, I took a physical test after the written test. The written test we took in a high school somewhere in Queens.

And was there a lot of people taking those tests at the time?

40,000.

40,000 people wanted to be firemen?

Yeah. Wow.

Because the job, I think in a lot of ways, it's a lineage job. It's like a lot of families do it. Definitely. And there's a lot of esteem with it. Yeah, big time. Especially at that time, what was it like? Was it a very revered position? Did you even think you could get it?

Get the job? Yeah. Yeah, I think because I was 19, I was in great shape. And the physical test is where they separate everybody. The written test was a joke. I mean, it was like a third-grade questions. Yeah?

Remember any of them or no?

Well, I saw the sanitation guy. He was saying about the dirt and the shovel. That's exactly what it was like. What would you use? A garbage truck, a plow, or a shovel and broom. It was ridiculous. If you got your name right, that was it. I got a 98 on the written test. Probably the highest I've ever gotten any test in my life.

But what was the physical part like?

Take me to that. My father took East New York to an armory in this real shit neighborhood. And we parked his Buick Regal. It was like the nicest car my dad ever had. I bought him these spoke rims for it for his birthday. That was nice. So we get there and He says, Here, you take the keys. I'm running for the subway and you take the car home. I'm like, Yeah, you sure dad. Don't worry about it. I mean, he's an East Harlem guy, so I wasn't too worried about him. So he took off. I go in this armory. It's like when you get in there, it's the size of a football in a ball field, and there's 100 guys that day that are going to take the test, and they break you up into 10 men groups. And you go around all these different stations and you take different tests. You had to run. One was a mile. One was an eight-foot wall. You had to jump over the eight-foot wall. That was like the separator. If you didn't get over the eight-foot wall, you went to the police Department. Sorry, guys.

Hey.

That's what separated them.

That's what it is, man. Sometimes you got to separate the beef from the pork.

Well, the funny part is I got a zero on one of them. If you get a zero on one of those stations, you're done. You're not going to get hired. Yeah, for sure.

Which one was you?

I had this thing called a ledge walk. You had to put on a turnout code, a helmet. You had to put boots on. You had to put a mask on. You went up on a balance beam next to a wall, and you had a slide along the wall like you were chiming along a ledge. It was called the ledge walk. I'm I'm chiming along this thing. I'm like, Why the fuck would I be on a ledge? I mean, is this job that crazy? What am I, Batman? I'm going to be out on the ledge. I went all the way down. I touched the line. I came all the way back, and the woman scoring me says, You didn't touch the line down there. Uh-uh. What? I raced all the way back, touched the line. I come back, she says, You ran out of time. I got a zero. I was like, That's it. Everything was down the drain. Come on.

You think she just didn't do it correctly?

I think, yeah, I I think she was there to knock some of the white guys out because there was too many white guys on the job, which they were complaining about. They wanted women, they wanted minorities. I think they were told, because I stepped on the line, she wasn't even anywhere near the line. No. But everything happens for a reason.

You get to zero.

Pissed.

And there's 10 stations. You do fine on the rest of them. You get out of there. And are you then waiting for your grade? Do you even like...

Yeah. Now Now, after you get all that done, everybody says their half-ass goodbye. I went back out. Thank God, my father's Regal was still there. I got in the Regal. I found I had a joint in my workout bag. I lit that sucker up. And now I'm driving home. We had no directions back then, so I'm looking for signs for the LIE, and boom, we get home. My dad was there. How did you do? I said, I think I did all right. So now, the girls have a lawsuit because 40 girls took the test, the first 40 girls ever, and they didn't pass with 40,000 applicants.

None of them passed?

None of them passed.

Were some of the women in there on that day? You were there with that 100 people?

No, I didn't see any women that day. But we had a couple in my battalion when I got there. Anyway, they had a lawsuit, and this lawsuit went on for six years. From that time I took the test, I didn't get a notice that I was hired for six years. Because it was-Because it was women, because the The lawsuit took so long. They usually hire about 2,500 people off the list. Now they had to go deep into the list. And because of that zero, I was like 4,300 on the list. So the women saved me. Thank you, girls. I appreciate it.

Yeah, because rarely does a complaining woman save you.

They saved me that day.

Brenda Berkman right there.

Brenda Berkman. Everybody knows Brenda.

Pioneering female firefighter. She was the sole named Class Plante.

She was a lawyer.

In the federal sex discrimination lawsuit that opened the fire Department of City, New to women firefighters. After she won the lawsuit in '82, she and 40 other women became FD and Y Firefighters. Was that a time where people were supportive of the women? Were they against the women? What did that feel like?

Did it feel like they were totally against the women. They were. It was an all-male place. I guess a lot of guys, they don't feel like they didn't mind the women that really passed the test. But to just get on because you're a woman that was not Today, now they have girls. They're so much into athletics and stuff. They could pass these tests now. But back then, it wasn't like that.

So some of it, they were just stuck in the deck. We're just going to put some extra girls in. Because some of that's just a liability.

That's it. They went, well, yeah, life and death.

And a liability for their own life.

That, too. Yeah. But I mean, if your kid is trapped in a fire, you want the best person going to get that kid, not somebody that didn't make it.

Yeah, for sure. 100 %.

I agree with that. But they saved me, and I'm the luckiest guy for that. So you're in, huh? I'm in.

You made it in. Yeah. Do you remember, do you get a letter? It's like, Yeah, I'm in. You got it? And does it have flames on the-My wife came.

I'd come pulling up in the parking lot from the working at Mastercraft Litho, and I had a little Chevette. We both shared this little Chevette car that my wife bought on her own when we were kids. I see her coming across the parking lot with a wave in the... I said, What is it? She goes, The fire department watch, six years. Fire Department watch. They're going to hire you. I said, holy shit. I looked at it. Tony Bonfiglio, New York City fireman. Report to Randall's Island, 823 something, 84. I was like, I'll be there.

That's pretty cool, huh?

Yeah. Oh, my God. I was so happy.

She was happy at the time of life.

She was happy. I was happy.

Where did you meet your wife? Christine, I met her. I know she's here with us today. Where did you meet your wife at?

Well, on my block, I was walking up my block in our neighborhood, and her and her sister just moved in from the Bronx. They were in the Marble Hill projects. They were like the last ones out of these projects. So I'm going up the block. I'm 14 years old. They're coming down with one of my friends, and he's like, Hey, these two girls just moved in from the Bronx, Chris and Bernie. And I'm like, Hey. First of all, I thought he was pulling my leg. So that was how we met. And then we went through school. We didn't really date until we were 18.

Hey, there you go.

There we go. That's a great shot. It was like size 32 waist back then.

Look, I'm looking at Christine.

Yeah, she's looking good.

Yeah, you can say what? I'm not looking at your waist, buddy.

We were like 24 years old there. I was just getting out of the academy. That's graduation day. I'm graduated from there after six weeks of training. Oh, that's nice, huh? Yeah.

Yeah, dude, you look pretty pleased.

The funny part is they give us your assignment. I get this thing, 34 truck. Now, like 150 firemen, only 10 are going to go to trucks. The other 140 are going to go to engine companies. There's an engine company. They're the water. They got the hoses. And then there's the truck. That's the ladders. And they break down the doors. The ledge walkers. The ledge walkers. So I didn't want to go to a truck. I didn't like the heights. I didn't like the ropes. I didn't like the ladders.

Look, I got a zero on the ledge walk. Yeah, you got the wrong guy. Why did they choose you for that then?

I have no idea. My father said they saw how good I was at breaking things that they send him to the truck. So now I see a truck in Manhattan. I'm like, Oh, man. All right. I tell her, I says, I'm going to a 34 truck. They gave me a truck. She's like, They gave me a truck? I'm like, Yeah, because most guys are in the engine for maybe 5, 10 years before they get to a truck.

And so in the engine means they're in the actual fire engine?

They're in the engine, and they're a separate company. They're engine A4, and we were a lot of three, four. It was a big 100-year-old firehouse.

And so a ladder, they do different stuff than the engine does.

Yeah, the engine puts the fire out. Okay. The ladder opens up, opens up the It breaks the doors down, cuts the roofs open, makes all the rescues and the searches. It's a lot more intimidating because you don't have the hose line. You're actually in there crawling around. With no water? No water. Maybe a can on your back. What? Yeah, I was a can man for quite a while.

And that's heating up quick, probably. Yeah. So you get in a ladder, and where's the ladder at? What's that like?

161st Street in Manhattan, for Amsterdam Avenue, a place called Washington Heights. Washington Heights?

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of Dominicans up there.

Oh, my God. When I got there, they were just coming in, and they took over with blood, man. They killed everybody. Really? They took over the drug business because that was the hub. You had the GW Bridge right there. You had all the parkways to head out to Brooklyn, out to Long Island. So everybody would come in and buy their crack and their cocaine. It was badass. I mean, they would be shooting all day long.

Was it exciting?

It was. Oh, my God. And the place was so crowded. It was full of people with these old broken down tenement buildings, Brownstones, tenements, all broken down, 100 years old. The firehouse was 100 years old.

Was it exciting to go work there? Did it feel scary? What did it become for you?

The funny part All I was going to say is that I went with my wife from the graduation. I said, We got to go. It's on 84th Street, I told her. I didn't realize that was 84 engine when I read the thing. I take her into Manhattan, and I take her down 84th Street, and there's no firehouse. I go all the way back up to the West Side. I come all the way down. There's no fire. And we're saying, Wow, this is nice. Look at this. It's all money, Brownstones, high-end stores. Finally, I go around 85th Street, and I find a firehouse, and I got my uniform on, and they tell you to not always knock on the door and say, Probe every probationary firefighter, Bonfiglio. This old guy answered the door. What can I do for you, Proby? He knew right away I was a Proby just by looking at me with the stuff on. I said, I'm looking for my firehouse, 34 truck. They said it's on 84 street. He's like, Why? Let me look at that. He's like, Dude, you're in with 84 engine and you're on 161st street. I was like, What?

Holy shit. I had to get in the car and tell my wife we got to go up to 100. Now we left the glitz and now we're in this freaking run-down neighborhood. It was like, holy shit.

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Truck company, ladder company.

You're in the truck company. You guys are the ones that go in. You have more of an ax and you do a host.

We got a forcible entry team, a roofman, and another guy that's called the OV, he's divv He vents out the outside. He goes up the fire escapes. Oh, yeah.

Peeping Tom, probably.

Yeah, you're the first guy in to break in the window.

Or just sitting there by it. I won't say nothing. Do you guys get there before Like an engine gets there, or does that matter?

We try to get there at the same time. You never know. I mean, if we're leaving quarters together, we always let the engine take off first. Hopefully, they go and find a hydrant. Okay, got it. We try to get in front of the building with the ladder.

Okay, got it. Take me on your first fire.

My first fire. Well, I've been at car fires, rubbish fires. We had water leaks, so many water leaks because it was such an old neighborhood. When we go to a water leak, we got to find out where it's leaking, sometimes we got to break into the apartment. Gas leaks. We did everything, all the utilities up there. So I doing it for about three weeks, and I'm still wondering, oh, my God, what's going to happen with a job? What's it going to be like? I still have no idea. I'm a can man. The probie gets the can.

Okay, and the can means what?

I got a fire extinguisher with a strap on my back, and I got a hook. And I'm going to be the guy that if I can put out whatever fire I can with the can.

Is itIs it actually helpful? Is the can helpful?

