by Damon Suede
Until Griff got married, he and Dante stil hung out weekends—drank, tanked, even shared a couple girls. Dante was always juggling three or four or more women.
A lot of the guys in the station did. Everyone knew young firefighters couldn’t keep it in their pants. Nature of the job: twenty-four-hour shifts, constant exercise, testosterone, waiting around the station cooking and puling pud and washing the truck. Chicks noticed and were always wanting to show their gratitude.
And the schedule made quick excuses easy. Sorry babe, I had to work a double. Yeah, sure: double Ds with a buddy on a round waterbed at a sex hotel in Jersey. Home on Tuesday, hon.
Al firefighters played around, but Dante’s appetite was legendary—food, fucking, fun… any order, any combo. Two years into the job and Dante had a fiancée named Shely, a girlfriend caled Maxine, and a couple friends with benefits on the side in case of erectile emergency. And somehow he juggled al of them pretty smoothly, replacing them as they got boring. Sometimes it almost seemed like the chicks didn’t mind sharing him so long as he pretended they were the one and only while they were fucking. Whatever it was Dante did to these girls, they couldn’t get enough.
Griff was always supposed to be his best man, but Dante’s love life never paused long enough to actualy put a ring on anyone’s hand. Shely turned into Lauren… then Bethany… then Krysta. Fiancées out the wazoo, but never a wedding.
Even though the bride hated his “arrogant ass,” Dante was best man at Griff’s wedding to Leslie Kiernan, which did happen. Then the best man spent the reception going down on the maid of honor in the parking lot in her boyfriend’s jeep. Boys wil be toys.
Dante got away with everything. And somehow everyone loved him for it even after they’d split. In a way, he acted out fantasies for al his buddies. Fires and females put out like clockwork for Dante. Just the way he was built.
And then 9/11 came and the Towers fel.
“10-60 has been transmitted for the World Trade Center, 10-60 for the World Trade Center.” Soon as the planes hit, every FDNY house had sprinted for the Twin Towers. Trucks poured into lower Manhattan, threading through the insanity in the streets. Smoke everywhere. Ash faling. Jumpers. Carnage. Streets muffled under shredded paper, shin-deep. People wandering dazed, covered in grit, stumbling in a thick gray blizzard. Shuffling armies of wage slaves trying to get home, to get to a phone, to get off the fucking island before it sank.
To pul the eight engines and five trucks required for a major emergency, dispatch had puled units from Brooklyn and Queens. Griff’s engine had been one of the first on the scene ’cause they were just over the river. Even after the second plane hit, the crews were hauling ass to get people out safely, to contain the situation. Twenty-five engines, sixteen trucks, probably six battalions. No one expected the Towers to actualy come down; a lot of guys had rushed inside trying to get civilians out.
Then— motherfuck— World Trade 2 did exactly that, and then it was worse than anything any of them had ever seen.
Griff had been street level, humping hose into 90 Church Street, when he heard a boom and a strange roar, and then this black cloud slammed through the streets, chasing them. Rubble and paper churning around him, he tried to outrun the pitch dark, but it caught him and threw him through a plateglass window, so he had to crawl blind through the smoldering fog to the rig. Zero visibility on a sunny morning.
The Big Apple lost its mind.
Command was wiped out. Hundreds of men missing. Griff was helping do search and recover with his crew in the subway at Cortlandt Street when he heard Dante’s name on the radio, some emergency cal from the site of the north tower before it went too.
Without thinking, Griff caled the Anastagios, or tried to—two hours after the crash there was stil no cel service, and phone lines were crippled with people wanting answers and people caling their families to say goodbye from inside the wreckage. Stil no count of the victims and wounded and what was the point, realy? He tried to cal his wife, same deal. They were in a bubble down here.
Dante could have been anywhere. Apparently, closer in you could stil hear victims trapped beneath the rubble, begging for help. The news stations figured it was World War Three. Nobody knew anything yet. The body count might be as high as 20,000; the whole city scrabbled to get a straight answer.