If a good can man could maybe put out a room of fire. Okay. You get your finger over that thing, you spread it around. So it's real? It's real, yeah.

Okay, got it. Do you remember the day that you get your first fire?

Yeah, it was like A few weeks in, and I'm doing my first twelve by watch. So you have a house watch, and somebody's got to man it. It's got a computer in there that comes on and tells you what your alarms are, and you acknowledge them. You hit all the lights, you send the companies out. So I got to do my first twelve by. So I never done a watch alone yet. So the twelve by was a little scary at first.

And that's twelve hours?

No, twelve to three. You do three hour watch. Okay. So twelve o'clock came. I went in, I took the book over. It's midnight, and I'm sitting there, and it's like one o'clock in the morning, and all of a sudden, like 1: 30, I start falling asleep. I'm like, I'm sleeping.

Look, I've had a job before. I know how it is.

I'm sacked All of a sudden, the alarm goes off. The computer goes, it starts ticking out this alarm. I'm like, Oh, my God. I was so scared. I got up, I hit the housewatch light. I'm looking at the ticket. It says, Engine A4, ladder three, four, first due, fire on an eighth floor. So now I got to hit all the bunk room lights. I got to hit the intercom, say everybody goes. I got to hit the three bells. And then I got to acknowledge on the computer, both companies, 10, four. And then I got to take the tickets and put them on the truck side and the engine side. And then I put my gear on, and out the door we go.

Let's go, Tony. I'm hamped up.

Oh, man. So now we get there. It's 3: 30, quarter to four in the morning, and it's like a project building, about 11 stories. It was a pretty decent building. It was on Amsterdam Avenue. We're the forceful entry team. Me, my lieutenant, who was this salty guy from the Bronx, Spinelli, he was like a real... I mean, he was the war days, back in the '60s and the '70s. How salty? Saulty means like... Oh, yeah. Yes, he was salty, burly mustache, unruly hair.

Gout in his smile. It's all bent and burnt.

Yeah, dude.

Definitely. Great guy, though. It's like he was raising an ashtray.

Oh, yeah. This guy, yeah. We're There's four small entry team is a camp man, an Irons man. He's got an ax and a Halligan and the boss. And we're the three guys. So now we go into the lobby door and we hit all the buzzers 3: 30 in the morning.

And there's people in there, sleeping.

Yeah, no, they're in there. So all of a sudden, they start, Who is it? Who is it? Fire Department, open the door. Open the door, fire Department. So they buzz you in. Now, they go in the lobby. Nothing's showing. Nobody's bailing out. I'm like, I don't know. So this might not be it. Take an elevator to the 7: 15 floor because the fire was on the eighth floor. We get to the seventh floor, and you never take the elevator to the fire floor for obvious reasons. We take it and we take the stairs to the eighth floor, and we get in this hallway, and now it's like a big projects hallway. I don't know if you've ever seen of them, but they're painted green, and they got fluorescent lights, and it's long. So we go to all the doors and we stick our noses in the jams, trying to smell smoke. We don't smell nothing. So the boss says to my friend Jimmy, the Duke, he says, Go up to the next floor and check it out. Calls down the battalion, says, Yeah, we got nothing showing on the eighth floor. We're going to check out the ninth floor.

So with that, now we go into the hallway, and my friend is on the top of the stairs, and he says, Lou, I think we got something. So I'm like, Oh, shit, this is it. I'm in this project hallway, quarter to four in the morning. I'm running up the steps with my hook and everything. And the boss says, What do we have? And the Duke opens this door, and I was like, Oh, my God. If there was a gate to hell, this was it, okay? Black, shimmering smoke that looked like satin curtains just going in all different directions. And my first thought was, no way we're fucking going in there, right? I see these guys.

Hey, look, let me see a two bedroom. This won't work for us.

They're pulling their boots up and they're putting their air. They're turning air bottles on and everything. I'm like, oh, shit, this is it. So now we're getting down on our hands and knees, and the Duke tells me, You hold my coat. Okay? And I'm like, Yeah, for sure, I'm holding your coat.

So you're behind him crawling?

I'm behind the Duke. The boss goes in first like this black abyss we just crawl into on the floor.

What are you looking for?

The fire apartment. We got to find it.

So this is just the hallway?

The hallway. Somebody left their door open.

Pull up that hallway you had, nick. Is that the one from the actual building? No. This is a general one. I know what you're talking about, though. It's narrow hallways.

Narrow hallways, long green. Look at that color, yellowish green. It looked just like that.

Oh, God.

So now we're on our hands and knees, and I got his coat. I got the can on my back. I got my mask on, and we're in total blackness. I'm crawling down like 100 feet. And I'm saying in my mask, I'm saying, What the fuck am I doing here? This is fucking crazy. I'm never going to do this again. I felt so helpless. And what am I going to do? It's pitch black. We're crawling in a hallway we've never been before. So we crawl up, and then all of a sudden, the Duke stops and he says, We're at the fire door. And I'm like, Okay, can't see nothing.

Yeah, it almost seems like some sex traffic. Anyway, whatever's going on, it sounds out of It's out of sorts. Anyway, so carry on. Sorry.

It's something that I'm not doing. I'm quitting in the morning. I swear to God, I was quitting. I was like, What are we going to do in here? We can't see. I'm on the ground. Finally, we call in, and I crawl in, and I hear the boss. He's up ahead of us in the apartment already. He says, Bring the can in here. So now I crawl past the Duke. I'm on my hands and knees, and about 10 feet up, I see the boss on his knees with a glow of the fire. He goes, You see the fire? It's to the left. And I look, and there's a room on fire. It looks like cotton candy. The flames are all over the place.

And how much is it protecting you? How much is your suit protecting you at that point?

No, nothing. What?

You didn't take it off, bro.

Yeah, no. They're just coats to keep you warm, basically. They got your leather helmet on.

Keep you warm. And at that point, does it take on... Do you start Did you feel a little bit more empowered or something?

No, I felt scared shit. I just wanted to get out of there and get this fire over with. So now I see him and he says, Do you see the fire? And I looked to the left and I said, Yeah, I see the fire. I'm in this mask. And he says, Hit it I got the can. I got the can and I'm on my knees and I go to hit it and nothing comes out. I hit it again, nothing comes out. I didn't have air in the can. It's like a total fuck up for a probie. You should have put it in there? That's my fuck up. My first job. I said to the boss, I got no air in the can.

I've used that excuse a lot of times. A lot of times over the years, buddy. I'll tell you that. I want to apologize to a lot of those women out there. That was my She's like, I got no air in the can.

That's a good analogy.

I got a ladder issue. But go on. Full extended. Fuck, you must have been embarrassed, huh?

I wasn't embarrassed, but I felt like, Oh, man, I'm going to catch some shit for this. Did you even pretend?

Did Did you just make a sound like you had air in? No.

I didn't make those sounds. I could believe it because you always check the can. You got to pressurize it, put a little water. So he says, All right, back out to the doorway. So I pan Now the fire is coming out over our heads in the hallway. And I get to the door, we came in crawling, and the elevator was right across from the apartment, fire apartment. And the door opens and there's 84 engine without a mask on or anything. They They took the elevator to the fire floor, and they got stuck. They're going down on their knees, and they're trying to put their masks on. I'm yelling in my mask. I'm like, Get the fucking line in here and put the fucking fire. I'm screaming. I'm like, Out of my mind now. So finally, they get in the line. Now it's black again.

And the line is the hose? The hose.

Okay. And it's all asses and elbows now in this hallway. That's what we call organized confusion. And bringing the line past me. I I see him get up to the room and the boss says, There's the fire to the left. I hear the line crack, get the water comes up, he cracks it, and now he hits it, and he starts pushing the fire in. I squeeze past them because I got to search the apartment. That's my job.

And you're searching for to see if there's anybody in there.

The bodies, yeah. Wow. Now I'm searching along the wall and still can't see. I'd get to a window and I'd smash it out with my hook, and I would stick my head out the window because this is the first time I could see again since we left that stairwell.

You got to get some fresh air.

Fresh air and some view of something. So then I go around and then all of a sudden, they knocked it down fast, and I run into the Duke, the Irons Man. He's like, Yo, Proby, you broke your cherry, man. Congratulations. And I was like, wow. I took my mask off. It was still gray smoke and steamy, but it was better than the mask because that was so confined. So I said, Yeah, Jimmy. I It was in my first fire, but this might be in my last fire. I said, I don't know if I'm doing this again. And there we were. We overhauled the apartment and we threw the mattress out the window. We took everything out, threw the street down into the street.

And who's down there catching that? He was hitting whoever. That's free.

Back then, nobody. Who gives a shit? Just, hopefully, nobody's down there. You yell out, look out. Then you throw the burning mattress out the window.

Oh, shit. I'll throw my ex-wife out that bitch. Don't suck. Let's take that out. Let's take that out.

Then And I'm looking out this window and it's encrusted with all these embers and shit, like gold and amber and everything. And it was like 5: 30 in the morning, and the Manhattan skyline was turning purple. So I had all this beautiful thing. I was like, wow, this is some sight. Excuse me? Yeah. Wow, I kiss the sky. Yeah, it was definitely rock and roll, man. I was like, yeah. So now I had to get back, and I put the air in the can when I got back, changed all the masks and everything. Now I had to go up and see the boss, take my medicine. So I walk up to the truck office and I knock on the door. It's open. He said, Yeah, come in. He's wiping his face down with a towel. He just came out of the bathroom. I said, I made like puppy eyes. I said, Lou, I'm sorry about not having air in the can. And he's like, wiping his face. He goes, Yeah, don't worry about it, kid. Shit happens. And I was like, Oh, wow. Thank you. I was 23 years old. So now I'm walking out and he goes, Hey, kid.

And I turn around, he goes, You did a good job. And I was like, Oh, wow. That's awesome. Yeah. And then I'm driving home saying, Am I quitting this fucking job? Because it was like nothing I've ever experienced. And growing up, I did a lot of crazy things, but this was the scariest thing I ever did. But yet it was so exciting and thrilling. I mean, I got home and the grass was so greener. The sky was so blue, and the air that I was breathing was so appreciative. Because you were alive. I was alive, man. It made me... I was like, wow, that was something. Of course, that wasn't my last job. I went 21 years more after that.

What made you decide? Did you just have to go back to work and it just kept being like that?

Yeah, we were a busy truck back then because we had a lot of fires, a lot of occupied fires, which are really a lot more intense than a vacant fire or something like that. You got a lot of people bailing out, and sometimes they're trapped. You got to get to them. The truck, that's their job.

Hearing you say this, and thanks so much for your time, Tony, too. I appreciate it, man.

Thank you. This is like an honor.

Oh, thanks, bro.

Are you kidding me? You guys are pioneers. You're the millennial pioneers with the entertainment these days. I think you changed the whole scene.

Oh, well, I think it's like people just we got to find more humans that have the best stories. Exactly. It was so crazy. We're coming in New York, and we just get an email from you the other day that you had seen that we put out a thing about looking for somebody that works in a fire department. My producer, Zack, forward it to me. He's like, Can you believe this guy we're going to be there? It was like, wow, it seems really interesting.

I think it was meant to be.

Hey, I think so, too. I was about to say, I think it was meant to be that your first fire didn't have any... Nobody was in it. Because that could have been super scary. Take me through some of the times where there was somebody in there. How much of a different scenario was that? Is the energy different when you get there? Who lets you know if somebody's in there, or do you even know? Take me through that process of right when you get there, and then take me into a fire where it was inhabited.

Well, this one fire where we lost this little girl, and that one really hurt me a lot because we got to the apartment and my lieutenant, he was a little Irish guy, the bravest guy I've ever met, Lieutenant Maloney. And I would chase him up to the fire, the door, the collar, and he would knock on the door with his little crowbar, fire department, open the door. It'd sound like some cartoon, the Irish broke. So these people opened the doors and we walk in and there's a card table sitting there. There are about eight people playing cards. They're eating. We're standing in the kitchen, the three of us, and we're like, my lieutenant says, What the hell did you call the fire department? So they're looking up, they're like, Yeah, I think something's burning in the back. It was a big apartment. So we're looking at each other, something burning in the back. What the hell is this? So now we go down the hallway. My lieutenant's cursing under his breath. He's like, All these are these motherfucking, fucking, fucking shit.

They're still playing cards. Cards is fun, though. Cards can be fun.

They were. But we get into the living room and there's these French doors. I don't know if you know French doors, probably from-Is it like that? They're glass paneled, and they're like two doors. You open to a room.

They're called French doors. You think there's going to be somebody French in there, but they're not.

Yeah, no French people.

It never is, dude. It never is. Typical French. You'll send the doors. We'll be there. They're not. Typically French. Yes.

Anyway, I opened the French door and the room is on fire. We're like, Holy shit. Close the door. We get down on our knees, start putting our masks on, and we call 10: 75. That means we got to work in fire. He's telling the battalion, the engine now, they're coming up with the line. So right before they got the line, I said, All right, guys, it's right here. I put my mask on. I said, Showtime. And I went to open the the French doors, and I get a call over to Handy Talkie. There's a kid in the room. My friend, the OV, is with the mother out in the street. So now we bust into these doors. They're hitting. Thank God we had the water. Hitting them. And I'm frantically looking for this kid in the dark, in black smoke. I'm on the bed. I'm feeling all over the bed. I got to find this kid.

Is it mostly feeling? How far can you see?

You don't see anything. You don't. I put tape over your eyes. It's nothing.

You're feeling with gloves on, too.

Yeah, sometimes gloves, sometimes you forget your gloves. But yeah. What? Back then, we were like, less equipment, better. You want to get in, you want to get out quick, too.

No, that sounds like a guy who forgot his equipment. That's always-Put air in the can. Yeah, put some air in your can, Anthony. That's always that guy's excuse. But that's a great attitude to take. Like, no, guys, if there's air in this can, we're going to have to be here all afternoon. Yeah. We're in and out of this joint.

I could have probably maybe put It's good to get out with the can. But anyway, so the engine, I'm in there, I'm going around, and finally I'm going around the wall. I'm under the bed, feeling around, trying to find this kid. And I get to a window, I break the window out, and I look out the window, and I see my Irons man that was with me. He's in the street with the kid, a limp kid, and they're taking the kid. They open the battalion car door. They go in there and they rushed off the Columbia Presbyterian.

How did the kid get out?

No, he carried. She was unconscious. Oh, he found her. She didn't make it. The kid was dead. Unfortunately, she was burnt. They tried to revive her at the hospital, but it didn't work. So I'm overhauling now, and I see my lieutenant, and I said, I just saw Jeff in the street with the kid. He's like, Anthony, the kid was right there behind the door. I was like, I was crushed, man. I shut that door. I felt like I killed that kid. So we go to Presbyter. So before we leave, Now the deputy shows up because now we got a 1045, which is a body. And he's like, What happened here? We're in this apartment. People are still playing cards. So my lieutenant says, Well, we came up to the apartment, and I said, I'll tell you what happened. And now the deputy looks at me. I go, You see these motherfuckers over here? I said, They didn't bother to fucking tell us there might be a kid in that back room. And I'm throwing F-bombs at them. And the deputy says, Lieutenant, you better control your man. So the boss puts his arm around my shoulder.

He says, Come on, come on, Anthony. He called me Anthony. That's Anthony in a brogue. Anthony, let's go down to the street. We went down to the street and we went and we picked up my friend Jeff at the hospital. I said, How did they make out with the kid? He said, They were trying to revive her. They were bringing her to the burn center. That was the last we heard of.

But there's no way you could have known that, right? Because you go in and the kid was hiding behind the door.

Who would think? You'd think somebody would tell us there could be a kid back there?

It's heartbreaking. Oh, man. Do you ever find out why they Let me let you know what was going on there?

I guess there was like an SRO bid or something. They were renting out that little back room to this woman and a child. It was pretty bad. I had a few of those. I mean, right after I was getting over with that one, I got another one where we showed up without our masks on because it was the middle of the day. Yeah.

No, I get it.

There was nothing showing. We get out and the guy says, They're working on the oil burner all day. And we had a lot of oil burners. They were They would smoke up. So we're like, 10: 20, he says on the box, which means all the other companies take your time. Don't blow the red lights and shit. So now we're heading up to the stairs to the caller's apartment. It's a forcible entry team, me, Lieutenant Clipper, and this guy, Jimmy Lynch. We get to the door, and the woman opens the door, and we own the apartment, and it's like a slight smoke condition in there, but slight. We're like, What do we have here? My boss says he was a smart fireman. He was from I've been to the rescue, too. He said, I think we got something above us. Usually, it's below us. But this, I guess, because the light, the smoke was so light. So now we get up, we don't have no masks or nothing. I see smoke coming out of the doorway, the locked door in the hallway. So I turned around, I donkey kick the door open, like three kicks. It kicks open, and we got a black wall of smoke.

We're like, Holy shit. After the 10: 20, we got to give it 10: 75, which means now we have a fire. Soso now we're crawling in. No masks. No masks. We're on our bellies.

Was it better or worse without a mask in this? Worse.

It was worse.

Because you could feel the heat.

Back in the day when they didn't wear masks, in the '60s, in the '50s, everything was wood and cotton. Then once the '60s and '70s, and everything's vinyl and plastic, and it's a whole different smoke. It's poisonous, so it gets you quick.

That's a great point, right?

Yeah. Back then, you could suck the cotton and the wood.

Yeah, it was like, yeah, you were smoking a pack of cigarettes. You're like, Hell, shit. I wish somebody had a couple of tobacco plants, and you'd have to crawl around for another two minutes in here.

Exactly. That's what it was like.

Things would burn slower back then, too, wouldn't they?

Well, back then, yeah. Plastics will take off a lot faster. God. Anyway, he craw in. We're like, Oh, shit. We got to go in. Jimmy goes in ahead of him, and I'm the last guy in. We're almost on our bellies crawling in. I hear the horrible words, We got bodies. I'm like, Oh, my God. Now we got to give 10: 45s. We had 10: 20. That means, don't come. Take it easy getting there. Now we went 10: 75. Now we got two 10: 45s, two bodies. So with that, I get a body, a little girl come. They pass it back to me. And I like, Let me out of the apartment.

Because you don't know if she-I don't know any.

I can't see nothing yet. I still can't see nothing until I get to the stairwell. I knew I had a kid in my arms. I see it's a little girl. The face is all darkened. So now I'm like, oh, shit, I'm going to run her down to The EMS is going to take her in the street. I go running down to the street and there's nobody there. And all the people are screaming. They're yelling and screaming. I'm holding this kid and I'm looking around because we gave the 10: 20.

Take your time.

There was nobody there yet.

They're at the malt shop.

I put the kid down. I do CPR on this little girl, and I put her down. I cupped her head, and I pretty much all I knew was a 15 and 2. You get two breaths into her, and then you give her 15. And this went on for 10 minutes before I got relieved. And the sound that she was making when the air would come out, they call it machine gun breath because it's like... And the smell because I had the smell of burnt lips. So finally, somebody came over and They started taking over, and then the EMS came. After 10 minutes, they let me go. So now I'm walking around the sidewalk. All these Dominicans are very emotional. They're all screaming and yelling and crying and everything. Praying, some of them, probably. Praying everything.

Yeah, for sure.

I figured, let me go back up to the floor because the other two guys were working on the mother. When I got there, the EMS already took over, and I was like, holy shit. It was like the first fire we had where the windows didn't break open. They were the new windows that the Gambino crime family put in in all of Manhattan, and they didn't break like the old windows, so it never got air. So it smoldered, and they died from the smoke. God. And that stayed with me for years. Sometimes I would smell and taste the burnt lips and everything. It was horrible.

That's heartbreaking. Who do you even talk to about that stuff? Do you guys go to some of the services? What What was some of that like?

I got back in the firehouse. The guys were listening up. They knew. I took my turnout code off, and I just went in. I took a shower. We all took showers. And then the boss says, into the office, let's talk about it. So he says, we did everything we could. There really wasn't nothing else we could do. Not having the mask didn't hamper us at all because we still got the bodies. And so then I went home. My wife heard about it already on the news. And so when I got home, they all greeted me. And that was pretty much all I got was some nice hugs and some tears at home. Yeah, you get over. It takes a while. I mean, I had a couple of things. I had this junkie that we kept called three times. We got called to the sixth floor. He kept lighting fires to stay warm in the winter. He was a young Black kid. So we would have to climb up these vacant stairs. I had to pop a hole in the cinder block walls to get in, vacant building.

And a couple of times it's happened. Yeah.

It's the first one. We go up sixth floor, dark, cold. It's icy. It's about 30 degrees out.

A nice kid?

I have no idea. I got to the back and I see my Irish Lieutenant yelling at him. He's like, What the fuck you doing? You can't light a fucking fire. And he was sitting there and he was in the corner. And I came in and I put my flashlight on him and he was looking at me with these eyes. And I was like, God, he had tombstones in his eyes. And he was only about 16, 17. So we put the fire out. We leave. Two hours later, we get called back again. Go up, got to climb these stairs, six floors, no steps, just the rises. And no No lights. It's dark. So now we climb all the way up again. We go through the thing. He lit it up again. He's yelling, You can't fucking do this. He's yelling at him and shit. I got the light on him. And the funny part was we just broke into an enterman's cake at the firehouse with the vanilla icing that we would keep in the fridge, get it nice and stiff. So as my friend Jeff in the dark, he's putting the fire out. I put the light on him, and he still got the vanilla icing on his mustache.

Somebody took a piece for the road, Jeff. The boss is yelling at him. That's why he was pissed. That's why he was pissed. This guy interrupted his dessert.

Three companies and a battalion are responding every time. And we got chains on. It's snowing. It's not like no easy ride. So you get a lot to get out there. So the third time, I hear we just got back from something. We went in our bunks, and we were getting the bunks, and we were like a little pillow talk before everybody was sleeping. And then Before you know it, boom, boom. Same box. Here we go again. I hear the boss yelling, Fuck, shit. I'll kill that motherfucker.

Dude, let him cook at this point. We're sliding down the bowls. This guy's trying to get to heaven. You guys keep coming in and ruining his trip.

Third time. So we're in the rig, and I said to my friend Jeff, I said, Let's tell the boss, stay on the... Don't even come up the stairs. We'll take care of it. And surprisingly, he agreed. So when we got to the door, I said, Lou, we'll take care of you. Stay down here. So me and Jeff go up. My light, my diehard battery died on me. So I had no light left. I'm trying to follow Jeff's light, and we're going up just on the rises, and then there's no platform. So you got to lean over your step to get on. And when you get to the fifth or sixth floor, you're looking down at this skeleton staircase. What? Yeah. So now we go in, go through the dark apartment again. He's in there again. Now he's got candles burning because we broke his bucket up. We smashed it all up. So we're like, Holy Holy shit. So now Jeff is leaning into him and he says, Listen, you can't fucking do this anymore. Jeff's like the good cop. I'm the bad cop. I lean into him. I look at him. I said, We come back here again.