Griff just put one foot in front of the other and tried to save a few folks, letting the eyewash stations clean his soot-caked eyes over and over so he could keep searching. He heard other planes had gone down, in Washington, but it was hard to tel and facts were thin on the ground. Some monster had punched a hole in New York, and hope was draining out of it into the river. Here he was, trying to find one person in the thick of it, feeling as blind and dumb and useless as anyone. Some fucking hero.
Griff picked his way in as close as he could to the Pit to keep an eye out. World Trade Center 7 colapsed in the early evening. Praying he’d hear Dante’s name again from someone down here, he worked with the crews that whole night like a zombie, his face gray under the ash. Everyone choking on the smel of acetylene torches and worse. Looking for his best friend and helping a few lost souls along the way. Thousands of people searching for family and coworkers who’d literaly disappeared into thin air.
Griff cut people out of cars and carried people to the ambulances. He rescued a starved Labrador with a broken leg, trapped in a deli licking milk off the linoleum. He found a pregnant paralegal shuffling barefoot in the powdered concrete, her shoes lost, her eyes lost, and pointed her toward the Bridge so she could walk home to her kids.
No one had seen Dante since that cal from the second tower, but Griff kept asking and looking and listening for that one name, day and night and day.
Thirty-seven straight hours with no sleep, and then Griff tore his hand open trying to lift a mailbox off a corpse in a $1,600 suit. He didn’t even notice he was bleeding til one of the paramedics was in his face shouting at him.
Shock. He was in shock.
They put him in an ambulance and herded him to one of the emergency tents that had bloomed like miracles around Ground Zero. People groaning and whimpering and choking on the dust. He couldn’t feel anything. Some wetneck resident in scrubs sewed his hand together and told him to go home; instead, he went looking through Hel for Dante.
IT TOOK five hours and most of his sanity.
“Are you family?” The Army Reserve nurse eyed his pasty skin and bright hair. Her eyes scanned a clipboard quickly. She flipped a page of scrawled notes.
They were walking through the wide, echoing halways at Belevue where there seemed to be acres of grimy patients on gurneys squirming slowly like someone had lifted a rock and shone a painful light on grubs. Clusters of weeping, frantic families who thought the world might end at any minute, desperate just to say goodbye and love.
“Brother.” Griff knew he looked insane. His mauled hand itched.
She tapped her notes. “He was pinned in a stairwel, but he dragged himself and his partner out a vent in time. Crazy mofo, sounds like.”
“You have no idea.”
They turned a corner and everything was suddenly okay.
Dante lay curled on his side, his black hair dusty and the top half of his face livid with bruises and smal cuts. The paramedics had cut him out of his clothes, and the gown was bunched over his sooty hip. Dante’s eyes and hands twitched, dreaming. His curved lips seemed too red and too dark, like a tattoo of a mouth.
He coughed in his sleep, and somehow it was Dante’s voice coughing, even from across the room.
Griff would’ve known it anywhere, and he almost pissed his pants he was so relieved, choking on lungfuls of air as he went to his best friend.
Dit-dit-dit. The nurse’s pager went off, and she headed back into the groaning sea of gurneys in the vast halway; she didn’t even look at Griff, and he wouldn’t have noticed if she had. Griff’s strong legs suddenly gave out, and he went down on a knee by the thin cot.
Thank you, God
. Thank you, God.
He wished Dante would make another sound, any sound. He leaned over that tired face just to hear him breathing, the exact music of Dante’s breath.
Kneeling so close, he wanted to put his dusty ear to his friend’s chest to hear the miraculous lub-dub of Dante stil living.
You asshole. Had to be a fuckin’ hero—
Griff’s blunt fingers fumbled over Dante’s wrist and took his rough hand. Suddenly he knew New York was gonna be okay. They were al going to survive.
Dante shifted a little, just barely squeezed back, and made one of those comfortable grunts in the back of his throat. Like someone had made a joke in his dream and he was gonna start laughing.
Griff’s deep red hair stood on end and his heart was suddenly too huge and too hot for his ribs, beating against its cage.