I'm throwing you out that fucking window. He just looked at me, and that was it. That was the last time we went back. We left there. We took his candles. But years later, I would see that kid's face looking at me, and it made me feel so A wasted life like that. Heroine. He had the works, everything.

That's scary. The fact that he kept going back to do it, it's just that power of addiction. It was cold. I guess it'd keep you warm up.

He was in a vacant. A lot of shit like that. Vacants were disgusting.

Because it's just anybody could be in there doing anything.

Squatters. Yeah, they're shitting on the floor. Drugs, needles. And you're crawling around in there because you still have to save them. Yeah, vacant fires.

Yeah. Do you start to develop a certain attitudes towards humanity or drug users or society? Absolutely.

Call them skills. They're all scales.

They're all scales.

Tell us back then. And matter of fact, on my block, we had a tight block, 161st Street, and we had a bodega, a A busy cab dispatcher, a whorehouse, and a bunch of drug apartments. It was a busy block. We had two guys on the block that were almost there the whole time I was there, and they were the lookouts. One guy was bald, and we called him 8 Ball. And the other guy always had a hat, and we called him the Hat. The funny part was they would watch our cars for us, so nobody would break into the cars and shit. I would see every agency there is come down and raid our block through the years I was there. Atf, Manhattan tactical north, CIA. I mean, everything. I'll tell you who was the worst ones was the FBI. They come down with machine guns I've never seen anybody, and then they clear the street. They hit all the apartments. It's amazing.

I bet they were all just visiting that whore house.

That whore house. I would inspect it now and then. I'd go in there with my hat and that thing, and they'd all be looking at me be like, What the fuck you want? I got to inspect this place.

What was it like in some of those joints? Was it interesting in there? Was it just women trying to just survive most of those types of people?

It was just some middle-aged, young, not too young, Dominican women. I guess they took care of the cab drivers and stuff, and they had the different rooms. Everybody had their little bed in there. Just trying to sit up. I would inspect it. You got condoms? The condoms are here.

Making sure the alarm works, ladies.

Yeah, they would be like, come on. Some of them, the prostitutes would be like, Get the fuck out of here, man. They'd be up all night. They didn't want nothing to do with me.

Oh, I'm sure. Yo, feleys, feleys, feleys, boys, guys. You know what time it is, it's time to level up and get that wiener up.

I'm upstairs.

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They did it perfect. Or this person moved to another country and they found a love and they did it perfect. No matter where you are in your romantic journey, therapy might be able to help you find your way. With over 30,000 therapists, Betterhelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. It works with an average rating of 4. 9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1. 7 million client reviews. Bam, that's a lot. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp. Com/theo. That's betterhelp. Com/theo. That would be the wildest thing for me would just be the access you get to... Dude, I remember one time I'm in Kansas City, and I guess somebody started a fire. As a comedian, you go to different hotels. You're always in hotels over the years. I got to the point where every now, every seven weeks, somebody start a fire, pulling an alarm. In the middle of the night, you got to go downstairs and be outside. I finally decided for myself, I'm going to wait because-Yeah, I'm not going out there. It was never a good fire. Right.

I was like, I'm waiting out there for 45 minutes or whatever while they see if there's a fire or not. I finally said, I'm staying in the room until I smell smoke or whatever. One time, I I'm in there, I just made this big sandwich, dude. It was really good. It was one of the better ones I'd probably ever made in my life. I remember this big fireman with an ax comes in or just opens my door, and the alarm had been going off for a while. He's looking for me, and I was like, Is there a fire?

I'm like, I miss something?

Yeah, he's like, You got to get out of here. I was like, Bro, every week they doing this shit. I'm not going. Right. I need this all the time.

But that's It's a cry wolf thing, too, though. For sure.

I knew it was on me. Hey, if it's bad, come back. And I think he's like, Fuck. I don't blame him.

That's a fireman attitude.

Yeah, and it should be. Hey, come back if I'm going to burn. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's just a lot of pressure. Immediately, I was putting all the pressure on this guy. But what were some of the environments you went into? Did you ever just walk into an environment, you're like, Oh, well, this is crazy. You're like a drug den Or like a drug den or like a-Oh, plenty of drug dens.

I mean, every building had a drug apartment where they would sell drugs. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but this one fire that I went to, it was in the middle of the day. It was like the second floor. We pull up, fire is blowing out four windows. It was going good. So we run out. Now we're second due, which means we go to the floor above the fire. So the first due truck has the fire floor. Second due goes to the floor above, which the floor above is really shitty because that's where the heat's going up. That's where everything's going. So now we get up the staircase, and it's starting to bank down and get dark. I see a guy runs past me, no shirt on, no shoes. He's got a three-year-old kid under his arm and a hefty bag.

Oh, yeah. So a politician, probably.

So he slips by us. So now we're going to take the door in the hallway above the fire apartment, and it's getting smoky. My boss puts his mask on, but we have to take the door. So I wanted to see a little bit. So I'm hitting The guy's got the Halligan in the door jam, and I'm smashing it with an ax, and he's trying to get a bite on the jam to bust the door open. So finally, we get it. We bust the door open, we put our masks on, and we go in and we're crawling around. And the engine company The company did a good job. They knocked the fire down pretty fast. So as we're crawling around, the black smoke is starting to go away, and it's getting lighter. And I'm on the floor, and I bump into a dresser. Now I could start to see a little bit. I put my light on the dresser. All the drawers are open. Stacks of hundreds of $150 bills. Every drawer, I mean, no 20s. It was all Coke money. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, my God. I'm still my one year there. Oh, yeah.

I'm a junior man.

You're like, I got to get something for Christine.

Well, that's it. I got an angel and a devil on my shoulders, and they're fighting it out. We're in smoke, so it ain't like a setup. Nobody's ever going to know. So I'm thinking, oh, my God, I could buy myself a new Harley with that money. And then I was like, the angel be like, Oh, you buy the new Harley and you're going to crash and you'll get paralyzed. And I'm like, oh, shit. The heck could happen. So now I told the senior man, I said, Eddie, come here. Look within this straw.

Yeah, bring another guy in now.

Senior man. He's like, holy shit, Tony. He's like, what are we going to do here?

Oh, Eddie setting you up again.

Yeah, I'm like, you're the senior man. You tell me what to do.

This is dirty tennis you guys are playing.

I could have been stacking thousands in my pocket.

If Eddie would have been like, Hey, let's take a little, you have to, huh? I would, yeah. Yeah, you got to. I think just to even make sure that it is what it is, get it back home. Right.

I was young. I had this, Oh, it's dirty money. It'll bring me a bad juju. It could have. Yeah.

You never know. I think that the karma of it, who knows? Yeah, you don't know.

So the boss walks in, the lieutenant, and he's like, What do you got? And I was like, We got all this dresser full of money. He's like, Oh, I don't see nothing. He was like, I don't know if you ever see Schultz on Hogan's heroes. He's like, I see nothing. He turns around, he walks away. So now we go out, and it's still a little smoky, but we could see we don't have our masks on. There's another room with a padlock on the door. He's like, take the door. He puts the ads in the Halligan, and I whack it with the ax. The door would bust it open. Theo, I'm telling you, it was like half the coke in Manhattan was in there. Bricks all the way to the ceiling on all sides of the walls. A pile of cocaine about 18 inches high on the table. We were like, holy shit. So the boss gets on, tell the battalion, we got a drug apartment, send the PD up. So now we're waiting for the PD to come. We wanted them to come before the drug dealers got back. So finally, two NYPD guys show up and they're like, Yeah, guys, what do you got?

I said, We'll go in that room and go in that room. I said, That's the money room. That's the coke room. So they both go in at the same time. They go, Holy shit. They call a backup. So now my boss is like, We're out of here. We don't want to be nothing part of this whole show here.

I'd have stuck around, man. Like Joey Dias says, every now and then, you bump into a Colombian.

I love Joey Dias. Oh, he's the best. He was a fireman in Colorado or some shit. Denver.

Was he a fireman?

Yeah, but he was selling blow. He said all they had was a pickup truck. I don't know if you have a... I think it was on Rogan, maybe.

Yeah, it sounds like, bro.

Yeah. He said, I was just selling. It was an easy way to sell Coke. He said, I'll go around.

People call the fire department.

Sorry, Joey, but you did tell that story.

No. People call the fire department. He shows up in a pickup truck selling Coke.

He says it was a ski Lodge place. There was never any fight.

That's a great idea, actually.

Yeah, the ski Lodge. It was perfect for him.

Yes. Joey Diaz has talked many times about having been a volunteer firefighter, which is really a drug dealer in Aspen, Colorado in the 1980s.

Can you imagine him in doing that?

I bet if you were anywhere with Joey in the 1980s, every place was Aspen, Colorado, dude.

I go to a restaurant. He recommend it in Jersey, a Chinese restaurant. Is it a good spot? King. He says, Oh, dude, this is the real deal. This is the Chinese food. You know how he talks, right? For sure. So I go there and the guy's name is Freddy, the Chinese guy. I'm like, Freddy, Joey Dias sent me here. He's like, Oh, yeah, Joey Dias. He said, He popular? I said, Yeah, he's pretty fucking popular. He's like, Oh, I didn't know. Food was excellent. Thank you, Joey. I love that food.

Joey has the... It's like, bro, I'll be like, Dude, my friend died last week in Buffalo, New York. He's like, Oh, next time you're in Buffalo, it doesn't matter. In your place. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Your friend died. It matters. You got to walk 11 blocks to get this prosciutto, right? He's like, The only way you get there is by foot, right? It sounds very alarming. But, dude, he's always got the best food recommendations. Absolutely. He just loves life, man. He just always has a connection.

Oh, man. What stories. He's so funny. He's one of the best. I love him.

Yeah, I don't know anybody like him. But I bet in your line of work, you probably met a lot of guys not like him, but with similar energies like Oh, crazy people.

Yes. When I got on in '83, we still had Vietnam vets that were in the fire on me. Really? Today, it's more college kids. They came out of college and they take the test.

Yeah, a lot of guys that want to be in the calendar.

It's a whole different thing. Nothing to the new guys. They're all great, but it was a different atmosphere with the vets guys. And plus, back then, they didn't have computers, and there was no cameras. It was BC, so you got away with a lot of shit. Today, you're on When you go on YouTube, they see you fight in the fire, the OV, the roof man. If you fuck up, a million people are seeing it right there.

People in the chat are like, Get rid of this guy.

What's he waiting for? Why doesn't he go in? Where's the hose line? What's taking him so long?

Yeah,dude, that's the worst.

Bullet comments. Yeah, dude.

That's a comment. Caruso's a pussy. Like, dude, he just his first day on the job.

Absolutely.

Dude, that is crazy that that's how it's going to be. Everything's going to be streamed and people will be able to comment at the moment.

That's a whole bit. And the other day, I was I was watching the chief had some iPad thing or something, and they had a drone in the air, and the thing was showing them all the roof, the holes, the fire, the back. It was like a 3D thing. It was like everything changes.

Yeah, there's already a real estate agent there. Yeah. Everything's changed.

Changes. So when I got on, the guys from the '60s and '70s, they were tough motherfuckers.

So some of them may come from war, actually. Big time. And this was just another place where they at least had camaraderie. They had a brotherhood.

Exactly. It was a paramilitary organization. You had your lieutenants and your captains and your chiefs.

Did the stress of the job ever affect guys too much? Was there scenarios like that that happened or not really?

No, I think most guys loved the job.

What made you end up loving it? What changed for you? Or when you look back-The brotherhood.

Really? Oh, my God. Like family. Yeah. That's why I did 15 years in 34 truck from a Proby. I did 15 years. I think I left there in '98. But yeah, I had a lot of friends. I'm still today. We're all together, the wives, the kids. The kids are on the job. Some of them are already captains. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess that's something that's so nice. That's one thing that's harder I even notice about life, even just like, as you get out of times in your life where you're either in school, we have teams that you're on or your buddies are always around or in the college, you don't really find a lot places where there's that much camaraderie anymore. You just don't find it.

No, that was it. That was it there, big time. We'd make the meals. Yeah. See, this is the two probies are coming off their probation. So when you come off probation, you throw a big party in the firehouse, and they all got lobsters and filet mignons, and they have a big celebration. I remember my proby meal. It was a lot of fun. I came off with another guy, Richie, who we both came out of the academy together. That's nice. But I know all these guys, like family, a lot of them aren't even here with us anymore. Really? Yeah, and that's old.

A lot of them has gotten older, passed away even?

Passed away, yeah. Some of them I don't know if somebody might have even passed away on 9/11.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's a great shot.

That's awesome, dude. Yeah, you could just feel so much excitement there.

Oh, my God, the fun we would have and the meals that I would make were incredible.

Really? That's why they kept you around, huh? Oh, I was a good cook. Were you? Yeah.

The first meal I brought in, my mother made meatballs and sausage and a whole Sunday gravy. And I bought and I brought it all in with the bread and everything. And the guys loved it. The Irish guys call it red lead. That was what they call it, tomato sauce. Can I make red lead tonight? Yeah, red lead. They loved it. They were like, Man, that was so good and everything. But you know what, kid? You got to make it here next time. So I was like, I get it. You got to make the meal in the firehouse. That's where everybody comes together because it could be all over the firehouse, but that's where everybody who's chopping this, who's cooking that, who's sautéing things. Yeah. Who's doing the entertainment?

The camaraderie.

I would put my Louis Primer on the stereo, and we would just be going jump, jiving well, and I'm just a gigolo, and place would be hopping. It was fun. Oh, that's nice. A great meal. Meals, about 11 guys would eat at the same. We'd all eat at the same time. And then everybody chips in at the end of the meal because the city doesn't pay for anything. We pay for everything. That's crazy. All our TV, all they pay for is a firehouse. Everything else we have to buy.

Really? Yeah. Is it still that way?

Yeah, still that way. Wow. Well, when I was on the job, you bought your own turnout coat and you had a helmet. I brought some helmets here, too. And the helmet fit perfectly to your head. They made it a mold to your head. You didn't need a chin strap. It just stayed on there. And then when Giuliani came in as mayor, and we had a couple of fires where guys got killed and everything, and he couldn't believe how shabby we looked because we had nobody fixed their gear. Nobody gave you new gear. So you went years with this gear, and it looked like the coats were all ripped up. I love the way it looked.

Like the Blaze News Bayers, huh?

And all the other fire departments around the country, they already They had bunker pants and bunker coats, and they had hoods. I hated all of that. I hated the bunker pants. I hated the hoods. And so that changed right there from the uniforms. And then they gave us a new helmet, three sizes, small, medium, large. And they had to have a damn chin strap to hold it on. It was a lot heavier. I hated it. But you get charges if you didn't wear it. If you took your old helmet and you got caught with it, or you got caught without your bunker pants on because it was like the takeover. It takes a few years before the old timers really give in to all the changes.

Everything takes a few years to seep in.

Especially in the fire department, it's all tradition.

Yeah, dude, that was one of the nice things. Even whenever I would go with Muff, It was my first girlfriend, her dad. Whenever I'd go over there, it would just be nice to see the guys all spending time together. They would know other fire departments around the city. It was definitely this secret society that was a little bit... It was a little hidden because you don't really think about the fire department all the time. I didn't. But they're right there, dude. And they're the first ones that have to get involved when things get bad. If it's okay to talk about what were things like During 9/11, what was... I know what some things were like, but when you look back on it.

Well, I got off work that morning. I did a 24-hour tour on the 10th, and I just got home, and I had a powerwashing painting business on the side. I had my Dominican helper waiting for me at home. So I got home. We came in, I'm making coffee, and my wife calls me. She's at work, and she says, You see what happened? They flew a plane into the towers. I'm like, You're kidding me. I put a little TV on that I had in the kitchen, and I'm like, Holy shit. I'm like, what happened? The guy had a heart attack? I thought it was a single plane that the guy just flew in by accident.

Yeah, some guy fucking just couldn't get a ravioli down.

You didn't know the first one. You didn't know it was terrorist. So then I take you, we get to the paint store, and the guys are all around the counter with a TV, and I come in, and the guy, Tony, turns around. He says, what the fuck is they fucking terrorist, flew planes into the fucking towers. And I'm like, holy shit. Now I see both towers going. Now I know it was an attack. So I said, All right, we got to get out of here. I had to paint a rabbi's house in Woodmere. So I got this painting truck with ladders, Tony's powerwashing and paint. I raced them. On the way there, I hear the first tower it collapses. So I'm cursing. I'm like, motherfuckers. My Dominican guy don't speak English. He doesn't really hear, but he knows something bad. He knows the towers. So now I get another 20 minutes, 10 minutes later or whatever, and I hear the second tower come down and I was out of light. I put my foot on the break and I just started crying. I was on the steering wheel because I knew how many guys just got killed from this whole deal.

I was crushed.

At that point, did you know because you were privy to the information or you just knew how it worked?

I just knew the way it works. They called in everything once those planes hit.

Could you have gone back in or you weren't even allowed to go in? When? At that moment, since you had just gotten off of a shift?

No. Well, now I raced to the rabbi's house. I throw the ladders to paint. I knock on the rabbi's door. I said, Listen, rabbi, I'm a fireman from New York City. I got to go to the Trade Center. I knew he knew it because I could hear the TV on inside. So he was like, Okay. I said, Roberto is going to take care of everything. I told Roberto, Listen, I don't know when I'm going to see you again. But he's like, No worry, no problem. My boss, I take care. He was such a great guy. So now I'm racing with my van, and I'm going In and out of the L, out on the elevated train, and I've got my hand on the horn, and I'm pedaled to the metal, and everybody's probably looking like, What the fuck is with that painter? I'm in on the wrong side of traffic. I'm just like the French connection. I'm in and out of fucking cars. I get to the firehouse, and it's chaotic. Everybody's running in. What are we going to do? Who's going? How are we going to get there? One guy said he was taking a boat because my firehouse in Howard Beach was on a canal.

My friend Wipper comes in. He's got a suburban, and my friend Bobby comes, and he was like, I'm going in with my suburban. Whoever wants to go, I'm leaving now.

And were there some guys that did not want to go, did not want to be involved?

No, everybody went. Wow. Yeah. So we grabbed our gear. A lot of guys went to a staging area. They made that mistake because they got stuck at the staging area. We took my friend suburban right to the pile right there. We were heading down Woodhaven Boulevard.

And it was no traffic?

It was traffic. The shit hit the fan already. So the Whipper's driving crazy, my friend the Whipper. And I'm like, Whipp, don't get anybody killed. There are enough people already. Slow down a little. So we get to the LIE and the cops have it shut off. The entrance to the Long Island Expressway. So I stick my turnout code out the window, and they move the cop cars, and they wave us in.

That had to feel crazy. It was, man. Obviously, there's excitement, probably a ton of adrenaline, fear.

Fucking adrenaline. What are we going to do When we get there, we said, we're going to be an ambulance. We're going to take bodies, and we're going to rush them to the hospital. That's what we figured. So now we're racing down there, and we get to the Midtown Tunnel, and my friend Whipp is a driver, man. He's the best. We're We're doing 100, and we're going through the Midtown Tunnel, and it's like a time warp with the lights and the yellow bricks. We're doing 100 miles an hour. We come out, we head downtown by the Midtown Tunnel. We head down, and he takes us right to the rubble. And we get out of the car and it's dark like an eclipse, and all the stuff is coming down on us, all the paper and the ash. It was dark. That walls were standing still.

Did it look something like this?

Just like that. That's a few days, week later or whatever, maybe. But it was dark. And when we got out of the car, we couldn't breathe. So we had to rip up T-shirts and we put them around our faces to breathe. And then I noticed there was an old hardware store right across the street with a glass door. I grabbed the tire iron, I went over, I smashed the door open, and we all went in, we grabbed ropes and masks and sledge hammers. Whatever, the cops came in behind us. Everybody was grabbing shit. So now we start to climb, and it It was like the top of the Trade Center was only about six stories high now, and we were climbing, and there was nobody around. It was quiet, dark, eerie. And we heard all the pass alarms going off that when firemen aren't moving, make It makes a breach noise, and you could hear that all around. There was maybe one or two other firemen. We were the only ones there. We were going in and out of voids, in and out of voids, going, Anybody hear us banging on shit? And waiting to see if that happens.

Nobody, nobody. Finally, we worked all the way up to the roof of the Trade Center, which was AstroTurf. Now you could see, and it looked like it went on for a mile. It was like a movie set. It was so crazy. On one side was the EAB Bank, and it was on fire. Excuse me. They had mesh, like the black mesh cover in it. And all you saw was the black mesh and the flames coming out. It was like satanic. It was so creepy. And so we were climbing all around inside and out of voids. And we did this for maybe about one o'clock. We got there at 11: 30, and my friend Bobby says, Tona, my throat is closing up. We got to get water. So I said, whip, we got to get water. We got to head to the street. Now it's like one o'clock. People are coming in from everywhere. Firemen, from cops, firemen, a National Guard was coming in. So we We worked our way to the street, and we needed water. And there was a guy, a Wall Street guy, with an expensive suit on, covered in cement dust. And he had a bottle of water.

What? Those big bottles? The big bottle. He was going around, giving everybody water and trying to wash their eyes out and shit. We were just waiting our turn to get some of that water. As we were doing that, these four women, they come out of nowhere. They set up two barrels, a piece of plywood. They had one the bread and peanut butter and jelly, and they started making sandwiches out of nowhere. It humbled. I got a little emotional because it was like to see all these people coming together right at this time, no matter what your race, creed, color, working together. So we passed the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We had the water and we went back. But before we got up, a deputy gets up on a car and he gels to whoever can hear. And it was like, six truck. We just got a call. They're trapped. They're in a shaft, and we're going to find them. This is the first time we're hearing anybody's alive. We're like, Yeah, we're going to. So everybody starts running for get gear. And there's a rescue truck that was crushed. And we ran over to the rescue truck, and we started opening up compartments.

I grabbed a jackhammer. We grabbed some big-ass jackhammer, bits, bottles for air. And now we start heading out to look for them.

You at least you had a mission.

We were on a mission now. Now we're looking for it. So now another two hours climbing up and down these... But meanwhile, Building Seven, which is the big building everybody talks about, was on fire from the moment we got there. Every floor. Really? Burned every floor.

And what caused that fire?