- Plip -
Something wet fel on their linked knuckles making the ash and grit run and Griff realized that he was crying-crying-crying and he didn’t know how to stop it felt so good to let the tears slide free and clean… the acid draining out of his head so it could stop burning. His mouth open and weeping ’cause a hole had been punched in him. Big gulps of disinfected air and his thick right knee bouncing with the last of his nerves. He couldn’t make himself stand up.
He raised his other hand to smooth Dante’s ragged, matted hair so he could see and then froze, because who knew what kind of injuries there might be. He couldn’t move, his stitched, pale hand hovering over Dante’s olive forehead, over the eyelashes inky soft against his cheek.
Griff watched his torn hand pul back slowly, like it belonged to a stranger. Would they let him stay? He was in shock, right? He had a right to be in the hospital. If the doctors wanted to move him, they could fuck off. He stiffened like a feral dog guarding pups.
Dante squeezed his fingers again, just barely, like a dream.
The relief was so sharp it made him gasp.
Nose running, Griff used his free hand to fish out his cel and dial the Anastagios so they could cry and shout and pass the phone around in relief; then he remembered that there was no signal, that it was just them there then, alone together, that he couldn’t reach anyone anywhere—so he told God instead.
THE nightmares started a week later.
Griff wasn’t alone by a long shot. It happened to a lot of them after the World Trade. Guys who’d escaped. Men who’d watched their friends, their family, burned and mangled next to them at Ground Zero. The FDNY remains proudly hereditary, so brothers had died together, fathers with sons-in-law, uncles, and cousins.
The Pit had bitten off chunks of people. Whole stations were incapacitated, hearts broken on every block. Half the trucks went on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds. There were 343 instant vacancies and more retiring daily. They’d al looked into the abyss and it kept right on looking back, window-shopping for damnation, it seemed.
The reality was kiling the FDNY survivors on the ground, but the fireman fantasy had taken hold of the whole country. They were the shining heroes of the moment. Movie stars and rappers wore firefighter merchandise. Firemen’s wives split and who cared, ’cause suddenly every woman in the Tri-state area wanted to slob their knobs by way of thanks. These charming lunatics had walked through hel in a gasoline overcoat.
Dante recovered quickly, no scars and few solid memories of that week, let alone that day. But something smal had changed in him. He was stil a loose cannon, but he stayed away from crowds more and stuck close to his friends and family; within the year he put in for a transfer to Griff’s truck in Red Hook, closer to home, he said. He scraped together a down payment on a faling-down brownstone a half-mile from his folks.
Griff’s wife Leslie snapped after seven months, and who could blame her? She’d never understood his love of the job. Now, Griff couldn’t stay stil for more than ten minutes; they hadn’t slept together since the attacks. Wedding Night of the Living Dead. He agreed to a no-contest divorce and she moved back in with her parents in Yonkers.
Griff couldn’t feel anything, let alone sad. He tried to miss her, but he was proud of her for saving her own life. Divorce happened to so many of the guys it was practicaly expected. He even told himself it was no big deal. He was a bachelor again. Yeah. Knowing it was a mistake, he moved back into his lonely basement bedroom at his dad’s and started bouncing at the Stone Bone so he could pay rent.
Like Dante, Griff was different too, although he couldn’t have said how. He barely slept, even with pils and bourbon. And he started panicking about the Anastagios’ safety, especialy Dante’s. Drive-bys at three in the morning became a regular thing, just to check, sometimes sleeping in his car out front and leaving when the sun came up, checking and rechecking to make sure they hadn’t disappeared. That they didn’t plan to. That everyone was stil here.
When he visited any of the Anastagios, he’d excuse himself to the bathroom and test windows and locks, fuses and fire alarms. It was like sand in his sheets, the nagging fear that he’d overlook a detail and his adopted family would die, leaving him trapped in the basement of his father’s empty house.
Griff knew he was losing his shit, but he couldn’t seem to make himself think that keeping his shit together was worth the trouble.
Not Dante.