Just the collapse. They had the two trade centers. The collapse of the other? Claps right in front of them. There was a lot of buildings on fire. So So now we're working up and down, and I take a fall. I fall into a void, and I fall on my right shoulder. My Bobby comes running over. He's like, Kido, you all right? I said, Yeah, I fucking hurt my shoulder. He helps me up. I take the jackhammer. I throw it into a void. I'm like, Fuck this shit. We had no radios. We didn't know if they found anybody or anything. Excuse me, my pin.

It was almost impossible.

It was impossible. Finally, we threw all this shit down because it was a couple of hours already climbing again. When you're climbing up these big, jagged pieces of concrete. Sure, it's scary. In and out, in and out. And we made our way into a store, like a high-end store that was maybe three stories up. And we went in through the window because that's-Three stories up what? High because the rubble was that high. So we crawled into their window, and it was a high-end women's store, and it's dusty and dark, and we're crawling around. I'm looking under all the clothes to see if there's anything. We're yelling, Anybody here? Nobody there. So we worked our way back out, and now we went to the Marriott, which was a hotel right there. And we came in one of these big broken windows.

It was right there at ground zero?

Yeah. We climbed down the debris into the lobby of the hotel. We're the only ones there. So we're like, holy shit, look at this place. We're looking around.

And it was kept okay?

It was a big lobby. There was ash and broken glass and shit, but it wasn't collapsed. So I said, look over there. I see a fireman sitting at one of those little desks in the lobby. We're like, holy shit. So we go running over. First fireman we're seeing, and he's covered in shit. No helmet. He's pale white. He's in shock. And he's sitting there and we're like, Holy shit, buddy, you okay? Hey, okay? And he turns and he looks at me, and it's one of the young guys that got on rotation. He just left our house, and they sent him to Manhattan. We called him Monkey Man. I'm like, Holy shit, Monkey, what the fuck? And he looked up at me and he said, All my guys are dead. They're all dead. And we were like, Oh, shit. I'm rubbing his shoulder. My other guys are like, Monkey, Monkey, you all right? He was in shock. So we're like, Look, Monkey, we got to go, man. You're okay. We're going to leave you here. It was funny because the phone was on the table with the little messenger light blinking. It was the weirdest site.

We left him, we left him. We climbed back out, out the window, back onto the debris. It's a long day. We were there till 9: 30. 11: 30 at night from 11: 30 in the morning. So we were going along, we found a hose line. Believe it or not, a hose line all the way from the Hudson. And there was a big opening with a void that had black smoke was pouring out of it. So we had the line, and for about an hour and a half, we just sat there. We're building seven about 100 yards away from us, burning. And we sat there, and one guy would go around through the voids, and the other two guys would just hold the hose line, pouring it into this A hole from hell. It was horrible. All of a sudden we're doing that, and we see this chief, and he starts yelling at us. He's between us and building seven. And he says, Drop that line. Get out of here. This building is going to come down. So we were like, Holy shit. Okay. We cracked it open a little, wedged it into some rock so the water would keep going down the hole.

And we took off and we were like, Hey. It was like five o'clock. We're hungry, we're thirsty, we're tired, we're covered in shit. Let's We go back to the rig, his suburban, and we'll go uptown and we'll get something to eat, and then we'll come back. So we get off the pile like, Where's the car? I think it's a few blocks this way. So now we're heading down, and there's nobody around still. I mean, there's Besides, firemen coming in. I don't know if you ever heard of Penny Crosne, but she was a popular reporter on Fox News. She was a real tough girl. Penny Crosne. I don't know if she was Fox, but there she is. It's very well known New York reporter.

She was out there on the street?

She was in the street when we were walking, and she had a microphone and a cameraman, and she came running up to us. She's like, Guys, can you give me some information? What's like down there? So the three of us are standing there, and she puts this big microphone in front of me, and she goes, Can you tell me? I said, Oh, it's bad, really bad. She put it in front of my other friend, Bobby. Bad, he says. Horrible. My other friend says the same thing. She's getting nothing out of it. She pulls back to ask us another question, and I'm like, Holy shit, look over there. And there's this Asian woman covered in dirt, bleeding from her head, and she's got a suitcase in her hand. So we run over to her. We're like, Man, are you okay? She was in shock or whatever. And she just kept looking. My friend went to take the suitcase. She yanked it back, and then she just walked away, and we were like, holy shit, that was weird. What do you think's in that suitcase? My friend said, money. The way she had that grip on that day, it was full of money.

Batch of Yen in there, I bet.

A lot of Yen. Wow. Some egg rolls, I don't know. But we got to the suburban, and it was covered. Now it was green. It was now gray. So we all get in, and it was like, Theo, the seats. The leather seats were like, we're squishing our backs in. We're getting comfortable. I was almost 40 at that time.

I can't even imagine. And the fact is you're alive. You've been through this. I can't even imagine what your body's going through.

We We were beat, we were covered in shit. And so it was funny because he put the car on and he started up and he put the air conditioner on and it blew dust out. It's like Lily Monster's vacuum cleaner. I'm like, oh, everybody's getting to a choking. The thing's blowing smoke out all the dust. We're like, thanks. We needed that. Now we're heading up town. Even with the windows open, the dust is flying off the rig. And we go up to 16 truck up in Midtown somewhere, and we take a break. I go in, we get a drink of water. I call my wife. What is she been thinking? I don't know. It's like 5: 30. Oh, I forgot to say before we got to the car, building seven collapsed. We just missed it. We heard a roar. My friend said, Seven just came down. So we were like, Holy shit, we just missed it.

But you've been near that all day down there.

All day, it was burning.

Because there's a lot of speculation about Building Seven over the years.

I think it's all bullshit.

You do?

Because I was there. Yeah. I mean, It gets me a little... Because I don't know what really happened that day. Who knows who was involved, whatever. I have no idea. But all I know is Building Seven was burning all day long from first floor to the top floor, every window. So people were saying there was explosions.

But you saw firsthand that it had been cooking all that.

And all the firemen that I ever talked to that were there that day, no one, everybody says there was no fucking explosions. They have all these things. Like the other day, I thought I saw an AI bullshit thing about guys saying they heard explosions. Like, they're putting that out on the internet, and it looks real. You think they're really firemen. You got to be careful today. You never know it's real.

Oh, yeah, I agree with that. You can't tell them.

You can almost tell a little bit today, but imagine a few years from now with the AI, you'll I'm going to be able to tell. You'll need an AI detection kit.

They probably will have that.

Maybe we can get in on that. We could come up with it first. Yeah, okay, sure.

I mean, if that's what we met for today, to be able to start that and keep that out of the world. That could have saved the world. What about over time with 9/11? There's been a lot of conspiracy theories and stuff like that. Has any of that grown in the world of the fire department culture or anything like that? Or is it person by person? Because you guys were one of the most effective groups.

343 men we lost that day. It's hard to even get over that number. Yeah, it was a lot, and we knew it was a lot. When we left 16 truck, we stopped at a Genevus drug store somewhere in Manhattan, and we went in and we got a couple of bottles of water, about four giant Milky ways, and some batteries for our flashlights. So now we're covered in shit. We're up at the counter and the young girl is ringing us up and she goes, You guys come from the Trade Center? So my friend Bobby says, What gives you that idea? So she just looked and grinched. No charge for you guys. So we took off. We ate our Milky Way. We had our water, and then we went back to the pile.

Is there a picture from that day, nick? If you have it, just pull it up. Don't even wait for me to see that.

That's my two buddies. That was a couple of weeks later.

That's Whipp and the other guy?

That's my friend Andrew and Marty. You would have to go down and work at the Trade Center. Yeah. And it was very unhealthy. A lot of guys got cancer. A lot of guys died after the Trade Center.

We just had a breathing expert in the other day, this guy, James Nestor, and he has a New York Times best seller, a book called breath. And he talks about, is it Ground Zero? Ground Zero Lung? Ground Glass Lung.

Oh, okay.

He talks about Ground Glass Lung. It's a condition that happened to a lot of people who were first responders at Ground Zero. Have you heard about this?

Yeah. Well, I never heard about the Ground Glass, but of course, the breathing, everybody was in... If you were there for a month or two, some guys were there two, three, four months. My friend Bobby was there the The whole time. He just got his nephew on the job. It was his nephew's first job, and he was in the troll. He was there every day looking for his body day and night.

Looking for his nephew?

Nephew, yeah, for his sister.

God, that's heartbreaking, huh?

Yeah. He's a good guy. He's a great guy, too.

Who? His nephew?

No, my friend Bobby. He's the boxing. He runs the fire department boxing team.

He is? Bring him on. Let's get a picture of him.

You see him on there. Bobby Maguire, FDNY Boxing. He's a Golden Gloved Champ.

Is he a pretty interesting guy?

I don't know if you know the Knicks, but his uncles are Dickey Maguire and Al Maguire and Marquette.

The Knicks?

Yeah. Oh, there he is. His father was John Maguire, and he was a big guy in New York. Jimmy Breslin actually called him the King of Queens because he opened the first gay bar in Queens back in the day.

Oh, that's He's incredible, man. Yeah. He sounds like an interesting guy.

I'd love to get to meet him sometime. He's a great guy, yeah.

I bet he's got some great stories, too, just from the boxing history of it. Joey Dias, he used to shovel ice out of James J. Braddock's driveway over in Jersey.

Yeah, I heard him say that.

That's pretty wild.

He'd give him a couple of bucks.

Yeah, give him a couple of bucks. Joey was like, This guy's been punched in the head so many times. He thought he gave me a five. He gave me a 10. But that's just a wild story right there. Yeah. Go back and show the guys. That's Marty right there? That's Bobby.

Bobby Maguire.

Bobby Maguire. And what was his nephew's name? Do you remember?

No, I don't remember. My wife might, but I don't.

Alan. His name was Alan.

Alan. He was a lifeguard in Rockaway, the kid.

His last name was Alan, and he just started on the-He just started.

It was like his first job, and Bobby was there. And I know his breathing. He's had a lot of breathing problems. Once you're there too long. Anyway, they're having a fight in Madison Square Garden in March. We fight the cops every year. It's called the Battle of the Badges.

Who's won over time? Over the years, who's won the most, do you think?

The cops are double the amount of pool that they can get, they're twice as big an organization as us. We're like 30,000. They're like 60,000. But we still we get some good fighters, and we beat them quite a few times. They fight everywhere. They fight in England. They fight in Ireland. Oh, really? Yeah. They fight any fire department, any cops.

So Bobby and his gang, this is like a thing they do all year?

All year. Yeah. He's so busy.

So he runs this, the FD&Y Boxing Club? Yeah.

Oh, wow. They raise hundreds of thousands for Tunnel to Towers every year.

And what is Tunnel to Towers?

That's with the World Trade Center Foundation, where the guy's brother ran through from Staten Island. He through the tunnel to get to the Trade Center, and he passed away. And so they started this organization. It's huge.

That's beautiful, man. We'll make a donation to him.

That'd be great.

Yeah, right here. Born from the tragedy of 911, the Tunnelster Towers Foundation carries out its mission to do good by providing mortgage-free homes to gold star and fallen first responder families with the young children and building specially adapted smart homes for catastrophically injured veterans and first responders. Wow.

He They ran through the tunnel with their gear on to get to Manhattan.

The FD&Y Boxing Club is comprised of active duty members, FD&Y and EMS, who train on their own time established in 1982. Fd&y Boxing has spent 40 years raising funds for worthwhile charities through spirited competition. Yeah, man, we'll make a donation to them.

Yeah, I'm going.

Bravest Boxing team will defend the Big Apple in the second international battle of the Badges.

The funny thing is, the best fights in the crowd, the cops and the firemen going at it. Holy shit, the brawls. One time I was there and this girl cop, she was badmouthing some firemen, and she threw a soda at the guy. And the one fireman And the other fireman says, Hey, I don't hit firemen. The other fireman said, I do. And he clocked her. Oh, yeah. Boom, she went flying over the thing. The whole fight broke out. It was crazy.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, once you throw a soda at you.

Yeah. And with all the people getting sex changes now, you don't know who You got what on them. Exactly. I'm not frisking you first to find out. What are you packing? How has the department changed since you got involved in NOW?

Well, from when I got on, and then in The early, late '90s, mid '90s computers came in, and that changed a lot. Computers and now digital things. We had fax machines and computers, and that changed a lot of things before it was just writing in a book. Now more things are more digital. So they had a little more eyes on you. You couldn't get away with as much.

More technology, stuff like that.

Because back in the day, the bosses ran the firehouse. There was nobody else that knew what was going on. Whatever they put in the book is what it was.

Yeah.

Matter of fact, when I bought my house, it was a funny story. I was 24, and I told my boss, I told the bank, Yeah, this is where I work if you want to check on my employment. And I gave them the number to the truck office. So I said, This is what I make. It was like twice what I was making. He's like, You can't say that. I said, Just tell the bank. Don't worry about it. And it worked.

What did Christine say when you called her that? It must have been crazy.

Yeah, well, her sister answered the phone, Bernie, and I was like, Bernie. She's like, Tony, how the fuck are you? What's going on? I said, oh, my God, we just got a firehouse. We're taking a break. We're all okay. I'll talk to my wife, tell her I love her, and I'll see her in a bit. I'll call her later. So I hung up and we went back to the pile. So now we get back on the pile. It's like, what do we want? First, we're walking along and guys are seeing other guys that you're hugging. So my friend Bobby sees a guy, they're hugging, and I'm standing there on a plateau, and this guy hits me another time, and he goes, buddy, you're standing on somebody. And I was like, oh, shit. I looked down and this guy in this three-piece suit, he's part of the ground. He's looking up at me, and I'm like, oh, my God. That was the first body I saw all day. Yeah. So now we're like, okay, so now we're moving along. What do you want to do? They started a bucket brigade. I don't know. We must have a thousand Home Depot buckets, and you would pass a bucket and take a bucket.

Just move water along.

For hours, we were doing that. It was starting-It was getting dark out. The day was getting, it was around 7: 30, 8: 00. Now we're doing this for hours. My back is killing me. And All of a sudden, we hear all this yelling. Everybody's yelling and cheering. It's 9: 30 at night, 9: 00. We're like, What is that? What is that? My friend Bobby goes, Look, look over there, down there. We look down, and here comes a parade of ironworkers with heavy machinery, cranes. They got their hard hats on, cut off shirts. Everybody's got their fist in the air. They're all hanging off the machines. Everybody's cheering like we won the Super Bowl. It was a drop in the bucket, but they got right to work, started taking off all the heavy shit. It had months, almost a year to go, but it was just a start. It just felt so good.

We had a chance.

Yeah. Then finally, we were like, Let's start heading home. I met a few guys heading home, and I was thinking in the back of my mind, all the guys that got killed. We had no idea how many yet. Can't even imagine. I run into a friend of mine, and he was off in a rescue company. I said, Hey, John. He said, Tony, how are you doing? He goes, Tony, Jerry was working. Jerry was like one of my best friends. And I was like, oh, God. I just stepped back because I knew he was in rescue one. I was devastated. My friend whips, soar, and he put his arm around me. He said, Come on, who knew? Let's go. Let's leave. And I was like, I'm still emotional.

It's heartbreaking. What was his name? Jerry what?

Jerry Nevens.

Jerry Nevens. Let's see a picture of him.

Funny story. When he told me he was going to leave to go to rescue, I was like, You motherfucker, are you fucking kidding me? It was like, because everybody was leaving. I was there 15 years. I was losing guys left and right. They were getting made, lieutenant. He wanted to go to a rescue. We used to bash rescue all the time. Rescues like a special company. When a trucky or a fireman gets in trouble, they send a rescue guy to get them. They're like expertise.

They're like the Marines or whatever?

Well, the Marines, but they're like specialists. Is that Jerry? Yeah, it's Jerry. Oh, there he is. And they were on 42nd Street, Rescue One. So they're right in the middle of Times Square. They were there. He made so many rescues. It was amazing.

Wow. So he enjoyed it once he got over there.

I used to go to some medal days, and he'd be there, and two, three metals hanging off of buildings, scaffoldings. He say, it was a lot of times in Midtown, the scaffoldings would break, and they'd have to go over ropes and get these guys. Yeah, he was just a great find. But when he told me he was going to rescue, I crushed. I was like, You got to be kidding me. He told me in the middle of a box, we were checking out a building. So now I get back in the rig, and we're going down the St. Nicholas Avenue, and I turned the ladder all the way out. So now it looks like a square. And I'm like, this way, looking at him, he's looking, he's like, What the fuck? I'm like, Fuck you. And we straighten it out. Now we're crossing over Amsterdam Avenue, and I see them put the lights on. Like, okay, we're getting to run. I see the boss on the phone, and he's taking down the information, puts his arm out like, We got to run. Sounds like a job. Numerous calls. Numerous calls means you're going to work.

That means people are calling. I see a fire, I see a fire, I see a fire.

It's not just some weirdo with a Ouija board.

Yeah, no Ouija boards, no fake alarms. You hear numerous calls, you know you're going to work. So now we go around Broadway, and I see we come up, and it's a second floor, it's blowing out like four windows, and There's an awning with off the fire escape on the second floor, and it's still not fire out. I got to get in there. I'm the OV. That's my job. So now I'm getting a ladder out. I'm putting the ladder up. The Dominican guys in the street, they're helping me place the ladder into the thing. I climb up the ladder, I smashed the window out. I put my mask on and I drop in. Now it's blowing all the other rooms. This room is getting ready to blow. It gets hot. So now I'm in there and I'm searching around and I get lost. I get a little... I get pumped into a bure on my knees and I get disorientated. And I'm getting scared because my ears are starting to burn. I know it's going to light up, which is crazy. I got caught in a closet. You never think, How did you get caught in a closet?

But I'm crawling in thinking it's an opening, and I turned in there, and I'm in this closet. Now I can't get out of the closet. I'm going around in a circle. My ears are burning, and all of a sudden I hear Jerry. He came in behind me. Jerry had a bite bar, which was totally illegal. Instead of having a mask with a net on, it was like you had a little bite bar in the mask, so you didn't need that. You just held it with your teeth, which was totally outlawed, but it made it easier to take it on and off. So I hear him say, Tony. I'm like, Jerry, he's like, You got to get out of here. It's going to light up. I'm like, I can't find my way out. I was taking my mask off, calling for my mother. I thought I was a dead man. Wow. And then all of a sudden, I heard the engine at the door, and I heard this guy, McCarthy, yelling, kick its ass, kick it's ass, hit it, hit it. I heard the water coming in, and I was like, it was music to my ears.

I was going to live again. And then after that, when I was in the street, I was like a zombie. And Jerry was like, What the fuck is wrong with you? I said, Dude, I was fucking close. He just laughed. But that was it. He went to rescue the next day. I never even thanked him for coming in after me that day.

Man. Yeah, I mean, it's just even the stories are so exhilarating. I can't even imagine what it's like, really.

We were putting a fire out. I made a cover of a magazine. I think he could bring it up. It was called Fire Command. I don't know what it was. It was like one of these buff magazines. Yeah, that's me in the middle. In a neck brace? Yeah. I look like an Italian organ grinded monkey man.

I thought you were going to show me you made the calendar.

I got the little ringlets in my hair. I got the bow ties on. The friend next to me, Kenny, he was a probie. It's a funny story. We had to take this lineup, the fire escape, because we got called in as an extra engine. It was a lot of fire. People were trapped. They were having a hard time putting the fire out from the inside. So we're taking the line up the fire. Now I'm in the engine. I'm detailed. I'm never in the engine, but when they need a guy and you got an extra guy, you go across the floor. Now I'm in the engine, and we're taking this line up the fire escape to the fifth floor, and The boss is yelling. This boss is Joe McLauchlin. He's yelling, Richie, get in there. Hit it, hit it. Finally, they charge the line. We tie it off to the fire escape. I mean, it's a lot of water going up that high. He's hitting the water. The guy right here, Richie, that's squinting his eyes, and he's hitting the water, and we're pushing our way in. We made it up to the fire floor escape.

We pushed the fire in, and now we're crawling in. We're climbing in through the window. The boss is yelling, They're looking at us, Richie. They're looking at us because we're outside on the fire escape. We get in, the ceiling comes down on our heads, all this hot plaster and shit's fucking burn my neck. So now we're getting in, we get to the engine on the other side is coming, and they're making a good push. They're putting the fire out. We're putting the fire out. So now we're at this wall with a window, and I'm on top of something, me and another guy were like, Neil, I thought it was a pillow from the couch. So the boss tells the probe, take the line and shoot the water out the window, and it'll take a lot of smoke so we could start to see what's going on here. And as they're doing that, you could start to see a little. The boss takes his mask off and he goes, holy shit, look what you're kneeling on. I looked down and we're kneeling on a corpse with no head, no legs, and no arms. And he's all like a crispy burnt.

We're like, we all jump off. We're like, holy shit. I thought it was a couch piece. That's what happened. They killed this guy. They cut him up, and then they lit the place on fire. That's why there's so much fire. You get a lot of fire in the middle of the day. It's usually arson. Somebody poured gasoline or something.

That was a murder, huh?

It was a murder. So anyway, before that, Kenny is a probie. He's probably about 21 years old, and he was in softball, and he hurt his leg sliding in the second base. So we were on inspection. I said, Kenny, what happened to your leg? He said, Oh, I caught it on softball. I said, Oh, that looks fucking terrible. Then we got that run to the fire. So now we're leaving the fire. We're going down the steps. I said, We're all going We're sick. We're tapping out, right? So I said, We're going to go with our necks from the ceiling coming down. I said, Kenny, take that bandage off and tell him you got burnt on your leg. So we get in the street. The street's busy. It's all fire department, cops. There's a borders in the street and everything. And the fire department doctor comes running over to us. And I said, yeah, the ceiling came down on our heads, and he's like, oh, and I said, and this guy got burned on his leg. And he looks, he gets his leg up. He looks at the softball injury, and he Third Degree burns. Patch this man right up.

So I look at Kenny because he didn't know. It was his first take. So now they take us. We're on the wall, on Malcolm X Boulevard, and they take us. We said, Where's the boss? We don't know where Joe McLauchlin is. So we see a bunch of people standing around. Somebody's on the ground. They're taking pictures. We go over there and we see the boss. He's on the stretcher getting his head tape down, and they're all taking pictures of him. We're like, Lou, Lou, you okay? Are you okay? And he looks up. He goes, Get the fuck out of my pictures, he says. We're like, He's okay. So they put us in the bus. There he is. The best Joe McGlacklin, CPO Joe. He was in the 17 truck in the Bronx in the war years. So he was a well-rounded fireman, tough as nails.

Wow.