Hotheaded, crazy-ass, short-fuse, seat-of-his-pants Dante Anastagio became the rock that every Brooklyn firehouse leaned on. Maybe it was years of living like a one-man circus, but nothing fazed Dante: puke, tears, halucinations… nothing. He started fixing up that enormous, crappy townhouse in Cobble Hil near his folks and, typical Dante, just decided to open the doors to the walking wounded. He loaned money he didn’t have. He gave barbecues and hookers and tires to everyone he knew and a lot of guys he didn’t, but no one was as grateful as Griff.
Dante saved him.
“Hey, Goliath! What are you moping over?” Dante’s face would jam into his in some Staten Island cop bar. Griff would shake his head and shake it off, remembering that Dante was right here breathing whiskey on him and that he didn’t have anyone to grieve over. Yet.
“Fucking eat something, ya mook.” Dante making fifteen pounds of chicken parm for the station, slapping a ful plate in front of Griff and not budging til he shoveled a saucy forkful into his mouth. Dante teling jokes and patting his back in circles while he made himself chew like a robot.
“That’s al you, man. She wants a slice of Vanila Gorila.” Dante getting him laid by a chubby stewardess at Paulie’s wedding anniversary when al Griff felt like doing was going to funerals and memorials and midnight Mass so he could cry in public and not feel like a fucking coward. Dante would show up in church wearing a suit with no underwear, nudging Griff in the ribs and pointing to the little sprouts poking through the ashes of his shitty life.
He got better. Dante kept forcing him to face normal life until it was normal again, and he was grateful to the point of obsession.
It had snuck up on Griff. He stil couldn’t say exactly when it had happened, only when he’d realized. Dante was the best friend he’d ever had in his life.
They’d grown up together, yeah. And they were family, sure. But Dante had become his axis, a vital organ necessary for his survival. Whole days would go by with nothing but those occasional two hours of Dante to make him feel like a human being. The world was this barren, radioactive junkyard he had to survive between Dante taking off and Dante coming back again. Even though they were two guys, the thought of losing him felt like amputation using a fork with no anesthesia.
Griff had panic attacks. He imagined muggings and wrecks and ilnesses that might visit Dante, even though they didn’t. He dreamed up revenges and rescues and cures that never took place. He knew it was weird. And somehow, Dante sensed his panic and never said anything. He just fucking knew and stood beside him and Griff was grateful, grateful like a kid puled out of a burning school.
The smoke and the smel cleared, and the Big Apple climbed back up onto its branch. As a big fucking thank you, the d
irtbag mayor decided to close down a bunch of firehouses and retire old-timers to balance his shitty budget. But little by little, the men of the FDNY put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
Even Griff. Even though he knew that Dante had done most of it for him while he was a zombie. Even if he had al these awful feelings for his friend, for a man, that he couldn’t control. In their world, two guys together was impossible.
Two guys? Bad idea.
“Too bad we ain’t queer, you and me,” Dante said one night at the Stone Bone and planted a firm kiss on Griff’s ginger-stubbled cheek and tipped their foreheads together. Griff almost choked on his Guinness Extra Cold. “Think of al the money we’d save on booze and roses.” Then Dante left with a pair of sisters who kept him tied up most of that weekend. Literaly… French bowlines with their stockings. He didn’t know that he’d left Griff in knots of his own, worrying how easy it would be to fuck up the friendship that was holding him together, to lose the one person beside him. Two towers, alone together.
Too bad.
Chapter 3
THE morning after the party, Griff woke up to baritone snores with his face pressed against hairy skin. It was early enough to stil be dark outside. And dark enough that he should have been in his own damn bed. Griff froze.
Holy shit.
With painstaking caution, Griff lifted his mussed copper-top to squint at the room. Dante’s.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Kennedy. How had they wound up crashing in bed together? He never slept at Dante’s because he didn’t know if he could trust himself late at night with too many drinks messing with his judgment. He knew better. Griff remembered dancing at a club— no—fighting at a party somewhere. In Staten Island? No, the Stone Bone. World Trade anniversary, ten years. Ugh.
Please God, please don’t let me have done something boneheaded.