Yeah. So he says, Get the fuck out of my pictures. So we're laughing. Everybody's taking pictures of him. So now they take us to the hospital. So we're in the emergency room, Columbia Press, and the young nurses are patching up and they're laughing with us. And it's a busy emergency room. Kenny's got his ding on. So all of a sudden, this middle-aged head nurse comes in. Good-looking woman, probably 40 or so. She goes to Kenny's leg and she moves the bandage. She makes a face. She's like, When did this happen? The kid is sitting there. He's like, We're all looking at him laughing. She just patches it up. She goes, You're lucky. We love you guys. We're like, Oh, we love you too. Busted. So about a week or two, a couple of weeks later, I come into the firehouse and this guy says, Hey, here's one of the superstars. I'm like, What are you talking about? He's like, You made the cover of a magazine. So I'm like, Holy shit. You're kidding. So now I go in the kitchen and everybody's clapping and everything. They already have the picture in a frame, right? But they changed it from report on firefighter's injuries They put report on firefighters faking injuries.

Yeah, I was going to say.

They put captions on everybody. So you see the woman with her arms crossed in the bandana? Her caption said, I know those motherfuckers are faking. Then there's a cop walking here and he goes, Yeah, chief, I got those fakers right here. Then this salty Harlem fireman is looking at us and his thing says, You guys disgust me. Look at that sad face. Oh, my God. That ringlet hair.

I love how you guys already have your neck braces on. Yeah, you got the braces on. Oh, yeah. I kept that in my back pocket.

Well, we had a prop pop closet at home. Canes and braces.

That's hilarious.

Yeah, so that was how we made that cover. I still have that hanging today.

Just you had to go down to some memory lane, man, just to think about different things and just to hear about the camaraderie of what the lifestyle was like. Bring up the part about the ground glass lung. Is that what it's called? I just wanted to make sure that I mention it on here so that people know about it. Let me see. Ground glass lungs refers to a radiological finding on CT scans showing hazy opacities in the lungs, often linked to inflammation or fibrosis from inhaling toxic dust at ground zero after the 9/11 attacks. The dust cloud contained over 2,500 contaminants, 50% construction debris, 40% 9% cellulose. Inhaling the dust led to World Trade Center lung injury, with firefighters losing up to 12 years of lung function. 70% of workers showed respiratory decline.

The longer you worked down there, the worse it was.

Yeah.

Because the dust really never settled for months.

Yeah. It's so crazy to think that it created a new disease.

Yeah, probably. Well, think about all those offices, all those fluorescent lights, all those computers, they just got pulverized to a dust. That's why everybody was covered between that and the cement.

It's a lot. Tony, there's so many more things I want to talk to you about. Maybe we could have you come back sometime Anytime. And talk about other stuff.

Maybe I'll bring Bobby Maguire with me. Very interesting man. Is he? Oh, my God.

No, he seems very interesting. I want to get a picture up, too. Is this Richard Allen? Yeah, that's his nephew. That's his nephew. You right there.

Get a picture. His sister's son.

Of Richie Allen. Yeah. That's awesome, man. We'd love to maybe get a- Every year, they acknowledge him in Rockaway.

They have a big thing with the lifeguards and everybody. Oh, they do? Yeah, surfer. He was a big surfer.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah, I got plenty more stories there. What was the murder? That was a good story.

You know what? I think I want to save it because there's even some basic... There's basic questions. Like, is somebody leaving a candle Is that the number one cause of a house fire?

Maybe house fires, probably bad electrical work and a lot of off-fires, arson, big time.

There's space heaters.

Space heaters. I don't know if you ever heard of the Happyland Social Club.

I don't know. It depends on which one you're talking about.

It was in the Bronx. Yeah, it wasn't that happyland.

It was a lot of different versions.

But a sad story, but I think, I'm not sure the number, but you could look it up. 87 people died from a gallon of gas in a match.

Yeah, it was horrible. You had to respond to that?

I didn't respond, but my friend Sully did. He was detailed out to the Bronx, and they were one of the There was trucks there. When they got in, they were crawling up the stairs, and they didn't know what they were crawling over. When they finally found out, it was all bodies. It was like crazy. You had happy lands.

A lot of times, you don't know what's going on, or at It used to be. You didn't know what was going on until you got in there.

No, probably not. You don't know who said it. You're just the adrenaline is running, man. Oh, my God. Your hearts are pumping. It never gets old. Oh, my bad. How many years like they would say we get there and be a top floor fire. Now you got to carry that mask, all your gear, everything. By the time you get to that sixth floor and you got to put a mask on, you suck in You're like, Now you got to put this little man. The mask is like demand breathing, so you only get air. I'd be in my mask like, I'm getting out of this fucking city. I'm going to Queens. I thought Queens would be an easier job for me.

Westchester. Send me to Westchester.

Anywhere. I'm getting out of this fucking ghetto.

Wow. Well, Tony, thanks so much for your service, man. Yeah, I would love to just have you come back sometime and just be able to just go down. There's some other roads I want to go down and learn more about it. That'd be great. But, yeah, I think today we just got a really good idea of just the brotherhood of just what your journey has been like, getting involved with fire departmenting. What did your wife end up getting a job in? My wife?

Yeah. She worked for a printer, and then she worked for a dentist. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Dental assistant stuff?

She ran the whole... Yeah, took the phone calls. Oh, yeah.

All the billing. Keeping everything organized. Yeah, she ran it. Yeah.

My wife was a hard worker.

Yeah, that's nice.

Like I said, she bought her first car when we were 17 with her own money, four grand. She bought a Chvette, red Chvette.

Dude, if I saw a girl with a car, yeah, I'm going with her.

Yeah, I was like, wow, this girl's got her own car on her own money. Mom didn't buy it.

That's my, I think, the number one thing I'm looking for in a spouse is hard working. Yeah. Because life's hard work.

Yeah. You can't do the door lock anymore, right? Because now they're all electric. You always have to say, if the girl gets in the car and don't open your door, she's out. So there's all these little tests. But yes, my wife was a hard worker and a great mother.

Yeah, it's a nice thing, too.

Yeah. It's funny because all them years of being in the fire, I'd come home sometimes and say, Oh, my God, I had a fire. Top floor was burning. I'm telling them all this stuff. And then she'll be like, Did you remember that we have to go to school tomorrow? And I'd be like, I just told you this whole story. It seemed like it went right over your head.

You're like, blah, blah, blah. We get it.

Every fire you've been to.

Matches.

Go spit that black tar in the sink again like you always do.

Yeah, behind every good fireman, huh?

Yeah, it's the wives. I got some pictures of the fire department wives.

Well, look, you can show me that. As long as they're appropriate, you can show me this.

They're appropriate. Good girls. Wild. A lot of them are Bronx girls.

Well, look, these days, Oh, yeah. Tough women over there.

Yes.

That's what you need in the world. You need a good, strong lady. This is your book right here, tales from the Tiller. Yes. I didn't even know you had written this.

Yeah, I wrote this. It just came out last September. Really? Yeah, great book.

Dude, congratulations. Everybody loves it. Yeah.

A lot of good stories in there, and I got recipes in there. A lot of good meals. For sure. Clamp Sauce Casino. I think you might like that.

Bro, I'll tell you this. I took a gal out the other night, went to a place, they had clams and white wine sauce.

I'm a clam guy. That's like, Oh, you would love the Clam Sauce Casino. Really? Well, you know Clams Casino? They put the peppers and the onions and a little bacon on it, and then they bake them.

No, I've never had that.

Louisiana didn't have Clam Sauce Casinos?

They might have had it. We had macaroni.

There it is.

Oh, yeah, that looks good.

I make it by this guy that got in trouble and was sent to our firehouse. It was one of his meals, and I took it from him, and we make it with the spaghetti. We put it over with the peppers, the bacon, the onions, breadcrumb, and the clams.

I want that. I'm a clam guy. Have you seen that kid that says that? No. Bring up that clam kid. I love this kid. But of course, that a fireman Ken's book would have fires with recipes thrown in.

It's funny because some of the stories are like, tragedy, and then it goes right into the recipe. It's a little weird, but that kid that does the Italian words.

No, I'm looking for the kid. Yeah, this kid's hilarious. But what did I just ask you for, Eric? Clam guy. Yeah, I'm a clam guy. Have you seen this little kid?

No, I'd see him.

This kid, they interviewed him. We'll finish on him. All right.

I'm a guy who only basically likes clams, really. I'm a clam guy. Yeah, I like that kid. All he eat clams, it's all I do. All he eats. He looks like it.

Clams are awesome. He's just crazy.

I hated oysters. Osters.

Kids getting a little bit weird. But yeah, that guy's a clam guy. It's getting a little weird. But I could see you guys just like, you guys show up at a fire, but you also brought dinner that has to be heated up. You're taking it up to the fire with you, leaving it on the leg.

As soon as you sit down to eat, the tone alarm goes off.

Every time, huh?

What happens is we have a big thing of foil paper, and one guy just starts cutting the foil papers off, and the other guy starts wrapping this.

Taking it to go.

Otherwise, the cockroaches will walk away. We had so many cockroaches in the firehouse. Oh, my God. You can never get rid of them.

Oh, God. We'll have to hear about it next time. You have a book, tales from the Teller, the true stories of heroism, Heartbreak and Humor, the luckiest guy alive in his journey in the FD&Y. That's awesome.

Starts with some of my jobs before that, and then right through to academy and right up to retirement.

Who helped you put it together?

Just me and my son. Oh, yeah? And my wife.

Oh, that's excellent.

It was all in-house. And my brother-in-law, who was in Seattle, he worked for Microsoft. Soft. He did all the proofreadings. Did he? Funny story is he threw his shoulder out, working the mouse, doing all my corrections because every chapter had like a thousand corrections on it.

Well, that sounds like an insurance I'm an insurance scam, but that'll be the next book.

But no, this is awesome. People are already telling me, When are you going to write another book? I'm like, Well, I'm just trying to get this one out now. It's hard. I go on the Instagram. That helps.

There's always some asshole. You write one book, it's like, When's your next book coming out. That guy, he can't even read. It's always people that can't read.

What's my next one going to be? More tales from the tiller? There you go. Hey, if it sells.

You never know, man. I've enjoyed your time today, man. Thanks for thinking with us. Oh, me too. Just taking us on a little bit of a journey. Yeah, we had so many questions for today, so I'd love to be able to get to more of them.

I can't believe how fast it went.

Another time. I know.

When you're having fun.

Hey.

You're the man.

I'm just glad we're not on fire in here today, man. I really am, dude.

Checking this lobby out over Over here, too. It's about a thousand years old over here.

I know. This place is pretty cool, man. Yeah, it's cool. If you get to go to this, there's a bar over there and a restaurant just at each end.

I went and I looked at them.

Yeah, it's just cool.

It's funny because I've been in big hotels in Manhattan before, and the lobbies are tremendous. There's stores and restaurants. I thought it was going to be like, I've never been to the Chelsea.

Yeah, this is a nice place to come. If you just come for a meal or something like, they went to the bar last night. It's nice in there, huh?

This is the suite.

Yeah, this is one of the suites, but It just feels like, I don't know. To me, it just feels like a lot more chill here. Yeah, definitely. And relaxed. But thank you for your service. I want to say that. Thank you for coming today and helping us share memories of some of your comrades that have fallen over the years and that have also served. We appreciate it, and we appreciate your wife and son, Dominic. We'll have to put a picture of all of them together at the end of the episode. Thanks again, man. Thank you. Yup, we had a good time.

It was a pleasure, man, and an honor.

Well, I appreciate it, Tony. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be cornerstone.

But when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones. But it's going to take.